Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “What’s he saying?” he asked Alvina.

  “He says the water tastes good…reminds him of a time back in the old days.”

  “Right after we killed that bastard Arenas.” Hermeto struggled up, fell back. “Remember, Alvina?”

  She soothed him, cautioned him to be quiet.

  “She doesn’t like me talking about the old days,” Hermeto said.

  “What’s there to talk about?” she said roughly.

  “The struggle,” said Hermeto. “The struggle was…”

  “The struggle!” Alvina pretended to spit. “All we did was die.”

  Mingolla felt sad for the old man. “I don’t know,” he said. “You…”

  “No, she’s right. We achieved nothing.” Hermeto’s voice rose in pitch at the end, making the sentence sound like a question, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. “We thought we were fighting men, and because we killed so many, we thought we were winning. But we weren’t fighting men. We were fighting tides…tides caused by two giants splashing the water thousands of miles away. We didn’t have a chance.”

  “We didn’t have a choice, either.” Alvina opened a tin box, took out bread and cheese. “They were killing us.”

  The old man’s voice became inaudible even to Alvina, and she asked him to repeat what he had said.

  “My brother”—he made the sign of the cross—“may God deliver him.”

  Alvina stroked his hair.

  He asked for more water, gulped it down. “But don’t you remember that time, Alvina? Up in the Cuchumatanes?”

  “Yes, I remember,” she said wearily.

  “They had us trapped in the high passes,” he said to Mingolla. “We didn’t have water, hardly any food. We could see the river down below, but we couldn’t get to it. The sky was filled with the hum of helicopters. We were so thirsty, we ate the flowers of shrub palms, and everybody got cramps. Once we found a place where animals drank, a little pond filled with scum. Finally the helicopters left, and we staggered down to the river. It was such a strange day…thunder and mist. We looked like skeletons, but whenever the sun touched us we glowed like angels, our flesh almost transparent. Like angels throwing themselves into a river.”

  “You make it sound beautiful,” said Alvina disparagingly.

  “It was beautiful,” said the old man.

  She began feeding him crumbs of bread and cheese. Mingolla was glad for the interruption, because the old man’s description had been hard for him to bear. He settled back against the wall, listening to the noise from outside, thinking about the struggle, the Army of the Poor; to banish thought he opened the packet of frost and snorted a quantity. He loaded a smaller packet with a supply for Leon, then lay down and closed his eyes. Through his lids the candle flames acquired a dim red value, and the bloodiness of the color started him thinking about Hermeto and Alvina. He realized that if he were to relax his guard, he would begin to sympathize with them, and his sympathy would be as ingenuous and ill-informed as his lack of concern. He had no way of understanding what it would be like to starve in the hills. The hardships he had endured seemed by comparison a privileged form of agony, and just knowing that made him want to pay some penance.

  The candles were snuffed out, and Alvina lay down beside him. He edged away, afraid of contact, afraid she might contaminate him with principle and lead him down a risky path. She smelled of earth, of musky heat, and those smells and the action of the drug inflamed his desire. And as if she sensed this, she said, “If you want me again, you have to pay.”

  He couldn’t frame a reply that would convey his mood, but at last he said, “I can get you out of here.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “But I can.” He propped himself on an elbow, trying to see her in the dark. “I…”

  “The government has my sister and her children. If we were to escape, they’d die.”

  “They could be located, they—”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  They lay in silence, and the screams and gabble of the Barrio seemed to add a pressure to the darkness, squeezing black air from his lungs.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You…I don’t know you well, and I don’t like you very much, yet I trust you.”

  “I’m sorry you don’t like me.”

  “Don’t feel put upon,” she said. “I don’t like most people.”

  Implicit in her statement, Mingolla thought, was a studied rejection of life, and he pictured how she must have been back in the days when politics was in the hills, when everything seemed possible: an ordinarily pretty Indian girl imbued with extraordinary zeal and passion. He wished he could help her, do something for her, and remembered the stack of romance novels.

  “Do you like making love?” he asked. “I don’t mean do you like…your work, but would you like it with someone you cared about?”

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “I could make you like it.”

