Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  Mingolla awakened from a dream of suffocation, unable to breathe the stale heated air inside the tent. He crawled out, stood and stretched. It had rained during the night, rinsing the sky of clouds, and the sun was fierce on the river, adding a shimmering glaze to its jade finish. Blue-and-silver fish were nudging pebbles along the bottom of the hot springs. It looked inviting. He could, he thought, get into nudging pebbles, hunting for tiny bugs in the silt. He stripped and waded in, quickstepping away from the scalding current that bubbled from the bank. The limestone bank extended about ten feet out, and at its edge the water was only inches deep over a smooth bottom. He kneeled, splashed himself, and tilted his face to the sun, his thoughts going with the race of the current. Something splashed near shore, and he turned toward the sound. Saw Debora standing in the water, undoing her blouse, her jeans folded on the bank. Water beads glistened on her thighs, in her black pubic brush. She shrugged off the blouse, held it crumpled in front of her, then tossed it next to the jeans. For a moment her body seemed inset into the greenery, a keyhole opening onto a tawny desert place.

  His senses ran out of him, coiling around her. She was a little thick-waisted, her breasts so small in contrast to the fullness of her hips that they looked immature, and this gave her a sexy childlike allure. She kneeled facing him, her expression tentative, a dozen expressions trying to be one, and he thought he must look much the same, because now he was insecure, afraid of making mistakes with her.

  “I couldn’t…” she said. “I had to.”

  He wasn’t sure what specific uncertainty she was trying to put behind her, but to smooth over her confusion he kissed her, met her tongue, and slid a hand along her inner thigh. She eased into the touch, and his finger slipped between her legs, found her open; she shifted forward, letting his finger penetrate, and he understood that she didn’t want to wait, she wanted to rush past the beginning, to know everything. He lifted her astraddle him, and her head resting on his shoulder, her hair striping his vision, she guided him into place, worked herself down until he was all the way inside. To be held that way, her warmth enclosing him, gripping him, it was, Jesus! so good, so good, he was melting in her, dissolving in that perfect fit. He could feel a clean untroubled face breaking through his old mask of war and anger, the shards falling away into the flood of the sun, the daze of bright water. Everything was melting, the jungle and the river running together, slick with heat and brilliance, greens and blues washing into a unity of light that penetrated his eyelids. She began to tremble, her nails pricking his back, and just the trembling nearly brought him off.

  He needed to move but they were angled wrong. Supporting her with one hand, he tipped her backward until her hair fanned across the water; he planted his free arm on the bottom to bear their weight. Her legs locked around his waist, inching him deeper, and he came, all the bad days, the longing, loosed in a heart-stopping pour that left him wobbly and gulping for breath. But he stayed hard, wanting her again. Sweat trickled down his back like molten cracks spreading; salt drops stung his eyes. His planted arm began to ache with the awkwardness of the position, but then as if it had connected with limestone muscles, the ache subsided. She worked her hips, grinding, pushing, building her moment. It was quick for her, too. Her belly tensed, she gave a sharp cry and clawed at his shoulders. Then she relaxed, mouth going slack, eyes closed against the glare. He pulled out, eased back in. So good, that silky muscle. Good like Jesus, like everything calm and sweet at once. A single word began sounding over and over in his head, Debora, Debora, Debora, but that wasn’t it, not her name, her name was only a translation of the real word, which meant much more, secret kingdoms of meaning, of mastery and giving. He looked down at her. At the tendrils of black hair floating on jade, the dreamy eastern face. He saw where they joined. He wished he could say something, tell her something, but he was leery of words…words spoken out loud had the weight of evidence, they could be held against you, and even though they’d become lovers, there was still distrust between them. But it was all right, all right for now. He gazed out past her head across the shimmering water toward the tree line, and as he moved again, as it became all right forever for a moment, he caught a flash of the way it had been after they’d mowed down the jungle around the Ant Farm: the full-bore immensity and silence of the light, the clear innocent air above palms blackened like matchsticks, the cracked red earth leaking steam, and how they’d walked through the dead land, crunching the scorched, brittle stalks underfoot, unafraid, because all the snakes in hiding were now just shadows in the cinders.

  They lay on their sides in the warm flow of the springs, and looking at the far bank, at the diminutive crowns of the trees, Mingolla felt they had grown enormous, that they were two exhausted giants newly surfaced from a deep. Debora threw back her head, and at that precise instant something silver streaked across the top of the sky; a worry line creased her brow. He pulled her to him, but she drew back and said, “No…the tent. Let’s go in the tent.” And coming to her feet with a splash, she outran him to the bank.

