Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “You shouldn’t…” She broke off, looking broken, defeated. Her shoulders slumped, and she stared out at the dance floor.

  It was strange, those first moments of confrontation between the families and their former victims. Haggard men and women, stumbling, blinking at the lights, looking—despite the urgency of Mingolla’s powerful command—bewildered, uncertain, like beggars allowed into the throne room. Some stood fingering their rags, hands to their mouths, in attitudes of humility and shame. But only for a second. Then they shuffled forward, intent on their chore. The Madradonas and Sotomayors were aghast, less terrified than affronted…or so it seemed to Mingolla. And as the attack began they fixed their eyes on the army, confident, trying to influence them. It was only when they discovered that Mingolla’s influence was too ironclad for them to affect that they displayed fear, and by then the army was upon them. A grizzled heavyset man struck first, impaling a pale skinny woman with a pitchfork, walking her backward into the center of the room; she plucked at the tines, open-mouthed, too shocked to scream. An old woman stabbed at a fallen man, her head thrown back like that of a triumphant animal. Marina Estil turned to run and was struck in the neck with a hoe wielded by a young boy; he hacked at her, miring her white silk dress with blood. There was an awful clumsiness to these assaults, a dreamlike momentum, and had the odds been less, the families might have survived; as it was, quite a few were managing to escape out the door. But the odds were too great. All around the room, huddled groups of the families were trying to beat off dozens of attackers; their shouts and screams, bright splinters of sound, were too energetic to suit the slow murders taking place. The blood of the families shimmered like a rich yield seeping up from between the seams of the fake gray stones, and everywhere were instances of courage: Madradonas saving Sotomayors and vice versa, as if in death they were at last uniting in a common cause. He felt no pity for them, yet he saw in their dying a sad inevitability, a summation of centuries of death, a pattern resolving into a knot of blood and fear, cinching tight about the neck of a monster whose neck stretched back into colonial days. And he saw, too, the indulgence of his own act of vengeance, how it had been a reaction worthy of the families, equally as unthinking and with a typically horrid result. But he wasn’t tempted to interfere.

  He guided Debora along the wall, shielding her against anyone who headed their way, warding them off with doses of fear, and they moved through the massacre unscathed, like saints immune to fire. But as they drew near the door, Mingolla began to feel an intense sadness and to hear a pure simple music inside his head, tones of crystalline purity. Faint at first, but stronger and more pervasive with every second. His step faltered, and he spotted the girl and the young crewcut man who had “entertained” the gathering standing beside the door, their faces empty, their eyes squeezed shut in concentration. Bells and sadness, sadness and bells. Mixing into a fluid heavy as mercury, slowing and dimming him. He tried to throw off the sadness, to muffle the bells, but his panic didn’t catch, just flared briefly and went out, and it didn’t seem worth the effort to fight anymore. The sad blue music was killing him, chilling him, tolling and tolling, a mournful angelus that made him long to grow slower and slower, to fade with the vibration of the ringing notes, receding forever into a place he could almost imagine, gray and secret deep, the bottomland of the spirit, a little hollow large enough for the soul to curl up in and sleep, and even the screams and shouts were knitting into music, a choral counterpoint. He wondered why Debora wasn’t doing anything, why she was just standing there, wasn’t she going to help…it didn’t matter, it was better to fade, to lean against the wall and let the sadness and the music vibrate inside him, breaking down the structures of his thought, and it wasn’t really so bad, this emptying, this winnowing, like the way you disappear into sleep, cell after cell shutting down, vision narrowing…and then there was something hot inside him, something charged and driven, and he felt Debora joining her strength to his, that twisting fevered energy building into a red noise of thought, of anger and loathing for what was happening, and the little girl shrieked, staggered away, and the crewcut man began to shake, he was biting his lower lip, blood filming over his chin, and the music and sadness splintering into fragments of terror and cool sound.

