Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  He turned to the boy, thinking he might appreciate this insight into “magic,” and caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. Gracela. Coming up behind the boy, her knife held low, ready to stab. In reflex, Mingolla flung out his injured hand to block her. The knife nicked the edge of his hand, deflected upward, and sliced the top of the boy’s shoulder.

  The pain in Mingolla’s hand was excruciating, blinding him momentarily; and then as he grabbed Gracela’s forearm to prevent her from stabbing again, he felt another sensation, one almost covered by the pain. He had thought the thing inside his hand was dead, but now he could feel it fluttering at the edges of the wound, leaking out in the rich trickle of blood that flowed over his wrist. It was trying to worm back inside, wriggling against the flow, but the pumping of his heart was too strong, and soon it was gone, dripping on the white stone of the bridge.

  Before he could feel relief or surprise or in any way absorb what had happened, Gracela tried to pull free. Mingolla got to his knees, dragged her down, and dashed her knife hand against the bridge. The knife skittered away. Gracela struggled wildly, clawing at his face, and the other children edged forward. Mingolla levered his left arm under Gracela’s chin, choking her; with his right hand, he picked up the knife and pressed the point into her breast. The children stopped their advance, and Gracela went limp. He could feel her trembling. Tears streaked the grime on her cheeks. She looked like a scared little girl, not a witch.

  “Puta!” said the boy. He had come to his feet, holding his shoulder, and was staring daggers at Gracela.

  “Is it bad?” Mingolla asked. “The shoulder?”

  The boy inspected the bright blood on his fingertips. “It hurts,” he said. He stepped over to stand in front of Gracela and smiled down at her; he unbuttoned the top of his shorts.

  Gracela tensed.

  “What are you doing?” Mingolla suddenly felt responsible for the girl.

  “I’m going to do what I tol’ her, man.” The boy undid the rest of the buttons and shimmied out of his shorts; he was already half-erect, as if the violence had aroused him.

  “No,” said Mingolla, realizing as he spoke that this was not at all wise.

  “Take your life,” said the boy sternly. “Walk away.”

  A long powerful gust of wind struck the bridge; it seemed to Mingolla that the vibration of the bridge, the beating of his heart, and Gracela’s trembling were driven by the same shimmering pulse. He felt an almost visceral commitment to the moment, one that had nothing to do with his concern for the girl. Maybe, he thought, it was an implementation of his new convictions.

  The boy lost patience. He shouted at the other children, herding them away with slashing gestures. Sullenly, they moved off down the curve of the bridge, positioning themselves along the railing, leaving an open avenue. Beyond them, beneath a lavender sky, the jungle stretched to the horizon, broken only by the rectangular hollow made by the airbase. The boy hunkered at Gracela’s feet. “Tonight,” he said to Mingolla, “the bridge have set us together. Tonight we sit, we talk. Now, that’s over. My heart say to kill you. But ’cause you stop Gracela from cutting deep, I give you a chance. She mus’ make a judgmen’. If she say she go wit’ you, we”—he waved toward the other children—“will kill you. If she wan’ to stay, then you mus’ go. No more talk, no bullshit. You jus’ go. Understan’?”

  Mingolla wasn’t afraid, and his lack of fear was not born of an indifference to life, but of clarity and confidence. It was time to stop reacting away from challenges, time to meet them. He came up with a plan. There was no doubt that Gracela would choose him, choose a chance at life, no matter how slim. But before she could decide, he would kill the boy. Then he would run straight at the others: without their leader, they might not hang together. It wasn’t much of a plan, and he didn’t like the idea of hurting the boy; but he thought he might be able to pull it off. “I understand,” he said.