  She laughed. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “No, really. Suppose I could hypnotize you, make you feel passion? Would you want me to do that?”

  The mattress rustled as she turned to face him, and he could feel her eyes searching him out. “Ten lempira,” she said. “And you can make me crow like a rooster.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  She reached down, fondled his genitals. “Come on, man,” she said bitterly. “Ten lempira. You’ll forget all about the other girls.”

  Humiliated, he pushed her hand away.

  “No?” she said. “Well, maybe when you’re feeling better.”

  He was tempted to coerce her pleasure, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, unable to shake the conviction that she was his superior.

  “I don’t understand,” said Alvina after a while. “I just can’t figure anything out anymore.”

  Morning in the Barrio was different from night only in that when sections of the roof were lifted, chutes of gray light spilled in, and people stood beneath the open sky, risking mortal harm for a glimpse of freedom; otherwise the same smoky orange gloom prevailed among the black beams and fires. The center of the Barrio, where Leon and Mingolla sat in a shadowed niche, featured a row of stucco houses strung out across the width of the prison; and in one of them, a house with a white wall and black shutters, and an oil drum fire burning at its corner, lived Opolonio de Zedeguí. “See those four guys out front?” said Leon, inserting the tip of his knife into his packet of frost. “They’re always there. His bodyguards. You’ll have to do something to get rid of them. A diversion, maybe.” He inhaled from the knife blade. His black eyes widened, his cheeks hollowed. “Chingaste! This is good stuff!”

  The four men ranged in front of de Zedeguí’s house were young and well muscled, and Mingolla could tell from their slack attitudes that they were under psychic control. De Zedeguí was being terribly incautious: these men might well have been the signal that had alerted American agents to his presence.

  “If you’ve got more of this stuff, I know some guys who can help,” said Leon.

  “We’ll talk about it later.” Mingolla did a bladeful of frost and looked around. He was beginning to get used to the noise and the smell, and he wondered if the place was growing on him. He chuckled, and Leon asked what was funny. “Nothing,” said Mingolla.

  Leon laughed, too, as if “nothing” were a hilarious concept. Sharp lines spread from the corners of his eyes, making his reddish brown skin look papery. “So,” he said after a silence, “you’re her cousin, eh? Strange she never mentioned you. She talks about family all the time.”

  “She didn’t know me,” said Mingolla. “Different branch of the family.”

  “Ah,” said Leon. “That explains it.”

  Mingolla had more of the drug. It was doing nice things to his head, but was tearing up his nose, and he thought he should star
t taking it under his tongue. Or stop taking it altogether. But he had become so used to being drugged, the indulgence seemed natural.

  “I thought all her people lived around Cobán,” said Leon.

  “Guess not.”

  “Y’know,” said Leon, “it’s crazy you coming here just to kill this guy. In here, he’s dead already.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “So what’s your real reason?”

  Mingolla saw that he would have to do something soon about Leon’s suspicious nature, but he felt too loose and composed to want to bother with it now. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, coming to his feet.

  They set off toward Alvina’s, and Mingolla wondered if the place had grown on him, though more likely it was the drug that caused the Barrio to appear…not beautiful, exactly, but painterly. Everywhere were tableaux that had the inner radiance and important stillness he associated with the Old Masters. There, three men roughing up a woman, who was clawing, kicking, and all of them looking up as the roof above opened to admit a shaft of white sunlight that played over them, freezing and transfiguring the action. And there, almost lost in the shadow of a thatched lean-to, an old hag straight out of Goya, her ravaged face framed by a black shawl, staring with perplexed astonishment at a feather in her hand. And the whole of the place with its black divisions, its smoky orange segments of misery, leaping flames, and silhouetted imps, was a collection of pre-Renaissance triptyches. He could be like the guy who painted murals in the bombed villages, he could stay here forever and ensure immortality by memorializing a life of terror and deprivation…A change in the noise, a wave of louder and more agitated noise rolling toward them, brought him alert. In the distance he saw a line of masked guards with whips and rifles driving a mob ahead of them.

  “This way!” Leon grabbed his arm, yanking Mingolla toward the wall of houses. “We’ll be safe in there.”

