Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “The world is a trap. You just happened to stumble into one of mine. Perhaps you’ll avoid the rest.” Izaguirre chuckled. “I have better things to do than worry about you. You’re very strong, David, but you’re really not very important. There are only a few of your kind and many of us. We can control you.”

  He hung up, and Mingolla knelt beside Don Julio, who arched his eyebrows, strained to speak. Groaned. Mingolla set about trying to wake him, but as he made contact, Don Julio’s mind winked out…like the hummingbird on the beach at Roatán. He felt for a pulse. Don Julio’s skin was remarkably cool, as if he’d been dead a long time.

  “What’s goin’ on?” said Ruy behind him; he was flanked by Tully and Debora.

  “Heart attack or something,” said Mingolla.

  He added an imaginary gray goatee and wrinkles to Ruy’s face. No doubt about it. The resemblance to Dr. Izaguirre was unmistakable.

  “Is he dead?” Debora asked.

  “Yeah.” Mingolla picked up Don Julio’s gun and stood. “Guess they don’t make right-wingers like they used to,” he said, searching Ruy’s face for a reaction.

  Ruy nudged the dead man’s arm with his foot. “Cono!” he said, and spat. He smiled at Mingolla. “What you do, man? Scare him to death?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In the gray light, the hills of Olanchito showed a ghostly leached green. Dirt trails wound through them, petering out into thickets and ledges, as if what they had once led to had been magicked away. Those nearest the sea were mounded sugarloaf hills, their crests bristling with stubby palms that from the coast road looked like growths of electrified hair; those farther inland were sharper, faced with granite, their peaks shrouded in rainclouds. For two days they followed the roads, and then they drove beyond the end of the roads into a wilderness whose jungles had overgrown the worst ravages of the war, but still displayed its passage in ways both subtle and distinct. For the most part—although occasionally they came across a ruin or a crater filled with ferns—everything looked normal. Trees were green, birds and insects clamored, streams plunged into waterfalls. Yet there was an air of evil enchantment to the place. It seemed the jut and tumble of the hills had been built up over a series of immense skeletons whose decaying bones pervaded every growth with wrongness. That wrongness was in the air, pressuring them, adding a leaden tone to the sunniest of days, heavying their limbs and making breathing a toil.

  The Honduran hills gave way without visible demarcation to the hills of Nicaragua, and traveling through them took a further toll on their spirits; even Ruy grew silent and morose. It was slow going. They inched down steep defiles, got stuck in streambeds, spent hours getting unstuck, were blinded by squalls that transformed the windows into smeared opacities. Each time they chanced across a bombed village, it seemed a relief to have this hard evidence of war in that it dispelled the supernatural aura. Some of the villages were inhabited, and in these they would buy red gas that was stored in oil drums and was full of impurities. The people of the villages were timorous, living like monkeys in the ruins, peeking from behind shattered walls until their visitors had left, and nowhere did they receive a sincere welcome.

  There was little privacy to be had, what with Ruy’s obsessiveness toward Debora and Tully’s ongoing need to discuss his troubles with Corazon; but sometimes at night Mingolla and Debora were able to slip away, to walk out from the campsite, to talk and make love. Mingolla continued to be confused by their relationship. The fact that love constituted for them an actual power obscured the more commonplace fact that love required a sequence of resolutions in order to prosper; and given the tenuousness of the circumstance, none of the usual resolutions merited real consideration. But he couldn’t help thinking about them, and when he did, when he looked at her and tried to imagine a future, it seemed inconceivable that they should have one. They were, he realized, scarcely more than children with guns, faced with a problem whose fantastic nature beggared logic; despite the proofs, he experienced moments when he was sure that everything they had learned was somehow in error. Trying to hold all this in focus, he would feel at sea, and forgetting the war, the unreliability of their companions, he would cling to Debora, as she did to him.

