Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  The engines broke down the next night while Ruy was attempting to impress Debora with the fervor of his revolutionary convictions, with his inside information concerning secret matters. The moon, almost full, hung low above the coast, and they were close enough to shore that Mingolla could make out the separate crowns of palms silvered by its light. Ruy was leaning against the wheelhouse door, and inside, visible through his opaque reflection, Corazon stood at the wheel. She turned toward Mingolla, her left eye glinting redly. He tried to read her face, and she held his gaze without a hint of challenge, as if willing to let him learn all he could.

  “Yeah,” Ruy was saying. “Don’t matter to me if the revolution’s dead. I start it all over myself if I have to, unnerstan’? And anyway”—he shook a finger at Debora—“why you keep tellin’ me that shit ’bout it’s dead? You think that, why you goin’ to Panama? You runnin’? Naw, that’s not it! You and this Yankee come on board, act like you gonna kill this black man, and then the next minute you actin’ like old friends. It don’t make sense. You got some kinda plan. A fool can see that. And lately there’s been too many strange motherfuckers headin’ for Panama. Gotta be somethin’ big happenin’ down there.”

  “How you figure?” Mingolla asked.

  “I told ya, lotsa strange fuckers travelin’ these days.” Ruy fingered a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “Wonder what’ goin’ on.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Debora. “People have been running to Panama since the war began.”

  “Not this kinda people.” Ruy cupped a match, lit up. He threw back his head and blew smoke, affording Debora a view of his sharp profile.

  With every gesture, he was—Mingolla thought—projecting the image of the Romantic Smuggler, layering it with his Zorro-like commitment. The pose was laughable, but Mingolla was coming to believe that Ruy knew this, that he was using the image to disguise a real commitment. He had been operating too long in dangerous waters to be the buffoon he pretended, and besides, Mingolla had a bad feeling about him, about his whole act.

  “Yeah,” Ruy said, tapping the side of his nose. “I been smellin’ somethin’ funny for a while now. Been hearin’ things, too.”

  “You fulla shit, mon.” Tully, perched on the rail, turned his head; the moonlight washed over half his face. “Ain’t nobody be tellin’ a chump like you nothin’.”

  Ruy ignored him. “This one man I carry south, he don’t think mucha me. And that’s good, ’cause when a man don’t think mucha you, he ain’t cautious.” He blew smoke toward Tully. “So he say to me, ‘Ruy, there’s more to this war than meets the eye.’ And I say, ‘Yeah? What you mean?’ I’m pretendin’ I ain’t really interested, y’know. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I probably shouldn’t be talkin’ on this, but the peace is comin’ soon, and Panama is where it’s comin’ from.’ And I say, ‘Wow! Peace, man! That’s fuckin’ terrific!’ And the man’s all puffed up ’cause of how he’s astoundin’ me, y’know. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he say. ‘People I know, they workin’ on the peace right this second. Negotiatin’, y’understan’.’”

  Ruy folded his arms, cocked his head, and from that pose, the pose of a bemused lecturer pausing to consider the effect of his words, Mingolla recognized the man of whom Ruy reminded him. It should, he thought, have been obvious to him from the beginning. All Ruy’s little clues had been designed to give himself away.

  “Anyhow,” Ruy went on, “I start pressin’ this man…not so he’d notice, y’unnerstan’. Just workin’ on him. And he tells me that, yeah, dey workin’ on a peace in Panama, but dere’s fightin’ still. Armies in the streets. I ask him who’s fightin’, and he act like it’s a big secret, like he’s really doin’ me a favor by tellin’ me, y’know, and he say he ain’t clear on the whole story, but he give me a name and say this name got a lot to do with it.” He put on a sly smile, swept all of them with a glance. “‘Sotomayor,’ he say to me. ‘You ’member that name. Sotomayor. That name, it’s the key to everything.’”

  Mingolla met his eyes, and though Ruy was not smiling, Mingolla could sense his secret amusement. He was about to call Ruy, to demand an accounting; but at that moment the engines stopped.

  “Fuck!” Ruy threw down his cigarette, flung open the door to the wheelhouse. “What’d you do?”

  “Nothin’,” said Corazon. “I don’t do nothin’. It just stop.”

  Ruy stomped forward, heaved off the hatch of the engine compartment; he put his hands on his hips and stared down into the darkness. “Corazon!” he bawled. “Bring the flashlight!”

  Corazon went forward with a flashlight, and Ruy grabbed it, lowered himself into the compartment. The rest of them gathered around Corazon. Below, Ruy swept the beam across a maze of grease-smeared metal. He held the beam steady a second, then banged the side of the compartment. “Son of a bitch! Motherfucker!”

  “Can’t you fix it?” Debora asked.

  Ruy banged the wall again, hauled himself back onto the deck. “Take parts to fix this cunt! And I ain’t got no parts.” He looked as if he were about to throw the flashlight, but only smacked it against his hip. “Man, this some real fuckin’ shit!”

  “Look like we gonna have to put into port,” said Tully.

  Ruy’s face was wild, the muscles knotting at the corner of his mouth. “I told ya, I’m illegal ’round here. They blow my fuckin’ head off if they catch me.”

