Applewood (Book 3): The Space of Life Between

by Myers, Brendan P.

  Breaking their silence, Esquinaldo waved his hand in the direction of the city and asked, “Did you know all this was once a lake?”

  “I had heard that, yes,” Dan replied, knowing from his prior stint as a tourist it had once been the heart of the Aztec empire.

  “It is a fascinating story,” Esquinaldo said. “You see, when the Spanish arrived, the great city of Tenochtitlan was located right down there, on an island in the middle of the lake. It was the capital of the greatest civilization this hemisphere had ever known, and in its day was the largest city in the world, home to hundreds of thousands of people. It was also an architectural wonder, quite advanced for its time. As in ancient Rome, there were aqueducts bringing fresh water from the mountains. As in Venice, there were grand canals. There were even bridges leading to the mainland that could be withdrawn in the event of external threat. Can you imagine? It is no wonder when they first set eyes on it, Cortez’s men thought they were dreaming.”

  Esquinaldo took another sip, keeping his eyes fixed on the city as if imagining it still the awe-inspiring wonderland it once was. Raising his hand, he pointed.

  “Right down there, where the Zocolo is now, there were great temples, and pyramids, and palace complexes. They say the streets were wide enough for ten horses. There was even a zoo, with three hundred people dedicated to looking after the animals. What I mean to say is, in that valley, right down there, more than eight-hundred years ago, was one of the greatest cities the world has ever seen.”

  He paused a theatrical moment before going on.

  “And with just five hundred men, the Spaniard Cortez invaded the city and took it as his own. The great king Montezuma was killed, the temples and the palaces destroyed, and Mexico had been conquered.”

  Dan didn’t know what to say to that. “Fascinating stuff,” was the most neutral thing he could think of before taking another sip.

  Esquinaldo smiled. “I think so too. In fact, I like to think myself a student of history. There is much to be learned from history, don’t you think?”

  Again, Dan had no idea where this was going and so just nodded indifferently and took a long drink.

  “And what history teaches us, Senor Proctor, is that most men are filthy slaves, unfit even to touch, and that the weak will always be overtaken by the strong.”

  Dan’s choking last gulp finished off his drink, the tinkle of ice revealing his glass to be empty. Esquinaldo reached for it and made them both refills before going on.

  “If you’ll forgive me, I suppose this is why I wanted to spend time with you, senor. You know, I do not meet as many Americans as I would like. Yes, I meet the occasional diplomat, or sleazy Jew businessman. But still, I have a great admiration for Americans, and I have a special admiration for Mr. Richards. He is, in his own way, the new Cortez, just as America is the new Rome.”

  Dan was mid-swallow when Esquinaldo referred to “Jew businessman” and had to work hard not to cough. But he needed to say something.

  “Rome fell,” he said through a mouthful of ice, to cover what he thought a whole host of wrong in what he had just heard.

  Esquinaldo only laughed. “Yes, yes, of course it did, Senor Proctor. Every empire eventually does. Persia. Byzantium. Rome. That is another lesson history teaches. But remember, Rome lasted more than one-thousand years. Your country is what, barely two-hundred years old? I think you will find you have a long run ahead of you. And like Rome at two hundred years, you will also find your best and most significant days are ahead.”

  For Dan, the one-thousand year remark only brought to mind Hitler’s dream of a one-thousand year Reich. He remembered his Wouk novel, and the Jewish intellectual Aaron Jastrow making his final journey up and through the crematorium chimney, and caught himself biting his tongue hard enough to draw blood as Esquinaldo went on.

  “No, senor, your country is the greatest power the world has ever known, and with presidents like your Ronald Reagan, and men like Mr. Richards fighting your battles, you are well on the way to destroying both your largest foe, and the world’s greatest evil, that Jew conspiracy known as communism. It will soon be driven out of this hemisphere, and then it will be driven out of Europe, and the day will come when the Soviet Union itself crumbles into dust. And on that day, you will have accomplished what men like me and my generation only dreamed of.”

