by Mike Bond
“He says wait,” Jesús said. “Someone will come.”
“Where’s he taking you?”
The boy asked the man, who said something then shook his head. “Can’t say,” Jesús said to Murphy. He came near and Murphy bent down and took him in his arms, then Epifanía. Jesús’s eyes kept filling with tears and he wiped at them angrily.
“Can’t I go with you, Guapo?” Epifanía said.
“Where I’m going it’s too dangerous. Here there are people who’ll look after you.”
“You’d look after me too. I know you would. I'll be a good help soon, soon I’ll see.”
“He’s going to fight the soldiers,” Jesús said. “That’s why we can’t go with him.”
He held them both, sensing that whatever he did it would be wrong. “I swear I’ll come back for you. For you both. We'll go up north,” he said to her, “and try to fix your eyes. And we'll go to Montana, Jesús, to the clear water mountains to fish for trout.” He stood, dizzy and nauseous, not wanting to let go. “I swear it.”
The old man spoke; the children pulled away and followed him through a path in the bracken into the jungle.
Murphy lay on the mud by the canoe. Blood trickled down over his brow into his eye, across his nose, blocking it when he breathed. He lay on his back but the arm hurt too much so he lay on his side, his head tilted back.
The day grew hot and heavy. His bloody scalp buzzed with flies. He crawled into the creek, drank, vomited, drank, and vomited again. Once a chopper went over, quiet as a dragonfly. Jets passed, high up; he could not see them through the treetops.
He contemplated the canoe. There was the knob of a bough cut off halfway down the side; it had thirteen rings.
He could not help these people. He could not let them help him. He could not take the canoe. He could not get downriver without one. It was too far, from here, to walk through the jungle to Mexico.
He could make a raft. There would be lianas, logs, sticks. He let his head fall softly into the mud. When he awoke he’d build a raft.
When he awoke the fog was back, the dusk. Was it only last night the priest had come? He looked round the hut for Consuela, listened for children’s voices. There was no hut, no voices.
A round-faced boy with a rifle came through the bracken. He was dragging a dead baby by the hand. Then Murphy saw it was a monkey. The boy tossed the monkey into the dugout. “Let’s go!”
“Go to Hell.”
“Hurry!” The boy pulled him up easily by the good arm and made him sit in the dugout. He poled back down the creek and out on to the Río. A string of cormorants scampered downriver and lumbered up into the gloom.
The pole plunked, sucked free, plunked, sucked free, the Río churning at the prow. Ticks were climbing from the monkey up the dugout’s hull. Murphy trailed his fingers in the fleeting cool water. A nighthawk screamed; a fish tail smacked.
After dark the fog lifted; the wind switched to the north, chilling his face. “Let me pole now, Niño,” he said.
“Later.”
From the east a towering wind came whipping the treetops. A wall of rain roared across the water, driving icy needles into their necks and shoulders, poured down their backs and cascaded into the hull. The boy yelled something and tossed him a can and he knelt bailing as the boat filled with rain; the rain fell harder, shattering the river, emptying the sky.
LYMAN TOOK A TAXI into Cobán and had a gin and tonic at the Hotel Excelso. The bar faced a dining room where no one sat. Beyond it was a half-lit garden where rain slanted across a Mayan pillar topped by four grinning jaguar heads. At the far end of the bar a tall, grim man in a too-wide gray suit and wet shoes stood with a fat, smaller man also in gray, their air furtive, as if even doing business together could get them killed.
Lyman downed another gin and took a taxi to the Little Pigs, a shack lit by two kerosene lanterns, smelling of tobacco and spilt beer. The bar girl was short with a round Mayan face and body and wore a yellow dress that made Lyman watch her breasts.
“Lousy night,” he said to the barman.
The barman inclined his head.
“Can I get a beer?”
“Why else would I be here? El Gallo?”
“What else you got?”
“Nothing.”
“El Gallo, then.”
