Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  In Annie and the Wolves, the small bit of it he read after Samantha committed herself, the huntsman’s daughter flees his house at dusk. In this sense, it is different than most fairy tales. The child doesn’t wander into the sunlit forest; she does not become carelessly lost. Instead, it opens at dinner, with her father, the huntsman, serving her a bowl of stew. The text is spare and summarizes only what is drawn above—it provides no insight or motivation. The huntsman serves poor Annie stew. Here we see him standing behind the hewn-wood table, his hands holding the bowl, at groin level, up to Annie’s face, his fingers clawed around the wooden rim, tendons standing out in his wrist, and some mane of fur, or hair, Ethan could never tell, tangled up his arms. Steam rises from the stew, a sausage floats at the surface. There are potatoes maybe, root vegetables. Nothing about it, vaguely sketched as it is, appears disgusting, but in the background, in the space between the huntsman’s forearm and the bowl, Annie’s face crumples into a display of abject horror. Her mouth hangs open and slack long past some scream, her lips droop low, we see her gums. Next we see, from behind, the huntsman’s hands on his hips, Annie’s still-stricken face triangulated between forearm and bicep. Annie, eat your stew! Annie flees out into the forest. Her mother (we assume) sits at the door looking down, maybe sleeping, doing nothing to stop her. Annie flees. Into the woods with the wolves.

  Ethan recalls it as she drew it—for each potential page Samantha had drafted dozens of illustrations. What bothers him is that from draft to draft nothing ever changed. She differed the medium (pencil to charcoal, the intensity of line and color) but made none of the artist’s usual revisions: there was no change in composition or perspective or light source. The same furred arms and sleeping mother remained, the same static horror. Ethan thinks he knows what this means. In the false light of retrospect, it all makes sense: the way sex seemed unlinked to desire, the way she drank, how easily her reason abandoned her after that night, the way that night seemed not like a surprise, a sudden unexpected calamity, but a culmination, the final domino in a long chain.

  He thinks he should have done more, but does not know what more he could do. Beyond certain facts (she grew up in Boston the only child of socialites, she went to Bryn Mawr, her parents died in a car accident), her past was unbreachable territory. She littered her depictions of it with small details: she told him the color of her childhood room, the name of her dentist, how she loved to sail and how she won the yacht club regatta at sixteen. He knew that as a teenager she wore her hair tied up under bandanas, always red or purple. He knew she named her first cat Doctor Theodore, and that her grandfather, when she helped him shovel snow on his farm in Vermont, used to make her what he called a Black Strap, a mixture of boiling water, rum, molasses, and nutmeg. For him, her past was a tapestry of unlinked details, vignettes. Early in their relationship, the first night she stayed at his apartment, when he told her about his mother’s death, she did not respond in kind—she did not try to hold her damage up to his own. He had assumed, always, that this was because of the way her parents died, the shock of it, their loss some terrain too painful to enter. Now he thinks he knows he was wrong.

  And then there are other days where even that clarity deserts him. The past he imagines for her is simply that—imagined. Like a jigsaw piece, it fits the jagged hole of his need too neatly. If there was a history of abuse, if Samantha’s life up until that night was a moving scar ready to be re-slit, then the fault was not entirely his own. He had waited at the table as morning assembled itself in the street. Her hair was up, he could not stop noticing that her makeup was already on. She said, what are you thinking? Ethan sees the moment as one of her illustrations: static, repetitive, the only thing that matters in the world, a moment outside of time. She asks, what are you thinking, he answers, the door closes and he raises his camera to capture her there at the threshold of something he cannot predict—but it’s just a shadow, a woman slipping away, a darkness coming in.

  Ethan woke to pre-dawn dark and the sounds he was beginning to know as those of morning: the first cocks crowing in the streets, fishing boats rumbling out into the bay. He got up, he checked his shoes for scorpions, he showered. The hot water was off, or maybe it had never been on. He shivered and washed his hair for the first time in three days and tried to remember not to swallow any of the water. Afterward, as he dressed, he considered making a list of things to do. He’d need more clothes—he’d bought two sets of new clothes by the bus stop in Mexico, but he couldn’t travel all the way to Rio de Caña on two sets of clothes, not if he were going to convince Yolanda’s sister to leave with him. The idea seemed idiotic enough as it was: a thing confused, something dreamed up as a joke and taken seriously.

