Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “Sit down.” He switched on the light. “I want to talk with you.”

  “Why?” Very nervous. “What do you want to know?”

  “Please, sit down.”

  She did as he asked, but darted a glance toward the door.

  “My name is David, and I know that you’re Alvina Guzman.”

  “It’s no secret,” she said, affecting calm, but again looked at the door.

  “I want your help,” he said, infecting her with feelings of friendship and trust.

  She lifted her hand as if to touch her face, but left the gesture uncompleted. “What help can I be? I’m a prisoner.”

  “I’m going into the Barrio.”

  “You don’t need my help for that.” She rested a hand on the pillow, then patted it again, testing its softness, its firmness, as if it were a very fine thing, indeed. “Why do you want to do this?”

  “There’s a man, a Nicaraguan named de Zedeguí…”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He killed my family.” Mingolla fleshed out the story, his desire for revenge, continuing to exert influence on Alvina, and explained that he wanted to pass himself off as her cousin and thus fall under the relative immunity accorded her family.

  “A friend of mine, he may know this de Zedeguí.” She looked at him with concern. “You may be tortured, and you’ll probably never get out.” In the adjoining room a prostitute gave a patently false cry of delight, and Alvina twitched her head toward the sound. “But if you insist on trying,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the Ninety-Nine just before three o’clock.”

  “What’ll you do till then?”

  “Work…the guards expect their money.”

  Muttered conversation from the next room, the sound of breaking glass.

  “Here.” He handed her a clip containing a thick fold of bills.

  “This is too much,” she said after counting it.

  “It’s not enough.”

  She raised no further objection, tucked the money into her blouse pocket, and sat with hands on knees, as stolid and glum as an idol. “Could I sleep until three?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  Her back to him, she unbuttoned her blouse, shrugged it off. Red weals of scar tissue crossed her shoulders, and when she slipped off her skirt, he saw that more severe scars figured her dimpled buttocks and thighs. The scars centered her for Mingolla, made clear her long history of hopeless striving and terror, of jungle hideouts and hard traveling. She folded her clothes at the foot of the bed and slid beneath the covers, sitting up, engaging Mingolla’s stare. Her breasts were pendulous, the areolas large and brown. The pucker of an old bullet wound on her right shoulder.

  “You’ve paid,” she said.

  He knew she was merely offering to fulfill a contract, and yet, aroused by his contact with her mind, he would have liked to make love to her. She wasn’t attractive, but she was plain in the way history is plain, its contrivance lending the world a symmetry that implies hidden beauty; and it seemed to him that her impassivity was symptomatic of the quiet confidence with which beauty confronts the world. There was beauty in her, he thought, and the scars bore this out. However, he didn’t want to use her: hers was not the sort of beauty he would feel comfortable using.

  “You wear your scars well,” he said.

  This displeased her. “Some men like them.”

  “That’s not how I meant it.”

  She continued to meet his eyes. “You haven’t answered me.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  A fleshy smack in the next room, a cry that was not feigned.

  “I’ll turn out the light in a minute,” Mingolla said.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of the night table, removing a knife, a calf sheath, and a largish packet filled with white powder. He tapped some of the powder onto the overfold of the packet and began dividing it into lines with the knife.

  “What’s that?” Alvina leaned in over his shoulder.

  “Frost.” He chopped at a granular lump. “It’s like cocaine…stronger. Want some? You won’t be able to sleep.”

  “No, not now. Aren’t you going to sleep?”

  “I don’t want to be groggy at three.”

  He fitted a drinking straw to his nostril and snorted five fat lines in rapid succession. The skin on his forehead tightened.

  “The guards will take that from you.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  He did three more lines. His thoughts began an agitated dance, and he imagined blue-white crackles of electricity sparking at his temples. The drain was bitter at the back of his throat.

  “Get some sleep now,” he told her.

