by R. M. Koster
Then he turned and stepped through the to-planes door into two decades of political obscurity.
Which left me the only member of my family actively engaged in the struggle for existence—or, rather, actively in search of a struggle which would give me the sensation of being alive. I was offered several jobs on the strength of my name and my medal, but I never considered working for wages, or working at all in the sense most men conceive it, and was set on investing my cash and energies in some enterprise which would bring a high return in excitement. So as the price of death was rising in Costaguana and the merchandising of it not offensive to my partner’s moral sense, I went into the gun trade.
Ñato and I scrounged a modest first shipment in Tinieblas: a dozen M-1 rifles, their stocks scuffed by tepid-veined conscripts with “Better Bored Than Gored” signs in their hearts, from an ordnance warrant officer with a talent for cooking inventories; six thousand rounds of .30 caliber ammunition, armor-piercing, tracer and ball, which I saw advertised on the Reservation Gun Club bulletin board and which the owner, a blubber-jowled naval dockcrane operator, the kind of gringo who doesn’t feel potent without an arsenal in his closet, was getting rid of after having stocked up on the new, noncorrosive stuff; four spanking M-2 carbines of the type lofted in one hand by the handsome young Irish American infantry captain who rallied an invisible platoon in the recruiting poster in front of Fort Shafter Post Headquarters—these, complete with banana-shaped magazines and two khaki-colored metal boxes of ammunition, from two khaki-colored stevedores; odd pieces brought back as souvenirs by members of the Korea battalion: a Russian burp gun which looked as though it might fire the carbine round; a 7.65 mm. Czech pistol, suitable for an Italian staff colonel to wear (in a patent-leather holster raked to the left of his paunch) when visiting his mistress; half a dozen serviceable Colt .45’s, the cleanest of which I kept for myself; and a cobra-lovely Luger such as in nobler times and climes might have been left, along with a silver flask of brandy, on the table in front of an officer who had betrayed the code. All of which we packed in a crate and a U.S. Navy footlocker, and loaded in a Jeep which I bought at quartermaster auction, and covered with a tarpaulin, and trucked (since it was dry season and a Jeep could make it) over the cordillera and through three river fords to Sombras in Selva Trópica Province. Where we found Jaime heel-squatting by the bow of a Seahorsed cayuco, watching the ocher river slap beneath houses perched on cranes’ legs on the steep bank.
He occupied the same place in his society as I did in mine: rebellious son of a notable chieftain. He’d had advantages. His father, who ruled a tribe that lived down between the Costaguanan border and the Caribbean, had taught him how to operate the official cayuco and its official outboard motor—though not how to swim, for swimming in those rivers is best left to the candiru, a kind of eel which will worm up a man’s penis and lodge there with spines. Then Jaime quarreled with his father and stole the canoe and went off to the provincial capital to make his fortune. All of which I learned later. At the time he merely looked reliable and nodded when I asked, waving my hand vaguely toward the east, if he would take me “over there.”
I left Ñato to watch our goods and went off with Jaime in search of customers. All day we slid along rivers the color of pus, past huge trees that clawed to wasted banks and mud flats strewn with dreaming crocodiles. I lay against a thwart, my head throbbing with the motor, too poached in somnolence to shake the flies from my forearms, and sometimes the banks pressed in so that we moved as in a tunnel under branches choked with gaudy feathers and great oval insect nests, and sometimes they spread back to leave us isolated as on the sea. Toward noon the stream grew viscous, and bright golden salamanders raced across the surface by our bows. We moved now with the current, now against it, and for a time a company of point-bearded phantoms in breastplates and curved helmets kept pace with us along the left-hand bank, hacking the vines with rapiers and sinking to their stockinged thighs in the gray muck. Then at dusk the water cleared. We heard the rush of rapids above us. Three uniformed bundles floated by us in the bubbly current, two face down with elbows wired, one face up with wagging pink necktie. And we stuttered round a bend to a landing where four merry lads were swinging a fourth bundle out into the stream.
