Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  “Why do you have to do that?” she moaned.

  “It’s not so bad. I’m not keeping them,” he said and erased the pictures one by one.

  She drew her hands away from her face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have asked.”

  “Can I see one before you erase it?”

  “You’ll have to get off the diving board.”

  She shook her head with a child’s vigor. For a moment he thought she might actually be fourteen. She opened her arms and began to kick her legs again.

  “You should take your pictures and get out of here,” she said. “You should maybe fuck off. Go to the Alamo. Go creep the green river.”

  Ethan backed away from the pool edge. Her voice had plummeted octaves into something hoarse and trembling, a voice wholly different from before, and he was certain, then, that this was her real voice uncovering itself against her will. It was a shift he recognized from his last months with Samantha and he had a feeling that she might begin to scream.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m leaving. I’m leaving right now.”

  “Sure you are. Where do you think you can go?”

  Her tone rose again into the teenager’s bobbing lilt, but her eyes, what he could see of them, still blinked through trance. Across the parking lot, the john left the prostitute’s room and began walking back, between cars, to the overpass. He stopped when he saw them and stood staring. Ethan looked away from him and turned to leave the pool.

  “Where are you going?” she asked again. “Where do you think you can go?”

  “South,” Ethan said. “Mexico, maybe.”

  He knew it was true as he said it. Nuevo Laredo wasn’t that far, and beyond it the continent fell away into limitless variations of forgetful possibility. There was Mexico and the realms farther south: the white beaches in Belize, Doyle, if he could find him, and the tropical shores of sea grapes and cane huts. Lotus flowers.

  “Oh,” she said. “Boystown. You’re going to go to Boystown and take pictures of all the sad women.”

  “No, I’m not going to Boystown,” Ethan said.

  “Sure you will. If you come to San Antonio and hang here”—she waved toward the motel, the man still watching them from the street—”then you’ll go to Mexico and hang out there. You can creep your thing or thing your creep. There are enough busted-up faces for your little camera.”

  She began to laugh.

  “I’d come with you and show you around, but I’m not old enough.”

  BACK IN HIS ROOM, with the shades pulled and the door barred, Ethan sat on the bed and considered Mexico. It seemed to coax him with some promising threat, another mistake he might make, and now he found that promise enticing. There were drawbacks: his Spanish was terrible and the border towns were dangerous, warzones, but get through them and into the interior and Samantha’s money—he could not think of it as his—would go a lot farther. Direction was arbitrary, hardly a choice at all. He may as well head south.

  He lay back on the filthy bed and listened to the music that had not abated, the same track looping over and over. The rap, the sampled Chopin. Again, he remembered, as he did frequently, his mother’s swollen wrists, the blue ready pulse of her still knotted veins—often they were all that remained of her physical presence, the only thing that for him had not fled with time. He checked his watch. It was what Mallory called, in her playful butchery of the Book of Hours, Midnight Vespers. He imagined that now Samantha might sleep through the nights, or if she didn’t, that her nights might be divided into their own allotted services of medication and dull sleep. She woke and slept and maybe would one day step back out into a world that he was sure must not contain him. He closed his eyes and let the music lull him where it would. At one point, still hearing it as he slept, it occurred to him that the past was the music of his dreams and it would never end.

  Hours before dawn and Ethan’s driving south. There’s the headlights on the open road and the exposed world fleeing before them: an armadillo scrabbling through the sudden brightness, the road itself, holding straight and long, unraveling like a skein of cloth rolling downhill. A future commencing just beyond possibility, something he must chase. In the last watches of the Texas night the horizon he drives toward is the cold blue of a vein pulsing under skin.

  By dawn, clusters of thorned mesquite twisted with scrubby cactus line the road. The wind rises out of the south and waves of red dust lift and blow across the far plains. He rolls up the windows and swerves to avoid hitting a turtle, but hits it anyway. He sees its body spinning up into the air behind his car, sprinkling the road with slivers of shell. The sharp light of morning, the golden half-light, holds in the east, and for a moment Ethan feels entirely alien to himself. He’s nothing but the present, a man heading south, untethered to anything but driving on the empty road toward the river and the signs for Laredo, where thin curls of smoke streak the air. It’s a sweet dissociation. In the new light’s false promise, it’s a realm of perfect physicality. A static, concrete world of things and now.

