Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “I mean here dere’s war”—Tully swiped at the sand—“and here dere’s none.” He made another swipe next to the first one. “And damn fools are sendin’ other damn fools to do t’ings nobody have any business doin’.”

  “What’s the problem?” Mingolla asked.

  “Dat Cifuentes squint was messin’ wit’ you…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Dey goin’ to send you after her, send you into de Petén to bring her back for interrogation.” Tully sighed, exasperated. “I say to Izaguirre, ‘Mon, dat’s a waste of dis boy’s talent. He got better t’ings he can be doin’.’ But de doctor he say dat’s how it goin’ to be.”

  “That’s fine with me,” said Mingolla. “Just fine.”

  Tully looked at him askance. “Don’t sound like you care much fah her.”

  “I care a lot,” said Mingolla in a dead voice, watching grackles swoop out of the high sun like bits of winged matter blown from its core. A vulture landed with a crunch in a palm top.

  “You gettin’ strange, Davy,” said Tully. “Gotta watch that.”

  “You ever hear words when you touch somebody’s mind?” Mingolla asked.

  “Words? Not’in’ like dat…but I do hear ’bout one fella say he got words one time, just a little bit. Why you axin’?”

  “I had a dream ’bout it.”

  “What kinda dream?” Tully was more than a little interested.

  Mingolla shrugged, thought back to his hallucination, wondering if his communication with the Christian girl had been evidence of something or just a fantasy. “Weren’t you going to brief me on the Iron Barrio?”

  Another sigh, and Tully pulled some papers from his hip pocket. “Yeah, all right. Dese here de plans, but ’fore you scan dem we better talk ’bout gettin’ in. Ain’t no big trick to that. De whores dat live dere…”

  “Whores?”

  “Oh, yeah. Lotsa people in de Barrio dey got family on de outside dat’s hostage, and to earn some extra money, de prison guards dey send some of de women out to work the street. Dey know de women ain’t goin’ to be ’scapin’ long as dere family have to pay de cost.”

  Voices behind them.

  A squat black man and a small boy were walking from the compound gate; the man was carrying a machete and a pistol.

  “Look like Spurgeon ’bout to slaughter he hog,” said Tully. “Anyway, dere dis one whore…Alvina Guzman. De other prisoners treat her special ’cause her father Hermeto Guzman, de one who led de Army of de Poor up in Guatemala. Dey bot’ heroes to people in de Barrio. So you hook up wit’ her, and t’ings should go smooth.”

  The hog watched the man’s approach, grunting softly as if expecting a treat. The man stopped half-a-dozen feet away and broke down the pistol.

  “You won’t have no trouble trackin’ her. Most nights she be in one of de bars on La Avenida de la Republica.”

  Mingolla touched the hog’s mind, found it strong, and hovered at its edges.

  “We goin’ to give you some drugs for to barter, for to…”

  “Why? I can just take over whoever I need.”

  “Dat ain’t always de best way. Y’can’t take over everybody. And dem dat’s watchin’, dey might be gettin’ suspicious ’bout how come you havin’ such an easy time.”

  The man snapped the cylinder of the pistol into place, and the boy said something in a high piping voice.

  “I won’t ’vise you how to deal wit’ it from dat point on. But gettin’ in ain’t a problem. You can handle de guards fine.” Tully elbowed him. “Hey, mon! Listen up! T’ought you wanted dis briefin’.”

  A shot rang out, and Tully jumped. But Mingolla, who had been anticipating it, gave no sign of having heard.

  The afternoon before he left for La Ceiba, Mingolla closeted himself in his room, intending to read awhile and fall asleep early. He read the title story of The Fictive Boarding House again, lingering over his favorite parts, the description of the building itself, with its ancient swimming pool whose waters were so filthy that it looked like a lozenge of jade, and its owner, the old Korean man who sat in his wheelchair all day writing characters on strips of paper and tying them for luck to the vines in his garden, and the maid Serenita, the last survivor of the contract, whose final moments scripted the author’s death. It was odd, he thought, that the same author could write two stories that had such opposite effects upon him, because the story about the two feuding families continued to rankle him. However, he managed to read it all the way through this time and was disgusted to find that the plot went unresolved. He tossed the book into his dufflebag, put a pillow over his face, and tried to sleep. But sleep did not come, and finally, giving up the idea, he went for a walk on the beach, watching sunset casting wild glitters over the sea, fading to a rippling line of gold drawn across the empurpled water within the reef. Darkness, and he sat down by the hotel wall, gazing up at the pale lumps of cloud cruising among the stars and whacking the sand with a stick.

