Perhaps Samantha’s new coldness was a kind of punishment. In Key West he’d found succor in her drinking. For the first time in their relationship, he had felt powerful. She was broken and confused, clearly she was afraid—she needed him. He could give her pleasure or he could withhold it. He could grant her sympathy and under-standing with a compassion greater than anything she’d ever be able to offer him. It was pathetic, he thought. You wanted her damaged? You wanted her vulnerable? Well now she is. Make it through to morning on your own.
Miles Davis was winding down. Samantha would never let him play this album.
“It’s not Kind of Blue,” she’d say.
Well, what was? he thought.
“Why settle for second best?” she’d said the one time they discussed it.
For a moment he was glad he didn’t do gallery shows anymore. Not in years. He was glad he’d quit and he was glad she’d never seen them. Samantha was, he thought, with her childish and privileged sense of aesthetics, a total fucking philistine. The world was not divided between the perfect and the worthless. And if it were, where did she put their marriage?
Outside, there was still no sun, but the darkness on the eastern horizon was thinning into a lighter shade. He turned off the music, he sat on the stool at the kitchen counter. Whatever happened tonight, he would understand, he would love her better than he had. People were not infinite—whatever she was, he could touch and satisfy. He would lead her as in dance, he would fashion her need to his gifts. He poured another drink and heard her key in the door. He waited and raised the glass to his lips, his clarity must not desert him—but it was only a sound down the hall, someone else coming home. Light, then, through the window. Cars in the street. A mad woman, someone’s cleaning lady, singing hymns. He waited and waited and slept.
WHEN SHE CAME HOME he was making coffee.
“Where were you?” he said as she closed the door.
Samantha stopped in the foyer between the kitchenette and the living room. The angled light through the open windows smeared against her face and she stood as if frozen, slouch-shouldered, a clay statue roughly formed and unfired. He waited for her to speak but she did not. She seemed tranced somehow, she stood in the light and under it her features looked rounded and vague. He moved toward her, he tried to smell her, but the room smelled only of coffee.
“Where were you?”
She held up her hand to the glare.
“Can we talk in the morning? I need to sleep.”
“It is morning,” he said. “It’s morning now. Look at all the sun.”
“Ethan,” Samantha said, “I need to sleep.”
The apartment shivered with sun and the coffee pot began to hiss. She had not moved out of the foyer.
“I was worried,” he said. “I made enough coffee for both of us.”
She turned then, toward the kitchen, toward Ethan standing there at the threshold.
“Some coffee would be nice.”
He took out two mugs and filled them with hot water to keep them warm.
“It’ll just be a moment. Why don’t you sit down?”
She did not sit. She crossed the kitchenette in two steps and stood before him. She touched his shoulder as if testing it, and then laid her head there.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was a terrible bitch.”
“I was frightened.”
“You must have been frightened,” she said in a dull tone into his shoulder.
He felt heat on his skin which he recognized, after a moment, as tears.
“It’s okay,” he said without knowing what he was referring to.
He stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head. She was just the right height for that. He felt his hurt at her cruelty dissipating, but it was not gone yet.
“Samantha, where did you spend the night?”
“I was ashamed when you left the party early. I was very ashamed.”
The word seemed wrong to him. Ashamed? What did shame have to do with it? Already, we’ve gotten it confused, he thought.
“Did you stay with Rodney?”
Ethan had not wanted to ask that question. As if the asking could conjure the reality. Perhaps, he had his pride.
“I stayed with Rodney,” Samantha said. “I was drunk and I needed someplace to sleep. I was very ashamed.”
Ethan stepped away from her, heard but did not feel his back press up against the spatulas hanging on the wall.
“Nothing happened,” she said. “Not with Rodney. He’s barely a man. He’s a room full of bad appliances. He’s an ice crusher or a wine pump. He’s a toaster oven. All chrome and good lines.”
“Samantha,” Ethan said slowly, “what are you saying?”