  Nine days after leaving the coconut plantation, they came across a road. Not a track or an old contra trail, but an honest-to-God road of yellow dirt, wide and wonderful to drive, beginning in the middle of nowhere and winding off through the hills. Mingolla assumed it was a military road intended to connect bases that had never been constructed, because though it was plain from the wildness of the bordering jungle that it had been long since abandoned, no weeds or any other growth marred its smooth surface, and this testified to the use of chemicals available to army engineers for just that purpose. They came to the road at sunset, and while they might have traveled on into the night with such a road, Mingolla decided it would be good psychology to make camp; that way, if the road ended after a few miles, they would at least have a bit of momentum with which to ease the rest of the next day’s travel. He pulled the Bronco up onto a hillside several hundred feet above the road, and they pitched their tents by a stream that had carved a ferny trench in the rock.

  That night Mingolla and Debora walked down the hill and sat in the fringe of the jungle; from this vantage they could look down the road to where it curved up into a notch between the two adjoining hills. An egg-shaped moon lay on its side in the notch, and in its light the yellow dirt appeared richly mineral and moist, not like gold, but like manure of some sort, or the track of a giant snail that had gone south ahead of them. No insects, only the hissing vowels of the wind. The presence of the road made the emptiness bearable, and the quiet was so pervasive and deep, Mingolla imagined he could hear the great humming vibration of the earth. It felt wrong to talk amid this stillness, and they sat with their arms around each other, admiring the road as if it were something miraculous. Debora tucked her head onto his chest, and smelling her hair, feeling the steady hits of her heart, almost audible in the silence, it seemed that everything he had in life had acquired a comprehensible value. He believed he understood love. Not so as to be able to write a definition. But he thought that from this moment on he would be able to call it to mind as a conglomerate of imagery and sensory detail. Whatever love was, it was here, right now, conjured in identifiable form by the silence and the road and Debora’s heartbeat, by a thousand other variables.

  She sat up, shaking back her hair. “I heard something.”

  “Probably the wind.”

  She came to her knees, smoothing her skirt, brushing off dew. She pointed toward the opposite slope, where mist was accumulating in thick bands. “We won’t be able to see soon.”

  “Nothing to see, anyway.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said after a moment. “About how I’ve changed. We haven’t been together that long, but if you measure the time in changes, it seems like years.”

  “How’ve you changed?”

  “I’m not as sure of things as I used to be. When I first thought about going to Panama, I just wanted to find out what was happening. And after we started learning what was happening, then I wanted to be part of it…even if it wasn’t my revolution, it was the revolution there was, and I knew there had to be one. I still believe that. But now sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the effort. I keep imagining us running away. Hiding, letting everybody else figure out the problems of the world.”

  He laughed. “It’s the opposite with me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah…I used to want to get away from everything. But the closer we come to Panama, the more I realize I can’t escape being involved. And the more angry I get at Izaguirre.” He laughed again. “Maybe this is what they call growing together.”

  “Maybe,” she said despondently. “At least you’re changing in the right direction.”

  “What do I know? I’ve taken the same dope as the fuck-ups who’re supposed to be making the movie.”

  “You
still believe they’re fuck-ups?”

  “There’s no doubt about it. The way they’re handling us, all the games. If peace is their plan, they’ll probably fuck that up. Think about it. Here’s these two families who’ve been doing the drug for centuries. All that power, and they’re just now trying to pull it together. Doesn’t augur well for the peace process.”

  “I guess not.”

  He studied her face, its exoticism as pronounced as the rose in Corazon’s eye. Just the sort of little treasure that would appeal to Ruy, to the man with everything…especially if it was beyond his reach, if his power couldn’t touch them. And Mingolla was certain they had grown that strong. They would have to be careful not to reveal too much to Ruy, because Izaguirre would be in contact with him, and he might panic if he thought they were too strong. Try to eliminate them. It might be time to confront Ruy. Mingolla had been hoping Ruy would give something away, some bit of information, but maybe the best tactic would be to bully him.

  “You act like you’re miles away, David.”

  “I’m back…just thinking.”

  “Well…” She settled against him. “If they are fuck-ups, maybe we can do something.”

