Crobey lifted his face away. “Come on back to the bedroom.”
“Man does not live by bed alone.”
He backed away, defeated. “A record-breaking fit of pique.”
“Beat it. I feel my temper going.”
“I can see that. You’re more than just a bit glacial today, considering. Wasn’t it Catherine the Great who commanded the farm serfs into her bed at night and ordered them back to the fields next morning?”
“Harry, please, for Heaven’s sake!”
He went.
By the time he returned—hair all wet down, towel strapped around his middle—she had fried four eggs and poured coffee. They sat facing each other across the Salvation Army table and she pushed the eggs around on her plate with a fork until Crobey said, “Stop looking like an injured cocker spaniel.”
“Shut up. Will you please just shut up?”
“What the hell do you think I am, ducks? An extra on your movie set?”
“You’re leading the witness,” she warned.
“Come on. Spit it out.”
She almost upset the coffee when she reached for it. Vexed, she lifted it with great care and drank from it and set it down, absurdly proud of the fact that she hadn’t spilled a drop.
Finally she said, “You just don’t give a shit, do you.”
“About what?”
“Last night. Me. Anything.”
“Come again?”
“‘The world is my whorehouse,’” she said bitterly. “Well you proved what you wanted to prove. You could get me into bed just like any other woman.” She mocked him: “Ah, ducks, take it easy, what the fuck, a little roll in the hay never hurt anybody.”
Crobey put his fork down and laid both palms on the table. “Now listen to me: Don’t confuse someone who doesn’t parade his feelings with someone who doesn’t have any feelings. You think it was a game? A one-nighter?”
Subdued, she said, “I wouldn’t care, if only—”
“If only what?”
She began to cry then—surreptitiously at first, hoping he wouldn’t notice, but it turned into great gasping heaves and she didn’t know how but he somehow got her up and guided her into the front room and sat her down on the couch and folded her against him so that she cried it out with her face buried against his hirsute chest, baptizing him with her tears, clinging to him, clutching him in an insane desperation because sometime during the night she had awakened and realized with a sudden explosion of terror that she would not be able to bear it if he left her.
She had never felt this with anyone. Never known such an agony, never known what a tender sad thing love could be. She’d got up this morning hating him for making her long for him, for destroying all her carefully constructed defenses with his muscular embrace or his harsh laugh, for subverting her prejudices by making her love him in spite of—because of?—his ridiculous masculinity, his reckless gaiety and resolute foolishness, his violently assertive intensity. It was melodramatic, absurd—she truly was obsessed by him: In the night she’d thought of all the years she hadn’t known him; and she’d been jealous of all the women he’d ever known; and she’d kept thinking that at best he’d make the kind of bully husband who never touched the dishes.
He kept patting her shoulder and there-thereing her. It was imbecilic. She pulled herself away, snuffled, dragged a sleeve across her eyes. “Don’t just let me sit here with egg on my face.”
She peered at him, trying to clear her eyes. “God damn you, it’s not that I don’t want to live without you—it’s that I can’t. And I don’t know what the hell to do about that.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, ducks.” He took both her hands. “You’ve eaten your way right through me like termites.”
“What a suave line you have there.”
He wrapped himself around her, more like a wrestler than a lover but his rough kiss dissolved her, made her feel as if her colors were running and blending into his own.
They were tangled together on the couch. Past Harry’s shoulder she saw Santana in the doorway, not smiling.
“God invented the fist so that we could knock before entering.” She began to sit up.
Santana’s expression never changed. He had a rolled newspaper in his hand. She watched him approach: He unfolded the paper and held it out for them to see. It was in Spanish but she recognized the photograph—Rosalia Rojas very young, her hair straight down over her shoulders and her smile bright and expectant: yearbook photograph.
Harry swung his legs around and got his feet on the floor. She saw his jaw creep forward to lie in a hard straight line. He looked from the newspaper up into Santana’s face. “¿Donde está?”
