by Mike Bond
Lyman ran his fingers over the leather steering wheel. But I’ve got to write it down somewhere. A record. A tape. About the Congregation, Guatemala. About all these things. So somebody can hear it. In case I die in a car wreck, have a sudden stroke. But who to give it to? Who’d keep it for me? No one.
At Langley Merck did not invite him into his office but instead led him up two floors through three coded doors to a place he’d never been, a closed corridor with deep green carpet and polished hardwood doors and wainscoting. He thought of it all being brought up, this antique-style hardwood, to be stuck inside tunnels of iron and concrete.
It was a little room with an oval maple table and maple chairs with plush green arms. The table gleamed with spray polish. There were video cameras in every corner and in the middle of each wall. “Take that one.” Merck nodded at the chair where the cameras pointed.
Lyman sat, folded his big hands before him, hating their yellow palms. He reminded himself not to bite the side of his mouth. Sweat trickled from under his arm down his ribs.
“We hear your trip to San Francisco was not an unmitigated success.” The voice came through the middle of the ceiling. A Virginia country club voice.
“I didn’t find this guy –”
“Not just that. You caused too much commotion.”
“It wasn’t my fault, the girl!”
“Which girl?”
“That reporter.”
“Ah. Then whose fault was it?”
“NoCal’s.”
“How, pray tell,” said another, slower voice, rumbling out the words, a Brahmin voice, “can you imagine it might have been theirs?”
“They have the people. I don’t know anybody, out there. And their people got mad when Murphy killed their man, up on that mountain.”
“They swear they didn’t do the reporter, Howie. And we believe them. That leaves you.”
Lyman lurched forward in his seat, looked into the camera. “Then Murphy did it!”
“Murphy’s the least likely part of this package,” country club said. Lyman could see him as a courtly cragged face, unruly black eyebrows and silver hair, an ancient assassin promoted to top management.
“Murphy’s a minor drug pilot,” country club said. “He also did two tours in Vietnam, got a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. You got through Vietnam without any wounds or medals, didn’t you?”
“In those days white guys got the medals.”
“Untrue. And how many tours did you do?
Lyman got out of his chair and stood at the end of the table. “You know how many tours I did!”
Like cobra heads the cameras turned toward him. “We just don’t understand your thing about Murphy,” country club said. “Under other conditions, we wouldn’t even mind having him working for us.”
“He killed Kit Gallagher.”
“We think not.”
“Then who did?”
“We’re not sure. Maybe the fates caught up with Kit. Maybe he’d drifted way beyond his role, wouldn’t change in a changing world. Or he was ad-libbing, like you.”
“I’ve stuck to your script when I can see holes in it for miles.”
“Like?”
“Like...” Lyman sat. This is where they’ll have you. “I just want to do my job.” He put his face in his hands, reminded himself not to look through the fingers. “I have this naive, absurd idea that if I just do my job, defend us as I would my own family, the rest of my life’ll be all right.”
“How is your family, Howie?” It was a third voice, New York intellectual, professionally interested.
“We have our ups and downs. Like everybody. But I think we’re the centers of each other’s lives.”
“That’s nice.”
“And I’m trying to move the Guatemalans on this contributions thing, on the Colombians. And I tell them they’ve got to cool it on this death squad stuff. But they say look, we were tougher than El Salvador and now they’ve had to have elections and we’re still in charge.”
“And you’ve told them?”
“Straight policy. That we don’t want to interfere in their internal matters but we’re concerned about image. And to stop knifing me in the back every time I start to make progress.”
“Maybe they don’t want too much progress. Maybe nobody does. Maybe you’re just not reading things right.”
“You know how far it is from Guatemala to Mexico, Howie,” said country club. “How’d you like to see a bunch of revolutionaries running Pemex? You think that’d be good for us?”
“We all agree on the death squad thing,” Lyman said.
“Human rights is the buzzword for the moment,” country club said. “It will pass.”
“Did you like being in California?” the Brahmin said.
