by J. M. Porup
“Love?” I said. I laughed. “The fuck you talking about?”
“Was there a woman there? Is that it?”
“What woman? Where?”
“Guangzhou Higher Polytechnic.”
“For fuck’s sake. That was how many years ago?”
“We read your email, you know.”
I’d spent a year teaching English in China. This was ten years ago, before my ex-wife, before South America, before Peru, before Kate, before La Paz. Back in the days when life was good, the world was simple and I was happy. I’d dated one of my students for a while. Ping Ping. Still sent me naked pictures by email, hoping I would return.
“So?”
“So…” He crossed his arms. “You got a big drug habit. Where’s the money come from, pay for that?”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You think I’m working for the Chinese? What are you, crazy?”
“Let’s skip the denials,” he said. “I don’t have time. I need to know where Pitt is and how to stop him.”
I held my hands out wide, gaped at the ceiling. “Fuck if I know.”
“Are they blackmailing you? Is that it?”
“What blackmail? What are you talking about?”
“Maybe they tell the Peruvians you’re here. An illegal immigrant. Get you deported back to the States.” He spoke around his cigarette. “Is that it? So you can work pumping gas to pay back child support for the rest of your life?”
A rare moment of calm settled on my soul. I had pondered on many late drug-addled nights how to respond to such a threat, should it happen again. I was ready. I blew my nose in my palm and wiped it on my pants.
“I have a rule,” I said. “A no-suicide rule. It’s the only rule I have. No. Let me finish.” I spoke slower now, to make sure he heard ever word. “I’m allowed to self-destruct in any way I want to. I deserve to suffer in this life. But I’m not allowed to die.” I held up an index finger. “There is one exception to this rule.” I moved close to his face and whispered, “Anyone tries to put me on a plane back to the States? I will be dead before it lands.”
I grinned and slouched in my chair. “So go ahead and make my day, Jack.” I drew my finger across my neck in a slitting motion. “You can only play that card once. It won’t work a second time.”
Ambo stared at me for a long moment, unmoving. The smoke from his cigarette snaked in circles around his head. He jabbed the leg of the upturned desk with a monstrous digit. The ancient metal bent under the pressure.
“Pitt is betraying his country. I know you don’t care about that. But he does. And I do. Can you at least tell me why? Why would he do such a thing?”
“Why would he kill Lynn? Why is the moon a rotting hunk of Flemish blue cheese? Fuck if I know.”
Ambo ignored this. “He doesn’t need the money. I’m a rich man. When I die, all I have is his. He knows that. He’s my son. He doesn’t need to take money from the goddamn chinks. So what, then? What is going on inside his head?”
“Maybe he got sick of killing people for a living,” I said.
Ambo sighed. Smoke leaked from his nose. He said, “Horace. I need your help. No one else knows him like you do.”
“What makes you think I’d tell you, even if I knew?”
He ground out his cigarette against the bottom of his shoe, twisting the butt against the heel long after it was extinguished. “Human decency,” he said. “You’re not an evil person. You feel things. I know you do.”
“You know what? You missed your true calling. You should have been a shrink.”
He said, “I know your hurt.”
“Don’t you fucking dare—”
His hands were out, palms open. “We don’t have to go there. I’m just saying. It’s more than you and me. It’s everyone. The entire human race.”
I rolled my eyes. “Melodramatic bullshit.”
“Melodramatic?” He rubbed the inside of his lower lip with a calloused finger. His eyebrows lowered, casting shadow across his eyes. “Why would you say that?” he said softly. “You think I’m exaggerating?”
He was convinced I knew something. I decided to bluff. Maybe then I’d have some clue what was going on. I said, “Pitt sent me a letter. Told me everything. The whole plan.”
The whites of his eyes glowed in the darkness, floating across the upturned desk at me, enormous sockets sucking up the light. “Do you really hate the world so much?”
I shrugged. “Can’t say that I’m a fan.”
He nodded. His lips puckered in a frown. “No?”
