Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “Davy!” A bassy shout. “Quit playin’ dese fool games!”

  Two cashew trees stood up from the thicket, wrinkled yellow fruit tucked among spreads of dark leaves, and farther off, towering above the hotel, whose red tile roof was visible over the tops of the bushes, a ceiba tree drenched the under-growth in a pool of indigo shadow; wherever sunlight penetrated the canopy, the air had a soft golden luminosity, and insects hovering there glowed with the intensity of jewels in a showcase.

  “Don’t vex wit’ me, Davy!”

  Fuck you, Tully!

  From beyond the wall came the crash of surf piling in onto the reef, and listening to it, wishing he could see the waves, Mingolla thought it didn’t seem possible he had been confined for all those months. His memories of the time consisted of a rubble of disconnected moments, and whenever he tried to assemble them, to make of them a coherent measure, he could not put together sufficient material to fill more than a few weeks…weeks of needles slipping into his arm, faces blurring as the drugs took hold, of fever dreams planing into a fevered reality, of pausing by the pitted mirror in the hotel lobby and staring into his eyes, not seeking any inner truth, just hoping to find himself, some part of himself that had been left unchanged.

  “Goddammit, Davy!”

  Only one day was clear in his memory. His twenty-first birthday…

  “Okay, mon! Dat’s how you want it!”

  …Right after the plastic surgery. Dr. Izaguirre had cut off the drugs so he could receive a call from his parents on a video hookup in the hotel basement, and he had waited for the call lying on a sprung sofa, facing a screen that occupied most of an end wall. The other walls were paneled in plastic strips of imitation maple, some of which had peeled away to reveal the riverbed textures of mildewed wallboard, and in the dim track lighting the overstated grain of the paneling showed yellow and black like printed circuitry made of tiger skins. Mingolla pillowed his head on the arm of the sofa, fiddling with the remote control box, trying to map out what to say to his parents, but couldn’t get beyond, “Hi, how’s it going?” He had trouble calling them to mind, let alone designing intimacy, and when the screen brightened to a shot of them in their living room, sitting stiffly as if posing for a photograph, he continued lying there, taking in his father’s insurance executive drag of blue suit and tie and stylishly long gray hair, his mother’s worn face and linen dress, noticing how the flatness of the image made them seem elements of the decor, anthropomorphic accessories to the leather chairs and frilly lamp shades. He had no reaction to them: he might have been viewing a portrait of strangers to whom he had a chance blood connection.

  “David?” His mother started to reach out to him, then remembered touch was impossible. She glanced at his father, who patted her arm, affected a bemused smile, and said, “We had no idea they’d made you look so much like a…”

  “Like a beaner?” said Mingolla, annoyed by his father’s unruffled manner.

  “If that’s your term of choice,” his father said coldly.

  “Don’t worry. Little tuck and fold here and there, little dye job. But I’m still your all-American boy.”

  “I’m sorry,” said his mother. “I knew it was you, but…”

  “It’s okay.”

  “…I was startled at first.”

  “Really, it’s okay.”

  Mingolla had not had high expectations for the call, yet he had wanted to have high expectations, to love them, to be open and honest, and now, seeing them again, understanding that they would demand of him a conversation to match their wallpaper, nothing more, his emotions went blank, and he wondered if he would have to dredge up old feelings in order to relate to them at all. They told him about their trip to Montreal. Sounds pretty there, he said. They spoke of garden parties, of yachting off the Cape. Wish I’d been there, he said. They complained about asthma, allergies, and they asked how it felt to be twenty-one.

  “Tell ya the truth,” he said, weary of stock responses. “I feel ’bout a thousand years old.”

  His father sniffed. “Spare us the melodrama, David.”

  “Melodrama.” A burst of adrenaline set Mingolla trembling. “That what it is, Dad?”

  “I should think,” his father said, “that you’d want this to be a pleasant experience, that you’d at least try to be civil.”

  “Civil.” For a moment the word had no meaning to Mingolla, only a bitter, insipid flavor. “Yeah, okay. I was hoping we could talk to each other, but civil’s cool. Fine! Let’s do it! You ask how I’ve been, and I’ll say, ‘Great.’ And I’ll ask how’s business, and you’ll say, ‘Not bad.’ And Mom’ll tell me ’bout my friends, what they’re up to these days. And then if I’m real, real civil, you’ll give a little speech ’bout how you’re proud of me and all.” He hissed in disgust. “There you are. Dad. We don’t even have to go through it now. We can just sit here and fucking stare at each other and pretend we’re having a pleasant experience!”