  “She’ll never come with me,” he had said to Yolanda. “Why would she?”

  “You are such an American,” she said. “You think you are the worst thing that could happen to a girl?”

  HE LEFT THE HOTEL to walk the waking city. The sun still low, rose over the water, and flooded inland against the moving line of mountain shadow in a wash of pink light. As it did, steam rose from the puddles in the pitted road. Ethan found a breakfast café and ate scrambled eggs and drank coffee as he watched farmers with straw hats pulled low and saddlebags full of beans and coffee and bushels of bananas ride in on mules out of the mountains. He reached into his wallet, unfolded Doyle’s postcard, and stared at it in all its hopeless insanity.

  THE CARD HAD ARRIVED, outside their door, over a year earlier.

  “Did someone send you a postcard from 1980?” Samantha asked as she handed it to him.

  Certainly it seemed that way: the paper was yellow and thick, the picture a blurry colonial cathedral set against an overexposed sky. The sender had blackened the town name out with a marker. There was no stamp, no postal code. On the back was a poem written also in marker, in Doyle’s childish handwriting:

  Fruit of memory,

  you shall indeed be changed, Tommy, in the country of the dead,

  with that echoing flower

  in your little hand, the hand of a man chosen by destiny, and those eyes beguiled by adventure.

  THE CARD HAUNTED HIM like something dreamt into the world. A bouquet of flowers seen in sleep and then woken to, sitting on the nightstand dripping dew in a room smelling suddenly of mud and rain. It was a question of acceptance: he had not expected to ever hear from Doyle again. Doyle was dead or gone or missing—Doyle who had been disappearing for years, shadowing himself into the tropics like so many lost gringos; Doyle, once his best friend, now rotting in some heat-stricken prison or hiding, or just perhaps stepping one day into a jungle so wild with poisonous flowers and monkeys with men’s eyes that there was no emerging from it. Until now—an enigmatic postcard appearing at his door, thick and heavy and smelling of coffee and dirt, a letter received, with all its impossible ciphers, from the dead.

  The postcard demanded interpretation—but he could not interpret it. Was it a message, a riddle, a sign? Was he supposed to glean something from the poem? It was odd enough that Doyle, a man missing for over two years, would send a postcard at all, let alone a poem. Doyle did not write poetry. Echoing flower, fruit of memory—it sounded alien, more alien even than a poem appearing in your mailbox normally would. It sounded like something translated.

  He tacked the card up to the bulletin board in his darkroom and stared at it in the low apocalyptic glow of the safety light. A cathedral, a poem, a hidden address. Like a row of ancient pictograms carved into a cave wall, he felt that read in the right order, they would explain where Doyle was, or what had really happened to him, or why, after so many years down there, he had finally gone, as they had always joked he might, full-tilt Heart of Darkness.

  Ethan spent more and more time in the darkroom. Often, Samantha was out, and when she wasn’t, when she came home for the night, she lolled on the couch, the room fruiting with the smell of spilled gin. In the darkroom, the old safety light buzzed and sizzled like a mosquito lamp popping
through the tropic dark. The developing liquids, the stop-bath, reeked of Mexican vanilla. Ethan often thought that a life would be easy to fix in a world where everything was connected, where every action had a clear and certain consequence. Under the red light the cathedral wavered like a town about to fall to storm; he heard the front door open and then close. The postcard, he decided, did not mean anything.

  ETHAN FINISHED HIS COFFEE and threw the last scrap of his eggs to a lurking dog. He did not like dogs, and here there was no escaping them. They skulked through the streets, wild and mangy and strange. Their fur, where they had it, was pocked and rough. They seemed like the worst, most pitiful jackals. Alone, they howled and crept carefully around people, but at night, from his balcony, Ethan had seen wild packs of them loping the perimeter of the dark forest.

