“Stay down!” she said.
“Ight, Ight, ’ucking ’ist al’ighty!”
The gunshots dwindled, and then there was quiet. Erik looked around, but there was no one. Just the body of Thom and the body of his assailant, neither of them moving. His first thought was that he’d be going back to jail, and then he cursed himself for thinking of himself when Thom was on the ground. The guy was covered in mud, and there were far more bullets in him than seemed necessary to kill a man. Thom was dead. He looked for Jean and couldn’t see her.
Then he saw a new group of people arrive. Stuck at ground level, he watched a toe nudge one of the fallen bodies. A man stood over him, and Erik tried to place the face.
The man reached down and swiftly cut his gag free with an absurdly large knife and said, “Well?”
Were they here to steal the couch? The man was a great shaggy human, a giant beard and a mustache. In fatigues and a beret that barely fit over a mass of hair. Looking like one of Guevera’s generals. One of those guys stuck in the wilderness for twenty years, huge and furry. On second thought, it wasn’t human. It was some kind of dirty, rabid bear. Jason Glakowsky.
“Dad?” Erik said, the word going weak and windy at the end like the breath had been knocked out of him. He fished for something else to say, his mouth open.
“Hi, Erik.” His dad smiled.
“Dad!”
Jason Glakowsky reached down and pulled Erik to his feet with a singular powerful motion and cut his wrist bonds.
Erik kept his head low. “Are they gone?”
“Yeah. For now. There were too many of us.”
Erik looked around for Jean and saw her off the trail, headed away from them, stumbling down the slope and deeper into the Andes. She was still gagged and wrist-tied, and she walked like someone who’d been hypnotized—seeing and yet not seeing. He borrowed his father’s knife and sprinted after her. Her eyes were wide, and there were tear marks on her face. When he stepped in front of her, she didn’t register him, didn’t focus, just sidestepped him.
“Jean! Stop!” He grabbed her shoulders. “Hey, stop. Maybe Thom isn’t dead, maybe?” A sear of guilt ran through him for saying it, for giving her false hope, but he couldn’t stop himself. He freed her from her gag and bonds. “My dad is here. Maybe he . . . Maybe he’ll know what to do.” She seemed to at last register his presence, stared at her wrists and then back at him. Her eyes were dull.
“Where’s Tree?
“Tree?” Erik had a vague memory of seeing Tree earlier in the day. Why wasn’t Tree here? Had Tree been shot and left to die on a hill? He had to keep it together, had to keep everyone together, one at a time. He turned Jean around and faced her in the direction of his father and his father’s men, supplied gentle pressure until she began walking that way on her own. It was all him now. It was up to him. The quest could not fail, but how . . . how could it possibly be accomplished? Everyone was dead.
Erik ran in the direction he’d last seen Tree, down one hill and up another, falling and rolling as he ran, back on his feet, tripping and not caring. He finally spotted Tree slumped against a boulder. He had been shot! Erik squatted next to Tree, looked for blood but didn’t find anything except a few marks here and there. He shook Tree’s shoulder, and his eyes opened.
“Tree,” he said. “What’s wrong, Tree? Are you okay?” And then a wave of anger rolled over him. “How come you didn’t tell us? Wake up, Tree. He’s been shot! Thom’s been shot.”
Tree’s eyes seemed to have trouble focusing, his lips worked to get out a syllable that had no voice behind it.
Erik reached out and felt Tree’s forehead. “You’re sick, dreamboy.” Remembering suddenly the mosquitoes, Tree’s dreams about getting sick. He put his arms under Tree’s legs and back, lifted. He was so light. Above him on the trail his father and his men had put Thom on the couch and seemed prepared to move on. Erik trudged up the slope slowly, out of breath.
“What’s wrong with him?” Jean said when he’d reached the trail.
“He’s sick, probably malaria. Something like that. My dad will know.”
“I can’t believe this, it’s a nightmare, why did I come?”
Erik recognized more faces, guerillas he’d grown up with. They were all gray-haired and wrinkled now.
