Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “‘Of all the hunts I have known,’ he said in a voice that rumbled like a volcano, ‘yours has provided the most intriguing of all. I am sorry to see it exhausted.’

  “The hunter trembled with hate, but limited himself to saying, ‘I am grateful I will never have to lay eyes on you again.’

  “The ghost’s laughter filled the sky with dark clouds. ‘You are an innocent, my friend. That which is fallow will one day be fertile again, and that which is valueless will grow to be priceless. Sooner or later you will dream a new dream, and we will return to have our sport within it.’

  “‘Never!’ said the hunter, ‘I would rather die.’

  “‘Die, then,’ said the conquistador’s ghost in a voice of flame. ‘Perhaps your child will have the gift of dreams.’

  “The hunter was staggered by this possibility, and knew that he would do anything to spare his child this doom.

  “Again the ghost laughed, and lightning flashed across the sky, its forked values defining the thousand forms of terror in the language of the gods. ‘Here!’ The ghost tossed a golden coin studded with emeralds at the hunter’s feet, a coin worth a decade of its usual payments. ‘I commission you to build me a new dream, one more elaborate than that of the palace. When I return it had better be ready.’ And with that the ghost rode off in pursuit of the king, its steed leaving a trail of hoofprints from which an ineffable smoke arose, signs clear enough so that any spirit peering down from the heavens might take note of them and follow.”

  Garrido butted his cigar, making a nest of sparks on the limestone. He seemed to be waiting for a response.

  “Coulda used a hair more dialogue,” said Mingolla. “But not bad.”

  Letting out a hiss of disgust, Garrido pulled himself up by his hammock rope. “Good night,” he said. He slipped into the hammock and pulled the mosquito netting over his head.

  Despite himself, Mingolla had been impressed by the story, although his secondary reaction had been to consider asking Garrido why he hadn’t simply said, “For the money.” But he realized this would have been unfair. He would have liked to question Garrido further, for it had occurred to him that not only were there a great many things he did not understand, but there well might be a great many other things to whose very existence he had been blind. He gave thought to cultivating Garrido’s friendship, but after reflection decided against it, feeling that friendship would blur his judgments, and that the argument between them would in the long run prove more entertaining than any conversation generated by an accord.

  He managed to get to sleep despite the frost, though sleep was hardly restful, a tapestry of anxiety dreams, and when he was awakened by a bright light shining in his eyes, he wondered if he had cried out and disturbed Garrido. “What is it?” he asked, shielding his eyes, his hand tangling with the mosquito netting.

  “Son of a bitch!” said a voice with a hillbilly twang. “This ol’ beaner talks American.”

  “I am American.” He struggled up. “What the fuck’s going on?” Something jabbed him hard in the chest, shoving him back; through the white mesh, he saw a rifle barrel and a hand holding a flashlight.

  “Sure looks like a beaner,” said somebody else.

  “I’m an agent…a spy. Who are you people?”

  “We own this place, man,” said the hillbilly voice, loaded with menace, “And you trespassin’.”

  A chill washed away the dregs of Mingolla’s drowsiness, and he pushed with his mind; but rather than meeting mild electrical resistance and enforcing his will, he was flung back, repelled: it was as if he had been riding in a car, had stepped out while it was still moving, and instead of running smoothly along, had been flipped up into the air. He tried again, achieved the same result.

  “That’s a disguise, huh?” said the hillbilly. “How we gonna tell for sure? Lotsa Cubans do real good American. Maybe we scrape ’way a little bitta that color, see what’s under it.”

  A chorus of dopey-sounding laughter.

  “Whyn’t ya do like them ol’ war movies, Sarge? Ast him questions ’bout baseball and stuff?” Another voice.

  “Yeah!” Hillbilly. “How ’bout that, friend. S’pose you tell us who plays centerfield for the Chicago Bears.”

  “Your pal in disguise, too?” Still another voice.

  “What you guys want?” Mingolla tried to push the rifle barrel away. “Lemme up!”

  “Guess his buddy’s a beaner for real,” said the hillbilly. “Go ’head and do him.”

  A burst of automatic fire.

  Mingolla stiffened. “Garrido?”

  “He answers ya, man,” said the hillbilly, “and I’m gettin’ outta here.”

