by Robert Stone
“You see,” Heath said, “I’m the wrath of God in my tiny way. I don’t go seeking out the misguided and the perverse, not at all. Those afflicted find me. I’m the shark on the bottom of the lagoon. You have to sink a damn long way before you get to me. When you do, I’m waiting.”
“That’s very good,” Holliwell said. “But don’t you think your clients may be out of luck with their investment here?”
“Very possibly. Still, they can’t say we didn’t try, can they?”
“No, they can’t.”
“It’s a war, Holliwell. Goes on all over the world. And, I suppose, in the long run the other side will win it. When they do, like all winners, they’ll find that things aren’t the way they’d planned and it didn’t turn out quite right. Then in a thousand years it’ll all be ancient history if there’s anyone to read it.” Mr. Heath pulled a long face. “But,” he said, “am I downhearted? No! The wicked flee when no man pursueth but the righteous are bold, Holliwell.”
He stood with Soyer on the colonnaded sidewalk in front of the Municipalidad, waiting for the dispatch of a jeep to take them up the coast. Military runners went back and forth between the Guardia station and the troop formations drawn up in the darkness of the square. The only lights to be seen in town now were the headlights of military vehicles and the yellow-faced flashlights of the Guardia MP’s who were directing the traffic.
Around the plaza itself, the troops awaited their orders in an uncanny silence that was broken only by the shouted instructions of an officer or the sullen, deep-throated uno-dos-tres of a platoon sounding off by number. From time to time one could hear the rhythmic tramp of a rifle squad moving at the double, as units separated themselves from the main body of troops to take their places in one of the trucks that were parked by the dozen in front of the cathedral steps. There were mounted troops as well; Holliwell could not see them but he could hear the clatter of shod horses’ hooves on the stones of Alvarado’s single paved street. Officers in braided high-crowned caps were appearing now, exchanging abrazos in the street—and a few civilians in guayaberas who looked like heroin dealers from the Bronx. The officers and their civilian associates seemed elated. None of them paid any attention to Soyer or Holliwell.
This tight deployment of many soldiers in a small closed space made Holliwell uneasy; his uneasiness was the result of previous conditioning. For the moment the fortunes of the Guardia Nacional were Holliwell’s fortunes—he had a side at last. He was fairly certain that from somewhere in the darkness beyond the occupied square he was being watched. He thought of the girl with braided hair and of the stare she had fixed upon him. From time to time he would see the same stare quicken in the eyes of a passing Guardia private; always it would fade when he met it, to be replaced by blankness, nada—or a guilty smile.
Presently two jeeps pulled up at the sidewalk where Holliwell and Soyer waited. Campos was in the lead jeep beside the driver; the escort carried four troopers and a 7.62. When Holliwell climbed into the rear seat, Soyer walked around to the passenger side for a minute’s guarded conversation with the lieutenant, then swung in beside Holliwell.
“Your nun is in her nunnery,” Soyer told him. “Campos has the place surrounded by Guardia but they’ll wait for us in deference to your nationality.” He took an automatic rifle from the rack behind the front seat and cradled the stock on his knee.
“You’re responsible for her,” Holliwell said.
“No,” said Soyer. “You are.”
The jeeps started up; a few deserted corners turned and they were climbing the tangled hill over the river. The road narrowed and descended into mangrove swamp and they could hear the sound of the ocean over their engines. Clear of the swamp they hit the beach strip. The darkness beyond their headlights was scented and absolute.
When they had driven for about twenty minutes, Holliwell found himself listening to the sound of a motorcycle somewhere ahead of them. The machine seemed to be holding a constant distance, leading them at their own speed. He began to sense the phantoms of Route Three, that paragon of war trails through night’s jungle. The escort jeep behind them followed close. Too close, Holliwell thought. At night in the jungle one always had a side to be on.