“The world is a vile place and humanity a stinking infection on the face of the earth,” I said, suddenly furious. “If you gave me a button and said, press it and the world goes boom? I would do so without a second thought.”
Ambo’s face drained of color. His eyes took on a thousand-yard stare. “Would you really? Is that the world you know? Then I feel sorry for you, Horse.”
“I don’t need your fake pity,” I said. “I’m not a fan of you, either. You and your bullshit, trying to steal land from the Bolivians. Not a fan of your double-crossing spy tricks for the good of corporate America. Not a fan of lying and deceit—”
But Ambo was laughing now, a wheezing asthmatic hack, his thin lips pressed tight in a bitter smile. “Here I was, all worried,” he said, clutching his sides.
“I know all about it,” I said. “Start a war, steal the altiplano. Monopolize the lithium. A replay of bat guano. Bat guano two.”
He raised an eyebrow. His smirk was insufferable.
“That’s it.” I banged my petite white fist down on a desk leg. “I know your kind. The smug schoolyard bully. It’s about time someone stood up to people like you.”
Ambo heaved himself from his chair, and with a flick of his fingers straightened his tuxedo. Fished his Stetson from under the desk, popped it onto his wrinkled scalp. “Get comfortable,” he said. “When this is all over we’ll get you out of here.”
He turned to leave. Randy the marine opened the door.
I called out, “He can’t be stopped. You know that, right?”
Ambo poked his bony beak over his shoulder, observed me silently.
“You know Pitt,” I said.
His head rose and fell, the steady beating of a funeral drum. “Then God help us all.”
EIGHT
I’m paddling in the surf by myself.
The swarm of rats arrive, swimming around me in the ocean, crowding onto the board, climbing up my chest. I look down and a newborn is in my arms, trying to touch my face. I grab a rat by the tail, flick it into the water, but for every one I knock off, three more take its place. I slap at them, punch them, but their claws dig into my flesh, climbing my biceps onto my shoulders. I look down again and the baby is screaming. It’s missing its eyes, its nose, its cheeks and then a rat bites down on its neck and the screaming stops.
I bolted upright and crashed my head against something hard. I covered my forehead with my hands, struggled to focus. Major Villega sat beside me on the edge of the wooden bed. Oh thank God. I was in jail. That was all. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. A monstrous pain throbbed in my skull. I must have fallen asleep. It was hard sometimes for me to separate the waking from the nightmares. I could still smell the shit in my lungs.
Villega groaned, stifled an intake of breath and rubbed his forehead. Reached down with his other hand, picked up his officer’s cap. Massaged a dirty finger across the copious gold braid.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, the wooden slats hard on my pelvis. There was no mattress. In the corner, a dark movement. I opened my mouth to scream, but Villega’s hand clamped down before the sound came out.
A rat.
He put a finger to his lips. His breath reeked of liquor. I nodded, and he let go of my head. He stepped out into the corridor. He stood in the open cell door, looked both ways. He crooked a finger.
I shook my head. I was happy where I was. I deserved to be in prison. If n
ot for this crime, then for another, one far worse.
“You leave now.” He spoke in English. I supposed so that the other prisoners couldn’t understand.
I shook my head again.
“You think I want you talk?”
When you’ve got a cocaine habit like mine, and the pathetic salary of an English teacher that I do, questions of supply dominate your lucid moments. To finance my habit, I had entered the wholesale market, buying by the kilo, selling in backpacker bars to idiot foreigners who were delighted by my cocaine-flavored baking soda.
Villega, like most cops in this town, made more money keeping drug dealers out of prison than he ever would enforcing the law. He offered protection. You worked his turf, no one bothered you. I played dumb. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Look,” he said. His face was close to mine, the pores on his cheeks erupting like some mutant grapefruit, his breath the stench of liquor and rotting death. “They can shoot me. For this. You understand?”
I folded my arms. “And why should I trust you?”
“It is obvious, no? I don’t want you here. Talking. To anyone. About anything.”
“Maybe you prefer me dead.”