  He extinguished the light and sat by the door. The lights were off in the adjoining room as well, and only a faint glow penetrated from the street, along with faint music and babble. Patches of shinier black like worn velvet appeared to be floating on the dark, and Mingolla wondered if—just as the chipped porcelain of the sink, the dinged cot, the splintered table—the darkness in cheap hotel rooms bore signs of previous occupancy. He thought about the Nicaraguan and was a little worried. Although he was stronger than Tully, and Tully was one of the best, he would be facing the Nicaraguan on his own territory…a dangerous territory. He would have to be very cautious. What most worried him was the Nicaraguan’s craziness, the morbidity that must have prompted him to seek refuge in the Iron Barrio. Craziness was a variable for which he could not prepare, and he only hoped it would prove a weakness.

  Alvina snored lightly. He made out the shape of her body, lying on her side, facing away from him. The frost had boosted his natural horniness, and he kept having to grapple with his erection, shifting it to a more comfortable position. He really would like to fuck her. To fuck history, do it doggy-style, kneeling and balls-deep in history’s meat, overlooking its scarred plain and chunky ass. And he thought that was in essence what he was doing by working for Psicorps. Fucking the history of rebellion, of the Army of the Poor, of brutalized peasants and Indians. He was the bad guy now. This had crossed his mind before, but never with such immediacy, and fired by the exhilarating clarity of the frost, he pictured himself on a movie poster, MINGOLLA in flaming letters, his figure towering above burning villages and screaming hordes, mento-rays beaming from his eyes. Then he saw it from another viewpoint. Saw himself sneaking along a corpse-choked alley, hunting for a victim. He couldn’t understand how he had come to this pass; he could perceive the events leading to it, but that alone explained nothing. It seemed to him that he must have been tricked, or that he had tricked himself, or…Alvina mumbled in her sleep. Damn, he wanted to fuck her! Not even fuck her, just be close to her, with someone. He was scared, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Anybody would be scared with the Barrio in their future. He would lie down next to her, that’s all, lie down and hold her, feel his drugged heart slugging against her scarred back, and know that if she could survive horror and deprivation, he could make it, too. He needed that consolation, that creature comfort. He stripped, padded to the bed, and eased in beside her. She stirred but did not wake. But when he put an arm around her, inadvertently touching her breast, she looked at him over her shoulder, the whites of her eyes luminous. “Go back to sleep,” he said. He couldn’t help cupping the breast, letting the stem of the nipple slip between his fingers, making it stiff. His erection pronged her ass. Without a word, she cocked her knee, and he slid between her legs, rubbing back and forth, feeling her moisten. He worked a finger into her cunt, then two fingers, swirled them around, her muscles sucking him deeper, hips grinding. She must want him, he thought. In her mind they would be brother and sister in league against a Nicaraguan monster. And he wanted her, not just anyone, her, wanted her big Commie ass to milk him dry, wanted union and redemption and control. He flipped her onto her stomach, came to his knees behind her, and slipped in with a slick effortless motion, pushing inside until none of him was showing. He held her by the waist, liking the eleva
tion, the combined sense of intimacy and distance. He withdrew a little, watched himself move in and out. He ran his hands along her flanks, molding them. Reached down and squeezed a hanging breast, forcing her face into the pillow. Not a sound from her, but that was guerrilla tactics, biting back their cries to keep their position secret, screwing under cover of midnight and ferns. He rode her hard, trying to drive sound out of her, trying to make her squeal, relishing the way her ass churned, forgetting to listen for her cries, and everything, fear and lust and drugs, balling up into a blazing knot, tightening and then unraveling into a thread of sweet languor, leaving him sweaty and gasping atop her.

  She turned away after he withdrew, tension signaling her resentment. “I didn’t mean…” he began.

  “You paid,” she said coldly.

  He was ashamed, and he saw he would have to repair the damage done, shore up her trust, maybe establish affection. But he was also contented, pleased with himself, with his conquest of history. The repairs could wait, he thought; for now he wanted her to know exactly whom she was dealing with, even if he didn’t know himself.

