LATER, AS IT GREW DARKER, Ethan said, “We’re not making any headway.”
“Sure we are,” Doyle said, and glanced back at their extra gas canisters. “But I’m conserving fuel. I don’t know how much we’ll be able to find between here and Roycetown. We’re against the current.”
The night had not cooled considerably with the dark, but mist rose off the river and draped itself like a shroud from the overhanging Spanish moss. Ethan licked his finger, held it to the air.
“Christ, how can there be a current when there isn’t any wind?”
He doesn’t know anything, Mirabelle thought. Look at him flap about there. This is the man who is supposed to protect me? A man whom Yolanda would trust?
“We’re heading upriver,” she said. “Toward the sea. There is wind at sea. There are many currents.”
“Sure,” he said. “Right. Just another tributary.”
She wanted to cross herself. Was each man more broken than the next? If Soto was as bad as they said, she was certain they would all die.
WITH FULL DARK, Doyle steered the boat out of the open water and into one of the ancillary mangroves. He dropped anchor.
“Is this safe?” Ethan asked. “Shouldn’t we keep driving through the night?”
“I don’t know. We all need some sleep and we’re pretty well hidden here.”
“I think I saw some lights on the water.”
“Maybe,” Doyle said. “But we really don’t want to meet anyone on this river tonight.”
Ethan said, “I like Soto behind me. I like him where I can’t see him.”
“He needs to sleep too, Ethan.”
“I don’t think he does. I think he’s still coming.”
Ethan could feel him out there, moving toward them, gaining on them as he inevitably must.
“It’s your choice. For the record I think that it’s the wrong one, but there’s no reason to break with tradition, I guess.”
“No,” Ethan said. “No reason at all.”
ETHAN STEERED as Doyle slept. Mirabelle sat on the aft bench near him and looked out over the dark water toward the darker jungle. She had not spoken for some time. She sat and stared and would not turn when he spoke to her. Fine, he didn’t need the distractions anyway. The river was black and narrow, he didn’t dare put on his lights, he had drunk, perhaps, too much rum.
“You awake there, Mirabelle?” he said.
She didn’t answer, but she was sitting straight up and her right eye, he could see by the angle she sat, facing aft, was open. He had imagined that she would be something like Yolanda. Yolanda but younger, unsullied by a thousand brothel nights. He felt ashamed to admit it, but he had expected some kind of exotic village maiden. Someone whose face would not bleed out the world’s damages. Younger than Yolanda, but beautiful too. A country girl who would thank him for his sacrifice, someone for whom it would be easy to make sacrifice. What are you, he thought, a fucking conquistador? The great white hope come to save the natives from themselves? You pitiful drunk asshole. Too bad for you, the Third World isn’t all Club Med and mangoes. Too bad the Chiquita Banana Girl happens to be mad.
The river turned and he steered widely around the bend, arcing into the shallower bankwaters. A stupid move. At night, in the dark, he wouldn’t have seen any logs or hidden roots. At the edge of the jungle something screamed and thrashed through the near foliage. There were jaguars here, and ocelots, the forest edge lit with fireflies. In the deeper reaches burned a thousand emerald eyes and the boat wake, when he checked it, frothed with phosphorescence. The mist had broken with full dark, but now rose again. His fever was growing worse and his hand trembled against the steering wheel as he pulled the boat through the turn, back into the deeper waters. He’d have to be more careful. This anger was just another form of self-indulgence, the flipside of self-pity. He remembered the guilt he’d felt at Yolanda’s kitchen table, the certainty of his inevitable failure. Anger, despair, the impulse toward destruction. They masked fear and eluded responsibility. They felt more sophisticated than cowardice, but no better.
“Mirabelle,” he said again, quietly so as not to wake Doyle, “I’m not feeling too well. I could use some conversation.”
“Oh,” she said. “But it’s hard to hear. I didn’t know that it was you who was speaking.”
“I wasn’t speaking. Not really.”
