As the army made its disorganized retreat, flowing off across the sand in gradually dwindling streams, a black lake draining into rivulets and animated puddles, the colonel lost interest in the corpse and went pattering over the boards and beneath the metal door and up the leg of a barstool, then onto a trouser leg and higher, until he was gazing at a pair of enormous eyes directly above him. The eyes were shut, and this frustrated the colonel. Unclear as to how he should proceed, he gave in to hunger and started to descend, intent upon returning to the grass, where he had scented food. But as he clung to the trouser cuff, preparing to drop to the floor, it occurred to him that his duty was not done. There was one thing left to do. He scooted back up to hang beneath those lidded eyes, awaiting an opportunity for dutiful action.
Over the next minutes, ten of them at least, and each one seeming longer than average, the urge to hunt became increasingly powerful, but he succeeded in resisting it, demanding of himself a familiar rigor, growing comfortable with denial. It was as if some old discipline were helping to armor him against the depredations of repetition and boredom. He involved himself in examining the oily creases in the skin surrounding the eyes, the shallow fissures in the lips, the graying stubble sprouting above them. Turning back to the eyes he found that they had come partly open, but the irises were angled upward, as if about to slide back beneath the lids. He crept higher, extending his neck so that his snout was scant millimeters from the right eye, and gave a grating cry. The lid shuttered down, then up; the eye shifted, focused on him, and after a brief period of disorientation, he came to feel sodden and dull. Agony lanced his knee, like a lightning bolt expelled from an all-encompassing ache. Staring at him, its snout almost touching his skin, was an indigo lizard with orange eyes. The colonel recalled the lizard hanging in this exact position earlier that evening, and could not imagine how it had managed to remain there throughout the beating that he had received. Less reasonable memories sprang to mind, muddying his understanding of what had taken place. He wanted to look about and locate Carbonell, but was afraid to move. Everything inside him felt broken, contused. Nevertheless, he raised his eyes and saw the rolled-down door. Which meant that Carbonell must be outside. Smoking and talking to his sergeant. Another memory surfaced…or not a memory. A dream. Carbonell’s face with one eye missing, a pulp of blood and tissue occupying its place. Startled, half convinced it was not a dream, the colonel straightened. The exertion brought dark shapes swimming up to cloud his vision. The glare of the lamp beside him grew wavering and pointy like a Christmas star…dimming, receding. Pain spiked his temple, and he went sliding away from the world in the grip of an irresistible slippage.
• • •
During the colonel’s first week in the hospital, he received many visitors and learned many things. He learned that Tomas was dead, as he had feared, and that Margery had been released, thanks to the actions of a young lieutenant, Jaime Arguello, who had been proclaimed a national hero for his single-handed assault on the barracks where she had been held by soldiers loyal to the traitor, Carbonell. “Traitor” was what the newspapers called him now that his atrocities had become newsworthy. Policemen asked questions of the colonel, most of which he was unable to answer. His memories had been beaten out of him, but the process of questioning dredged up a few details, and the policemen supplied others. For instance, when asking about Carbonell’s death, one of the policemen told the colonel that the autopsy had revealed several lizards in Carbonell’s esophagus, and wanted to know how this might have occurred. The colonel had no information on the subject, but he recalled the indigo lizard and had the idea that it had played some part in the event. When he said as much to the representative of the air force who came to gauge his fitness for duty, the representative appeared to view the statement as a symptom of unsoundness—two days later the colonel received notification that he was to be retired on full pension, this an entirely misleading term for the pittance he was due.
Having no real income and no prospects, alienated from his family, the colonel’s view of the future, never rosy, turned bleak indeed. In the bathroom mirror he observed that the lines in his face had deepened and that the gray in his hair, formerly a salting, had spread to cover his entire scalp. He was old. Grown old in a single terrible night. What possible future could he have? But during his second week in the hospital, he was visited by a lawyer bearing Tomas’s will and the deed to the Drive-In Puerto Rico, who informed him that he, Mauricio Galpa, was now sole owner and proprietor of the restaurant. This legacy caused the colonel—until that moment benumbed by his experiences—to weep and to remember all the kindnesses done him by Tomas, and then to think that perhaps the old man, too, had played a part in what had happened. He tried to piece it all out, but medication and headaches impeded thought and he made little progress.
