Dugan listened as one campesino slowly and carefully read something from a book that sounded like a child’s poem. He stumbled over two syllable words here and there, but otherwise did okay.
“It’s very nice,” Dugan said, meaning it.
Teresa smiled. Turning, they left that building and headed toward the central plaza, where they went inside the church to see a Bible study session in progress. A group of mostly elderly women sat in folding chairs in a circle at the rear, Bibles open in their laps.
“Education is important, don’t you think?” Teresa asked him.
“I do,” Dugan replied with a trace of wistfulness, at that moment recalling his own lack of formal education. But she gripped his arm as if reading his thoughts and that somehow made everything all better.
With the earlier rain having turned into a fine mist, the two walked from place to place, while along the way, with obvious pride in her voice, Teresa showed him the town hall, the pharmacy, the doctor’s office, and the market.
As they walked, Dugan turned every now and then to see they were not alone. Her friends Guillermo and a still unhappy Manolo trailed from about twenty yards behind. The young boy pottered along happily beside them.
“Seems like we have chaperones,” Dugan said lightly.
Teresa rolled her eyes. “I have asked them not to. But they believe they are doing what is right, and it has worked for us for a very long time.”
Dugan couldn’t help but wonder exactly how long very long might be, but set that aside for the moment. “Who’s the kid?” he asked instead.
“His name is Martin,” Teresa said warmly. “His parents are dead, and so the entire village has taken to raising him. Alas, he likes to spend most of his time with us.”
Dugan smiled to remember Arturo in the boat, and his fascination with ‘ojos de lobo.’ Maybe it’s universal, he thought, hoping too that the boy and his father had made it home safely.
“Come, this way,” she said, grabbing his hand before taking them off the main road toward a thick patch of woods.
Only a few yards in, they came upon a winding trail. Taking him in a firm grip, Teresa led him expertly through and around treacherous stretches with perilous drops, while all along the path, Dugan sensed the woods around them bristled with men with guns who were watching them the whole way. Once on the other side of the mountain, they came upon the guerrilla stronghold, though he didn’t see it at first.
Cloaked by camouflage netting that made it look like any other stretch of jungle from above, they hiked down into the vast complex, which contained tens of dozens of well arranged tents and open buildings. Campfires burned throughout the encampment, the strong scent of spiced meat and red beans filling the air. At what must have been the mess tent, a long line of people both civilian and military queued up with bowls and spoons in hand to be served something peppery from large vats. As they wandered through, Dugan found himself on the sharp end of many a hard stare, and held Teresa’s hand more tightly to see that to a man and woman, they all smiled when seeing her.
The hardest stare he got came when they stopped in front of a man on a raised platform at one of the open buildings. Sitting at a table with oversized maps hanging off the edges, he was dressed in military fatigues and a cap with a red star. Perhaps early thirties, he was ginger bearded and wore tortoise shell glasses that gave him the air of a university student. His cold, sharp eyes belied that impression, for when he looked closely at him, Dugan saw they were the eyes of a man who has both seen and meted out more than his share of suffering and death.
He stared Dugan up and down as if determining whether he should live or die, and with a shudder, Dugan realized that was exactly what he was doing. Reflexively, he wanted to reach into the man’s mind, however he knew that was the wrong move. Whatever this man decided would be his fate. Setting aside even that the trio of vampires could kill him instantly and without hesitation, as in his retreat from the doomed Club Infierno, there were far too many minds here to reach into, and most of these carried weapons.
After a minute or so, the man nodded slightly. Teresa squeezed his hand and began leading them away. Dugan was surprised to find his legs were shaking, but stopped himself from asking about what had just occurred. The girl would tell him in her own good time.
Toward the boundary of the encampment, past the hospital tent and a long string of communal showers, they came upon a large, tarped area, beneath which about a hundred uniformed men sat on benches while staring up to a stage, on which a man dressed in civilian clothing was giving a fiery lecture. Dugan was taken aback to see the uniforms of the seated men were of the Salvadoran military.
“They are our prisoners,” Teresa said quietly, in answer to his unasked question. “We do not kill them, at least, we prefer not to. After all, they are our brothers. We simply educate them on the inequities in our society, and inform them of the corruptions of the government they serve. We open their eyes to the manifold ways in which they are simply the pawns of rich men.”
Dugan nodded, and when they reached the limit of the guerrilla outpost, the girl again conducted him into the woods, this time taking a different trail that rose steeply before leveling off as it went around the mountain. At one scenic overlook, Teresa stopped, and the two looked down into vast fields of cultivated acreage. On the cool night breezes, Dugan smelled corn and beans and other vegetables that he suspected were there to provide sustenance to the people of the province, and not the coffee or sugar cane that was planted only for export and to line the pockets of the wealthy.
“It all used to belong to a single family,” Teresa said, gesturing to the boundless fertile expanse. “Now, it belongs to the people.”
As they went farther up the mountainside, Dugan was stunned to feel the first hints of listlessness associated with the coming dawn.
“Didn’t know it was so late,” he said.
The girl turned to him and smiled. “Fear not, hijo. We are almost there.”