  A pickup truck filled with plantains pulled up to the curb. The farmer hopped out and, on his way into the café, he kicked the dog so hard between the ribs that it lifted off the ground, twisted in the air like a cat falling out of a tree, and hit the ground running and yelping and dropping scrambled eggs from its mouth. The man nodded to Ethan.

  “Buenos,” he said, and stepped inside. Already, a pair of chickens pecked and tossed the egg scraps. Ethan stepped out and into the street and began to walk as an old man sitting on the corner grabbed his leg and said, “Look, look how it is here. Chickens eat their own eggs.”

  A DOORBELL CHIMED as Ethan entered the detective’s office and a blue lizard scrambled across the concrete floor. The detective looked up but stayed sitting at his desk. He said, “Please do not worry, I’m sure she will be back by lunch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do not worry,” the detective said again in English. “She will not run out on you for good.”

  “I’m not here about a missing woman,” Ethan said.

  As he stood, the detective put on a pair of pointed, wire-rimmed glasses. He ran his right hand quickly over his mustache, smoothing it down, and pulled up on his belt so that he sent a faint ripple through his belly, which rested now on his desk.

  “Truly? There is no missing woman?”

  “Afraid not. Is that okay?”

  There was a noise then like a big dog barking, which Ethan realized was the detective laughing.

  “Is that okay?” he said in between bursts of laughter. “Is that okay?”

  He came around the desk faster than Ethan would have expected. He wore enormous white sneakers with little red lights that flashed as he walked. He pointed to a woven palm chair with the flourish of a maitre d’ offering a VIP booth.

  “Please sit down, sir,” he said. “Not a missing woman? Not a cheating wife? If I were not such an ugly, disgusting man I would kiss you.”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, as he searched for a phone card, Ethan had noticed that while most of the stores on the boardwalk—the stores selling beach gear and clothing to tourists who no longer came—were closed and boarded, once he turned inland and walked past the markets, the winding reaches of the city held no shortage of paint shops or private detectives. For two whole blocks the shops alternated between stores selling tubs of pastel paint, and signs, each one more elaborate than the next, offering cheap detective work. On some signs, men hid in bushes and pointed telescopes at busty women with expressions that, depending on the sign, varied between lust and indigestion. On others, characters in wide fedoras peered out of cars or trees with telephoto lenses. And on one, a neon fresco of the last supper depicted Jesus peering over his black beard at Judas, as if to say, I know what you’re thinking because I’ve got the best private detective in town. Parrots perched on all the apostles’ shoulders while the apostles drank piña coladas. Certainly, Ethan thought, the detectives struck some deal with the painters.

  “I am so grateful for this opportunity,” the detective said as he examined the postcard. “This is excellent. This is very fantastic.”

  He walked around his desk, opened a drawer and removed a magnifying glass. Light through the window caught and refracted off it, glinted for a moment in the dusty room.

  “You know,” the detective said, “I can’t tell you how nice it is to use this on something other than a photo of a naked woman. You have no idea how tiring that gets.”

  The blue lizard scurried up the wall behind him. The room was bare but for the desk, two chairs, and the low-hanging light bulb. Diesel fumes from the street puffed through the open window.

  “I mean really,” the detective said, “what is my responsibility? A man comes to me. He says, I think my wife is cheating on me with my cousin. He says, you must find out. I need to know. I need proof. So what can I do? It is my obligation, it is my profession. But say she is cheating on him—say every afternoon while her husband is at work, this cousin motherfucker takes her to his beach bungalow and fucks her so hard my camera nearly breaks. What then? Do I show the pictures to the husband? Do I say, yes, sir, you are a cabrón?”

  “I guess so,” Ethan said. “You want to get paid.”