The report of the first mortar was so inevitable that Holliwell failed, in the first seconds, to take note of it. It had struck a good distance inland, far enough so that the charge echoed in the folds of the mountain wall. There was a second, then another, then the rattle of a machine gun—three long bursts. From a different quarter altogether came the single-minded wack wack wack of a rifleman with a target. The firing came in waves of varying frequency but once it started it did not stop. None of it was very close by. Through it all, Holliwell could hear the steady drone of the motorcycle ahead.
He turned toward Soyer but could not see his face for the darkness, only that the Cuban had drawn his rifle closer and that his right hand rested over the trigger housing. Lieutenant Campos turned around in the front seat as though he were about to consult with Soyer, but then turned back again to face the road in silence. Holliwell, behind the driver, had sobered to a state of tortured alert. The dreadful visit they were about had receded from his mind; he stared into the shifting dark beside the road as though he could force its secrets to his senses. He noticed that the motorcycle preceding them was no longer to be heard.
As soon as he saw the mangrove log loom across the road at the extent of the headlights’ scan he knew exactly what would come. The log blocked the road at the neck of a curve; it had never been there before. Thinking back on it just afterwards, he would convulse in horror at the time he allowed to pass between his first sighting of the barrier and his leap into darkness. But in fact there had not been much; he was rolling on the packed sand and crawling for cover well before the two jeeps pulled up short and the machine guns opened up from the bend and from the inland side of the road approaching it.
The ambush had the form of an L, as he had somehow known it would. The L’s short horizontal bar enclosed the turn parallel with the barricade, the vertical bar lined the dozen feet or so in which the vehicles would have to decelerate. The gunners had nothing but time, Holliwell thought, frantically elbowing his way over the soft sand. They would have opened up before the tires stopped rolling; before them, two excellent Detroit jeeps, packed together immobile and neatly defined in their own light like a pair of squid cooked in the ink.
There was fuck-all cover on the open beach. Pressing himself into the contours of the sand he listened wild-eyed to the devouring enfilade, the shells ringing on metal, the screams. There was no moon, the stars were faint and cold in a sky ablaze with lights and colors from behind his own eyes. In that hallucinatory darkness, he could not tell sea from shoreline or even distinguish the outline of palm groves. It seemed to him, when he thought over the instants just past, that at least one other passenger had jumped for it—it would have been seconds after his own dive. Whoever it was, if he had escaped, would be with him in the darkness now, out between the ocean and the hostiles.
The shooting on the road had stopped and he raised his head to look over his shoulder. One of the jeeps was burning; he saw a figure outlined for a moment against the flames. Men were laughing, speaking in excited voices. Two short bursts sounded—they were not taking prisoners that evening. Then the voices grew fainter as the ambush party retired, inland, toward the higher ground.
Holliwell crawled a little farther from the road and then stood up cautiously. He was about fifteen yards from the water’s edge. For a moment he stood still and listened hard—but he could hear no movement nearby, only the small waves laving the shore and the intermittent gunfire. He was alone and lost, in outer darkness without friend or faction. It was a frightening place—the point he had been working toward since the day he had come south. It was his natural, self-appointed place.
He hunkered down by the water’s edge and tried to decide on a course. He could not go back to town, both sides would be hunting him
there, and now that there was blood upon the ground, explanations would not be suffered nor bargains struck. He might try to hide in the bush, where there were tiny plantation villages. But that would be unwise, he thought. They would know him for a survivor of the ambush. He would go the way of Cole.
At last he decided that he would walk to the mission. It seemed to him he had some claim on companionship there. He would tell her what had happened if he reached her in time, and if she could not or would not help him and he remained free—he might somehow lose himself among the other foreigners scavenging in the ruins there. He struck out along the shoreline.