He pursed his lips. A corner of his mouth twitched. “Maybe yes.”
I put my head in my hands, closed my eyes. I tried to forget my dream, but there it was all over again: the blood, the cry, the rats. I couldn’t stand it. I had to get out of here. Even if it meant Villega’s pistol to the back of my head. Forgive me, Lili, I thought. I am too weak to take my punishment as I deserve.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I stepped out of the cell. Villega grunted, pointed down the corridor. I walked toward freedom. A long row of cells stretched ahead of us, twenty men crowded into each barred room, a symphony of snores echoing along the concrete cell block. I had gotten the special gringo cell. For that, I suppose, I should have been grateful.
A prisoner in the cell next to mine looked up as I passed. A smile tugged at my lips, always a unique sensation, when the world disappeared. I clutched at my face, at the rough wool that covered it—a hood, I realized, trying to pull it off, but Villega yanked me off balance.
“Has to look real,” he whispered. “We pretend.”
“Pretend?” I said, panting, my breath hot inside the hood. “Or for real?”
His breath came fast and short, his nose at my ear. “Easy pretend if you think real. Hands behind.”
“Villega…”
“Hands behind,” he insisted.
I put my hands behind my back. Handcuffs clicked around my wrists.
Villega pushed me and I stumbled along the corridor. A brush of air fanned my face as the heavy metal door swung silently open. He must have greased the hinges; they were rusty and grated noisily when they brought me back from my fecal shampoo beauty treatment.
We turned in an unknown direction, Villega’s leather shoes clacking against the tile floors. Fluorescent lights glowed through the hood from overhead. Otherwise I could see nothing.
Another door opened. The smell of vomit and diarrhea filled my nostrils. The kitchen. I had eaten nothing all day. I imagined the prison employed professional vomiters and crappers instead of chefs to produce the slop they served, guaranteed to have a domino effect on their customers.
Villega drove me deeper into the smelly haze. My thigh brushed against a metal countertop. Something furry with toenails grazed my hands. A dog? It was cold to the touch.
An outside door opened, and the cool gazpacho smog of Lima soaked through the hood, caressing my cheek. For the first time ever I was grateful for its foulness. There are varying degrees of hell, I was discovering, and leaving the prison kitchen was a step up in the underworld.
I hoped.
The hood vanished, a magician’s trick, and voilà! The world again, ready to be loathed anew. I blinked. We stood in an alleyway. Dumpsters overflowing with garbage crowded the narrow passageway. A hiss and a high-pitched yelp. A cat bit down on a rat’s neck. Despite not having eaten since yesterday, a sour taste filled my mouth. I choked down the urge to puke.
“Now what?” I asked.
Villega unlocked the handcuffs. “Now,” he said, “you go away.”
“What will you tell them?”
“Why you no here?”
“No. Why your momma’s such a whore. What do you think?”
His face puckered, an angry grapefruit, ruby red. His pores pulsed; a zit oozed pus. A thin sliver of air escaped his lungs. “People disappear,” he said quietly. “In this prison. They go away. No one ever knows. What happens. Sometimes we,” and he laughed, a bitter chuckle, “we drop them in the ocean. Far out.” His laughter died. “Far out.”
“Far out is right,” I said. “Why not? I don’t even know how to swim.”
He laughed. “Because you are the Horse! I cannot kill my favorite Horsie.”
I frowned. “Why the fuck not?”
He shrugged, a Latin shrug, fingertips backward and skyward. “I am not a bad man, Horse,” he said.
My eyes narrowed. Villega? On a charity kick?
“Anyway,” he added, as though embarrassed by this admission, “you are innocent. At least of this. You couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Depends on the fly,” I said. I thought suddenly of the inmate in my neighboring cell. “But someone saw us. Won’t he tell?”
Villega grinned, a great slash through the pores in his orange face. “He say nothing. Or maybe he go disappear. Also.”
I looked both ways down the alley. To my right, a dead end. To the left, the street. A car hummed in profile, the ambient city light coating it in a halo of fuzz.