  His father’s eyes narrowed. “I see no point in continuing this.”

  “David!” His mother pleaded with him silently.

  Mingolla had no intention of apologizing, enjoying his charge of anger, but after a long silence he relented. “I’m kinda tense, Dad. Sorry.”

  “What I fail to understand,” his father said, “is why you insist on trying to impress us with the gravity of your situation. We know it’s grave, and we’re concerned about you. We simply don’t believe it’s appropriate to discuss our concern on your birthday.”

  “I see.” Mingolla bit off the words.

  “Apology accepted,” said his father with equal precision.

  For the remainder of the conversation, Mingolla fielded questions with a flawless lack of honesty, and after the screen had faded to gray, his anger also grayed. He lay punching the remote control buttons, flipping from car chases to talk shows and then to a haze of pointilist dots that resolved into a plain of bleached-looking ruins. He recognized Tel Aviv, remembered the ultimate bad omen of the city nuked on his birthday. The picture broke up, and he jabbed the next button. The ruins reappeared, the camera tracking past a solitary wall, twisted girders, and piles of bricks. Dark thunderheads boiled over the city, their edges fraying into silver glare; shards of buildings stood in silhouette against a band of pale light on the horizon, like black fangs biting the sky. There was no sound, but when Mingolla adjusted the fine tuning, he heard bluesy guitar chords, synthesizer, a noodling sax, and a woman’s voice…obviously the voiceover from another channel.

  “…Prowler’s latest, ‘Blues for Heaven,’” she was saying. “Hope it ain’t too depressin’ for you music lovers. But, hey! Depression’s all over these days, right? Just consider it a mood alternative…like a drug, y’know. Little somethin’ to add texture to your usual upbeat feelin’, make it all that much sweeter.”

  It had begun to rain in Tel Aviv, a steady drizzle, and the music seemed the aural counterpart of the rain, of the clouds and their fuming passage across the city.

  “Prowler,” said the woman. “The fabulous Jack Lescaux on vocals. Tell ’em ’bout the real world, Jack.”

  “Laney’s in her half-slip, pacin’ up and down,

  chain-smokin’ Luminieres, watchin’ the second hand spin ’round.

  I’m sittin’ at the window, pickin’ out a slow gray tune,

  and two shadows walkin’ east on Lincoln turn down Montclair Avenue.

  ‘That mother he ain’t comin’ back,’ says Laney. ‘Y’can’t trust him when he’s broke.

  I just know he took my money.’ She blows a blue-steel jet of smoke.

  I say, ‘Take it easy, honey. Why don’t you do some of my frost.’

  She laughs ’cause life without the proper poison is a joke at any cost.”

  The song with its mournful disposition, its narrative of two junkies enduring a bad night, was like the voice of a ghost wandering the city, and it pulled Mingolla in, drew him along, making him feel that he—with his shattered memories and em
otions—was himself half a ghost, and causing him to imagine that he would be at home among the spirits of Tel Aviv, able to offer them the consolation of flesh-and-blood companionship. There was a premonitory clarity to this thought, but he was too absorbed in the music and the city to explore it further. He saw that the ruins posed a dire compatibility for him, enforcing the self-conception that he was the ruin of a human being in whom a ruinous power was being bred.

  “David.” Dr. Izaguirre’s voice behind him. “Time for your injection.”

  “Inna second…I wanna hear the rest of the song.”

  Izaguirre made a noise of grudging acceptance and walked in front of the screen. He was pale, long limbed, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, thinning gray hair, and a perpetually ardent expression: an aquiline El Greco Christ aged to sixty or thereabouts and fleshed out a bit, dressed in a starched guayabera and slacks. He peered at the ruins as if searching them for survivors, then pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket and fitted them to his nose with an affected flourish. All his gestures were affected, and Mingolla believed this reflected a conscious decision. He had the impression that Izaguirre felt so in control of his life, so unchallenged, that he had tailored the minutiae of his personality in order to entertain himself, had transformed his existence into a game, one that would test his elegant surface against the dulling inelegance of the world.

