The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  Coldness was spreading through her, turning her to ice. “I was thinking, Tim…I was thinking I might like to do some scaling while I’m here. Just for old time’s sake, you know.” She could hear the shakiness in her voice and tried to smooth it out; she forced a smile. “I wonder if I could borrow some hooks.”

  “Hooks?” He scratched his head, still regarding her with confusion. “Sure, I suppose you can. But aren’t you going to tell us where you’ve been? We thought you were dead.”

  “I will, I promise. Before I leave…I’ll come back and tell you all about it. All right?”

  “Well, all right.” He heaved up from his chair. “But it’s a cruel thing you’re doing, Catherine.”

  “No crueler than what’s been done to me,” she said distractedly. “Not half so cruel.”

  “Pardon,” said Tim. “How’s that?”

  “What?”

  He gave her a searching look and said, “I was telling you it was a cruel thing, keeping an old man in suspense about where you’ve been. Why, you’re going to make the choicest bit of gossip we’ve had in years. And you came back with…”

  “Oh! I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about something else.”

  The Mallison place was among the larger shanties in Hangtown, half a dozen rooms, most of which had been added on over the years since Catherine had left; but its size was no evidence of wealth or status, only of a more expansive poverty. Next to the steps leading to a badly hung door was a litter of bones and mango skins and other garbage. Fruit flies hovered above a watermelon rind; a gray dog with its ribs showing slunk off around the corner, and there was a stink of fried onions and boiled greens. From inside came the squalling of a child. The shanty looked false to Catherine, an unassuming facade behind which lay a monstrous reality—the woman who had betrayed her, killed her father—and yet its drabness was sufficient to disarm her anger somewhat. But as she mounted the steps there was a thud as of something heavy falling, and a woman shouted. The voice was harsh, deeper than Catherine remembered, but she knew it must belong to Brianne, and that restored her vengeful mood. She knocked on the door with one of Tim Weedlon’s scaling hooks, and a second later it was flung open and she was confronted by an olive-skinned woman in torn gray skirts—almost the same color as the weathered boards, as if she were the quintessential product of the environment—and gray streaks in her dark brown hair. She looked Catherine up and down, her face hard with displeasure, and said, “What do you want?”

  It was Brianne, but Brianne warped, melted, disfigured as a wax-work might be disfigured by heat. Her waist gone, features thickened, cheeks sagging into jowls. Shock washed away Catherine’s anger, and shock, too, materialized in Brianne’s face. “No,” she said, giving the word an abstracted value, as if denying an inconsequential accusation; then she shouted it: “No!” She slammed the door, and Catherine pounded on it, crying, “Damn you! Brianne!”

  The child screamed, but Brianne made no reply.

  Enraged, Catherine swung the hook at the door; the point sank deep into the wood, and when she tried to pull it out, one of the boards came partially loose; she pried at it, managed to rip it away, the nails coming free with a shriek of tortured metal. Through the gap she saw Brianne cowering against the rear wall of a dilapidated room, her arms around a little boy in shorts. Using the hook as a lever, she pulled loose another board, reached in and undid the latch. Brianne pushed the child behind her and grabbed a broom as Catherine stepped inside.

  “Get out of here!” she said, holding the broom like a spear.

  The gray poverty of the shanty made Catherine feel huge in her anger, too bright for the place, like a sun shining in a cave, and although her attention was fixed on Brianne, the peripheral details of the room imprinted themselves on her: the wood stove upon which a covered pot was steaming; an overturned wooden chair with a hole in the seat; cobwebs spanning the corners, rat turds along the wall; a rickety table set with cracked dishes and dust thick as fur beneath it. These things didn’t arouse her pity or mute her anger; instead, they seemed extensions of Brianne, new targets for hatred. She moved closer, and Brianne jabbed the broom at her. “Go away,” she said weakly. “Please…leave us alone!”

  Catherine swung the hook, snagging the twine that bound the broom straws and knocking it from Brianne’s hands. Brianne retreated to the corner where the wood stove stood, hauling the child along. She held up her hand to ward off another blow and said, “Don’t hurt us.”