I jerked my thumb at the car. “Friend of yours?”
Villega waddled down the alley toward the car. The cat yowled. Villega’s heel had squashed the rat’s internal organs.
“He take you to bus station.”
I didn’t move.
He said, “You don’t trust me.”
“Should I?”
He opened the back door of the car. “You have choice?”
I got in. All the passenger seats were missing. I sat on a low wooden stool. There was no door handle. What wasn’t missing had been replaced with ill-fitting spare parts. I could trace the car’s lineage to Detroit in the seventies, but the car was so Frankenstein further identification was impossible.
The driver lifted his head, examined me in the rear-view mirror, resumed his vigil of the empty street. A black woolen hat hugged his scalp, covering his ears. Sunglasses shielded his eyes. His face, though clean-shaven, was unmoving, the muscles in permanent neutral. The engine hummed, rattling the car, interrupted by the occasional clank.
A dirty fist thrust money in my face. The fist connected to a green sleeve, the sleeve to a green shoulder, the shoulder to a neck, and Villega’s face.
“Take,” he said.
I looked at the money. “What’s the catch?” I asked.
“No catch.”
“There’s always a catch.”
“I want you to go away.” He shook the money. “Now take.”
I took. In the dark the bills felt worn. Probably small-denomination Peruvian play money. I shoved them into the front pocket of my jeans.
“I guess—” I said, but my voice caught. I cleared my throat. “I guess I owe you thanks then, Major.”
He leaned into the car, the crown of his head bumping against the roof, a giant jack-o’-lantern hovering in the dark. “You disappear. You get?”
“I get.”
“Stay disappear. For you.”
I patted his leathery cheek. “For me?”
He withdrew his head from the car. “For me too.”
A thump on the roof with his palm, and the car took off, throwing me back against the rusty frame. It was black as night can get in Lima. By accident or design all the streetlights were out. The driver used neither headlights, taillights, fog lights or any other kind of light, inside or outside. He gro
und through the gears in time to fly through a stop sign.
I held on to the driver’s seat and braced myself for impact. “Where are we going?” I shouted over the noise of the wind.
The driver said nothing.
“Bus station, that right?”
Still, nothing.
“Which bus station?”
Lima has half a dozen bus stations. Depends on where you’re going, what company you’re taking. I tapped him on the shoulder. He overtook a taxi, cut him off, then veered right down a narrow side street.
“First bus out of town,” he said in Spanish, his voice an effeminate whisper, as though he were afraid to allow himself more forceful expression.
“Going where?”
He said nothing.
I tapped him on the shoulder again. This time he grabbed my hand, twisted my fingers in a direction they were not designed to go.
“Cuzco.”
I folded my arm, then my body in the direction he held my fingers. I could not break his grip. “Anywhere but Cuzco,” I said. “I’ll give you anything you want. What about Ecuador? Guayaquil’s nice this time of year.”
Lili’s grave was in Cuzco. Where we’d buried the bones. Tombstone and everything. I’d covered the slab in flowers. Didn’t do any good.
Cuzco was soaked in memories for me, like a discarded rag stuffed into a Molotov cocktail. I’d left for a reason. I’d sworn I’d never go back.
The man said, “Boss say you go to Cuzco. You go to Cuzco.”
“If I don’t want to go? If I refuse?”
The driver looked at me again in the rear-view mirror. He smiled. Half his teeth were missing, the others black and rotting. He said, “Break your legs and check you in as luggage.”
He released me. I sat back and shook my hand, flexing my fingers. “Please,” I said. “Have pity. Not there. Anywhere but there.”
An early morning garbage truck loomed ahead of us, entering an intersection. We ran the red light, horn blaring, missing the front fender of the truck by inches.
The driver said, “Tell it to the major.”
I climbed aboard the double-decker bus. It was raining, a rare drizzle in this seaside desert city, just enough to moisten the dust on the windshield and coat exposed skin with a thin glaze of liquid smog.