  “Run up the sail,” Mingolla suggested.

  “Sure, man! That way we be right off Truxillo come daybreak, and that son of a bitch Dominguez, he be smilin’ ear to ear when he see the Ensorcelita. Shit!” Ruy clutched his forehead. “What the fuck am I gonna do?”

  “You can’t fix it for sure?” Mingolla asked.

  “Ain’t you listenin’, man?” Ruy spun around to face him, his fists balled.

  “Den we got no choice but to ’bandon dis washtub,” said Tully. “I go look fah somethin’ to wrap de guns.”

  Ruy shoved him. “We ain’t abandonin’ shit, man!”

  Tully knocked him against the side of the wheelhouse and engulfed his throat in a one-handed chokehold. “Don’t be ’busin’ me, mon. Got dat?” He gave Ruy a squeeze, and Ruy’s eyes bugged. “Now you wanna stay wit’ de ship, dat’s fine. We don’t need you.”

  Mingolla looked at the shore, at the shadowed hills rising inland. “What’s out there?”

  “Too many fuckin’ soldiers,” said Ruy, massaging his throat. “That’s what.”

  “Olancho,” said Tully. “Mountains, jungle. Dat’s where de war begin, but dere’s no fightin’ now. Hard to say what’s out dere.”

  “Maybe there’s a way,” said Ruy. “If we can get past the checkpoints, then maybe I can get you to Panama. And maybe I can get financin’ for another boat.”

  “We do fine by ourselves, mon,” Tully said.

  “Fuck you will!” But Ruy moved away from him. “You be lost ’fore you go ten miles. But there’s ways I know. Military roads, old contra trails. ’Fore I got the Ensorcelita I used to travel that route.”

  Mingolla stared out at the coast, then at Ruy. It might be best, he thought, to hold back on calling Ruy, see what he had in mind. “Are those ways still open?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Ruy. “But we need a truck or somethin’. Maybe one of them off-road vehicles. Won’t be hard to find somethin’. Lotsa these farmers ’round here, they fix up their trucks with extra gas tanks so they can go huntin’ in the hills.”

  “How long will it take?” Debora asked.

  “Depends what we get into,” Ruy said, sidling up to her, solicitous. “But I tell ya one thing. Time we come to Panama, we gonna have a few stories to tell.”

  Two miles from where they came ashore, tucked in among the ranks of coconut palms, stood a copra plantation: tall wooden racks for drying coconut fiber; three tin-roofed sheds in which the product was stored; and a long ranch-style building of whitewashed stone with a red tile roof. This last served as living quarters and office for the owner, D
on Julio Saldivar. Parked around the corner of the building was a venerable Ford Bronco with an auxiliary gas tank welded into the luggage compartment. Don Julio met them at the door with an automatic pistol in hand, but Mingolla persuaded him to amiability and generosity, telling him that they were government agents on secret assignment. The plantation owner offered him use of the Bronco, camping equipment, and offered Debora, whose clothes had been lost during the swim to shore—no lifeboat on the Ensorcelita—the old clothes belonging to his daughter who was off at the university in San Pedro Sula. Mingolla had Ruy and Tully check out the Bronco, and sat with Don Julio in the kitchen, a cramped room with an old-fashioned gas stove and a motel icebox and photographs of Don Julio standing over a variety of slaughtered game animals decorating the pebbled white walls. Don Julio set about drawing a map of the coastal hills, tracing the roads that would lead them away from the checkpoints.

  “What’s here?” Mingolla asked, indicating a section on the map where the roads vanished. “You haven’t marked anything down.”

  “There’s nothing to mark,” said Don Julio. “Just ghosts and jungle.”

  He was short and paunchy, in his late fifties, mahogany-skinned, and dressed in baggy shorts and a guayabera unbuttoned to display his smooth chest; his head was massive, jowly, and his thick black hair was frosted at the temples. The stern prideful lines of his face put Mingolla in mind of his own father, and from the prideful blustery way Don Julio spoke of his daughter’s devotedness Mingolla got the idea he was lying, that his daughter really hated him. Don Julio’s conversation veered into politics. He patted his gun, vowed eternal vigilance against the Red Menace: there was something more than a little pathetic about the combination of his machismo, his self-portraits with dead jaguars and tapirs, and the emptiness of his house. He spoke of his youth. He’d owned a ranch in the Petén. It had been a chore, he said, to keep the guerrillas off the land, but he’d managed. And, oh, what a man he’d been for the ladies! His Cadillac, his nights at the Guatemala City discos. Was there a town in all the world as fine as Guatemala City? Mingolla withheld comment. He himself had spent three days in the city. One night he had been standing in a pachinko parlor on Sixth Avenue, a major downtown artery, playing the machines; he had been lost in playing, and when he had turned around to get more change, he had discovered that not only was the parlor empty, but that Sixth Avenue, which moments before had been thronged with crowds and traffic, was completely deserted. He’d run all the way back to his hotel, and none of the Guatemalans there had wanted to talk about what was going on. Guatemala City, to Mingolla’s mind, was brimstone country. Death squads patrolling in their unmarked Toyotas, sirens and distant gunfire, and up in Zone 5, where people lived in houses built of tires and mud, young boys dreamed of making rich men bleed.