  “You crazy motherfucker!” Mingolla said. “We’re…”

  The rifle punched harder into his chest. “You ain’t outta the woods yo’self, boy. Now you wanna answer my question?”

  Mingolla suppressed an urge to scream, to heave up from the hammock. “What question?”

  “’Bout who plays centerfield for the Bears.”

  Snickering.

  “The Bears play football,” said Mingolla.

  “Well, I’m convinced! Take a reg’lar American to know that,” said the hillbilly amid renewed laughter. “Trouble is”—the humor left his voice—“we don’t cotton that much to Americans, neither.”

  Silence, insects chittering.

  “Who are you?” Mingolla asked.

  “Name’s Coffee…Special Forces, formerly ’tached to the First Infantry. But y’might say we seen the light an opted outta the military. You gotta name, boy?”

  “Mingolla…David Mingolla.” He thought he knew them now, and to make sure he asked, “What do you mean, ‘seen the light’?”

  “The light’s holy in Emerald, man. Y’sit under the beams what shine through the leaves, let ’em soak into ya, and they’ll stir truth from your mind.”

  “That right?” Mingolla pushed again, and again achieved nothing.

  “Think we’re nuts, don’tcha?” said Coffee. “You ’mind me of my ol’ lieutenant. Man used to tell me I’s crazy, and I say, ‘I ain’t ordinary crazy, lieutenant sir. I’m crazy gone to Jesus.’ And I’d tell him ’bout the kingdom we was gonna build. No machines, no pollution. Y’gonna thrive here, David, if you can pass muster. Learn to hunt with a knife, track tapir by the smell. Hear what weather’s comin’ in the cry of a bird.”

  “How ’bout the lieutenant?” Mingolla asked distractedly, trying to gain a purchase in Coffee’s mind. “He learn all that?”

  “Y’know how it is with lieutenants, David. Sometimes they just don’t work out.”

  The mosquito netting was flung back, and he was hauled from the hammock, forced to his knees, a rope cinched about his wrists. He saw the shadowy cocoon of Garrido’s hammock in the indirect glow from the flashlight: it looked to be bulged down lower than before, as if death had weighed out heavier than life. He was yanked upright, spun around to face a gaunt rack of a man with rotting teeth and blown-away pupils; an unkempt beard bibbed his chest, and dark hair fell in snarls to his shoulders. He was holding the flashlight under his chin so that Mingolla could see his grin. Behind him stood his men, all of a cut, bearded and thin, smaller than their leader. Their fatigues holed, rifles outmoded.

  “Pleased to meetcha, David,” said Coffee, lowering the flashlight. “You up for a little night march?”

  “Maybe he should pop a couple?” said one of the others.

  “Yeah, maybe.” Coffee dug into his pocket, then shone the flashlight into his palm, illuminating two silver foil bullets. “Ever do Sammy?”

  “Listen,” said Mingolla. “I’ve got—”

  Coffee drove a fist into his stomach, bending him double. Only the fact that someone was holding the rope around his wrists prevented him from falling. He couldn’t breathe for several seconds, and when he had recovered sufficiently to breathe through his mouth, Coffee grabbed his chin and straightened him. “That’s the first lesson,” he said. “Y’answer
when you spoke to. Now y’ever done Sammy?”

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t get all anxious…it’s purely a joy and a triumph.” Coffee held up one of the ampules. “Just breathe in deep when I pop it, y’hear. Or else I’m gonna give ya ’nother lesson.” He crushed an ampule between his thumb and forefinger, and Mingolla inhaled the stinging mist. “Here comes number two,” said Coffee cheerfully.

  The world was sharpening, coming closer. Mingolla could see the spidery shapes of monkeys high in the canopy, backed by rips of moonlight, framed in filigrees of black leaves; he heard a hundred new sounds, and heard, too, how they knitted the darkness into a comprehensible geography of rustling ferns and scraping branches. The wind was cool, its separate breezes licking at him, feathering his hair.

  “I love to watch the first time,” said Coffee. “God, I love it!”

  Mingolla felt disdain for Coffee, and his disdain manifested in a rich, nutsy laugh.