  “Why not? Because you’ve got children, because you’ve had an unhappy life?” Catherine spat at Brianne. “You killed my father!”

  “I was afraid! Key’s father…”

  “I don’t care,” said Catherine coldly. “I don’t care why you did it. I don’t care how good your reasons were for betraying me in the first place.”

  “That’s right! You never cared about anything!” Brianne clawed at her breast. “You killed my heart! You didn’t care about Glynn, you just wanted him because he wasn’t yours!”

  It took Catherine a few seconds to dredge that name up from memory, to connect it with Brianne’s old lover and recall that it was her callousness and self-absorption that had set the events of the past years in motion. But although this roused her guilt, it did not abolish her anger. She couldn’t equate Brianne’s crimes with her excesses. Still, she was confused about what to do, uncomfortable now with the very concept of justice, and she wondered if she should leave, just throw down the hook and leave vengeance to whatever ordering principle governed the fates in Hangtown. Then Brianne shifted her feet, made a noise in her throat, and Catherine felt rage boiling up inside her.

  “Don’t throw that up to me,” she said with flat menace. “Nothing I’ve done to you merited what you did to me. You don’t even know what you did!”

  She raised the hook, and Brianne shrank back into the corner. The child twisted its head to look at Catherine, fixing her with brimming eyes, and she held back.

  “Send the child away,” she told Brianne.

  Brianne leaned down to the child. “Go to your father,” she said.

  “No, wait,” said Catherine, fearing that the child might bring Zev Mallison.

  “Must you kill us both?” said Brianne, her voice hoarse with emotion. Hearing this, the child once more began to cry.

  “Stop it,” Catherine said to him, and when he continued to cry, she shouted it.

  Brianne muffled the child’s wails in her skirts. “Go ahead!” she said, her face twisted with fear. “Just do it!” She broke down into sobs, ducked her head, and waited for the blow. Catherine stepped close to Brianne, yanked her head back by the hair, exposing her throat, and set the point of the hook against the big vein there. Brianne’s eyes rolled down, trying to see the hook; her breath came in gaspy shrieks, and the child, caught between the two women, squirmed and wailed. Catherine’s hand was trembling, and that slight motion pricked Brianne’s skin, drawing a bead of blood. She stiffened, her eyelids fluttered down, her mouth fell open—an expression, at least so it seemed to Catherine, of ecstatic expectation. Catherine studied the face, feeling as if her emotions were being purified, drawn into a fine wire; she had an almost aesthetic appreciation of the stillness gathering around her, the hard poise of Brianne’s musculature, the sensitive pulse in the throat that transmitted its frail rhythm along the hook, and she restrained herself from pressing the point deeper, wanting to prolong Brianne’s suffering.

  But then the hook grew heavy in Catherine’s hands, and she understood that the moment had passed, that her need for vengeance had lost the immediacy and thrust of passion. She imagined herself skewering Brianne, and then imagined dragging her out to confront a village tribunal, forcing her to confess her lies, having her sentenced to be tied up and left for whatever creatures foraged beneath Griaule’s wing. But while it provided her a measure of satisfaction to picture Brianne dead or dying, she saw now that anticipation was the peak of vengeance, that carrying out the necessary actions w
ould only harm her. It frustrated her that all these years and the deaths would have no resolution, and she thought that she must have changed more than she had assumed to put aside vengeance so easily; this caused her to wonder again about the nature of the change, to question whether she was truly herself or merely an arcane likeness. But then she realized that the change had been her resolution, and that vengeance was an artifact of her old life, nothing more, and that her new life, whatever its secret character, must find other concerns to fuel it apart from old griefs and unworthy passions. This struck her with the force of a revelation, and she let out a long sighing breath that seemed to carry away with it all the sad vibrations of the past, all the residues of hates and loves, and she could finally believe that she was no longer the dragon’s prisoner. She felt new in her whole being, subject to new compulsions, as alive as tears, as strong as wheat, far too strong and alive for this pallid environment, and she could hardly recall now why she had come.