Now that he was standing away from her the sunlight was in her face again. Fresh rivulets of mascara flowed over old trails on her cheeks. She had been crying in the night.
“Nothing comes out the way you think it will,” she said.
Ethan looked down at her hands grasping his sweater. They seemed small and pale, a child’s hands making fists with the thumbs all wrong. He twisted away from her and felt her fingers loosen, break from him like dry leaves from a bough. He poured the hot water from the mugs and filled them with coffee. Nothing she said made sense. The moment presented a choice and the choice was beyond reckoning. Still, he thought, if his choice was between loving or rejecting her, he would have to love her. Suspicion, he told himself, is a failure of compassion.
Pigeons fluttered about the window. Outside, the day turned toward noon. The city’s haze of risen heat had already begun to cloud the far horizon.
“Here,” Ethan said as he handed her the mug. “The coffee’s good.”
At the bus stop beyond the wharf, Ethan waited under a clapboard and tin lean-to while Doyle spoke to the drivers. A child with bare pustule-covered feet sat next to Ethan on the concrete and together they watched Doyle from the shade. Doyle kept pointing west, away from the ocean and the coast roads, into the interior. Each driver in turn, Ethan saw through the blur of the windshields, shook his head. Clearly, there were no buses into the mountains.
Ethan was drinking from a glass bottle of Coke. It was made with cane sugar and was sweeter than it was in the States. He didn’t like soda very much, but the Coke was cold and the sugar helped draw out the dull guaro trance. The child was staring at the bottle.
“Hey, yanqui,” the kid said. “Are you a gringo?”
Ethan nodded.
“I thought so.”
Doyle continued to move between the coaches. An old woman selling sweet coconut water waved to him and pointed into the mountains. Ethan watched him turn, speak to her, and then follow her behind one of the buses.
“Do you have a dog?” the boy asked Ethan.
“No. I don’t have a dog. I used to have—” The word wouldn’t come to him and he motioned generally with his hand.
“Gato?” the boy asked. “A cat?”
“No,” Ethan said, and then he had it. Tortuga. It was an island he’d been to once with Doyle, several years before.
“A turtle,” he said.
“Could he do tricks?”
“No, he could not do tricks,” Ethan said.
Doyle walked back around the side of the bus with the coconut woman and a younger man—an Indian in a straw hat with a machete looped through his belt. Afternoon was coming on and the grackles in the breadfruit trees had already started their crazy twittering. One of the sores on the boy’s foot leaked puss and blood onto the dusty concrete.
“Can I have your Coke?” he asked.
“Sure,” Ethan said as he stood and nodded at the boy, put his sunglasses back on, and stepped out into the road.
ETHAN SAT WITH DOYLE in the pickup truck’s rusted-out flatbed. The Indian drove and his cousin, or brother, already Ethan couldn’t remember which, sat up front with him in the cabin. For some reason, Doyle had explained, none of the buses from town were running the western routes. It was strange. They weren�
��t long routes, since the buses could only go so far west, into the lower hills—the middle mountains were barely traversable by car. Given time, horses or mules were a safer bet. The Indians were crossing the country, though, heading into Guatemala—they would take them as far as they wanted.
“Why aren’t the buses running?” Ethan asked Doyle over the rev and jerk of the engine.
“All sorts of possible reasons. Road work, maybe. An accident. Flood warning.”
Ethan took off his sunglasses. The sun settled a little lower in the cloudless sky, and to the east they could see it starting to reflect and move over the water. No roads ran directly between the town and the interior, and the pickup hugged the coastal highway for a while. To the right, the land lay barren and arid: yellow dust littered with rocks, trash, and chunks of ancient coral. The ground leading to the sea descended into a dry forest of withered brown cactus, flowering vines, and buttonwood trees stunted and twisted by wind into postures of agonized children. Ethan closed his eyes and then opened them again. The landscape had accrued some new menace. Jagged barrancas fell away toward the shore, sickly horses with distended, watery eyes and sharp ribs scavenged garbage by the side of the road, scrub fires burned in the distance.
