by Mike Bond
He saw a napalm pod as it would strike the earth, its onrush of fire, people running coated in flame. America’s backyard barbecue.
Vodega extended a hot wet palm. “Murphy’s back.”
“Where!”
Vodega raised his hands, in crucifixion or ignorance, it wasn’t clear. “Shit!” Lyman screamed.
“A patrulla civil recognized his photo.”
“Why didn’t you grab him?”
“My dear Colonel, you just sent us his picture! Anyway, we heard you’d got him, in San Francisco.”
“That’s crap! Who told you that?”
Again the smarmy shrug. “It’s a small world.”
“Advise all the patrullas. Spread the photo, the checkpoints −”
“Every drunken civil guard in the mountains has his lousy photo.”
“Put a hundred thousand quetzales on him.”
“Yours, Colonel? Or mine?”
The propjet climbed fast to avoid fire. The refracted sun off the Río de la Pasión blinded Lyman but he would not turn away, nor look at Vodega. To the south the hills were like storm omens, steepening dark waves. Murphy’s down there, he thought. If I can figure why he’s back I’ll have him.
MURPHY WENT DOWN to the riachuelo and drank. The water tasted of rocks, moss, cool sand, the humus of leaves. Water spiders skittered away; black beetles chugged along the bottom raising tiny trails of silt. A water snake uncoiled past his hand and slid like a slender twig downstream.
Naked he scrubbed his body with silt, sitting in the stream to wash it off, lying back drinking the cold water as it flowed over him. It was sweet-tasting from the guavas that had fallen from a tree; the tree’s blossoms floated on the surface.
He stood on the bank letting the sun dry him. How long have I lived in buildings and walked on concrete, he wondered, yet spoke of being down to earth, of having my feet on the ground?
“WITH your knowledge of helicopters it is a very unusual chance,” Principio said. “But we should never do it with such short notice, not knowing you.”
“And I don’t know you,” Murphy reminded him.
“You’re more danger to us than we to you.”
“Perhaps.”
“We’re willing to study it. We think the four of you should go down to the coast as two happy couples, you and Dona, and Guadalupe and Pablo. Quickly. If it seems possible, to do it.”
Murphy watched the stream roil round its polished stones, tiny flies shifting before it in skeins of light. Caught by the current, a fern frond ducked and rose, tugged constantly downstream, constantly reasserting itself. Till one day it would break.
IT’S ACTUALLY in the Bible and you’ve missed it. Not that you cared about the Holy Book. But you knew what it said.
Outside Lyman’s window a large buff spider with a yellow belly sat in the center of a web full of dead insects. As each new insect landed the spider leaped on it, bit it to death, and returned to the center.
The walls were barracks yellow, the door and trim dark. There were voices in the hall; he hoped no one would knock. He shoved the Bible into a drawer and shut it. The Bible just another handbook for mass control, social management. A storehouse of tactics. Like any effective tool, it had to have enough truth or it wouldn’t sell. But when it says, “Thou shalt not kill”, is that what it really means?
THEY WALKED SOUTH all day, a hundred yards apart: Lupe in the lead, then Dona, then Murphy without a rifle, then Pablo. The trail was rarely visible through the jungle understory. After sunset they crossed a ridge with the jungle falling away in a great sweep to the south. Lupe looked at her watch, shifted her rifle. “We have to close up, move faster.”
“Christ! We’ve done forty klicks in seven hours!”
“More,” she smiled. “Nearly fifty.”
“How many to go?”
“Sixty.”
“When you escaped through the desert, hombre,” Pablo said, “you didn’t walk like this?”
It was like the Sonora desert, but jungle. Running all night through the thick, tangled, humid blackness, seeing only rarely Dona’s shade flitting before him, or Lupe’s before her, hearing occasionally Pablo’s soft pad and steady breathing behind him. Each time he fell he rolled to his feet and kept running, Pablo slowing, giving him slack, then closing up again.
