Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  “They need help,” Andrew said. “Don’t you think we should help them?”

  “Oh, definitely. They’ve come to the right place, haven’t they? The three of them, come to grace us, I think. To try our ministry. Is that why you’re here?”

  “Sure,” Doyle said.

  “You’ve come to the right place. We minister to the weak. So what’s it you need? Because there’s no medicine for dengue. That’s been revealed to me, brother. You have to ride that one out.”

  Mud streaked John’s face from his scratching fingers. A fly lighted in his hair and did not move.

  “We need a boat.”

  “What’s that, Matthew?” John said. “Let the Brethren be the light of the world, a city on the mount?”

  He pushed himself toward them, came clown-walking closer.

  “Well, I’ve seen some hills, brother, and I’ve seen some fire, and I’m all for giving boats away, but you have to tell me why.”

  “You don’t need to give us the boat,” Doyle said. “We’ll rent it. We’ll pay you right now.”

  John held his hand out and turned his head away from Doyle. He squinted like one listening for some distant noise, a girl’s voice or a train’s whistle sounding from realms still almost inaudible.

  “No one’s talking about money here,” he said finally. “We’re talking about the truth. Because dengue’s no rush. I mean there’s just nothing you can do. What I’m thinking, what I believe, is that this girl is pregnant, and in trouble, and you two are sort of on the run. On the lam. And you’re thinking, hey, there’s no way I’m going to let my baby be born into this climate, among these folks. Because you want to save that baby. Am I right? Is there a baby to save?”

  ONCE THE MORMON CHURCH disappeared and the tin-roofed shacks and cratewood houses fell away farther into the hills, once the cleared muddy bank settled into full foliage and the shadowy mangroves gave way to open river framed by forest and looming mountains, Ethan said to Doyle, “Think we’re in the clear?”

  Doyle shrugged and looked behind them at their frothy wake, the green river snaking away in wide turns against the hanging jungle.

  “Don’t know,” he said and turned back to steering. “This isn’t really my expertise. Fleeing the police is different than fleeing a mercenary. The police probably stopped looking for me after a week. If Soto is as bad as Tireisias says, he’s probably still coming. Anyway, we have a head start.”

  Doyle glanced to where Mirabelle sat in the front of the boat, watching the water break and curl away from their prow. She did not seem to be listening.

  “Of course, there are other troubles on the water,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Copal doesn’t allow many unlicensed planes to overfly the interior near the coast. Supposedly, it’s a way to mitigate revolution.”

  “Revolution from whom? Who has planes?”

  “Right,” Doyle said. “The real reason is probably to maintain a monopoly on coffee and emerald exports. Anyway, the roads, as you’ve seen, are not to be trusted. So most drug or gold or gun-runners move their wares up the river. There’s a dirty fortune to be made between Qultepe and the coast.”

  He gestured toward the banks, the jungle there, the moss-strung tributaries and shallow coves.

  “Welcome to pirate alley.”

  “Are you serious?” Ethan asked.

  Doyle opened his bag and produced a bottle of Flor de Caña. He opened it, drank, and offered it to Mirabelle. She turned away from the prow and looked down to her feet, but accepted the rum. She drank and shuddered and drank some more. Doyle grinned.

  “Shiver me timbers,” he said.

  John was sitting on a cola crate and pulling cactus from the yard when Soto came down the road. He had planted the cactus around the periphery of the church when they built it, and now he sat and rent it barehanded in the afternoon heat. Soto stood before him and appraised his bloody hands.

  “I did not know that Mormons paid penance,” he said.

  John stopped his work and looked up at Soto and licked his lips. He smiled his reasonless smile, made more crooked by the streaks of mud still on his face.

  “I may do no penance,” he said. “For I have toiled in the world. My life, brother, has been woe and pain.”

  He reached down again and grasped a cactus with both hands and began to pull. The sound, then, of skin shorn away as the cactus held to the earth.

