Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  Panama.

  Not what he’d expected, nosiree!

  He hadn’t reached the topless country of white beaches, the tanned coast of movie star tits and coco locos, the loll of brochure-portrait dewy daughters of the idle isles, and you got American money, Jim, this land is your land, for rape, rent, and shopping mall development…whatever’s your pleasure. No, he’d reached the bloody republic of history, where Colombian pirates raided the coast and screwed their victims’ corpses, where once a band of white sailors had become headhunters and cannibals, where Chinese railroad workers had drowned themselves by the hundreds when their opium ran out, where a little weed grew that gave you the power to raise armies of the dead.

  Where a man named Carlito had been born.

  Panama…little shiver of three syllables.

  Then the word seemed to acquire a new meaning, to tell of green hills rising beyond a barricade, of Daríen, the cloud forest, the lost tribes, the witch-men and their thoughts like streamers of mist.

  That Panama, now…that might just be an option after all.

  Jack and Gilbey edged closer as if his longing for escape had spoken to them, and something stirred in the gutter at Mingolla’s feet. A thin shred of a man wrapped in tatters of brown cloth, stinking of garbage. Mingolla went to his knees beside him, looked into eyes empty and doting as a dog’s. The man’s lips were scabbed, and his nose had been broken; strings of bloody mucus hung from his nostrils, thick and webbed like macramé. He reached out his hand, clutched at Mingolla’s arm, and Mingolla, his bitterness swept away, began to work on the man’s mind. Behind him, a rustling, a shifting, but he paid it no attention.

  Then Gilbey said, “Watch it!”

  Mingolla glanced up, saw figures silhouetted against the stars, looming above him, and one, cowled, its face an oval of darkness, swung at him with something long and crooked. He twisted away, but the club struck the side of his head, sending white lights shooting through his skull, and he fell on his back. Gilbey hauled him up, dragged him onto the sidewalk, and he had a dizzy glimpse of hundreds of people choking the street, shuffling forward, making no sound other than the glutinous passages of their breath. Eyes like holes cut in dirty sheets, and weapons at the ready.

  Glass shattered.

  Gilbey jerked him around to face the store. Jack was smashing the window with his crowbar, clearing away hanging icicles of glass. Gilbey dragged him through the window, into the mirrored showroom. He kept blacking out, floating back to consciousness, seeing himself in the mirrors. Open-mouthed; a black forking of blood from his hairline. Behind them, the army converged on the broken window, pressing inside, unmindful of the spears of broken glass that pierced them. Mingolla tried to strike at them with his mind, but couldn’t focus and was pulled past his floundering mirror images and down a narrow corridor toward the back door. The knob turned in Gilbey’s hand, the door gave a little, but was stuck. Gilbey dropped his machete and wrangled with the knob.

  Mingolla leaned against the wall, looking down at the machete. It was a long way off, spinning, receding, and he wasn’t sure he could reach it. But if he could reach it…well, he knew about machetes. Yes, indeed! He bent at the waist, swayed, and in righting himself, managed to scoop up the machete. The hilt was greasy with Gilbey’s sweat, the rust and blood on the blade gleamed in the light from the transom. Its heft stabilized Mingolla, and he turned to face the army.