  “Best you not hit a toad wit’ dat stick,” said a girl’s voice.

  Elizabeth was walking toward him through the palm shadows, her white church dress aglow with striped moonlight, holding a hymnal. “Why not?” he asked.

  “Dat a cassava stick,” she said. “You hit a toad wit’ it, and dey will run you off de island.”

  He laughed. “I’ll try to avoid it.”

  “Not’in’ funny ’bout it,” she said. “Dis very thing have happen to Nadia Dilbert’s boy last year. De toads spray milk at him, make he life not worth livin’.”

  “I’ll be careful,” he said, matching her graveness.

  She came a few steps closer, and his eyes went to the cushy swell of her breasts backing the lace bodice.

  “Where’s your friend?” he asked.

  “You mean Nancy? She off wit’ some boy.” She glanced behind her. “I guess I’ll be…”

  “Stay and talk a minute.”

  “Oh, I can’t be late for church.”

  Mingolla opened her to the possibility of tardiness, projecting desire. “C’mon,” he said. “Just a minute or two.”

  Her eyelids lowered, and she seemed to grow vacant, as if listening to an inner voice. “Well, a minute, maybe.” She set her hymnal on the sand beside Mingolla and perched on it, careful not to soil her dress. She snatched a peek at him, then looked away, gone stiff, her breath quickening. “Tully,” she said, “he tell me you be leavin’ soon.”

  “Did you ask him ’bout me?”

  “Oh, no…well, I did. But dat was for Nancy. She took wit’ you.”

  “Uh-huh.” Mingolla tracked the purple riding lights of a shrimper inching across the horizon. “Yeah, I’m leaving.”

  “Dat’s too bad…you miss de carnival at French Harbor.”

  He looked at Elizabeth’s beautiful face, her broad symmetrical nose and haughty mouth and sculpted cheekbones, a face that—if he were to draw it—would come off as registering an adult sensuality, but now seemed entirely youthful, eager yet under restraint; and he realized that he didn’t want her, that he wanted to mark her, and by so doing to mark Tully. He wasn’t sure why he wanted this. Despite their months together, Tully was an unknown quantity, hidden behind a front of braggadocio and crudity…though Mingolla suspected that the front was designed to disguise a simple and ingenuous self that Tully had long since rejected. And perhaps, Mingolla thought, what he really wanted was to establish his superiority by dismantling that front, revealing the fact that Tully cared about more than he would like to admit. It didn’t matter. His wanting was reason enough.

  “Elizabeth,” he said, shifting, half-turning, resting a hand on her belly. She tensed, but didn’t pull away, and as his hand moved to her breast, slipped up to finger loose a button, then two, she held her breath and arched against his palm. But when he began to slip the dress from her shoulders, she clutched at the material, holding the halves together. “I don’t know ’bout dis,” she said. “I don’t know.” He whispered her name, making it a charm,
urging desire upon her, and grazed her neck, her cheek, with his lips. She threw back her head, released her hold on the dress, let his mouth find the upper slopes of her breasts.

  “Ah, dat such a sweet feelin’, Davy.”

  He lifted one breast free of the lace, its heft like a full wineskin, and admired its blackness agleam with sweat and starlight, tasted blackness on the nipple.

  “Davy, oh Davy.”

  He was growing distant from her, distant even from his own desire. The stars, the mash of waves, this nubile island sophomore, it all smacked of some mixture of movie romance and high school follies, and he was beginning to get bored. More than bored. His very conception of evil mischief was at risk.