  At three-thirty Mingolla and Alvina stood among a group of women—a couple of dozen at least—waiting for the bus that would transport them to the Barrio. Nobody spoke. The night was starless, moonless, and wind seethed in the grasses along the side of the road, pouring off the unfeatured blackness of the sea. Behind them lay a collection of huts, a true barrio, their thatch looking as bedraggled as molting feathers in the wash of light from their doorways. Headlights came from the north, swelled and resolved into a white schoolbus with neat black lettering above the windshield that read DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. The bus braked with a squeal, its door hinged open, and three short wiry men piled out, their pistols drawn. They wore street clothes, and red masks like those worn by wrestlers covered their heads. Mingolla saw that the masks were not merely red, but depicted flayed faces with anatomically correct renderings of muscle and tendon. Horrid things that made the men’s eyes look glittery and false, their mouths becoming simple black holes each time they spoke. When they spotted Mingolla they cut him out from the milling women, pushed him down in the grass, and trained their pistols on him. “Wait!” he said, projecting camaraderie and trust. The pistols wavered, lowered.

  “Who are you?” asked one of the men, helping him up.

  Mingolla led the men aside, gave his name, and told them he was with the government, that he intended to work undercover in the Barrio, seeking intelligence from a certain prisoner. He asked their names.

  “Julio.”

  “Martín.”

  “Carlito.”

  He asked if they would be on duty the next night, and they said yes; he told them to expect him to be among the women when it came time to drive them to work. He thought it strange that he could so easily work his will upon men with such fearsome visages, and his dominance made clear the petty resources of the evil that funded them. They hustled him onto the bus, and as he had instructed, they shoved him into the seat beside Alvina. “How did you manage it?” she whispered after the engine had kicked over.

  “Bribes,” he said.

  She absorbed this and nodded. “You’ll do well in the Barrio.”

  They drove for half an hour past coconut plantations and brush, then turned onto an unmarked road; the road widened into the plain of packed dirt that fronted the Barrio. Mingolla had seen aerial photographs of the place, showing it to be a single-story building with a roof of corrugated iron that spread across miles of defoliated jungle. Seeing the building at ground level was in some ways less impressive, for it had the appearance of a long warehouse atop which masked guards were posted—not an unexpected sight in Latin America; yet he felt rather than perceived its size, as if it possessed a gravity and atmosphere subtly different from the surrounding land. And closer, deeper within that sphere of influence, able to make out particulars, he understood the full menace of the prison. Spotlights swept over the roof from the nearby jungle, the beams causing the bloody masks of the posted guards to flare like matches, illuminating thick coils of smoke that twisted blue and ponderous like the tails of demons whose bodies were lost to sight in the heavens. Above the main gate—a sliding metal door—and also swept by the spotlights, the bodies of eight men and women were depended from crude gallows, all gashed and burned to such an extent that Mingolla couldn’t believe any of them had survived to be hanged. Through the windows of the bus came a terrible smell compounded of charcoal cookery, smoke, the cloying mustiness of death, the sickly sweetness of people living cramped together, and God knew what else…a thousand smells blended into an evil perfume that made Mingolla gag. And as the bus pulled up to the gate, which was partway open, he heard a noise that—like the smell—was a combination of elements, of laughter and babble and screams, yet was remarkable neither for its constituency nor its whole, but for its rhythms, how it ebbed and faded with the inconsistent unity of jungle noise, of birds and insects obeying the designs and principles of an organic environment.

  “Keep close,” Alvina said as they were herded through the gate, and Mingolla caught up her hand. The gate grated shut behind them, stranding them in sultry heat and dimness, and their three guards disappeared into a door set into a side wall. Before them was another gate perforated with slits from which issued the noise and the smell and an orange glow: Mingolla felt as if he had been swallowed by a beast with metal jaws and fire in its guts. With a screech, the interior gate was hoisted, and they walked rapidly into the shadows on the right. They fetched up against a rough stone surface, and Alvina whispered, “Leon?”

  “Who’s with you?” came a raspy voice.

  “My cousin…he’s all right.”

  “Charmed,” said the voice.

