Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  He continued to win. The people who had congratulated him became disgruntled and drifted off, and when there was only a handful of players left, the woman closed down the game. A grimy street kid materialized from the shadows and began dismantling the equipment. Unbolting the wire cage, unplugging the microphone, boxing up the plastic cubes, stuffing it all into a burlap sack. The woman moved out from behind the stall and leaned against one of the roof poles. Half-smiling, she cocked her head, appraising Mingolla, and then—just as the silence between them began to get prickly—she said, “My name’s Debora.”

  “David.” Mingolla felt as awkward as a fourteen-year-old; he had to resist the urge to jam his hands into his pockets and look away. “Why’d you cheat?” he asked; in trying to cover his nervousness, he said it too loudly and it sounded like an accusation.

  “I wanted to get your attention,” she said. “I’m…interested in you. Didn’t you notice?”

  “I didn’t want to take it for granted.”

  She laughed. “I approve! It’s always best to be cautious.”

  He liked her laughter; it had an easiness that made him think she would celebrate the least good thing.

  Three men passed by arm in arm, singing drunkenly. One yelled at Debora, and she responded with an angry burst of Spanish. Mingolla could guess what had been said, that she had been insulted for associating with an American. “Maybe we should go somewhere,” he said. “Get off the streets.”

  “After he’s finished.” She gestured at the boy, who was now taking down the string of light bulbs. “It’s funny,” she said. “I have the gift myself, and I’m usually uncomfortable around anyone else who has it. But not with you.”

  “The gift?” Mingolla thought he knew what she was referring to, but was leery about admitting to it.

  “What do you call it? ESP?”

  He gave up the idea of denying it. “I never put a name on it,” he said.

  “It’s strong in you. I’m surprised you’re not with Psicorps.”

  He wanted to impress her, to cloak himself in a mystery equal to hers. “How do you know I’m not?”

  “I could tell.” She pulled a black purse from behind the counter. “After drug therapy there’s a change in the gift, in the way it comes across. It doesn’t feel as hot, for one thing.” She glanced up from the purse. “Or don’t you perceive it that way? As heat.”

  “I’ve been around people who felt hot to me,” he said. “But I didn’t know what it meant.”

  “That’s what it means…sometimes.” She stuffed some bills into her purse. “So, why aren’t you with Psicorps?”

  Mingolla thought back to his first interview with a Psicorps agent: a pale, balding man with the innocent look around the eyes that some blind people have. While Mingolla had talked, the agent had fondled the ring Mingolla had given him to hold, paying no mind to what was being said, and had gazed off distractedly, as if listening for echoes. “They tried hard to recruit me,” Mingolla said. “But I didn’t see much point. Those guys think they’re mental wizards or something, but all they do is predict stuff, and they’re wrong half the time. And I was scared of the drugs, too. I heard they had bad side-effects.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know…I heard they did bad stuff to your head, changed your personality.”

  “You’re lucky it was voluntary,” she said. “Here they just snap you up.”

  The boy said something to her; he swung the burlap sack over his shoulder, and after a rapidfire exchange of Spanish he ran off toward the river. The crowds were still thick, but more than half the stalls had shut down; those that remained open looked—with their thatched roofs and strung lights and beshawled women—like crude nativity scenes ranging the darkness. Beyond the stalls, neon signs winked on and off: a chaotic menagerie of silver eagles and crimson spiders and indigo dragons. Watching them burn and vanish, Mingolla experienced a wave of dizziness. Things were starting to appear disconnected as they had at the Club Demonio.

  “Don’t you feel well?” she asked.

  “I’m just tired.”

  She turned him to face her, put her hands on his shoulders. “No,” she said. “It’s something else.”

  The weight of her hands and the smell of her perfume helped to steady him. “There was an assault on the firebase a few days ago,” he said. “It’s still with me a little, y’know.”