  The boy spoke to Gracela; he told Mingolla to release her. She sat up, rubbing the spot where Mingolla had pricked her with the knife. She glanced coyly at him, then at the boy; she pushed her hair back behind her neck and thrust out her breasts as if preening for her two suitors. Mingolla was astonished by her behavior. Maybe, he thought, she was playing for time. He stood and pretended to be shaking out his kinks, edging closer to the boy, who remained crouched beside Gracela. In the east a red fireball had cleared the horizon; its sanguine light inspired Mingolla, fueled his resolve. He yawned and edged closer yet, firming his grip on the knife. He would yank the boy’s head back by the hair, cut his throat. Nerves jumped in his chest. A pressure was building inside him, demanding that he act, that he move now. He restrained himself. Another step should do it, another step to be absolutely sure. But as he was about to take that step, Gracela reached out and tapped the boy on the shoulder.

  Surprise must have showed on Mingolla’s face, because the boy looked at him and grunted laughter. “You t’ink she pick you?” he said. “Shit! You don’ know Gracela, man. Gringos burn her village. She lick the devil’s ass ’fore she even shake hands wit’ you.” He grinned, stroked her hair. “’Sides, she t’ink if she fuck me good, maybe I say, ‘Oh, Gracela, I got to have some more of that!’ And who knows? Maybe she right.”

  Gracela lay back and wriggled out of her skirt. Between her legs, she was nearly hairless. A smile touched the corners of her mouth. Mingolla stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “I not going to kill you, gringo,” the boy said without looking up; he was running his hand across Gracela’s stomach. “I tol’ you I won’ kill a man so close wit’ death.” Again he laughed. “You look pretty funny trying to sneak up. I like watching that.”

  Mingolla was stunned. All the while he had been gearing himself up to kill, shunting aside anxiety and revulsion, he had merely been providing entertainment for the boy. The knife seemed to be drawing his anger into a compact shape, and he wanted to carry out his attack, to cut down this little animal who had ridiculed him; but humiliation mixed with the anger, neutralizing it. The poisons of rage shook him; he could feel every incidence of pain and fatigue in his body. His hand was throbbing, bloated and discolored like the hand of a corpse. Weakness pervaded him. And relief.

  “Go,” said the boy. He lay down beside Gracela, propped on an elbow, and began to tease one of her nipples erect.

  Mingolla took a few hesitant steps away. Behind him, Gracela made a mewling noise and the boy whispered something. Mingolla’s anger was rekindled—they had already forgotten him!—but he kept going. As he passed the other children, one spat at him and another shied a pebble. He fixed his eyes on the white concrete slipping beneath his feet.

  When he reached the midpoint of the curve, he turned back. The children had hemmed in Gracela and the boy against the terminus, blocking them from view. The sky had gone bluish gray behind them, and the wind carried their voices. They were singing: a ragged, chirpy song that sounded celebratory. Mingolla’s anger subsided, his humiliation ebbed. He had nothing to be ashamed of; though he had acted unwisely, he had done so from a posture of strength, and no amount of ridicule could diminish that. Things were going to work out. Yes, they were! He would make them work out.

  For a while he watched the children. At this remove their singing had an appealing savagery, and he felt a trace of wistfulness at leaving them behind. He wondered what would happen after the boy had done with Gracela. He was not concerned, only curious. The way you feel when you think you may have to leave a movie before the big finish. Will our heroine survive? Will justice prevail? Will survival and justice bring happiness in their wake? Soon the end of the bridge came to be bathed in the golden rays of the sunburst; the children seemed to be blackening and dissolving in heavenly fire. That was a sufficient resolution for Mingolla. He tossed Gracela’s knife into the river and went down from the bridge in whose magic he no longer believed, walking toward the war whose mystery he had accepted as his own.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At
the airbase Mingolla took a stand beside the Sikorsky that had brought him to San Francisco de Juticlan; he had recognized it by the painted flaming letters of the words Whispering Death. He rested his head against the letter g and recalled how Baylor had recoiled from the letters, worried that they might transmit some deadly essence. Mingolla didn’t mind the contact. The painted flames seemed to be warming the inside of his head, stirring up thoughts as slow and indefinite as smoke. Comforting thoughts that embodied no images or ideas. Just a gentle buzz of mental activity, like the idling of an engine. The base was coming to life around him. Jeeps pulling away from barracks; a couple of officers inspecting the belly of a cargo plane; some guy repairing a forklift. Peaceful, homey. Mingolla closed his eyes, lulled into a half-sleep, letting the sun and the painted flames bracket him with heat, real and imagined.