Erik’s father, Jason, wrapped gauze around Thom to slow his bleeding. Blood was oozing from all over his body, soaking the couch. A fallen giant. There was no trace of a heartbeat, and they discussed whether they should bury him. Jean sobbed once and closed Thom’s open eyes.
“We’ll take him into the village,” Jason said. “She’ll know if he can be saved.”
“Saved?” Erik said, trying to extract the outrage from the hope.
Jason shrugged.
What would there be to resuscitate? Erik looked down at the still body of Tree in his arms. A drop of sweat shimmered above Tree’s eyelid, and Erik tried to hold himself together. They were supposed to get on a Greyhound, he remembered, go spend some time on the beaches of Mexico. He wanted to burn that couch.
The grizzly crew of guerillas in camouflage began digging a grave for the dead man. Erik studied the man. A normal man, a black canvas jacket with two bullet holes in it. This was his enemy. A man who would die for a couch.
Jason led those who weren’t working on graves deeper into the valley.
“Everything is falling apart,” Jean said. “The quest is over, isn’t it?” She came to a stop on the trail.
“Why the hell are we walking this way? We’ve got to go back!”
“Your dad says there’s some kind of village up here. But it’s a long way. We’ll be lucky to get there before nightfall.”
“Then why are we going this way? We’re not guerillas. We need a hospital.” The group was already much farther down the trail. They were trotting, speeding the couch along.
“It’s the right way,” said a weak voice from Erik’s arms. Tree cocked his eyes at an odd angle to try and focus on Jean, unable to hold his head up.
“Oh Tree, did you hear about Thom?”
Tree blinked, looked down the trail. The guerillas carrying the couch with Thom were fading into the distance.
Erik didn’t want to follow, didn’t want to be there when they unloaded the body off of the couch, the blood all emptied from it. Didn’t want to be there when they scratched out a grave in the ground next to the trail with their rifle butts.
“What a crazy fuck, running into fire like that. Stupid fucker, fuck fuck fuck.”
Jean shook her head, her eyes red. “I guess it was brave. But it was all useless. If he’d only been a couple minutes later, your father would have gotten there.”
Erik shook Tree in his arms, filled with an angry frustration. “What are we going to do now, Tree?”
Tree came back to consciousness for a moment, then closed his eyes again.
They staggered along the trail, and the clouds descended and engulfed everything in fog. A lost land with only the barest hint of trail at their feet. The voices of the guerillas talking in Spanish seemed from another century. Erik carried Tree. He was aware only of the barely-alive body of one friend on his back and the dead body of his other friend somewhere ahead. And of the dead man they’d left behind, earth surrounding the body, mud filling his mouth. It all started with a waterbed. He was going to have a thing or two to say to that waterbed owner if he ever got back. And somewhere in front was a couch. It was just a couch. A couch that everyone wanted. Yes, the fucking quest was over—nothing was worth this much, was it?
Every once in a while, Tree mumbled in his sleep.
Erik’s arms numbed with weight of Tree. They passed the valley, and to his right was what felt like a great drop-off. The fog obscured any bottom. The trail was thinly etched into a mountain. To his left the slope was steep and rocky enough to be considered a cliff. To his right a veiled vertigo. Erik nudged a rock off of the trail, and the fog enveloped it without a sound.
One of the g
uerillas offered to carry Tree, and Erik refused. Tree was his. His friend, his responsibility. He was dizzy and exhausted but sure-footed with an otherworldly determination.
The sun had been lost for some time, and the eerie light of the fog about them diminished. Jason passed a rope between them, looping them together in a line. If one falls, all fall, Erik thought. Could this possibly be smart? A bottle was passed around with increasing earnestness, and they could hear some soldier in front singing a drunken song. A hollow, frightening call of a giant bird sounded in the fog, like the call of some prehistoric creature spotting its prey.
“Where did they find booze?” Erik asked into the air so as to get the bottle directed toward him. The fog was so deep it now obscured the people in front and behind him on the trail.