  The corridor was just wide enough for two abreast, and the army surged into it, grunting, bumping into each other, unable to master the tactics of two-at-a-time. Mingolla swung at the first to come within range, slashed a chest, a belly, drawing lines of blood in gray flesh. Two of them fell, then a third. He chopped at the shoulder of an old woman whose shawl had slipped down to blind her, he spitted a young man and kicked him away. With a screech, the door came open, and Mingolla backed into an alley almost as narrow as the corridor. Blocked at one end by a high brick wall, at the other by more of the army. Gilbey took a stand beside him, wielding a two-by-four, and Mingolla, retreating toward the brick wall, slashed the gut of a shirtless man whose skin hung in folds about his waist. He should be feeling something, he thought. Fear at the least, because he likely was going to die: there were too many of them, their heads bobbing, eyes slits of ebony, pale skin showing through rents in their clothing. And regret at killing his ex-patients. Surely he should feel regret. But it was as if the blow to his head had reduced him to their state, to an emptiness empowered by a command, swinging the machete, a little faster and more accurate than they, yet equally single-minded. No shudders flowed along the blade—their lives weren’t stubborn enough to produce such phenomena—and when their blood spattered him, it dripped from his arms with the slowness of heavy machine oil. Flesh Dummies with Real-Life Organs. There was a sweet brainless appeal to cutting them down, a muscular pleasure in a stroke well conceived and nicely executed, and Christ, was he ever doing a good job! Piling up the bodies. They slipped and flailed as they clambered over the pile. Easy to pick off. He swung, connected, biting to the bone. Swung, connected, swung, connected. Should be a work song to sing while he chopped. Well, I’m gon’ take dis machete…Jesus fuck! The alley snapped into horrid focus for Mingolla. He saw his last victim writhing as slow as an earthworm at his feet, shoving guts back into his belly. Once again he tried a mental assault, and as he did, this time succeeding, he realized that in hiding his power from the families, he had hidden its true extent from himself as well.

  He felt a sun was inside his head, a heavy black sun shedding lines of force, and he sensed the minds of the armies, those in the alley, those in the store and on the street, sensed them in the way a constellation might know the fires that comprised its shape. Sensed their fragility and vacancy. Some of those near him fell, others staggered and leaned against the walls for support. He had no pity for them. They were unimportant, incidental, and he had wasted too much time with them as it was. A feeling of grim righteousness stole over him, so profound an emotion that it seemed a physical condition, a cellular affirmation of the need to strike back at whoever had tried to kill him. He exulted in the feeling and imagined himself confronting his enemy.

  Ruy.

  Oh, yeah! Had to be Ruy!

  The army rustled, stirred by the wind of Mingolla’s anger.

  He pushed through the men and women in the alley, shouldering them aside, unconcerned by their proximity…although he didn’t like touching them, subject to an irrational fear that bits of their substance would flake off and cling to him. He weaved through the motionless dark figures thronging the store, catching sight of himself among them in the silvered mirrors, a man hiding among mannequins. He’d forgotten about Gilbey, but as he moved into the street, he noticed him missing. He turned to the store. Gilbey was kneeling next to a body that lay half-in, half-out of the shattered window. A crowbar beside the body’s outflung hand.

  “C’mon, Gilbey,” he said.

  Gilbey’s hand fluttered over the body; he might have been searching for a switch with which to reactivate it.

  “There’s nothing you can do for him,” said Mingolla, laying a hand on Gilbey’s shoulder.

  “Leave me alone!” Gilbey knocked away his hand.

  His eyes were glistening, and Mingolla wondered at this, at tears from Gilbey.

  “I…” Gilbey looked at Mingolla and said his name a couple of times in a quizzical tone as if it meant something rare and unfathomable.

  “What is it?”

  Gilbey shook his head, smoothed Jack’s rumpled shirt.

  It was useless to continue their charade of friendship, Mingolla realized; it had been a sentimental mistake to distinguish Gilbey from the others, to pretend he was alive and well. There was no room for sentiment here. He walked away from Gilbey, resisting the impulse to say goodbye, and, using his reflection in a store window, he set about cleaning the blood from his face and arms. Around him, the dead stood stockstill like statues in a street scene by De Chirico. He could almost
hear the vibration of their emptiness, their longing for purpose, and he knew how to ease that longing, he knew the purpose for which they had been made.

  Anger had always been big in him, but what he felt now was anger come to fruition, anger that seemed a separate shape walking in his body, a glittering man of furious principle. His anger spread to infect the army, and as he hurried toward the palace, shadows pushed themselves up from the curbs and doorways and fell into step behind him. The moon was up, and the walls of the buildings glowed with such brilliance that he could make out the gray patches where the whitewash had flaked away. More than ever, the narrow streets reminded him of canyons, and with their ragged hair and primitive weapons, the army might have been cavedwellers on their way to engage a neighboring tribe. Their skin looked as pale and crumbly as cheese, and their eyes had the reflective blackness of the window glass.