They passed a schoolhouse and the Indian beeped the horn and waved at the girls sitting on the white coral perimeter wall. Were classes never in session? Ethan could not remember the last time he had passed a school in this country where the yard wasn’t filled with students. The girls whistled and waved and the Indian slowed the truck but Doyle banged on the glass between the bed and the cabin and they drove on.
“We need to make it to Plaza del Porros by nightfall,” he said.
The road turned and curved down to the shore. They passed a grove of shade palms and sea grapes, rotten picnic benches and half-spun hammocks—the last vestiges of the tourist resort at Playa Baranquilla. Here the sea looked hard and smooth as polished stone, it moved away from the shore in a layered spectrum of electric blue, aquamarine, and emerald. In the distance waves foamed softly on the risen reef.
“Good place for a cocktail,” Ethan said and glanced to Doyle, but Doyle was not listening. He was looking to the west, the green pastures and grazing land there, the rising tropical plateau of cerros—low hills—and beyond it, the dark border of jungled mountains.
Finally, the road split and they made a left turn toward the interior, and Ethan felt it, the dread again, that this time he knew had nothing to do with guaro. From a closing distance, the mountains seemed bereft of grace or beauty. They were simply vast and overgrown; he could not see where the road entered them or where it went once the jungle closed over it. They drove toward the mountains and there was nothing beyond them. They loomed a hard dark mass, the sliver of sky above them as thin as the rim of the world seen from the inside of an urn.
Why were they going there if the buses weren’t running? The idea seemed wrong to Ethan. Like when you’re diving and you see a whole school of fish suddenly stop and tremble and turn suddenly—you flee with them.
Ethan nodded toward the mountains.
“You really believe they’re doing road repair here? Two hundred miles south of the capital?”
“No,” Doyle said. “I’d say that someone barricaded the road. Police or guerrillas or maras.”
Ethan swatted a fly out of his face. Another landed in his ear. He’d felt this menace on the road for some time now.
“Which is worse?” he said.
“If it’s police, they’re probably just looking for drugs. Working a basic extortion angle. If it’s the maras, it’ll be robbery, and if there were women along, possibly rape. I can’t imagine the guerrillas would be this far east. Not yet, anyway.”
The road rose. They were climbing the cerros, entering the tropical plain. The sun, falling away to the west, lit now on the mountain peaks. A flock of white birds flushed silently from the road before them.
“Not to be pessimistic or anything,” Ethan said. “But shouldn’t we choose another route?”
“Do you want to go to Rio de Caña?” Doyle asked.
“I have to. I’m not sure what want has to do with it.”
“You’re set on that?”
“I am.”
Behind them, far to the east now, the dry forest looked like a field of bones. Ethan felt some pleasure in the abridgement of possibility. There was the road into the jungle and the girl somewhere beyond it. You could abandon your vestments of the past here, because here what you did not abandon was stripped from you anyway.
“There are no other routes to Rio de Caña,” Doyle said.
WHEN THEY ENTERED the jungle at the base of the mountains, the land immediately broke away on their right into a sharp muddy river gorge where a number of houses clung to the valley wall. They were built on stilts beneath the higher tree cover, but still it seemed that one good mudslide would wash them all into the lower canopy and hidden river below. To the left, the cut rock face, the exposed earth, giant roots of trees and groves of bamboo bound the road. The sun, so hard and bright outside, was diffuse here; it came in a spangle of green light, milky and moving. The jungle smelled of rain and flowers and nowhere, even looking straight up from the bed of the pickup, could you see the sky. Ethan stared over the right edge of the road where the valley fell away hundreds of feet into groves of palm and wild bananas.
“We’re probably safer back here than in the cabin,” Doyle said. “At least we can always jump for it.”