  She looked at Brianne and her son, feeling only the ghost of hatred, seeing them not as objects of pity or wrath, but as unfamiliar, irrelevant lives trapped in the prison of their own self-regard, and without a word she turned and walked to the steps, slamming the hook deep into the boards of the wall, a gesture of fierce resignation, the closing of a door opening onto anger and the opening of one that led to uncharted climes, and went down out of the village, leaving old Tim Weedlon’s thirst for gossip unquenched, passing along Griaule’s back, pushing through thickets and fording streams, and not noticing for quite some time that she had crossed onto another hill and left the dragon far behind.

  Three weeks later she came to Cabrecavela, a small town at the opposite end of the Carbonales Valley, and there, using the gems provided her by Mauldry, she bought a house and settled in and began to write about Griaule, creating not a personal memoir but a reference work containing an afterword dealing with certain metaphysical speculations, for she did not wish her adventures published, considering them banal by comparison to her primary subjects, the dragon’s physiology and ecology. After the publication of her book, which she entitled The Heart’s Millennium, she experienced a brief celebrity; but she shunned most of the opportunities for travel and lecture and lionization that came her way, and satisfied her desire to impart the knowledge she had gained by teaching in the local school and speaking privately with those scientists from Port Chantay who came to interview her. Some of these visitors had been colleagues of John Colmacos, yet she never mentioned their relationship, believing that her memories of the man needed no modification; but perhaps this was a less than honest self-appraisal, perhaps she had not come to terms with that portion of her past, for in the spring five years after she had returned to the world she married one of these scientists, a man named Brian Ocoi, who in his calm demeanor and modest easiness of speech appeared cast from the same mold as Colmacos. From that point on little is known of her other than the fact that she bore two sons and confined her writing to a journal that has gone unpublished. However, it is said of her—as is said of all those who perform similar acts of faith in the shadows of other dragons yet unearthed from beneath their hills of ordinary-seeming earth and grass, believing that their bond serves through gentle constancy to enhance and not further delimit the boundaries of this prison world—from that day forward she lived happily ever after. Except for the dying at the end. And the heartbreak in between.

  I’ve been down these rivers before, I’ve smelled this tropical stink in a dozen different wars, this mixture of heat and fever and diarrhea, I’ve come across the same bloated bodies floating in the green water, I’ve seen the tiny dark men and their delicate women hacked apart a hundred times if I’ve seen it once. I’m a fucking war tourist. My bags have stickers on them from Cambodia, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Laos, El Salvador, and all the other pertinent points of no return. I keep telling myself, enough of this bullshit, your turn to cover the home front, where nobody gives a damn and you can write happy stories about girls with cute tits and no acting ability, in-depth features on spirit channeling and the latest in three-piece Republicans who do it to the public doggie-style and never lose that winning smile, but I always end up here again, whichever Here is in this year, sitting around the pool at the Holiday Inn and soaking up Absolut and exchanging cynical repartee with other halfwits of my breed, guys from UPI or AP, stringers from Reuters, and the odd superstar who’ll drop by from time to time, your Fill-In-The-Name-Of-Your-Favorite-Blow-Dried TV Creep, the kind of guy who’ll buy a few rounds, belch platitudes, and say crap like, Now Katanga, there was a real war, before going upstairs drunk to dictate three columns of tearstained human interest. I used to believe that I kept doing all this because I was committed, not a pervert or deluded, but I’m not too sure about that anymore.

  A few years back I was in Guatemala City: Mordor with more sunshine and colonial architecture, diesel buses farting black smoke, and a truly spectacular slum that goes by the nineties-style name of Zone Five. I was just hanging out, doing yet another tragic piece on the disappeared, dodging carloads of sinister-looking hombres in unmarked Toyotas, and pretending to myself that what I was going to write would Make A Difference, when this colleague of mine, Paul DeVries, AP, a skinny, earnest little guy with whom all the Guatemalan girls are in love because he’s blond and sensitive and in every way the opposite of the local talent, who tend early on to develop beer guts along with a mania for sidearms and a penchant for left-hooking the weaker sex…DeVries says to me, “Hey, Carl, let’s haul our butts down to Sayaxché, I hear there’s been some kinda fuckup down there.”