That town was called Golconda. A mulatto named Cérbero Entrañas, who gave himself the title of colonel, had seized it that same afternoon, imprisoning the mayor and butchering the fourman garrison. He was my first customer, and when Jaime and I returned two days later with Ñato and the guns, he paid in gold pieces dug up from under the mayor’s house (he’d spent the intervening hours convincing the mayor to tell him exactly where to dig) and tested the bulk of his purchase at once, ordering the townspeople assembled and the mayor tied to a large tree that grew above the bank and twelve disciples arranged in two ranks one kneeling, one standing, so that the rifles of the front rank all but brushed the mayor’s fluttering chest, and convincing the mayor’s son, a boy of twelve, to give the command to fire. And when the volley burst, splitting the sky above Golconda and snuffing the monkey chatter in the trees across the river, Ñato Espino retched, and then grinned his grin, and said, “That’s justice, that’s revolution,” and I felt the left side of my face go hard and numb to feeling as though calcified.
Our immediate success sent us traveling. To Galveston, where we bought lever-action Winchester .30-30’s (always a popular model south of the Rio Bravo, though somewhat bruising to the shoulder), a hundred of them and two unsinkable fiberglass boats. We opened the watertight compartments in the hulls and packed the rifles snug inside and sealed the fiberglass and shipped the boats to ourselves in Bastidas and claimed them at the customs shed and sailed them down the coast, Jaime in one, Ñato and I in the other, and up a river into Costaguana. To Havana, where the government was letting Springfields go dirt cheap. The gringos had replaced them with semiautomatic Garands, but they were unquestionably lethal and easy to operate as well, and we found a pilot who was willing to fly them and Ñato and me from Camaguëy to a field in Jaime’s father’s territory. Jaime was back in favor by then—his share of Colonel Cérbero Entrañas’ gold coins dangled about the plump neck of the most prominent of his several stepmothers—and his father gave us a feast and six giggling twelve-year-olds with conical breasts and rings in their noses before we took the guns over to Costaguana in our now sinkable boats. to Guadeloupe for some charming French-made Walther auto-loading pistols, a luxury item whose workmanship seduced me, which we imported smoothly enough thanks to an imaginative packaging job—they came in football-sized, cellophaned boxes labeled “Ma Griffe”—but had the devil’s time selling at a decent profit. To Curaçao for a gross of Belgian Browning rifles, which sluiced through Tinieblan customs as dental drills, lubricated by a juicy bribe to the Bastidas port captain. To Guatemala, where we purchased Czech machine pistols from the private stock of the lately deposed President Jacobo Arbenz. To Managua and Kingston and Port-au-Prince, wherever we could find things that went bang and caused trouble.
These we dragged up the Costaguanan rivers past floating islets of baled corpses and cindered villages haloed with buzzards, through regions ravaged alternately by outlaw bands and government columns where balloon-bellied children fed on dirt; and delivered them to those who craved them most. To Autólico Caco, another self-commissioned colonel, who held a town called Esperanzas and took tribute from the copra planters; to Bronteo Culón, “El Corbatero Negro,” whose men churned like locusts through the ricelands of the Hermosura Basin; to Polifemo Caganza, a one-eyed ex-shepherd whose people, men, women, and children lived in caves at the headwaters of the Rio Manso, a cattle thief and occasional bank robber who could eat a whole calf at one sitting and who, they said, kept no woman for himself but made love to his mare instead; to Calixto Merdona, “El Corbatero Rubio,” who left a prosperous provincial law practice when his student son was tortured to death in Chuchaganga Police Headquarters and who had a nail keg full of what looked like marbles and
turned out to be the eyes of government soldiers. All these men fought General Huevas and, at times, each other and ruled their countrysides, collecting taxes and administering swift justice, and all were good customers, for during la rabia a Costaguanan’s life depended on his weapon, and his place in the world on how many followers he could arm. They paid in gold, more often in greenbacks, at times in Costaguanan lunas, for I would take these too, at a slashing discount, if my buyer had nothing else, and with each shipment I grew harder. The sensation I experienced in Golconda when Cérbero Entrañas had the mayor shot reproduced itself in other parts of my body, and on examination I realized that a hornlike substance was spreading beneath my skin. It was thin enough to let a little feeling pass, supple enough to let me move without impediment, but infinitely hard, harder than glass and, more, unshatterable. It spread like a rash yet remained unnoticeable to others, creeping down my cheek and across half my neck to stop at my collarbone, appearing next on my abdomen and, within the course of one afternoon, flashing across my loins and down my right leg to my ankle. On the day we delivered two cases of Sten guns to Polifemo Caganza, the secretions began collecting on the inside of my left forearm, and during the night of carousing that followed, they seeped up my arm, across my shoulders, and over the right side of my face. It continued that way, a new outbreak with each trip into Costaguana, and before the year was out, I was sheathed from crown to toe.
