She writhed a little, and sighed, and said, “Everyone loves you, Marder. Amparo is your absolute slave; I see her watching you like old campesinos watch the monstrance with the blessed sacrament in a procession. Your daughter has sacrificed her whole life to be here with you. And I am here. Yes, I’m a journalist and this is, as you say, the story of the decade, but it’s mainly you. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like Richard Marder. It’s embarrassing to admit to fascination, but there it is. And I like the way you smell.”
“So fascination and smell were able to overcome your dislike of Americans. In my case, at least.”
“Oh, I fuck Americans all the time. Germans. Australians. It’s the Mexicans I avoid in that department. No, when I feel like getting off, I usually fly up to L.A. or New Orleans. I have a number of colleagues I frequent, nice men, occasionally married ones, no attachments, no job-related caca.”
“That seems unpatriotic, if you don’t mind me saying so. As an honorary Mexican, I am inclined to be offended. What’s wrong with Mexicans?”
“Nothing. A noble race. Perhaps I just had a run of bad luck. No, keep doing what you were doing. No, further in. Yes. Well, my Mexican horror stories. They court you, you’re the moon and the stars, and then after they fuck you you’re just a chingada, a kind of human garbage that they don’t have to consider. I have been with Mexican men who have called their wives on their cell phones, sitting naked on the side of my bed while their semen was still dripping out of me. The very last one I had was doing me from behind, and I recall thinking that my feet were feeling a little rough and that it was time for a pedicure—and, by the way, foreplay to these guys is a couple of drinks at the bar—when his cell warbled. It was La Paloma, if you can believe it, and he actually picked it up. While he was fucking me. And had a conversation with his wife. Why was he out of breath, she asked. Oh, the elevator was broken, he had to walk up six flights. This is the kind of romantic interaction I have had innumerable times with my countrymen, God bless them!”
Her speech was now interpersed with heavier breathing and sounds indicative of the catlike pleasure she was apparently capable of and desired, and which, Marder believed, had not been part of her liaisons all that often.
“So which is it?” he asked. “Marder is unique or just another in a line of non-Mexican rigid objects?”
“Oh, closer to unique. I can usually figure out what makes a man tick before the coffee cools, but not you. And I tried. I used every likely contact I have in New York to find out who you were, and I drew a blank. You’re no one special, it seems. But now you’re in the middle of a drug war with a lot of money that doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. You take the part of a bunch of pelados that no one has ever given a shit about, and you defy the two major drug gangs in the neighborhood—not one but two—and turn your house into a fort and stock it with heavy weaponry—and where did that come from, she wonders—and get the whole thing organized by a fairly serious mercenary and drug-lord bodyguard—and, let me tell you, he’s something special anyway—and … and you proceed to shaft not only El Gordo, your chief ally, but also shoot the best pal of the meanest narco in the area, this totally dangerous felon, because of a teenage girl you barely know, out of what appears to be sheer decency. Such things don’t happen, querido, not in Mexico.”
“They happen everywhere. As you point out, I’m no one special, yet here I am. Skelly is special, but he’s here too, which I find only a little short of miraculous. I’m surprised, by the way, that you were able to uncover much about him in your researches. He tends to keep a low profile.”
“Not low enough. His war record is fairly public, and as for his career afterward—well, let’s say I’m part of the reportorial fraternity that spends a lot of time looking into the doings of the big drug cartels. I specialize in Mexico, obviously, but I know the people who know the narcos of Asia and Russia and so on. Did you know he worked for Khun Sa?”
“I had no idea. He’s mentioned the name.”
“The lord of the Golden Triangle. He could eat El Gordo dipped in salsa. In any case, your Skelly’s a mercenary. He sets up security operations for the worst people in the world. You would imagine him to be on a moral plane with someone like Servando Gomez, and yet here he is, the best friend of a man I would call … I suppose ‘saintly’ would be the wrong word considering what you’re doing at the moment. But don’t stop! And kiss me a little here.”