  When he reached the street that opened onto the parking lot in front of the palace, he divided the army into two forces, sending one on a circuitous route in back of the palace toward the barricade and instructing the others to wait in the shadows until summoned. Walking across the parking lot, he felt calm in the midst of anger, as if the core of his personality had separated from the rest and was observing the goings-on. Parked by the steps were a number of jeeps, and he was pleased to see that most had keys dangling from their ignitions. Inside, the party was in full swing, the atmosphere more drunken than when he had left. Madradonas and Sotomayors tripping the light fantastic to the strains of a jazzy dance tune; the storytelling robot stood unmoving in a corner, switched off. Probably past Izaguirre’s bedtime. As he worked his way through the dancers, Mingolla smiled and nodded to whoever caught his eye. “Lovely evening,” he said. “Wonderful party.” And then, pitching his voice so low that they couldn’t be sure what they had heard, he would add, “You’re gonna die,” and smile more broadly. Debora was hemmed in against a table by a group that included both Ruy and Marina, and Mingolla insinuated himself into the group, stood next to her. “Where’s Tully?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think they went back to their hotel.” She looked at him askance. “You’re bleeding! What happened?”

  He touched his brow, his fingers came away red. “Got a little bump,” he said, smiling at Ruy. It was too bad about Tully and Corazon, he thought. But he wasn’t going to postpone things. They would just have to fend for themselves.

  “That looks serious,” said Marina. “You should have it tended to.”

  She was acting nervous, fidgeting with her skirt, unwilling to meet his eyes.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, feeling a heady mixture of rage and glee. The blue plastic shell of the palace suddenly seemed the inside of a vast skull, Carlito’s skull. In the beams of light slanting from the ceiling he saw the haywire geometries of Carlito’s thought; the air had the stink of his stale brainwaves, and the dancers, the group by the table, the inanimate robot, all of them were the sorry creatures of Carlito’s imagination, whirling and talking and pretending to be real, each of them moved by some strand of plot or whimsy. But that was coming to an end. He pictured the blue walls cracking, unable to contain the power that Carlito had inadvertently kindled.

  “I’ve had an interesting time tonight,” said Mingolla. “What you might call a real eye-opener, isn’t that right, Ruy?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Ruy said.

  “No, I bet you don’t.”

  “You should have that cut seen to,” Marina said with some agitation. “I’d be…”

  “Don’t trouble yourself.” Mingolla glanced around at the others; they were staring at him with puzzlement as if they sensed something imminent, but weren’t sure what, and though he had planned to wait until he and Debora got clear, he realized that now was the time, that he couldn’t leave without at least witnessing the beginning of the end. That he, like Carlito, delighted in dramatic presentation.

  He took Debora’s arm, steered her away into a clear space at the edge of the dance floor. He turned back to the group by the table. They looked nervous.

  “Somebody tried to kill me tonight,” he said.

  Somebody turned off the music, and everyone was whispering.

  “It’s not that important for the culprit to be singled out”—he raised his voice—“because every damn one of you is guilty. But I think it’s appropriate that some punishment be meted out.”

  Marina pushed through to the front of the group. “How did it happen, David?”

  “Somebody sicced the army on me while I was walking,” he said.

  “Ruy!” She spun about to face him.

  “It wasn’t me!” he said. “I’ve been here all night.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Mingolla called out to the dancers, “How ’bout some more entertainment, folks?”

  “I wouldn’t risk myself just to get back at you,” Ruy said to Mingolla.

  “Who was it, then?”

  Ruy was caught without an answer for a moment. He searched the crowd for a likely candidate. “Marina?” he said.

