Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  They were scrawny, sun-darkened, lying face-down with their ragged hair hanging a fringe off the hood; their skins were pocked by infected mosquito bites, and the flesh around the bullet holes was ridged up and bruised, judging by their size, Mingolla guessed them to be about ten years old; but then he noticed that one was a girl with a teenage fullness to her buttocks, her breasts squashed against the metal. That made him indignant. They were only wild children who survived by robbing and killing, and the Guatemalan soldiers were only doing their duty: they performed a function comparable to that of the birds that hunted ticks on the hide of a rhinoceros, keeping their American beast pest-free and happy. But it wasn’t right for the children to be laid out like game.

  The soldier gave back Mingolla’s papers. He was now all smiles, and—perhaps in the interest of solidifying Guatemalan-American relations, perhaps because he was proud of his work—he went over to the jeep and lifted the girl’s head by the hair so Mingolla could see her face. “Bandida!” he said, arranging his features into a comical frown. The girl’s face was not unlike the soldier’s, with the same blade of a nose and prominent cheekbones. Fresh blood glistened on her lips, and the faded tattoo of a coiled serpent was centered on her forehead. Her eyes were open, and staring into them—despite their cloudiness—Mingolla felt that he had made a connection, that she was regarding him sadly from somewhere behind those eyes, continuing to die past the point of clinical death. Then an ant crawled out of her nostril, perching on the crimson curve of her lip, and the eyes looked merely vacant. The soldier let her head fall and wrapped his hand in the hair of a second corpse; but before he could lift it, Mingolla turned away and headed down the road toward the airbase.

  There was a row of helicopters lined up at the edge of the landing strip, and walking between them, Mingolla saw the two pilots who had given him a ride from the Ant Farm. They were stripped to shorts and helmets, wearing baseball gloves, and they were playing catch, lofting high flies to each other. Behind them, atop their Sikorsky, a mechanic was fussing with the main rotor housing. The sight of the pilots didn’t disturb Mingolla as it had the previous day; in fact, he found their weirdness somehow comforting. Just then, the ball eluded one of them and bounced Mingolla’s way. He snagged it and flipped it back to the nearer of the pilots, who came loping over and stood pounding the ball into the pocket of his glove. With his black reflecting face and sweaty, muscular torso, he looked like an eager young mutant.

  “How’s she goin’?” he asked. “Seem like you a little tore down this mornin’.”

  “I feel okay,” said Mingolla defensively. “’Course”—he smiled, making light of his defensiveness—“maybe you see something I don’t.”

  The pilot shrugged; the sprightliness of the gesture seemed to convey good humor.

  Mingolla pointed to the mechanic. “You guys broke down, huh?”

  “Just overhaul. We’re goin’ back up early tomorrow. Need a lift?”

  “Naw, I’m here for a week.”

  An eerie current flowed through Mingolla’s left hand, setting up a palsied shaking. It was bad this time, and he jammed the hand into his hip pocket. The olive-drab line of barracks appeared to twitch, to suffer a dislocation and shift farther away; the choppers and jeeps and uniformed men on the strip looked toylike: pieces in a really neat GI Joe Airbase kit. Mingolla’s hand beat against the fabric of his trousers like a sick heart.

  “I gotta get going,” he said.

  “Hang in there,” said the pilot. “You be awright.”

  The words had a flavor of diagnostic assurance that almost convinced Mingolla of the pilot’s ability to know his fate, that things such as fate could be known. “You honestly believe what you were saying yesterday, man?” he asked. “’Bout your helmets? ’Bout knowing the future?”

  The pilot bounced the ball on the concrete, snatched it at the peak of its rebound, and stared down at it. Mingolla could see the seams and brand name reflected on the visor, but nothing of the face behind it, no evidence either of normalcy or deformity. “I get asked that a lot,” said the pilot. “People raggin’ me, y’know. But you ain’t raggin’ me, are you, man?”

  “No,” said Mingolla. “I’m not.”

  “Well,” said the pilot, “it’s this way. We buzz ’round up in the nothin’, and we see shit on the ground, shit nobody else sees. Then we blow that shit away. Been doin’ it like that for ten months, and we’re still alive. Fuckin’ A, I believe it!”