I thought first of seeing a doctor, but I had never been examined or received treatment, not even as a child, and the idea of being poked and fingered by some grave, pretentious fool with manicured nails and a Latin diploma repelled me. My condition, whatever it was, caused me no inconvenience. No, once I became accustomed to the slight numbness, I enjoyed it. That was the way to be, I thought, hard as some prehistoric saurian, immune to the tame nips of newer species, and baked in danger. I left no minute’s gap for the wedge of boredom and blotchiness. I poured my profits into larger shipments, always looking to risk my entire stake, and with each shipment risking prison in Tinieblas and death in Costaguana. Why not be hard? One had to be alert for government patrols and rival traders. One had to deal with ruthless men. And there was the discomfort of heat and rain and insects, the alien indifference of the jungle, the palpable ambiance of violent death, to keep one’s lips sweet with the flavor of living. When I wasn’t angling for guns in foreign cities, I was threading them into Tinieblas or sweating them up those rivers, as fully immersed in life as a panther.
Late in November we came to Golconda again, with the rain pelting so hard we had to bail, so heavy we had to rope the boats together lest we lose each other. It lifted just as we turned the bend to Golconda landing where our man was waiting for us, a Costaguanan nicknamed Memo whose full name I never knew. He’d come over to us one afternoon while we were eating in a cantina in Esperanzas, knowing our calling, for we weren’t ashamed of it. He was tall and well-made, an educated man, traveled. He said he knew Tinieblas, a magnificent country, and Ciudad Tinieblas, a charming capital, elegant yet not stiff like Lima, say, or Bogotá, and finally that, if we didn’t mind mixing business with our rice and fried beans, he was in the market for cartridges, delivery at Golconda. Cérbero Entrañas was dead, forty-four bullet wounds and his thumbs chopped off to compare with print records in Chuchaganga, but Memo said that a new band was moving through in the wake of the troops. The leader, a friend of his, was cagey, afraid of spies; Memo would purchase for him.
He had fine table manners, this Memo, which he displayed for us on a slice of grilled beef, taking an ivory-handled clasp knife from his side pocket and carving the whole portion into neat parallelograms before closing the blade and forking the morsels carefully into his mouth. Sprucely dressed too, compared to the cantina’s other customers, ourselves included, in a fresh brown shirt, sleeves buttoned over imperially slim wrists, and tight brown trousers stretched over the tops of well-buffed brown boots. And he was refined where it came to personal protection. He had a little .25 caliber Beretta which he carried in his hip pocket swaddled in fawn-colored chamois. He showed it to us during the course of our chat, and though it seemed light, almost frivolous, for the life-style then in vogue in Costaguana, I had to admit it was a lovely little pistol. More, he offered a most attractive price for .30-06 and .30-30 cartridges, items we could lay our hands on easily enough. His friend meant to do some serious pillaging when the rains lifted and was willing to pay well for dependable ammunition. Hollow-point bullets in hunting loads, Memo specified; the sort of round which left an exemplary exit wound. “‘Pour encourager les autres,’” he quoted, patting the corners of his mouth with a folded linen handkerchief. How many rounds would his friend take? Why, as many as we could transport In one trip, of course. His friend didn’t care to linger near Golconda. So we agreed to meet Memo there on such-and-such day.