Just then, they turned a corner and came upon a tropical oasis cut into the mountain featuring a dazzling waterfall. Looking up, Dugan couldn’t see where it began, but it appeared to plunge hundreds of feet beneath them to the floor of the valley.
Gripping his hand, Teresa led him on maybe the most hazardous part of their journey, an insubstantial spit of land jutting only a few feet from the mountainside. Dugan looked down only once to the impossibly distant ground below before wooziness set in. When they reached the spray of water, and Dugan feared for a moment she might lead them in, he looked just beyond it to see their path opened into a narrow fissure running just behind the waterfall. After stepping through it into darkness, he saw they were in a deep and dusky hidden grotto.
Hand in hand, the two turned and watched the kaleidoscope vision of rainbow molecules churned up by the force of water plunging a hundred stories or more, before she turned them around and the two walked into the darkest corner of the dank cave and lay down.
5
In the ever advancing lethargy of the forthcoming dawn, Dugan felt the feathery weight of Teresa’s head light upon his chest. Reaching out her hand, she lay it atop his. It had been a very long time since Dugan had experienced such intimate contact. He had forgotten what it was like.
In a soft voice, he asked, “So, did I pass the test?”
He felt her lips turn up in a smile. “You are still alive, hijo. That alone should answer your question.”
Dugan thought a few seconds before asking, “Why?”
“That other evening in the nightclub. You were in grave danger, and yet you took precious seconds to save what humans you could. I thought it was sweet.”
“Anyone would have.”
“No, hijo. Not anyone. But you already know this.”
Dugan supposed that was true. He wasn’t sure why even he had done it. “Were you the one who put the bomb there?” he asked bluntly.
“Yes,” she answered matter-of-factly.
Too matter-of-factly
for Dugan. “There were innocent people there,” he reminded her.
“No,” she answered firmly. “There were not.”
“I was there,” he offered weakly.
He felt her lips curl up again. “Are you so innocent?”
Dugan had no ready answer to that question. “How long have you lived?” he asked instead.
“A very long time,” she answered ambiguously. “Through many revolutions.”
After another moment, he asked, “Who was that man back at the camp? The one who looked at me.”
“That was Bernardo. He is the leader of the guerrillas in the north.”
“Do you work for him?”
“We help where we can. Our presence has often made the difference to his efforts, that is, provided he can hang on during the day.”
Dugan realized that must be true, then thought back on all the junk vehicles on the roadway outside town. He suspected the vampires presence made more of a difference than she admitted as she went on.
“Bernardo realized long ago that this war cannot be won. The guerrilla leadership fractured early on due to egos and strategy conflicts. Our weapons are mostly old and not always reliable. No, the best that we can hope is to protect our village and the few others in the vicinity until people come to their senses and the killing stops.”
“When do you think that will be?”
“That is up to your country. You are the ones who provide the weapons to our government. You are the ones who keep them in power. It is your country who trains our military and provides advisors to teach them how best to maim and murder our people. Were it not for your government’s efforts, our government would have fallen long ago, and liberty would reign throughout the land.”
Dugan ruminated over that, remembering questioning Richards about it on the boat. The CIA man said that it was ‘complicated,’ though Dugan rejected that out of hand. Yet, having grown up in the United States, he knew any whiff of communism was bound to provoke such a reaction, though he knew it was just as much a kneejerk defense of capitalism and corporations than it was belief in democracy. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realized the status quo in America was not so very different than the one here in El Salvador, differing only by degree. What would happen in his own country if ninety-nine percent of the people had nothing, and one percent of the people had everything? He suspected much the same. He hoped so, anyway.
He felt Teresa’s cool hand stroking his chest. It felt nice.
“Why does Manolo hate me?’ he asked directly.
She chuckled. “Poor boy. He is in love. Alas, it is a love that is not returned. We do not choose who we fall in love with, no?”
“No, we don’t,” Dugan answered.
“He wanted to kill you, you know,” she said, clasping his hand more tightly. “And he is probably right. It is a very foolish thing I am doing.”
After thinking a moment, he asked softly, “What are you doing?”
Her head lifted slowly from his chest. She brought her face near to his. He found her chilly breath intoxicating. As they stared into each other’s immortal eyes, he felt her reach into his mind with a power he could only dream of, and he knew then she had been undead a very long time. She poked around inside his head for only a few seconds before she smiled.
“What?” he asked defensively.
“You are a virgin,” she answered in a gentle, sensitive voice.
Embarrassed, but mostly beyond all of that now, Dugan answered.
“Yes, I am.”
She brought her face closer. For an awkward moment, he thought they were going to kiss, though since his transformation, the thought of kissing as a prelude to eroticism was the last thing on his mind. Funny, as a human, it was all he wanted to do; well, that and more. But since his change, he actually found the thought of kissing kind of gross. She surprised and relieved him by merely taking him into a cold embrace.
