They met their freshmen year at Middlebury, where they were roommates in a leaky dorm that overlooked the playing fields. At first Doyle showed little sign of the man he was to become. He was a pale blond boy, soft-spoken and almost diffident—typically Southern, Ethan thought, in the cautious way he seemed to approach his Northern colleagues. He walked and sat with the rigid posture of a child born to a military family and he drank without peer. At the end of the first week of classes Ethan returned to their room to find Doyle waiting at their fold-up card table with two glasses and two bottles of whiskey—one of Irish, which he claimed for himself, the other of Scotch, which he presented to Ethan.
“It’s the end of the day,” he said, “and we need to take the edge off.”
Ethan wanted to tell him that for the first time in his life he felt free from whatever neurotic discomforts, external or internal, honed themselves into an edge, but he imagined by the way Doyle arranged himself without smiling, in a perfect ninety-degree angle in his chair, that this was, for him, a serious affair. And it may have been, though later Ethan learned that these signs, a grimness of aspect and rigidity of posture, were not weathercocks to Doyle’s mood. Still, he did present the evening whiskey as a ritual of strange solemnity, and would barely tolerate a change in time or brand. Once, for his birthday, Ethan gave him a bottle of twelve-year-old Redbreast Irish Whiskey which he thought would be a welcome substitute for Doyle’s regular thin and sweet Tullamore Dew. But he never drank it. I’m a Tullamore man, he said when Ethan pressed him. I’m an undeviating line.
Perhaps, Ethan thought, but whatever steadiness of purpose or personality Doyle imagined for himself was limited to the compulsions of ritual. Twice during that first year he dropped out of school and tried to join the Merchant Marines. Each time, somehow, his father caught him before he could enlist and drove him back hundreds of miles to Vermont. The second time came in early spring, and Ethan was there in their room, watching the walls of sleet blow down across the fields from Canada, when the Doyles arrived. Ethan watched the black Cadillac make its way in ponderous skids and jerks over the iced roads, he watched the falling sleet spark in the wide cast of its headlights. When the car stopped outside their dorm, Mr. Doyle stepped out into the storm, walked around the hood like a chauffeur, and opened the door for his son. Ethan remembers the moment, the old man—he was old then already, almost seventy—waiting for his troubled son to join him in the rain. Ethan remembers the gathering sheen of ice beading on his overcoat, and his bare, bald scalp. When Doyle finally slipped out—beside the old man’s stiff authority he seemed effete and languid—he pulled off his woolen cap and offered it to his father. Mr. Doyle shook his head, touched Brendan’s shoulder once, and walked back around the car.
After this, Doyle seemed to lose his desire to flee school. He became a Spanish language and literature major and met Paolo in a class on the revolutionary works of Alejo Carpentier. They moved in together, all three of them, in their junior year, and Doyle wrote a senior thesis on El Cid. After graduation, Paolo went to school for journalism, Ethan moved to New York to pursue photography, and Doyle, struck again by some wanderlust, joined the Peace Corps.
“I’ve heard,” he said to Ethan one night just before he shipped off to Copal, “that down there a white man can fulfill every single sexual fantasy.”
They were drinking in the White Horse Tavern in New York, the tavern where Dylan Thomas sat at the bar and completed, it seemed, his life’s second ambition: he drank until he said, I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I believe that is the record, and then passed into a coma from which he would never awake. Now, the White Horse bustled with tourists without entirely losing what merits it must once have had—it was dark and wooden. They sat, Ethan and Doyle, under a bust of Dylan Thomas. They thought it fitting somehow. Winter was coming on, the sun was already a thin slit over the city, thin and thinning and growing dark. In the morning Doyle would be heading off for two years in the tropics, and until then they raged as best they could against the dying of the light.
“I’m talking everything,” Doyle said. “The kinkiest power-of-Greyskull orgasms you can imagine. A white man is a hot commodity down there.”
“Sure,” Ethan said. “Bring a horse and see if you can’t get free hot chocolate for life.”
They ordered another round of whiskey. Time and low light splintering through the ambered glass.
“Ten more to break the record,” Doyle said.
“I don’t think we’ll make it. Do you?”
“What difference does it make? I’ll die down there anyway.”