  With the flap closed, sealing them into a confine of half-dark and air as still as a held breath, he felt more alone with her, strangely more alive. Her body was aglow with dampness, her eyes were gleams. He kneeled between her legs, bent lower and tasted her. Tasted her, exploring the folds of her cunt, lapping at her, imagining honey smearing his mouth. She hardly moved for a minute or so, but he could tell how she’d wanted this, how known and gloried in it made her feel. Her hips bucked, her legs clamped his head. Breath was knocked out of her in hoarse gasps. The muscles of her stomach bunched, and she wrapped her hands in his hair, holding him immobile, as if were he to take his mouth away or do anything more, she would break into pieces. Afterward he lay beside her, kissed her, and she said, “I can taste myself…I thought it’d be horrible to taste myself.”

  “And it’s not?”

  “No, because I can taste you, too.”

  The demureness in her voice aroused him, and he entered her again. And this time, obeying an impulse, he pushed into her mind as well, reestablishing that blazing mental circuit they’d experienced with Amalia. His body was galvanized, his movements seemed to be conforming to the twists and turns of the electric knot they were weaving inside each other’s heads, and from that point on he was aware of what was happening only during lapses in the connection. He would find himself battering at her, pinning her wrists above her head, or that she had mounted him and was raking his chest with her nails. Hours of this, on and on into the night. Brutal, sweaty, animal sex. He knew he should be worn out, but every renewal of the mental contact restored him, kindled in him a sensation of thrilling strength and vitality.

  Toward dawn, with gray light hanging in the folds of the tent flap, Debora went outside, returning a few minutes later, her body damp from the river, carrying a cloth and a full canteen. She sponged off his chest, his groin, and then, setting the canteen aside, she took him in her mouth. She was a shadow bending to him, the act veiled by the fall of her hair, and because she had caught him by surprise, he was at first less aware of his responses than of hers. Fingers digging into his thigh, the pressure of her mouth. She was sweetly inexpert, too gentle with him, learning as she went, but his thoughts went with her hesitant movements, and it was fine, lovely, the concerned delicacy of those thoughts, the fleeting memories of other more expert women, the messages he tried to send, urging to do it this way, oh yeah, Jesus, that’s it, and worries that she wouldn’t like it when he came, he wanted her to like it, and then his regard of her was subsumed into dominance and need, the need to flood her, fill her, prurient images of her lips, his cock going in, hollowing her cheeks, mixed in with the sensation of her tongue curling around him, and he saw flashes in the dark air, and he followed them with his eyes, with the thrusting of his hips, with all his wish, all his muscled intent, his hips bridging to meet her mouth, and said, “Debora, Christ!” and laid his hand on the back of her head, guiding her the last bit, going blank and
rigid into light, into a nervy flare of pleasure that was a greater fulfillment than all the previous violent ones. She nestled close, smiling a bright prideful smile, and kissed him, bringing his own salt taste to his mouth. She whispered something.

  “I didn’t hear,” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  He was certain she had whispered, “I love you,” and was happy that words were becoming accessible to them, that trust was building; but at the same time he was put off by the claim implicit in the words, frightened by their power, and he began once more to wonder who she was, this stranger whom love made seem so familiar, and why they were here and what they were going to do.

  The most intriguing thing about their lovemaking was not the intensity of their mental contact—Mingolla realized that he’d been expecting something of the sort—but was its aftermath, the sense of strength and vitality it brought to them. He recalled what Izaguirre had said about a mutuality of focus between two psychics acting to increase their powers, and to test the truth of this, he went with Debora to visit Amalia again. They each awakened her with only the slightest of efforts, and when she attacked Mingolla, he repelled her without difficulty. Amalia did not take defeat well. She peered fearfully at them over the edge of the hammock, the pink splotches on her face glowing like radium in the gloom of the hut, and wept. Debora tried to comfort her, but Mingolla’s interest was more clinical, and he worked to shore up the less dominant patterns of her mind, fueling them with his strength, curious as to what she might be able to tell them about her past.

  “I don’t remember,” she said defiantly when he asked about her therapy. But he could tell she was lying and urged her to comply.

  “There were lots of us,” she said. “In a big house.”

  “Boys and girls like you?” Debora asked.

  “No one’s like me,” said Amalia.

  “I mean were they…sick?”

  “Broken,” she said, and the word seemed to resonate beyond the walls of the hut, as if every broken thing were responding to her signal.

