Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  “They’re everywhere.”

  “I know. I bring them in. I pay local kids to catch them. They eat cockroaches. This is the cleanest kitchen in Central America.”

  “Doyle, it’s swarming with lizards.”

  “Have you ever seen a cockroach?” Doyle said. “Very disgusting.”

  IT WAS TEN in the morning. They sat and drank water and the lizards peered at them from behind glasses and stacked plates. After several years without seeing Doyle, Ethan had thought that it would be awkward to meet his friend again, this man who was now a fugitive, who lived some strange approximation of whatever life he had originally intended, who volitionally filled his kitchen with lizards. They sat and did not speak and it’s fine thought Ethan, it’s not awkward at all, this silence or anything else. He had imagined that Doyle would have changed irreparably, would be a man beyond recognition. He remembered, then, the incident at Yolanda’s sink. I’ve got it wrong, he thought. It’s not that I still recognize Doyle, it’s that I don’t recognize myself anymore. That last morning in New York when Samantha stood at the door, headed off to work and everything that followed, he said goodbye to someone who by then appeared as much a glyph as Doyle’s postcard. It’s that I don’t recognize anyone anymore.

  “Can we put on the fan?” Ethan said.

  “I broke it.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “It was an accident. My machete was aflame.”

  “Your machete was aflame?”

  “I was burning cockroaches.”

  In the low light of the kitchen, Doyle looked older than he had on the verandah. Already the first webs of sun wrinkles spread from his eyes, his pale blue eyes which seemed paler now, bluer as well, and hard, like bathroom tiles bleaching with age. In college there had been something restless about Doyle’s gaze, something impatient. He’d look from thing to thing, person to person, his eyes moving around a room like he was constantly hoping that here, here would be whatever it was he wanted—and then moving on, always disappointed. Now, though, he stared at the table, his water glass, looked back up to Ethan, held his gaze there. His hair, which he kept short—cut himself, Ethan was sure—receded in a wide V. No doubt if he wore aviator sunglasses he’d look just like a mercenary, one of those gringos who always hid his eyes, even inside and in the dark, for fear that someone might see the heat-stunted synapses misfiring there.

  “So you ended up with a villa in the hills after all,” Ethan said.

  Doyle nodded, played with the tassel of a sheathed machete.

  “Of course, you’re a fugitive.”

  “I am,” Doyle said. “I am a fugitive.”

  “That must undermine the whole tropical paradise experience. Then again, this is hardly a paradise.”

  “But it is tropical.”

  “Sure,” Ethan said. “Just look at all the lizards.”

  Doyle brought their water glasses to the sink and turned back to Ethan.

  He said, “Ethan, good as it is to see you, don’t you think you ought to tell me why the fuck you’re here?”

  AFTERWARD, DOYLE SAID, “That’s the most idiotic story I’ve ever heard.”

  They were walking in the banana grove beneath his verandah. The trees grew in perfect symmetrical rows, and they wandered the shaded pathways between them down into the valley. Doyle, carrying his machete with him, chopped idly at banana fronds as they walked.

  “I’m talking bar none, full throttle, the most idiotic story I’ve heard,” he said.

  “I admit, I could have done things differently,” Ethan said.

  “Here are some basic rules that are easy to observe. You never go back into the bar with weirdos. You never get sarcastic. Maybe you can get away with that in Mexico, but down here that’s called machete death. Hack, hack, hack.”

  Doyle mimicked the action, hacked three times at the nearest bundle of bananas. He wiped his blade, splattered with unripe fruit, on his khaki pants.

  “Are these your bananas?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’m paid to watch them. Make sure nobody steals.”

  They walked on into the valley and it grew hotter under the low-growing trees, where some mist still hung and the light came obliquely through the warm, wet air. It fell between the leaves like water over scaled steps and pooled where it could on the green-shadowed path.

  “Why do you trust this woman?” Doyle said.

  “Yolanda? She seemed desperate.”

  “Look around as we walk through town, Ethan. There’s no shortage of desperation here.”

  A parrot screamed and flushed from the tree before them.