  Esquinaldo went wistful toward the end. Dan just felt sick to his stomach and had heard quite enough. The phrase “The banality of evil” came unprompted into his head, and he almost smiled to think that for all his host’s outward success and urbane charm, he was about as banal a person as Dan had ever met.

  He set his still half finished drink on the table.

  “Well, I’ve enjoyed our little chat,” he said, doing his utmost to sound gracious before adding something else. “With your permission, there is something that has been troubling me. I’ve already taken far more of your hospitality than I deserve, and I’m considering getting a hotel room for the remainder of my stay, until my nephew comes back.”

  Dan wanted to see where it went, and his worst suspicions were almost instantly confirmed. After speaking, he detected an immediate change in Esquinaldo’s so far breezy attitude. His face went tight. His sea green eyes went flat. When next he spoke, he had to make an obvious effort to affect the same friendly mask.

  “I am afraid I cannot allow that, senor. After all, I have been charged with your comfort and safety. I cannot abandon that responsibility. Either way, I promise you that your stay here will last only another day or two. Three at the outside. Of that, I can most definitely assure you.”

  Dan locked eyes with the man, and knew that these were the same eyes he’d seen blazing out from that black and white photo shown him by Rosa Lopez. He wondered how many people had looked into those eyes as their last living act, and knew then for a certainty it was more than a few.

  Dan stood and nodded. “Again, senor, I thank you for your courtesy.”

  Turning, he left the gated pool area and walked across the freshly mowed grass as nonchalantly as he could. Once inside the house, he sprinted to the bathroom and only just made it to the toilet in time before vomiting up nothing but green liquid, and he kept on going until there was nothing left inside him to vomit.

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  Though the two died in each other’s arms the previous evening, Dugan awoke to find Teresa had already completed her nightly metamorphosis from death to life. While making his own journey, he felt her head still resting upon him. He also felt the sensation of fingers running lightly along his chest. When he regained the ability to open his eyes, he saw that hers had already opened. She stared deeply into his eyes and smiled.

  “Good evening, hijo,” she said.

  Dugan returned the smile. “Good evening to you.”

  He took a few seconds to shake off his torpor and remember where he was. Hearing the echoing gush of the waterfall, he glanced in that direction and saw moonbeams breaking through to shimmer on the sides and floor of the cave. When he looked again at Teresa, he found she was still staring at him.

  “What?” he asked playfully.

  She shook her head. “It is nothing. I just enjoy watching people like us come back to life. It is a fascinating thing to see someone return from their intermission . . . at least, that’s what I call it. Do you have a name for yours?”

  Though he did, Dugan was hesitant to share it. It was just something silly he had picked up from the endless reading and studies that Julian put him through during those long months in Colorado. He had never said it aloud, and was worried it would sound dumb. In the end, he decided to risk it.

  “I do, or at least, I think I do. It’s from something I read once, from a poet named Keats. John Keats. Have you ever read him?”

  Teresa shook her head no. Dugan soldiered on.

  “Well, he wrote this poem, called Endymion, and it’s about a shepherd who falls in love with a moon goddess. But that’s not the
important part, because it wasn’t so much the poem that stuck with me, but something he said in the preface to it. He said:

  “The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy. But there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.”

  He paused a thoughtful moment before going on.

  “Anyway, I know it probably sounds dumb, and I guess it’s mainly because of, you know, the stage of life I was at when I got changed, which was somewhere between a boy and a man, but that phrase, ‘the space of life between’ has always stayed with me. So that’s how I think of dying every morning and coming back to life each evening. The space of life between. Does that make any sense?”

  Teresa pondered it before nodding deeply. “Yes, it does, hijo. It is beautiful. It makes very much sense.”

  She again rested her head on his chest, and the two stayed like that a while. At one point, Dugan absently lifted his hand to his neck, feeling there scabby flecks of dried blood that were the residue of their ferocious lovemaking last evening. Smiling in remembrance, he scratched them away, knowing that beneath those would be brand new and unblemished skin. Just as had his concussed eardrums from the blast at the club, his wound would have healed itself overnight.

