Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  For once, take his advice, thought Ethan. He’s been right every time.

  “You have no obligation to these people,” Doyle said. “You’ve been had. You’ve been played. You’re the oldest joke in the book of gringo jokes.”

  Ethan imagined Yolanda’s wry scorn. How sheepish and ashamed and drunk he had felt at her kitchen table. How she put him—a sloppy, indulgent, privileged American—in his place: I bought you your life, and then offered him grace as if it were hers to bestow. He remembered the streets of whores, the ruin of the Mexican city. His guilt had compounded itself. A woman who lived in the clockless darkness of colonial rot had risked her life for his. He had felt ashamed of his own sadness. Compared to her, he had not earned his despair. It was a low trick to have played, and not one that he needed to die for.

  Still, no boats on the horizon. The wind through the trees brought a smell of jasmine. He imagined tending to the girl inside. Mopping her sweating brow, sleeping on the couch. What did he walk toward, if he walked away from this?

  “I can’t leave her alone, Doyle.”

  Doyle turned on his heel like a soldier drilling in the yard.

  “I know you’re in pain,” he said. “I feel some sympathy for that. But you don’t belong here. This isn’t as complicated as you want to make it. You’ve been lied to. It happens. Now you can leave with me or you can stay here and die. Those are the only options, because Ethan, get hip to this: as much as I love you, I am not going to sit here and wait for these people to find me.”

  He was slipping into his punchy expat jargon. North coast talk. He didn’t wait for Ethan to respond before turning and looking over his shoulder: empty water, empty road. So he’s afraid, thought Ethan, and he’s abandoning me and he can’t do it without playing Panama Jack. Fine. I’m hip to it.

  “I need to stay with the girl, Doyle. I can’t imagine abandoning her.”

  Doyle didn’t turn around. When he spoke, he spoke to the sea, the ways beyond it, the whole world that, like Ethan, disappointed him with its folly.

  “What you should try to imagine is getting a life. Getting a grip.”

  “This is advice? This is advice coming from you?”

  “No, it’s a fucking warning,” Doyle said. “It’s your run-of-the-mill caveat. Perhaps, Ethan, you do not approve of my life? But get this, because this is important: the past is in the past. Irredeemably, irrevocably. You make a choice. Say, for example, to kill a police officer. That’s it. It’s over and done with. You make one choice and then you make another.”

  He turned, finally, to look at Ethan. He seemed as certain now as he had fourteen years earlier when he insisted on only drinking Tullamore Dew. It was a beautiful thing almost, that certainty, that total lack of ambivalence: Doyle, standing there against the palm-break shore, certain of the way clarity would reveal itself to a man who walked an undeviating line.

  “So you ruined your marriage? Your wife was raped? No arrangement of idiotic behavior will undo that.” He nodded toward the house, the girl inside. “Leave redemption to the pious and shitting peasants.”

  Ethan leaned against the front door and slid slowly down to the stoop. Doyle swigged the rest of the ron dulce from his glass. It was overly sweet, cloying, and Ethan watched his throat chug like a piston to get it down. His eyes had begun to hood as they had in the bar in Roycetown. He was chewing on the inside of his cheek, and when he spoke again there was blood on his teeth.

  “You know, this isn’t a country for the living,” he said. “It’s one of the great advantages we have over them that we may spend so many of our years alive, while they, from birth, struggle to stave off death. It creates a sort of moral whimsy, an attitude of longing. Those policía would have killed me for another fucking drink. Women who are already dead cling to life with their thighs. We want to disdain them, to remain apart, but it’s impossible. They have so much it’s so easy to take.”

  “That’s not what’s happening here,” Ethan said.

  “I’ve glutted myself in the slums,” Doyle said. “And then I’ve passed out pesos like Indulgences. This is no different.”

  Blood rouged his lips and stained his teeth. He looked like a child who’d gone a round with a candy apple. In her last night at home Samantha had bit her tongue and spat blood in Ethan’s face. She bit and spat and bit again and he’d had to grab her by the hair and force his hand into her mouth, between her teeth, and pull her toward him, against his chest. They’d spent their last night like that—him kissing the top of her head, kissing and kissing it, whispering into dawn with his hand like a gag in her mouth.