“Sure.”
“You stayed in the Oasis, all that?”
“Sure.”
“We understand you doubled up on us.”
“That’s shit.”
“We know it’s shit. And we don’t like it.”
“I didn’t do any doubling up.”
“You weren’t happy to be Tim Merriweather at the Oasis, with your pretty new blue Acura and your PPK from NoCal’s friends on Polk Street.”
“That fucking cunt joint.”
“You seem to like it there.”
“Why’d you run the double on us, Howie?” Curt Merck said. “The room at the Hyatt Regency and the Dodge from Asia Rentals? How stupid do you think we are?”
“That was for you.”
“If you don’t understand the fault of your own gestures,” the Brahmin said, “how are you going to understand our needs?”
“My needs have always been whatever yours were. That’s the problem. Yours keep changing.”
“Do you want to explore that a little bit for us, Howie?” New York said.
“I wasn’t running a double. I was keeping you clean.”
“Even in your soul, Howie, we don’t want private agendas.”
“I don’t have a soul. That was the first thing you removed when I came here.”
“You had no soul long before that. Or you wouldn’t have done us any good.”
“When we want soul, Howie,” New York said, “we pay for it. And it wasn’t in your contract.”
“What do you want from me, then?”
“Go back to Guatemala. Hold Arena’s hand. Try to move him toward some understanding on the contributions thing. About the importance of working with Medellín and Cali. For everybody’s good. About removing all this nickel-and-dime competition. These little guys. Remember, Arena’s our ally: try not to be so judgmental. And let’s avoid private agendas.”
“Everybody’s got a private agenda or two...” He looked into the camera.
The amused Brahmin voice: “Tell us about them.”
He could see him there beyond the camera somewhere, an attenuated pale man with nervous fingers. A secret homosexual, unknown even to himself. But probably not to the Agency. Look at a sample of your blood they can tell everything you’ve ever done, you’ll ever do. “I have no idea. No interest. I just want to do my job.”
“And what, pray tell, is that?”
“Finding Joseph Murphy.”
“If he reappears down there, won’t you be the first to know?”
When Lyman left it was after dark, twin lines of taillights trailing away before him in the Virginia slush. God, just to drive to the end of the night, the end of your soul, till you and everything you know is washed away.
48
“IT WAS A WASTE of lives,” Dona said. “Everything we do is a waste of lives.”
“There was no way to predict those helicopters,” Principio said. “It’s the only disaster we’ve had in this sector in over two years. In war you can’t plan everything. Even in life you can’t.”
Dona stared away from Principio’s angular features at the dark wall of jungle
painted with shreds of firelight. Everything he did angered her, his skinny ankles with their long thin hairs, his sandals and long toes, his clean worn uniform, his fingers folded like a priest’s, a priest who has his eyes on people’s souls, not on their lives. And what is the soul except an excuse to fall back on when one fails to live? “I won’t do combat anymore,” she said, wanting to wound him.
“Any of us can go, at any time. But don’t blame yourself, not for the accident, nor for wanting to go.”
“I do, you fool! You! Acting so holy!” She threw a stone into the fire, realizing it was at Principio she’d wanted to throw it. “Five people we lost! Four rifles, a machine gun.” She saw Martín and the others dead and fought the tears, waited till they passed. “What good do you imagine it did, their sacrifice?”
Principio drew up his knees with his arms around them; this infuriated her. “It’s the most people we’ve lost in one fight in thirteen months.”
“It makes us weaker!”
“We’re getting stronger!”
“That’s mierda!” She wanted to scratch him, mar his calm assurance, realized she was very hungry and the hunger was making her tense. “We don’t even know what we’re offering any more! Why die for us?”
“It’s not for us we’re dying. But for a chance for everyone... free schools and health care, land to grow your own food, enough to sell if you want. No more fear of death squads, freedom to say what you want, live how you want. We’ve been over this territory, every person in la lucha, a thousand times, Dona. You know it all by heart!”