  Mingolla was disappointed. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

  “You hear what I’m sayin’?” asked the pilot. “I mean we’re livin’ goddamn proof.”

  “Uh-huh.” Mingolla scratched his neck, trying to think of a diplomatic response, but thought of none. “Guess I’ll see you.” He started toward the PX.

  “Hang in there, man!” the pilot called after him. “Take it from me! Things gonna be lookin’ up for you real soon!”

  The canteen in the PX was a big barnlike room of un-painted boards; it was of such recent construction that Mingolla could still smell sawdust and resin. Thirty or forty tables; a jukebox; bare walls. Behind the bar at the rear of the room, a sour-faced corporal with a clipboard was doing a liquor inventory, and Gilbey—the only customer—was sitting by one of the east windows, stirring a cup of coffee. His brow was furrowed, and a ray of sunlight shone down around him, making it look that he was being divinely inspired to do some soul-searching.

  “Where’s Baylor?” asked Mingolla, sitting opposite him.

  “Fuck, I dunno,” said Gilbey, not taking his eyes from the coffee cup. “He’ll be here.”

  Mingolla kept his left hand in his pocket. The tremors were diminishing, but not quickly enough to suit him; he was worried that the shaking would spread as it had after the assault. He let out a sigh, and in letting it out he could feel all his nervous flutters. The ray of sunlight seemed to be humming a wavery golden note, and that, too, worried him. Hallucinations. Then he noticed a fly buzzing against the windowpane. “How was it last night?” he asked.

  Gilbey glanced up sharply. “Oh, you mean Big Tits. She lemme check her for lumps.” A humorless smile nicked the corners of his mouth. He went back to stirring his coffee.

  Mingolla was hurt that Gilbey hadn’t asked about his night; he wanted to tell him about Debora. But that was typical of Gilbey’s self-involvement. His narrow eyes and sulky mouth were the imprints of a mean-spiritedness that permitted few concerns aside from his own well-being. Yet, despite his insensitivity, his stupid rages and limited conversation, Mingolla believed that he was smarter than he appeared, that disguising one’s intelligence must have been a survival tactic in Detroit, where he had grown up. It was his craftiness that gave him away: his insights into the personalities of adversary lieutenants; his slickness at avoiding unpleasant duty; his ability to manipulate his peers. He wore stupidity like a cloak, and perhaps he had worn it for so long that it could not be removed. Still, Mingolla envied him its virtues, especially the way it had numbed him to the assault.

  “He’s never been late before,” said Mingolla after a while.

  “So what, he’s fuckin’ late!” snapped Gilbey, glowering. “He’ll be here!”

  Behind the bar, the corporal switched on a radio and spun the dial past Latin music, past Top Forty, then past an American voice reporting the baseball scores. “Hey!” called Gilbey. “Let’s hear that, man! I wanna see what happened to the Tigers.” With a shrug, the corporal complied.

  “…White Sox six, A’s three,” said the announcer. “That’s eight in a row now for the Sox…”

  “White Sox are kickin’ some ass,” said the corporal, pleased.

  “The White Sox!” Gilbey sneered. “What the White Sox got ’cept a buncha beaners hittin’ two hunnerd and some coke-sniffin’ niggers? Shit! Every fuckin’ spring the White Sox are flyin’, man. But then ’long comes summer and the good drugs hit the street and they fuckin’ die!”

  “Yeah,” said the corporal, “but this ye
ar…”

  “Take that son of a bitch Caldwell,” said Gilbey, ignoring him. “I seen him coupla years back when he had a trial with the Tigers. Man, that nigger could hit! Now he shuffles up there like he’s just feelin’ the breeze.”

  “They ain’t takin’ drugs, man,” said the corporal testily. “They can’t take ’em ’cause there’s these tests that show if they’s on somethin’.”