Reaching out her hands, she gently pulled down the collar of his leather jacket, worn up since he had put it on at the airport. Next, he felt her cool breath upon his neck, seconds before he felt an almost sensual rubbing of her fangs along his throat. Of their own volition, his own fangs dilated from his mouth and reached for her neck as well. At the same moment she plunged a single fang into his throbbing jugular, he did the same to hers, and her lifeblood started spilling into his mouth just as his essence streamed into hers. With an intense erotic jolt, he understood immediately that unlike him, what ran in her veins was the blood of the human, and he drew deeper. Visions of the people whose blood it was started running through his mind: a cruel military man who ordered dozens of people hanged; an informant who had given away their position; a captured prisoner who spurned all effort at reform; a young boy struck by a car and left for dead in a ditch. Her gifting him release had been a blessing.
He began to feel something he thought he would never experience again, though to be honest, he had felt echoes of it with each of the three humans he had killed. At the time, it had felt so obscene, he hadn’t even tried to deal with it, chalking it up to residual human sense memory and burying it deep within his psyche. But what he had felt then, and what he was experiencing now, was nothing less than a tightness in his groin of the same variety he used to feel when necking with his girlfriend, or as a human he had felt many nights alone.
Suddenly, he heard her giggle, the feathery bristles of her eyelashes rubbing like butterfly wings on his cheek.
“What is it?” he asked tentatively, not wanting to remove himself from her offered feast, but curious. He felt her reach down to unbuckle her own pants before reaching across to open up his.
“Pigs,” she said teasingly, referring to the blood she was currently consuming. “I forgot what a good boy you are. I had forgotten too just how good pig can be.”
She reached out again with her fangs and tongue and began siphoning more needfully while wriggling her way out of her jeans. Dugan too returned to her neck and suckled deeply and longingly before reaching down to lower his own pants; and soon thereafter, in the usual human way, and in what he only hoped was the usual vampire way, in something that Dugan could only regard as a minor miracle, the two were joined as one.
6
Dan inspected himself in the mirror one last time and took a deep breath before he approached the front door of the cottage. The invitation had arrived that morning, delivered by Esquinaldo’s ever efficient man Friday, Fritz, on the same yellow stationary that had started this whole goddamn thing. This one said, “Senor Esquinaldo requests the pleasure of your company for drinks poolside, this afternoon, at 4 p.m..” He wondered idly just who the talented calligrapher was, and thought about asking Fritz about it, before dismissing it as unimportant. That, and he didn’t really want to know.
Aside from their brief conversation that first morning Dan had left the residence, he and Esquinaldo’s paths had not crossed. His host’s office had remained dark the past few nights, ever since the vice president and his entourage made their visit. Dan glanced into his notebook once or twice since then, trying to make heads or tails of it all, but the whole thing just gave him a headache, so he returned to his Wouk novel for solace. He had finished it just that morning.
Of greater concern was his nephew. Ten days had passed since he and Richards left. He was growing frantic with worry, and not just for Scott. His own ridiculous status as a prisoner in the guest cottage of a man he didn’t know – and didn’t care to – was beginning to gnaw at him as well.
And then the invitation arrived.
Having dawdled long enough at the mirror, he walked out the front door and went down the steps. Let’s hear what this Nazi bastard has to say, he thought with more swagger than he felt.
The afternoon rains had already come and gone, and the mid-September sun shone brightly overhead as he approached the pool on freshly mowed grass. The landscapers had made their weekly visit that morning, and Dan had to admit the place looked spiffy. Glancing to the pool enc
losure, he saw Esquinaldo seated alone at a table beneath an umbrella, with what looked to be a fine silver cocktail set and matching ice bucket by his side.
He sent Dan a friendly wave as he approached. Dan returned it and then fumbled with the chin-high gate mechanism before figuring it out and letting himself in.
“So good of you to come,” Esquinaldo said with an excess of conviviality, rising to his feet as Dan walked over.
Dan offered his hand in greeting before spying Esquinaldo’s gloves and remembering. He quickly pulled it away.
“Had to juggle a few things, but I was happy to do it.”
Esquinaldo chuckled and gestured him to have a seat. “I owe you an apology, senor. I fear I have been a negligent host. It is long past time that you and I talked.”
Dan wasn’t so sure about that. While taking his seat in the cushioned chair, he reflected on all the activity he had seen at the estate in his short time here. As a conversation starter, he decided to dance around it.
“No apology necessary,” he said. “It’s understandable. From the look of things, you’ve been quite busy yourself.”
Esquinaldo shrugged. “My various enterprises keep me occupied, this is true. Still, there is no excuse not to be a good host.” Pointing to the cocktail setup, he said, “Fritz has mixed us something tropical, if that is okay with you?”
Dan nodded that it was. Esquinaldo lifted a pair of tongs and plopped a few cubes of ice into two margarita glasses, then raised the chilled decanter and poured something green into them both. He squeezed a lime into each before handing one across to Dan.
Raising his drink, Esquinaldo said, “To better days,” and the two clinked glasses.
Dan took a sip of the sweet concoction, tasting tequila and triple sec with maybe a splash of pineapple juice and Midori. It was actually quite nice.
“This is very good,” he said.
Esquinaldo swallowed and nodded his agreement. The two sat back beneath the shade to sip their drinks and admire the spectacular view of the city below, and the majesty of the volcanic mountains surrounding it.
Applewood (Book 3): The Space of Life Between Page 20