  He opens the windows again; he feels the too-warm wind. He knows how it is that you experience pleasure or pain in the moment, but you love and grieve in the future and the past. More than anything, loss is retrospective or projected. As it occurs, in the suddenness of the moment, you cannot tell, when you wake alone, whether your lover is in the shower or in another’s bed. It’s the photograph’s trick: outside of time there is no haunting.

  As he approaches the border he begins to feel vaguely afraid. It’s a comforting feeling, warm and sure and realer than guilt or regret. He feels it and feels it and holds it close as he drives on over the flat reaches of the highway and into the coming day.

  First there was the sea, moving in metallic sheets against the darkening horizon, then there was the shore, Playa Ratón, the beach of jagged coral, broken glass, and sand the soiled yellow of old bones. Beyond the shore, the wind-stunted thicket of sea grapes hung before the outdoor deck of the canopied bar. The air reeked of the rotting, windfall berries, and anyone taking in the view from the deck would have to do it through the perimeter of sea grapes. This time of night, this time of year, or century, there were only two men on the deck and they were not watching the sea.

  Cunningham raised his glass, drained it, and wiped his forehead with the stained sleeve of his white linen jacket. Although little sun remained, he wore green mirrored aviator sunglasses and a yellow shirt that he kept unbuttoned halfway down his chest. It was the type of getup peculiar to Anglos in the tropics forty years earlier, and it seemed that he had been wearing it all that time.

  “Really, General, are you sure your man Soto is coming?” he said. “I don’t know how many of these daiquiris I can drink.”

  Guzmán shrugged and his oversized epaulets rose and settled like angel wings starting to open. It was, Cunningham thought, like all the uniforms down here, vaguely ridiculous. So much for meeting incognito.

  Guzmán said, “Now, Barry, there was a time a man could be shot for insulting our national cocktail.”

  Cunningham held up his glass to the blue glow of the mosquito lamp. He turned it upside down. It was empty.

  “A daiquiri? Daiquiris are Cuban. Named after Sir Francis Drake. There is no way they’re your national cocktail.”

  Guzmán gulped from his glass and smiled. His teeth glinted bluely in the electric light.

  “Ah, but Barry, you’ve been away too long. El Lobo has decreed it the national cocktail. It has been mandated, and history, as you know, is nothing before one of El Lobo’s mandates.”

  “Maybe it’s the nature of my work,” Cunningham said, “but everywhere I go people are declaring that history is dead. Everybody is making mandates.”

  “And you have a problem with this?”

  “It’s just that I’m a man of principle. And principle is dependent on history.”

  The general had not stopped smiling.

  Cunningham held his hand up to the light and snappe
d his fingers.

  “Otro vez,” he shouted when the bargirl looked his way.

  He took off his sunglasses and blinked blearily at the lightened dark. He tried to smile but his mouth moved the wrong way, downward, like one about to be sick.

  “What can I say? I’m easily convinced.”

  THE BARGIRL WHO BROUGHT THE DRINK could not have been more than eighteen. She was certainly, Cunningham thought, very beautiful, in the way that women down here were beautiful. Her black hair sparkled under the mosquito glow. Her cocoa-colored eyes were large and round and she smiled at him and then looked down sharply when the general turned his gaze on her. Doleful, thought Cunningham. A village maiden. A treasure of Central America. The world, he thought, the slavering world is yet beyond her comprehension. Guzmán’s buggy little eyes had assumed an aspect of kindling rage. It was boring to watch these petty violences play out, but it was always to be expected. Well then, darling, Cunningham thought, welcome to the new Copal.

  Guzmán caught her wrist as she turned to leave. She stared down at the table, at Cunningham’s drink. Cunningham tasted it and smiled but she did not notice.

  “Excuse me,” Guzmán said, “but can you tell our foreign friend here why the daiquiri is our national drink?”