* * *
“Mother of God, that was wonderful,” she said after an extended nonverbal interval. “I haven’t had anything like this in ages.”
“I’m surprised you stopped talking.”
She laughed. “Oh, the talking is what makes it wonderful. And you’ll have noted the difference in the audio effects from what came in through the window from little Lourdes.”
“More full-throated, I’d judge,” he said, “more sincere, less influenced by hard-core porn. Speaking of which, what do you think of Fuentes’s notion in The Old Gringo that the old hacendados had their peasants whipped if they made any sounds of pleasure during lovemaking? Did that really happen?”
“Assuredly. Their ladies insisted on it. It was intolerable for peasants to have something that was denied to them by their status and their Church, and the masters complied, because they, of course, had all the sex they wanted from those very peasant women. And when the patrón had such a woman, it went without saying that she could not share any pleasure with that farm animal, her husband, ever again. However, thanks to our glorious revolution, I have no hesitation about making any sounds that … yes, keep doing that, press harder … yes, oh, that’s excellent. Viva Zapata!”
* * *
Somewhat later, she shifted position, drew a line of small kisses down his belly; he felt the fall of her hair following this damp line. Then some moist noises and again her voice from the darkness, “So, about Skelly: How do you come to be such buddies? You were in the war together, yes?”
“Yes. It’s a long story, and how will you continue the interview if your mouth is full?”
“I will take small breaks. I find it enhances the lubricity.”
He was drunk, so he told her the whole story, starting with Naked Fanny, and the voodoos, and Moon River, the montagnards, Joong, and what Skelly was, and the firefights on the trail, and the assault on the SOG outpost, and about all the dead. Then he stopped, and after a moment there came a sound amusingly similar to the withdrawing of a cork from a bottle.
“And what happened then? Did the communists attack again?”
“No, not exactly. What happened was, I got up in the morning after the assault. I was sleeping in one of the longhouses because all my stuff had been burned up in the attack. It was Joong’s father’s longhouse, as a matter of fact. I went out to piss and when I came back through the village I noticed that some kids were playing with a ball, throwing it back and forth, and some other kids were knocking another ball around with sticks, and a couple of real little kids had balls attached to strings that they were whirling around their heads. Everyone was having a great time, and it was strange that it took so long for it to occur to me that I’d never seen so many balls in the village before. Skelly was gone with the surviving Vietnamese rangers up the mountainside to the south to see if he could make contact with any bad guys, and I was poking through the ruins of the command hooch to see if there was any radio stuff that I could salvage, when a kid flung his ball and it bounced by me and I saw that it was a voodoo. Long story short: it turned out that the PAVN had been gathering these things for weeks. I mean, we put out thousands, and they’d picked up hundreds and left them in the village after the attack. That had been the real reason for the attack in the first place and also why they hadn’t pressed it harder. They didn’t have to: yet another way in which we’d underestimated our enemies. Also, the kids had been playing with them all morning, and therefore to the pinball wizards back in Naked Fanny, all those voodoos moving around must have looked like the central mar
shaling yard of the northern Ho Chi Minh Trail. If you keep that up I will lose interest in my story.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I suddenly find that telling this is more important than getting blown, because, while I’ve had a blow job before, I’ve never told this whole thing to anyone. Slide up here, would you?” After a moment, she did.
“That’s better,” he said.
“Never? Not even to your wife, during that long marriage?”
“No. Chole wasn’t interested in war stories, and besides … maybe I wanted to start fresh with her; we were both escapees from our lives. But now it’s not like real life; it’s the Day of the Dead, when everything is permitted, and I want to vomit out this lump of shit and you’re a woman who can take it, you’re the great chronicler of artistically dismembered corpses.”
“Can I do this?”