  “Tel Aviv,” said Izaguirre. “Terrible, terrible.” He went back behind the couch and gave Mingolla’s shoulder a sympathetic squeeze just as a flight of armored choppers flew out of the east over the city. It may have been this sight that triggered Mingolla’s response, and perhaps Izaguirre’s squeeze had a little to do with it, but whatever the cause, Mingolla’s eyes filled, and he was flooded with a torrent of suddenly liberated emotions and thoughts, mingling shame over his behavior with his parents, irritation at Izaguirre’s witness, and loathing for the self-absorption that had prevented him from relating to the tragedy of Tel Aviv in other than trivial and personal terms.

  “…rain is falling harder, makin’ speckles on the walk,

  blankets stuffed in broken windows glow softly in the dark.

  An old bum his hands in baggies, slumps in a doorway ’cross the street,

  his eyes are brown like worn-out pennies, got bedroom slippers on his feet.

  Some wise-ass stops and says, ‘Hey buddy! Know where I can get some rags like that?’

  The bum keeps starin’ into nowhere…he knows nowhere’s where it’s at.”

  Mingolla was overwhelmed by the desolation of the ruins and the song. The white blossoms lay in the dust like crumpled pieces of paper, the camera zoomed in on one to show how it was blackening from the radiation, and his identification with the place was so complete, he felt the white thoughts lying in the dust of his mind beginning to blacken as well. The vacancy of Tel Aviv was a sleet riddling him, seeding him with emptiness, and he came to his feet, buoyed by that emptiness, gripping the sofa to keep from floating away.

  “Don’t you want to listen?” Izaguirre sounded amused.

  “Naw, un-uh.”

  “Are you sure? We have time.”

  Mingolla shook his head no, continued to shake it, trying to get rid of all his nos, all his negatives, each shake more vehement, and when Izaguirre put an arm around him, he was most grateful, desperate to be led away from Tel Aviv and Prowler, ready now for his injection.

  A crunching in the brush. Mingolla looked this way and that, thinking it must be Tully, but spotted a scrawny black man standing about twenty feet away: one of the islanders who inhabited the outbuildings. They had taken to following him around, retreating whenever he tried to confront them, as if he possessed some dread allure. The man slipped deeper into the thicket, and Mingolla relaxed, stretching out his legs. An alp of cumulus edged across the sun, transforming its radiance into a fan of watery light; wind flattened the tops of the bushes. Mingolla closed his eyes, basking in the warmth, in a heady sense of peace.

  “You a damn fool, mon,” said a rumbling voice above him.

  He sat up with a start, blinking. Tully was a black giant, looming into the sky, hands on hips.

  “A true damn fool,” said Tully. “I wastin’ my time teachin’ you dat block, ’cause dere you sit, winkin’ on and off like a fuckin’ caution light. What you doin’, mon? Daydreamin’?”

  “I…”

  “Shut your fool mouth. Now dis”—he tapped his chest—“dis a good block. And dis ain’t.” As if a furnace door had been slung open, Tully’s heat washed over Mingolla. “And dis what you doin’.” The heat ebbed, vanished, flared again. “I should put my foot to you!”

  The sun hung directly behind Tully’s head, a golden corona rimming a black oval. Mingolla felt weak and weakening, felt that threads of himself were being spun loose and sucked into the blackness. Panicked, acting in reflex, he pushed at Tully not with his hands, but with his mind, and he was panicked still more by the sensation that he had fallen into a school of electric fish, thousands of them, brushing against him, darting away. Tully’s fist swung toward him, but that electricity, and the attendant feelings of arousal and strength, was so commanding that Mingolla was frozen, unable to duck, and the blow struck the top of his head, knocking him flat.

  “You ain’t got de force to war wit’ me, Davy.” Tully squatted beside him. “But, mon, I just been waitin’ for you to make dis breakt’rough. Now we can really get started.”

  Mingolla’s head throbbed, grass tickled his lower lip. He stared at the tips of Tully’s tennis shoes, the cuffs of his blue trousers. He struggled up, leaned against the wall, groggy.