  Mingolla had a bad feeling. “Why there?”

  “They’re not hunting anybody…it’s just a sweep.” Leon pulled at him. “They always do it about this time; they never check the houses.”

  People were running in every direction, shouting, screaming, bright spears of sound that shattered at their peak, and Mingolla was slammed into a beam by someone’s shoulder. Diseased flowers swirling, eddying around him, all the same kind, with patterns of black mouths and empty eyes and mottled brown petals like skin, a wilted vaseful of them washing down a drain. Forked twig hand clutching his arm, wrinkled mouth saying, Please, please, and being swept away. He fought toward Leon, but was thrown off course by the tidal flow of the mob. The guards were closing, he could see the patterns of bloody muscle on their masks, hear their whips cracking, and shouts of pain were mixed in now with those of panic. A little boy clung to his leg with the desperation of a small animal hanging onto a branch in a gale, but was scraped off as Mingolla beat a path through a clot of people stopping up the flow. The screams fed into the smoky light, making it pulse, making the flames leap higher in the oil drums, and Mingolla had the urge to lose control, to begin cutting with his knife and screaming himself. He wound up beside the door Leon had entered, wedged it open, and a teenage boy slipped past him into the dimly lit room…slipped past and cried out as a knife flashed across his neck. Leon’s startled face peering out. Mingolla pushed inside and backhanded Leon to the floor, and Leon rolled up into a crouch, the knife poised. But he faltered, his expression growing puzzled, then woeful under Mingolla’s assault of guilt and friendship betrayed. The knife dropped from his hand.

  Mingolla bolted the door, kneeled beside the boy, and checked for a pulse; his fingers came back dyed with red. Leon had slumped against the rear wall and was weeping, his face buried in his hands. In the corner beside him, ringed by guttering candles, wrapped in blankets as gray as her skin, an old woman was trembling, staring fearfully at Mingolla. He snatched one of her blankets and used it to cover the dead boy. He picked up Leon’s knife, squatted next to him. “Who are you working for?” he asked. Leon just sobbed, and Mingolla jabbed his leg with the knife, repeating the question.

  “Nobody, nobody.” Leon’s Adam’s apple bobbed, his voice broke. “I wanted the rest of the drugs.”

  Leon’s treachery brought home to Mingolla the full extent of his foolhardiness. The manchild strolling around Hell, contemplating its aesthetic, playing ineffectual good Samaritan. He was damned lucky to be alive. No more bullshit, he thought. He’d finish his business and get out. Leon’s tears glistened, he sobbed uncontrollably, and Mingolla intensified his assault, slowly elevating Leon’s guilt to a suicidal pitch. He held the knife to the side of Leon’s neck.

  “No, please…God, no!” The old woman crawled toward him, dragging a train of blankets. “I’ll die, I’ll die!” Her voice articulated and decrepit, like a grating pain, like broken ribs grinding together. Her face a gray death mask with hairy moles, lumped cheekbones. Her death an accomplice after the fact to the dead thing of her life. Mingolla looked away from her, repelled, ready to cut Leon, full of cold judgment.

  “It’s not his fault,” whined the old woman. “He’s not responsible.”

  Mingolla had an answer for that, courtesy of Philosophy 101, but withheld it. “Whose fault is it, then?” he asked, pointing at the boy with the knife.

  “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know what he’s…” A tear the size of a pearl leaked from one of her rheumy dark eyes. “The things they made him do, the awful things…but he fought back. Ten years in the jungles. Ten years living like an animal, fighting all the time. You don’t know.”

  Leon’s sobs racked his chest.

  “Who are you?” Mingolla asked.

  “He’s my son…my son.”

  “Did you know he was going to do this?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, and you’d have done the same. All those drugs, so much money. You’re no different from us.”

  “No,” said Mingolla, pointing again to the boy. “I wouldn’t have done this.”