“Patul,” his father said from some meters ahead. “It’s the pueblito we’re headed toward. It’s a smuggler’s village, moonshiners. We arrived there last night. The best trago you’ll ever find.”
“How . . . how?”
“Well. That’s a hell of a question. I don’t really understand either. We came from Colombia. Took us a week. I was contacted by an old friend—I believe you know Per? We don’t always see eye to eye, but in recent years we’ve had a bit more in common. He was wondering if I’d heard the rumors, and I had. We’ve known about the couch, or whatever it is, for a long time. The relic.” Jason smiled. “I’m glad you’re a part of it, proud of you.”
Erik could feel a blush run through him, followed by the despair of having it all fall apart so miserably.
The trail on the cliff broadened and then turned into the opening of a tight valley, and they dipped underneath the fog. There was light coming from the valley, a tiny pueblo. Patul looked like a constellation that had fallen to the ground. Too far away from civilization for electricity or roads or the outside world to come nosing into what they did. Dark human forms that wove and slurred and carried on with drunken joviality began to materialize. The trail crossed a wooden bridge, and then they were in the center of the constellation.
A man named Angel, the soft g making the name An-hell, led them toward one of the lights—a mud shack with a blazing fire on the floor. The smoke coursing out the doors, the room blackened and shiny from years of fires, guinea pigs running underfoot. A crude wooden table listed in a corner. A giant, bored fat woman with a single lens in a pair of glasses watched them enter. They planted the blood-soaked couch with Thom on it near the fire. Erik set Tree on the ground, his back propped against a wall. He noticed for the first time that the couch had begun to fall apart. It had rips in the cushions, one arm seemed to be separating, and it was stained. Erik began to pull Thom’s limp form off the couch, warning them the couch would make sure he was dead, but his father told him to stop. “Leave him on it. Rosita will move him if she thinks he should be moved. She knows.”
“Yellow fever,” Jason diagnosed after looking at Tree. “He hasn’t been in the country long enough for anything else. He should be alright, most people his age pull through, but it won’t be fun. Rosita might be able to do something”—he gestured toward the woman—“but he’s too far in to stop it.”
Rosita stood, dressed in multiple layers of colorful blankets dirty with soot and mud. When she walked, she angled her right hip heavily into the air, swept her foot out, as if a baby were clinging to one leg. She said something that Erik didn’t understand.
“The couch can’t stay here,” Jason said. “She said it’s got to leave before the full moon.”
“Si, Señora,” Erik answered when no one else volunteered.
She stared at him for a while, inspecting, and he tried an awkward smile.
Erik said, “Can you help Thom?”
She cleared her throat mightily, leaned over and spit a great mass of phlegm into the fire, where it hissed and crackled. She shrugged. “Tal vez, tal vez.”
Erik shuddered. Was it too late for helicopters, sirens, and the clean, waxy halls of hospitals?
She sent Angel out, and he returned a minute later with a plastic bottle of what looked like water. Angel took a draw off it, coughed, wiped his mouth sloppily, and handed it to Rosita.
Rosita took several giant swallows and poured the rest over Thom’s body, shaking the bottle to get every last drop out. Then she took a burning log from the fire and lit the alcohol that she’d poured on him. It sprang to life, spreading quickly over him.
“Hey!” Erik yelled. “What in the fuck!?” They were cremating him right here, he realized.
Jean moved toward the woman, and Rosita held her hand up, snapped at Jason.
Jason put a hand on each of their shoulders, restraining them.
Thom’s body was covered by a pure blue leaping flame. Rosita let it burn for only a few seconds, and then she pulled off one of her blankets and laid it over Thom, extinguishing it. She removed the blanket, then pulled half-a-dozen fist-sized rocks from the fire ring and put them on various parts of Thom’s body. There was no movement from Thom. He’s dead, Erik thought. This is ridiculous. Leave the poor fucker in peace.
“Vayan.” She waved them out of the room with the back of her hand. Erik and Jean backed slowly out the door. They left Tree asleep or unconscious. Angel closed the door behind them.
