by Ferenc Máté
The lieutenant fell silent and looked him in the eye. Then, with much care, he drew more lines on his bottle.
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “We’re probably all crazy.”
Chapter 5
Kate waited.
The sun had sunk into the mist over the sea and the air around the ketch was soon drained of light. The bay flared a sudden emerald-green, then grew dark, and the hills, the town, the sky were swallowed by the night. She held the wheel of the anchored boat. In the dark, where the town had been, flames flared, some high, others tiny and faint like flickering, guttering candles. Overhead the first star glowed.
She had often taken a turn at the helm these past weeks, usually at night, and she held the wheel now with deep affection, wondering how it would be to sail off all alone, out of the bay into the unlit sea, out of the lives behind her. The thought calmed her. It contained no fear, no shape or face. She closed her eyes and wondered if the darkness had a sound. When she opened them again, the sky was thick with stars.
THROUGHOUT THE AFTERNOON the stranded passengers had drifted out of the cantina, ambled in the shade, come back, turned their chairs to face a new direction, and now sat and watched the plaza being set up for the fiesta.
The sun turned blood-red, then sank into the sea. The plaza filled with people streaming from the cemetery. Some carried flaming candles, others sleeping children, and some were emptyhanded but full of memories of the dead. The dangling lights glowed over them and over tables loaded with plantains, red peppers, limes, dried lima beans and coffee beans strung into necklaces, hardened cane sugar cut into cubes and carefully piled, and bottles of colorful juices in tidy rows. The air was sated with the steam of boiling corn, the smell of roasting fish, charred meat, and the sickly sweet smell of burnt sugar for candy floss. A mariachi band played on the church steps, their shadows from the firelight bobbing on the wall. People milled about, eating, drinking, and eyeing the woven chains of orange marigolds. Children danced, the soldiers grew drunk, and the passengers of the promised coaster mingled timidly with the crowd.
Dugger wove his way through the revelers, as unhurriedly as he could manage, toward the dark alley that led behind the jail. He stopped for a bite of pan de muertos, followed by a slug of tequila from a thick glass, checking each time to see if someone followed. A little girl sat on the ground beside her pyramids of limes. She wouldn’t look up, not even when he cajoled her, not even when he put a peso down beside the neat green piles. She stared at his boots as if they were warning enough not to look their owner in the eye.
He had nearly made it to the alley when a woman’s anxious voice stopped him. “Good evening, Captain.”
Dugger turned his head. This must be the Irish one, he thought. “Good evening,” he said, and wished she’d go away.
She glanced over her shoulder. “I have heard you’re headed for Tahiti.”
“I’m headed for the loo,” Dugger said, slurring.
Her face changed. A flame sparked in her blue eyes and she halted a nervous smile to purse her lips. “Excuse me,” she said.
Maybe it was her eyes, or the firelight on her cheeks, or just the many glasses of tequila, but she seemed to him the most intriguing woman alive.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to get . . .”
She grabbed his arm. “Don’t leave me,” she said, as firmly as an order. “He’s coming.”
The general came toward them weaving through the crowd. He slowed often, turning here, smiling there, like a benevolent godfather exchanging pleasantries.
The woman squeezed Dugger’s arm. “Take me with you.”
“To the loo?”
“To Tahiti.” When she saw no sympathy in his eyes, she pushed the hem of her shawl off her forehead to reveal her shorn blond hair, so short it almost stood on end. Then she whispered, “I’m a nun.”
The general now walked a direct path toward them.
Dugger pulled his arm away.
“They shoot nuns,” she said, with a plea in her voice.
“And hang gringos who help them. So let’s not let him get two birds with—”
Someone fired a pistol into the air and people laughed and the mariachis played louder.
“You won’t help me then,” she said, her voice suddenly hard.
Dugger couldn’t stop looking in her eyes. There was something wrong about her. Those eyes had turned cold. Icy. Almost eerie. Something frightening that he remembered having seen before. You’re just drunk, he thought.
The crowd gave a cheer.