“I didn’t think it was you.”
Perhaps silence was better, he thought. In this case he’d prefer not to know.
“What do you hear, then?” he asked anyway.
She started to turn toward him and then stopped as if suddenly stung. She shuddered.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s the engine and the water and the howling monkeys, right?”
“Yes. That’s right. I hear those things, too.”
“It’s the flies that bother me. The sound of their wings. It makes them sweat and I don’t like to hear that. And the Mother—” she said, and paused and went on. “—you know I hear Her. I won’t lie about that. Yolanda must have told you.”
A mystic, he thought. Of course. Here where everything seeped with portent, who needed imagined mysteries? Still, look at her, this miserable girl. She almost left with Soto because—why? He knew her name? He promised her children to care for? How could she be sane? She had grown up alone in that wasted, heat-blighted town on the edge of this wicked river. One must accept something, and if the choice was between faith or poverty, reality or escape, who wouldn’t choose faith and certainty and madness?
“Of course,” he said. “Of course she told me.”
“And it doesn’t frighten you?”
He laughed and he was surprised by the sound of it, a reflex as sure as a gag. Scornful and without merriment. Doyle stirred and moaned but did not wake.
“Everything frightens me,” Ethan said.
She turned with stony slowness, rigid neck, head not wanting to follow her body, hanging back and then snapping around as if she were turning toward something sure and dread. Her eyes glistened, as he’d known they would, with tears. She blinked twice and hard and looked over his shoulder, closed her eyes again, and then looked back at him. It was the same expression he’d seen in the café, the one he’d recognized as demented certainty, and he knew that she perceived someone else with them on the boat. The hair on his neck and arms raised, he felt it through his sweatshirt. He looked behind him once. Only the green amber trail of their wake, the river falling into mist and darkness.
“What do you see?” he asked.
For a time Mirabelle did not answer. Nameless shadows broke and moved on the river. Now there were no more monkey cries, the birds that called were far off and fading away. The jungle was silent but for frog croaks and the boat engine coughing over the water. They were a beacon for whatever was out there—Soto and pirates and the mad girl’s specters dreamed into the world.
Finally she said, “I see Our Lady of Sorrow. She works Her beads and She weeps for us. She clashes Her beak.”
Ethan decided not to ask about the beak. In the café the thought had come to him clearly: only the mad could be certain. He’d recognized her certainty for what it was: the twitching thing climbing from a rim of shadow, the presence on the road. But what of faith? Wasn’t that what many would pronounce her sureness? And if she saw what she said she did—well, she had more reason for it than anyone. Also, there was his own certainty on the way to Plaza del Porros—I have to. I don’t know what want has to do with it. Of course, probably, that was a lie. Every step so far he’d decided on somehow, or done nothing to stay. There was that moment at the table in the kitchen with Samantha. I’m not saying it wasn’t a mistake, he had said. I’m not saying it was out of my hands. But I was lonely.
She had stood up, looked back once from the door. No, Ethan, she said. You make choices and then you account for them. The rest is pretty much bullshit.
Ethan nodded at Mirabelle, he tried to smile, he knew that at some point he sho
uld sleep.
“She’s begun to speak again,” Mirabelle said. “She knows the future.”
“She does?”
“Yes, and She gloats. She’s very gloating.”
“What’s she prophesy?” he asked
“I’d rather not say.”
Mirabelle turned back to the water. Ethan checked the gas level and engine gauge but couldn’t read them in the dark.
HE WAS TAPPING his ring in the night when she woke, maybe, and said, “You’re married, aren’t you?”
“Sort of,” he said. “Or, not anymore. I’m divorced. My wife is in a facility.”
She mouthed the word. “A what?”
“A hospital. A home for rich people in despair.”
“Like a nunnery?”
“No,” he said. “Well, yes. Sort of like a nunnery.”
“Do you visit her there?”
“No, I’m not allowed to.”
“Do you write her letters?”
