The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller

by J. M. Porup

  Villega’s money had been enough for the bus ticket and not much more. I’d be lucky to buy a meal or two with the change left over. But for the major, that was generous, and his altruism had me on high alert. Why would he let me go? If he wanted to silence me, he could have just had me killed, like he said. Unless…

  Unless they let me go on purpose. Unless they wanted to see where I’d lead them. Was Ambo that desperate? Was I his only clue to where Pitt might be? Yet another reason not to go to Cuzco.

  The bottom level of the bus was full. I looked at each face. Dawn broke over the horizon, casting a jellylike orange glow over the brown Indian faces snoozing in their ponchos. I climbed the staircase to the upper deck. More Indians. There were no empty seats.

  I was about to get off, proclaim the utter absence of available seating to my inimitable chauffeur below, when a hairy white finger pointed toward the front of the bus. The TV overhead blared the usual Hollywood action drek, dubbed in Spanish, blasting at high volume. Underneath was one open seat.

  I grunted. “Gracias.”

  “No problem,” the man said in English. He wore a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. A backpack snuggled between his knees. Yellow earplugs bulged from the side of his head.

  I trudged to the front, slid past an old woman who smelled like cheese. I collapsed into my seat. The noise from the television gave me an instant headache. I lifted myself up, looked back. The man in the red cap stared in my direction, unblinking. The engine roared. The bus lurched. I lifted a hand, waved over the top of my seat. His expression did not change.

  NINE

  I fought to stay awake. It’s a twenty-hour bus ride from Lima to Cuzco. Sea level to 3400m. I had no cocaine. No cigarettes. No booze. And no way of getting any, either. The only thing I had in my favor was the nonstop racket from the television and the headache it gave me. Thank God for Mexican voiceover actors, who made everything sound like a ridiculous telenovela.

  Bleary-eyed, burnt-out, waking became dreaming, the nightmares returned, my eyes wide open, the road ahead an endless stream of dust and sorrow, and the day that Pitt betrayed me shoehorned its way into my brain.

  It had started as a weekend getaway at their rustic cabin on the coast, but took a number of unexpected turns along the way. Mode of transportation for one.

  “Get yourself to the airport, and the rest is on us,” Pitt had said. Easier said than done, considering the bastard taxi drivers’ union kept the airport fare artificially high. Four hours of local buses later, I finally arrived at the airport with a crowd of janitors and security guards. I made my way to the private departures terminal, where Pitt escorted me onto the tarmac.

  “Ain’t she a beauty?” Ambo shouted when he saw me.

  He threw one arm around me and another at his Piper Mirage four-seater. Leaning against the fuselage, munching a carrot, reclined Lynn, sunglasses covering half her face. Despite the cold and gray, she wore a green bikini, a transparent yellow sarong draped around her waist. The bikini top covered her nipples, but not much else.

  She pushed off from the plane, crunched her carrot. “His very own salad shooter.”

  “It slices, it dices, it purees!” Ambo clapped me on the back. “What do you think?”

  “You know how to fly this thing?” I studied the propellers, ignoring the busty ghost in my peripheral vision.

  He laughed. “Is oil from Texas?”

  We were aloft then, the four of us, a chitty-chitty-bang-bang of the skies, Ambo at the wheel, Pitt his copilot, Lynn and I in the backseat, avoiding knee contact.

  “So you’re Pitt’s mother,” I said, turning to her.

  “Birthed from these very loins.” Her broad lips, thick with red, twisted in a cartoon squiggle. She looked out the window at the long strand of beach below.

  “Name’s Horace.” I held out my hand. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure?”

  “I don’t believe we have.”

  Ambo shouted over the roar of the motor, “She’s my trophy wife.”

  “Trophy wife?” I shouted.

  “First prize, oil drilling. Picked her out of the catalog. On special, too. Ain’t that right, dear?”

  She laughed. Her hand squeezed my crotch, and I set my face to frozen. “And me so lonely in that li’l ol’ catalog, too.”

  I tapped Pitt on the shoulder. The hand on my crotch held me tight. “Dude. You never told me your mom’s a babe.”

  “For good reason. Daddy here’s the jealous type!”