  “Oh, God…Davy! You do dat so nice…”

  Christ, he thought, let’s remake the language of love, bring it into the world of intellect. When You Touch Me, My Self-Conception Dissipates, or at least a world of bad poetry, That Still Moment of Gladness After You Slip Inside, That Eyes-Closed Charge into Frenzy, and Later the Lights Beside Our Open Lips Are Senses Overused, or…He had an idea! An inspirational idea. He scrambled up, helped her to stand. Stood close, hands on her hips. And pushed love into her mind, the shaped flow of all he had felt for his Long Island woman, for Debora. “Let’s go in the water,” he said. “I want to feel you close to me in the water.” Amazing that she didn’t puke, the sugar he’d injected into those words. But, no, she bought it a hundred percent, love translating stupidity into the meaningful. She wanted to be with him in the water, too. Whatever that meant to her. A trip to Paradise, a ride on the fabulous Sexmobile, a pass to some glandular Disneyworld. She undressed with her back to him, and the sight of her ass, the supple columns of her thighs, reinstituted desire. But he held to his course. They waded out holding hands, stepping on God only knew what manner of offal, hog guts, fish brains, a thousand grotesque possibilities, holding hands, and breasted into a shallow dive, and stroked to within twenty feet of the reef, near enough that the white starlit sprays came cold onto their skin, yet not so far out that they couldn’t touch bottom. He pulled her close, kissed her deep, and the feel of her slippery hips, her nipples sliding across his chest, his cock gouging the cool rubber swell of her belly, once again kindled desire, causing him to consider having his cake and eating it, too. No, no! Stay with the plan. Unrequited and unconsummated. Her eyes glittered with fishy brilliance, her black mouth with its eel tongue poking out. Seeing her that way, he managed to disengage.

  “Davy!” She tried to draw him back, but he eluded her, gliding farther away, until she was invisible against the dark wall of the reef.

  “I don’t know ’bout this,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “Davy!” Panic in her shout.

  He dived and stroked hard away, surfaced fifty feet away.

  “Where you at, Davy! Don’t be ’larmed!”

  His laughter was drowned out by the surf, by a phosphorescent spray of water rising up like the teeth of a gigantic comb. He let the current carry him to the base of the reef and hid in a volute of rock, gripping a barnacled projection.

  “Davy!” She was moving toward him. “You don’t gotta be ’fraid, Davy! I love you!”

  She passed within a few feet, calling, searching, and with the stealth of a shark, he ducked beneath the surface and swam underwater toward the shore. He could still hear her calling out to him as he dressed. Before long, fearing that he’d been swept out through the channel, she’d chance searching beyond the reef. “Davy, Davy!” she’d cry, bobbing off to Africa, her dark head sliding down the troughs between the waves, buoyed by love. Passing ships would toss life preservers, but she’d ask, “You seen my Davy?” and when they said no, she’d tell them to sail on, she wasn’t going to stop until she found her man. He saw her washed up on Arab shores, wandering the deep forests, haunted, driven, ravished by terrorists, worshipped by multinational executives and sheikhs. “Who,” they’d ask her, “is this Davy?” And she would sigh, she would weep, stare listlessly toward the Angel of the West, and the sheikhs would fume, knowing they could never really possess her, that this mysterious Davy had ruined her for all men, that one perfect moment had been marbled and set pedestal-high in memory, overshadowing all others, and that true love would never die.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Avenida de la Republica in La Ceiba was a night street, wide and potholed, divided by a railroad spur belonging to the United Fruit Company. It ran along the waterfront between rows of stucco bars and rundown hotels, most of the latter painted a dark green, as if during some long-ago season of painting that color had been on special. The hotels had peaked roofs and rickety side stairs and interior courtyards where fat concierges held court at Formica tables, drinking Salvavida beer, joking with their friends, and bawling insults at the prostitutes who slept away the afternoons in the stuffy rooms. By day, the street was a scene of unparalleled torpor. Bits of cellophane and paper trash blew in the gutters, and there was little traffic apart from dogs, the occasional beggar searching for a doorway in which to sleep, and black-clad widows with corroded-looking skin, who would perch on the curbs, holding trays of cigarettes on their laps. From the docks beyond the seaward row of hotels came the constant grinding screech of metal under stress, and the heat was oppressive, every breath of wind filled with grit, rasping the skin like an animal’s tongue: Mingolla noted with amusement that the prices in the hotels were five lempira for a room without extras, ten for a room with a woman, and twenty-five for one with an air-conditioner, thus firmly establishing the value placed upon coolness by the citizenry.