Later, looking back on that moment, suspending it in time, it seemed portentous—a sign of dread already opening like a spider’s egg in Doyle’s mind.
“I don’t want to become one of those guys,” he said and finished his whiskey and nodded for Ethan to do the same. “There’s nothing worse than a gringo who goes down to help and comes back with an eighteen-year-old wife. Or worse, stays down there while sixteen-year-olds fuck him for bean money.”
Outside now, it was full dark.
“You’re not one of those guys,” Ethan said. “Of course the natives have buxom tendencies. So try not to go full-tilt Heart of Darkness on us.”
“The horror,” Doyle said. “The horror.”
TWO YEARS IN, and two months before he was scheduled to come home, Doyle applied for an extension. After that expired he worked for a nonprofit AIDS education firm in the capital city. He taught prostitutes about condoms and went to the prisons to lecture members of Mara Salvatrucha about the dangers of needles and prison sex. Then, without providing any explanation, he picked up and moved south and started writing English ad copy for a rum distillery even though Copalan rum was rancid and not exported abroad. But the English on the bottle helped it sell in Copal, and many of Doyle’s slogans were laughable: Drink Me Now! The Best Rum for Powerful Taste! Start a Fire? Yes!
Throughout this time Ethan and Paolo both stayed in contact with him: email, letters, the yearly visit. Still, as the political climate in Copal deteriorated, Doyle grew increasingly distant. He stopped writing emails, and his rare letters were fitful and fevered. He wrote once to Ethan on rum distillery stationary in sprawling, enormous handwriting:
Dear Ethan, I want to tell you what I know of the world. I have grown a beard and I have shaved a beard so I suppose you could say I’m burning the candle at both ends here, but there’s an old Copalan saying that to get to the brothel you have to go there first. Make of that what you will. I’ve heard about Paolo’s engagement and regret that I will not be able to attend. I no longer go to celebrations where the natives don’t set the town on fire with their fireworks—I’m sure he’ll understand. On that note (marriage), once one gets beyond the fawning pleasures of grinding to reggaeton in the local discothèque, one finds that even the most erudite of the colonial subjects is no more stimulating when it comes to conversation than your regular pueblo beauty. Several months back—you still have time up there, don’t you?—I was at a prostitute’s house, trying to educate her on the prophylactic wonders of your average Trojan when, mirabile dictu, her father blew off his own foot while trying to shoot a gecko through the webbing of the hammock in which he reclined. Sometimes I find insects in my stool. We really have fucked this place and fuck it still. Walking through the streets, a pleasant undertaking (ha ha), I experience certain lacrimations of shame.
I want you to know that the world here is full of liars. We could fuck children if we wanted to. Believe me, I’d break my rum bottle, but then I’d have no rum.
Five years in, when he left the rum company, moved farther west to the Guatemalan border, and opened a bar, Ethan accepted, finally, that Doyle was not going to return.
It was not such a bad idea, really, buying a bar. It’s what you did if you were an expat in the tropics and didn’t need, or want, to keep a low profile. A whole community of expatriates had grown up along the north coast, and if you didn’t speak much Span
ish or mind a lack of culture—or violent crime, for that matter—if you were just there for the beach and the rum and the drawn-out days that settled into green and thrumming nights, if you didn’t look anyone else in the eye to avoid seeing what miscalculation of purpose had led them there and didn’t mind that the woman in your bed, whose beauty was incommensurate with any other thing in your life, was simply trying to survive, then it was fun and sun and paradise in the tropics.
But Doyle didn’t build his bar on the coast. He didn’t want the ex-Marines or CIA, the tired, wind-wrinkled fugitives or the men with knives in their boots and tropical shirts (in a country where no one actually sold tropical shirts), men who couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, men who owned boats and hidden seaplanes—Jimmy Buffets with mean streaks. He wrote once to Ethan: No one walks into my bar wearing a goddamn parrot.
What he did want, Ethan could not tell. It became a haven, though, for locals—Doyle’s. Men coming home after work in the cane or the mountains, or more often now, men starting their days after no work at all. For Doyle, each night settled into a comfortable routine. The night came on with bottles of beer and shots of rum or agauardiente handed round the bar. By midnight always, if not earlier, the men sang songs in Spanish and Indian dialects. No one spoke English except to sing, without knowing what the lyrics meant, the words to “Hotel California.”