  Pilot and copilot high-fived, and the plane dipped sideways, sending my guts skyward. Ambo put his hands back on the wheel. I swallowed hard. Shifted sideways, sat as far from Lynn as I could, but with her Valkyrie wingspan she clutched my nuts tight in her hand.

  The plane landed with a series of bumps in Chiclayo, the biggest city near the surfing mecca of Huanchaco, in northern Peru. A shooting pain stabbed my scrotum. Lynn had shoved a crumpled piece of paper into my jeans. I opened my mouth, let my chin bob with the movement. With my palm, I pushed down on my pants, crushed the paper. I looked out the window, fascinated by a passing windsock.

  A security detail waited for us. We caravaned to Huanchaco in three black SUVs. Bulletproof, Pitt boasted.

  “Great,” I said. “Someone’s taking shots at us?”

  A shrug. “Doing what we do, we don’t make a lot of friends.”

  The “rustic cabin” turned out to be a beachside mansion. Four enormous Greek columns supported the entryway. My flip-flops echoed on the polished marble floors. A butler in a red Hawaiian shirt and white polyester slacks showed me upstairs to my room.

  “Tomorrow’s surfing,” Pitt said, shoulder against the door frame of my room, watching me unpack the dirty canvas sack I used as luggage. Extra pair of jeans I found in a dumpster. Check. Long-sleeved shirt I hadn’t washed in six months. Check. Three soap dishes of cocaine. Check.

  He threw a wetsuit on the bed and said, “Eat light, easy on the booze, up at dawn.”

  “What’s this for?” I asked, fingering the neoprene.

  “Water’s cold out there, man. You’re going need it.”

  I opened the window. The thin white curtain fluttered into the room on the evening breeze. The ocean rolled and crashed against the beach a hundred meters away.

  “It have to be so early?” I asked.

  The sharp edges of the crumpled note still stabbed at my left nut. I enjoyed the pain. I had left it there. All throughout dinner I had wondered. What did she want? She hadn’t looked at me, lifting forkfuls of seule meunière to her lips, licking away the creamy sauce with a darting tongue.

  Pitt was yammering on about surfing. Could he tell? Did he know? Did he suspect? Act natural. I put my right foot on the bed frame, rested my elbow on my knee. What would he think if he found out? He couldn’t find out. It had to end. That was the only solution.

  “What’s that in your pocket? Let me see.”

  “See what?”

  His hand grabs my crotch, pushes me back against the wall. He’s got his hand on the bulge now. I’m fighting him off but he’s about to pull the paper from my pants, so I knee up between his legs. He bends over. I knee up again, into his face. His nose explodes. He sits back on the bed, and I connect with a left hook to his eye.

  “Blame the moon,” Pitt said, and grinned, his undamaged, perfect face beaming chaste friendship at me.

  I blink. Shake my head. The vision dissipates. Schoolyard nightmares. The peculiar charisma of the schoolyard bully: push me, beat me, rob me: give me more.

  “The moon?”

  “Tide waits for no man,” he said, and punched me in the shoulder. He left the room with an Indian war cry, chopping an imaginary tomahawk over his head.

  I went into the bathroom and shut the door. I fished the jagged paper from under my testicles. It was an electricity bill, still in its envelope. On the back, printed in her precise, feminine hand:

  the dunes 2 a.m.

  I tore it into pieces, again and aga
in, until they were practically dust. Open lid. Flush. Again. Again. Again. The toilet was empty, but still I flushed.

  I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. It had to end. The choice was simple: her or her son. She was a decent lay, or at least as decent as I deserved. But Pitt…he was a worse human being than I was. Just being around him made me feel better. Which was more important? Sex you can pay for. Listening to Pitt’s atrocities was priceless.

  No. It had to end.

  I stared at the alarm clock. Hypnotized by the glowing red numbers. Every half an hour I got up to renew my dose: snort of coke in each nostril, swig of pisco to wash it down.

  Two fifteen. I sighed. I got out of bed, went to the window. The full moon shone on the beach, its weakened spotlight hiding the earth’s blemishes. The sand sparkled silver. Palm trees swayed and rustled in the night breeze. A woman walked the dunes, her figure draped in a flowing cotton robe. She moved in slow motion, doing T’ai Chi.