  Mingolla stepped close to the crewcut man, grabbed the front of his jumpsuit, kneed him, let him fall. He turned to Debora, pulled her through the door. “What the hell were you doing…waiting like that?”

  “You weren’t doing anything! Why should I?” She reached out to him, but withdrew her hand. “For a second, I just didn’t care anymore…about anything.”

  “Dammit!” he said. “You…”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel like that!” she said, halfway between anger and tears. “You feel like that all the time, and it’s all I can do to keep going in spite of it. I…”

  She twisted away from him, and he stood a second, looking at her back. His chest ached with some feeling he couldn’t identify, and his face was hot. Debora was taking deep shivery breaths. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get outta here.”

  As they climbed into one of the jeeps, a Madradona man, blubbering, came running up and struck Mingolla on the cheek, a feeble blow, but one that sobered him, alerted him to the fact that other men and women were converging on them from the corners of the parking lot. The man went to his knees, swayed, clutched at Mingolla’s leg. Mingolla kicked him away, gunned the engine, and sped off, weaving among the survivors, who cried out in frustration, reached for him with bloody hands. He turned down the street leading to the barricade, bouncing over the potholes. The crests of the distant hills were outlined in stars, the glowing walls jogged in his vision. Dark figures were scaling the barricade, some falling when gunfire flashed between gaps in the boards; but many more were making it over, and more still were massed at the foot of the wall. Mingolla laid on the horn, and some of the ragged men and women scattered; others stood and gawked, but he didn’t slow down. “Hold on!” he said to Debora as the wall loomed high, and then, amid splintering boards and gunfire and the thud of bodies impacting the hood, they crashed through the barricade, slewed sideways in the dirt. He fought for control of the jeep, managed to straighten it out. Saw that they were in the middle of a battle much like the one they had fled. Groups of soldiers firing at larger groups of attackers on a field of yellow dirt tufted with grass that showed black in the moonlight. And beyond, a meadow of taller grasses stretched toward the hills.

  Debora beat on his shoulder, pointed to a shack with a tarpaper roof, isolated from the battle. “They’ll have extra guns in there!”

  A bullet pinged off the fender.

  He pulled up behind the shack, kept the engine running while Debora darted inside. A second later, she returned with two rifles, shoving a wiry mahogany-skinned man in fatigues ahead of her. She forced him into the back of the jeep.

  “Who the hell’s he?” Mingolla asked.

  “Hostage,” she said. “He was hiding.”

  He was astounded by her transformation from hopelessness to martial efficiency. She seemed at home in this chaos, desperate, yet her desperation contained, channeled.

  “Come on!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”

  He swerved out from behind the shack and across the meadow. Bullets zipped past, one striking sparks from the frame of the windshield, and for the first time Mingolla was afraid. His asshole clenched, and a cold spot formed between his shoulder blades.

  Debora knelt in the seat, facing behind them, and began to fire. In the rearview mirror he saw three sets of headlights in pursuit. He floored the jeep, and they went sailing over depressions in the meadow, skipping like a stone. The windshield was blown out by a round, and Mingolla threw the jeep into a zigzag course, sending Debora into his lap. She righted herself and kept firing.

  “Head north!” shouted the man in the backseat.

  “Why?” said Mingolla, hunching his shoulders, turtling his neck, expecting a bullet at any secon
d.

  “There’s a road! Trails! You can lose them there!” The man’s head poked between the seats. “Make for that big hill!”

  An explosion at their rear, and in the mirror Mingolla saw a fire burning in the meadow, two sets of headlights giving it a wide berth.

  “Damn!” Debora’s rifle had jammed. She flung it down, picked up the second rifle.

  With every jolt and bounce, the jeep felt as if it were going to take flight, and Mingolla urged it to stay earthbound with body English and wishes. He made promises to God, get me out of this, Jesus, and I’ll sin no more, and his heart was hammering to the rhythm of Debora’s fire, and the hill was swelling huge and black above them, and the man in the backseat was shouting directions, and then they were swerving up into thick jungle along a narrow dirt track.