  Teasingly, he withdrew his fangs from his mouth and ran them gently along the back of her neck. He felt her smile, but soon after she raised her head.

  “I am afraid not, hijo.” Pushing herself to her knees, she went on. “Anyway, there is no time. We have to go. We will miss the celebration.”

  Raising himself onto his elbows, Dugan asked, “Celebration? What celebration?”

  2

  He heard the music long before they arrived in town, an unambiguously Latin combination of acoustic guitars and steel drums. It seemed to be coming from somewhere near the central plaza. Walking hand in hand with Teresa, in stark contrast to his experience of last evening, the two left the trail and walked into a town filled with people. Given the sheer number, Dugan supposed surrounding villagers must surely have come. Many of those he had seen the night before at the guerrilla compound were here. Some of the Salvadoran army prisoners were here as well, smiling and clapping their hands to the music and participating in the festivities.

  The air was redolent of fried tortilla along with cheese, beans, and shredded pork, the ingredients of El Salvador’s ubiquitous street food. As they approached the plaza, excited children munching on blue and white snow cones ran to and fro. They passed gleeful students in school uniforms carrying sparklers, and blindfolded kids hefting bats twice their size doing their best to bash the candy from overheard pinatas. Blue and white balloons and ceremonial bunting were everywhere. From a flagpole in the central square, the flag of El Salvador flew above the rebel banner of the FMLN.

  “What’s the occasion?” he asked Teresa, who had been coy about the details ever since she’d brought it up.

  “It is our independence day!” she said gaily. “It is just like your own July Fourth. On this day in eighteen-twenty one, El Salvador and the rest of the Central American nations won their independence from Spain.”

  Dugan smiled to be reminded that at least some revolutions were successful. The two wandered the plaza together taking in the sights before sitting down to clap their hands to the festive music and watch the dancing and the celebrations. The music stopped every now and then for children to stage pageants and put on well rehearsed skits, to the delight of the crowd and the pride of their parents.

  As the hour drew late, though the music still played, the two got up to again stroll the town, hearing intermittent celebratory gunfire from both far afield and as near as the next street. When the two found themselves roaming in a quieter section of town, Dugan asked the question.

  “So when do I get to meet Gilberto?”

  It had been uppermost in his thoughts since he arrived in the village. Though it was wonderful to spend time with these people, especially with Teresa, he had not forgotten the reason he had come.

  Her reaction surprised him. She laughed.

  “Gilberto, hijo? Is that what you call him?” She gripped his hand more firmly. “I am going to call him that from now on. We will have a very good laugh.” Pulling at his arm, she said, “Come. You will meet him now.”

  3

  It was miles from the village, on the opposite side of a neighboring mountain, and down deep in a bowl-shaped valley. Rising from the jungle floor and covered with vegetation was a peculiar loping hillock, only a few hundred feet in height, but with an unusually wide base. Aside from that, it could be any one of the smaller hills Dugan had seen sprouting up here and there in this mostly mountainous region.

  Teresa led him into the valley and then to a nondescript spot at the foot of the hill, distinguished only as the place where a couple of large boulders had randomly collected, no doubt from a long ago landslide. After releasing his hand, Dugan watched her walk into the cluster of boulders and then disappear into the earth. After a hesitant moment, he followed.

  At the same spot she disappeared was an opening not much larger than a few rabbit holes. He placed first one foot and then the other tentatively inside and discovered it was a staircase of some variety. While taking his next steps into the darkness, his thoughts inevitably drifted to an outcrop of boulders in his mortal life, and falling into a hole not so dissimilar to this one. It was after his head disappeared below this rabbit hole he remembered that had been the last time he saw the sun.