  “I warned my friends about the Reds,” said Don Julio, returning to his favorite topic. “Once I took some of them down to the beach in Tela…you know Tela?”

  “No,” said Mingolla.

  “Nice little town up the coast,” said Don Julio. “Government people vacation there in the summers. But that didn’t stop the Commies from making their mark. Defacing the walls with slogans. Anyway, I took my friends down to the beach. These friends, they were liberals”—he made an obscenity of the word—“they believed in freedom of speech! Pah! And I pointed out the slogans on the walls of the bars. Look, I told them. Now that communism has spread to the grassroots, all its fine philosophy has been reduced to these misspelled words. Stupid passions like the ones aroused by a soccer match are invading the political process. Up with Liberty! Down with Injustice! As if poverty and disease were something you could stamp out by a score of two to nothing. Aren’t the lessons of history plain, I asked them. Just consider Nicaragua. They invited in the Cubans, and now the whole country’s nothing but an armed camp of goose-stepping snitches and assassins. And what’s the revolution done for the poor? The only difference is that nowadays when they crap on the streets, they do it single-file and sing songs about brotherhood.” Don Julio sighed. “But they wouldn’t listen, and you see what happened. Six years of hell.” He patted Mingolla’s arm. “Thank God for men like you and me. Communists know better than to come around us, they know what they’ll get.”

  Debora entered the room in time to hear these last words, and she shot Don Julio a venomous look. She had on a gray skirt and a print blouse, and unmindful of her hostility, Don Julio said, “You look breathtaking, señorita! Lovely!”

  She let the comment pass. “The car’s ready.”

  “You’re leaving so soon?” Don Julio stood. “What a pity! I get so little company since my wife died. Ah, well.” He pumped Mingolla’s hand. “I’m proud to have made your acquaintance, and I’ll pray for the success of your mission.”

  He stood in the door waving as they went around the corner. Dawn was breaking, and in its gray light the beach was revealed to be foul with animal wastes and coconut debris, the tidal margin heaped with piles of foam and clumps of seaweed that at a distance had the appearance of dead bodies cast up by the surf. The Ensorcelita was a dark stain bobbing beyond the breakwater.

  Mingolla opened the driver’s door, then realized he had forgotten the map. “Forgot something,” he said. “Be right back.”

  Ruy, sitting in the back beside Corazon and Tully, looked as if he were about to say something; then turned away.

  The front door was open, and as Mingolla entered he heard Don Julio talking in the kitchen, saying in a dull monotone, “I have a message for him.”

  Mingolla moved cautiously into the kitchen. The plantation owner was speaking into a wall phone, his back to the door.

  “Yes,” he said. “They have just left.”

  “Put the phone down,” said Mingolla.

  Don Julio whirled around, his left hand going to his holster, and Mingolla struck at him, expecting an easy victory. But as he penetrated Don Julio’s mind, he was stunned by the emergence of a powerful pattern. A frail tide of emotion washed over him, a seepage of anger, and it seemed that the pattern—which he perceived as a serpentine form of crackling silver—was breeding its double inside his skull, influencing his thoughts to glide in a slow hypnotic rhythm. It was so easy just to go with the pattern, to loop and loop, to let his head nod and wobble, to listen to the droning that came to his ears from within his head, a shrill oscillating sound like the whine of a nervous system on the fritz. And maybe that’s what it was, maybe it was, maybe that’s…He saw Don Julio’s hand slipping toward his holster, and tried to shake himself alert. But the seductive rhythms of the pattern were all through him, lulling him, convincing him of his security. Don Julio, moving very slowly as if submerged in thick syrup, unsnapped the holster. Mingolla took a feeble step toward him, stumbled, and whacked the side of his head hard against the wall; the pain blinded him for a moment, but acted to disperse the pattern, and before it could be reestablished, he generated a charge of fear. Don Julio staggered backward, and Mingolla kept up the assault, sending waves of fear, of loathing at being touched so intimately by a strange mind. The plantation owner whimpered and fell in a heap, his eyes rolling back.

  Mingolla picked up the phone and listened.

  “Hello,” said a man’s voice through long-distance static. “Hello.”

  “Who is this?” Mingolla asked.

  “Why, David! Congratulations! You must have passed your test.”

  “Izaguirre?”

  “At your service.”

  “You set this up?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I assume Don Julio attempted to subdue you with his mental gift…am I right?”

  “No,” said Mingolla. “I came in and he was on the phone, so I hit him.”

  “I think you’re fibbing, David. How is Don Julio? Salvageable?”

  Mingolla looked down at the plantation owner: he was in bad shape, pasty, sweating, and breathing shallowly. A little toy rightist with a silver snake in his head.

  “No ma
tter,” said Izaguirre. “I’ll send someone to check.”

  “You’re not too fucking clever,” Mingolla said. “Don’t you think I know Ruy led us here? I see what’s going on.”

  “There’s no need to be clever. Whether or not you’re aware of your situation has no bearing on the dangers you may face.”

  “And I’m sure you’ve set plenty of traps.”