  I crept down the stairs barefoot, my flip-flops in hand. I slid my feet into the sandals, stepped out onto the cool sand. She stood on top of a dune, between two tall palms, her feet apart, knees bent, arms out, holding an imaginary ball.

  She had shown me some T’ai Chi one drunken afternoon in a filthy motel in Callao. “Let’s play with the imaginary ball,” she’d crooned from the bed, and leaped naked onto the floor, crunching a cockroach underfoot. It was her way of relaxing when nothing else worked, she had explained, after her screaming subsided and she’d washed off her foot. When drugs and alcohol didn’t work, she had purred into my ear, and there’s no eligible male nearby, T’ai Chi is all you’ve got left.

  That. Or a bullet in the brain.

  I climbed the dune. Put my hands in my pockets, affected nonchalance. I stopped next to her and looked out at the sea. “It’s over,” I said. “You know that.”

  Her eyes remained closed. She breathed slowly, lips unmoving. “Security’s watching us.”

  I looked back at the house. A dark shape clung to the roof. Cigarette smoke curled from the window of an SUV parked by the side of the house.

  “Good night, then.” I put a foot into empty space, launched myself down the dune.

  “He’s going to take you.” The sea murmured on the sand. The tide was coming in. I could taste the salt spray on my lips. “Like he took me.”

  I looked up the dune at her. I had the sudden urge to crouch low, stand up inside her imaginary ball. Instead, I scooped up a handful of sand, letting it stream through my fingers.

  “Take me,” I said. “What does that mean?”

  “What he wants, he takes. He wants you.”

  “Who does? Pitt?”

  “Ambo. Look what happened to my husband.”

  She stood motionless. I squinted at her face. White powder circled her nostrils.

  I sighed. “Easy on the dope, alright, Lynn? Ambo is your husband. I’m going back to bed.”

  Her voice cracked. “I mean Pitt’s father.”

  That stopped me. “What about him?”

  “Industrial accident.” She pronounced each consonant, her lips hissing, groaning the syllables. “Oil rig.”

  “What happened?”

  Her fingers shook. The imaginary ball was in danger of bouncing free. “Ambo wanted me. So he took me.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes.”

  “He murdered your husband.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you married him?”

  Her breathing came in gasps, no longer the steady meditative breaths of T’ai Chi. “He can be very persuasive,” she said. “He decides he wants you, he will take you too.”

  “What could he possibly want from me?” I laughed. “What am I, Lynn? You tell me, huh?” She didn’t move. “Or you want me to tell you?” I climbed back up the dune, stood in front of her, an unspoken challenge to open her eyes and meet my gaze. “I am a worthless piece of shit. I am scum. I am a drug addict who teaches English to criminals so they can rob tourists. I will most likely die of a drug overdose or a knife between the ribs. And you know what?” I smacked at her fingers with my open hand, but she refused to look at me. “You know what?” I said, growled the words at her. “I don’t really give a shit.”

  Her face quivered. She punched her lips together. Tears dropped from the corners of her eyes.

  “Ah shit, Lynn.”

  I scratched at the back of my head with my nails, wishing I could rip the flesh from my body, my face from my skull, peel back the layers of skin and be faceless, nameless, without body: some spirit. I turned to the sea, as though begging for guidance, but heard only the soft roar of the infinite deep.

  “What do you care anyway?” I said. “This is just—”

  “Just what?”

  I held my hands to the stars, pleading with the Milky Way for answers, but the mute universe cursed me with its silence.

  She said, “Who do I have left to love?” A long thread of snot trailed from one nostril. She snorted it back up and swallowed. Tears dripped from her chin.

  Love. That word. I bit my cheek, twisted my foot into the sand. “What is that, that I’m supposed to—”

  “My husband doesn’t love me.”

  “So what if he doesn’t? You think that makes you special?”

  “He can’t love me. Won’t love me.” She fought to hold on to that goddamn imaginary ball, eyes squeezed shut, hands shaking wildly, but her head fell to her chest, her face cast in shadow. “He stole Pitt’s father from me. He took Pitt. Now he’s taking you. Who else is there? What do I have left?”