Several days before he was released from the hospital, he received a phone call from Margery in the States. She thanked him effusively for what he had done to help Gammage and said that she had wanted to see him, but the news bureau, fearing for her safety, had flown her out of the country; and now the government—the colonel’s government—had declared her persona non grata.
“I tried to call you,” she said. “But I couldn’t get through until today.”
“I’m glad you’re safe,” the colonel said.
“Sooner or later they’ll grant me another visa. Then I’ll come visit.”
“That would be nice.”
“This is so…” She made a frustrated noise. “I hate the telephone.”
The colonel waited for her to continue.
“I know there was something between us,” she said. “Not just a moment. Something I’d like to understand. You know?”
“I felt something, too,” the colonel said.
“Maybe you could visit me.”
“I’ll be undergoing treatment for a while. Physical therapy. But yes, it’s a possibility.”
“You sound so distant.”
“It’s the pills. They give me so many pills, it’s hard to think.” He reached for a glass of water on the bed table and took a sip. “What are you doing now?”
“Oh…I’m going to be flying to Israel next week. We’re doing a piece on the elections. The period leading up to them.”
“Israel. That’s very far away.”
“I’ll only be there a month.”
A vague emotion possessed the colonel, a nondescript sadness that seemed attached to no specific thing, but to all things, like weather blown in from the sea.
“They’re paging me. I have to go,” Margery said. “But we’ll get together. I’ll come visit you. I promise.”
“I know,” said the colonel.
The day before he was released, the colonel hired a man to transfer his belongings to Tomas’s room behind the Drive-In Puerto Rico, and the next morning, dressed in civilian clothes, going slowly with his cane, having to stop every couple of minutes to restore his equilibrium and catch his breath, he walked down to the beach and sat on the deck of the restaurant, watching the placid sea. Inside the break the water was the color of aquamarine; beyond it, a dark lapis lazuli. Gulls skied against the blue heavens, and confections of white cloud, bubbled like meringue, moved leisurely west to east along the horizon. Combers plumed at the seaward end of Punta Manabique. The glorious peace of the day overwhelmed the colonel. He rested his head in his hands, his mind flocked with things half felt and half remembered, with shades of sorrow, bright spikes of relief. Tears filled his eyes. He wiped them away and, steadier, he unlocked the corrugated metal door, rolled it up, and stepped into the restaurant.
The place had been cleaned, the bar stools washed free of blood and set in a neat row, and there was a note from Tomas’s girl, who signed herself Incarnacion, giving her telephone number and saying that she would be ready to work whenever he needed her. But it was the rear wall that held the colonel’s notice—the mural was missing. Gone. The lime green background color did not appear to have been paint
ed over, but the volcanoes and cruise ships and Carbonell’s face and the gray airplane, they were all gone…except for the image of an indigo lizard high in the left-hand corner. The colonel was unclear about many things, but he was certain the image of the lizard had previously occupied the lower right-hand corner of the wall. He did not find this dissonance as disturbing as once he might. It seemed that by way of compensation for his lack of clarity concerning his personal life, he was now able to grasp some of what Tomas had told him over the years and, though he could not have articulated it at the time, he recognized a strange circularity in the events that had led to his ownership of the restaurant.
He switched on the generator to cool the beer, made coffee, and taking a cup, returned to the deck. In the verge of the palms, hummingbirds blurred the air above a hibiscus bush; the breeze wafted steam from his cup. A lapidary fineness of well-being settled about the colonel, as if land and sea and air had conformed to his physical shape and emotional configuration, and he thought of what Tomas had said about finding a place you knew was yours. It did not escape him that the old man might have known more than he had claimed about the world and magic, that he might have anticipated their fates, and may even have had a hand in directing them. Nor did the colonel fail to acknowledge the significance of the vanished mural, the blank wall that had been left for him, perhaps, to fill with his own images. Once he would have sought to explain this away, to debunk any less than traditionally rational explanation; but now he wanted to understand it, and he realized that in order to do so he would first have to accept the uniqueness of the circumstance.
