The DMZ

by Jeanete Windle

  “I’m sorry,” he went on as Julie blew her nose. His mouth quirked ruefully. “I keep saying that to you, and let me tell you, I don’t make a regular habit of apologies. But I didn’t mean to hurt you.” His mouth twisted again. “Okay, maybe shake you to your senses a bit. But I had no business shooting off like that.”

  Wadding the handkerchief in her lap, Julie pushed her hair back from her face with a weary hand. “Look, you don’t need to apologize. You were right. It wasn’t my parents I’ve been angry about all these years. It was me. I … I guess I really have been a spoiled brat.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Rick countered swiftly.

  “No, but you’ve been thinking it.” Julie rushed on past his immediate denial. “It’s just—oh, I know all those years they gave weren’t really all for nothing. Carlos, Doña Nina—they’ve showed me that much. It’s just …”

  She took a shuddering breath and dropped her eyes to the handkerchief in her hands. “I missed them!” she said, her voice quivering. “All those boarding school separations—it really wasn’t the things … the American lifestyle. I never cared about that, and I knew they didn’t either. It was them. I … I guess I resented that they just accepted so easily that they had to do without me most of the year. Oh, I know they were thinking of what was best for me, and I’m sure they would have liked us to be together all the time, but …”

  Julie raised her eyes from the handkerchief, now a twisted knot. “I don’t know what I wanted. For them to cry a little when I left, maybe? Oh, I know they were trying to be brave for me, and maybe they did cry when I was out of sight. Their letters always said how much they missed me. But they were so content with their work. They didn’t seem to mind what it was costing them … costing us! Even when they died in that epidemic—you’re right; they would have felt it was worth it. Whether or not they had any idea what was going to happen, they wouldn’t have walked away from people who were hurting and sick and needing them anymore than they’d have robbed a bank.

  “But what about me? I was their daughter! If they loved me as much as they always said they did, as much as they loved the Colombians and the I’paa, shouldn’t it have mattered to them to stay alive—not to go taking risks—for me? Wasn’t I, our being together as a family, as important as saving the world … or San Ignacio?”

  Why she was trying to explain herself to this man, Julie didn’t know. Nor had she expected an answer to that very rhetorical question. But she had hardly finished that bitter wail when Rick responded slowly, thoughtfully, “I think you know how much you mattered to them. I guess maybe your parents really believed what they were doing out there was worth the sacrifices they made—including you.”

  Rick eased the AK-47 to the ground beside him and leaned forward to flick a wandering fire ant off his boot. “There was a Bible passage that came up in one of that chaplain’s study groups back at Fort Bragg. It never really meant anything to me because I had no family. But Jesus was talking to His disciples, telling them that far from those crowns and thrones they were expecting, His message of salvation was going to turn families against each other, bring persecution to those who dared follow, bring about His own death on the cross. He told them it might even cost their lives to follow Him and that anyone who wasn’t willing to put Him above father and mother and even sons and daughters wasn’t worthy to be His disciples. I guess your parents—unlike most people—took that call seriously.”

  “I know the passage,” Julie interrupted wearily. “Matthew 10. I found the last part inscribed on my parents’ grave. ‘Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’ That’s the whole point. Why should losing family need to be part of saving the world?”

  Rick moved his shoulders in a shrug against the rough wood of the mango tree. “It would make sense to any soldier. If the enemy is coming at you, and your men start whining that they can’t leave their families or risk getting hurt because their families are going to miss them, then the battle is already lost. If you’re a soldier at war, you go out to fight, knowing you may never come back, because you believe that your country—and that family you’re leaving behind—is worth that sacrifice.”

  “Yes, well, that’s fine,” Julie argued. “But my parents weren’t in a battle.”

  “Weren’t they?” Rick said quietly. “I don’t think your parents would agree. If every missionary—or every aid worker or Peace Corps volunteer working to save people in some of the nastier corners of the world—chose to stay home because of the potential cost, where would the world be today?”

  “Maybe.” Julie took another deep breath and was pleased to hear her voice emerge even and steady. “Getting off the subject of me, there is something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time—or someone like you. Everything you say—it’s obvious you have a real faith in God. I believe in God too, and the Bible and—well, everything. I mean, it’s only natural. I grew up in church, had Christian parents, went to a missionary boarding school. I’m not saying I only believe because of my parents. I believe for myself that the God of the Bible is exactly who and what He says, that He intervened in human history by sending Jesus Christ to pay the penalty for our sins. I’ve checked out other religions, and I’ve never found anything that made better sense. But you …”

  Julie looked Rick over consideringly. They hadn’t come across a stream for bathing that day, and Rick was almost as unkempt as she herself felt, perspiration visible against the heavy material of his uniform, his hair darkened from sweat under a headband he had cut from her ripped sweatshirt, the shadow of a day’s beard dark against the uncompromising line of his jaw.

  He looked every bit as tough and dangerous as her first impression had been, so that right now she could believe any story of his past exploits. But there were lines of weariness at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth that had not been there a week ago, testimony that the long days of hiking and the nights of guard duty were taking their toll on him too.

