by Mike Bond
“I’m a goddamn tourist, and you shot at me!”
“I shot to miss you!”
The whites of her eyes and her teeth gleamed with fear and pain from his holding her hair and her neck jammed down on her rifle. Still pinning her arms he felt down her sides: no revolver. He pinned her right arm, shoved his left under her head to hold her left wrist. “Where’s the other compañeros?”
“Please, Señor, don’t kill me, please?”
“Tell me and I won’t hurt you.”
“They’re up ahead.”
“How far?”
“Beyond the hill, where the road turns.”
“How many?” Knife clamped in his teeth, he felt her breast pockets then down her thighs − no knife, a scrap of tortilla in one trouser pocket. He raised his hand up the inside of her thighs, clamped it there.
“Please, Señor − I was warning you only.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know − I was told to stay here, warn off anyone who wasn’t soldiers.”
He slipped the knife under her rope belt, twisted the blade and slit the trousers open to the knees.
“Please, Señor.”
He slid the blade under the front of her shirt, drew it down, cutting the buttons, gripped the knife again in his teeth and pulled the shirt apart. There was a black line down her right breast where the blade had nicked it. “Please, Señor – I’m just seventeen...”
“You tried to kill me.” It was a stallion rising in him now, the delicious stinging joy, the hunger to absolve it. She wore nothing under the coarse trousers, her mound little and warm as a bird in his hand.
“I could have killed you,” she cried. “I didn’t want to!”
“STOP MAKING so much noise!” Dona whispered. “You’re like a hippopotamus!”
“I’m trying to keep up with you! Wait − I’m caught. There. Goddamn snakes. Don’t know how you stand this.”
“The hammock’s safe. Once you get in it.”
In the darkness ahead an even greater blackness. “This the tree?
“The ceiba?” She moved ahead. Yes.”
He put down the gun and backpack. “I can hang my own hammock,” she said.
Her face was near; he could sense her form against the darkness, reached out, knowing exactly where she was, her arm already familiar in his hand. Maybe it was your healing me, he thought, engraved you on me. “You got this goddamned thing on safety?”
“Of course, gringo − you are so crazy!”
“I hate it. I hate them so much it makes me sick just to see them.”
“Just because you had to fight for what you didn’t believe in, now you think no one should fight at all.”
“You have guns − they have guns; you’re just inoculating yourself with their disease.”
THE GIRL WAS FIGHTING to keep her legs closed but he jammed a knee between them, rammed her legs up and shoved in, her channel dry, too small, the rubbery membrane tearing, her cry, the channel slicker now with blood, and that’s what it always takes, he thought, a little sacrifice to get things going, couldn’t shove in deep enough with her writhing and flinching; it reared up like a stallion crashing down her velvet walls, driving far up, her insides imploding, in the sweet slick hot delight of coming to this and nothing more.
You could’ve made a baby. You always know. He drove the blade deep into her throat, blood spraying in his face, her body frantic then rigid then finally quiet beneath him. He grew huge again − I should have kept you, he thought, but it’s better this way − and finally it soared out of him long and deep, from back there, the beginning, from way behind it, life, the end. He pulled out and rolled aside, wiped the knife and his hands and face on her rough-woven trousers. Oh Jesus, he thought. You bastard. But then again − she tried to kill me. He heard Nancy playing a Beethoven sonatina, the mantel clock ticking out its years, saw his son Joshua tossing up a tennis ball, not high enough, not hitting it at the drop. Joshua leaned forward, into the serve, and the pain of his death drove again through Lyman like a sword, Joshua beneath the huge tire of the cement truck, half a boy’s body in a lake of blood. Sheathing the knife and pistol he took up the girl’s rifle, a battered M-16, short clip, only three shots left. He crept slowly to the edge of the starlit meadow and knelt looking for the best way across it and around the hill ahead, where the road turns.
DONA LAY with her head on his left arm, her breath against his neck, her hands up between his arms and chest, the rifle lying at her back. He pulled the blanket down a little to see the angle of her cheekbone and the extra darkness of her hair. “Your feet are too big,” she said. “You’ll pull out the blanket.”
He kissed her forehead; it smelled of smoke, jungle, and river. Already she was sleeping, the barrel of her rifle cold with dew against his knuckles. Through a tiny high gap in the branches the Pleiades shone down. When he looked a moment later they were gone. But it seemed a good omen as he drifted off to sleep.
15
HIS VOICE came from the light. “You can put it down.”
She held the weight tighter, was suddenly conscious of how it cut into her shoulder, made her back ache as if she carried concrete. She slid it from her shoulder and it thumped to the ground. She raised her arms, could see the jungle below and realized she was flying, dipping and diving naked through the winds, veering with the turn of a hand, air rushing past her body.
There was a warm tingling between her legs. Must have to pee, she thought. I’ll have to get out without rocking the hammock, not waking him, and walk barefoot in the snakes to take a pee. But the feeling was hotter, radiating, a magnet between her loins and his, urging them together. For a moment she let herself imagine it. But maybe he doesn’t want to. I’m heartless, wanting this, even thinking of it, after what’s happened.
