by Mike Bond
Vodega got out of the jeep. “We know. We’ll get this pilot for you.”
THROUGH THE HUT’S open door Murphy could see other huts, a boggy trail between them, a bit of stream bank. A rooster crowed; a baby wailed. Hens clucked; two donkeys brayed back and forth across the village. The air smelled of fires, rotten vegetation and dank soil.
He shifted position and the earth moved with him. Turning on his side he tugged at the banana leaves wrapped round his arm. The pain and stench were horrible. With his good hand he fumbled for the tin cup of water the old woman had put on the floor by the head of his hammock, but it was empty.
Sunlight poured across the red dirt floor and over three clay pots and a white plastic jug, glinted on a half-loomed rug hanging from the center pole. The old woman and a younger one crouched on either side of a fire pit, both barefoot, in black cotton dresses and red embroidered ponchos. As the old woman spoke she rotated an iron pan on the coals, her flat cheek and wide brow lit by the sun, her silver hair braided down her back. She poured the pan into his cup. “Drink,” she said in Spanish. “Soon comes la doctora.”
THE FINGERTIPS that touched his cheek smelled of jungle, smoke, and gun oil. The man’s face was shadowed, only the long bridge of his nose, his thin lips and pointed chin visible. In the open collar of his shirt dangled a silver crucifix. “What happened to you?”
“Plane crashed.”
“Who shot you?
“Don’t know.”
“Stop lying.”
A second man crouched down, black hair long under a camouflage cap, a white scar up his forehead. Two others standing in the door, rifles, one chewing gum. “Why were you flying over the jungle?” the scarred one said.
“Taking a friend to Costa Rica.”
“I think you’re CIA. Coming back from the raid on Paxtún that killed eighty-four people.”
The men stepped away. When Murphy woke again it was dark. Firelight tossed shadows across the thatched ceiling; green saplings hissed into the flames; the murmur of the river came with a cool musty smell through the door.
THE OLD WOMAN fed him bitter hot drinks, built the fire till it crackled, her shadow dancing like a garroted man against the thatch. His heavy blankets were sodden with sweat. A glaring eye hissed down and he tried to get away but a strong hand held him. “Tranquilo, tranquilo!” a woman said. A lantern was hooked to the beam over his head. Cool hard fingers touched his cheek.
The woman wiped his face with a cold cloth, then cut away the banana leaves and washed around the wound with water smelling of peroxide. “So you’re a soldier.”
“No.” He realized she’d spoken English. “Who are you?”
“The doctor.” Her voice neared. “This will hurt, but is necessary.” She slit open the arm; he groaned as the black blood spurted out. “Who shot you?”
“I don’t know − stop!”
The pain was unbelievable as she dug inside the wound for splinters and bits of dead flesh. “Rémito − Pablo!” she called. “Hold him!”
The one with the crucifix and the scarred one pinned Murphy down while she cleaned the arm. “Who were you meeting,” she said, “on the ground?”
“Not here,” he gasped. “Costa Rica.”
“Don’t give me that! You’re a narcotraficante?”
“I don’t care, what happens, on the ground. Stop!”
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. The backs of her fingers brushed hair from his brow. “Listen, gringo, I can’t stay. I must cut off this ruined arm and we’ll send you downriver to Mexico.”
It surprised him he could move, sit up. “No.”
She smiled, her face round and brown. “You can’t save it.”
Inch by inch he forced the arm up, made the fingers move. “I won’t give it up.”
Her clothes rustled as she stood. The hammock rocked, the rush-mat ceiling sliding back and forth. Across the room she was speaking to someone – “Delirante.” There was a silence, the fire hissing. Again she spoke. “But we’ll try.”
“WHO IS HE?” Rémito said.
Dona Elena Villalobos rubbed exhaustion from her face, looking down at the gringo panting with pain and fever. “Probably flying grass.”
Rémito snickered. “Silly games.”
“Even with as much sulfa and bactrin as I’ve got he might not live. Seven point six-three caliber, clean through, broken humerus, but not shattered.”
