“All you need to think about is helping me muck. Then you go to bed, sleep lying down, okay?”
“Listen to this, now she tells me how to sleep.”
Hannah folded her arms.
“I don’t muck,” he concluded after a moment.
Hannah ended the wrangling with a calm “Shut up, Ham.”
“You didn’t hire me to muck, is all I’m saying. That there’s Work’s thing.”
“I’ll muck. You hold the light. I don’t want these cattle woke up if I can help it.”
Hammond broadly yawned and as he did the dim red light fell across his face, exaggerating the cleft in his chin and the dimples thimble-deep and scarlike in his cheeks. His accent was Midwestern. His face was lean, angular; he had a fine, straight, large nose, furrowed brow, a handlebar moustache; roustabout’s muscles, taut and supple, were strung through his legs and arms. It was the darnedest job he’d ever had, this one; but what do you do?—you’re furloughed, as they called it, three weeks from your last job, wander east to see the city sights knowing that a three-week furlough generally means unemployment when you show up again, and what do you find right there in the paper but a classified ad for ranchhand. You call. You go to the address, still thinking it must be a joke. There’s this fine-looking woman who offers you more than you’re already making. The single requirement is silence, which is something you prefer anyway, silence, solitude, a little rum, screw the banter.
“Bacteria level’s got to be way up. Did you check the moisture level in that forage?”
“Sixty-seven percent.”
“What was the sugar level?”
“Didn’t look, guess as it’d have to be up some.”
One of the cows came awake in its bed of straw. It made a low gulping sound.
“Well, get us a wagon,” Hannah said. “I’m sure we’re going to rile them no matter what we do. We’ve got to clean this place up but fast or we’re going to have a real mess on our hands.”
With a grunt Hammond got out of the chair. “Hey, what time is it, anyways?”
Hey is for horses, she thought—the face on her watch was obscured in the carmine shadows.
She guessed, “Twelve, twelve-thirty.”
“Gee-sus,” Hammond declared. “What a goddamn circus.”
Hannah didn’t hear him. She was worrying whether the silage, manufactured of a green forage wilted to about sixty-five or seventy percent moisture which was created by makeshift humidifiers in the silo, had gone bad. The silage recipe, her own concoction with trace minerals added before they took delivery (always in the middle of the night, always with the chance of being asked by a sleepy policeman what it was they were delivering into the freight elevator—smelled like hay), had worked well over the years, but now had begun to turn rotten enough that by evening the odor, like field-rotting squash or a gulp of maize glutton or barley taken up the nose, hung strong in the air. The watering trough needed to be drained and replenished. Flops like discuses of bronze and hay shafts had to be collected and the slurry discharge of silage liquor flushed. It would take hours to bring the ranch back to normal.
“Goddamn zoo,” he said, and got to work filling a bucket with disinfectant, another with detergent, got the brooms and brushes, connected the hose up. He noticed the bottle of rum—his—on the floor, half-drunk. “Whose been into my? that damn Work.”
“What now?”
“Work’s been into my bash.”
Hannah laughed, though it made her head throb. “No, that was me, I’m sorry.”
“What d’you know next?—saint Hannah drinking bashes? The world is coming to a wicked end.”
“I’ll replace the bottle.”
“No need to replace the bottle, you only drank three-quarters of an inch.” Hammond took his hat off, and his face had a gentler look to it. “You doing all right?”
“I’ll survive,” she said.
“I mean, I don’t mean to be a pain, like.”
Hannah was sympathetic, but seemed to him so solitary, in her smiling, “Of course you mean to be a pain.”
Why hadn’t he and she ever sparked it off? he wondered, taking the shovel, a snow shovel, out of her hands and throwing himself into the heavy work. They were very different people, he knew, when he first came. The surroundings and the labor itself were so peculiar that if it hadn’t been for Hannah at the middle of it all, he knew he’d never have come to the ranch in the first place. She was good. He wasn’t that bad, was he?—maybe not all that bright upstairs, but solid, right? It was Krieger who showed up once who made him understand that she and he would never go that way, down that love way. Some nights it bothered him, most nights not. “Goddamn zoo,” he finished, and rubbed his hands together.
