Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “Run, dammit!” Bobby Boy shouted.

  The kid shifted his weight, let his arms dangle, waiting. To Mingolla’s eyes, he appeared to be growing more solid and substantial against the background of wasted gray shapes.

  “Kill his ass!” Bobby Boy shrilled.

  Nobody fired, nobody moved.

  “Kill him!” Bobby went a couple of paces toward the kid and waved angrily at the soldiers. “Y’hear me? Kill him!”

  Reluctantly, it seemed, the soldiers lifted their rifles and opened fire. The bullets blew the kid forward in a staggering run, and he collapsed between two of the mounds. Black blood webbed his back, puddled beneath his mouth. His left leg beat a tattoo against the dirt, and his entire body humped up once, then was still.

  Ruy sighed, and Mingolla let out the breath he’d been holding; it felt hot in his throat. Debora’s hand was tremulous on his arm, as if she were poised for flight. “Shit,” said Eddie. “Shit.” Corazon’s mystic eye looked to be glowing, and Tully was stone-faced. Sebo, spent and sweaty, leaned against the hut, his mouth open, eyes slitted…Chinese eyes.

  Bobby Boy walked over and kicked the kid in the side. He turned back, his features warped by a scowl, giving his round face the appearance of a nasty man-in-the-moon. “I ain’t payin’,” he said to the other soldiers. “Muthafucka didn’t play fair.”

  “You better fuckin’ pay,” said somebody. “You’d make us pay.”

  “Yeah, man,” said somebody else. “You be squawkin’ at us, sayin’ that the bastard didn’t make it, and that was what counted.”

  “Pay up, Bobby Boy! Y’ain’t got no reason not to!”

  “Hell you say!” Bobby Boy stalked back to the group beside the hut. “Hey, Eddie,” he said. “You with me on this, ain’tcha? Tell ’em the rules, man. Tell ’em what’s right. The son of a bitch didn’t even try.”

  SECTOR JADE

  The world is not a solid body, but rather is a point in time and space upon which a myriad of beams of light are shining, beams of every color and intensity, some waxing in brilliance, some waning, and the character of this particular point is therefore always in flux, always becoming something new. Thus it may be said that the world has ended many times, but few men have ever noticed.

  —Attributed to the San Blas Indians

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The armies of the Madradonas and the Sotomayors—more than a thousand strong—lived in the streets of Barrio Clarín, in doorways and gutters, under benches in public squares, in pitiful shelters made of cardboard or beneath no shelter at all; and every morning Mingolla would walk out among them and minister to their needs, plying them with his strength, inducing temporary frameworks of happiness and well-being. He derived little satisfaction from the work; the armies were unsalvageable, and the best he could do was briefly to restore their humanity; their minds retained scarcely any structure, and the process of their thoughts was slow and turgid like porridge slopping in a bowl. Though he gained a measure of redemption from these kindnesses, he was less trying to assuage guilt than to evade it. It seemed to him that he was suffering a peculiarly American form of guilt in that he did not want to be perceived as who he was, and thought that by disguising himself as a do-gooder, he might be able to confound whatever all-seeing moral eye governed the region.

  Most of the streets in the barrio were narrow, one lane of potholed asphalt, and forked at odd angles between dilapidated four-and five-story buildings of whitewashed stone…old colonial-style dwellings with vented French doors opening onto ironwork balconies, and bands of faded blue and green painted along their bases like stratifications. It was the rainy season, and every day began with drizzles and ended in downpours. Swollen gray clouds passed so low overhead that their bellies appeared to be sagging between the roofs; and this, along with the extreme overhangs of the roofs, produced a claustrophobic effect, making it look that the buildings were leaning together, being pressed down by the heavy skies. Faint traffic noises could be heard from beyond the barricades, and occasionally a jeep would pass, bearing a clutch of Madradonas or Sotomayors. But there were no babies crying, no radios playing, no matrons leaning on the balcony railings to gossip with their neighbors. The apartments were empty, as were the little stores with murals on their pastel facades depicting disembodied shirts and hats, sparkling kitchen appliances, floating loaves of bread, and sewing machines the size of mastiffs.