“If you use the sulfa and bactrin now, one of ours will die later without them.”
She stepped outside, let her eyes find the stars. “I don’t have the right to refuse him.”
“You don’t have the right to give him our antibiotics.”
In the dark she saw Rémito finger his forehead. The scar worries him, she thought; it interests death. “How soon can we get more?”
“Not soon.”
“In five days I’ve lost two wounded who would’ve lived had I any place but these dirt-floored huts and water boiled over smoky fires. There’s dirt everywhere, the flies feed on wounds while I work on them.” Her voice was gritty with fatigue; there was lethargy in her cells, grime beneath her eyes, an empty ache in her legs. “Now these campesinos with their dying gringo. Did you ever notice, in our churches, all the angels have blue eyes?”
“He’s CIA.”
“If he is I suppose you should kill him. But then why is he afraid of the soldiers?”
“Failed them, somehow.”
“He has old shrapnel wounds. In his chest and hip.”
“We should kill him.”
She inhaled the wood smoke, rotten vegetation, and human ordure smells of the village. “When I was younger, every odor had such meaning. Now they’re just smells.”
Rémito took a deep, weary breath. He caressed her temples, massaged her neck. “Whatever you do,” he said, “do it quickly. So we can go. Before the Army gets here.”
6
EVERY TIME Lyman came down to Guatemala he hated it. Till he got here. Back stateside he’d probably hate it again. He watched the rain fall in thick diagonal sheets across the parade ground, rubbed his shoulder where the holster had chafed it. Wet damn heat. Bugs chewing the rotten skin right off you. Worse than the Mekong. Didn’t mind wearing this gun then.
Trouble’s Nancy. Way she gets on you. In Nam at least there were women. Here what you got but monkeys? Those Nam girls’d sell you anything. But Nancy never gave you any space without enlarging hers.
And now Kit Gallagher in a black plastic bag. Just like the old days. Except now it’s him. Always said he’d end this way.
Admit it, Lyman thought, you just don’t like her fucking other guys. You should be happy Kit’s dead. But you’re not. It’s what’s rubbing you. Or you’d be eating it alive, down here. Guns, choppers, fear so thick you can slice it with a knife. Taste it, smell it, spread it on your bread. Fear in the night − the best kind, fear out of every nook and cranny, every crooked little street. Fear keeping everything alive.
This pilot still alive somewhere. Fearing too. Can feel him, Lyman realized. Wanting to live as bad as I want to kill him. But always have to play what if: what if he made the road, at Machaquilá, got a ride somewhere? If he’s in Chiapas already, on the MC-DC flight, hungry to tell his story to the world? What would he say? Who’d listen? What if Nancy’s doing it right now, while the kids’re in school, some guy’s number in her mouth?
Forget Nancy. Let her get it off with other guys. If she does you’ll dump her when you get back, go outside.
Nothing wrong with outside time. Set up your own deal. Anybody who has to show up five days a week can’t call himself free. Can’t call himself brave either: only a coward denies his own needs. I used to tell her that, Nancy. But anybody who has to explain things to his wife certainly isn’t free.
The rain hammered into pools flooding the parade ground. With revulsion he went down the steps into the downpour that coated his face like warm syrup and mel
ted instantly into his clothes. How had he forgotten a poncho? Now he’d have to ask Vodega for one − Vodega’d love that: “Army of Guatemala”, made in New Jersey.
He started the Jeep but it wouldn’t shift into first, the synchro busted. Nam relics. Ghosts of gook chicks spreading skinny thighs across the back bench, American kids screaming out their shattered guts. Oh the dance of life. He nudged it into second and moved off slowly, the Jeep’s bald tires slithering in the crud. He had to snuff this pilot. When the pilot was dead he’d break it with Nancy, get his black ass outside.
But Nancy didn’t give up that easy. And did he want to, if she hadn’t been serving it around? She always told him. One way or another. He flicked on the wipers but the blades were gone, their brackets scraping miserably. Hunched over the steering wheel, he drove one-handed, wiping at the glass.