“Four-twenty,” Lupe said. He could smell her and Dona and Pablo, and himself, each separately, hear his own heartbeat in his temples and their hearts thumping in their chests, the whistle of breath in his windpipe and the rush of their lungs.
“Christ!” he said, bent over, holding his knees, needing to vomit, to spit, but nothing would come out.
“Well done, niña,” Pablo said.
Lupe moved against him, whispered something, they kissed. Pablo turned to Dona, kissed her on each cheek, turned to Murphy, his hand coming out of the gloom. “Well done, comrade.”
“You’re going?”
“Just stick with them.” Pablo moved on ahead and took a trail breaking to the right. They went straight, slower now, for two hours, till dawn cut in nearly horizontal layers between the tops of the trees. In the distance a rooster crowed; a truck was climbing a hill. The trail grew clearer; Lupe picked up speed, her black mane bobbing far ahead, Dona’s behind her, Murphy angry now, trying not to fall back.
They laid up, panting, in a cave on a rocky jungled slope with a tan glimmer of a road cut visible above through the trees. “Bathroom, whatever you have to do,” Lupe whispered, “do it now. We don’t move outside all day. I’ll take first watch, till noon, Dona till three, then Gringo, then me.”
HE WOKE to the sound of a car coming along the road. It was dark. The car paused and seemed to come downhill toward them, stopped. “Let’s go,” Lupe said.
The car waited, no lights, on a trail below the road. Someone was there. “Listos, amigos?” he said. It was Pablo.
Lupe drove with no lights, her rifle slanted loosely across her chest. The road was narrow and terribly rutted and potholed. Trees had been dropped in it to fill the biggest holes, and the car jounced and clanged miserably over and around them, slithering, stuck then stuck again as they pushed knee-deep in mud, the wheels spraying them, the blackness harsh with the smells of overheating radiator, crushed vines, and oily mud searing on the exhaust. The road climbed a plateau where she drove faster, branches and boulders clanging and clunking the fenders, rocks pinging on the chassis, brush and trees ducking past, thorns screeching at metal; the transmission kept popping out of fourth so she held the gearshift and drove one-handed.
“Chopper!” Pablo yelled; Lupe skidded into the brush and they dove out scrambling for cover. Lupe ran back to slam the doors and kill the dome light. The roar loudened, three choppers in formation slid across the stars, a beacon slashing up and down the road. They rumbled westward, their thunder dying in the mountains.
“How the hell you hear that?”
“Natural selection, hombre. Those who don’t hear them die.”
“We were very dumb,” Lupe said. “About the light.”
“Before this it didn’t work,” Pablo said. “I thought it was cut, but we must have bumped the wires. I’ll take out the bulb.”
“And the brake lights?”
“Already I’ve taken out their bulbs.”
They drove back down the ridge into forest. Then Pablo walked ahead, holding a cigarette for Lupe to follow its light. They crossed a stream on foot which Lupe drove through fast, then climbed a mountain and broke out on a savanna studded with thorny trees, the grass barer, the calciferous soil like a tilled graveyard.
There was a thump and a body rumbled underneath. “Damn,” Lupe said.
“Jabali,” Pablo said, then to Murphy: “Mountain pig.”
“No,” Lupe said. “Armadillo.”
Three times they stopped so Pablo could scout forward for soldiers or civil patrols, and drove on cattle tracks around each checkpoint. After midni
ght Pablo drove and Lupe slept, her head thumping against the window.
DAWN hinted in the east, ahead lay the lights of a town. “Fifty kilometers to Guatemala City,” Lupe said. “We’ve circled the last checkpoint.”
The road coiled ahead through gray hills tinged with reddish green daybreak and loud with chattering birds and roosters. People were walking on the roadsides − women balancing bundles of corn or water jugs on their heads, old men and boys with tall firewood stacks slung from tumplines around their foreheads, a naked little girl with a black puppy on a string. The air stung with the smoke of green hardwoods, smoldering rubber and burnt diesel from the trucks laboring up the hills, the seared asbestos smells of their brakes and clutch plates deepened by the occasional stench of pig manure where a family fence ran close to the road.