  “That’s Sir Thomas Malory,” he said. “The Sankgreal. The worldly knights, the sinners, the knights who have raped maidens and slain babies, they have toiled their lives in the world and the toil of the world is penance enough. To watch a baby die and then to wander again into day? Is there penance beyond that?”

  “No,” Soto said in his carnival lilt. “Definitely not. But there is always an accounting.”

  John pulled again and the cactus came free. “That’s crap,” he said. “That’s the crappiest of crap.”

  “So, you have seen babies die?”

  “Oh, like, jeez. I’ve seen it all, brother. In the Dakotas. The Indians and their SIDS. That’s Sudden Infant Death. You should see it. The smell of it. The sheer fucking purpleness of the thing. It’s hard to forgive. I mean, it’s probably unforgivable. I was married, you know. The world turns and turns and we dizzy with its toil.”

  “Perhaps,” Soto said, “you should spend your money on baby formula. Not books of Mormon and not—” He waved his hand toward the church. “—this palace.”

  “I know that tune. I’ve heard that song. But I wanted the city on the hill. The city on the hill will always be in light, you follow?”

  John stood like the tin man unwrenching himself after a day’s rain: one leg at a time, then his torso stiffly following. He wiped his bloody hands on his white shirt.

  “Say, brother, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for friends,” Soto said. “I think you’ve seen them. A local girl with whom I have an arrangement.”

  John turned and began loping down the machete path away from the church.

  “Come on then,” he said. “I leant them a boat and I can lend you one too. You’ll catch up in no time. Zippo.”

  Soto followed behind down the long, poorly cleared path. Vines hung and tangled about their faces. John, walking ahead, pushed through them even as his skin, unaverted, cut and tore against the flowering creepers. Behind him, Soto cleared brush with his machete.

  “I never liked the Book of Mormon,” John said. “Not really. It’s got no stuff, you know? No heft.”

  “This seems a strange way to the river,” Soto said. “Why not keep your boat by the near bank?”

  “But I was born into the Mormons and they’ve got something going on. They’re new enough for that. They’ve got some living history. Not like here.”

  He stopped and turned to look at Soto.

  “History’s been dead here for a long time, brother. We’re just marching it out. A procession across the fields. Death and his pageant in sorrowful aspect.”

  He began to walk again.

  “It’ll play out soon enough,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  The path turned and fell toward the river. The tangle of grass and shrubbery diminished as the soil dried into sandy, shell-flecked earth. They were approaching a brackish mangrove.

  “How much farther?” Soto asked.

  When they reached the water the path flattened and opened into the mangrove of twisted cypress and a green lagoon where the boat lay rotten and half submerged. White orchids flowered and twined about its sagging hull.

  John said, “You’re right about the baby formula and the Bibles. But I’ve done what I can. I had a wife once, you know.”

  Soto’s face, now, a stilted posture of fury. Something carved into cathedral walls or illumined onto medieval texts by sorrowful monks. He shook his head and shook his head and looked at the ground and then back up to John. He closed his golden eyes and opened them again. When he spoke it was
in his hollow, grotto voice.

  “Why would you lie to me?”

  “You know the writ. You, brethren, are not in darkness. You are sons of light and sons of day and not of the night and not of the darkness. But hey, brother, it doesn’t take much to tell that you are not a child of light.”

  John put up his hand when Soto swung his machete, and the machete clove through it and settled in the bones of his nose. John fell amidst the scattering of his fingers as if he were reaching to retrieve them. Soto placed his boot on his face and tore the machete free. He raised and swung it twice more through the wet, rising sound, the echo of bird cries in its aftermath and Andrew calling John’s name and running from the mission on the hill down the rough-cut path to the river.

  The gringos were not looking too good.

  With the day came the heat and the heat on the windless river was a torment. The sun fell directly in the open water where they made their passage, and the boat turned to a searing, glinting thing. The white fiberglass hull, the cream leather seat cushions, the chromed steel steering wheel all sharp with heat too hot to touch. The sun blazed and clouds of humidity rose off the water and did not break. Neither of the gringos had thought to buy hats and they’d taken off their shirts, dipped them overboard, and tied them around their heads. The water was tepid and silty and the shirts stank with the foul reek of fish bones and algae and diesel as they dried.