  “The daiquiri is rum and sugar and lime,” she said. “And in Copal we have the purest rum and the sweetest sugar and the freshest limes. Copal is rich with treasures.”

  She spoke in nervous monotone. A schoolgirl reciting her lessons. There was nothing remotely sexy about it, but Guzmán bobbed his head with vigor. He was still smiling his big blue smile.

  “That is very good,” he said. “You are a pride to the nation. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Cunningham watched her face try to hold its smile and slowly collapse. There was no safe answer to that question.

  Guzmán released her wrist and handed her a ten-dollar bill. Dollars were rare in Copal, and under the pulsating light, Cunningham could not tell for sure if her fingers trembled as she took it. She nodded and turned and left.

  “I suppose you have her now,” Cunningham said.

  WHEN SOTO APPEARED, he came up from the shore, weaving through the windbreak as if he had been strolling along the beach and turned, like an insect, toward the light of the bar. He broke through the trees and loped up from the shadows and onto the deck. He stood for a moment away from the light with his head bowed. In the playing shadows of the new night Cunningham could not see his face. It seemed, almost, that he did not have one—there was the dark of the sky above him and the dark of his hat and the ribboned shadow about his features. The man himself, Cunningham thought. Of all the lunatics the world’s warm shores flung at you, Soto was his own weird specimen. Cunningham drained his new daiquiri. A man in the service of right-eousness keeps the worst company.

  Guzmán was speaking.

  “Soto, we thought you weren’t going to make it. Barry thought you’d stood us up.”

  Guzmán sounded unsure of himself, Cunningham felt. His voice was suddenly hearty and jocular, a barman’s convivial tone. The general was not convivial.

  “Come have a drink,” he said.

  Soto did not move but stood and waited and whistled, a long, high, modulating whistle. A Peter and the Wolf whistle with more Wolf than Peter. It was singsong and flutey, something piped, and Cunningham did not like the sound of it. Then from beneath the trees crawled the child. He must have been crouched there, in the slight sandy incline before the deck. Mud streaked his face and his jeans were too long for his small legs, a sibling’s pants perhaps. He wore no shirt and his skin held the fair coloring of the Spanish northerners. He approached Soto and Soto put his hand in his hair and then on his shoulder and led him over to the bar. The general, Cunningham saw, had begun to tap his gold ring on one of his medals.

  “What’s with the lad?” Cunningham asked.

  “No se,” Guzmán said. “But there are rumors.”

  It was fun to watch Guzmán churn. Perhaps tonight he would have trouble with the bargirl.

  “I don’t know what you expect,” Cunningham said. “Deal with creeps and this is what you get.”

  WHEN SOTO RETURNED to the table he brought the child with him. The boy carried a bowl of baby octopus.

  “Siéntate,” Soto said and the boy sat, with the men, at the table. Like one with coattails Soto flipped out his jacket and swept off his hat as if preparing to bow before royalty. He sat.

  “The boy has to sit somewhere else,” Guzmán said.

  “No he doesn’t,” said Soto. Cunningham had forgotten how strange his voice was. “Anyway, he doesn’t speak English.”

  The boy looked down at the bowl and began to eat the octopus with his fingers. He didn’t look back up.

  “Our problem,” said Guzmán, “is that the banana people have offered El Lobo twenty million dollars in cash if he ignores certain export taxes. The oil people have agreed to a similar figure. We would like to accept this deal.”

  Soto opened his arms in a wide show of beneficence.

  “Do you know that I have crossed jungles to come here? The dart frogs are disappearing in the mountains and the Indians clamor for more guns.”

  “If the oil prospectors go into the interior, I’d like to guarantee them safe passage,” Guzmán said. “But the guerrillas keep burning the banana groves. We cannot ensure the safety of the roads.”

  Soto shook his head violently, like a man trying to free himself from a cobweb. He looked to the eating child.

  “This is so unbelievably petty,” he said. “So they burn a field? So they arm some pitiful fucking inditos? That’s it, no?”

  “Forty million is not petty. And Barry thinks there will be a revolution.”

  “Barry always thinks there will be a revolution. Barry thinks it’s still 1980,” Soto said.