Approaching from the direction of the colonel’s hotel, a man drew near and ascended the steps of the deck. Young, dark with the blood of the Miskitia; carrying a lieutenant’s dress jacket and hat. “Is it too early?” he asked.
“I have coffee,” said the colonel. “And some pastries…though they may be stale. This is my first day. I’ve had no time to organize.”
“Bueno…cafe.” The young man sat at a table removed by two from the colonel. He leaned against the railing and let his head fall back. The strain that had been apparent in his face dissolved. “Dios! The sun feels good.”
“Would you mind serving yourself?” The colonel indicated his bad knee. “I have an injury.”
The young man went inside and poured a coffee. On his return, after a moment’s hesitation, he sat on the bench opposite the colonel. He offered a friendly smile, blew steam from his cup. His mustache had not grown in fully, like the mustache of a pubescent boy, yet lines of stress tiered his brow and his eyes seemed worn, like dark coins from which the symbols of the realm had been effaced.
“What brings you out so early?” the colonel asked.
“I couldn’t sleep in my hotel. It’s all the reporters, the officials. They keep me awake half the night, and afterward I can’t sleep.”
“Reporters? Are you famous?”
“No, I…no. I’m only doing some appearances. Publicity for the army. They tell me I’ll be back with my unit in a month or two.”
“That’s not so long.”
“You have no idea how long a single day with these people can last.”
“I can imagine,” said the colonel. “Surely there must be some benefit attendant to these appearances.”
“The girls.” The young man smiled shyly. “That part of it’s all right.”
The colonel laughed, then introduced himself as Mauricio.
“Mucho gusto,” said the young man. “Jaime.”
They began to speak of other matters. The weather, the fishing, the quality of the national soccer team, the girls of Puerto Morada. And though the colonel suspected that the young man was his country’s latest hero, perhaps the next in a curious tradition of heroes whose lives were somehow connected to this stretch of beach with its hummingbirds, lizards, and wandering cows, he did not invest the notion with much thought and immersed himself in the conversation.
The sun climbed higher; warmth cored the colonel’s bones. The sky paled to an eggshell blue, the swells beyond the break grew heavier. A shadow glided through the water near Punta Manabique. He could not tell if it was a manta ray, but the shadow was itself validation of a kind, implying that beneath the surface of things there was always a beautiful monster waiting to rise.
“Do you think there are places that know us?” he asked the young man, and in asking the question, he felt the presence of Tomas, felt his old friend’s amiable yet pointed inquisitiveness occupying his flesh like a perfume, then drifting on, but leaving its trace. “It is a common enough question to ask if one knows such and such a place. ‘Do you know Fuengirola? Do you know Roatan?’ But do they have a sense of us? I wonder. Does their vitality affect us in ways we cannot conceive?”
The young man looked puzzled. “Are you implying that we are acted upon by the ground beneath our feet? I don’t believe it. Our fates are not controlled by mysterious forces. A man carries his fate with him.”
“That was not precisely my implication. But I must say I’m not so certain of things as you appear to be. I am beginning to believe there are places made for us in this world, and if we find them, we may understand patterns in our lives, in all life, that are immune to straightforward analysis.”
A tall black woman in a red blouse and a denim skirt emerged from the sea grape beside the restaurant, bearing atop her head a bowl covered by a white cloth, and began walking along the beach toward the town, establishing a human comparative to the swaying of the palms—this graceful juxtaposition of man and nature caused the colonel to contrast his generally dismaying impression of the world with his impression of it now.
“This place, for instance,” he said. “I have only been here a short time, but already I know a few things I did not know before.”