She stood, too angry to stay. “All I know by heart is sorrow!”
ONCE AGAIN Murphy looked down from the clearcut Belize hills to the Río Mopan and the guard post under tungsten lights on the Guatemalan side. It was like going back into a dream where everything had gone wrong but now he could change it, go back into when he’d come this other way, swimming across the river in the night, before then coming down the mountain after the Army truck had let him off, before then the trip from Flores with the soldiers, the cattle truck, the Río de la Pasión, the dugout canoe with the boy who now was surely dead, his hoarse, “Water! God please water!”
He could go all the way back up the Río de la Pasión to the first moment with her, when she’d peered down through the lantern’s aureole and he’d thought she was death. But it had gone wrong long before that, when he’d landed on the Machaquilá road, when he’d flown out of San Francisco with Johnny Dio... even long before that, the first time he’d flown for money, the first time he’d flown. But he could not understand how to make it happen differently.
In his mind’s eye Dona was looking sideways, to his left, sun gleaming off her Indian-black hair, her smile wide, the slender body strong under the loose shirt. Then her body was naked and he inside her, back down the tunnel of life into the whorl of the universe: all you can do is do what you like, because it’s the only message you can trust.
He went down the steep cindery slope in darkness, listening for the hiss of vipers or the rattle of a cascabel. The river seemed impossibly fast and the water too cold. He put all his clothes and his shoes in a double plastic bag and tied it off and shoved it in his shoulder pack and stepped naked into the hard icy water. With the pack on one strap around his neck he swam the river, came out on a sandbar way downstream, got dressed in his dry clothes, squirmed carefully up through the riverside brush and steadily and patiently climbed the mountain.
A wedge of orange moon rose out of Belize, outlining the pine trunks and their knobby roots that jutted like old men’s knees up from the needled ground. He reached the ridge, turned south to the saddle where the road crossed it, and followed the road down the long piney slope he’d ridden up in the Army truck. As he walked he tried to count the days and got to twenty-four but knew that there were more since he’d sat in the back of the Army truck and smelled the rare fine scent of the pines and remembered clearly the smell of Texas pines and deer rut and the sweet tang of gun oil, seeing his father’s boot heels rising before him, dropping their sharp snow imprints along the long llano ridges.
At dawn he climbed from the road and slept high on a piney hillside at the edge of a clearing where sun shimmered all day on the yellow grass. Bees and hummingbirds fed on rainbows of flowers, hawks and falcons keened far above, the hubbub of birds and crickets constant as an air conditioner. The sun poured into the crack in his skull where the bullet had creased it, into the dent the black man had made with his pistol, into the mended bone of his arm, softening wrenched tendons and bruised skin, relaxing the muscles of his back when he lay face down in the grass, tiny spiders running across his nose. At sunset he ate half his day’s rations of bread, canned meat, nuts and dried fruit, waited till darkness then dropped down to the road and walked all night, leaving it only twice when cars came out of the darkness like furious, preying monsters.
After midnight the next night he passed the turnoff to Tikal where a month ago he’d wanted to turn south toward Dona, toward the long straight Machaqilá road through the pine forest beyond the ziggurat hills where once he’d landed the Aztec.
Near San Benito he slept in the brush and walked into town at dawn. Women waded knee-deep in translucent Lago Petén Itzá, unloading corn sacks from dugouts that had come across from Flores. He walked out of town along the dirt road he’d traveled a month ago with doomed cattle in the back of a red Hino truck.
He was hungry and stopped to eat frijoles volteados and tortillas in an open café with a thatched roof on four posts, drinking milk from a green coconut with its bottom slashed off and a straw stuck in the hole. At another table a man and woman played happily with a baby; the man got up, went to a blue Jeep parked in the street, and came back with a baby bottle. On the Jeep’s front bumper, above the license, was a metal plate:
US ARMY FLYING SCHOOL
Fort Rucker, Alabama
Murphy pushed aside his plate. It was a crime to waste food; he pulled it back. Methodically he scooped the frijoles with a tortilla. The man paid; he and the woman stood; she held the baby to her shoulder. “Con permiso, Señor,” Murphy said.