  Sometime later—how much later, he could not be sure—a voice said, “Fucked up your hand pretty good, didn’tcha?”

  The two pilots were standing by the cockpit door. In their black flight suits and helmets they looked neither weird nor whimsical, but creatures of functional menace. Masters of the Machine. “Yeah,” said Mingolla. “Fucked it up.”

  “How’d ya do it?” asked the pilot on the left.

  “Hit a tree.”

  “Musta been goddamn crocked to hit a tree,” said the pilot on the right. “Tree ain’t goin’ nowhere if you hit it.”

  Mingolla made a noncommittal noise. “You guys going up to the Farm?”

  “You bet! What’s the matter, man? Had enough of them wild women?” Pilot on the right.

  “Guess so. Wanna gimme a ride?”

  “Sure thing,” said the pilot on the left. “Whyn’t you climb on in front. You can sit back of us.”

  “Where your buddies?” asked the pilot on the right.

  “Gone,” said Mingolla as he climbed into the cockpit.

  One of the pilots said, “Didn’t think we’d be seein’ them boys again.”

  Mingolla strapped into the observer’s seat behind the copilot’s position. He had assumed there would be a lengthy instrument check, but as soon as the engines had been warmed, the Sikorsky lurched up and veered northward. With the exception of the weapons systems, none of the defenses had been activated. The radar, the thermal imager, and terrain display all showed blank screens. A nervous thrill ran across the muscles of Mingolla’s stomach as he considered the varieties of danger to which the pilots’ reliance upon their miraculous helmets had laid them open; but his nervousness was subsumed by the whispery rhythms of the rotors and his sense of the Sikorsky’s power. He recalled having a similar feeling of secure potency while sitting at the controls of his gun. He had never let that feeling grow, never let it empower him. He had been a fool.

  They followed the northeasterly course of the river, which coiled like a length of blue steel razor wire between jungled hills. The pilots laughed and joked, and the flight came to have the air of a ride with a couple of good ol’ boys going nowhere fast and full of free beer. At one point the copilot piped his voice through the onboard speakers and launched into a dolorous country song:

  “Whenever we kiss, dear, our two lips meet,

  And whenever you’re not with me, we’re apart.

  When you sawed my dog in half, that was depressin’,

  But when you shot me in the chest, you broke my heart.”

  As the copilot sang, the pilot rocked the Sikorsky back and forth in a drunken accompaniment, and after the song ended, he called back to Mingolla, “You believe this here son of a bitch wrote that? He did! Picks a guitar, too! Boy’s a genius!”

  “It’s a great song,” said Mingolla, and he meant it. The song had made him happy, and that was no small thing.

  They went rocking through the skies, singing the first verse over and over. But then, as they left the river behind, still maintaining a northeasterly course, the copilot pointed to a section of the jungle ahead and shouted, “Beaners! Quadrant four! You got ’em?”

  “Got ’em!” said the pilot. The Sikorsky swerved down toward the jungle, shuddered, and flame veered from beneath them. An instant later, a huge swath of jungle erupted into a gout of marbled smoke and fire. “Whee-oo!” the copilot sang out, jubilant. “Whisperin’ Death strikes again!” With guns blazing, they went swooping through blowing veils of dark smoke. Acres of trees were burning, and still they kept up the attack. Mingolla gritted his teeth against the noise, and when at last the firing stopped, dismayed by this insanity, he sat slumped, his head down. He suddenly doubted his ability to cope with the insanity of the Ant Farm and remembered all his reasons for fear.

  The copilot turned back to him. “You ain’t got no call to look so gloomy, man,” he said. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch, y’know that?”

  The pilot began a bank toward the east, toward the Ant Farm. “How you figure that?”

  “I gotta clear sight of you, man,” said the copilot. “I can tell you for true you ain’t gonna be at the Ant Farm much longer. It ain’t clear why or nothin’. But I ’spect you gonna be wounded. Not bad, though. Just a goin’-home wound.”