When the first was gone the man brought him another, a third and fourth. He watched the bar girl serving the four plank tables where a few peasants sat like cavemen waiting out the winter. He imagined holding the girl’s naked ass in his hands. “I’ll have some rum,” he told the barman.
He raised the glass slowly, tasting the rim. Tonight one cigarette. He smiled, thinking how good that cigarette would be. How to make it last. How do you make life last?
Another fruitless day, he thought. Another meaningless night. At the end do we get punished for all our meaningless days? Father, one day, barefoot, trousers rolled to his knees, a red cap on his head, had walked up a greasy road through the Mississippi woods and had never come back. And we had sat by the pond, Aunt Ettah and Lila and I, not knowing. He’d gone because I’d argued with him, said talking to me was like talking to a block of wood. And they all blamed me. They all blame me.
The barman refilled his glass. “Nice here,” Lyman said. Just keep changing − that makes life last. “I’m going to Petén for the temples. How’s it up there?”
“It’s fine,” the barman said.
“Fine for what?”
“Fine for temples, anything.”
“No danger of rebels?”
“Ask the authorities.” The barman nodded his chin in the direction of the Military Base.
“I’m asking you.”
The barman rolled up the wick of a kerosene lantern, stepped back to look at Lyman in its brighter light. “I have no idea.”
THE RAIN STOPPED; the clouds parted; the last wraiths of mist slunk away across the water. At a bend in the river the boy turned ashore and tied up in the lee of a fallen tree. Bullfrogs croaked steadily. “I just want a place to sleep,” Murphy said. The boy tossed the dead monkey over his shoulder and led Murphy uphill to a hut in a grove of banana trees. Lantern light shone through its rush walls; inside someone was moaning. The boy entered and someone came out. “Where are you?” she said in English. “I can’t see in the dark.”
“It’s you! What are you doing here?”
Dona reached out and took him in her arms. “Oh, I’m sorry, so sorry,” holding him tight, her voice against his chest. “I’m so sorry,” she kept saying, holding him, swaying with him, her hair in his face as he bent down to her and finally held her too, the two of them together.
“I did it,” he said.
She looked up at him. “You? What do you mean?”
“They were looking for me. Like you said.”
“No!” She shook her head wildly. “They killed everybody because it was a reprisal, for an attack on a convoy. They picked it because it’s a village that refused to go to the camps. It’s not you.”
“They were your people too.”
She held him tighter. “It won’t go away.”
“Nothing ever goes away. And nothing ever stays.”
She shook her head. “Only the two children? No one else?”
“The old man went back. He says no.”
She reached up, held his face in both hands. “You’re so feverish! This is blood! You’re hurt?” Quickly her fingers traced the edges of the wound. “Come, let’s get you into the light.”
“No.” He sat on the short, wet grass. “They came for me, the Army. And I didn’t know it was for me. So I hid, like Father Miguel said. I should've surrendered.”
She held his face as if to purge his thoughts. “If you had they would've killed everyone, just as surely.” She held him one last time. “Come into the hut. I must see this wound. We will give you something hot.”
“TWENTY QUETZALES,” the bar girl s
aid, cocky hope and fear in her eyes.
“Fifteen.” Lyman put his hands in his pockets so she wouldn’t see them tremble. “For all night.”
The silky, black top of her head did not come up to his shoulder as she stood beside him while he paid for the room at the Hotel Excelso. He followed her up the stairs, watching her thighs for the dark place between them. The room was long and thin as a boxcar, a window at the far end, a single bed across the middle. Next to the bed was a chair with a lamp and a stub of candle in a beer bottle. He lit the candle and put out the lamp.
She stood with arms folded while he tucked back her hair and kissed her neck. She smelt like fruit, like passion fruit. He could see umber nipples beneath her low halter. There was a nervous taste in the back of his mouth. He reached into the halter and played with a wide, flat breast.