MURPHY sat in early sunlight beside a red achiote bush, his back against a warm adobe wall, cradling his splinted arm against his chest. Yellow chicks pecked at the dirt by his feet while the mother hen paced nearby. A little girl crawled into his lap, avoiding his arm, her long mahogany hair tickling his face. She tore bits of squash leaf and tossed them to the chicks, who scurried for them then spat them out. “They’re not hungry,” he said.
“Want corn.”
“Give them corn, then, Ofélia.”
“No corn.”
He nodded up at the cornfield on the slope above the village. The stalks were brown. “Where’s that corn?”
“They kill.”
“Who?”
“The first people come from corn.” She got up and moved away. The sun’s heat danced between the huts. When I was young, he thought, I’d knock down a willow stem without thinking. Now everything seems holy.
The old woman carried her blue plastic bucket up from the Río and filled his tin cup. From the hut she brought a lime and squeezed it into the cup. “Keep drinking water.”
Towering clouds blocked the sun. Murphy stooped into the hut. His arm throbbed; he moved it at the elbow. The pain was severe yet good. It was as if someone else wiggled his fingers. The old woman scraped frijoles from a quake, warmed them in a pan on the fire, spooned them into his dish.
“I’m not hungry, Consuela.”
“How can you not be hungry?”
“What happened to the corn?”
“The Army poisoned it, and the beans and the rice in the aguada by the river.”
“That’s crazy! Why kill the corn?”
“To make us move to the camps where you live inside hot wire, and if you try to leave they shoot you.”
“And if you don’t go to the camps?”
“Sooner or later they kill you too, just like the corn.”
A NONCOM brought coffee. Carusi, the general’s adjutant, clicked a pencil against his thumbnail. Vodega smiled steadily. General Arena had a cold and kept blowing his nose into a soggy tissue. Under the table Lyman wiped his palm against his thigh to cleanse it of the General’s handshake.
“It’s been a week and you haven’t found the pilot,” Lyman said. “Shall I remind you he killed our man on loan to you?”
“He wasn’t on loan to us.” Arena tasted his coffee, wiped his mouth with his great dark paw.
“Shall I mention what this does in DC? You do read American papers occasionally? You want these jerks in Congress to smash us?”
Arena had a tiny, merry smile. “Whether you get smashed or not has nothing to do with me.”
Outside the window, Lyman saw, the rain had stopped. “Imagine, General, where that leaves you. When we thought some day you might replace Mejía Victores.”
“We have your democracy now, You can’t just put me in or take Mejía Victores out, like in the old days. We have an ‘elected’ president, same as you.”
“I mean Chief of the Armed Forces, General. The guy who runs things. To bring a little stability to this place.”
“Please don’t lie so badly, Colonel, it’s disrespectful. Stability’s the last thing you want here. And please don’t doubt the effort we’ve made to find this pilot.”
“I doubt everything, most of the time. Especially down here.”
“That’s your job,” Vodega said, “to doubt things. We don’t mind. We help you all we can.”
“So then help me by reconsidering the contributions thing, as Gallagher asked you. And don’t be so goddamned territorial about the Colombians − we work with them − they’re good people.”
“Your version of good and ours aren’t necessarily the same.” Arena blew his nose, loudly. “And, regarding this pilot − why do you want him so bad?”
“If ever once we leave a death unanswered, General, the whole thing begins to unravel. You know that.”
Arena wadded the tissue and put it back in his pocket. “Then you’ll be pleased to know that a few minutes ago I have word, one of our infantry sweeps, near Sayaxché, they turn up an old man who has sold corn to an Indian from Río de la Pasión. This Indian told the old man there’s a gringo in his camp.”
Lyman jumped up, slammed his chair against the table. “Then what are we doing here? Get the choppers, for Christ’s sake! Are you people crazy?”
The General raised his hand. “Moderation, my dear friend! No one knows where he’s from, this Indian. The Río’s two hundred kilometers long, thousands of streams coming in...”