  “What do you think will happen when Soto finds her?” Ethan asked.

  “Hey, I’m all for nobility,” Doyle said. “But there’s nothing noble about this. You’re not going to make any difference at all. Whatever’s going to happen to her is still going to happen.”

  “You called it. Things are what they are or they’re worse.”

  “Fine,” Doyle said, as he turned and walked back into the house. “I wish you’d told me you came down here to die. We could have gone about it with a bit more gusto.”

  “Help me make up the cholera bed,” Ethan said. “Before you go.”

  BUTTERFLIES LIGHT on Mirabelle’s face. She can feel their sticky feet tracking across her skin, their wings when they flap leaving a down of dusty scales. She wipes them off and wipes them off and the fan overhead turns and wobbles and she feels that too, a turning in her gut, and she is shitting again, through the cut hole in the table that she’s using as a bed, into the bucket.

  The butterflies are gone, but when she wipes her face her hands come away wet. Has someone been crying? She turns her head to the side but there’s just the curtained window, the trees hanging down beyond the curtains, the sea darkening beyond the trees. She listens and smells; she does not sense the Mother.

  She kicks her feet. Flies scramble between her toes. “Rosa,” she says, “was it this bad for you? Or was it worse?”

  “Ay, Mirabelle,” Rosa says. “You are very filthy. I think that is why the men have left.”

  MIRABELLE DRINKS from the thermos of electrolytes and almost retches. The infused water is tepid; it tastes salty and viscous and she drinks it down, swallowing hard against the urge to retch, until the thermos is empty. She feels, immediately, a new throb in her bowels and she is at it again.

  She wipes her forehead and cold sweat pimples her skin. Oyster sweat. She trembles, she says “Mother of God” and then laughs. “Mother of God Mother of God Mother of God.”

  Outside the palms whisper in the low, soughing sea breeze.

  She looks out through the window and Rosa is sitting in the tree, way up in its high canopy, cracking coconuts with her teeth.

  “You need to drink electrolytes, Rosa,” Mirabelle says. “I told you that. I told you that’s what you needed.”

  Rosa opens the coconut and drains it into her mouth. The milk is brown and thick.

  “I like these more,” she says. “They will grow my breasts.”

  “It will make you sick,” Mirabelle says, and then closes her eyes and keeps them closed, because she wants to tell Rosa that her breasts will never develop now that she’s dead. When she opens her eyes Rosa is hunched up in the corner, dry heaving.

  “Maybe that man was telling true,” Rosa says. “Maybe I am nothing.”

  “Telling the truth,” Mirabelle says. “Not telling true.”

  She doesn’t know why she still bothers to correct Rosa’s English. Against the wall the girl continues to heave.

  “Look, those cocos have made you sick.”

  Rosa gags and spits and shrugs.

  “Nada,” she says. “Nada nada nada.”

  ETHAN WAITED TILL SHE SLEPT, till he heard her mumbling cease and her breathing settle, before stepping in off the stoop and sitting by her bed. He didn’t want her to see him while she was awake. She must have her pride. He stood and approached her bed, he pulled her sheet up over her shoulder
s. She lay on her back—the way they’d fashioned the cholera bed, with a hole just big enough for her to fit her bottom through, it was the only way possible.

  He sat and watched her sleep. He watched her sweat and moan and worry her covers about her throat. He listened to her teeth chatter. First it was just a light sound, tooth grazing tooth, but then as she fell deeper into sleep or dream or fever it grew louder: a clattering like an obeah woman shaking bones in a leather bag, molar on molar and jawbone suddenly tense, standing out. Finally he did what he’d known he’d do: he reached out—a gesture from long ago, a movement of the hand beginning in one world and completing, or beginning again, in this moment, here—he reached out and touched her brow. He touched her brow and said, “Easy, Mirabelle. You’re grinding your teeth again.” And when the sound didn’t stop, when she ground them louder, gnashed them so hard he thought they’d break, he ran his fingers down her face to her jaw, her throat, he lay his lips as slowly and surely as he could on her forehead.