  The river had long ago turned sick. Every restaurant and bar in Roycetown, the colonial pirate port on the Caribbean coast, poured their cooking oil and drained their waste into the river. Even deep in the interior, where the Sulaco cut through the cloud forest and rubbed up against the mountains, the Indians reported spearing strange, malformed fish. When the first wave of two-headed carp appeared in nets or stranded on the banks of de Caña, the fishermen came to the café and showed their catch to Mirabelle.

  “A sign,” one said, that first time. “This is clear.”

  What could she tell them? Nothing was clear to her. They could not seem to understand that she was not a mystic. Her vision was unattended by wisdom or understanding. It stank, rather, of inevita-bility and dread. The Mother had not appeared as Ixtab until it was quite clear that Rosa was going to die. Consequently, there was something nasty in Her appearance—unnecessary. She crawled about the floor, She yanked on Her black noose, She moaned and rolled Her wide, pulpy eyes. She denied Mirabelle any notion of hope. The river birthed strange fish and the mountains released clowns trailed by children. When the Mother appeared She opened Her mouth but did not yet speak and Mirabelle felt certain that She would not do so until Her message was already obvious and beyond averting. Her appearance felt like a recrimination or a haunting. Mirabelle looked aft to where Ethan lay on his back in the baking sun. One could ask for little and expect less. There would be no light.

  AT TIMES, when the water looked deep enough, Doyle steered the boat out of the open river and into the shade of the jungle canopy. It was dangerous there, Mirabelle could tell that: half-sunken logs jutted from shore, and the cypress roots that tangled about the mangroves extended from the banks like open, clawed hands beneath the surface. Centipedes dropped from the trees; warm, rank water fell from the cupped leaves; birds rustled and screamed above them, announced their presence to the forest. Ethan swore and slapped at insects. If they hit a root or ran aground, there would be no saving them. You couldn’t drink the water, the forest was impenetrable—if they tried to float and swim upstream to Roycetown they would be simple prey to caiman and crocodiles and pirates. They decided after some time to endure the heat of the open water.

  “Is this normal weather?” Ethan asked. “This heat seems a little unnecessary. A little post-colonial. A little indulgent.”

  Indulgent? Mirabelle thought. This heat? Take a look at yourself, man. Ethan lay on his back with his shirt off and his sunglasses on. The way he lay like that, with his stomach pulled down toward his spine, she could see his ribs and the first sharp jut of his hipbone. She turned away and looked back to the water sliding against their hull. So, he was not bad-looking. But he seemed wanton and lazy and angry. He had done nothing since they boarded the boat but lie there and slap at bugs and complain. He had behaved very poorly with the Mormons.

  “Yeah,” Doyle said. “The heat is strange. Very humid. I’d say that there’s a storm coming, except that it’s not storm season.”

  Ethan pulled his shirt from his face and sat up on his elbow. There was a tattoo on his right shoulder that she had not noticed. He smiled at her and at least his smile was not deranged.

  “What do you say, Mirabelle?” he asked. “On a scale of one to ten, is this weather strange, or not strange?”

  “I can’t answer that. It is two different scales.”

  Ethan flopped down again onto his back.

  “God, Doyle, why are the natives always inscrutable?” he announced.

  Doyle grinned and shrugged and drove on. For some reason, he would not look at her. He trembled with weird energy. He was abrasive in the café, and ever since then, nearly silent. Ethan, anyway, to his credit, was friendly enough. He had reminded her several times to drink from the bottles of agua purificada they bought from the Mormons. He’d touch her shoulder and open the bottle, hold it out to her.

  “Mirabelle,” he said, “you need more water.”