  She gave his shoulders a squeeze and stepped back. “Maybe I can do something.” She said this with such gravity, he thought she must have something specific in mind. “How’s that?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you at dinner…that is, if you’re buying.” She took his arm, jollying him. “You owe me that much, don’t you think, after all your good luck?”

  “Why aren’t you with Psicorps?” he asked as they walked.

  She didn’t answer immediately, keeping her head down, nudging a scrap of cellophane with her toe. They were moving along an uncrowded street, bordered on the left by the river—a channel of sluggish black lacquer—and on the right by the windowless rear walls of some bars. Overhead, behind a latticework of supports, a neon lion shed a baleful green nimbus. “I was in school in Miami when they started testing here,” she said at last. “And after I came home, my family got on the wrong side of Department Six. You know Department Six?”

  “I’ve heard some stuff.”

  “Sadists don’t make efficient bureaucrats,” she said. “There were a lot of people taken into the prison the same day we were. We were all supposed to be tested, but the guards started beating people, and everything got confused. No one was sure who’d been tested and who hadn’t. It ended up that some of us were passed through without the tests.”

  Their footsteps crunched in the dirt; husky jukebox voices cried out for love from the next street over. “What happened?” Mingolla asked.

  “To my family?” She shrugged. “Dead. No one ever bothered to confirm it, but it wasn’t necessary. Confirmation, I mean.” She went a few steps in silence. “As for me…” A muscle bunched at the corner of her mouth. “I did what I had to.”

  He was tempted to ask for specifics, but thought better of it. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then kicked himself for having made such a banal comment.

  They passed a bar lorded over by a grinning red-and-purple neon ape. Mingolla wondered if these glowing figures had meaning for guerrillas with binoculars in the hills: burned-out tubes signaling times of attack or troop movements. He cocked an eye toward Debora. She didn’t look despondent as she had a second before, and that accorded with his impression that her calmness was a product of self-control, that her emotions were strong but held in tight check and let out only for exercise. From the river came a solitary splash, some cold fleck of life surfacing briefly, then returning to its long, ignorant glide through the darkness…and his life no different really, though maybe less graceful. How strange it was to be walking beside this woman who gave off heat like a candle flame, with earth and sky blended into a black gas, and neon totems standing guard overhead.

  “Shit,” said Debora under her breath.

  It surprised him to hear her curse. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she said wearily. “Just ‘shit.’” She pointed ahead and quickened her pace. “Here we are.”

  The restaurant was a working-class place that occupied the ground floor of a hotel: a two-story building of yellow concrete block with a buzzing Fanta sign hung above the entrance. Hundreds of moths swarmed about the sign, flickering white against the darkness, and in front of the steps stood a group of teenage boys who were throwing knives at an iguana. The iguana was tied by its hind legs to the step railing. It had amber eyes, a hide the color of boiled cabbage, and was digging its claws into the dirt and arching its neck like a pint-size dragon about to take flight. As Mingolla and Debora walked up, one of the boys scored a hit in the iguana’s tail and it flipped high into the air, shaking loose the knife. The boys passed around a bottle of rum to celebrate.r />
  Except for the waiter—a pudgy young man leaning beside a door that opened into a smoke-filled kitchen—the place was empty. Glaring overhead lights shined up the grease spots on the plastic tablecloths and made the uneven thicknesses of the yellow paint appear to be dripping. The concrete floor was freckled with dark stains that Mingolla discovered to be the remains of insects. The food turned out to be decent, however, and Mingolla shoveled down a plateful of chicken and rice before Debora had half-finished hers. She ate delicately, chewing each bite a long time, and he had to carry the conversation. He told her about New York, his painting, how a couple of galleries had shown interest even though he was just a student. He compared his work to Rauschenberg, to Silvestre. Not as good, of course. Not yet. He had the notion that everything he told her—no matter its irrelevance to the moment—was securing the relationship, establishing subtle ties: he pictured the two of them enwebbed in a network of luminous threads that acted as conduits for their attraction. He could feel her heat more strongly than ever, and he wondered what it would be like to make love to her, to be swallowed by that perception of heat. The instant he wondered this, she glanced up and smiled, as if sharing the thought. He wanted to ratify his sense of intimacy, to tell her something he had told no one else, and so—having only one important secret—he told her about the ritual.