“Yes. Conservatively, if you please. Okay, so when I saw the voodoos there, I ran for the hills. I mean, I was nineteen, an air force electronics guy, and so I ran to find Skelly. He was the man, he had the voice of command, he had the training. I found him coming down a mountain track. He was alone, because the LLDBs had run off. They figured they could exfiltrate back to Vietnam by themselves, and they had no particular interest in defending a yard village or hanging out with a couple of Americans who had no radio contact anymore and hence no money and no resupply. They hadn’t found any sign of the PAVN. And then I told him about the voodoos and what I thought it meant. It took him a little while to get it, and as I looked at him … you know the expression ‘hollow eyes’? Yeah, we know what it means, the metaphor, but Skelly really had hollow eyes. His eyes are deep-sunk eyes anyway, but these didn’t look like any eyes I ever saw on a person before, a living human being. You saw a look like that occasionally on the wounded, the ones who knew they were goners. He’d lost all his friends at once, all these beautifully trained tough guys, invincible warriors, and some enemy mortars had caught a break and they were all dead. Oh, and I just found out why: one of our Vietnamese was a spy, and the whole mission was a setup, a joke. Ha-ha. I had to pull him, to yell at him that we needed to get back to the village and evacuate it, that they’d send the bombers in.
“So then he got it and we ran like madmen down the mountain. By that time the B-52s had probably already taken off from U Tapao in Thailand, maybe a forty-five-minute flight for an Arc Light mission, six planes, thirty tons of bombs per plane. They fly so high you can’t see or hear them, and you only know it’s happening when the bombs start to explode. We heard the first blasts when we were still in the forest, and when we came out into the open the whole area was full of smoke and dust and this overwhelming, colossal noise. Skelly kept going, just dived into the dust, and I figured later he must’ve got knocked down by the edge of the blast from a five-hundred-pound bomb. But I thought he’d been killed for sure, that I was alone on a mountain in Laos.”
“What did you do?”
“I lay flat on the ground and cried and pissed in my pants. After it was over, I got up and found Skelly. He was bleeding from lots of little wounds and he was concussed, completely out of it. The village was gone, not even ruins, a field of craters, and … well, four, five hundred people—it’s hard to actually dispose of that much human flesh, so there were pieces, gobbets, I guess you could call them, all over where the village had been and on the outskirts where we were. Mostly unidentifiable, like in a butcher’s shop, but also the occasional piece where you could tell what it was despite the dust—a shoulder and part of an arm or a torso with breasts on it or a little kid’s head. Some of it was stuck on Skelly and I picked it off him, bits of people he’d known and loved, courtesy of the USAF. Well, mistakes happen, what can you do? There it is, as we all used to say in the war. I kept saying it like a mantra all that first day when I had Skelly on my back and was walking to Vietnam.”
“How far was it?” asked the good reporter. She made no sympathetic comment, for which he was grateful, although he wished he could see her face. Should he light a candle? No, he had to have the dark to tell this.
“A little over twenty-five klicks,” he said after a longish pause. “I was heading for a Special Forces camp I knew they had at Quang Loc. I had a compass but no maps, no radio, of course, no weapons but my sidearm and Skelly’s K submachine gun, a couple of C-rats, and four canteens of water. Also I had to actually walk across the Ho Chi Minh Trail and find my way through thousands of active PAVN and Vietcong.”
“And you survived, obviously. The two of you survived.”
“Our bodies survived,” he corrected. “Even that was ridiculous, when you think about it. I was in pretty good shape and I’m big enough, but I certainly wasn’t a SOG elite soldier, and Skelly was in and out of consciousness. The route led straight through a dozen miles of thick rain forest. I couldn’t use the trails and I had to pick the steepest routes, because those were where I had the best chance of avoiding patrols.” He stopped.
“Go on,” she said.
“I can’t,” he replied. “I’m starting to sweat and I’m getting nauseous. I think this was a mistake. The only thing I can think about now is getting away from here and finding a small white room and spending the rest of my life in it, never talking to anyone.”