  “Why would she lie?”

  “I can think of a million reasons,” Doyle said. “Maybe it’s a drug scam? A prostitution ring?”

  “No,” Ethan said. “It’s not like that. She saved my life.”

  “That doesn’t sound likely.”

  They walked on, and they were low enough now that if he looked back over his shoulder Ethan could see Doyle’s hill house painted yellow and green against the hazy, browning sky.

  “Why do you say that? The guy had a switchblade. You said it yourself, I was fucked.”

  “Ethan,” Doyle said. “Where is Samantha?”

  “We’re separated,” Ethan said. And then: “She’s committed herself.”

  Doyle turned and stopped and looked at him, but Ethan was wearing his sunglasses and he knew that Doyle wasn’t able to see whatever he was looking for, that he saw himself, green and metallic and condensed in the mirrored glass. Probably, he wanted to tell Doyle everything about Samantha, as if Doyle’s absolution, or Yolanda’s, could equal her own. A tarantula dropped out of a tree, landed at their feet.

  “Look,” Doyle said. “A killer spider.”

  He nudged it with his machete and it scuttled back, yellow-spotted and hairy, a mammal almost, into the shade.

  “Ethan,” he said, “do you know how many times I have found a tarantula in my home?”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  “Fifteen times. Fifteen uninvited tarantulas,” Doyle said.

  INSIDE AGAIN, and Doyle opening drawers, packing a duffel bag, pulling out maps and spreading them on the kitchen table.

  “These maps are no good,” he said. “They’re too new.”

  Ethan walked to the table, looked over his shoulder.

  “They’re optimistic,” Doyle said. “To say the least.”

  “Optimistic?”

  Doyle turned away from the map and poured another glass of water. He had not stopped drinking water all morning.

  “Yeah, optimistic,” he said. “After he was elected, El Lobo ordered that all new maps match his intended—and totally unrealized—roads program.”

  Ethan looked down at the map, at the clear and perfect symmetry of highways, of towns linked by wide roads, of throughways traversing the un-travelable interior in straight and idiotic lines over the mountain peaks. He knew that in the mountains what roads existed were single-laned and unpaved, donkey trails that switchbacked like a frozen slinky in long loops down the mountainsides. He looked at it—the strange insanity of it, like his picture of Samantha in Key West, as if forcing it onto paper could conjure it into the world.

  “How does anyone get anywhere?” Ethan said.

  “A philosophical question, or a literal one?”

  “Whichever you can answer.”

  “Where would they go?” Doyle said. “They use old maps, I guess. The new ones are for tourists, and in case you haven’t noticed, the tourist trade is not exactly booming.”

  “Have they built any of these roads?”

  “No. It’s total fantasy. It’s like with the hospitals. The Church will help subsidize them if El Lobo lets them set up missions among the Indians, which he never will since it’s in everybody’s best interest to keep foreigners way the fuck out of the interior.”

  “And the roads?”

  “The roads are a moot point. Even if he had the machinery and t
he money and the labor, the guerrillas would never let him into the mountains.”

  “This is common knowledge?”

  “This is the commonest of knowledge.”

  “Then why make the maps?”

  “Probably to prove to the United States that their thirty million dollars in aid is going someplace other than the Caymans.”

  “And he thinks that will work?”

  “Who knows?” said Doyle. “El Lobo is like everyone else in a uniform here. He is batshit to the extreme.”

  AFTER HE PACKED HIS BAG, Doyle said, “I think we need to go to a bullfight.”

  Ethan was sitting at the kitchen table. Light through the skylight fell in a bending slash over the faucet and down to the floor. Outside, it was hot and growing hotter. The dawn breakfast was not sitting well in Ethan’s stomach and all the lizards watched him with their glassy black eyes.

  “Why do we need to go to a bullfight?”

  “There’s a guy there who might be able to give us some climate tips. See how things stand in Rio de Caña. And besides, bullfights are really excellent.”

  “I could use some new clothes,” Ethan said.

  “We can get you some clothes.”