  When she settled but stayed sleeping, he stood and went to the window. He opened the curtains and wiped some dust from the sill. There was wind now on the water. He thought of the flagellants in The Seventh Seal. In a life devoid of redemption, judgment might be grace enough. He looked back once at the girl on the bed and then out again to the empty lane that led to the sea, the sea where a new breeze came on the turning tide. He was waiting for Soto.

  HE WAKES ON THE STOOP with the ron dulce in his lap and knows that some time has passed. The tide is in—it slicks up against the sea wall at the end of the lane—and the light has changed. The whitewashed house, the palms and mangoes in the yard—everything glows pink in the low light of a tropic dusk. Beyond the leafline of hanging sea grapes and buttonwood trees, the beach is gone and there is just the evening sea moving out against the darkening sky in layers of amethyst and slate. Tree frogs croak. The night birds begin to call. He stands from the stoop and leaves the rum there; he steps inside and starts to close the door but can’t, with the smell. Inside, he changes the waste bucket as quietly as he can and hopes she doesn’t awaken. He walks the bucket outside and empties it into the pit Doyle dug behind the house. Inside again, he replaces the bucket and washes his hands and turns to the open door as the back window streaks with reflected green flashes of distant heat lightning.

  Mirabelle wakes and sees the Mother sitting by her bed, “Where have you been?” she asks. “I thought you would come sooner.”

  The Mother nods and rocks and Her headdress of feathers shivers and molts at the motion. She opens Her eyes wide in pity or sorrow and then closes them. Her eyelids are wrinkled and slate-colored, damp like the cold walls of a well seen from the inside.

  “I’m sick,” Mirabelle says. “I think I have cholera. That’s why I’m drinking all these waters.”

  She opens the thermos and holds it up to the Mother.

  “Would you like one? They are very disgusting.”

  The Mother shakes Her head and does not open Her eyes. Mirabelle turns away and looks out through the window where there is little light left on the water. In the coming darkness the room settles into a smoky blue and she cannot see far beyond the Mother’s hunched shoulders, the outline of the kitchen door.

  “Are the men gone?” she asks.

  The Mother opens Her eyes, clacks Her golden beak. Sometimes She has lips, sometimes a beak, always a blue parrot’s tongue. She does not answer the question. Mirabelle has not seen the men in hours. Maybe they left her. Isn’t that what Rosa said? It could have been a dream, but she thinks she remembers Ethan once by her bed; she remembers hearing somebody walking around, outside, on the porch. Then comes the pain, the sudden heat and wrenching movement in her intestines that’s followed by a spasming in her bowels. She’s shitting again into the bucket. The Mother ruffles Her feathers and clacks Her beak and Mirabelle hopes that Ethan has not abandoned her.

  When she is finished, another cold sweat comes over her. She wipes the perspiration from her brow, she closes her eyes, and when she opens them again the room blurs with new dark. She sees only the Mother’s trembling outline kneeling just beyond her bed. By the sound of clacking beads she knows the Mother has begun to finger Her coral rosary.

  There was a time, once, when the Mother’s appearances did not command such melancholy, when the Mother would come and sing to her or tell stories of Her days in the jungle among the Indians and the Romans, when She’d reach out and almost touch Mirabelle, when Her shirt would moisten with breast milk. That was before Yolanda left and Jose died and Rosa died and Mr. Bernal took her in and did what he did.

  Someone moves around outside on the porch in the dark. The room flashes once with green heat lightning and Rosa says, “Did you know that once I let Jose touch me?”

  “No, you did not.”

  “Es la verdad,” Rosa says. “He was very mean on me.”

  The Mother shakes and ruffles Her feathers, looks up at Mirabelle through Her veil of tears and feathers and Her sagging skin. She opens Her beak and moves Her black tongue.

  “Ill,” She says, and it’s the same thing She said on the boat and in the hotel room in Roycetown.

  “Yes, I know I’m ill. I have cholera. I told you that already.”

  She says it again—ill—and Her voice is soft and sweet. Clear and sharp as wind on the open sea. Nothing like a parrot’s voice.

  “Please tell me more,” Mirabelle says. “Speak to me. Do not stop speaking to me.”

  “All will be ill,” the Mother says.