  There were a dozen or so steps down the narrow stairway. At the bottom was a corridor where Teresa waited. Taking his hand, the two walked along the vaulted passageway, then turned left into another. After winding their way through a virtual labyrinth, with still more sharp twists and turns and zigzagging stairways, through the darkness ahead Dugan saw a light. Nearing the brightness, Dugan noticed the walls of the twelve-foot high corridor were carved top to bottom with symbols from an ancient language. Mixed in among the hieroglyphs were detailed drawings of what he assumed were long forgotten Gods, and depictions of the sometimes horrific rites associated with their worship. Looking up, he saw engraved into the ceiling above were elaborate maps of what could only be the stars.

  At the same moment he realized they were in a hidden and heretofore undiscovered pre-Columbian archaeological wonder, they turned a corner and walked up four stone steps to find themselves in the great room. Illuminated by flaming torches placed throughout the inner sanctum, all four walls were decorated with life sized and colorful murals depicting the daily life of a long dead civilization. Intricately detailed columned statues of fearsome deities rose floor to ceiling from each corner. On a pedestal jutting from the far wall was what might have been a throne, a deep and wide benchlike object painted in reddish pigment, and decorated with still more delicate carvings and glyphs.

  Dugan noticed in the middle of the room, on another pedestal, was an altar of some sort. After being swept away by the sheer grandeur and antiquity of the place, it had taken a moment for it to register that the altar was currently being used as a desk. Stacks of papers and rolled up maps and other documents were scattered about here and there. In a chair behind the altar, no doubt appearing smaller due to its size, was an officious looking, portly man, with close cropped brown hair and wearing thick-rimmed glasses. He stared across at Dugan and then glanced at Teresa.

  “Is this the guy?” he asked in a high tenor that echoed throughout the space. Teresa nodded. Once she did, the man again cast his gaze Dugan’s way. “So where’s Richards?” he asked with a hint of cynicism.

  It took Dugan a moment. “You are Gilberto?” he finally stammered out.

  The man raised his eyebrows before issuing a healthy guffaw. Puzzled, Dugan turned to Teresa and saw the same mirth on her face he had seen when he first mentioned the name. By then a little flustered at a joke he wasn’t in on, he waited for it to be explained. When the man at the a
ltar finally finished laughing, it was.

  “Sorry, young man. It’s just that only one man has ever called me that, and that man’s name was Duane Richards.”

  Getting up from behind the altar, he walked down the two short steps and approached Dugan to offer his hand. “My name is Don Gilbert. You are Mister Dugan, I presume?”

  Dugan took the man’s hand and shook it.

  “Scott,” he said. “Most people just call me Dugan.”

  “Dugan it is, then,” he said, releasing the extended hand and then pacing a few steps toward the altar. “And because you came here by yourself, I can only assume you have no idea what’s going on, right?”

  Dugan started to nod before curbing it. “I might have some idea,” he said, maybe a little peevishly. “But you are right,” he added quickly, “that is, Richards kept me mostly in the dark.”

  “By the way, where is our friend Duane?” Gilbert asked. “I understand we were unsuccessful in sending him to hell.”

  It took Dugan some time to apprehend Gilbert was referring to the bomb at the club. Before answering, he reached to his shoulder and removed his backpack, the added weight of the briefcase inside long ago wearing on him. Once it was on the floor, he began to speak.

  “He was injured in the bombing, if that’s what you mean. Got a piece of metal in his leg. Probably a concussion too. He’s out of commission, at least for a few days.”

  The man nodded before an apparent stitch in his lower abdomen had him grabbing the altar for support. Teresa went over to assist him, putting her arm around his shoulder before looking Dugan’s way.

  “Don is recovering from a gunshot wound. He came very close to death. Only now is he well enough to travel.”

  By then, Dugan’s mind was overwhelmed. He readily conceded he had no clue what the hell was going on. If he felt stupid the other night answering all of Teresa’s questions with, “I don’t know,” he felt doubly stupid right now. Then again, coming here had been his idea, and he had to live with that. A thousand questions ran through his head.