“¿Pues—a la policia?”
She said, “Goddamn it. What is it?”
“Sorry, ducks. Seems the game’s been called on account of death.”
“Rosalia?”
Harry, naked, left the towel when he strode across the room. “Get yourself ready to travel.” He disappeared.
“Oh, the poor thing. She was so—” She followed him as far as the door. “Why her?”
He was climbing into underwear. “Gunning for both of them, I guess. The paper makes it out to be a mugging.”
“Isn’t there a chance—”
“No.”
She pressed her cheeks with her palms as if to reassure herself of her own reality. I must look a fright: She ought to do something about her hair. But she didn’t move from the doorway. “You want to put me on a plane.”
“Ducks, I want you to stay alive.”
She said, “She was such a breezy kid.”
“She was all right,” Harry acknowledged.
“Maybe now at least they’ll reopen it in Washington.”
“I doubt it. They’ll just pull the covers up over their heads. They’ve got an out, haven’t they—nobody can prove it wasn’t an ordinary robbery attack.” He buttoned up his short-sleeve khaki shirt and left the tails out over his Levi’s. Then he sat down to lace up his roughout-buck boots.
“What are you going to do?”
“Find out how Glenn wants to play it. Give him a hand if I can.” He looked up. “This gives him a stake in it, doesn’t it?”
“What about you?”
“Ducks, you’re my stake in it.”
“I don’t want you killed, Harry.”
“People have been trying to kill me for twenty-five years. Don’t worry about me.”
She went back across the front room for her boots. Santana stood in the kitchen doorway—neither drinking nor smoking nor eating nor reading; simply waiting.
She tried to comb her hair. Turmoil enveloped her—she had always tried to exercise control over the events of her life and because she was able and intelligent she usually succeeded but now they were racing by too quickly and she felt adrift.
Harry was with Santana talking Spanish when she emerged. Santana came away, heading back past her to her room. She said, “Don’t bother, I didn’t pack it.”
Santana hesitated and Harry scowled. She said, “Down in the Amazon basin the jaguars hunt in male-female pairs. When two of them pounce on a big tapir that outweighs both of them put together, the battle can be kind of fierce. We were down there on location once and I saw it happen. It can look right dicey, as you’d say. But the outcome’s always the same.”
“That’s kind of fanciful.”
She said, “Please don’t sell me short.”
Santana looked on with stiff disapproval.
Harry said, “Okay, ducks. We’d better pick you out a gun.”
Chapter 14
Cielo walked fretfully to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the thin mist. Kruger was down there striding back and forth like a colonial officer, whipping a stick against his britches; Cielo measured the distance again with his eye and turned back toward the mountain.
Vargas’s eyebrows lifted—he was awaiting Cielo’s signal. Uneasy, Cielo shook his head and went back to the trees, crossi
ng the flat rock where the helicopter had set down last night, passing two field guns and the crated mortars. The field pieces were small ones, three-inchers.
He had another close look at the oak to which the block-and-tackle was cabled. It was the biggest tree in the vicinity and looked as substantial and monolithic as a granite mountain and Kruger, the engineer among them, had passed on its suitability as an anchor for the cable but Cielo was troubled by doubts because water was easy in the rain forest and the rock subsurface was close beneath the soil—even the biggest trees had no need to drill roots very far down; it made for a shallow purchase.
Kruger had dismissed it. The oak, he’d pointed out, was old enough to have survived a hundred hurricanes. It would support the weight of a Sherman tank, let alone a small mountain howitzer or a crate of rockets.
Vargas came across to the oak. “Before long the sun will burn this off. We need to be under cover by then.”
“All right.” He still felt nagged by reluctance but he forced himself away from it. “Let’s get started then.”
He went to the rim and watched the cable pull taut over the guy pully. The crate—twelve hundred pounds—began to skid and tilt; then it was lifted off the ground and swung far out. Vargas and two of the men prodded it with poles to slow its pendulum swing. After a time it settled down, twisting a bit in the air, hanging clear out over the face of the cliff.