  Gilbey barreled ahead. “White Sox ain’t gotta chance, man! Know what the guy on TV calls ’em sometimes? The Pale Hose! The fuckin’ Pale Hose! How you gonna win with a name like that? The Tigers, now, they got the right kinda name. The Yankees, the Braves, the—”

  “Bullshit, man!” The corporal was becoming upset; he set down his clipboard and walked to the end of the bar. “What ’bout the Dodgers? They got a wimpy name and they’re a good team. Your name don’t mean shit!”

  “The Reds,” suggested Mingolla; he was enjoying Gilbey’s rap, its stubbornness and irrationality. Yet at the same time he was concerned by its undertone of desperation: appearances to the contrary, Gilbey was not himself this morning.

  “Oh, yeah!” Gilbey smacked the table with the flat of his hand. “The Reds! Lookit the Reds, man! Lookit how good they been doin’ since the Cubans come into the war. You think that don’t mean nothin’? You think their name ain’t helpin’ ’em? Even if they get in the Series, the Pale fuckin’ Hose don’t gotta prayer against the Reds.” He laughed—a hoarse grunt. “I’m a Tiger fan, man, but I gotta feelin’ this ain’t their year, y’know. The Reds are tearin’ up the NL East, and the Yankees is comin’ on, and when they get together in October, man, then we gonna find out alla ’bout everything. Alla ’bout fuckin’ everything!” His voice grew tight and tremulous. “So don’t gimme no trouble ’bout the candy-ass Pale Hose, man! They ain’t shit and they never was and they ain’t gonna be shit till they change their fuckin’ name!”

  Sensing danger, the corporal backed away from confrontation, and Gilbey lapsed into a moody silence. For a while there were only the sounds of chopper blades and the radio blatting out cocktail jazz. Two mechanics wandered in for an early morning beer, and not long after that three fatherly-looking sergeants with potbellies and thinning hair and quartermaster insignia on their shoulders sat at a nearby table and started up a game of rummy. The corporal brought them a pot of coffee and a bottle of whiskey, which they mixed and drank as they played. Their game had an air of custom, of something done at this time every day, and watching them, taking note of their fat, pampered ease, their old-buddy familiarity, Mingolla felt proud of his palsied hand. It was an honorable affliction, a sign that he had participated in the heart of the war as these men had not. Yet, he bore them no resentment. None whatsoever. Rather, it gave him a sense of security to know that three such fatherly men were here to provide him with food and liquor and new boots. He basked in the dull, happy clutter of their talk, in the haze of cigar smoke that seemed the exhaust of their contentment. He believed that he could go to them, tell them his problems, and receive folksy advice. They were here to assure him of the rightness of his purpose, to remind him of simple American values, to lend an illusion of fraternal involvement to the war, to make clear that it was merely an exercise in good fellowship and tough-mindedness, an initiation rite that these three men had long ago passed through, and after the war they would all get medals and pal around together and talk about bloodshed and terror with head-shaking wonderment and nostalgia, as if bloodshed and terror were old lost friends whose natures they had not fully appreciated at the time…Mingolla realized then that a smile had stretched his facial muscles taut, and that his train of thought had been leading him into spooky mental territory. The tremors in his hand were worse than ever. He checked his watch. It was almost ten o’clock. Ten o’clock! In a panic he scraped back his chair and stood.

  “Let’s look for him,” he said to Gilbey.

  Gilbey started to say something but kept it to himself. He tapped his spoon hard against the edge of the table. Then he, too, scraped back his chair and stood.

  Baylor was not to be found at the Club Demonio or any of the bars on the west bank. Gilbey and Mingolla described him to everyone they met, but no one remembered him. The longer the search went on, the more insecure Mingolla became. Baylor was necessary, an essential underpinning of the platform of habits and routines that supported him, that let him live beyond the range of war’s weapons and the laws of chance, and should that underpinning be destroyed…In his mind’s eye he saw the platform tipping, he and Gilbey toppling over the edge, cartwheeling down into an abyss filled with black flames. Once Gilbey said, “Panama! The son of a bitch run off to Panama.” But Mingolla didn’t think this was the case. He was certain that Baylor was close at hand. His certainty had such a valence of clarity that he became even more insecure, knowing that this sort of clarity often heralded a bad conclusion.