3.
THE SUN ROSE, misbegotten heap of fire, to bursts from .50-caliber machine guns. The air was awash with deaths. When they heard one of the machine guns reporting they knew it was being fired by a boy of sixteen or older. Boys and girls younger than that—twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—were given lesser weapons, the best among them AK-47 automatic rifles, worth twenty-two hundred dollars less than .50-caliber machine guns. An old cowboy herding cattle was seen to fall off his horse; the horse then fell on him. A squadron broke across a narrow clearing where his cattle had been grazing the sweet grass which had grown through the wet season, and wrestled one of the beasts away into heavy brush. The others in the herd went about, muzzles to the ground, as if nothing had happened.
It was past the border and it had gotten worse during the night. A militia of government soldiers had crossed into Honduras in hot pursuit and had gotten themselves cut off by another band of insurgents circling behind, over a long ridge of pitted boulders, to pin them throughout the darker hours before sunrise. There was a shaggy moon and many stars to fight by: a thin worthless aura of light that illuminated the heavens but not earth. The troops that happened to encounter each other at unexpectedly close range were obliged to take aim at yellow bursts of enemy fire the size of pinheads out in the sultry forest. One didn’t smoke for fear of being spotted. One didn’t speak. The enemy was so close one could feel its breath and sense its reciprocal fear. A canteen clanked and the immediate sky was alight with crossfire. An hour of silence and a lone pistol would go off in the dense black.
Then a mortar broke on the dawn’s refulgence to detonate in a murky unmanned swamp area, pinkish in the sunrise. Way off target it boiled up only spattering mud and wet sand, birds and small reptiles, onto trees and stone. The boy who had been given the opportunity to use this wondrous instrument, after ten days of training with other boys, lived through this skirmish (which lasted far into the morning) but was later dressed down by the commander of his patrol. Having deployed three rounds of mortar at a cost of four hundred dollars, over twelve thousand córdobas, he had succeeded in burning out some cedar trees, killing small wildlife and shattering the tympanic membrane in his right ear. He was not worth the cost of his gear and subsistence.
The fat man too faced into the pink sun. The molten image of it danced on the black surface described in his coffee cup, which he soon replaced on its chipped saucer. Sounds from the deadlocked engagement did not reach this garden nor the ears of the fat man or the young girl who sat with him, although it raged—convulsive, in eruptive gusts—not seven miles away.
In the other house Krieger soaped and shaved. One of the few superstitious traits he allowed himself was the way in which he performed this particular task: without variation he began with the razor at his right sideburn, shaved down that cheek, working his way under the chin midway. After, he shaved the left in the same manner, leaving the upper lip for last. He rinsed, put on his shirt and went into the dusty house.
“Finished already?” he noticed as he stepped out onto the roof garden, ducking his head under the low-bowed lintel.
“You look terrible.”
“No sleep again.”
“I don’t understand how it was you managed to hold down a j
ob, in a corporation all those years,” the fat man said. “Suit, tie—look at you now …” raising heavy eyebrows at Krieger’s tiger-striped stockings collapsed in ringlets about his ankles, frail white stretch of hairless flesh above.
“Absurd accident is what, can I have some of that?—pardon me, way I managed it was I never slept. What I did, I slept on Sundays.”
“Like God.”
Krieger frowned: he did not like the fat man’s daughter; he did not like any of the fat man’s children, of which there seemed to be endless numbers. “What?”
The girl answered. “Like God, ‘on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made and he rested on the seventh day from all his work.’ That’s the Bible. My papa makes us all read the Bible every night, don’t you, papa.”
“Like God then sure why not,” Krieger rushed along. “But none of the resources I was securing in His Image for good old Standard Fruit ever much found its way into a Banco Capitalizador account under my name.”