  “Feel like you lookin’ down from the mountaintop, don’tcha? Don’t you trust that feelin’, David. Don’t figger on runnin’ off or takin’ me out.” Coffee grabbed Mingolla’s shirt, pulled him face to face. “I been up in Emerald for two years now, and I can tell when a fly takes a shit. Far as you concerned, I’m lord of the fuckin’ jungle!” He released Mingolla with a shove. “Awright, let’s go.”

  “Where we going?” Mingolla asked.

  “Questions?” Coffee went face to face with him again, and madness seemed to be flying out of his enlarged pupils, a vibration beating around Mingolla’s head. “Y’don’t ask questions, y’do what ya told.” Coffee relaxed, grinned. “But since you new, I’ll tell ya. We goin’ to the light of judgment, gonna decide whether or not y’run with the pack.” He shouldered his rifle. “Hope that eases your mind.”

  The man holding Mingolla’s rope gave it a jerk, and he fetched up against Garrido’s hammock; he recoiled from it, and the man said, “Ain’tcha never seen a dead beaner?”

  A chemical fury was building in Mingolla, a furious perception of new involvements of honor and character. He wrenched the rope loose from the man’s grip, and when the man jabbed at him with his rifle, he brushed the rifle aside and, moving with uncommon swiftness, kicked the man’s legs out from under him. “I’ll kill your ass!” he said. “Touch me again, I’ll kill your ass quick!”

  “My, my,” said Coffee from behind him. “’Pears we gotta tiger by the tail.” His tone was mirthful, sardonic, but when Mingolla turned, he saw in the configuration of Coffee’s grin a kind of harsh appraisal, and realized he had made a mistake.

  Every half-hour as they walked, the men beside Mingolla would pop ampules under his nose, and the inside of his head came to feel heavy with violent urges, as if his thoughts had congealed into a lump of mental plastique. He tried to influence the men, using all his power, but without success. Even had influence been an ordinary problem, his concentration was not what it should have been. The roughness of the terrain commanded a measure of his attention, and the generic mystic-warrior personality supplied by the drug tended to decry the concept of influence as lacking in honor. Rather than continuing his efforts, he concocted intricate escape plans with bloody resolutions. The sharpness of his senses was confusing—he spent a good deal of time identifying odors and sounds—and the initial burn of the drug was of such intensity, he became convinced that many of his perceptions were hallucinations. He had trouble believing, for instance, that the drumbeat issuing from his chest was his heartbeat; nor could he accept that the high-pitched whistlings in his ears were the cries of the bats that flashed like Halloween cutouts through the moonbeams. And so when he first sensed Debora’s presence, he disregarded it. But the impression remained strong, and once, straining toward the darkness from which the impression seemed to derive, he was positive that he had brushed the borders of her mind, feeling the telltale arousal of electrical contact, and feeling also a mental coloration that—though he’d had no previous experience of it, at least on a conscious level—he recognized as hers. After that one contact she either blocked or moved beyond range. What was she doing? he asked himself. Tracking him? If so, did she know his assignment? Then why hadn’t she ambushed him? Maybe, he thought, she had never been there at all.

  They came to a large circular clearing overgrown with ferns, ringed by giant figs and mahogany trees: the canopy here was less dense, and the clearing had the look of an aquarium bowl filled with pale milky fluid at the bottom of which strange feathered creatures were stirring in a feeble current. Man-shaped objects were affixed to the tree trunks, but the dimness masked their exact nature. Mingolla was thrown onto the ground and left in the care of a single guard, while the rest—fifteen in all—sat down in the middle of the clearing. The guard forced two more ampules on Mingolla, and he lay on his back in a silent fury, working at the ropes. The subdued voices of the men, the insects, and the soft wind fused into a hushed clutter of sound, and it increased his fury to think that he should be subject to any judgment conceived in this muddled place.

  “Ain’t gon’ do ya no good to slip them ropes,” said the guard. “We just run ya down.” He was a balding man with a full reddish brown beard and a triangular piece of mirror hung around his neck. “Naw, ol’ Sarge ain’t gon’ let ya ’scape. He been waitin’ onna sign for a long time, and ’pears to me you it.”

  Mingolla redoubled his efforts. “Maybe I ain’t the sign he’s been expecting.”