  He averted his eyes when he said it, looked down and then past her, the muddy river breaking away in a yellow wake, the steam rising from the near banks, the jungle that led only to more jungle. He did this several times—every time, perhaps, that he grew thirsty, he offered her water, and his voice, when he did, came like an echo, a phrase repeated out of a dream in which it carried dire consequences. There was something in his tone she recognized but could not place.

  After she drank he’d take the bottle from her, cap it.

  The third time he did this she said, “Do you think that I cannot close my own water?”

  He moved back and looked away. She could not see his eyes through his sunglasses.

  “It’s an old habit,” he said. “From days with those who tremble.”

  THE RIVER TURNED and narrowed and the water darkened from orange to a muddy green under the hanging limbs. Birds called from branches overhead. Caimans followed in their wake. They came suddenly upon Indian settlements—smaller than villages, odd half-cleared banklands of cratewood shacks and cooking lean-tos—and just as suddenly passed them. At times dogs barked from the banks and once, as they approached a settlement, they heard an American evangelist calling from a radio in one of the distant shacks. A great star fell from heaven burning like a torch, the preacher cried. And it fell on a third of the river and on the springs of water. A third of the water became wormwood, and many men died from the water because it was made bitter. The signal broke into static as they came closer.

  Doyle gulped from the rum and drove on. They were level with the settlement now and there was no sign of people. The signal wavered into sound again.

  Outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexual deviants and murderers and idolaters and whoever loves and practices a lie.

  “That’s grim,” Ethan said. “What is it, Revelations?”

  “Yes, it is from Revelations,” Mirabelle said. “Do you read the Bible?”

  “No,” Ethan said.

  Mirabelle glanced to Doyle and he shrugged and offered her the bottle. She looked away toward the receding settlement, the shacks and abandoned mud huts broken and falling to ruin and weeds and then disappearing into the uninhabited jungle. Over the rot of the river and the warm gas of frogspawn and dead fish, the boat smelled like rum. She thought of Mr. Bernal, his wet, teary mustache, his hand on her face.

  Once when she was lying on her back in the grass under the lime tree, she’d asked him, “How do you love me?”

  He blew a cloud of cigar smoke into the air, up toward the thousand risen stars.

  “I do not think there is any love left in the world,” he said. “There may be s
ome comfort. There is certainly obligation.”

  Now on the narrowing river, birds screamed and screamed as the day waned and Doyle checked their wake, whatever might follow them there, and then drove on under the sagging canopy. He slapped at a mosquito buzzing about his eyes and then at another on his arm. He turned again and looked behind them.

  THANKFULLY, AFTER HOURS ON THE RIVER, though it had not gotten any cooler, the sun no longer blazed overhead. It was beginning to move against the mountains and Mirabelle knew that the dark and the cool would come quickly once it fell behind them. Doyle throttled back on the gas and killed the speed. They chugged slowly upriver and he steered the boat as far as he could into the canopied bankwaters, he turned again and again to look behind them. Whoever Soto really is, Mirabelle thought, these men are very frightened. It seemed ridiculous to her now that she had almost gone with him. She had known when she saw him first that he was wicked. But he had lured her, he had smiled and called her darling and presented her with charges more miserable than herself. Are you so lustful as that, she wondered, so much in need of love? Also, though, she had observed in him some vast sorrow that she took for compassion. And he had recognized her, he had called her by name as the Mother had prophesied—he had called her by name and so had Ethan.

  She looked overboard, the horizon ahead streaked into a sunset the color of split papaya. An eerie, falling light. The jungle glowed as if with distant flame and a hundred thousand flies rose from the water. Bottle flies and mosquitoes and midges. Ethan and Doyle crawled with them. Her hands itched, she wore blue flying beetles like rings. The river turned and sludged, she heard it gurgling against their prow, she heard the first monkey howls of night, she heard behind her the click of the Mother’s coral beads. Ethan was sitting up now, drinking Doyle’s rum. He nodded and raised the bottle. The air sighed with the Mother’s pitiful weeping. She did not turn around.