She dropped her dress. Her breasts swayed like pomegranates. Her pale, stringy underpants sloped into her crotch. Her skin looked oiled in the viscous light. He took off his clothes and lay beside her, caressed her. He could not will himself to harden. She would not touch him. He thought of Nancy’s thighs around a stranger’s neck. He stuck his finger up inside the girl; she sucked in breath.
He mounted her but could not enter. She stared sideways at the cracked wall where the candle cast spider web shadows. “Don’t be sad,” she said.
He paid her twenty quetzales and the taxi. The night had chilled. A crescent moon was going down, Hydra slinking west. He walked out of Cobán toward the Base, his stomach eerie as though his marriage had just died.
12
INSIDE THE HUT a fire hissed, a kettle on a pole across it. A woman lay on a mat, under blankets, knees drawn up. “What do you mean, a reprisal?” Murphy said.
“The guerrillas destroyed a convoy, last week, on the Flores road. We think the government attacked your village for that...”
“Can I use the kettle?” the boy said.
Dona glanced at the woman on the mat. “She’ll need hot water.”
“She needs food more.”
“Put half the water in a bowl. Very soon I’ll want the kettle.”
With a machete the boy slit the monkey’s belly. The woman on the mat made a clenched cry and Dona went to her. “Qué hubo?”
The woman writhed, could not speak. “Nada,” she said finally. “Lo mismo.” Dona felt the woman’s swollen belly. “It’s never lo mismo, carina. You’re getting closer.” She stood. “It’s a breech birth,” she said in English. “Caesarean, has to be. But I have no anesthetic.”
“You’d do that here?”
“Here is not the problem. In the mountains, under a poncho in the rain, I have done brain surgery. Removing metal fragments.” She sighed. “Why am I telling you these things? Come, let me look at your head!”
He sat by the fire while she washed the wound with hot water that stung unbearably. Each time the woman had a contraction Dona went to her. The boy finished skinning the monkey, laid it over a log to disjoint it.
“The bullet glanced off this place where the two sutures of your skull come together,” Dona said. “So maybe it’s just broken the edges. I can feel them move.”
He pushed her hand away. “It was fine till you messed with it.”
“That’s true, it was. You just don’t infect. Only a little, here, up under the hair.” She soaked the blood and scab until she could pull the hairs free. “Amazing you didn’t break the arm again. Tomorrow, in the light, we’ll make a new cast. But you have a monstrous concussion, I’m sure. You feel dizzy, very weak?”
The boy finished chopping up the monkey and set the innards aside. He poured some of the hot water from the kettle into a clay bowl and set the kettle back on its pole over the coals. He put the monkey’s head and all the chopped pieces into the kettle, added fresh splits of wood to the fire, and took the innards outside. The woman writhed, relaxed, panting. “It’s coming, cariña,” Dona kept saying, wiping the woman’s face.
“There’s nothing you can give her,” Murphy said, “to ease the pain?”
Dona moved from the woman back to him, cleaning the wound. “You think if there was something I would not give it to her?”
“I don’t think it was a reprisal, my village.”
“They came because they were looking for you, but they killed everyone because of the convoy.”
He looked up at her kneeling above him, one half of her face firelit, the other shadowed. We all have two sides, he thought. “Then we share the blame.”
“If you’re hungry for blame there’s always plenty to be found.”
“The government has its army, and you have yours. But it’s the people who suffer.”
“Every person in your village was part of the guerrilla, fought for it every way she could, he could.”
“Even the children?”
“If you were a child seeing your parents killed, losing your older brothers one by one?”
“It keeps war going, that kind of thinking.”
“Every village in the Petén’s the same. Everything the Army does just makes it worse. There’ll be war till everyone’s dead.”
“You like that?”
“I’m a doctor. I wish the war would stop. I think it’s better to be a slave than dead. But the war’s going on anyway. It won’t stop. So do I go away and never think of it? Or do I stay and try to help?”
The boy came back with roots and the innards he had washed in the Río. He cut up the intestines on the log and put them in the pot with the rest of the innards and the roots.