For the most part there were no more houses now. Just the rock-lined road, the jungle valley, the mist that shrouded the deepest descents. Far below, the sound of water. Above, around, everywhere it seemed, screaming birds. The road began to turn and level: they were approaching the first switchback.
“Now it gets fun,” Doyle said.
The Indian took the switchbacks quickly—far more quickly than Ethan thought safe. He could feel the back tires spinning and kicking up stones on the full turns. Here, the road turned and turned and swiveled like a serpent winding into the mountains. Each switchback was nearly a hundred and eighty degrees—they seemed to be making little progress. The few times Ethan had driven in the mountains with Doyle and Paolo, they’d honked their horn on the switchbacks—you didn’t want to meet another car coming around the bend. But the Indian whipped the turns wide and silently.
“Are they crazy?” Ethan asked. “Are they totally fucking crazy?”
He pondered the insanity of the road. Every hundred yards or so there was a stretch of guardrail, never much more than ten feet of it. Was this, he wondered, all that was left of a continuous guardrail, or had they just put up rail in places where cars were known to have crashed, as if it were the spot, not the road itself, that was dangerous. Occasionally, in the canopy far below, he saw the wrecked shell of a car or truck, rusted out and overgrown with flowering vines.
The road leveled and they passed a banana plantation where hundreds of rows of trees layered the mountainside down into mist and strange houses built from old truck cabins, tin sheets, and banana crates crested the lower foliage. A sign by the road informed them that the left lane was closed.
“What left lane?” Ethan said.
“Caution is not this country’s strong suit,” Doyle said. “They seem without the impulse.”
There was a hint of sarcasm in his tone. A hidden judgment.
“Are you making an economic argument?” Ethan asked. “Pointing out some gross inequity?”
“You bet,” Doyle said. “Most babies in my town are nursed on Coca-Cola instead of formula. There’s already been a thousand murders in the capital this year.”
“Doyle, is there some rule by which I’m supposed to feel inherently ashamed? I eat bananas, I used to drink fair-trade coffee, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to save a girl from slave traffickers.”
There was a scream in jungle just ahead of them. High-pitched and long. Ethan did not know if it was a monkey or a bird, a mating call o
r a death cry. The valley echoed with it and he saw the Indian in the passenger’s seat cross himself. Doyle raised his eyebrows.
“Every spook or mercenary I ever met in this country told the same story,” Doyle said. “They were doing something bigger than themselves, more important.”
He wiped his face. Down here everybody was nervous and everybody had tics. Most Anglos had that one.
“For gringos,” he continued, “revolutions and self-destruction are the same in that they are both forms of self-indulgence.”
And what about you? Ethan wanted to ask. What is your life if not that? You came down here not out of compassion, but to cast aside some other guilt. You did AIDS work, you served some greater purpose, until what? Until that purpose became too small and you searched on? You became a fugitive, you danced into dawn with dead chickens, you stayed in this country where there can be nothing for you but torment and death when surely you could have fled. In college Doyle often made a show of reciting Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in an absurd Irish brogue. Ethan recalled that now, Doyle standing on a barstool with a glass of Tullamore in his hand, trilling his r’s scornfully around the edge of apocalypse.
Of course, Ethan wanted to say, the best lack all conviction—but then they heard the megaphone and the shouting and for a moment he didn’t know what was happening. He saw the truck parked sideways in the road and the men on the ridge, and he knew then that they had turned right into the barricade. Whatever was going to happen on the road was happening now, and though he was afraid, had been for hours, Ethan felt some strange absence of terror: the moment unfolded clearly. The Indian slammed on the brakes and both of them put their hands up against the windshield. They’d done this before. Two men with rifles ran around the sides of the parked truck, yelling—though beyond their first calls of “Para! Para!” Ethan had no idea what they were saying, whether they were speaking in Spanish at all. The men on the ridge were pointing MP5s at them. They were police, then, or maras—if they were guerrillas the weapons might still be Russian. Here it comes, then, thought Ethan.
Horse Latitudes Page 20