Dugger saw the general, with a saggy drunken stare, glaring right at them only steps away.
“Slap me,” he told the nun.
Her eyes widened at him.
“Slap me, then walk away angry toward the sea. Then he won’t think you’re running. And no man in his right mind would follow an angry woman.”
She slapped him so loud that the people around them turned. Then she strode away.
Dugger waded back into the crowd and made his way to the general. “Oh, Generale,” he slurred, flinging an arm over his shoulder. “I have a gift for you. A pirate’s ring. I won it at cards from a genuine pirate. Name your price.”
“You need to sleep,” the general said, watching the pale woman walk toward the water. Just as well, he thought, she’s too stiff anyway. But such a perfect . . . ah, never mind. He turned and resigned himself to the flowing crowd.
Chapter 6
One more tequila, Dugger thought. It’s always that last one that enlightens. Shows the way. To God only knows where. “Hola,” he said loudly to an old man with bonitos stacked before him in the dirt of the plaza. He raised his glass of tequila and drank it down. As best as he could, he strode down the dark alley that circled the church. A dozen steps past the steeple, where a dull glow came through the bars of the jailhouse window, he stopped. “Hey, sailor boy,” he called softly.
Nello’s head rose behind the bars. “Jesus, Cappy,” he said. “I can smell your breath from here.”
Dugger laughed. “Liquid courage.”
“Go get some sleep.”
“Can’t.” Dugger snickered. “We’re sailing soon.”
“You’re dead drunk.”
“That may be so. However, when you hear the church bell toll three times, hide under your bunk. You got a bunk to hide under?”
“Sure. Nice wooden bunk with no mattress.”
“Fuck the mattress. Hide under the bunk until the walls crumble.”
“You gonna blow up the jail?”
“I’m gonna blow it down.”
Snorting with drunken smugness, he vanished in the dark.
HE BROKE INTO THE CHURCH through the narrow side door reserved for bringing out the dead. A lone candle flame hovered somewhere in the darkness and, from high in the steeple, the mariachis’ music and singing tumbled down as if falling from the sky. He closed his eyes to adjust to the dark, but the world started spinning, so he opened them again. He felt his way along. At the bottom of a wooden ladder fixed to the steeple wall, he looked up. The bell, lit by firelight, seemed a hundred feet above.
“Jeezus,” he growled. “Why so high?” He put his hands on a rung. Climb, he thought, one rung at a time. It’s like walking, except you have to use your hands. He managed a dozen rungs, then his arms began to shake. Don’t look down. Don’t look up. Don’t look anywhere. Just climb. But his hands wouldn’t let go.
When he was five years old he had climbed an old cherry tree in his grandfather’s yard, to look over the houses and see what mysteries lay beyond. He did well until the last branch. It was dry. It broke off in his hand. He fell through the dense old bower, its tangled branches slowing his fall. And all the way down—seemed such a long time—all he could think of was how sad his grandfather would be if he died.
He didn’t break a bone, but his dread of heights remained—he was convinced the next fall would be his last. It was a strange dread, not that of falling, but that something he depended on—a handl
e, a grip, a footing—would somehow give way. But soldiers have been working here for days, he told himself—same ladder, same rungs—so what are you afraid of?
Think of something more scary than falling, he chided. Cover a fear with a worse fear. He tested the next rung, and when it held, he went on.
He climbed without looking down, but he felt the ladder and steeple sway, and not to the same degree each time, nor even the same direction.
He was wheezing, out of breath. If only I weren’t so drunk, he thought. If I weren’t so drunk, I wouldn’t be bloody up here. Whoever invented steeples? And ladders? And thinking? He concentrated on a vision of the pallid woman. Her face turning suddenly into a death mask. Now, that was scary. Those eyes turning icy. That steely mouth. Keep climbing, keep climbing. That padlock of a mouth holding everything inside. “Almost there,” he muttered. “Almost there.”
Hanging sixty feet above the ground, with every muscle clenched, he suddenly remembered where he’d seen her face before. In nightmares. He’d read about her in a poem in grade school. Later that night he’d dreamed she came into his room and sat on his bed. Touched him with hands of ice.