He would not remember how long he walked before he came to the buildings at Las Ruinas. They had arranged hurricane lamps on the front steps in the form of a cross and these lights were the first he had seen since leaving Alvarado. He had followed the faint broiling glow of the tame surf, wetting his shoes, sinking, at places, to the calf in soft sand. On his left, the dark ocean played out its infinity of time; inland, men played out their lives in a less patient darkness. Where he walked was no-man’s-land. Sometimes he felt free; at other times fear overcame him, waves of fear, congruous with the rise and fall of firing. He stopped only once—to watch two helicopters swing in tandem along the mountain slope, made visible for a moment in their searchlights.
In the cover of the mission boathouse, he stopped and tried to spy out the state of things. Thin lines of light showed behind the fastened shutters of the dispensary wing but the rest of the building was dark beyond the span of lamps along the stairs. He could hear voices and laboring footsteps on the veranda. The arc of a tossed cigarette appeared for a second at the window of the priest’s apartment. There were two dark pickup trucks parked along the road out front.
He moved away from the boathouse and had started to advance along the beach when he saw two dead men at the water’s edge. One lay face up with his arms outstretched as though he had rolled off the dock; his chest was destroyed. The other was on his knees, a bloodied face half buried in sand. The two dead men wore the helmets and camouflage fatigues of the Guardia. Holliwell paused for a moment and then walked on. He would be visible from the building now. He took the chance.
Shadows appeared suddenly from the tree line by the mission garden. Someone shouted. A burst of machine-gun fire exploded from the edge of the veranda and he threw himself to the sand. The firing was in his direction but aimed high. Armed men were advancing from the woods around the garden, but they were civilians, he saw, not Guardia.
“May!” he shouted. He could feel a line of guns turn on him.
A lone man in dark slacks walked from the road and across the beach toward him.
“That you, Holliwell?” the man asked. It was Father Egan.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” the priest said.
Holliwell stood up and brushed the sand from his shirt.
“Want to talk with the boss?” Egan asked. “Come on.”
As he walked with Egan to the mission steps, sentries tracked him with their weapons. On the steps themselves, men in Guardia uniforms emerged from the darkness of the veranda, carrying cardboard boxes. They were unarmed and without helmets; thus dispossessed, they did not seem to be Guardia any longer but only frightened young Indians. They carried their burdens in silence, moving carefully through the cruciform arrangement of lamps to stack the cardboard boxes in the parked trucks.
Holliwell looked up through the lamps’ glare and saw Justin at the top of the steps. Her hands were thrust in the pockets of her white smock; he could not quite see her face. For the first time since he had met her she seemed at ease. After a moment she came down to him.
“What happened?”
“They took me out of the hotel about seven o’clock. To the justicia. They have thousands of troops in Alvarado.” He brushed a loose hand toward the invisible mountains. “They’ve got choppers.”
“I know,” she said. She turned partly away, pivoting on a hip, her hands still in her pockets. He understood that she would not want to face him now and be undone, and have her pride of battle spoiled by intimacy with him, thoughts of the morning. “How did you get away?”
“We were coming … they were coming out to get you. We were ambushed.”
“Campos?” she asked.
“He was there. I think they got him.”
She gave a whispered gasp. There was a roll of automatic fire from the direction of town.
“I tried to get out,” Holliwell said. “Alvarado was closed down by noon. They just took me in.”
“You talked to them.”
“I was under some compulsion. I tried to make a deal with them. They told me you wouldn’t be hurt.”
“You talked to them.” There were men with guns watching them from both sides of the building as they spoke. Justin sighed and put her foot on the bottom step. “Oh, Frank. You betrayed me then, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Holliwell said. “I didn’t think so.”
“But you did,” she said calmly. “Imagine not knowing.”
“If you’d been there you might think better of me. Of course, it hardly matters now.”
“Doesn’t it matter to you?”
“What matters to me isn’t important,” he said.
He was suddenly impatient with her. Watching her stand cool and brave amid her war, he had been awed and moved at the measure of her courage and her delusion. He felt envy and admiration and love for her. He considered the tremor of concern he detected in her voice as she asked after his conscience unworthy of the moment.