“Yes, but you’re here now and you can’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have a firm grip on your sexual organ.”
He laughed, and his tension faded a little. “Yes, the classic barrier to male flight. Okay, think of the hardest thing you ever did—physically, I mean—and up it by a factor of ten. After the first day, I was wiped and we’d made it maybe two klicks. It was like walking through sheets of drywall; every foot of vines and bushes and bamboo had to be hacked through with Skelly’s Ka-Bar knife. I’d dump him on the ground and make a five-meter tunnel and then go back and pick him up and lay him down and take a drink of water and start hacking again. And it wasn’t even hacking, really, because I couldn’t make any noise; I was terrified of being found and shut up in a little cage. I had to slowly slice through every fucking branch. At the end of the second day I sat down to die. It is simply a technically impossible feat to cut your way through twenty-five kilometers of triple-canopy highland Asian forest with a knife, while carrying an unconscious man, on essentially no food or water.”
“But you did it.”
He swallowed several times and willed calm upon his heaving belly. “No, that’s just the point. I didn’t do it. I had supernatural help.”
“What! You’re saying God made a miraculous tunnel through the forest?”
“More or less. I was lying there waiting to die, with my nose and mouth covered in insects, bitten all to hell, and I heard a voice in my head that wasn’t me. If this has never happened to you, it’s impossible to convey the reality of it, but there it was, as real as your voice coming to me in this dark room.”
“So you’re saying that God, after letting however many millions of people die in that miserable war, just decided that Richard Marder and Patrick Skelly were indispensable in his great scheme of things?”
“Yeah, I am. I’m sorry if it doesn’t make journalistic sense, but that’s how it was. Anyway, I got up and started to cut again, and somehow it was easier. It was like I was out of my exhausted body; I could see the patterns of the vines and shit blocking our way, and I found myself passing through them with the bare minimum of effort. I felt like I wasn’t alone there in my tunnel—there were beings in there with me. And when we got to the bottoms, I just knew when and where to cross the streams. And the roads. I actually crossed branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Patrols and convoys went by us and no one ever saw us. The voice told me when to move and when to stay still. After that we only moved at night, and I was guided through the night too. I didn’t step on a mine, or fall off a dike, and again no one saw us. It must have taken us a week. And then I was sleeping, or not really sleeping but in a deeper trance. I have a sense of what I was seeing in the trance,
but I don’t have words to describe it, only this being supported by powers.
“And then I felt that they were leaving me and I cried out, like don’t leave, don’t leave me! It turned out I was actually yelling, because I woke to find a hand across my mouth. It was Skelly. He’d come to sometime in the night, and he was the old Skelly again. He asked me where we were and I said I thought we were about two klicks southeast of route 14 and if we hit the road where I thought we would, we’d be less than five klicks south of Quang Loc. He just nodded like this was a routine report. He told me I looked like shit and that he’d get me back alive, and not to worry. And it was like he’d been in charge and he’d been carrying me all that way. I was so glad not to be responsible anymore that I just fell into it and that was the story we told when we ran into a patrol out of the Special Forces base later that day. He got a Silver Star for that, by that way.”
“And you never told him the truth.”
“What, that angels had guided me through the jungle? No, as a matter of fact I didn’t mention that part, because everyone in the army knew for a fact that if a SOG operative and an air force puke had to get out of a situation, it’d be the SOG guy who led the way, eating snakes and being the total warrior that he was. And so I left it at that and later … it’s hard to explain, I sort of sank into passivity. My dad got me a job with his sister in the restaurant she owned up by Columbia, and I fell into a marriage with a girl I liked well enough but didn’t really love, and so life went on, until one day I woke up and there was a voice telling me, go to Mexico. Which I did, and I met Chole and had that life. It was Chole who made me go back to school. I got a degree from General Studies at Columbia and went to work in a big publishing house and worked my way up through the editorial ranks.”
The Return: A Novel Page 34