  “It’s not so simple as that,” the detective said. He put the postcard and the magnifying glass down, rested his belly again on the tabletop. “You see, I get paid either way. But then, of course, it’s a question of integrity, right? I mean I’m hired to tell him the truth. If I take his money and lie to him, it is like I am fucking him too. I am making him a cabrón all over again. So it is simple, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “No. It is not simple. Because what will happen when I show him the pictures? He will go home and sharpen his machete. Then he will go and cut up his wife for sure, and probably his cousin too. And then, maybe, the police will shoot him. But probably they won’t. But maybe this cousin has a brother, another cousin. What is to say he won’t decide to seek vengeance? Now it is the whole city chopping each other up while the mayor wonders why there are no more tourists and the guerrillas in the mountains wait for us to be so goddamn poor or dead or both that we need them. So you see? I have a disgusting profession.”

  “I didn’t know there were still guerrillas,” Ethan said.

  “Guerrillas or maras or traficantes. I do not think even they can tell themselves apart anymore. But that is in the mountains. Here it is just people chopping each other up with machetes because they have nothing better to do. I wish the tourists would come back.”

  He pulled up his pants again and sent another ripple through his belly, peered over his wire-rimmed glasses at Ethan.

  “Are you a tourist?”

  “I don’t know,” Ethan said. “What else could I be?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” the detective said. “I do not mean to offend you, since I am honored that you chose me for this assignment. But that was a very stupid question. A gringo in this city? You could be an expatriate, which means that you could be a criminal or a pervert or both. Or you could be CIA. Or a Mormon. Are you a Mormon?”

  “No, I’m not a Mormon.”

  “I did not think so. You are not clean enough. Why, if you don’t mind me asking, sir, did you choose me, a disgusting little man, over all the other detectives?”

  Outside, a truck backfired in the street. The room thickened with diesel fumes. Now the blue lizard was on the ceiling, its crest blossoming from its throat like a bright red flower. In no time at all, it seemed, the detective had become paranoid.

  “Your sign said you speak English and my Spanish es muy malo.”

  Ethan wished he hadn’t inserted the Spanish phrase into his sentence. It was, as Paolo had put it, totally gringo-landia. The way the expats on the north coast spoke—an idiotic Anglo-Spanish patois. The detective smiled and reached into his pocket, pulled out a purple handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am the only one who does. I learned it in detective school.”

  “If they taught English in detective school, all the other detectives would know it, too,” Ethan said.

  The same strange barking sound, as if a dog could have a hairball. The detective laughing.

&
nbsp; “Maybe you are a detective too? Where do you think I learned English if not in school?”

  “You have idiom,” Ethan said. “I’d say you did learn it in school. De las Americas. In the eighties. No?”

  “Oh, very clever. Very clever. Definitely not a tourist. But I think you should never say something like that out loud around here.”

  He reached down and picked up the postcard again, smoothed down his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. In the street a cabbie began sounding his horn. The detective pushed his glasses back on his face and read the poem aloud.

  “The country of the dead,” he said. “That must be Copal, no? That is what Copal is for Latin America. A reminder of what can await you. From where you have come you may go again, no?”

  “I don’t know that it means anything,” Ethan said.

  “Still, it is a very beautiful poem, don’t you think? I once wanted to be a poet.”

  The air in the room now almost unbreathable. The overhead fan spreading a layer of smog.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to find the cathedral?” Ethan said.

  “Yes, I think so. But it will be expensive, difficult. I will have to bribe several people. This friend has done much to stay, how do you say, incognito. What did he do, anyway, that he must hide?”

  What Doyle did was buy a bar. Or stay at his bar too late one night, or close too early—or more likely, it started far before that, Ethan often thought, when he thought about Doyle at all. In truth, beyond some arrangement of the facts as he knew them, Ethan found it dangerous to try to align Doyle’s past with the catastrophe of his present. It was an impossible undertaking. There were too many poor choices to point at only one and say, there it is, the moment from which everything else erupted. Besides, it didn’t seem to matter. Once someone is, by intention almost, a Central American fugitive sending out freaky postcards through avenues unknown, how do you separate the cause from the continual expression of the effect?