  The guard laughed derisively. “Sarge don’t ’spect nothin’. He just reads ’em when they come. Ain’t nobody better’n Sarge at readin’ sign.”

  “I am,” said Mingolla, hoping to play on the guard’s delusions. “That’s why I’ve come…to instruct, to give direction.”

  The guard laughed again, but shakily; he lifted his piece of mirror and reflected moonlight into his face.

  Mingolla had just begun to make headway with the ropes when Coffee walked over, dismissed the guard, and squatted beside him. He sucked on his teeth, making a whiny glutinous sound, and said, “Ever think much ’bout the Garden of Eden, David?”

  Coffee’s wistful tone—as if he were regretting original sin—took the edge off Mingolla’s anger and left him at a loss for words.

  “Read this article once’t,” Coffee went on. “Said the Garden was somewheres in the Anartic. Said they found all these froze-up berries and roots from thousands of years ago. They figgered once’t the Serpent did his business with Eve, the life force drained outta the place, and everything turned to ice. Reckon that’s so?”

  “I don’t know.” Mingolla tried to influence Coffee and failed. It seemed the drugs added a spin to the electrical activity of the brain, one with which he couldn’t synchronize even when under the influence himself.

  “Yeah, me neither. Can’t believe nothin’ y’read in the papers. Like all the horseshit they print ’bout politics.” Coffee popped an ampule, sucked in the mist. He glanced toward the clearing. Only three men remained sitting there.

  “Where the rest of your men?” Mingolla asked, leery.

  “Scoutin’ ’round.” Coffee cracked his knuckles. “Yeah, the stuff they print ’bout politics…Man! Pure horseshit! Gotta dig out the truth for yo’self. Half of them First Ladies was guys wearin’ dresses. Y’can see that just by lookin’. Ugly! I mean if you was president, wouldn’t you have yo’self somethin’ better for a wife than one of them ol’ bags? Yessir, them presidents was all queers…members of a secret queer organization.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Mingolla, making another fruitless effort at mental contact.

  “Wouldn’t ’spect ya’ to know. Come to me as a revelation. That’s the only sorta knowledge y’can trust.” Coffee’s profound sigh seemed the result of understanding the wide world and its great trouble. “Ever have a revelation, David?”

  “Depends what you mean by ‘revelation.’”

  “If y’have to figger what it means, y’ain’t never had one.” Coffee scratched his beard. “Y’belie
ve in anything…like a higher power?”

  “No,” said Mingolla. “I don’t.”

  “Oh, yes y’do, David. You a man with a plan, a man what’s too busy schemin’ to stop and figger things out. That’s when the revelations come, when you stop.” Coffee gazed out at the clearing again, his Lincolnesque profile set off by the pale light. “That’s what y’believe in, David. In not stoppin’, in not believin’.”

  The three men in the clearing were as still and silent as prophets at their meditations, shadows in a milky globe, and the mystical quality of the scene convinced Mingolla for a moment that Coffee’s assessment had been accurate, that inspiration was to be had at the center of the light.

  “Last man with a plan to come ’round Emerald was me,” Coffee said. “Way it looks from here, I can’t judge ya ’cause you a judgment on me. I ain’t been too clear in my mind lately, been slackin’ in my work. ’Pears you sent to test me, and I welcome the test.”

  “What kinda test?”

  “Fang and claw, David, Fang and claw.” Coffee took a handful of ampules from his pocket and heaped them on the ground. “There’s your ammo, man. Roll on over, now, and I’ll cut ya loose.”

  “Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

  Coffee turned Mingolla over, sawed at the ropes with a knife. “I’m comin’ for ya in the mornin’, when the light’s strong. Gonna take ya out, David.”

  Mingolla’s stomach knotted. “What if I kill you?”

  “You a test, David, not a challenge.”

  Mingolla sat up, rubbing his wrists, looking at Coffee. The moonlight brightened, and he felt it was illuminating more than their faces and clothes, enforcing honesty like a shared attitude. He thought he could see Coffee’s truth, see him leaning against a gas station wall at some hick crossroads, top dog in a kennel of curs, sucking down brews and plotting meanness, and it seemed to him that though Coffee was misguided, insane, he had at least come to an honorable form of meanness. He wondered what Coffee could see of him. “What ’bout weapons?” he asked.