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold;
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life in Death was she,
Who thicks men’s blood with cold.
An opium-smoker wrote that about a sailor who had sinned, and was doomed to sail forever with the half-dead woman as his only companion. And here she was. That’s why she wanted to sail with him to Tahiti. Death for a crew. Death at the helm in the middle of the sea.
He reached the top rung, out of breath, his heart pounding with fear. He flopped onto a plank and clutched it. “Aya yaya ayee,” the mariachis sang. He pulled himself up to the opening in the belfry. Breathe deep. Just breathe deep. Then he forced himself to look down.
Behind the church, the cemetery shimmered with the flames of a thousand candles. Women were still polishing headstones with rags. Glowing skeleton costumes swayed among the graves draped with flowers; sugar skulls littered the grass.
In the plaza before the church, bonfires flickered and colored lanterns dangled, and people danced languidly as if swimming through darkness among islands of light. The scene started spinning, so he looked away to the dark sea and the ketch lit by stars.
He pulled his knife from its sheath. Gripping the familiar handle cleared his head. He crawled along the plank toward the bell, climbing under and over the timbers that had been used to slide it from the steeple. He wove himself through the web of ropes that lashed the bell to the beams above. The music swelled and children shrieked in delight. He waited until the song ended in a long boisterous trill, then he reached up, grabbed the bell rope just below the tongue, and slammed the tongue with all his might against the bell. A thunderous echo shook the steeple. He thought he’d go deaf. He slammed the tongue again. Then for the third time. When the sound died off, someone in the plaza cried out, “Es uno milagro! Mira! Mira! Look at the bell rope hanging still against the wall. How can the bell ring by itself, if not by miracle?”
Dugger crawled along the plank to the ropes that tethered the bell.
Then he reached up and cut them.
The ropes recoiled with fury, slicing the air. They struck his face and chest. He grabbed for the plank, but everything was sliding, falling—the beams, the timbers—and the great bronze bell slid sideways and slammed the steeple. It broke the wall. Beams swung and bricks poured down, and bats and ropes zigzagged through the dust. The bell teetered; then toppled. With its tongue clanging a last toll, it tumbled toward the plaza through the firelight.
KATE SAT NEAR THE COCKPIT with her legs over the side, watching the lights and the flames of the plaza on the shore. She longed to be there, among the crowd, the smells, the music and laughter, and it struck her then that she couldn’t remember when she last laughed out loud. And to dance. Oh, to dance. Close to him, with her head on his shoulder, arms wrapped around each other. She stood and started swaying to the rhythm of the music that came in waves with the breeze over the sea. Maybe if you don’t look, she thought, the yearning might go away. She picked up the tail of the mainsheet from the coil and trailed it over the side, back and forth in the sea, creating a stream of phosphorescence behind it. Seeing the sea sparkle, she smiled. I can make my own lights.
The church bell tolled three times. She turned and saw it catch the firelight as it fell. It hit the roof of the low building beside the steeple, and a moment later there rose a tumult of crashing, breaking, shouts, and cries. Gunshots rang and a great cloud of dust rose and billowed over the plaza in tall glowing streams. Kate rushed to the mast. She grabbed the main halyard and began to hoist the sail.
DUGGER FELL BACKWARD into the abyss. The plank he had been on was flung into the air and he was catapulted through waves of dust, hitting walls and rungs, beaten from all sides on his way down. So she was Death, he thought, and waited for the last blow, the ground against his head, when he felt a rope wind tight around his upper arm. The rope yanked his arm from the socket of his shoulder, inflicting a pain he had never known.
He dangled in blinding agony.