  “Caught me by surprise, mon, or I stay from bashin’ you.” Tully grinned, gold crowns glittering among his teeth, his good humor given the look of a fierce mask by the deep lines etched around his mouth and eyes. He was huge, everything about him huge, hands that could swallow coconuts, chest plated with muscle, and had about him an air of elemental masculinity that never failed to unsettle Mingolla. His hair was flecked with gray, his neck seamed, eyes liverish, but his arms—straining a white T-shirt—had the definition of a man twenty years younger. Above his left eye was a pink hook-shaped scar, startling in contrast to his coal-black skin, like a vein of some rare mineral. “Damn,” he said. “You goin’ to be somethin’ special! You almost ’whelm me wit’ dat touch.”

  Mingolla turned his gaze to the hotel roof, watched a string of pelicans flying above it, appearing to spell out a string of cryptic syllables.

  “I know you wary, mon,” said Tully. “You like a little boy, and you got to be strong ’fore you go to facin’ up to me…and dat’s natural. Dese drugs, dey put you in a new world, and dat’s a trial for anyone, ’specially somebody been t’rough it like you. But I for you, Davy. Dat you can count on. I just got to be hard wit’ you, ’cause dat’s how you goin’ to get hard ’nough for dis new world.”

  Mingolla’s distrust must have showed in his face, for Tully let out a laugh as guttural and toneless as a lion’s cough. “Dis t’ing ’tween you and me gettin’ to be a bitch,” he said. “’Mind me of me and my father. Now dere was a harsh mon, lemme tell you. He come home drunk for he supper, and he say to me, ‘Boy, you so ugly you make me lose my appetite. Get under de table! I no want to be lookin’ at you while I chew.’ And I don’t do what he say, he put me under dat table!” He gave Mingolla a friendly punch on the leg. “S’pose I tell you get under de table? What you goin’ to do?”

  “Tell you to fuck yourself,” said Mingolla.

  “Dat right?” Tully scratched his neck. “Lessee if dat’s de case. You stay outside tonight, Davy. Don’t come back to de hotel. Stay out here and t’ink ’bout what’s ahead.”

  “How’m I supposed to know what’s ahead?”

  “Got a point dere. All right, I give you a glimpse of de future. Once you t’rough wit’ trainin’ dere will be a test. We be sendin’ you to La Ceiba, and you goin’ into de Iron Barrio and kill a mon wit’ de force of your mind.”

/>   The concept of killing as a test left Mingolla unmoved, but Tully’s mention of the Iron Barrio drained him of belligerence.

  “Stay clear of de hotel tonight, Davy.” Tully stood, un-kinked his back, twisting from side to side. “Study on how you goin’ to deal wit’ de Barrio wit’out my help. And if I catch you inside ’fore mornin’, it will go hard for you. Dat much you don’t need to study on.”

  Tucked into a corner of the concrete wall was a tin-roofed shed that had once been a dive shop, and later that afternoon Mingolla entered it, intending to wait there until everyone was asleep and then sneak into the hotel. As he stepped through the door, a ghost crab scuttled from beneath the wooden table that centered the shed and vanished down a gap in the boards, leaving a trail of delicate slashmarks in the dust. Golden light slanted from rips in the tin, painting splotches of glare on the floor; dust motes stirred up by Mingolla’s tread whirled in the light, making it appear that something was about to materialize in each of the beams. Resting on the table were four rusted air tanks, bridged by spans of cobweb and looking in the gloom like enormous capsules of dried blood.

  Mingolla sat against the rear wall of the shed next to a stack of yellowed scuba diving magazines. To pass the time he leafed through one and was amused to discover ads for various of the island’s resorts in the front pages. Pirate’s Cove, Jolly Roger’s, and such. Their buildings now abandoned, beaches cordoned by patrol boats, tourists driven off by the threat of rockets…though the island had never come under attack. Which was perplexing. Roatán was a logical target, being isolated, home to a CIA computer base, and well within range of rockets, bombs, or even an assault. The fact that there hadn’t been an attack made no sense, but sense, he thought, was not something war made in any great quantity, and he supposed that some absurd reason underlay the island’s security, some meshing of Marxist and capitalist irrationality, maybe a trade-off of immunities, an agreement to leave each other’s computers alone in order to provide both sides with the capacity to mete out death and destruction along predictable lines. That he could have this thought, which seemed a very adult thought, the type of caustic and dispassionate judgment that people often characterize as symptomatic of a mature disinterest, was, he decided, a sign that he was on the mend, that he was growing inured to the corrosive passions of war, becoming capable of clearsighted progress.