There was a quality to the darkness of Patul that Erik hadn’t experienced anywhere else. Space and distance dissolved. The points of lights floated in their constellation unable to pierce the darkness. From over a hill came the sound of hoofbeats, the faint outlines of horsemen. There was a spookiness to it, an expectation of flaming arrows, a headless rider. A plethora of horror movies attempted to reinvent just this. This was what we were supposed to fear. There was no background hum, and that was what was simultaneously peaceful and unsettling. Hoofbeats retreated into utter stillness, the thinness of the twelve-thousand-foot atmosphere causing sound to fade into nothing. The mud and toil of the day dissolved into black-velvet canvas at night. This is what ancient villages must have looked like, he thought. I’m in the past.
Someone grabbed him under the arm, but he couldn’t make out the face, only the fumes of a day’s worth of drinking. He was led to an abandoned mud-brick house not in the constellation. A candle was lit. He was introduced to the townspeople, all of them a great leap of drunkenness ahead of him and waiting stonily in the darkness for his and Jean’s arrival. Two more candles were lit, and then the party started. Angel, Edison, Galo, Julita, Maria, names he didn’t catch. His father was there with a giant red accordion strapped around his neck, looking more like a bear in the circus than ever. Another guerilla mouthed a clarinet, her hair black and tangled and tied up with a knotted bungee cord. Angel took up Erik and Jean as a special project, passing them the trago, a clear liquid that smelled like turpentine, his arms around both of them, speaking in a slur achieved only under obscene amounts of the best liquors. Jean got up and danced a couple of tunes with Erik, both of them dancing the marvelous dance that only the drunk can dance, and then a giant, quiet villager broke into a dance beyond grace, his great form unrestricted by the pull of the earth. Erik and Jean watched him in wonder and drank steadily, drank with vigor, drank to forget, drank for their comrades, and the drinking was encouraged, the villagers each wanting to share a toast with them. Yelling each other’s names before drinking.
“Galo!” Erik cried.
“Enrique!” Galo shouted.
“Julita!” Jean yelled.
“Djinn!” Julita answered, throwing the fire liquid down her throat.
And for each of those, Erik toasted for Thom or Tree, shouting their names into the night. And consciousness was like a phonograph with its power cut, a flywheel in its last rotations, a black hole. Gravity sucking dry the light of consciousness.
Erik woke up under a mass of blankets to see the remains of the slumber party. The guerillas, his father, and the Patulians were spread chaotically about the floor. He was wrapped around a girl from the village, both with their clothes on. How did that happen? He co
uldn’t see Jean. He worked his way to his feet, amazed he wasn’t hungover, took one step and realized he was still drunk. Sky leaked ultra-blue into every opening of the decrepit adobe.
He made his way outside, tripped about in the grass, took a leak. At one end of the valley, the way they’d come in, was a lake fed by three waterfalls charging down the steep cliffs. Beyond the cliffs were rugged mountains with peaks surrounded in clouds. The other end of the valley dipped down and slid into the fog again. Patul was between, a limbo of sunlight. Perhaps twenty adobe houses were scattered about the valley and up one hillside, but most were caved in and abandoned. Between him and Rosita’s adobe where Thom lay was a painted hut with a cross on the door, a church of sorts which looked like it hadn’t been attended since the Middle Ages.
Erik ambled back to Rosita’s place, trying to figure out the path he’d walked in the night. The village felt empty. Sheep filed up a hillside, but the houses were quiet.
He found Jean and Rosita by the fire on Rosita’s floor, which doubled as the town tienda. Tree was laid out against a wall, where someone had put some blankets down for him. A curious guinea pig had its front legs up on his forearm. A shifty smoke wallowed around at a height of four feet and above, encouraging everyone to sit on the floor. Thom lay on the couch, and to Erik’s eyes was obviously dead. A statue of a man, a shocking paleness, eyes closed, hands crossed tomb-style over his chest. Heavy stones were scattered in patterns about his body. His clothes were riddled with holes and caked with dried blood and mud. Jean had one hand around a hot drink of some kind and the other resting on Thom’s ankle.
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