  Cunningham reached across the table and snagged an octopus.

  “Those are pretty good,” he said.

  “Why does the president need forty million dollars?”

  “The Americans expect the roads they paid for. And their funds are long ago misplaced,” Guzmán said.

  “Is there no one else you can tax?”

  “This year tax collection did not even cover government salaries,” Guzmán said.

  Soto turned his gaze to Cunningham.

  “Tell me, Barry,” he said. “Is it a revolution or a coup you’re trying to prevent?”

  “Hey now,” Cunningham said as he reached across the table for another octopus, “we’ve got a plan.”

  AFTER SOTO AND THE BOY LEFT, Cunningham looked down the shore to where they had disappeared. He felt like a stage actor drafted into a sitcom. Here, in the shabby bar on the stricken beach, everything seemed to tremble at the edge of farce. The general licked his lips, straightened his epaulettes, and wiped his forehead with the silk ascot he usually wore about his throat. Cunningham could not stay his mouth from twitching into a sneer. It was almost too boring. Wherever one went, one saw the same such figures strutting through the same postures: base greed and violence, silly uniforms, maniacal plans. Of course, the plan Guzmán had pitched to Soto was ludicrous.

  Cunningham had known Soto in the States at Yale and he saw what happened to him in the jungles in the eighties. A colonial orphan blighted by the consequences of wars that had, even by Cunningham’s standards, clambered into horror, Soto was not to be trusted. Such as they were, his methods were extreme, his principles devoid of clarity. As a contractor, he liked to think, of the oldest school, Cunningham had trudged all over the world. Everywhere was a pisshole and everywhere the bastions of order were crumbling. Usually, one found men like Guzmán, men who believed in nothing, who saw the chaos around them as a confirmation of that void, a blossoming of the nothing at the heart of their world. Such men were unfazed by the consequences of their actions, but their actions were easy to predict. Or there were those, like Cunningham himself, who believed strongly in their work, who felt ordained by duty. And then t
here was Soto. He believed in something for sure, he seethed with conviction and the rage of right-eousness, but his reasons were forged in the reasonless crucible of a jungle war and could not be comprehended. Cunningham had heard rumors that the farmers at the edge of the cloud forest were now calling Soto Duende, after the folk-spirit who stole children in the night.

  “This is ridiculous, General,” Cunningham said. “Why send one maniac after a girl when you could send an army?”

  “The world is watching us now. Their eyes are on Mexico and El Salvador. We must be discrete about how we handle our guerrillas. We would not want to make a mess for our American uncles.”

  The general’s paranoia was also to be expected. It was another symptom of your typical banana republic war criminal. Their megalomania was such that they believed themselves beyond scrutiny, and were certain that they were always being scrutinized.

  Cunningham nodded out at the dark moving water as if he had just noticed it.

  “You can’t blame the tourists for staying away,” he said. “It’s a filthy sort of sea. I wouldn’t swim in it. Not if I were a shark.”

  Guzmán didn’t seem to be listening. He was standing and raising his hand to the bargirl, and the bargirl was stepping out toward him onto the dark reaches of the deck.

  “I think if you were a shark, you would like Copal very much,” he said.

  Axiom of the border: everything was for sale. Ethan came with one bag, a camera, his clothes, and knew that whatever he bought, he would leave with less. There was a time when the elderly would arrive by the busload from Texas, buy cheap medications that might kill them anyway, and then shuffle off again across the border. The markets were still filled with merchants and children and quack doctors hawking whatever wares they had to hawk, but now they were without customers. The merchants shouted and shouted, their cries rising like doves from a gonging church steeple, but there was nowhere for them to settle. It was all just noise. The disarray and panic of a Mexican market without any of the commerce. Ethan felt, as he found a cantina, ordered a beer, and sat on the outdoor patio, that he was listening to the death cries of a city at the end of its future. By night, cartels waged war on its streets; by day, bandits attacked even the most paltry of knickknack shops with flurries of machine-gun fire. Now, even America’s most desperate citizens did not risk the border towns. What does that make me? he thought.