  One afternoon Mingolla ate his lunch on a stoop facing a store in whose windows and along whose aisles were arranged dozens of mirrors; ornate lettering on the facade proclaimed that within one could buy items of religious significance. He’d seen similar stores in Guatemala. Hotly lit windows thronged with golden crosses, gilt-framed Madonnas, Sacred Heart lockets…the gold flashing in the mirrors, brilliant images duplicated over and over, creating a dazzling maze of faith and nowhere for the eye to rest. But the only image held by these mirrors was that of his face: an infinity of gloomy young men, their expressions resigned, empty of conviction. The barrio had done this to him, he thought. Had planed away the extremes of his emotions, making him slow and dim like the members of the Sotomayor army who ranged the street, some moving hesitantly about, but most lying motionless in the drizzle that pocked the leaden puddles. Not far away, an old woman in a widow’s shawl squatted by the curb and peed. Just beyond her, a haggard gray-skinned man walked with the gait of a somnambulist, stopping to touch a wall, to stare, then stumbling on. Their clothes were ripped and stiff with grime, their eyes dark and shapeless-looking like holes worn in rotted fabric. They were armed with clubs and knives and garden tools, and many bore wounds that had gone untreated. Little black receivers like drops of ebony were affixed to their ears, and it was through these that they received orders to fight or disengage. Gauzy shadows appeared to be collecting around them as if they were decomposing, adding their substance to the air. Mingolla wished he could puke, have some overwhelming reaction, but he only felt numb.

  The woman sitting at his feet began to hum. A slovenly thirtyish plug of a woman, with heavy thighs and pendulous breasts and jaundiced skin. Clad in a dress that might once have been blue. After he’d finished working on her, she had told him her name was Irma and that she missed her babies.

  “How ya doing, Irma?” he asked.

  “I’m singing,” she said, gazing off down the street. “Singing to my babies, putting them to sleep.”

  “That’s good.” He held out half his sandwich. “Hungry?”

  She rocked an imaginary child in her arms, smiled and hummed.

  It might not be so bad, Mingolla thought, to keep growing slower and slower like the people in the armies of the barrio, to wind up inhabiting shreds of memory. Lots of normal people were no different, and they seemed content.

  “Pacito, Pacito,” Irma crooned, and chucked the invisible baby under its chin. Faint Madonna smile lighting her doughy face.

  Mingolla turned away, hollow with the sight, yet at the same time pleased that a human smoke still fumed inside Irma, that she had love to rely on…something he could no longer do wholeheartedly. He remembered one of his father’s salesmen, an old earnest huckster with gray hair and a face like a rumpled dishrag. He’d played uncle to Mingolla, delighted in imparting to him anecdotes of his days on the road, the lore of insurance and selling. “First thing,” he’d said once, “you give ’em the bad news. The premiums, the payment schedules. Then you work around to the benefits, just the ordinary stuff. They’re not impressed. Fact is, they’re disappointed. They were hoping for something better. So you let ’em stew a minute, and then you tell ’em. ‘Now here’s the beauty part.’” The salesman had been referring to some hidden investment potential, but to Mingolla his words had had the musty resonance of a universal constant, and he had taken from them a different meaning, a belief that the world—going on and on with its routine turnings, its unremarkable miseries and joys—could suddenly unfold to reveal at its heart a luminous principle as full of serene significance as a Chr
istmas star. Making love with Debora had always seemed to disclose this kind of beauty, but since arriving in the barrio, though their lovemaking was as good as ever, too much else had changed for Mingolla to derive anything from it other than release. Debora had changed most of all. She was caught up in the process of the peace, passionate about it, and even her ordinary conversation smacked of an ingenuous idealism that dismayed Mingolla and caused him to look at her in a new light, to wonder how she could be such a fool. Like the night before, during a pause in lovemaking, lying on their sides, still joined.

  …it’s funny…she’d said.

  …what’s that…

  …I was thinking how I’d like to live with you, and what I decided I wanted was green places, green solitudes…green…

  The word green became a chord sounding in him, binding him to her, and for a split second he had a kinesthetic sense of her body and his, how she felt having him inside, the nerveless warmth and comfort of being filled.