  Ethan’s stomach did not feel good. There was a heat and roil in his bowels. Something pulsed behind his eyes. His ring tapped, beyond his will, on the countertop. He would not think about it, becoming sick here. Doyle’s bag was packed. He stood at the door.

  “Doyle,” Ethan asked. “I don’t suppose you have a cocktail for the road?”

  Doyle reached into his backpack and pulled out a plastic bottle of local, homemade guaro.

  “Christ,” Ethan said.

  “Hey, it’s noon somewhere.”

  Ethan had drunk enough guaro to know he didn’t want to be drinking guaro. He had seen men lying dead in the street from too much of it, which really wasn’t very much.

  “Isn’t the expression it’s five o’clock somewhere?”

  Doyle grinned and tossed the bottle to Ethan.

  “Like, welcome to the tropics, amigo.”

  THEY PASSED THE BOTTLE of guaro back and forth as they walked. The path from Doyle’s house led down out of the hills and into the arid lowlands near the beach. Below them, in the colonial pavilion, the clock struck, and faint electric music rose from the desiccated arcade on the shore. Once, as they walked, a pickup truck filled with girls in Catholic school uniforms drove by. The girls waved and whistled and the truck sped up into the hills faster than Ethan thought safe. Behind it, a wake of dust rose in a screen off the road. They walked and passed the bottle back and forth, and Ethan felt the heat in his face intensifying, growing tighter, as if he were hanging upside down and his head was filling with blood. A child climbed a ceiba tree by the road; the music from the arcade was tinny and false—carousel music from a different world. A beachfront in New England when he was a child. His mother standing and watching the carousel turn, the horses rising and falling through shadow. He felt dread opening in his mind, building beyond any comprehension. It’s the guaro doing this, he thought and then no, it’s not the guaro, but the path leading down into town, the arcade music, the tired Indians sleeping by the road, the thought, the idiotic, useless thought, of trying to save another woman. Where were they going now? To a bullfight? To Rio de Caña? He drank from the plastic bottle, but his tongue was numb to anything but the faintest taste of sweet smoke. His lips were dry and he licked them. Throw it up, he’d said to Samantha as she stood in the bathroom drinking cough syrup. Throw it up or I’m calling an ambulance. Just below them, scrub fires burned in the shantytown. A flight of blackbirds broke into the sky.

  BY THE TIME they reached town, the colonial plaza was filled with beggars. Dirty children and old women, drunk men with no shoes—they were on them immediately. The children reached out and touched Ethan’s hands, the old women mumbled and prayed; they made strange, wide crosses in the air; they cackled and parrots cackled too in the rows of planted fruit trees. The children pulled at his leg, touched his arm, called, “gringo, gringo, gringo;” the drunk men keeping a farther distance mumbled, “hello America, hello America”; the music on the shore blared with sudden static. The plaza smelled strongly of rotting fruit.

  Once they were alone, they sat for a few minutes on a bench and finished the plastic flask of guaro. Ethan’s head no longer felt heavy, but just the opposite now: light and airy, a balloon untethering from his body. Beyond the plaza—the cobbled circle, the spitting fountain, the ruined cathedral—the rest of the town sloped down the winding streets into a hazy shimmer. Ethan rubbed his eyes. They ached and he felt himself dry swallowing. He saw the bottle on the ground before them. Had they finished it? Had Doyle dropped it? The ludicrous red parrots scrambled and called in the trees above them. They nibbled at hanging fruit. Scraps of it fell about them on the bench.

  “I like parrots,” Ethan said. “Always have. But this is a bit much.”

  “Sure,” Doyle said. “Parrot city.”

  “I mean, this is really pushing it. Don’t you think they’re pushing it with all these goddamn parrots?”

  “Sure,” Doyle said again. “Another of El Lobo’s brilliant plans. When he took office he ordered a list of national treasures. Parrots were on it, right next to howler monkeys and crocodiles, I think. To attract tourists, he mandated that the plazas, our national historic sites, be filled with macaws. I suppose we should be happy he chose parrots over monkeys.”

  “Or crocodiles,” Ethan said.