  Mirabelle wipes her head and drinks from the thermos until it is empty. She begins to shit again. She turns her eyes away from the Mother. What is it when the world has come to this, when you have come to this? The world broke you down until you were nothing. It surrounded you with trembling men and dead children and cafés filled with rotten fruit and goddesses who did nothing but proclaim the obvious. On the shores of the river, idiot inditos without shoes tried to spear the worst fish anyone had ever seen. Her father had abandoned her and her mother had abandoned her and Yolanda, always so full of wisdom and wit and knowledge of the ways of the world, she had abandoned her too.

  “I am not even an insect,” Mirabelle says.

  There is wind in the trees and bird screams and the manic clattering of the Mother’s rosary, and Her voice rising as sweet and melodious as a lullaby.

  “All will be ill and all will be ill and all will be ill.”

  Mirabelle turns as far from Her as she can. There is no one who will love her without rubbing her face in the world’s trash.

  “Shut up,” she says. “Even if you are real, I don’t believe in you anymore.”

  Ethan woke on the porch in the night and knew that Soto was coming. He poured the last of the rum into his glass, filled it almost half full, and lit the paraffin lamp that hung from the rafters. Mosquitoes sparked through its wavering corona and moths, ghostly and elongate as orchids, drifted in swarms out of the forest.

  He waited. By now Doyle was probably back in Roycetown with his Greek sailor girl. He would not have traveled at night.

  In his dream there had been a hound with a child in its mouth. It came through the stands of wild palms on the shore and loped up the lane to the house. Now, he looked down the road and waited. In the west, a red cloudbank scudded out toward sea where the stars still turned in cold blue symmetries. He had seen the hound’s teeth and its breath misting into the air and then had seen that it wasn’t vapor but smoke, for the hound held a cigar, along with the child, in his mouth.

  Ethan sipped his rum and listened to the flap of ghost moths about the lamp’s golden light. Insects trilled in all the trees and the moving cloudbank now hung uniform and solid as a sarcophagal lid. Over the water the stars disappeared and the world beyond the porch fell to darkness and insect cries, the whisper of the sea against the shore and the tremulous keen of wind through stands of dry palms. Ethan held out his carving knife to the lamp’s glintings and stuck it in the soft stoopwood
. He could not imagine what use it would really be to him. He sat on the lit porch, a beacon for whatever moved toward him through the dark. A light that he too had followed, choice by choice, to this spot. He drank his rum. When he saw the man, lit only by the pale cherry of a burning cigar, coming down the lane toward the house, he picked up the knife, dropped it again, closed the front door, and stood waiting on the stoop.

  WHEN SOTO CROSSED into the lamplight he swept off his hat, put one foot on the steps, and wiped his face with a handkerchief as if, in some other world, he were asking a girl out for malts. Somewhere along the way, Roycetown maybe, he had showered and shaved, and his beard was trimmed and neat. He wore a white linen sports coat and like Cunningham’s it was wrinkled with heat or wear. Underneath it, his blue shirt was halfway open and a gold necklace shone against his skin; he folded his handkerchief and stuffed it sloppily into his breast pocket; he held his machete unsheathed in his right hand; he dropped his cigar and ground it into the stoop. He looked up at Ethan and spread his arms.

  “Well,” he said, “where is she?”

  Ethan did not like his voice. It was too deep and theatrical. He stepped back against the door. There was no way to appear unafraid.

  “She’s inside.”

  “Is she sleeping?”

  “She has cholera.”

  “Is that so?” Soto lifted his nose, sniffed the air twice like a dog, and made an elaborate face of disgust. He wiped his nose with his hand, put his Panama back on and dipped his face into shadow.

  “I hate cholera,” he said. “Once when I was a boy I saw it infect a whole Mayan village. Rows and rows of people, the whole town really, shitting into buckets in an outdoor infirmary. It was something to behold. It was disgusting. You cannot imagine the sound or the smell.”

  A stiletto opened out of nowhere, it seemed, into his hand. He rested his machete against his leg. He smiled and shook his head and trimmed a new cigar.

  “It was instructive to see. I watched full-bodied men and women shrink to nothing. They shat and shat and they withered like dried fruit. They shat and they were nothing without their shit. I carried their buckets of waste, I burned their blankets. I realized that these Indians were less than their own excrement.”