“I don’t know what it is about that fucking song,” Doyle said the first and only time Ethan visited the bar. “But people are batshit for the Eagles here.”
Watching Doyle work behind the bar, watching him stand and pour drinks and laugh and shake hands and nod at his bouncers when arguments looked soon to be settled with machetes, Ethan thought, who does he think he is? Whatever it was he hated about himself, or found shameful—race or money or privilege—does he imagine that he can just shed it here, can turn and really become one of them? Does he think that they will ever see him as anything but a man, however kind, who has more than they can possibly imagine having? Or is it the opposite: does he know that’s not possible, will never be possible, and is it his difference, his privilege, ingrained and taken as almost inherent here, that makes him stay. Here, he will always be somebody.
AND THEN THERE WAS the night when the fight broke out over the mermaid in the paper. In the past, Copalan newspapers had reported on government or trade or crime, but violent experience had long dissuaded most of them from this practice. It was easy enough to get killed in Copal. They didn’t have to ask for it. Now they usually ran state-planted puff pieces, tourist information for imaginary tourists, or made-up tabloid nonsense—in this case, a photo of a dead mermaid who had supposedly washed up on the northern shore. The photo was distinctly fake, ridiculous, a ludicrous, ill-matching photoshop clusterfuck of woman and fish. The tail was purple, hugely scaled, and wider than the torso to which it was joined. She was posed face down, and on one shoulder a tan line was not quite erased. It became a national sensation.
That night at Doyle’s, when the conversation turned, as it had many times recently, to the mermaid, one of the men sitting in the corner stood and said, “I’m sorry, but it is clear that this mermaid is not real.”
“You’d think,” Doyle had told Ethan years before, “that considering the state of this country there’d be an abridgement of national pride. But it seems to go the other way. The worse this place gets, the more people want to insist on how great it is.”
And since the story had run, the mermaid had been adopted as a symbol of Copalan excellence. A sign that the nation was graced with wonders.
So for a moment the bar quieted. The men who’d been discussing the mermaid stopped and turned and put their drinks down.
One of them said, “There are fish with many heads in the rivers. No one denies this. There are jaguars with men’s voices in the forest. And now there is this mermaid. Do they have mermaids in Honduras? In Guatemala? No. It is a sign of God’s love for Copal.”
“It is a toy made out of rubber,” said the first man.
THE ENSUING FIGHT had been bad. Machetes, bottles, even an old Navy cutlass drawn. The police were called and came quickly all things considered. Of Doyle’s three bouncers, two had to be taken to the hospital.
After they cleared the bar, two of the police stayed and drank guaro. Doyle would have preferred they deplete his good rum stocks—it would bode better for the rest of the night. The guaro was cheap and rough, and it could make you weird. As it was, the captain was glazing out and it wasn’t impossible that he’d popped something hot before the boozing started.
“They are stupid motherfuckers, these peasants,” the captain said to Doyle in English.
Doyle didn’t like it when people spoke English to him down there. It meant they were about to get chummy or mean. The captain was smiling but that wasn’t really a sign either way.
“You must think we are all stupid motherfuckers, eh?” He drank from his guaro and draped his arm around his deputy’s shoulders. “Doyle thinks we are idiots and peasants. He laughs at us in the street.”
His deputy clearly didn’t speak English and the captain was no longer smiling. Whatever he was on had flared out and he was crashing fast with the guaro. His expression fell away and his face just hung fat and slackly, like all the flesh there had suddenly become too heavy to hold up.
“Maybe he is right,” the captain said to the deputy. “Maybe you are an idiot.” He pulled his pistol from his holster and put it on the bar.
“Closing time,” Doyle said. “But take the bottle with you. On the house.”
Everyone stood. It was just the four of them in the bar—the police, Doyle, and his one remaining bouncer. The police walked to the door. Two more steps and it was just another night where people lost hands to machetes. And then the captain turned and threw the bottle of guaro down hard at the ground. He had probably forgotten that it was plastic and wouldn’t shatter.
“Don’t you think I deserve another drink?” he said. He was still holding the pistol. “I think everyone agrees that I deserve another drink.”