  “I’ve always wondered if I would accept it so easily if I hadn’t heard it all my life. I mean, I can understand why someone hearing it all for the first time would write it off as a fairy tale—or science-fiction plot. An all-powerful God creating the universe, then coming down to live among the people He created and dying to save them from their sins. You, for instance. What made you choose the God of the Bible over, say, some Native American folktale of mankind emerging from a hole in the ground or something? Or reincarnation, or any of the other popular philosophies floating around these days?”

  Rick had retrieved the AK-47, and Julie saw his narrowed gaze sweep the plateau beyond the mango tree, then flicker back into the brush before he looked over at her.

  “I guess it’s like you said,” he said simply. “It—He—makes sense out of my universe.”

  He tossed aside a piece of grass he’d been chewing. “Oh, I checked out a lot of religious systems too. By the time I got into the army, I knew there was something missing in my life, and there were a lot of options on base. Everyone was trying to get you to come to their service or religious ceremony. I even toyed around with some of those eastern gurus.”

  Rick slanted Julie a sudden grin. “I just couldn’t stomach those robes or bald heads! But when it got down to it, every belief system I saw came out to pretty much the same thing. Some great big, impersonal God, or gods, or just some Force way out there which didn’t really have much to do with mankind, and mankind didn’t have much to do with it either. From what I could see, people practiced their religion for two basic reasons. To placate their Supreme Being, or Beings, so they’d be left alone—you know, ward off bad luck or evil spirits or just getting struck with lightning or some other disaster. Or to offer enough bribes—whether literal sacrifices or prayer wheels or donations or burning candles and counting rosaries like my barrio back home—so your God, or gods, would do what you wanted.

  “But none of it made any difference in how people lived their lives. You could kick your dog, beat on yo
ur wife, cheat the poor, whatever—and as long as you paid your dues, that was it. None of it changed people—and I knew I, at least, was in desperate need of change.

  “Then I met that chaplain, and he introduced me to the God of the Bible. I must have read the whole thing in a month, and it turned my life upside down. I mean, here you have a God who created the universe with so much love and joy, it just shouts off the pages. Then, like putting a kid in a great big sandbox or inside a room just chock-full of art supplies and fun things to do, He puts human beings in the middle of that universe and says, ‘Have some fun. See what you can do.’

  “Now, He’s an all-powerful God. It would be easy for Him to force us to fall down and worship Him and obey His laws. Human history would have sure been different if He had! But He goes and does something incomprehensible. He sets mankind free to choose. He loves us enough that He wants us to love Him back—not because He’s programmed us that way, but because we choose to as free living beings. And when we use that freedom to choose our own selfish way instead of His, when we make a terrible mess of this beautiful world He’s given us, He doesn’t do what we deserve—just wipe us out and start over. He comes down Himself as a human being—Jesus Christ—and lives our life with us. Then He gives His own life to show us the way back to God.

  “Even the laws He gives us—and the Bible’s full of them, I’ll say that. But God isn’t asking for us to sacrifice our firstborn sons or repeat a hundred chants before He’d consider our latest interruption to His nap. He tells us to do things like love one another. Do to others what you would like done to you. Love your wife and kids. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t murder. And all of it isn’t for His benefit but for ours—because He cares enough to keep us from hurting ourselves and others. If everyone in the world followed those commands, just think what a place it would be.”

  Getting up, Rick walked outside the overhanging branches of the mango, making one of his swift surveys before he returned. When he did, he hunkered down on the heels of his combat boots right in front of Julie, his intent gaze disturbingly close.

  “I’m a soldier. And as a soldier you’ve got to decide before you ever pick up a gun whether the leaders you’re following into battle are the kind you’re willing to risk your life for. It’s like Aguilera and his band. They’ve got great ideals. But people who would use murder and kidnapping and extortion to reach those ideals aren’t the kind of hands into which I’d want to put my future.

  “But the God of the Bible—I hadn’t reached the last page before I knew this was what—who—I’d been searching for my whole life. And you know what? Even if it was just a fairy tale like you said, even if none of it were true, that’s the kind of God I’d cross the line to fight for any day. But He is real! I guess that’s where faith comes in, but I know that as surely as I’m breathing. And because He’s real, my life—and this whole sorry world—makes sense.”

  Julie looked at Rick in wondering silence. His long lashes were lifted to hold her eyes with his own, and their brown depths were not, as they had so often been, scornful or mocking or furious but utterly serious. Julie swallowed as she pulled her eyes away.

  Captain Rick Martini, I really like you! If only she hadn’t ruined so completely any possibility that he would ever think as well of her.

  Pushing away a pang that had nothing to do with the last hour’s turmoil, Julie said lightly, “I wish my life made as much sense. Maybe I really am that spoiled brat. My parents gave their lives to help others. Me—so far, all I’ve done with mine is chase a Pulitzer. I can’t even let my parents go, much less make the kind of sacrifices they made.”

  “Maybe you’re selling yourself short,” Rick answered quietly. “You don’t know what you have in you until you’re called on to use it. I think you are more your parents’ daughter than you give yourself credit for.”