“This guy, who sold the corn −”
“He’s not wanting to explain. So it takes a little while. But we cover every way out, Colonel. My men, they are hitting every part of that river, anywhere some Indian shoved aside the bugs and snakes to build his filthy little hut. If your pilot’s on the Río, no way he’s getting out.”
“I remember other people,” Lyman said, “being so sure of things. I had a CO in Vietnam, once, he was so sure he’d cleaned out a valley he got himself and half a platoon killed. I’m glad the gooks got him. Otherwise I would have.” He looked at Vodega. “At least we should be up there, Sayaxché, somewhere...”
“That’s in hand,” Arena sniffed. “The next chopper north, you two are on it.”
CONSUELA ducked into the hut, her hair and poncho streaming rain. “Placido’s brought corn!”
Murphy stood, wrapped his blankets round his shoulders, bent to glance beneath the dripping lintel at the charcoal sky battering the earth with rain − the huddled huts, disheveled path, and bent-down jungle drowned in gray-green aqueous light.
“I’ll make tortillas,” Consuela said. “There’ll be food when the father comes.” From under her hammock she took a wooden mortar and pestle, untied the sack of corn, poured some into the mortar, and handed him the pestle. “You do it.”
He held the pestle under his left arm and began to twist it with his left hand into the corn in the mortar. “Not like that!” she chided, “keep it closer.” Gripping the pestle against her flat old chest she used the forward rocking motion of her body to crunch the corn down. “This you can do, with just the good hand.”
He tried it, twisting the heavy pestle down into the kernels that popped back up the mortar’s worn silvery sides only to fall under the pestle again. “What does it mean, what Ofélia says − the first people came from corn?”
“Not the first. Here, shove the pestle down and out. Push with your weight, not against it. In the beginning, the Creators wanted to have someone to thank them. They asked Coyote how to make people, and she said make them from earth. But these earth people weren’t strong, they melted in the rain. No!” Consuela scolded. “Can’t you see you’re pushing too hard?”
“I’m crushing the corn.”
“Not too much! So Coyote told the Creators to make people from wood, and they will praise you. The Creators whittled people from sapwood, and these wood people made many children and covered the earth.”
With his left hand Murphy moved his splinted right arm to hold the pestle. “Don’t use that hand!” Consuela snapped.
“This mak
es it stronger.”
“But then the Creators find these wood people have no hearts, no spirits. They do not remember the Heart of Heaven. They do not praise the Creators. ‘De acuerdo!’ say the Creators, and bring down a black rain of flaming pitch to destroy the people of wood. This time, Coyote tells the Creators to make people from the corn.”
The rain was gone. Outside the door the village hunched stained and dripping under a slaty sky. Water splattered from the thatch and bled in ochre ribbons into the Río. “Do the Creators think that the people of corn have hearts and spirits?”
“Not enough.” Consuela sat back on her heels. “We suffer because we don’t care about God. We do not praise the creation of life.”
Across the river the far dark shore loomed out of the mist. A tiger heron screamed, but he could not see it.
7
“I GOT ALREADY three House committees, two Senate committees, special prosecutors, all that shit, journalists, everybody, up my back.” Curt Merck’s Slovac accent was burlesqued by the squawk box. “And now you can’t even find this guy what did Gallagher.”
“I’ll find him, Curt. But we cut a deal.”
“Deal? The deal is you find him.”
“After I get him I go outside. With no recriminations. No callbacks.”
“After this you work the basement. In the library. You can cut the grass.”
“I didn’t screw this op, Curt. It was screwed long before.”
“It’s your ass now.”
Lyman checked his watch. The round clock on the signal room’s yellow wall said two-thirteen − nine minutes slow. “In eight minutes I jump the slick to Sayaxché.”
“You think this time you got the pilot tracked up?”
“Tracked down, Curt?”
“Up or down, just get him!”
“We got ten, maybe twelve villages to check. Off the Río de la Pasión, the Santa Amelia.”