The young man, who had been staring apprehensively toward the hotel, turned to him, his face once more full of strain, and said, “I’m sorry…I was preoccupied. You said something about this place? I don’t think I understood you.”
A breeze drifted the grit that had accumulated on the table top, rearranging the grains into a slender crescent of glittering specks, and though some small portion of the colonel’s mind resisted the idea, he imagined a similar shift must have happened inside him, that all the grit of his desultory past had been realigned to suit a larger purpose. He wanted to deny this, but to do so he would have had to deny the feeling that then engulfed him. A feeling of calm satisfaction, of happiness. He had an urge to confide in the young man, to explain the simplicity of the thing it had taken him nearly twenty years to learn; but he realized that the years were necessary to the lesson.
“It’s not important,” he said, patting the young man’s hand. “It is enough to understand that whatever comes to you in life, you will always find a welcome here.”
JAILWISE
During my adolescence, despite being exposed to television documentaries depicting men wearing ponytails and wife-beater undershirts, their weightlifter chests and arms spangled with homemade tattoos, any mention of prison always brought to my mind a less vainglorious type of criminal, an image derived, I believe, from characters in the old black-and-white movies that prior to the advent of the infomercial tended to dominate television’s early morning hours: smallish, gray-looking men in work shirts and loose-fitting trousers, miscreants who—although oppressed by screws and wardens, victimized by their fellows—managed to express, however inarticulately, a noble endurance, a working-class vitality and poetry of soul. Without understanding anything else, I seemed to understand their crippled honor, their Boy Scout cunning, their Legionnaire’s willingness to suffer. I felt in them the workings of a desolate beatitude, some secret virtue of insularity whose potentials they alone had mastered.
Nothing in my experience intimated that such men now or ever had existed as other than a fiction, yet they embodied a principle of anonymity that spoke to my sense of style, and so when I entered the carceral system at the age of fifteen, my
parents having concluded that a night or two spent in the county lock-up might address my aggressive tendencies, I strived to present a sturdy, unglamorous presence among the mesomorphs, the skin artists, and the flamboyantly hirsute. During my first real stretch, a deuce in minimum security for Possession with Intent, I lifted no weights and adopted no yard name. Though I wore a serpent-shaped earring, a gift from a girlfriend, I indulged in no further self-decoration. I neither swaggered nor skulked, but went from cell to dining hall to prison job with the unhurried deliberation of an ordinary man engaged upon his daily business. I resisted, thanks to my hostility toward every sort of authority, therapy sessions designed to turn me inward, to coerce an analysis of the family difficulties and street pressures that had nourished my criminality, with the idea of liberating me from my past. At the time I might have told you that my resistance was instinctive. Psychiatrists and therapy: these things were articles of fashion, not implements of truth, and my spirit rejected them as impure. Today, however, years down the line from those immature judgments, I suspect my reaction was partially inspired by a sense that any revelation yielded by therapy would be irrelevant to the question, and that I already knew in my bones what I now know pit to pole: I was born to this order.
While I was down in Vacaville, two years into a nickel for armed robbery, I committed the offense that got me sent to Diamond Bar. What happened was this. They had me out spraying the bean fields, dressed in protective gear so full of holes that each day when I was done, I would puke and sweat as if I had been granted a reprieve and yanked from the gas chamber with my lungs half full of death. One afternoon I was sitting by the access road, goggles around my neck, tank of poison strapped to my shoulders, waiting for the prison truck, when an old Volkswagen bus rattled up from the main gate and stopped. On the sliding panel was a detail from a still life by Caravaggio, a rotting pear lopsided on a silver tray; on the passenger door, a pair of cherubs by Titian. Other images, all elements of famous Italian paintings, adorned the roof, front, and rear. The driver peered down at me. A dried-up, sixtyish man in a work shirt, balding, with a mottled scalp, a hooked nose, and a gray beard bibbing his chest. A blue-collar Jehovah. “You sick?” he asked, and waggled a cell phone. “Should I call somebody?”
Eternity and Other Stories Page 27