  As the pilot completed the bank, a ray of sun slanted into the cockpit, illuminating the copilot’s visor, and for a split second Mingolla could make out the vague shadow of the face beneath. It seemed lumpy and malformed. His imagination added details. Bizarre growths, cracked cheeks, an eye webbed shut. Like a face out of a movie about nuclear mutants. He was tempted to believe that he had really seen this; the copilot’s deformities would validate his prediction of a secure future. But Mingolla rejected the temptation. He was afraid of dying, afraid of the terrors held by life at the Ant Farm, yet he wanted no more to do with magic…unless there was magic involved in being a good soldier. In obeying the disciplines, in the practice of fierceness.

  “Could be his hand’ll get him home,” said the pilot. “That hand looks pretty fucked up to me. Looks like a million-dollar wound, that hand.”

  “Naw, I don’t get it’s his hand,” said the copilot. “Somethin’ else. Whatever, it’s gonna do the trick.”

  Mingolla could see his own face floating in the black plastic of the copilot’s visor; he looked warped and pale, so thoroughly unfamiliar that for a moment he thought the face might be a bad dream the copilot was having.

  “What the hell’s with you, man?” the copilot asked. “You don’t believe me?”

  Mingolla wanted to explain that his attitude had nothing to do with belief or disbelief, that it signaled his intent to obtain a safe future by means of securing his present; but he couldn’t think how to put it into words the copilot would accept. The copilot would merely refer again to his visor as testimony to a magical reality or perhaps would point up ahead where—because the cockpit plastic had gone opaque under the impact of direct sunlight—the sun now appeared to hover in a smoky darkness: a distinct fiery sphere with a steaming corona, like one of those cabalistic emblems embossed on ancient seals. It was an evil, fearsome-looking thing, and though Mingolla was unmoved by it, he knew the pilot would see in it a powerful sign.

  “You think I’m lyin’?” said the copilot angrily. “You think I’d be bullshittin’ you ’bout somethin’ like this? Man, I ain’t lyin’! I’m givin’ you the good goddamn word!”

  They flew east into the sun, whispering death, into a world disguised as a strange bloody enchantment, over the dark green wild where war had taken root, where men wearing brass scorpions on their berets, where crazy lost men wandered the mystic light of Fire Zone Emerald and mental wizards brooded upon things not yet seen. The copilot kept the black bubble of his visor angled back toward Mingolla, waiting for a response. But Mingolla just stared, and before too long the copilot turned away.

  THE GOOD SOLDIER

  …I wish I had an army of a million guys like me,

  I’d break the chains that bind the Beast

  And pull the wings off Liberty.

  I’d storm the Holy City and watch how long

  The
angels took to die,

  Then bustin’ into the Great Throne Room

  I’d be surprised to find

  That God ain’t nothin’ but an old gray man

  Who can’t remember why.

  from “Marching Song”

  —Jack Lescaux

  CHAPTER SIX

  Paths that lead to the most profound destinations, to moments of illumination or change, have nothing to do with actual travel, but rather negotiate a mental geography. And so the walk Mingolla took one day from the door of a hotel on the island of Roatán to a patch of grass where he sat cross-legged, hemmed in against a high concrete wall by a thicket of aguacaste bushes, was only the final leg of both a journey and a transformation that had encompassed a week of tests and five months of drug therapy, yet had covered scarcely any distance at all. Beside him, the bole of a palm was tipped half out of the dirt, exposing filaments of its root system, and the trunk curved up to a cluster of green coconuts, their slick dimpled hulls looking from below like the faces of evil dolls. Some of the fronds were dead, gone a tawny orange, and the burst wrappings of the newer fronds had unfurled into corkscrew-shaped lengths as gray and raveled as used bandages. Mingolla watched them shift in the wind, pleased by their slowness, by the twisting, coiling movements that seemed to mirror his own slowness, the drifty cast of mind that hid him from his trainer.