  “Given that they’re into playing God, the worst we can do is to inject some realism into the situation.” He stared down the road, trying to identify a black object that had appeared in the notch. “Something’s coming.” He helped her up, and they retreated farther into the fringe.

  “It’s stopped,” she said.

  “Naw, look. It’s coming again.”

  After a couple of minutes they realized that the object was in fact two objects, one light, one dark, and that they were advancing at a leisurely clip, moving forward fifty or sixty feet, stopping, then moving forward again; and after a couple of more minutes they saw that the objects were a horse and a wagon. The wagon was a little house on wheels with a peaked roof, the walls painted dark blue and illuminated with five-pointed gold stars and a crescent moon; the horse was white, dappled with gray. No one was driving. The reins were lashed to a peg on the driver’s seat, and the window and door were black with shadow. There was something horrible about the wagon’s approach, the way it lurched emptily like a body without bones, and this, allied with its archaic appearance, lent it an omenical potency.

  The wagon drew abreast of them and stopped. The horse shifted in its traces, eyes rolling, ablaze with moonlight; it was an old horse, its breath wheezy. When Mingolla stepped out onto the road, the horse tossed its head but stayed put: it was as if it wanted to run, but was obeying a set pattern of stopping and starting, and Mingolla had caught it just right. He grabbed the bridle, held its head. The horse’s eye swiveled, regarding him with fear, and Mingolla—taken by its sculptural beauty, its madness—knew the horse had been trifled with by someone like him, some drugged genius of the new order, and had been coerced to move haltingly along this desolate road for no reason other than that of the most pitiful folly. He was more affected than he had been by the terrible human results of similar folly. Human beings were liable to such, but horses, as beautiful and stupid as they were, should not have to put up with that kind of crap.

  Debora came up beside him, and he handed her the bridle. “See if you can gentle him,” he said. Then he hauled himself onto the driver’s seat and ducked inside the wagon.

  Before he determined the wagon’s contents, he knew by intuition that it held nothing good, that it held nothing much at all, and that whatever he found would be testimony to a knowledge not worth having. An instant later he felt dread. But that was just fancy. He realized that his first intuition had embodied the true essence of terror, the comprehension that everything we dread is simply a reminder of insignificance, one we assign a supernatural valence in order to boost our morale. An angle of moonlight cut across a pallet on the floor. There was a faint cloying smell as of something once alive and unhealthy. Mingolla hesitated, not sure he wanted to poke around more. He spotted a gleam in a rear corner and reached for it. His fingers touched a slick paper surface, and he picked up a sheaf of glossy photographs, each showing a black woman intimately involved with a fat white man. His toe struck something that rattled against the wall. He groped and came up with a handful of bones. Human bones, neither fractured nor exhibiting any other sign of injury. Finger bones and sections of spinal joint. They took the light and made it seem a decaying tissue stretched between floor and window. And that was all. Except for dust and the idea of dissolution. Whether the wagon and its contents were a contrivance, a message sent from one playful maniac to another, whether one recognized it as such, Mingolla was certain that its effect upon anyone would be to make him aware of his triviality, his unlovely organic essence. He climbed back onto the driver’s seat, feeling mild giddiness and nausea. The light was so vivid in contrast to the wagon’s darkness, he thought he might breathe it in and exhale shadow.

  “What’d you find?” Debora asked.

  “It’s empty.” He jumped down.

  “He’s better now,” said Debora, stroking the horse’s nose.

  “I’m gonna unhitch him,” Mingolla said. “Let him graze.”