At sunrise they crossed the Río Las Vacas bridge into La Ermita and the Guatemala City smog, turned up Calle Martí behind a rusty red truck whose back doors clanged their chains each time it jerked forward.
Lupe drove through the city and across Río Barranca down a long slope of packed shacks, the river valley falling off steeply below. The road turned to garbage and mud thick with citrus skins and cardboard, the air bitter with charred litter and plastic, naked children and bony dogs staring from the tin and cardboard huts. She parked amid broken cars and trucks where a man with a Galil kept guard, and led them down the slippery stinking slope of a dump where people lived in caves burrowed out of the garbage and trash, alleys loud with the music of competing tinny radios, the voices of strangers calling each other.
In a lane of rotten detritus and reeking urine Lupe banged on a plank door hinged by two rubber straps to the corner post of a chicken-wire shack covered in newspapers. There was no answer and she opened the door. “Stay here,” she said to Murphy. “If no one comes by dawn tomorrow, go home.”
52
INSIDE in the igloo-like light he could read the advertisements on the newspapers of the ceiling and walls. Flies clustered on a black stinking fluid that percolated from under a wall across the floor; there was a crucifix and a God’s Eye over the door.
He tried to lie where the black stream would not touch him. Exhaustion was thick as vomit in his stomach and his eyes would not stay open. He thought of eating some of the newspaper to slow the gnaw in his stomach. As the sun rose higher the hut grew hot, the smell horrible. He went outside and sat in the half-shade of an upturned truck seat; three boys were playing soccer with a shred of tire; a woman brought a skinny rooster out of her hut and cut off its head on a car fender, catching the blood in a chunk of coconut bark.
He had diarrhea and tried to find a hidden place among the walls of trash; there was nothing to drink and his tongue stuck in his throat. He went back into the hut and slept, curled in a corner in the reeking heat.
“Let’s go!” Dona was shaking him. It was dark. They went up through the aisles of trash to the car. She wore sports clothes and carried a handbag.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he said.
“It’s just you and me.” She gave him the car keys. “Take the Periférico.”
“Where are Lupe and Pablo?”
“We’ll see.”
He drove up the long hill of garbage. Kerosene lanterns glowed on faces in the crowded huts. “Where we going?”
“I have a Mexican passport. You are this American − Lamar Bultz − where do they get such names, these people? We’re on vacation... Listen, now, we must practice the story of what we’re doing here.”
The traffic was light − a cattle truck with two men in the back holding M16s, a Jeep, a BMW with dark windows, the dim roadsides empty of life as they rehearsed past times and presents, lives in which she was María Iturbo of Oaxaca and he was still Lamar Bultz of Flagstaff, and they were in love.
She directed him south on Central America Nine toward Villa Nueva, past Lago Amatítlan flat as mercury under the moon, black buttresses above one shore.
Sickness was a snake in his stomach. One by one the checkpoints passed, at each Dona pretending to wake, rummaging sleepily in her bag for her Mexican passport while the soldiers thumped their rifle butts on the ground. The road narrowed, slinking through curves in rolling hills silvered by the setting moon, no lights in passing huts and villages, occasionally a truck or car the other way. Several times he pulled off the road and waited, twice doubling back, but no one followed.
The moon fell down, sea smell in the air. She pointed him down an overgrown lane through miles of dunes and salt-brush to a village square with an adobe church. They left the car in a grove of wind-stunted cypress behind the church and went down to a narrow beach and a broad estuary scattered with stars, beyond it a hump of sand spit and the shuddering roar of the sea.
“We have three days,” she said. “I’m not supposed to tell you, but now you know.”
“I don’t like having the truth dribbled out like this.”
“How else would you do it? The less we each know −”
“I won’t be pushed around by Lupe.”
“We have three days. Let’s just live with that.”
They took off their clothes and washed in the estuary’s liquid silver; it felt like a magic shield they could wear; he drank the salty algal water and it felt good in his stomach.