“When I decide what happened,” he said, “I’ll decide to live with it.”
Apparently it was his fate to witness popular wars; Vietnam had been a popular war among his radical friends. As a witness to that popular war he had seen people on both sides act bravely and have their moments. Popular wars, thrilling as they might be to radicals, were quite as shitty as everything else but like certain thrilling, unperfected operas—like everything else, in fact—they had their moments. People’s moments did not last long.
“You can’t stay here,” she told him. “We’re pulling out of here when we get the trucks loaded.”
“I can’t go back. I was seen at the justicia by your friends.”
“My friends,” she said, “my friends will be where we’re going.”
“I hope so, May, for your sake. The government’s out in force here and you may not win this round. They claim you’re surrounded.”
She had started up the steps, Holliwell following. As she stooped to pick up one of the hurricane lamps she glanced at him over her shoulder; on her face in the flickering light was the immanence of a smile.
“We were never surrounded. We disarmed the Guardia force that came out.” She raised her chin toward the defanged troopers loading the trucks. “We killed some,” she said when she had turned away.
In the dispensary, the lights were on behind the shutters. Beds had been crowded to one end of the room; against two of the walls sat a dozen or so more men in Guardia fatigues. Across the long room, two black Caribs in sport shirts and Guardia helmets watched the prisoners with Uzi’s across their knees.
The bed in which Holliwell and Justin had made their gesture at love was occupied by a dark, hard-faced young man who was sitting up in it, smoking. His leg was wrapped in clean bandages, there was an anchor tattoo on his left arm. Father Egan, who had followed them up, sat down on the foot of the young man’s bed. Holliwell looked about the room and his gaze fell on two small bottles of the medicinal brandy which were under the bed behind Egan’s feet. Happily and without ceremony, he reached down past the priest’s soiled, sandaled feet to grab them. Father Egan sighed.
He opened one of the brandy bottles and put the second in his trousers pocket. Justin watched him drink. He looked back at her, thinking to see her look away. He remembered now how her eyes had no edge to them, behind them she was naked.
“Well,”
he said, when he had finished drinking, “a terrible beauty is born.”
She held his look steadily, then her sober fateful expression broke into a bright young smile, unexpected and unashamed.
“Isn’t it something?” she said.
“Yes, it is.”
“What am I supposed to do with you now?” she asked. “You’re in it.”
“I guess that’s not your problem. I’m not in it with you.”
“You’ll just have to keep talking, won’t you? Explaining yourself.”
“If I had explanations left,” Holliwell said, “I would make all of them to you. If it mattered.”
“And I would believe them, Frank. You could get me to believe them all, if it mattered. But I’m the only one who would.”
“I’m going to lose another war all by myself,” he said. “This is the second.”
Justin looked at the floor while he emptied the brandy bottle. Seconds passed before she spoke.
“You’re a good loser,” she said. “You’re a lucky man. You’ll live longer than you deserve if you help me out.”
“So now we’re tough guys.”
“That’s right,” she said, and smiled a little. Her smiles were like mercy. “We have to be tough guys now. I’m going to give you the mission’s boat. This kid”—she nodded toward the wounded young man—“is named Pablo and he’s American.” Pablo in the bed mumbled something inaudible and tried to smile. “I want you to get him down to the boat and get the two of you out to sea. Get clear of the coast before daylight.”
Holliwell looked at the young man on the bed and back at Justin.
“Would we really have a chance?”
“I think you’d have a very good chance,” she said.
Pablo stirred himself.
“That’s the truth,” he said. “The weather’s nothing but beautiful. I could get a good sound boat mostly to Florida.”
“Inside of a day,” Justin said, “you should run across one of the steamers coming up from the canal. We can see them right off the beach here every day of the week. If you meet rough weather you can turn south and if you still have enough gas you might make Limón in Costa Rica.”