Doyle’s bouncer stepped toward him with his hand outstretched, which he shouldn’t have done, and the captain nodded and worked up some kind of smile and shot him in the leg. He might not have meant to fire, it might only have been a gesture, the pistol wave, but it didn’t matter. The gun went off and the shot ruptured the bouncer’s femoral artery and he collapsed, not even howling, just paling out and dead before Doyle could do anything.
At first the captain laughed when the man went down and then, when it was clear what was happening, he looked back up at Doyle and his expression wasn’t right, his eyes hollow, dilated and bright against the droop of his wasted face.
Doyle had the sawed-off shotgun rigged under the counter, and he fired it from low, without raising it, and it blew out the palmwood front of the bar and splintered away the captain’s right knee. The captain was on his back, flailing like a roach and screaming, emptying his pistol into the wall, the bottles over Doyle’s head, and with his last bullet the face of his deputy, whose skull burst back through the bar’s one window and into the trees outside.
Doyle ran upstairs, where he filled two duffel bags with his cash savings and several of his favorite books. He came back down and began breaking bottles, washing the floor and the walls with alcohol. The captain continued to bellow. Doyle grabbed a bottle of rum, put it in his bag, and went to the door; turned back, took another bottle, packed it too, and walked again to the door. He lit a match and stepped out into the dawn loud with the captain’s wails, roosters and dogs woken by the gunfire, the whole town awake in the false and sudden light.
Driving through the dark in the night with the detective. He steered with one hand, pointed with the other out through the passenger-side window, past Ethan’s face, into the hills. “Out there,” he said, “there are bandits.”
Ethan looked. The streets lay lightless, framed by banana plants and stands of bamboo; beyond that it was just the layered dark
rising into black hills. The sky on the far horizon looked flat and cloud-streaked and empty. There were no stars.
The road bent and they took the turn quickly, crossing whatever lane might exist. Something darted from the street in the sudden wash of their headlights. A coyote, maybe. On their trip out of town, a dog pack chased the car as they passed beneath an overpass at the far end of the abandoned loading docks. Ethan was glad, watching the dogs snap in the growing distance, that he’d accepted the detective’s offer of a ride. The dogs were a lot worse than the Guatemalan coyotes and he didn’t want to wait at the bus station at dusk or take a bus along the coast road at night.
The forest gave way to fields of sugarcane, swaying under some breeze he couldn’t feel. The road straightened and continued through the borders of cane, high and dense as English hedges, on into the night. The car sputtered and swerved over the narrow road. The detective was speaking.
“Here the Peace Corps volunteers were kidnapped,” he was saying. “In the middle of the day. Not even at night and not even in a city and they took them into the fields. You can imagine what they did to them.”
Ethan could imagine. Ever since Doyle first went missing, he’d scoured the internet for any mention of Copal, so he knew the story already: how the four volunteers, two women and two men, were dragged into the fields, what happened to the women there and then the men. It was the last straw before the Peace Corps withdrew from Copal. The detective kept talking, describing it anyway, not leaving anything to Ethan’s imagination—how the men finally convinced their captors that they weren’t CIA agents but aid workers trying to sanitize the local wells, how they let them go, how the four of them wandered down the lane too shocked to speak and boarded a bus, sat bleeding, the women half naked, and no one very surprised at all.
Ethan didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want anyone else’s nightmare stories. What he wanted was for the detective to stop talking. What he wanted was to reach across the cab and force his thumb into the detective’s eye, to take his face and smash it against the side window. He could feel it in his right hand, the concussion of the detective’s head against the glass, the give of his fat-slabbed cheekbones against Ethan’s fist. He did not wonder at his rage. It was a new occurrence. He’d never been a violent person, but in Ethan’s dreams of vengeance, he had done some terrible things. He thought of them, at first, as fantasies—the mind’s way of coping with the violence that infected his life. But they were not like any fantasies he’d had before. They were not ethereal or contrived, he was not aware of constructing them. Instead, they came on as urges, diarrheal, palpable as pain, stark as a sudden thirst. He could actually feel the collapse of the detective’s face against his hands—he could feel it and he wanted to consummate that feeling.
Horse Latitudes Page 15