The tiny, shimmery green insect that hovered lit and was slapped at as sole response to Krieger’s complaint—palm came away from forearm: nothing. “You and your money obsession, money money money. You can see how easy money is to get. It doesn’t ultimately pertain to my focus in here.”
“Oh no?”
“Obviously it’s a necessary tool, but only a tool, like a saw or a hammer. But they’re not buildings, not architecture, you can’t live under a hammer.”
“A profound observation,” Krieger said, dryly, and watched the thick-jointed fingers of his colleague drum the table. How was it Krieger had never before noticed that diamond nestled into the fold of skin at the knuckle? its soft shine an irrelevant detail obscured under the first blanket of smoke that shrouded it. Ugly, evil hand. He looked at his own, along the edge of the cup. It was almost the opposite: slender, fine.
“Your cynicism is juvenile and insults my intelligence, this is fine with me you are undertaking this for the profit” (flickered smirk) “and my promise is always good that, after, if you still want to set up within my jurisdiction wherever it may end up being you will be protected and safe. We both know someday it may all come out, some reporter tramping through on assignment to another story altogether and stumbles on the remnants of our fund-raising efforts” (waiting for Krieger to laugh or taunt, and when he didn’t continued) “and you will be happy to know some people in positions of authority who can arrange to block extradition. Then, you will be grateful to the more serious ramifications here than money.”
“Your part of the money.”
“No need to harbor any foolishness against me for godsake. A war zone always has been, is now and foreverafter shall be a perfect place to make money, legitimate money, a lot of money, you’ll get more than you could ever use in three lifetimes down here.”
“It’s too bad I despise your politics.”
“You’ll come around.”
“When Allah dons a yarmulke.”
Abruptly, a shift of wind, and churning was heard. The helicopter scattered a colorful flock of birds. It lifted away from the grass strip to the west where it had touched down for five-ten minutes, and shattered the morning atmosphere, faint as drawn-out afflatus beyond the overgrown garden. In its casement the rough-sawn door of the house very slightly rattled.
Now there’d be some casualties, Krieger thought, and looked with curiosity at the face of the fat man’s daughter which displayed indifference to the racket of artillery fire. Flesh of his flesh, cold-hearted little thing—but it was, to her, routine as church bells on a Sunday morning. Even more routine.
“Id debajo y traed los fósforos,” he instructed his daughter and watched her as she disappeared past the door to find matches for his cigar. To Krieger, “You hear that?”
“Hear what,” as the door shook softly.
“That.”
“Yeah, so what? earthquake,” Krieger smiled.
The fat man smacked his lips, “Earthquake no, that’s either UH-1H Huey, or maybe Mi-8 transport, gunship, I don’t have any idea what they’ve started to ship in to those bastards, earthquake no. This is all starting to wind up, I can smell it in the air.”
“Wind up? wind up! it’s just begun, they haven’t even got underway down here. But it’s not going to make any difference.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said. There is no winning this war.”
“My politics which you despise so much, Krieger, if you believe what you say that things are going to get worse, knowing what a pragmatist you are how could you be stupid enough to despise my politics? You know my politics are bound by the authority of money being placed behind them to win out in the end. You want to end up on the losing side?”
Krieger’s face seemed abbreviated, half there, before he said, “Money? for once you’re wrong about money. You’re the one who doesn’t care about money.”
“I don’t.”
“But here you are saying you think money heats the blood as hot as patriotism does? the kind you see in a young country that’s just blown off a hated pharaoh. And it hardly matters how much you loved him.”
“He was a friend. He’s dead. I’m alive. But money? Yes, money tends to do that. It’s not the way I work, but I see it in others all the time.”
“You’re wrong and I can see why you’re wrong. Because you come from old money, musty money, the kind of tired money that’s cranking this war up, retread money, gringo money.”
“I don’t care how old the money is and I don’t care where it comes from—it buys what’s needed to make things happen that have to happen.”
“You sound like a junior State Department boy on his first company picnic. Forget it, this is a dead end.”