She recalled the woman in the hut, in pain but not crying out, the baby wailing at her breast. If I have to pee I’ll check on her, she thought, though Pollo should be watching unless he fell asleep. Maybe she’s hemorrhaged or the baby’s sick and here I lie thinking about sex.
She slid one foot over the side. “What’s the matter?” he said.
“I was trying not to wake you. Must check María −”
He sat up. “I’ll go with you.”
“It’s only a hundred meters through the jungle. Sleep.”
He slipped into his sandals, tossed her pack over one shoulder, took the gun. “I’ll go before you.”
From the clearing the Río was a canyon of stars. The coals still glimmered through the hut’s rush walls. Pollo stood when they came in. “She’s been awake,” he whispered, “but now she sleeps.”
“And la chica?”
“She drinks and sleeps. She’s happy.”
Dona touched the backs of her fingers to the baby’s face, the back of the woman’s hand. She beckoned Pollo outside. “Bien, you know where to find me?”
“Sí, Doctora.”
“I’ll come again at dawn.”
“Sleep well,” Pollo whispered, catching Murphy in the corner of his eye.
In the jungle she took the rifle from Murphy. “Meet you at the ceiba.” When he’d gone she slid down her clothes and crouched, the wonderful feeling of it coming out, its warm smell rising up from the leaves. The rasp of cloth as she pulled up her clothes made her skin tingle. It was still there, the itchy feeling of having to pee, hotter than before. She bit her lip, saw the stone slabs she’d climbed as a girl, up Antigua’s temple stairs. Yes, we called it church, she reflected, but it was ours from before, long before there was a church, when the stones that now make the church then stood in another form, for a different God − the sense of all this history was like God, this column of power. And he must like me a little bit, she thought, for he likes lying down beside me and kissed me and it’s true as he says that I saved him... though maybe he would have lived anyway for he seems to live through everything, and in her hand she could feel how he would
be, could not close her hand all the way around him. I will do it, she decided. I give up, he can have me. The Galil snagged on a creeper; she bent and tugged it free.
She was coming to him across the starlight filtering down through chinks in the rain forest night − he could sense her, felt where she was, the motion of each limb, her face, each step turning, bending toward him through the trees. I’ve always loved you, he said to her inside himself. You’re all I’ve ever cared for.
Just to brush her lips once with his was enough to last a lifetime but made him need to taste her mouth, her teeth against his lips, her odor washing him through mouth and face and hair and hand and every pore, her tongue like an orchid he’d seen once in the jungle deep in the crevice of a tree, her body hard against him like the Galil, her nails digging into the back of his neck, as if they were twins, two halves of one, dying of thirst for each other, drinking each other in.
She lay beside him naked, the hammock swinging softly and there seemed forever, always, to do all this. To be naked, naked against her naked − how small, how lovely how slender how complete –
“This can’t matter afterwards,” she whispered, as if someone could hear, “we can’t do it anymore, just this once. Just this once I so need to, oh if you could understand how I need you.”
No wall between them, one skin, one blood, one body, to kiss her the only thing now, had ever been the only thing, wetting her rough smooth lips, his tongue inside them, against her teeth, her tongue warmed and curved and curled and wrapped his, drew back came forward and took him in again.
He reached down her slender body over the curve in her hips and between her thighs and she raised up one leg so he could touch her there, rub her there, anything he wanted she wanted, the two were one, and she held him, held his power, had forgotten how big, filling her hand as if it belonged there, completed it, her hand aching to envelop it and go up and down it and her fingertips around the tip and everything she did she knew how it felt for him as if she had the same sensation.
How small inside she was opening out, deep resonating petals, how slender her hips how small her breasts against him, and he saw how she would be heavy with child, everything, all time, was this, her body rising beneath him, her eager lips and teeth and tongue and breasts and belly reaching up, sucking him in, her knees locked round him, and he was coming into her, an arrow to pierce her so she could die and be reborn and this time I’ll live forever, she thought, in the glory of it deepening inside her, widening her, wedging her apart until its point hit high inside her, dead center, making it all come true, she could not tell the smell of him from hers, his breath or hers, his skin or hers. We’re twins, we just got separated young, for he was her body and she his, the great white sheet of night washing her away, and she saw that everything is twinned, has its reflection, is doubled.
She saw a rabbit crouched in the grass. It’s mistaken, she realized, to think the eagle watches over it.
He could see all around as if the night weren’t there, then realized that it wasn’t, the raw boughs spiring into gray, skeins of creepers cascading down, bulging leaves and bracken, the fading stars. The jungle thinned with light, the trees tapered to carbon spars and blew away on centuries of wind, the soil chased after, flake by scurrying flake, the earth was bare − the entire earth − he saw how everything had gone, inhabited the stars.
16
THROUGH A CRACK in the floorboards between his boots Lyman could see muddy ground. Roll a few grenades under these barracks you’d get everyone inside. Curling his toes against the morning chill he sat thinking how he’d attack the Base, as a guerrilla, how to draw strength to the northeast perimeter. But you wouldn’t really be there, you’d fire across the middle, cutting it, hit the southwest from their back then when the northeast turns on you, you hit them hard from the front, where you’d started in the first place. It was pure sense, pure guerrilla, and he thought lovingly of it for a moment, realized his toes were cold and slid on his boots.