  The sun climbed higher, its heat an enormous weight pressing down, its light leaching color from the stucco walls, and Mingolla’s sweat began to smell rancid. Only a few soldiers were on the streets, mixed in with the usual run of kids and beggars, and the bars were empty except for a smattering of drunks still on a binge from the night before. Gilbey stumped along, grabbing people by the shirt and asking his questions. Mingolla, however, terribly conscious of his trembling hand, nervous to the point of stammering, was forced to work out a stock approach whereby he could get through these brief interviews. He would amble up, keeping his right side forward, and say, “I’m looking for a friend of mine. Maybe you seen him? Tall guy. Olive skin, black hair, thin. Name’s Baylor.” He learned to let this slide off his tongue in a casual unreeling.

  Finally Gilbey had had enough. “I’m gonna hang out with Big Tits,” he said. “Meetcha at the PX tomorrow.” He started to walk off, but turned and added, “You wanna get in touch ’fore tomorrow, I’ll be at the Club Demonio.” He had an odd expression on his face. It was as if he was trying to smile reassuringly, but—due to his lack of practice—it looked forced and foolish and not in the least reassuring.

  Around eleven o’clock Mingolla wound up leaning against a pink stucco wall, watching out for Baylor in the thickening crowds. Beside him, the sun-browned fronds of a banana tree were feathering in the wind, making a crispy sound whenever a gust blew them back into the wall. The roof of the bar across the street was being repaired: sheets of new tin alternating with narrow patches of rust that looked like enormous strips of bacon laid there to fry. Now and then he would let his gaze drift up to the unfinished bridge, a great sweep of magical whiteness curving into the blue, rising above the town and the jungle and the war. Not even the heat haze rippling from the tin roof could warp its smoothness. It seemed to be orchestrating the stench, the mutter of the crowds, and the jukebox music into a tranquil unity, absorbing those energies and returning them purified, enriched. He thought that if he stared at it long enough, it would speak to him, pronounce a white word that would grant his wishes.

  Two flat cracks—pistol shots—sent him stumbling away from the wall, his heart racing. Inside his head the shots had spoken the two syllables of Baylor’s name. All the kids and beggars had vanished. All the soldiers had stopped and turned to face the direction from which the shots had come: zombies who had heard their master’s voice.

  Another shot.

  Some soldiers milled out of a side street, talking excitedly. “…Fuckin’ nuts!” one was saying, and his buddy said, “It was Sammy, man! You see his eyes?”

  Mingolla pushed his way through them and sprinted down the side street. At the end of the block a cordon of MPs had sealed off access to the right-hand turn, and when Mingolla ran up, one of them told him to stay back.

  “What is it?” Mingolla asked. “Some guy playing Sammy?”

  “Fuck off,” the MP said mildly.

  “Listen,” said Mingolla. “It might be this friend of mine. Tall, skinny guy. Black hair. Maybe I can talk to him.”

  The MP exchanged glances wi
th his buddies, who shrugged and acted otherwise unconcerned. “Okay,” he said. He pulled Mingolla to him and pointed out a bar with turquoise walls on the next corner down. “Go on in there and talk to the captain.”

  Two more shots, then a third.

  “Better hurry,” said the MP. “Ol’ Captain Haynesworth there, he don’t put much stock in negotiations.”

  It was cool and dark inside the bar; two shadowy figures were flattened against the wall beside a window that opened onto the cross street. Mingolla could make out the glint of automatic pistols in their hands. Then, through the window, he saw Baylor pop up from behind a retaining wall: a three-foot-high structure of mud bricks running between an herbal-drug store and another bar. Baylor was shirtless, his chest painted with reddish brown smears of dried blood, and he was standing in a nonchalant pose, with his thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets. One of the men by the window fired at him. The report was deafening, causing Mingolla to flinch and close his eyes. When he looked out the window again, Baylor was nowhere in sight.

  “Fucker’s just tryin’ to draw fire,” said the man who had shot at Baylor. “Sammy’s fast today.”

  “Yeah, but he’s slowin’ some,” said a lazy voice from the darkness at the rear of the bar. “I do believe he’s outta dope.”