The man looked at him, surprised. “Sí?”
“You were at Fort Rucker?”
“I was just there. For six months.”
“You fly a Huey, then.”
“Sí.” As the man approached, Murphy saw his face was badly scarred, a map of Guatemala, almost, the Petén high and jagged above his left eye and down his cheek from the ear to Puerto Barrios at the mouth, the Tenangos and the Pacific coast torn and mended along the right side of his chin.
“How is it, this war?” Murphy said.
“Very bad.”
“And the rebels?”
“The poor always dream of a better world. It’s just a dream.”
“You’ll win?”
“We’ll never beat them, but they’ll never win.” The man almost smiled. “Es una tontería, la guerra. War is stupidity.”
There seemed less danger now so he rode in the back of a pickup to La Libertad and then walked twenty kilometers to El Subin, a town that was nothing but a steel bar across the road and a fortified gun tower and a few tiendas and children begging money. He caught another ride to Sayaxché as late afternoon fog drifted downriver, blurring the soldiers waiting by a row of armored personnel carriers on which the US Army stars had been painted out. He crossed the Río in a dugout with six soldiers; the town came grainily into focus, its streets broken and gritty, garbage and plastic showing the high water mark, the shore stinking of sewage and dead fish.
There was a hotel overlooking the river with four rooms and hammocks with mosquito netting and a WC at the end of the hall with a pipe that dropped straight into the water. He counted forty-seven bullet holes in the door of his room. Up the dirt street was the Temple of God and across from it a restaurant where he ate pollo and rice while through a loudspeaker the minister of the Temple promised everyone that the sorrows of this
world will be recompensed by joys in the next.
After a long while he gave up trying to sleep and sat watching the black muscled Río ripple northwards toward Mexico. If she was dead he would still go through with the other part. No, there’d be no point. If she were dead he could see himself shrinking into how the world saw him − a fleeing killer − no hope, no future, trying uselessly to change into someone else.
With the smell of cooking fires and the ashes of dawn over the Río he ate hot tortillas and drank strong coffee in the restaurant, went down to the river bank and rented a dugout with a five horsepower Evinrude from a man named Vaquero, who insisted on five hundred quetzales deposit. “But I’m just going to El Ceibal,” Murphy said, “for the ruins.”
“The Army doesn’t mind if you’re a tourist,” Vaquero answered. “They shoot at you anyway.”
For hours he steered through fog too thick to see the prow, listening for the change of propeller pitch to warn him when the boat neared the shallows. Then the white disk of the midmorning sun burnt through the mist and the river suddenly appeared, a wide tilting sheet of flowing silver edged green with reflected jungle.
A string of ducks rose before the prow, settling ahead till roused again by his approach; a blue heron plodded upriver with steady whistling wingbeats. A log ahead became an alligator that rolled over and vanished with a slap of its tail. The river narrowed, filled with floating islands, sun-spangled, vibrant with birdsong; the propeller snagged often, forcing him to tip up the motor and clear away weeds. He came round a bend in the river and ahead was the cove where Jesús had fished from his mother’s dugout and where Epifanía had gutted catfish to hang on racks of saplings.
49
THERE WAS NOTHING to come back for, ash and broken pilings of huts and cinders of palm fronds scattered among bones the vultures had dragged from the fire where the bodies had been burnt with helicopter fuel. Digging in the rubble of Consuela’s hut he found a twisted spoon and the glob of plastic that had once been her water jug. There were scraps of black jerky on the branches where the soldiers had hung the faces they had cut from the bodies before they burned them. He kicked over a chunk of half-burned wood and saw it was the charred mortar in which he’d ground the corn Placido had brought upriver, that had made the tortillas for the Mass Father Miguel had said before the choppers came.