Down below Kruger was watching with his neck craned back, his face pale in the mist. He began to make beckoning gestures with both hands and Cielo relayed these signals to Julio who shifted the gears and began to pay out cable from the donkey engine’s winch drum. The heavy crate began to descend, well out away from the face of the cliff, and Cielo sat back on his haunches and relaxed; it was working splendidly.
The donkey engine banged away methodically and down at the mouth of the cave Kruger had stepped to one side and was reaching up to guide the crate to its seat on the flatbed cart that waited to receive it. Four men clustered around the swaying load while it dropped slowly amid them. There was a second donkey engine in the cave, only seven horsepower but enough to winch the dolly into the cave.
For the next hour Cielo squatted on the rim relaying hand signals from Kruger at the base of the cliff to Julio at the hoist engine. It gave him a kind of peace to perform this near-mindless repetitive job. There were two small howitzers, four mortar crates (one containing mortars and three containing ammunition), two crated rocket-launchers and four crates of rockets. The rocket-launchers doubled up on one load; at seven minutes per load Kruger had calculated it would take an hour and a quarter to finish the job but it was running a little slower than that and Cielo realized the mist probably would clear before they had everything put away. But that did not particularly exercise him.
In any event near the end of the first hour the clouds came scudding over the peaks and by half past eight it had begun to drizzle, a very fine spray that pricked his face and made him smile.
The donkey engine ran out of gas. There was always something you’d neglected. They had to pause while Cielo tossed the end of the rope down to Kruger and a man went off to the camp to bring back a five-gallon jerrycan from the Jeep. Julio came over to the rim and gave him a hand hauling it up; it was heavy and the work made him sweat. Julio said, “Almost done now—just the two guns left. Then I can get back to my book. I’ve only got a couple of chapters left—I want to find out how it comes out.”
“I can tell you how it comes out. The computers take over the universe.”
“Very funny.” Julio stumped away lugging the gasoline. He was in a good mood; the helicopter had brought him half a dozen science fictions.
Vargas and his crew hooked up the first field gun and Kruger down below waited with his arms folded on his chest, head tipped back, blinking when raindrops struck his face; brooding. To Kruger everything had come out of kilter with time. The tragedy of Kruger’s existence was that he hadn’t been born early enough to be a storm trooper.
The engine coughed and started up again. Cielo looked back toward the cliff and thought of checking up on the oak tree again but he was feeling a bit lazy and his earlier unease had been settled by a gentle calm. He wagged a finger at Vargas and then at Julio; the field gun dragged along the ground a bit and then swung aloft and swayed out over the drop.
Down below him Kruger’s men stood out well away from the cliff. Kruger walked across the hardpan and dragged the dolly aside; they wouldn’t need it this time, the gun had its own wheels. Coming back onto the drop zone Kniger looked up and watched the gun descend; he began to wave the others forward and they moved in like scavengers toward a carcass. Old men now, all of them—old for this at least; they were over forty, some of them fifty or as near to it as made no difference; Vargas was what, now—fifty-six? For men like these this kind of life was nothing more than simulation.
They’d been nurtured on patriotism and old Draga’s monstrous calumnies. Time had betrayed them. When Draga was gone Cielo would have to face up to the dismal grief of disbanding them. Some of them would take it with relief, he knew—Vargas for instance. Others would lose their moorings and be swept away by the guilt of their failure: He could picture one or two of them on skid row and he didn’t know how he could prevent that. Julio had his own plans, Cielo thought—but they involved business, not insurrection. As for Kruger, that one wouldn’t suffer; he’d find another war and go off to shoot Communists somewhere.