  He chose an inexpensive third-floor room and spent the afternoon going over the layout of the Barrio, which was situated several miles to the north, itself the size of a town, rumored to contain more than forty thousand souls, and studying photographs of Alvina Guzman and his target, Opolonio de Zedeguí. The Nicaraguan was a thin fit-looking man of middle years, with black hair, a high forehead, and skin the color of sandalwood. His sensitive features made it difficult for Mingolla to think of him as a formidable adversary, but then he doubted that his own photograph would strike fear into anyone, and he cautioned himself against overconfidence. At dark, he stowed these materials in a drawer and sat by the window, watching the street come to life. Prostitutes swarmed into the bars, packs of merchant seamen and dockworkers hard on their heels. Pushcart vendors sold ices and roasted shishkebobs of meat and onions on portable grills; children hawked candy and windup toys and necklaces of black coral. The pockets of the pool tables in the bars were blocked off and their felt surfaces used for dice games; the jukebox music seemed to be bearing up the shouts of winners on rich clouds of melody and rhythm. The entrances to the bars were wide and brightly lit, framing dancers and gamblers and brawlers, and it appeared to Mingolla that the street was the site of dozens of small theaters in which the same play was being performed.

  At nine o’clock he walked two blocks south and entered the Cantina Las Vegas 99, the bar where Alvina Guzman plied her trade. He pushed through the crowd to the end of the counter and ordered a rum. Several men were ranged along the counter; the one nearest Mingolla favored him with a disconsolate stare, then went back to gazing into his glass. All the men at the counter were looking into their glasses, all gloomy, and Mingolla had the notion that if he were to imitate them, his thoughts would sail away at the speed of rum into some interior darkness. He engaged in a desultory conversation with the bartender, talking World Cup soccer and the weather, and critiqued the mural on the wall above the jukebox: sparkling dice and roulette wheels, playing cards and poker chips, each given the impression of enormity by the tiny people painted beneath them, their hands upflung in awe. Every couple of minutes he scanned the crowd for Alvina, and at last he picked her out. She was standing by the jukebox, feeding it a coin. A blocky, diminutive Indian woman with adobe-colored skin and full breasts and hips. Her black hair was woven into a single braid that fell to her mid-back, and her clothing—a white blouse and print sk
irt—showed signs of long usage. Like Hettie, her face conjured up Debora, not by its prettiness, for Alvina was not pretty, but by its impassivity. She stood unmoving, her squarish face without expression, and when a romantic ballad came on the jukebox, she began to dance alone, turning in tight graceful circles, her eyes fixed on the floor. Mingolla had been about to approach her, but held back, seeing in the dance, its sad abandon and its relation to the melodramatic Spanish of the lyrics, something he did not want to interrupt.

  “Today like yesterday just like tomorrow,

  I sit and watch the moon rise,

  the rumpled sheets frozen in its light

  like drifts of snow.

  At nine o’clock in the evening,

  only one cigarette left,

  and when I have finished smoking it,

  you will be a memory…”

  Alvina looked lost when the record ended, as if she had awakened to find herself in another world. Mingolla beat his way through the crowd, put a hand on her arm, and her face seemed to drain of an energy whose presence he hadn’t noticed before. “Ten lempira,” she said.

  “Sí, pues,” he said. “Y por la noche?”

  “Your accent,” she said. “It’s Guatemalan.”

  “Yes, I’m from the Petén. San Francisco de Juticlan.”

  “I’m Guatemalan, too. From the Altiplano,” Her interest flagged. “For the night it’s fifty. You have a hotel?”

  “It’s nearby.”

  She took a step toward the door, then said, “I don’t do the thing with my mouth…understand?”

  Mingolla said that wasn’t important.

  They walked without speaking to Mingolla’s hotel and up the stairs to his room. Inside was a cot, a chipped sink, a night table, and a ceiling fixture. The walls were dark green boards, striped with light showing through from the adjoining rooms, and from the room on the right came the sounds of strenuous lovemaking. Alvina started to unbutton her blouse, but Mingolla told her to wait.

  “What is it?” she asked nervously.