“I write her lawyer letters,” he said. “I’m the executor of her estate.”
Mirabelle seemed not to hear him; he was tapping his ring again.
“Is it expensive to write letters in America?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not. It’s nearly free.”
“Then I don’t know why Yolanda does not write to me anymore.”
He didn’t answer. If he did, it would have to be lie after lie. And anyway, if Yolanda could secret a passport to her mother’s island, couldn’t she send letters?
“Were you close to her?” he asked.
“Yes, she raised me. I never knew my mother.”
“I believe that,” Ethan said.
“Will I be able to live with Yolanda in Texas?”
The river straightened and opened before them in an undeviating line. Ethan thought for a moment of the highway he’d driven from San Antonio to Nuevo Laredo, the perfect straightness of it, the wide horizon rising copper and sere into dawn, the heat wavering and breaking from the road like a flock of birds, the flatbush and gnarled mesquite thickets whipping past, and the great wave of dust spreading in the gathering, inevitable distance. In retrospect it was a lure, the perfect straightness of it, the border drawing closer. There was no changing course, no place to turn, and if every path led straight to this, then this now, this river, led straight to what? Ahead, above and beyond the jungle’s canopy of shadow, the sky glinted with the light of a hundred thousand stars. Southern stars he could not recognize. I’ve passed into realms beyond my sextant, he thought. The girl was suddenly very talkative.
“You’re not seeing the Mother right now, are you?”
“No, it’s just you and me in this boat,” she said, and smiled sadly, the mouth rising as the eyes clouded and looked away. Yolanda’s smile.
Ethan nodded at Doyle.
“And him.”
“Yes,” Mirabelle said. “And him. He is a very angry man, isn’t he?”
“Well, really, who isn’t?” Ethan said.
“I don’t know what any of you have to be angry about.”
“Oh God,” he said too loudly. “Don’t start that shit, Mirabelle. Ask your Blessed Virgin if it’s so confusing. Everything in the world can break your heart. It doesn’t matter who you are.”
For a moment she didn’t answer, but looked down to his feet where the rum bottle rested against the aft hold. She reached for it, opened it, and drank.
“It’s almost empty,” she said.
“Discipline in all things, Mirabelle. Get used to it. It’s the American way.”
“You should not drink so much.”
“It’s a question of obligation,” he said. “If a man sets out to drink a bottle of rum, that’s what he should do. America was founded by such men. It’s the very lifeblood of our history. Franklin drank a liter of rum and then invented the rocking chair. Doyle’s people, Virginians, used to imbibe anti-fogmatics at dawn to stave off the treachery of the fog. Really—anti-fogmatics—that’s what they were called. And look around, there’s plenty of fog.”
He was speaking too much. It was a stupid rant and there was nothing clever about it. On the river with Soto in their wake, with Mirabelle, this poor, abandoned girl, quivering before him, sarcasm evaporated into the thinnest of vapors. And he was not drunk, not really, not by the week’s standard. It was the anger speaking again, talking through him. The Southern Cross wheeled overhead—that, at least, he could recognize. When he spoke again, his voice sounded far off and distinct from him. There was someone talking for him, out of him, chuckling with scorn as he drove on and on into the darkness.
“My wife,” he was saying, “you should have seen her. Samantha—now she could drink.”
Mirabelle watched him as he spoke and he wondered, in some place disassociated from the rambling voice, what she saw. How could she trust these sudden moods, this collapse of restraint? His face and arms itched with new sweat, his shirt stuck, drenched, to his middle back. He wiped something wet from his face.
“You think that you know someone. I mean, we married. Right? The premise should stand. But she was a riddle to me, even then. A riddle I wanted to uncover. That was the fun of it, I think. Here’s the secret of signs, though, Mirabelle. Of omens. They are always masking something worse than themselves. Did you know that?”
“Yes, I knew that,” the girl said quietly.
“Samantha was very cruel,” Ethan said. “She was very cruel when she drank.”