  “Sayaxché?” I say. “What could happen in Sayaxché?”

  Sayaxché’s a joke between me and DeVries, one of many; we’ve been covering back-fence wars together for four years, and we’ve achieved a rapport based on making light of every little thing that comes our way. We call Sayaxché “the one-whore town,” because that’s how many ladies of the evening it supports, and she’s no bargain, with horrible acne scars and a foul mouth, screaming drunk all the time. The town itself is a dump on the edge of the Petén rain forest, with a hotel, a regional bank office, whitewashed hovels, an experimental agricultural farm, a ferry that carries oil trucks across the Río de la Pasión on their way to service the ranches farther east in the jungle, lots of dark green, lots of starving Indians, Joseph Conrad-land, what could happen?

  “Forget it,” I tell DeVries at first.

  But I’m getting fatigued with the disappeared, you know; I mean what’s the point, if they’d been disappeared by magic everyone would love to hear about it, but another tragedy, more endless nattering of miserable Third World gossip…ho hum, and so I end up hopping a DC-3 for Flores with DeVries, then it’s a bus ride on a potholed dirt road for an hour, and we are there, drinking beer and smoking on the screened verandah of the Hotel Tropical, a turquoise cube on the riverbank with three-dollar rooms and enormous cockroaches and framed photographs everywhere of Don Julio, the owner, a roan-colored man with gold chains and a paunch, posing proudly with a rifle and a variety of dead animals. We’re listening to ooh-ooh-ah-ah birds and howler monkeys from the surrounding jungle, staring at the murky green eddies of the River of Passion, trying to pry some information out of Don Julio, but he has heard of no fuckup. He’s a real stand-up guy, Don Julio. Hates commies. One of those patriotic souls who will in drunken moments flourish his mighty pistola and declaim, “Nobody takes this from me! A communist comes on my land, and he’s a dead man.” And so he’s doubtless lying to us in order to protect his pals, the secret police. He shrugs, offers more beer, and goes off to polish his bullets, leaving me and DeVries and a Canadian nurse named Sherril—she’s on her way south to do volunteer work in Nicaragua—to indulge in the town’s chief spectator sport, which is watching the oil trucks rolling off the ferry getting stuck in this enormous pothole, which is artfully placed at the end of the dock and the beginning of a steep incline so that it’s the rare truck that avoids getting stuck. In front of the ba
nk across the street, a two-story building of pink cement block, some Indian soldiers with camo gear and SMGs are advising the driver of the current truck-in-distress on possible methods of becoming unstuck; they favor a combination of boards and sand beneath the tires, and rocking back and forth. The driver, who’s been frustrated now for more than an hour, is close to tears.

  “Well, this is fucking terrific,” I say to DeVries; he’s ten years younger than me, and our relationship has been established so that I have the right to express stern fraternal disapproval. “There’s no end of newsworthy material to be found here.”

  “Something might turn up,” he says. “Let’s hang for a while and see what surfaces.”

  “What’re you guys looking for?” Sherril asks. She’s long, she’s tall, she’s looking good, she’s got light brown hair and no bra, and she’s waiting for this guy who promised to paddle her upriver to the Mexican border to see the Mayan ruins at Yaxchilán but hasn’t showed up yet and, being two days late, probably won’t show at all; she acts very engaged-disengaged, very feminine-in-control, like I want to do my thing with the rebels so I can live with myself, you know, and then raise my children to love animals and never say bad words in Calgary or somewhere, and me, I’m beginning to think that if she’s stupid enough to go paddling up the River of Doom with some sleaze she met in an Antigua bar, she’ll be idealistic enough to choose to sleep with a war-torn journalist such as myself. I can tell she’s impressed by my repertoire of cynicisms, and there is definitely a mutual attraction.

  “We heard there was some trouble here,” I say. “Soldiers all over.”

  “Oh, you must mean out at the farm,” she says.

  DeVries and I exchange glances and say as one, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, “but a lot of soldiers were out there the other day. I think they’re still there. They’d have to come back through here if they left.”