  “Shit and piss,” I said. “That’s what you got. Just like me. Same as every other goddamn person in this whole fucked-up world.”

  My flip-flops broke as I tramped back to the house, pounding my feet into the sand to get away from her, away from the thoughts that filled my head. I left the sandals where they fell, more garbage to coat the world, fill the belly of some unlucky whale.

  I didn’t look back until I had tracked sand all the way up the stairs and into my room. From my perch in the lightless window I looked down at her. She lay on the ground in a heap. The waves crashed loud on the shore, the tide getting higher, higher.

  She stood, her bathrobe trailing from her naked limbs. Her hairless body emerged as though from a cocoon. She ran along the sand into the breakers, jumping as each wave hit, the bare cleft between her legs grinding down on the foamy waters. A bigger wave heaved itself over her naked body, and she fell. She did not get up. I waited. Still she did not get up. The water was cold. The current was strong. She would be washed out to sea. She was going to die. I opened my mouth to shout for the security detail, but as my lips parted she crawled onto the sand. She lay there, soaking up the darkness. The waves washed away the sand around her, digging her a hole in which to hide.

  I dragged myself into bed. Huddled deep inside my blanket, eyes wide open, wishing myself deep in the bowels of the earth. I snorted a continuous stream of cocaine to ward off sleep. Blood and snot mingled on my pillow. I shivered the night away.

  The next morning I was in the bathroom when the door banged open. A purple dawn filtered in past the dark figure blocking the doorway.

  Pitt’s voice said, “Hey man, ready to hit some killer waves?” Followed by a gasp.

  I stood on tiptoe, reached up to undo the noose. A knife flashed in the dark, sawed through the rope that hung from the ceiling. I coughed, struggled to pull up my pants. Failed. Wiped the K-Y off on my shirt. I clawed at the rope around my neck with my clean hand.

  “The fuck, dude,” I said. “Don’t you ever knock?”

  TEN

  We showered and were enjoying a cold morning beer when the maid announced lunch.

  She was a plump little number, firm flesh bulging in all the right places. Don’t fuck with her, Pitt had warned me. She’s security. The tip of her fingernail dug into Ambo’s shoulder as he sat down at the table. He frowned at his empty plate. Lynn sat beside him, her menthol cigaret
te trailing smoke from between her fingers. Did she see the gesture? Sunglasses hid her face.

  Pitt and I had waded into the surf that morning strangers, and waded out again as friends. He’d made no mention of my autoerotic habit. I’d tried to raise the subject but he spoke over me, banishing the theme to the heap of unmentionables.

  Meanwhile, every time I looked at Lynn I saw her naked in the waves the night before. I closed my eyes, but there she was, twitching in the surf, groping at the sand. I shook my head, trying to free myself from this vision. I drank deep from my glass of Cusqueña.

  “Nothing like a cold beer before noon,” I said.

  “Except perhaps a second.” Pitt grinned. He was topless again, in jeans and flip-flops. The sun filtered through the latticed wooden canopy onto our table on the beachside patio. He laughed and slapped his ribs.

  I rubbed my damaged side through my crusty brown sweater. I was sweating in the noonday heat, but I didn’t want them to see my scars. The injured rib was down low, on the right. I hissed at the pain.

  “You hurt yourself?” Lynn leaned over her martini. Her triangular bikini—pink this time—did nothing to hide her rubbery pectoral missiles.

  “That’s why surfers have flat chests.” Pitt’s lips were tight, his eyes on Lynn. Perhaps he remembered the smaller glands he’d suckled as a child.

  “Well,” she said, and sipped from her cocktail, “remind me not to take up surfing.”

  Pitt put his glass down. “Let’s have a look at you.”

  “What for?” My scars itched under my shirt. Lynn knew about them. Obviously. Pitt saw them this morning when he barged into the bathroom. All the same I didn’t want to be their freak show entertainment for the weekend.

  Pitt said, “My guess is, it’s cracked. Could be broken. We should check.”

  I shrugged. “If it’s broken, it’ll mend.”