  “The problem,” Doyle said, “was that people started stealing the parrots and stuffing them into cages, suitcases, garbage bags, whatever. There’s a huge European black market for parrots, apparently. So El Lobo demands that the fuckers are replaced. He fills the plazas with so many birds that even if you stole them hand-over-fist there’d still be enough for the tourists. And then he orders the police to shoot anyone they see fucking with the parrots. Of course people still steal them, but not as many. So voilà. Parrot city.”

  “And there are no tourists.”

  “It’s like everything else here,” said Doyle. “A decent idea in theory turns insane in practice. Seems to happen every time.”

  DOYLE STUMBLED as they left the plaza. Ethan tried to forget the spectacle of Doyle at the nightclub. Very likely, it’s the mad leading the mad here, he thought. Doyle stopped a moment and pointed at the cathedral, at its bone-colored plasterwork, its crumbling bell tower, its rounded arches.

  “See that,” he said. “It’s the oldest clock in the Americas, one of the oldest in the world. It was a gift from the king of Spain. He was saying, I’m keeping my eye on you.”

  “There’s a lot of old clocks in Central America,” said Ethan. “I used a detective to find you. He showed me a list.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have used a detective.”

  “What did you expect me to do? Wander Copal looking at clock towers?”

  “I thought you’d find a way. I thought you’d figure something out.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me,” Ethan said.

  Against the dull brown of the clock tower, the perfect blue of the sky seemed hard and flat, dimensionless. A blue screen. Everything ends here.

  After a moment Ethan said, “Not to worry. This guy had lights on his sneakers.”

  Grackles flew in and out of the belfry like wasps at a hive. They too wheeled flat against the eastern expanse of sky. Ethan turned and looked behind him, to the west. The rocky hills leading to groves of bananas and bamboo. The moving green of moss-webbed jungle rising into thicker mountains. You didn’t want to go there. But what else could they do? They were at the end of the way here. There was nowhere to go but into the interior.

  “What now?” Ethan asked.

  “Now we get you some clothes, don’t you think?”

  Another drunk approached them as they walked at the edge of the plaza. His eyes were half closed. Saliva strung his beard. He stopped before them
and held up his hands without speaking. A perverse magician preparing his trick. He dropped his hands, he smiled. Like a child at a kung fu movie saying ching-chong chow foon, he began to speak to them in fake English. Just noises, threads of syllables and nasal grunts that sounded, he must have imagined, like their language. They stepped around him and he followed, waving his hands and mumbling in nobody’s English. He did not continue beyond the plaza, though. He waited at the periphery of banyan trees like a demented spirit that could not cross the threshold. He watched them as they walked away into the creeping decay of the village. He waved, he called in his tongues, he did not follow.

  FULL INTO DAY NOW and at the end of the mud street, just beyond a three-foot-high barrier of unlaid cement, the town market squirmed before them. Here the shouts of hawkers drowned out the arcade music. Before them the market seethed with movement. We’re going there, thought Ethan. We’re going there and I’m going to get some more clothes. Things will feel different with new clothes. Then we’ll go to the bullfight. He liked the simple certainty in these thoughts—this itinerary that felt like purpose. It didn’t matter that he was also certain that he would not like the bullfight. He would not like, he was even more sure, everything that followed it. He slowed his walk and Doyle went on a little ways ahead of him, immune to his building dread. Cars rushed down the street, beeped their horns and swerved around the cement pile, drove on impossibly into the market square.

  Inside, the market trembled in its own insane carnival. People hawked their wares in rising sonorities from behind tables and market stalls. Indian women laid their goods out on green and red woven rugs. Children ran between them, Ethan and Doyle, selling packets of gum and mangos and heads of cabbage. They passed stalls of knickknacks—belt buckles and Zippo lighters, boot knives and woven machete sheaths—and went on into the stranger realms of the Indian market, where men pandered the bleached skulls of cows and horses, boots made of snakeskin, the bones of chickens tied up in leather pouches. They passed on out of the Indian quarter to where locals sold clothes out of the backs of pickup trucks or off flimsy card tables.