“But you’re not trying to help,” Murphy said. You’re a guerrillera. A maker of war.”
“And I say to you, everyone here who thinks and dreams, everyone who has known pain, is a guerrillero.”
“Dreams always fail.”
“I have no bandages but will wrap this in a strip of clean india. You must wash the wound twice a day, with hot, boiled water.” She tied off the colored cloth, pulling the last hairs free from under it.
“Why are they hunting me? At least ten grass planes fly out of the Petén every week.”
“The Army’s attacking other drug flights too. They’re even killing the people who pay them for protection. But they are not suddenly against the mariquana, because they’re still flying it themselves. Your friends, the ones killed when your plane got burned − they paid protection?”
“Every month ten thousand dollars, right to the top. Some General named Elena. Every shipper from Guatemala pays him the same.”
“Elena? There is no General Elena. Arena, maybe?
“Arena? Arena. Yes. That’s it.”
“He’s the Director of Counterinsurgency. If an attack was ordered on your village, he was the one. Soon he’s to be Chief of the Armed Forces.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s in Cobán, sometimes in Guatemala City. But you won’t find him. Better you go back to America, to the television, tell them what happened to your village. The Indian villages are napalmed, the people driven into camps to starve behind electric wires. Children shot in the street, women in the fields. For nothing. Because they are Indians. Tell them it’s happening everywhere in Guatemala. That America must stop paying for the Guatemalan Army.”
“Their guns are Israeli − I saw them. Galils.”
“America passes money to Israel for Guatemala, to get around the ban of your Congress against sending too much money to Guatemala. Israel built a Galil factory in Guatemala City, sends all the napalm, other explosives. Israeli pilots teach the Guatemalans how to make low-level bombing runs on villages. Mossad taught the Army how to run the IBM computers it has in Guatemala City.”
“It makes my head hurt – your propaganda − everybody’s.”
“It’s even in our newspapers, and they’re certainly not free.” She turned to the boy. “Soon I’ll need the kettle, Pollo.”
“It’s not half done,” Pollo said.
“There’s the
bailing can,” Murphy said. “In the canoe. I’ll get it.” The air outside was cool and fresh after the smoky hut, the stars a vast explosion of light. He went across the clearing down to the Río and knelt to drink, the water rising up his wrist as his hand sank into the mud. He filled the bailing can, went back to the fire, and set it on the coals.
When the water boiled Dona put her instruments in it. The woman kept crying out. “Sorry, Doctora,” she gasped. “Can’t stop.”
“We must choose, cariña. The baby’s still blocked and I can’t get his head down. He’ll die if he doesn’t come out soon. I must cut you open, the stomach, as I showed you. But there’s nothing I can give you, for the pain.”
“Aguardiente?”
“No, there’s nothing.”
“Do it.”
“You will help me, gringo? First use a little of this soap to wash your hands with some hot water. Then give me the instruments I ask for. And Pollo bring the water, when I say.”
The woman’s belly was enormous. Murphy tried not to look at her swollen, bleeding vagina. Dona washed the woman’s stomach with a piece of india and the tiny chunk of soap. She traced on the skin with her finger, changing positions and looking at it from different angles. The woman twisted up her body, clawing the mat. “Momentino, cariña,” Dona said. “Momentino.”
She took the scalpel and cut a steady long diagonal down across the belly. The woman shrieked, tears pouring across her face, fists against her teeth. “Take her hands, Pollo!” Dona said. She made a second cut, blood spurting out black in the dim light and pooling against the cloths she kept rolled round the cut. She pulled up the skin, cutting beneath to separate it from the muscle, then slit down into the muscle, the little cords popping back. “More cloths,” she said, tossing the blood-soaked ones aside. “He’s moving, cariña, your baby’s moving.”
The turgid womb beneath was purple-colored. The woman’s mouth was bleeding; she’s bit her tongue, Murphy thought. “Check her pulse,” Dona said.
“Steady. A little faint.”