  “Fool,” said the old woman, and the screams and shouts from without, receding but still a measure of chaos, seemed to be echoing the word. “What do you know? Nothing, you know nothing. Leon…Oh, God! When he was seventeen, just married, the soldiers came to our village. They took all the young men and armed them with rifles and drove them in a truck to the next village, where the people were suing a big landowner. A real villain. And the soldiers ordered the young men to kill all the young women of that village. They had no choice. If they hadn’t obeyed, the soldiers would have killed their women.” She looked sadly at the gray walls as if they were explanations, reasons. “You know nothing.”

  “Forgive me,” said Leon. “God, oh God, forgive me!”

  “I know he tried to kill me,” said Mingolla. “I don’t care what made him this way.”

  “Why should I bother?” Leon’s mother gazed at the ceiling, her hands upheld in supplication. “Let him take my son, let me starve. Why should I live any longer?” She turned a look of pure hatred on Mingolla. “Go ahead!” she shrilled. “Kill him! See”—she pointed a knobbly finger at Leon—“he doesn’t care, either. What’s it matter, life or death. In this place it’s the same.” She screeched at him. “I hope you live forever in this godforsaken hole! I hope life eats you away an inch at a time.” She tore at her blouse, ripping away buttons, baring the empty sacks of her breasts. “Kill me first! Come on, you devil! Kill me! Me!” And when he did nothing, she tried to pull his hand away from Leon’s neck, to drive the knife into her chest. Her eyes as full of bright mad life as a bird’s, her claw fingers unnaturally strong. Breath whistling in her throat. He shoved her down, and she lay panting, teeth bared, an old gray bitch-wolf gone into fear, gone beyond it into a kind of exultation, lusting for death. He didn’t feel merciful toward her; mercy would have been inappropriate. She neither wanted nor needed it. He put her to sleep to rid himself of an annoyance. Withholding judgment on Leon, he settled in the far corner among the blankets…they even smel
led gray.

  To fend off weariness he did more frost. He rejected the idea of returning to Alvina’s. There he would be drawn to listen to Hermeto’s reminiscences, feel renewed appreciation for Alvina, and that would only weaken him. He would wait here until midnight and then take care of de Zedeguí. Take care of him in a straightforward fashion. No diversions, no tricks. He wanted a gunfight, a test of strength. Subtlety was not his forte, and he would be prone to bouts of foolhardiness until he gained more experience; he needed to reassure himself of the efficacy of brute force. A certain lack of prudence was corollary to the wielding of power, he thought; a credential of boldness. And if this attitude reflected a diminished concern for his survival, so be it: such a diminished concern would be an asset to a killer, for if one valued one’s own life too highly, such a valuation would be difficult to dismiss in regard to other lives.

  Leon’s weeping began to perturb him, and he let him join his mother in sleep. He pulled out de Zedeguí’s photograph, inspected it for clues. But that bland professorial face gave nothing away, unless its unreadability was itself a clue to subtlety. He hoped that was the case, that their struggle would be one of strength against subtlety: that would be the best proving ground of all. He dipped up more frost with the edge of the photograph. The drug was a solid form in his head, a frozen vein of electricity that soon began to prevent any thought aside from a perception of its own mineral joy. Mingolla’s nasal membranes burned, his heart raced, and he sat unmoving. He gazed at a spot on the wall, his resolve building into anger, like a warrior envisioning the coming battle, living it in advance, yet for the moment secure amid hearth and home, with his dogs sleeping at his feet.

  It began to rain shortly before six o’clock, a hard downpour that drummed like bullets on the iron roof, drowning out every other noise. All over the Barrio, sections of the roof were being lifted, allowing tracers of rain to slant through the orange gloom, the separate drops fiery and distinct. People cast off their rags and danced, their mouths open, their torsos growing slick and shiny, and others caught the water in buckets, and others yet dropped to their knees, their hands upheld to heaven. Fires hissed and burned low. Smoke fumed, and a damp chill infiltrated the air. There was a general lightening of mood, a carnival frenzy, and, taking advantage of it, Mingolla strolled up to the oil drum fire at the corner of de Zedeguí’s house and joined three old men who had gathered around it, convincing them that his presence was expected and welcome; out of the corner of his eye, he studied the four guards flanking de Zedeguí’s door. He blocked, becoming invisible to the uncommon senses of the man he intended to kill, and thought how best to deal with the guards.