  Mingolla framed another question, but before he could ask it, Amalia began to speak. “…And the light of the Beast that had been loosed was the light of reason for the Madradonas and the Sotomayors, and they met in the city of Cartagena to contrive a peace, and when they went forth from the city unified in purpose and over the years insinuated themselves into the seats of the mighty, preparing for the consolidation of the world into a single nation. But not all were of this accord. Passions still ran high among the youth of the families, and they continued to murder and rape, to swindle and defraud, as had the countless generations that preceded them, and so it was determined that…that they, too…they, too, should…”

  Amalia slumped in the hammock, the patterns of her mind in utter disarray, beyond Mingolla’s capacity to restore. For a moment the only sound was the creaking of the hammock ropes, and to Mingolla, feeling desolate, realizing that he and Debora were trapped in a circumstance beyond their control or comprehension…to Mingolla the creaking of the ropes opened into a vision of a room with softly glowing walls, the light issuing from almost imperceptible cells embedded in pattern of magenta swirls on the wallpaper, and he was lying on a bed in a motel, furnished with a chrome desk beneath a wide mirror, and matching chairs of chrome and mauve upholstery, the decor achieving an effect both sterile and gaudy. Water running in the bathroom. A click, the bathroom door opening, and Debora came in drying her hands on a towel. Wearing a T-shirt and panties. He’d never gotten used to the changes plastic surgery had made in her face, and each time she reappeared after an absence—no matter how brief—he would fail to recognize her for a second, would have to seek out the old planes and lines, blur the new regularity of her features and find the exotic asymmetry that had first attracted him. Only her subdued manner was familiar, the way she moved around the room, keeping close to the walls like a cat exploring, eyes down, withdrawn. She fingered a dial beside the door, dimming the lights, and lay next to him.

  “How you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m still not used to it here,” she said. “There’s so much…”

  “So much what?”

  “Everything. Food, light, coolness. Anything you want.”

  “It’s the land of silk and money. We do not want for the luxuries.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  Years before, he would have made a joke of her asceticism, but they had gone beyond jokes, beyond any sort of lightness.

  “Won’t be much longer,” he said. “After tomorrow…” He left the rest unspoken; they both knew about tomorrow.

  They made love in the cool dry room, and yes, there was heat, and yes, there was joy, and there was that electric fusion of minds, yet it was no longer love they made, it was something less and something more, a ratification of their commitment and an exercise in power, an erotic calisthenics that bred in them a core dispassion that—like love—was its own reason for being. After they had done, their power was as palpable and bristly as ozone in the room, and with only a slight effort, Mingolla reached beyond the walls to engage the mind of a harried businessman on his way to shuffle papers over a drink at the motel bar, to worry about sales techniques, to ponder the morals of the waitresses…and the minds of passing motorists, dazed by the lights of Love City in the distance, scattered across a tawny strip of desert like stars whose constellate figure has abdicated to a better sky, and Mingolla plucked the thoughts from their heads, his own thought ranging over them, as strong as God in contrast to their firefly frailty, tuning in the trillion-watt wastage of the American West…Jerk-off motherfucker, cut in on me like that, I’ll drive this iron up your asshole…If I brake real hard, it’d jack her through the goddamn windshield, and serve her ass right for whimperin’ alla time, goddamn bitch has to pee every fifteen minutes…God, let not the wickedness of the world, let the wickedness, let not…in that mind the image of God a pearly sexual light, a pernicious denial…and wordless drones of thought, a static crackle of imagery and wants and hopes as feckless and ill-informed as a child’s, memories as random as a wash of transmission during a thunderstorm, and nowhere a mind of true strength or substance.

  Not within range, anyway.

  In the pale glow that came through the drapes, Debora looked worried, and he asked if she was thinking about the next day.

  “No…about the day after. About what we’ll do then.”

  “We’ll be okay.”

  “I know,” she said, and turned away from him.

  They awakened before dawn and ate breakfast in the diner next to the motel, a place called—according to its three-tiered neon sign—EAT VERNA’S TEX-MEX DELICIOUS. They had eggs-over-easy and bacon and toast and coffee, and sat in a booth of red vinyl sparkles, staring out through their reflections at the highway, the torrent of headlights and sleek dream machines westering, whispering toward the false dawn of Love City, piloted by men and women who wanted a good time then salvation and still believed this was possible, and thought maybe an immersion in the lingerie department of life would silver their hopes and streamline their wishes and send them home to boredom all chromed and supercharged with the horsepower of sexy experience. They lingered over their empty plates. No reason to hurry. Izaguirre wasn’t going anywhere, secure with his guards and his walls. There were no other customers, and when the waitress brought the check, she leaned on the booth and said, “You folks goin’ or comin’?”

  “Coming,” said Mingolla.

  “This your first time to Love City?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She nodded, a skinny fortyish woman with lines of sad wisdom on her face and rainbow stripes in her frizzy baby-chick-colored hair, an aging hillbilly punkette who had come late to a regretful morality, her disguise completed by a starched green uniform. “Ain’t nothin’ there you two couldn’t work out by yourself…if you take my meanin’,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, now. I ain’t preachin’ ’gainst L.C. God knows, I let it all wallow
there a time or two. It’s just it don’t make nobody happy. Don’t make ’em sad, neither. It just sorta is…like everything else, y’know. So what’s the point?”