  “Pull over…here!” Debora elbowed him, pointed to a shadowed avenue leading off between two large trees. He did as she instructed, shut down the engine. She propped her rifle on the top of the windshield, covering the road, and as another jeep, its headlights piercing the darkness, swung around the curve, she opened fire. Screams, silhouetted figures against a flash of flame, and the jeep flipped over, the husk of a dead olive-drab beetle crackling in its own juices. “There’s one more,” she said. “They must have seen.”

  Mingolla reached with his mind. Found three frail minds less than a hundred yards away. He made them afraid…so afraid that they whirled, flared bright, and winked out one by one.

  “We’re okay now,” he said.

  Everything was still, a stream chuckling somewhere near, insects and frogs bubbling, and even the crackling of the flames was compatible with the stillness. All the dark confusion of the escape might never have happened. The shapes of branches and leaves overhead were sharp in the moonlight, and Mingolla felt the aches and tremors of adrenaline as if the moon were illuminating his weaknesses, pointing up their isolation. It seemed that none of what he remembered of the past hour had happened, that they had been disgorged from a nightmare and left on this hillside to sort out reality.

  “Are you going to kill me?” said a voice from the backseat.

  Mingolla had forgotten their hostage. The man was sitting up, looking alert but not afraid; he had a feline cleverness of feature and crispy black hair. Mingolla saw in him an opportunity for some good, a last chance to practice mercy.

  “You can go,” he said.

  “We can’t…” Debora began.

  “Let him go.” Mingolla laid a hand on her rifle. “Just let him go.”

  The man climbed out of the jeep. “I won’t tell anybody,” he said as he backed away.

  Mingolla shrugged.

  The man backed, stumbled, and broke into a run, his figure standing out for a second against the flames of the jeep, then vanishing around the curve.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” said Debora; but her voice lacked conviction.

  Mingolla fired up the engine. He didn’t want to look at her, he didn’t want her to see his face for fear of what might be written there. As he pulled out onto the road, her hip pressed against his; she left it there, and the contact made him feel close to her. Yet he also felt that the closeness wasn’t important, or if it was, it was of memorial importance, because things were changing between them. That, too, he could feel. Old postures were being redefined, connections tearing loose and reforming, shadowy corners of their souls coming to light. He put it from mind, put everything from mind, and concentrated on the road, driving north toward Darién.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  By five o’clock the next afternoon, after two car changes to throw off pursuit, they were high in the Darién Mountains, their pace slowed to a crawl by a dense mist. Visibility was no more than a few feet, and Mingolla had to clear condensation from the windshield to see even that far. Finally he gave up and pulled off the road. Debora went to sleep in the backseat, and he sat staring out into the mist, at vague green loops of vines and foliage that resembled fragments of a florid script, the signatures—he imagined—on a constitution not yet manifest in the land. Now and then he heard cries from the mist, cries that seemed as complex and strange as the shapes of the foliage. Birds, he figured. But recalling Tully’s stories of the region, the brujos and ghosts, he pictured little brown men sitting in huts, sending out winged spirits; and once the moon had risen, setting the mist aglow, he thought he could feel them fluttering around the car, dispersing into eddies and streamers whenever he turned his eye their way. He was only a little afraid of spirits; he was much more afraid of his memories and potentials.

  After a half-hour he nodded off and was awakened sometime later by a tremendous feeling of anxiety. Something had happened, something bad. He tried to dismiss the feeling as the hangover from a dream, but that wouldn’t wash. His heart was pounding, he was sweating, and when Debora spoke from the backseat, he jumped at the sound.

  “I just had a terrible feeling,” she said. “A dream or something.”

  “Yeah…me too.”

  She sat up. “Do you…”

  “What?”

  “I wonder if something happened back in the city.”

  It rang true, but he didn’t want to think about the city, about anything that lay behind them. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Come and sit with me…all right?”

  He crawled over the seat, and once he had gotten settled, she lay down, resting her head in his lap.