“That’s why she’s in a nunnery? Why you divorced?”
Ethan reached out to her for the bottle. Both behind and before them the mist was rising, thicker now, off the water, and the space between the two points collapsed, closed in on them. No tremors yet of dawn.
“No, that’s not why,” Ethan said.
WHAT HAPPENED WAS Mallory stepped around the desk and said, “Would you like some mead?”
Ethan was shooting a brochure for the Cloisters Museum in New York and Mallory, a young Chaucer scholar, was helping curate the exhibit while she finished her dissertation. Already, he was shutting off the lights and packing up his camera. It was well after hours.
“Mead?” he said. “Are you serious?”
“Sure. Become a medievalist and everyone gives you mead.”
“Sounds like a predicament.”
“Forsooth,” she said. “It’s like a joke, I guess, but it’s not very funny.”
He watched her as she pulled a bottle of Canterbury Mead out of the cabinet and started to open it. She looked like a medievalist, he thought, without really knowing what that meant. There was a certain bookishness about her: jet hair, Samantha’s hair, pulled back tightly into a bob, glasses with black plastic rims forming harsh half-moons around her hazel eyes. Her lips, sharp with dark lipstick applied too severely to an already thin mouth. Lots of silver jewelry. Lots of lavender hand lotion. A little more buxom, a little less clothing, and she’d be a librarian, he realized, out of his adolescent fantasies. She could not work the corkscrew.
“Here,” he said, and walked around the counter where she stood leaning against a bookshelf. “Let me help.”
She sighed and smiled, handed him the bottle.
“The lyf so short,” she said. “The craft so long to lerne.”
“That’s familiar.”
“It’s Chaucer.”
“That’s right,” he said as the cork came free. “I always liked Chaucer.”
Mallory nodded.
“Of course. Everyone likes Chaucer. Chaucer’s got it going on.”
He looked at her, but she was not smiling. She produced two plastic water cups from under the desk. A galactic swirl of dust from the bookshelf clung to her blouse. He didn’t like that he couldn’t tell if she were mocking him.
“Why mead?” he said. “And why tonight?”
She smelled her mead and winced and when she did her glasses fell forward on her nose. She pushed them back and looked away, past him, at the tapestry he’d been photographing.
“I’ve been having illicit thoughts,” she said. “All week. I’m trying to behave.”
“And so you’re drinking?”
“Drink wine and you will sleep well,” she quoted. “Sleep well and you shall not sin. Avoid sin and you shall be saved. Ergo, drink wine and be saved.”
Ethan sipped his mead, swallowed, and then realized that in the sway of the moment he had not tasted it. He could not feel the cup in his hand or the pull of the door behind him. Still one light illuminated the far wall: the unicorn there, with the maiden in its lap.
“You’re a regular concordance,” he said.
“It’s what medievalists do. We read things, repeat them, and change their meaning.”
“The oldest lines in the book.”
She laughed and drank her mead in one gulp.
“Oh, golly. A pun,” she said.
AT HOME Samantha said, “Captain Jealousy’s been out late. Can you show me your papers? Are they all stamped?”
At first, because the lights were off and he couldn’t see her eyes, he thought she was being playful. But as he closed the door and smelled the bright reek of gin, as he waited for her laugh that did not come, he knew she was drunk and angry. Samantha was a cruel drunk or a tired drunk or a horny drunk, but never a nice one.
He turned on the lamp but it was unplugged or the bulb was blown. The neon glow of the hardware stores and billboards far below lit the room through the open blinds. Half of her face was blue and hard, coral under moonlight, and the other half wet with shadow. The false light sparkled on the array of open bottles strewn about the coffee table.
“What are you drinking, anyway?” he said.
“Martinis,” Samantha drawled. “Half gin and half vodka.”
“That’s not a martini.”
“I call it The Husband. Half fruit and half cold fish.”
Horse Latitudes Page 25