He groped with his foot and found the ladder, then wove his good arm around a rung. He unwound the rope. His bad arm hung like a rag doll’s. He eased himself down. Once on the ground, he sat against the wall and let the wave of nausea subside. He spit out some blood. Slowly, from the elbow up, he felt along the arm. No break. But it was out. Dislocated. He had seen it happen enough aboard big ships, when winches or windlasses grabbed sleeves; or when nets being fed out with lead balls snagged an arm. And he had seen old Morrison pop them back in, but first he would give the man a thick stiff rope to bite so as not to break his teeth. Then he put his fist into the man’s armpit, took a firm hold of the elbow, and with a quick but ferocious jolt drove the elbow into his side. Levered, the arm would pop back in. But old Morrison was dead. There was no one to help. If he didn’t do something quickly, he’d soon pass out from pain.
He stood up and put the bad arm gently against the wall. He edged the fist of the good arm slowly into his armpit. Then gritted his teeth. He waited until the music hit a crescendo, then, with a lunge, drove his elbow hard against the wall. His body shook with pain. But he had felt the pop. And his arm hung better. Useless and aching like hell, but it hung better.
Chapter 7
When the dust cloud hit him, the lieutenant’s laughter turned into a cough. He was still coughing when the boy came running, waving his pistol, his dust-caked face streaked with tears. He kicked a crowing rooster from his path and ran at the lieutenant, shouting, “He got away! He got away!”
“Who?” The lieutenant wheezed.
“The spy,” the boy roared. “My spy!” The rooster crowed. The boy spun, and with a quick shot reduced it to swirling feathers. He turned and ran back into the dust cloud of the plaza.
The lieutenant strolled through the bedlam of the crowd and, stopping by a fire, sat on a box of fireworks guarded by a soldier. For a while he watched and listened to the madness, then—and he could never explain why—he rose and calmly threw the box of fireworks into the flames.
The night exploded with light.
Sparks spewed, rockets shot up in a chaos of angles, fire wheels spun and rolled away, hissing cones sizzled, and arcs of fire burst among the stalls, against the fountain, the church, the steeple, and the sky. Children shrieked and slapped the sparks and one yelled, “This is better than Christmas!” In a boisterous mass, people pushed toward the sea. “This is a revolution!” a man shouted. “It’s the end of the world,” an old woman cried. A braying donkey kicked down a fruit stall and the mariachis played with added fervor. An old Indian woman turned a skewered fish over the coals.
THE PALE WOMAN FORCED HER GAIT under the dust cloud aglow with light. She tried to escape toward the safety of the darkness, but the voice of Mother Superior rang out in her
head. “We do not swing our arms. We place our weight on the entire foot. We float.” And she hurried stiffly along the sand where the sea left bubbling foam.
Someone grabbed her arm from behind and spun her. It was a firm grip, but it didn’t stop her; instead it propelled her in the opposite direction, toward the crumpled pier. She smelled the tequila before she saw the lieutenant’s face. He pushed her hard and fast and she stumbled, but he held her arm and quickened his stride.
They were almost at the pier when she saw the skiff of the ketch. He yanked her to a halt. She tried to run, but he lunged for her and tore the buttons off her blouse. She froze. The curves of her breasts shone pale in the night. He came nearer. Trapped between him and the skiff, she said in cold defiance, “Go ahead. I don’t care about that.”
He stopped, and pulled her to him instead. “The general thinks you’re a nun.”
She laughed out insolently. “I’m the opposite, “ she blurted. “My name is Darina. Remember, Teniente? Do you know what that means?”
The lieutenant didn’t know and didn’t want to. He yanked her into the skiff of the ketch and pushed her under the foredeck. “Tell the capitán, he’d better leave tonight.” He pulled a crumpled canvas from the floorboards and covered her with it. Then he lifted the stern and dragged the skiff into the sea but left the bow still wedged in the sand. He leaned on the gunwale and caught his breath, then he straightened, turned, and walked slowly back toward the plaza and the light.
Chapter 8
Dugger cradled his aching arm and staggered out the side door. He stopped at the ruins of the jail, the walls fallen outward, bars twisted, a fire smoldering somewhere in the rubble. “Nello!” he called, but nobody replied. He walked over the pile of rubble but found nothing but splintered planks.
At the stables the boy saddled his horse, cursing, and Dugger ducked his head and hurried on with rockets and sparks shooting over him.