For himself there was simply the money Draga would leave him. There was something curious in that—not long ago he’d had ten million dollars in his hands but he’d turned it over to the old man. When Julio had questioned that he’d explained that they couldn’t double-cross the old man and survive it; the old man had tentacles everywhere and how could you spend money without his getting wind of it? But that was only a half truth. In a way he loved the old man. After the old man died it wouldn’t matter if Cielo turned traitor to his cause but while Draga lived Cielo would humor him because these dreams were all the old man had left.
A boat. That was his own dream. Not a Greek yacht; just a boat—fifty feet, maybe sixty, an old one would do if it didn’t have dry rot. Something with plenty of canvas and a little diesel auxiliary. A boat and a warm-water landing where he could moor it; a house by the landing where he could moor Soledad and the children and bask away his days in a soft warm nesty feeling of family and love. All he really wanted was the old man’s half million dollars to see him through. Ah, he thought, I’m one hell of a revolutionary.
Musing, he watched Kruger’s men drag the field gun out of sight into the cave. The cable came back up and Vargas hooked it to the last gun.
The drizzle tapered off. Steam in the air now; he could hardly see the oak back there and beneath him Kruger’s face was leached of color by the gray mist. There was always rain in El Yunque but it seemed to have been heavier than usual this year—every day a half dozen squalls, some of them drenching. It was a wonder the whole mountain didn’t wash away. Everywhere you saw trees with their root systems exposed to the air where floods had carried the earth away.
He didn’t like it up here. Cabin fever was another danger; he couldn’t keep the men here forever. The schedule of rotations permitted each man a two-day furlough in the fleshpots; the men were away two at a time on overlapping days; their discipline was strong and he knew none of them would get drunk enough to let anything slip. Nevertheless they were beginning to think of themselves as prisoners. A few had their own resources: Julio would last as long as the supply of science fiction held out and Vargas had the methodical patience of a saint and Kruger, the good soldier, obeyed orders to the end but the others were restless and soon a listless apathy would infect them; they would begin to quarrel among themselves and things would begin to disintegrate. And there was Emil, if he ever returned from the city. But he saw no solution to it unless the old man died soon.
The idea had occurred to him that if push came to shove he might mount an attempt to
invade Cuba, then abort it for some reason. That would push things back toward Square One for a while. It would take time to reorganize and re-equip. The thought remained in his mind as a workable contingency but he preferred to avoid it; anything like that might cause injuries and jeopardy. What was the sense in exposing the men to pointless risks? Besides, an aborted attack would disappoint the old man acutely.
Something snapped—very loud. The earth seemed to quake under him. He was watching Kruger, waiting for signals, but the noisy tremor spun him around and he was in time to see Vargas diving toward a man nearby, tackling the man, driving him down and back from the cliff—and then it registered on Cielo’s consciousness that the derrick was coming apart.
He saw in an instant what was happening: The one thing they hadn’t been able to test—the rim of the cliff itself was buckling. A fissure must have opened; rot in the rock. The telegraph pole that had been pinned into the ledge by cables and rock drills was letting go and in that split instant of time he saw the great logs scatter like toothpicks,
He whipped around to scream a warning at Kruger but Kruger had seen it, too, and was scrambling to get out from under the plummeting field gun. For a moment Cielo thought there was time, believed Kruger would make it; the angle of perspective gave him false hope. Kruger launched himself like an Olympic swimmer—a flat dive to get away from the impact area—but his soles skidded on the wet and he bellyflopped and the gun came down on him—bounced horribly and tipped over, its cable whipping like a snake, lashing its heavy loop back toward the cliff where it knocked a man—Ramirez—clear off his feet; Cielo wasn’t certain but he had the terrible feeling the cable had struck Ramirez right in the face. The man pirouetted back out of sight.
Stunned by shock and the suddenness of it Cielo climbed to his feet on rubber knees and looked left: Vargas was standing up, the man he’d rescued dusting himself off, someone else lying askew with the butt end of a telegraph pole across his chest. The donkey engine died with a sputter and Julio stared at Cielo in horror. Vargas on his big legs stumbled from side to side like a man concussed; but Cielo believed he’d not been hurt.
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