  Mingolla acknowledged the greeting, but was mesmerized by the patterns of smoke and flame and shadow within the Barrio, a constant shifting of darks and lights so allied with fluctuations in the noise that it was several seconds before he could assemble a coherent image of the place. A forest of blackened beams supported the roof, lending perspective to what had at first seemed an infinite depth, and among the beams stood all manner of shelters: lean-tos, tents, huts, piles of brick hollowed by caves. The walls were the walls of small stucco houses with shuttered windows; in other parts of the Barrio, according to Mingolla’s plans, were labyrinths of such houses, remnants of the town that had once occupied the land. Fires bloomed everywhere. Along the walls, in grills and oil drums. And the resultant light was a smoky orange gloom through which packs of prisoners shuffled, many with knives in hand.

  “Bitch of a hometown, huh?” said Leon, emerging from the shadows. A middle-aged Indian almost as short as Alvina, with a seamed face and sunken cheeks and black bowl-cut hair. Despite the heat, his shoulders were draped in a blanket.

  “This is the friend I told you about,” Alvina said. “You can trust him to help you.”

  “Don’t volunteer me for free.” Leon grinned, revealing seven or eight rotting teeth tipped at rustic angles like gravestones.

  “You’ll be paid,” said Mingolla.

  Leon’s face hardened in reaction to Mingolla’s curtness. “What do you need?” And when Mingolla gave him de Zedeguí’s photograph, he said, “I’ll find him…we’ll talk in the morning.” He drew a knife from beneath his blanket. “You have a weapon, man?”

  Mingolla unsheathed his own knife.

  “Then let’s go,” said Leon.

  During that walk across the Barrio, through zones of flame, patches of sticky-looking darkness, and layers of intolerable stench, Mingolla saw many memorable things, many things that beggared explanation; yet he asked no explanation, for though he grew sick at heart from seeing, he realized that the Barrio was its own explanation, a world with its own rules of right action and process of good and evil. The Barrio seemed to be displaying itself for him, offering him a sampling of its treasures. As he turned his head a frayed curtain would be drawn back from a lean-to, or a group of people gather
ed around an oil drum, silhouetted like ragged crows, would step aside, opening avenues of sight down which his eyes would travel toward some horrible or pitiful or—infrequently—beautiful sight or event. He saw gang rapes and beatings, a spectrum of the crippled and the diseased. He saw a man whose hand had been replaced by a wooden stump in which a fork was embedded, and another man bearing a tray of mouse carcasses like tiny bloody candies. He saw two matronly women painting a design of crescents on an infant, and beyond them, a young woman crucified to a beam, her waxy breasts painted with this same design. Once a section of the roof was lifted, a noose dropped over the head of a sleeping man, and he was hauled up kicking and spasming by a handful of guards; and farther on, another section was lifted, and a barrel of water was poured onto some children who laughed and licked the droplets from one anothers’ skin. And the windowless one-room house shared by Alvina and her father provided a further instance of the Barrio’s process. Chained to its door was a boy of about twelve armed with a machete; he appeared content to be chained and held out the lock to Leon, who opened it and gave him a mango. Then Leon bade them good night, reminding Mingolla of their meeting the next morning.

  Inside, the walls were pale blue, flaking, inscribed with a decade of graffiti; the room was lit by thin candles and dominated by two mattresses, on one of which lay Hermeto Guzman: an ancient white-haired man with skin the reddish dark of raw iron, his bony frame scarcely making an impression on the sheet that was tucked around him. The smell of feces was strong, and Alvina spent the better part of an hour cleaning the old man, while Mingolla sat on the other mattress, leafing through a pile of paperback romance novels. Alvina didn’t bother to perform introductions, and it was unclear whether the old man had seen Mingolla; but as she tipped up his head, helping him drink from a bottle of mineral water, he stared at Mingolla with eyes that were dark yet touched with light, stoic and alive. They seemed to be drinking him in with the same avidity as that with which he gulped down the water. The eyes made Mingolla feel young and unknowing, and he thought the old man’s frail whisper must be commenting upon him.