“Why? because it’s the truth?”
“The truth! Talk about dead ends! The truth’s the biggest dead end ever invented. No possibility of further supposition. So, yeah, because you certainly aren’t going to be talked out of thinking that is accurate and anyway I don’t see where it would do a hell of a lot of good trying to convince you otherwise, so … dead end and, fuck it. Off to the wars.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” the fat man finished. “If we didn’t extract them, the community, they’d be disappeared by any number of others anyway. Accidentes personates.”
The girl returned. “I can’t find no matches.”
“No? oh, look here, papa had some in his pocket, forgive papa?” She was too old to pat on the head, although he tried.
4.
HENRY SAW MADELEINE first among those regarding him. Her ruddy face, the sere blue of her irises, pools dried down to mercury. Worry that worked like the furls of a flag over her white forehead. Here was her only movement. At least at first. Her severely angled hair, so dark, marking off strict borders about the face. And behind, as if she were caught in the old painting taped to a wall in the bunkhouse, in the background grottoes, mysterious pewter crags, the wild forests, and at the center of a tiny orchard the Statue of Liberty, yes, the Statue of Liberty itself, dazzlingly bright pink!
No, the Statue proved to be an old inspection tag dangling from one of the steam pipes that ran the length of ceiling; the grottoes, crags, trees, were peeling paint, white layer, gray layer, moss green. At present Lady Liberty fluttered in the balmy, rain-rinsed morning air that entered by the open window.
Henry could smell Maddie on the pillow next to his. The breeze that wafted into the room was shot through with sea salt and diesel. His head felt clear as cold water. His limbs were flush with blood, and were supple. He could hear the city, huge mechanical beast with engines in its belly and for armor fastigiated tops of skyscrapers. It bestirred itself, hurlyburly, beyond. There was a ferocity to the city noise, but benign and in party with Henry’s cheer. He half sat up on his elbows, glanced around the room for Madeleine, but he was alone. He looked at the pillow where she had slept. He put his cheek down on it, breathed in deeply. One of her hairs, soft copper ray, curled
on the case.
The clock read eleven. Henry pushed away the sheets and got up. He stepped into his overalls. There was a rap at the door.
“Maddie?”
The door came open; Hammond.
“Oh, good morning,” Henry faltered.
“Says you, Work.”
Henry hitched the straps of his overalls. Close quarters, bad tempers. It was like this at boxing camp sometimes. He sat on the bed, with his back squared, and pulled on boots over his bare feet, began with concentration to lace them at the hooks.
“Guess you had a pretty good time of it yesterday,” Hammond said. He stared at Henry’s broad back, awaited some response, but as none was forthcoming simply reiterated, “Yeah, pretty good time.”
Hammond had taken several more steps into the room. The door remained open behind. He had never been in this room before last night, when he and Lupi brought Henry down from the silo tower and laid him on the bed. Madeleine thanked them, asked them to leave. Now Hammond scrutinized the room with fresh eyes. Her dress was draped over the painted metal stead at the foot of the bed. Its buttons, flat false-pearl disks, he took as a taunt.
“Wish I’d had me half as good a time.”
Henry finished with his laces, stood up. Even the creaking of the bedsprings remarked the transition from peace and well-being to this.
Hannah had arranged shifts so he and Hammond seldom encountered each other; their primary sense each of the other was gleaned intuitively, through observation of the work accomplished by one when the other was at rest. Henry knew Hammond was capable of honest, hard work, but that recently he had sluffed off.
“What d’you want?” Henry asked, at last.
“Well, by my watch it’s eleven-fifteen. Your shift started three hours and a quarter ago.”
Beneath one of the windows was a footlocker. Henry opened it and fetched from it a pair of heavy suede gloves, blackened and well broken in. “You seen my wife?”
“Your wife? Your wife? Hey, son. First I have to tuck you into bed, then I have to shovel your shit for you, and now you want me to dog your old lady? You’re in trouble if it’s got to that.”
Come Sunday Page 39