  She laid down her fork and gave him a penetrating look. “You can’t really believe that,” she said.

  “I know it sounds—”

  “Ridiculous,” she broke in. “That’s how it sounds.”

  “It’s the truth,” he said defiantly.

  She picked up her fork again, pushed around some grains of rice. “How is it for you,” she said, “when you have a premonition? I mean, what happens? Do you have dreams, hear voices?”

  “Sometimes I just know things,” he said, taken aback by her abrupt change of subject. “And sometimes I see pictures. It’s like with a TV that’s not working right. Fuzziness at first, then a sharp image.”

  “With me, it’s dreams. And hallucinations. I don’t know what else to call them.” Her lips thinned; she sighed, appearing to have reached some decision. “When I first saw you, just for a second, you were wearing battle gear. There were inputs on the gauntlets, cables attached to the helmet. The faceplate was shattered, and your face…it was pale, bloody.” She put her hand out to cover his. “What I saw was very clear, David. You can’t go back.”

  He hadn’t described artilleryman’s gear to her, and no way could she have seen it. Shaken, he said, “Where am I gonna go?”

  “Panama,” she said. “I can help you get there.”

  She suddenly snapped into focus. You could find her, dozens like her, in any of the R and R towns. Preaching pacifism, encouraging desertion. Do-gooders, most with guerrilla connections. And that, he realized, must be how she had known about his gear. She had probably gathered information on the different types of units in order to lend authenticity to her dire pronouncements. His opinion of her wasn’t diminished; on the contrary, it went up a notch. She was risking her life by talking to him. But her mystery had been dimmed.

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Why not? Don’t you believe me?”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference if I did.”

  “I…”

  “Look,” he said. “This friend of mine, he’s always trying to convince me to desert, and there’ve been times I wanted to. But it’s just not in me. My feet won’t move that way. Maybe you don’t understand, but that’s how it is.”

  “This childish thing that you do with your two friends,” she said after a pause. “That’s what’s holding you here, isn’t it?”

  “It isn’t childish.”

  “That’s exactly what it is. Like a child walking home in the dark and thinking that if he doesn’t look at the shadows, nothing will jump out at him.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “No, I suppose I don’t.” Angry, she threw her napkin down on the table and stared intently at her plate as if reading some oracle from the chicken bones.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” said Mingolla.

  “I have to go,” she said coldly.

  “Because I won’t desert?”

  “Because of what’ll happen if you don’t.” She leaned toward him, her voice burred with emotion. “Because knowing what I do about your future, I don’t want to wind up in bed with you.”

  Her intensity frightened him. Maybe she had been telling the truth. But he dismissed the possibility. “Stay,” he said. “We’ll talk some more about it.”

  “You wouldn’t listen.” She picked up her purse and got to her feet.

  The waiter ambled over and laid the check beside Mingolla’s plate; he pulled a plastic bag filled with marijuana from his apron pocket and dangled it in front of Mingolla. “Gotta get her in the mood, man,” he said. Debora railed at him in Spanish. He shrugged and moved off, his slow-footed walk an advertisement for his goods.

  “Meet me tomorrow then,” said Mingolla. “We can talk more about it tomorrow.”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you gimme a break?” he said. “This is all coming down pretty fast, y’know. I get here this afternoon, meet you, and an hour later you’re saying, ‘Death is in the cards, and Panama’s your only hope.’ I need some time to think. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have a different attitude.”

  Her expression softened, but she shook her head, no.

  “Don’t you think it’s worth it?”

  She lowered her eyes, fussed with the zipper of her purse a second, and let out a rueful hiss. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “How ’bout the pier on this side? ’Round noon.”