At dawn a boy took them in his dugout across the pale estuary reflecting pink tumbled cumuli. The church tolled six, the bell’s sound quavering across the still water. A line of snowy egrets undulated away like a broken necklace. The dugout crossed the inverted reflection of the sand spit’s palm huts, and grated ashore. Beyond the huts was a streak of platinum that was the sea, then the lightening blue pit of space. “Twenty centavos,” the boy said.
A woman in a black dress was cooking frijoles on a chunk of tin over a ring of stones. Smoke from the driftwood fire contorted in the breeze. A man came out of a hut scratching his chest. “Sí,” he said. “I have rooms.”
It was a hut with a plank door, a driftwood floor and palm frond walls, two woven willow sleeping mats raised on posts, a wooden chair. Beyond the door was the curl of the beach then the great blue shoulder of the sea. “You want breakfast?” the man said.
It was coffee from fresh beans heated over the fire then crushed with a rock and boiled in a black pot, black frijoles covered with green salsa, bright yellow eggs from hens run wild, tortillas charred on their edges. When they could eat no more they took their coffee cups out and sat on the newly warm dune going down to the waves that hissed and darkened the sand with foamy wet fingers.
A bony lion-colored dog burrowed in the sand trying to escape his fleas. A salt-corroded red and white sign, COCA COLA DA MAS CHISPA! banged in the wind. Gulls cried, blown eastward; blue waves slapped the strand.
The sun reddened her black hair. “How did he die,” he said, “your fiancé?”
She raised her head from the sand to look at him. “That doesn’t matter now.”
“It always matters. It never stops mattering.”
“He was one of seven people captured by the new IBM that Mossad gave the Army to watch the flow of water and electricity in Guatemala City. They found them all in one house, and shot them the day the Pope came.”
The waves broke suddenly and late against the steep beach, shaking the dunes so that sand avalanched down them.
“I was such a kid,” she said. “Twenty-three, first year of medical school. Wild with studying so hard and trying to keep my head above water, working in the hospital from midnight to six as an orderly to pay for my room and food. Diego was so bright, alive, a cardiology intern. He thought that if we’ve learned how to heal the body we can learn how to heal the soul.”
Looking southward the beach was pure as cocaine, stretching out through blue sea and sky to a horizon of low clumped trees hazy at the world’s edge. In both directions the line of white sand fled beyond the ends of the earth. “I wish I’d known you then. I wish I’d always known you.”
“Silly!” She pushed him. “Then you’d be bored with me now.”
“I’ve always wanted to walk this beach. From Alaska to Chile. Funny to realize you’ll never do the things you always thought you’d do.”
“Down there’s El Salvador. You’d never get through.”
“El Salvador,” he said. “The Saviour. Who said do unto others what you would do unto me?”
She put a finger over his lips. “Let’s try to live through all this, and raise children, get old and tired of each other, like normal people?”
He smiled, pillowed in the warm dune, tasting the sand the wind blew into his face. The sun like a hot abrasive sponge seemed to cleanse his skin. “Better to die for something than nothing,” he said dreamily.
He must have slept, woke remembering a vision of atoms, atoms uniting in paramecia, ants, bears, humans, each a coalition of atoms defending their union from dissolution, all hungering to continue.
53
THE HUTS were a tiny hump on the beach behind them. The sea slung cool foamy tentacles round their ankles, crabs scurried sideways along the waterline. Far ahead a pebble became a thatched shelter, a blue-painted dugout drawn high up on the sand below it at the edge of the dune grass.
The shelter was empty, the windy sand trackless. The other side of the dune went down to a fringe of thick trees along a riachuelo paralleling the beach, with flat low jungle behind it. Her ankles and the rolled-up cuffs of her jeans were white with fine sand.
A tern slanted across the cobalt white-capped sea, its cry familiar as a language he’d forgotten. When they went further down the beach they could not even see the huts or the shelter and blue boat in the misty distant silver curve behind them; ahead the tree-topped cape of El Salvador seemed no closer.