  She looked injured, disappointed, like a teacher let down by her prize pupil.

  “It was her…don’t you see?” Ruy said to Mingolla. “She’s trying to get back at me, trying to set me up.”

  “My God, Ruy,” Marina said, and gave a pitying laugh.

  “It had to be her,” said Ruy. “All these years she’s pretended that she’s forgiven me, but I knew she hadn’t.”

  “Forgiven you for what?” Debora asked.

  “Years ago,” said Ruy. “I did something to her. I didn’t mean to, I was crazy about her. But…”

  “You’re the one who made her lose her child!” said Mingolla, putting together Marina’s flighty behavior that evening with her pleasure in punishing Ruy, with other hints and clues.

  “This is ridiculous!” said Marina.

  “Yes, yes!” Ruy moved closer to Mingolla, eager now. “And she’s been crazy ever since. But she’s managed to make everyone think her craziness is something else. Dedication, efficiency. She’s just been waiting her chance. She knew I’d be accused if anything happened to you.”

  Guilt was plain in Marina’s face, but Mingolla was unable to redirect his anger; the fact of her treachery was not at all surprising, considering what Ruy had done, and he had hated Ruy for too long to give up his vengeance. In any case, he wasn’t concerned with specific guilt, but rather with example, and Ruy, with his pleading manner, his sweaty fear, made a perfect example.

  “’Bye, Ruy,” he said, and struck with stunning force.

  Ruy sagged, his knees buckling, and went down on all fours. His saturnine face emptied, and he collapsed onto his side. Mingolla stood over him, plucking at his mental knots, undoing them one by one. “What we call this, folks,” he said in a lectoral tone, “is field-stripping the human mind. Easy as pie once you get the hang of it.” Ruy tried to speak, but succeeded only in making ugly dream noises. His hands scrabbled on the floor, his legs twitched, and he gazed up at Mingolla, his mouth working, his brow creased, as if trying to recall something important, something that would save him. “Doesn’t take long at all, as you can see,” Mingolla said. “Be glad to give lessons.”

  The Madradonas and Sotomayors were silent, their expressions ranging from the horrified to the bemused.

  “Know where you are, Ruy?” Mingolla asked with vast solicitude.

  Ruy looked worried. “I…unh…I…”

  “Real good, Ruy.” Mingolla gave his shoulder a pat. “You’ll make a terrific soldier. Defending the Sotomayor honor. Shitting in the street, clubbing the other zombies. You’ll do just fine.”

  Ruy ventured a weak smile.

  “But it’s gonna be tough. Know how tough it’s gonna be?”

  Ruy had no idea, but was all ears.

  “Lemme show ya.” Mingolla seized Ruy by the shirtfront and began to slap him. Each slap seemed to win a little battle in his heart, to wipe out the last vestiges of compassion.


  Somebody grabbed Mingolla from behind, but he shook them off and sent a wave of hatred across the dance floor, a signal powerful enough to summon the army. The families retreated, leaving him and Debora and Ruy in a cleared circle. He studied them, and they returned measuring stares, looks of appraisal. He saw that they weren’t upset by what he’d done; they were merely gauging his relative worth, the risks involved in dealing with him. They appeared to have no conception of defeat.

  “We understand your reaction, David,” said one of the Sotomayor men. “But we can’t let you take matters into your own hands.”

  “Show’s not over, folks,” said Mingolla. “Time for the big finish.”

  A noise behind him. He turned, saw Marina kicking Ruy, who was curled up, trying to protect his head. Mingolla caught her arm, ripping a seam of her silk dress, and backhanded her to the floor. She rolled onto her stomach, sat up, demented-looking, all her elegance dissipated. She went crawling back toward Ruy. Mingolla shoved her away with his foot.

  Hubbub at the entrance, a scream, people milling.

  Ragged figures were crowding through the door. Mingolla pulled Debora against the wall.

  “What did you do?” she said, pushing him away.

  “They tried to kill me, dammit!”