His body was stiff and sore, as if he’d played football, then he remembered he’d been drunk, had gone to town; his head was hurting, God what a fucking headache. Then he remembered he’d banged his forehead with hers, the girl when she was trying to escape, fighting him, and he remembered how easily the knife cut the trachea, the jugular, almost automatically, her body quivering one last moment in his arms. Was it true, he wondered, stood and lowered his trousers to see the blood in dark flakes on his penis, saw his shirt, the backs of his hands. “Oh Lord Jesus Christ,” he said, rubbing his neck gently and shaking his head. But the headache wouldn’t lessen, and he wandered toward the latrines to wash his face in cold water.
“THIS CAN’T happen again. No more after this.” Her voice was hoarse, as if from too much talking.
“I won’t let it stop.”
On her side, she drew one leg up over his hip, seeking him. “La lucha − won’t let me. I don’t want to.”
“To hell with la lucha.”
“You’d love someone who’d do that, leave those whose lives might depend on her?”
“And in la lucha people don’t love, get married?”
“Married, yes.”
“Then we’ll get married.”
She put her fingers over his lips. “You mustn’t even say that.”
With the swing of the hammock he rolled on to his back and she pulled up on her knees and knelt over him, the blanket sliding from her shoulders. She kept coming down and down and down atop him till he hit the place where he could go no more and she winced and pulled up slightly.
“You like this?” he said.
“God yes I like it. I’m not crazy.” Her hair slid up his chest as she came forward to kiss him, fell over him, breast to breast, skin to skin and sweat to sweat, her nipples hard against his ribs.
The dance of life was this, the yin and yang, the going in and coming out, one body and one blood, one core, one understanding − not thinking, far beyond it, the body doing this, the body knowing what is right.
“YOU LOOK LIKE you fall in a pit,” Arena said.
“Too much aguardiente.”
Arena took the coffee pot and served it around. He put it down and brought round a plate of biscuits. He’s learned this at Langley, Lyman thought. This convivial serving of his guests. To lower their defenses.
“Since when does rum scratch your face?” Arena said.
“I fell downhill.”
“That was very much rum.”
“That’s all there is to drink in this Christly place.”
“Come now. There’s El Gallo.”
When he’s being convivial that means he’s planning an attack, thought Lyman. Or has figured a new way to use me. Or knows how he can lose me. But when he is being convivial he’s also at risk because he doesn’t expect me to attack. “You’re still wrong, General,” he said. “It was the pilot, at that village, who shot your men.”
“My men get shot by many people, Colonel.”
“And it’s the same one who killed Gallagher. I saw how he moved, how he got in and out. He’s a soldier, General, and a good one. I want him. And you still can’t find him.”
“If that was him. This we don’t think yet.”
“Just because the priest says it was some Kekchi. Trouble with you people’s you can’t drop the habit of believing your priests. No Kekchi looks like that guy. Kekchis aren’t that tall − he knew how to use a gun.”
“You think Guatemalans don’t know how to use guns, Colonel?”
“Not these farmers you keep killing all the time. Most of them can’t even handle a plough. Excuse me for being blunt − I’ve got a hangover − but I could run Guatemala with a lousy military academy. How come you can’t with a whole army and equipment up the rectum − excuse my Spanish − and all the counterinsurgency training you can swallow and a fucking spy satellite and twenty-four-hour infrared overflight and six hundred million in military aid and three billion in slush f
unds and another ten billion you make off the grass and coke flights?”
“Talking to you, Colonel, is like talking to a recorder. We don’t think the man at that village who shot our two soldiers was this pilot you are so hungry for. The priest has been to the point of death three separate times and this is what he begs us to believe. He has said some other things we know are true, so we are disinclined to disbelieve him.”
“Like what?”
“He has admitted he sympathizes with the revolution.”
“What priest doesn’t sympathize with the revolution? Half your fucking Army and all the campesinos do! Probably even you do.”
“You’re an expert now, on our society?”
“I’m paid to be. I’m not very good at it but I’m better than you. You don’t have the fucking faintest idea what’s going on.”
“And you do?”
“Give me a lancha and ten men, General. I’ll show you how easy it is to find this sky pilot.”
Arena nodded slowly, watching his hands folded on the table before him, like the stubby fat prow of a ship, Lyman thought.
“Why not take your ten men and go up to Sayaxché this morning?” Arena said. “Angelo Vodega will go with you.”
II
House of
Obsidian
Knives
17
POLLO blew on the coals and added resiny ocote twigs that flared up quickly. God give us peace, Murphy thought. Peace is love, came the answer. They heated the monkey stew, gave some to the woman, María, who was able to sit up and eat.
Globules of fat floated in the stew, between the bones. The monkey’s flesh was wiry, the hairs nearly human − short, dark, and strong. The baby’s wizened face seemed fuller, less frightened. You’re getting used to it already, Murphy thought. Pollo took up his machete. “I’ll find some roots for María.”