He was waiting above the landing when we turned the bend. He’d rigged a little lean-to by tacking one side of a rubber ground sheet to the big tree where Cérbero Entrañas had had the mayor shot, and I suppose he’d sat there most of the afternoon, waiting for us. Reading, for when the whole thing was over I found a little leather-bound, vellum-paper copy of Unamuno’s essays stuck back where the rubber met the ground. I suppose he heard our outboards and finished a paragraph and tucked his book away and rose just as we came in view. He waved but didn’t come down to meet us. Stood stretching as we ran our boats up on the pebbles.
“Trouble?”
“The whore rain,” Ñato called back, getting out of the bow of my boat to lug it a little higher up.
Memo took a couple of steps down toward us, then smiled and called, “Excuse me,” and went back to urinate against the big tree. He stood there, legs apart, and I breathed the way you do after a long trip and took off my wet shirt and spread it on a case of cartridge boxes and swung my bare feet over the gunwale into the shallow water and waded out and up toward him.
“Stop there.” He had his pistol out, gunhand extended toward my chest, left hand in his hip pocket as on a target range. I hadn’t seen him move. First he was pissing; then he had us covered. “Put your hands on your heads.”
I stopped. Not because I’d decided to. The stare of that little eye stopped me like a firm hand against my chest. I didn’t raise my hands, though I suppose Jaime and Ñato did, for Memo said, “You too, Kiki.” In the second that followed I was aware of the bullet scars on the big tree, whose leaves were sponging up the last rays of sunlight, and a parrot squawk across the river behind me, and the after-rain freshness of the forest which seemed gathered in a drop of water pendant from a twig above Memo’s shoulder. Then I pushed my chest against the pistol stare, and the eye blinked fire.
Four blinks and four pops while other things were happening. My .45 rose from the waistband of my pants and floated upward. The hammer came back, the safety went down, and as the barrel passed Memo’s chin on the rise, as it reached his lips, which were beginning to open in wonder, just as I began to feel the four stings on my breast, my pistol fired. Memo’s head flew back, dragging his shoulders and trunk back onto his lean-to, flinging his gun arm up so that his fifth shot carried well above my head and his sixth straight up through the branches to shake a little shower on him from the rain-glossed leaves.
The sun went down then, and when I’d breathed and eased the hammer forward and clicked the safety up, I went down to my boat and put on my wet shirt, so neither Jaime nor Ñato noticed the four hornet bites in a cross around my left nipple or the four flattened slugs lying in the mud near where my feet had been. The sting marks went away in a week or so, but I kept the smiling glow of calm and power which came to me as I let my pistol rise on its own impetus and drive a widening tunnel through the roof of that man’s mouth and out the back of his head.
I am in the Roman apartment where we lived thirty-odd years ago when Alejo was ambassador. The unconscious iguana has been carried to my mother’s room, unoccupied now that she’s away. But I am fully-grown and married. To Olga?
To Elena? To Marta? To some composite woman who feels sorry for the iguana and has put the radio on for him. No matter, for his elbows are bound tight with baling wire. I enter the room to punish and torture him. I can’t see him but can hear him rustling about. Perhaps he is not bound. Perhaps his hands are merely tied in front. He will be dangerous, able to defend himself. He comes for me from behind a chair, still in human form, not bound at all, and I am paralyzed. He begins to eat me, tearing my genitals away with pointed teeth. No pain, but the horrid anguish of mutilation. He rips flesh from my inner thigh and looks up, munching, his dull reptile eyes scanning me contentedly. Between bites he reminds me that it wasn’t the woman who set him free; it was I myself.
31
Deathmusty shroud of cobwebbed dreamterrors which I strain at wearily. Afternoon sun bores at the green curtains. Air conditioner whooshes dully. My bed, my room, my house. Mito is safe at school. Iguanaman is back in Monsterholm, and I am happily returned to a reality where I am merely paralyzed, not gobbled alive.
Sopped in sweat. Wifely Elena has tiptoed off, drawing the covers up under my chin, and I’ve no way to throw them back. The buzzer has wandered from beneath my left hand. Intrepid explorations along, the full half-inch range of my middle finger, then I abandon the hunt and repose like Dr. Livingstone to await discovery and rescue.