  “Maybe,” Julie retorted skeptically. Swiftly, she rose to her feet, and Rick stood up immediately with her, slinging the AK-47 over his shoulder. Brushing off her slacks, Julie glanced toward the tangle of jungle beyond the mango tree. The shadows were growing dark with the onslaught of dusk above the river bluff.

  “Well, if we’re not going to have every animal in the area rummaging through our leftovers, I guess we’d better get back to camp.”

  Then her hand shot out to grip Rick’s forearm. Her voice came out just above a whisper. “Rick!”

  Rick’s head turned in the direction of hers, and Julie knew from the sudden stillness of his lean body that he had seen it too. A face. Framed in the lacy arch of a fern patch not a dozen paces into the jungle. It wavered among the shadows curiously indistinct in outline like a shadow itself. Or a ghost.

  But this was no ghost. Features round as a moon and the dark bronze of mahogany under those misleading streaks of gray and white. Flat, wide nostrils. Jet black hair cut in a straight bang above an oriental slant of eyes.

  Like few other North Americans, Julie knew those features. One of the rare, wandering natives of this equatorial rainforest.

  But who? And from where? Hostile or peaceful?

  Julie blinked in her effort not to move. And though the closing of her eyes was only the fraction of a second, when she looked again, the face had vanished.

  TWENTY-TWO

  JULIE WANTED TO START DOWNRIVER IMMEDIATELY.

  “If this is his hunting ground,” she argued, “he must come from a village somewhere in the area. And that’s bound to be on this river. He’s probably heading downstream just like we are. In fact, if he’s on his way home from a hunting trip at this hour of night, his village can’t be very far away or he would have started home a lot earlier. It’s almost dark out there, and the natives around here don’t travel after dark—not if they don’t have to. Besides wild animals and snakes, that’s when they believe the evil spirits come out.”

  Rick was more cautious. “How can you be sure he isn’t hostile?”

  “If he were hostile,” Julie said impatiently, “we’d have an arrow through us right now. Or these days, even a bullet. No, odds are he was as startled to see us as we were to see him. He’s probably on his way home right now to report to the village elders about the crazy gringos he’s spotted in the jungle.”

  She paused. “I wish I knew what tribe he’s from. My parents provided medical service for several of the tribal groups in this region. If these people have heard of them—”

  “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?” Rick interrupted. “We haven’t even established that there’s a village yet. In any case, we’re not moving from here tonight. It’ll be dark before we’d get a hundred meters, and I’m no more excited about wandering around at night here than the natives are.”

  Despite her eagerness, Julie conceded he had a point. If they were going to stroll up to a native village, better to do so in broad daylight, when they could make it good and clear that their intentions were harmless, than after dark when strangers tended to be shot first and examined later. Especially dressed as Rick still was, in guerrilla clothing. Who knew what report that native would make of what he’d seen?

  Julie didn’t allow herself to doubt that they would find the village. Unless game was scarce or they were on a war raid, the Amazonic tribal groups rarely wandered farther than they could travel back before night. And at this hour, where would the native they’d seen be heading but home?

  Julie had the first watch that night. Once Rick took her place, she didn’t expect to be able to sleep but did so, dreamlessly.

  It was earlier than usual when Rick shook her awake, the sun not yet risen into view. They were both eager to get started. She eyed Rick as she rummaged through the previous night’s leftovers for their breakfast. He had already dismantled the shelter and scattered the ashes of the campfire, and he now stood at the edge of the bluff, studying the lay of the jungle and river below. His expression was remote, telling Julie nothing of his thoughts, and she wondered if it had occurred to him, as it had to her, that this might well be
the last day of their curious partnership. Or if he was thinking of her at all.

  Suddenly, insanely, though last night she’d been ready to start off at once, Julie felt that she did not, after all, want to take that final trek downriver. She wanted to stay right here in this strangely beautiful paradise, just the two of them, shutting out forever the world that clamored for their return.

  Are you crazy? she demanded of herself sternly. There were people looking for them, worried about them. They had jobs to do out there, their own lives to live. What are you thinking, Julie?

  She brought her mind firmly back to the leftovers from supper. The uneaten armadillo meat had turned rancid overnight and would have to be discarded. But there were two avocados and a dozen of the long pods, their white fluff a little dried out but still edible. Dividing the food onto two palm leaves, Julie carried Rick’s portion to him and began methodically working her way through the rest. There had been a time when she had missed having salt or even the simple seasoning Linda had used at the guerrilla camp to make their meals palatable. Now she hardly noticed. Food was simply energy to fuel the day’s march.

  Rick split the remaining water in his canteen with Julie to wash the meal down. They would have to find more clean water before long.

  The sun was just showing its upper rim above the jungle canopy as Rick and Julie made their way down the bluff. This put them for the first time on level ground with the caimans, and they had to retreat deeper into the brush to stay beyond reach of the sudden lunge of a hungry reptile. Rick unsheathed his machete again, and their going slowed. Though they kept a sharp eye out, they saw no further sign of the native they’d spotted or anyone else, for that matter. The river was wide and the bend in it a leisurely one, so that the sun was high overhead by the time Rick and Julie could again see before them an unbroken panorama of muddy water and high banks stretching away downstream.