  …edens, she said. Places without strangers, without rules, make our own rules, our own reasons…

  Her intensity made him aware of his own growing ambivalence, but he tried not to let it show.

  …why’s that funny…

  …I’ve always hated them, jungles, mountains…my father was always dragging us off into the wilderness…he loved it, loved the emptiness…and then after I got out of prison, I was in the jungles and mountains so much…I hated them…but with you, I want a clean place, a place no one else has ruined or touched…

  Troubled, wanting to shut her up, because everything she said was causing him to lose faith in her good sense, because how could she be so glad and hopeful in this terrible place, he moved inside her.

  …David, oh God, David…

  He clutched her ass with both hands, grinding against her, squeezing out feelings.

  …I want you to come in me, David…now…but in my mouth, I want you in my mouth…

  The words honed his arousal, and he thrust at her for a few seconds, then stopped, feeling distracted. Seams of light through the vents of the shutters, her skin gleaming palely in blurred stripes…

  …what’s wrong, David…

  …tired, that’s all…

  …we can stop, it’s all right…

  …maybe…

  …we’ll make love in the morning…I want that, I want to walk out and feel you still warm inside me…

  He held her as she drifted off, brushing the edges of her thought, their minds engaging like gears in a slow mesh, and he suddenly saw an expanse of smooth-grained golden wood, and had a sense of her personality, her anxiety and the calmness that underlay all her moods, and he heard a chirpy woman’s voice gabbling about a customer she’d had to deal with, knew the woman to be his…or rather Debora’s Aunt Juana, going a little senile now, and Debora was studying the grain of the wood, noticing how the flow crested into dark slivers like stylized waves, and looking up at the glassed-in shelves with their lumps of pre-Columbian pottery, and she wished Aunt Juana would be quiet, those same stories over and over, and if Juana kept it up, Papa would lose his temper, and then she’d have to spend all night soothing him, and she glanced at him, a heavy bulbous man, his impassive face not unlike the faces on the lumps of pottery…and then Mingolla was himself again, marveling at the contact, wondering at all his attempts to fathom her, because there she was, locked in her memory of another time, that mixture of poise and concern and naïveté that was the base compound of her soul, and beneath that, the frail inquiry tinged with hope that we, every one of us, are even before innocence begins. Then another memory, one so brief that he could retain only a sensation of agony and harsh radiance, and he was spinning in the stream of her memory, in a ruddy glow that was like the light of her blood coursing into the past, and memories were slipping by so quickly he could scarcely differentiate between them, and then the stream slowed, entering a region of dusky light, murky darks, dusty, ancient memories, creaky old things, and he had an image of yellowed lace veils, webs of memory lifting from brassbound chests and shaking loose dust that sang as it fell, the singing translating into a whining like the circuit of the blood, then into voices and visions and thoughts, and he was walking in a garden with a young man, the sun making an embroidery of shadow on the stones, and the duenna close behind, coy whispers and signals, and later the pain of a child being ripped loose, and later yet the heartsick perception of the sick old man a lover had become, and then a clangor of steel, shouts, the silver armor masking the horse’s head gone pink from a rinse of blood bubbling from the slash on its neck, and the passage of memory speeding up again, voices and images blending into webs of golden light that wove an endless pattern, binding blood and time and history into a knot, a sexual twining…Mingolla surfaced from this immersion feeling as if he had fallen a hundred floors and landed in feathers. He was sweating, his heart racing, and he was amazed to find that Debora was still asleep. He tried to put together the experience with the intimations of magical connectivity he’d had while working on Major Cabell; but he was reduced to supposition, to vague theorizing, and the only thing that seemed apparent was that the contact had spoken to the character of his relationship with Debora, that they were all flash and dazzle, and no real substance…

  Irma sighed, and Mingolla glanced up at her. She was leaning against the glass of the door; a Marlboro decal with the picture of a cowboy lighting up was stuck to the glass beside her mouth like a visual word balloon. Her arms cradling her dreamed-of child. She held it up for him to approve, and still thinking of Debora, seeing not the emptiness of Irma’s arms but the memory they embraced, he said, “Yeah…nice-looking boy.”