  …David…

  “I’m here,” he said, rejecting the easy solace offered by that kind of intimacy.

  …I love you…

  Her sending had a wistful flavor, as if she were trying to resurrect the emotion.

  “I love you.” His voice sounded flat, tinny, like a recorded message.

  She shifted to a more comfortable position, and out of reflex his hand slipped down to cup her breast. He thought he could go for years without touching her that way, and his palms would remember the weight of her breasts, their exact conformation. The contact relaxed him.

  …my father used to love places like this…

  …you told me…

  …high, misty…

  …you like them…

  …I can’t help liking them, I’ve spent so much time in them with my father…we used to visit a village in the Cuchamatanes Mountains called Cahuatla, it was so strange, the men wore shirts with big floppy embroidered collars and monkey-skin hats, and some of them looked a little like monkeys, they were all tiny and wizened-looking, even the young ones…and when they’d come out of the mist at you, you imagined they were monkey spirits…we’d go there every May for this festival, my father was amused by it, he couldn’t see it too many times…

  …what sort of festival…

  …it was really nothing special, all the men would ride horses from one end of the village to the other, and at each end they’d drink some aguardiente, and then they’d ride back and drink some more, and they’d keep getting drunker and drunker…the whole thing was to see who could stay on their horse the longest…

  She continued telling him about the festival, and he could see it, the scrawny little monkey men, their striped shirts with red and purple collars shiny as velvet, swaying drunkenly on their bony mounts, and for a while it was enough to listen to her, hear her, watch her memories unfold; but not for long. He sensed her fraying attention in the patchiness of the memories, and he felt her arousal, knew that she wanted to make love, that she was open, wet, and her readiness seemed to him obscene, because something bad had happened, something no amount of lovemaking would erase. But there was no use in dwelling on it, he decided, and there was nothing they could do except make love. She skinned out of her jeans, her panties, sat on his cock, lifting and lowering herself, using the front seat for leverage, and he got into it on the level of prurience, watching her ass come down and sheathe him. At the end her cry sounded as eerie and distant as those of the birds lost in the mist.

  They talked for a bit afterward, but their hearts weren’t i
n it, and soon she was asleep again. Mingolla tried to stay awake, to keep watch. He was troubled by the lack of pursuit, and he suspected they were being spied on from above by choppers with thermal imagers. But realizing that if this was the case, no amount of watchfulness would save them, he gave in to sleep and fell into a dream.

  In the dream he climbed out of the car, leaving Debora asleep, and walked farther up the hillside into the mist, picking his way through vines and ferns, his trousers growing heavy with dampness accumulated from the leaves. Before long, he saw a crumbling glow in the mist that resolved into an oblong of yellow light defined by the doorway of a hut. He was not afraid to approach the hut; in fact, it seemed he had been searching for just this hut for a very long time. He ducked inside and sat down facing a gnarled root of a man with black hair and wizened features and coppery skin: an old man, yet with the vitality of youth about him. He was wearing a loose-fitting shirt striped with red and purple and black and yellow, and trousers of the same fabric. The light came from three lanterns hung on pegs and made the freshly skinned poles of the walls gleam like rods of gold.

  The brujo—for such Mingolla knew him to be—nodded on seeing him enter and went back to staring at a complicated pattern traced in the dirt floor of the hut. Mingolla, too, stared at the pattern. It took his eye ever inward like the chart of the labyrinth, and he realized that this pattern was the core pattern of the world and time, the one that all the patterns of thought and movement of all living creatures were destined to create. As he followed its course, he found the particular point at which he and Debora made their contribution to the weave, and understood that his visions of the future—of which this was one—were nothing inexplicable or magical, but were a result of being attuned to the pattern, of intersecting its flow and seeing along it to other points that were pertinent to his course. He was on the verge of looking along it into the future, past the time of their meeting with Izaguirre, when the brujo, with a sweeping gesture, rubbed out the pattern and grinned at him.