  They led the horse uphill through the accumulating mist to a clearing bounded by twisted spreading trees with black bark as wrinkled as the faces of old, old men, and they watched him graze, moving a step, munching, moving another step. Here he looked at home, serene and natural. His dappled coat blended with the mist, making it appear that he was either materializing from or disintegrating into the ghostly white ribbons clinging to his shoulders and haunches, his head sometimes vanishing when he bent to pull at a clump of grass. Moonlight slanted through the mist, haloing every object, creating zones of weird depth, coils of smoky glow, as if some magical force were dominating the clearing and illuminating its shapes of power. It was partly this perception of the magical that roused Mingolla’s desire, the hope that he could evoke a magic of his own and forget the foulness of the wagon. He pressed Debora against one of the trees, opened her blouse, and helped her skin down her panties. “It’s too damp,” she said, pointing to the dewy grass. He lifted her a little to demonstrate an alternative. Her breasts were cool, gleaming with condensation, and felt buoyant in his hands; her eyes were aswim with lights. He drew up her skirt, lifted her again, and as he entered her, she threw her arms back around the trunk, her legs scissoring his waist. The stillness of the night was banished. The horse whuffling, munching, and the muffled noises from the jungle were gathered close, sharpened and orchestrated by the wet sounds of their lovemaking, their ragged breathing. It was a white act, seeming to kindle the moonlight to new brilliance. Mist curled from Debora’s mouth, tendriled her hair, and seeing her transformation, Mingolla felt that he, too, was being transformed, changing into a beast with golden eyes and talons, gaining in strength with every thrust, every cry she made. Afterward he supported her against the tree for a long time, too weak to talk or move, and when at last he withdrew, when he turned to the clearing, he expected to find that the horse had disappeared, that it had been dissolved by their good magic. But there it was, shoulder-deep in a white sea, staring at them without curiosity, merely watchful, knowing exactly what it had witnessed, its eyes steady and dark and empty of questions.

  Several nights later Ruy invited Mingolla and Debora for coffee in his tent, while Tully and Corazon were gathering kindling. Ruy had apparently given up all rights to Corazon, preferring to concentrate on Debora, and though he had stopped making overt attempts at seduction, his eyes were always on her, and much of his conversation was suggestive. Mist curled through the tent flap, glowing in the radiance of a battery lamp, and Ruy lay on his sleeping bag, a coffee cup balanced on his stomach, talking about Panama, telling them more of what his long-ago passenger had purportedly told him. As he spoke, his language and his inflections grew more and more refined, and at last realizing that he was revealing himself to them, that there was no further use in circumspection, Mingolla asked, “What are you, man? Madradona or Sot
omayor?”

  Ruy set down his cup and sat up; shadows filled in the lines of his face, “Sotomayor,” he said. “Of course most of us have grown accustomed to using other names.”

  “Why…” Debora began.

  “Why haven’t I told you before? Why am I telling you now? Because I…”

  “Because it’s a game he’s playing,” Mingolla said. “Everything’s a game to them.” He wanted to ask Ruy about the horse, but was afraid he might lose his temper. “And we’re supposed to believe you playful fuckers are capable of making peace with one another.”

  “We have no choice,” said Ruy haughtily. “You know a good bit of it. Would you like to hear the rest?”

  “Sure,” said Mingolla. “Entertain us.”

  “Very well.” Ruy sipped his coffee. “Toward the beginning of the last century, the wiser heads among us concluded that the world was headed for disaster. Nothing imminent, you understand. At least in terms of that generation’s happiness. But they could see the development of conflicts and forces that would menace everyone. They realized that the feud had to end, that we had to turn our energies toward dealing with these questions. And so we met in Cartagena and made a peace between the families.”

  Mingolla spat out a laugh. “Altruists!”

  “That’s right,” said Ruy. “You have no idea how great an altruism was required to overcome centuries of hatred. It wasn’t only that we had to end the feud; we had to become colleagues with our bitter enemies, because the logistics of creating a worldwide revolution were…” He couldn’t find an appropriate term and shook his head. “We had to initiate breeding programs to begin with. The families were not large in those days, and we needed more manpower to infiltrate the political arena, the military, the intelligence communities. That’s been the purpose of programs like Psicorps and Sombra…to swell our ranks. It’s taken us more than a hundred years, but finally we’re ready for a takeover. There’s not an agency of any importance in Russia or the United States whose strings we can’t pull.”