  She hesitated. “All right.” She came around to his side of the table, bent down, and brushed her lips across his cheek. He tried to pull her close and deepen the kiss, but she slipped away. He felt giddy, overheated. “You really gonna be there?” he asked.

  She nodded but seemed troubled, and she didn’t look back before vanishing down the steps.

  Mingolla sat awhile, thinking about the kiss, its promise. He might have stayed even longer, but three drunken soldiers staggered in and began knocking over chairs, giving the waiter a hard time. Annoyed, Mingolla went to the door and stood taking in hits of humid air. Moths were loosely constellated on the curved plastic of the Fanta sign, trying to get next to the bright heat inside it, and he had a sense of relation, of sharing their yearning for the impossible. He started down the steps but was brought up short. The teenage boys had gone; however, their captive iguana lay on the bottom step, bloody and unmoving. Bluish gray strings spilled from a gash in its throat. It was such a clear sign of bad luck, Mingolla went back inside and checked into the hotel upstairs.

  The hotel corridors stank of urine and disinfectant. A drunken Indian with his fly unzipped and a bloody mouth was pounding on one of the doors. As Mingolla passed him, he bowed and made a sweeping gesture, a parody of welcome. Then he went back to his pounding. Mingolla’s room was a windowless cell five feet wide and coffin-length, furnished with a sink and a cot and a chair. Cobwebs and dust clotted the glass of the transom, reducing the hallway light to a cold bluish white glow. The walls were filmy with more cobwebs, and the sheets were so dirty that they appeared to have a pattern. He lay down and closed his eyes, thinking of Debora. About ripping off that red dress and giving her a vicious screwing. How she’d cry out. That both made him ashamed and gave him a hard-on. He tried to think about making love to her tenderly. But tenderness, it seemed, was beyond him. He went flaccid. Jerking off wasn’t worth the effort, he decided. He started to unbutton his shirt, remembered the sheets, and figured he’d be better off with his clothes on.

  In the blackness behind his lids he began to see explosive flashes, and within those flashes were images of the assault on the Ant Farm. The mist, the tunnels. He blotted them out with the image of Debora’s face, but they kept coming back. Finally he
opened his eyes. Two…no, three fuzzy-looking black stars were silhouetted against the transom. It was only when they began to crawl that he recognized them as spiders. Big ones. He wasn’t usually afraid of spiders, but these particular spiders terrified him. If he hit them with his shoe, he’d break the glass and they’d eject him from the hotel. He didn’t want to kill them with his hands. After a while he sat up, switched on the overhead, and searched under the cot. There weren’t any more spiders. He lay back down, feeling shaky and short of breath. Wishing he could talk to someone, hear a familiar voice. “It’s okay,” he said to the dark air. But that didn’t help. And for a long time, until he felt secure enough to sleep, he watched the three black stars crawling across the transom, moving toward the center, touching one another, moving apart, never making any real progress, never straying from their area of bright confinement, their universe of curdled, frozen light.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the morning Mingolla crossed to the west bank and walked toward the airbase. It was already hot, but the air still held a trace of freshness and the sweat that beaded on his forehead felt clean and healthy. White dust was settling along the gravel road, testifying to the recent passage of traffic; past the town and the cutoff that led to the uncompleted bridge, high walls of vegetation crowded close to the road, and from within them he heard monkeys and insects and birds: sharp sounds that enlivened him, making him conscious of the play of his muscles. About halfway to the base he spotted six Guatemalan soldiers coming out of the jungle, dragging a couple of bodies; they tossed them onto the hood of their jeep, where two other bodies were lying. Drawing near, Mingolla saw that the dead were naked children, each with a neat hole in his back. He had intended to walk on past, but one of the soldiers—a gnomish copper-skinned man in dark blue fatigues—blocked his path and demanded to check his papers. All the soldiers gathered around to study the papers, whispering, turning them sideways, scratching their heads. Used to such hassles, Mingolla paid them no attention and looked at the dead children.