  It rained every morning and every afternoon, and often during the night, and whenever it stopped raining, the heat would settle in; it seemed to have a presence, to be a huge transparent animal crouching in the streets and exhaling a foul warmth. Posters plastered to the walls of the buildings wilted at the corners and hung in scrolls; heat haze rippled above roofs and sidewalks, making it look as if the entire barrio were about to dematerialize. The surface of the asphalt melted into sludge; you could peel off rubbery hunks with your fingers. The armies floundered in humid air, the buzzing of their minds weak and intermittent like that of winter flies trapped between panes of glass. Sweat popped out in drops the size of pearl onions, and smiles were sharp and strained. Then the rain would begin again, diminishing the heat a fraction, spattering on the asphalt, drumming on the roofs, ticking the windows, and lying in bed at night, Mingolla could sense in its incessant rhythms the tension of an event taking shape. Something final and powerful. Whether good or evil, he didn’t know and didn’t care. He was under the spell of heavy life, heavy weather, and he had no interest in the eventual outcome, no interest in anything other than making it through each day.

  They were quartered in a pension called the Casa Gamboa, a one-story building of pink stucco with an interior courtyard centered by a swimming pool whose water was so dirty that it looked like “a sector of jade amid the bright tiles.” Macaws sat on perches under the overhang of the roof, cocking their eyes knowingly at passers-by and chuckling, and thick jungly vegetation grew in plots around the pool. Through a breezeway at the rear of the courtyard could be seen an old Oriental man in a wheelchair, who would sit most of the day beside a small garden and tie strips of paper to the stakes between the rows. The maid was a pretty dark woman named Serenita. All these things elements in the story The Fictive Boarding House. Mingolla was not surprised to learn he was living in Pastorín’s (or Izaguirre’s) story. He realized he had been living in it ever since Roatán, and that even the fact of his existence was to some extent a Sotomayor conceit. Indeed, he found it a comfort to be part of a fiction in that perceiving life this way tended to insulate him from the real, and when he was not working, he would spend his time in the room he shared with Debora. A large white room, much too large for its sparse furnishings of chair, table, bed, and dresser. The room was cooled by a creaky ceiling
fan, and mounted on the wall beside the door was a cheap tin crucifix; a cord ran up behind the cross to the light fixture on the ceiling, giving the impression that Christ had some role to play in the transmission of the current. The figure was poorly rendered, its hands and feet disproportionately long, and its expression dyspeptic instead of soulful. Mingolla sympathized with the distorted spiritual values it embodied, and he held out hope that it would effect a miracle of a quality in keeping with its grotesque appearance.

  On one occasion Debora dragged him out of the room to attend a negotiating session. She wanted him to see for himself that they were going well, and though he refused to accept this, there was no use in arguing the point. It was in her nature to cling to belief, to commitment, and he knew she would have to experience total disillusionment before giving up the idea of revolution, even one as horrific as this.

  The sessions were held in a working-class restaurant with pale green walls and long tables and a glass case atop the counter containing crumbs and dead flies and crumpled wax paper. The negotiating teams consisted of five members of each family and a handful of psychics who had undergone the drug therapy. The psychics—there were thirty-one in the barrio all told—were hostile, suspicious, and neither Mingolla nor Debora succeeded in establishing a relationship with any of them; they were interested only in maintaining their relationships with various members of the families. The Sotomayors, however, were—with the exception of Ruy—gracious to a fault. They were all lanky, long-nosed, and homely…though their chief negotiator, a tall woman in her early thirties named Marina Estil, had a severe hawkish beauty. She was quite tall, almost six feet, with sharp cheekbones and large eyes and black hair cut short to resemble a cowl. Her fingers were extremely thin and seemed paler than her hands. In her frankness about Sotomayor frailties, she impressed Mingolla as being someone whose concern for peacemaking outweighed the imperatives of the feud, and he came to put a modicum of trust in her.