Life During Wartime (37 page)

Debora took the barrel of the gun. ‘Wait for me in the glade.’

Reluctantly, Mingolla turned the butt loose, and with a final look at Nate, he walked down the archway of leaves and stood in the feathery shadow of a palmetto. It gave him a strange feeling to think of Debora killing someone, especially by this method of mercy killing cum execution. He tried to excuse her in terms of her guerrilla experience; he wanted her to be virtuous. Minutes passed, and he became worried that something bad had happened, that Nate had managed to get the gun away from her. He
started back toward the hollow, and at that moment the gunshot sounded. Monkeys screaming, a thousand dark wings beating overhead. A few seconds later Debora came through the archway, the gun tucked into her belt. He wanted to comfort her, but she walked past without comment, moving so quickly through the sparse brush that he had trouble keeping up with her.

They spent their last day in Emerald packing a canoe with provisions and weapons, and finalizing their plans for the journey. By river to the Petén Highway. Bus to the town of Réunion. Then on foot through jungle to the Río Dulce south of San Francisco de Juticlan, and thereafter by boat downriver to Livingston. They gave Amalia – who had wandered into the village shortly after Debora’s arrival, likely directed that way by Izaguirre – into the hands of a young childless widow; they had little hope that Izaguirre would fail to reclaim her, but at least she would be well taken care of in the interim. Then they paddled the canoe to the hot springs, where they would spend their last night.

The early evening was a quiet time. Debora sat on the bank, morose, dangling her legs, touching her toes to the scalding water as if testing her threshold of pain. Mingolla sat beside her, cleaning the rifles, thinking of the days ahead. He gazed south down the river. The darkness looked thicker there, a black gas welling toward them, and he thought he could sense the precise articulation of their journey, the uphills and downhills, the ducking-into-covers, the sprinting away from this or that danger; it seemed his thought was a wind going out of him, coursing over the shapes of land and event. Once in a while they talked, mostly about nothing, asking if one or the other was hungry, thirsty, sleepy. On only one occasion did they have a real conversation, and that occurred after Debora asked Mingolla what he was thinking.

‘Not much … just ’bout the apple trees in my backyard. Back home, y’know.’

‘I would have thought you’d be thinking about the trip.’

‘I was, but just then I was remembering pruning the apple trees, sawing off the dead limbs.’

‘I’ve never seen an apple tree.’

‘They’re kinda neat. I never thought much about ’em ‘till I had
to work with ’em. You spend hours cutting at something, and you start noticing things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like when the sawdust gets hot, it smells like hot apples.’

‘What else?’

He mulled it over. ‘When there’s a long branch that’s dying, and it has a choice where to bring out a new leaf, it always puts the leaf right at the end, right at its tip.’

She dabbled her toes in the water. ‘Nate was like that.’

‘How do ya mean?’

‘Just something he said before …’ She pursed her lips, stared at her hands. ‘I wish,’ she said after a long pause, ‘that I could really believe he wanted to die, that it wasn’t just, madness.’

‘I think it was both.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was just madness.’

‘Then why’d ya do it?’

‘He might have tried to hurt us again.’

‘That’s a good enough reason.’

‘It always has been before, but …’ She kicked the surface of the water, sent spray flying. ‘I’m feeling too much,’ she said, glancing at him as if in accusation. ‘I don’t want this – you and me – to make me weak.’

He tried to jolly her. ‘Seems to me it’s done just the opposite.’

She looked puzzled, and he explained he was talking about their increased strength.

‘That’s not what I meant!’ She kicked the water again. ‘I meant what feelings do to your resolve.’

‘When you kill somebody, you should feel something.’ He told her about the Barrio and de Zedeguí, what his lack of feeling had done to him, and after he had finished, she said, ‘He was right. We are creatures of power. But we’re not in control of anything. Izaguirre’s in control, or else somebody’s controlling him.’

‘Probably,’ he said. ‘And it’s for sure we’ve been manipulated. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t have some control.’ He laid the rifle on the bank, put an arm around her. ‘I keep thinking about what Nate said.’

‘What?’

‘ ’Bout how they always made mistakes, how they were skillful
but careless. There’s this haphazard character to everything that’s happened. I’ve noticed it in myself, the way I acted in the Barrio. I assumed I’d blow through everything, that I was in complete command, and I ended up taking stupid risks, almost getting killed. And I can see it in the shit that’s been done to me. Like the time Izaguirre gave me that booster shot and then worried after the fact whether he’d given me too much. It’s in the stories, in their playfulness. The chopper’s a perfect example. I mean what a fucking waste of energy it was to set that up. It wasn’t necessary, it was a conceit, a chance for Izaguirre to play God. These people have been doing the drug for centuries, and that character’s engrained in them. They’re powerful but they’re fuck-ups. And if we can just stay cool, if we don’t trust anybody but each other, maybe we’ll catch them off guard. Maybe we’ll be their biggest fuck-up of all. I really feel that’s true.’

She said nothing.

‘Really,’ he said. ‘It’s more than a feeling.’

‘I hope they’re not fuck-ups,’ she said. ‘I hope whatever they’re doing, it’s something that’ll change things.’

‘You mean …’

‘I don’t care who’s running things down here,’ she said, ‘as long as it isn’t the American Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala City. Or United Fruit, or Standard Fruit, or the Banco Americano Desarrollo. Or some other American company. If Izaguirre is working against them, then I want to work with him.’

She had thrown off her despondency and seemed on the verge of anger; Mingolla didn’t want to argue.

‘Yeah, well … whatever. But let’s be careful? Let’s not start trusting people before we’re damn sure about them. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But we’re going to have to trust somebody eventually, and I hope it can be Izaguirre’s people.’

Starlight laid a sheen on the river, picking out the eddies. Wind drove off the mosquitoes, and Debora and Mingolla spread their sleeping bags outside the tent and lay down. Close to him, her features looked softer than usual, more girlish, and when he touched her breasts, her breath came quick and warm on his cheek. Despite their intimacy, he felt estranged from her, too full of trepidation about the journey to lose himself, and he explored
the shapes of her breasts, her hips, her cunt, trying to find in his knowledge of her body a truer knowledge of mind and soul, some fact of topography that would confirm the good news of his emotions, that would explain her and justify the risk he was taking. Arousal, however, was the only result. Her skin felt like the starlight, smooth, coated with a cool emulsion. As he lowered between her legs, fenced by her long thighs, she arched her neck, staring up into the sky, and cried out, ‘God!’ as if she had seen there some mysterious presence. But he knew to whom she was really crying out. To that sensation of heat and weakness that enveloped them. To that sublimation of hope and fear into desire. To the thoughtless, self-adoring creature they became, all hip and mouth and heart.
That
was God.

Men are weeds in this region.

 

– Thomas de Quincy

Ruy Barros was a bad man. Everybody in the town of Livingston would testify to this. Consider, they’d say, that Ruy has often been seen wearing watches and gold chains resembling those once belonging to his passengers. Consider, too, that his wife embarked upon one voyage heavy with child and returned with neither a big belly nor an infant. Does this not suggest that Ruy, who has no patience with the weak and infirm, found the child a nuisance and cast him over the side? Is this not borne out by the fact that his wife left him shortly thereafter and went to live with her family in Puerto Barrios? And consider the woman with whom he has since taken up, a slut with a mystic rose in place of her eye of wizardly power. Should proof be needed of his evil nature, consider his cargoes. Cocaine, deserters, antiquities. No, they told Mingolla, you would do well to take passage on another boat … though the
Ensorcelita
is the only boat in the harbor that will bear you to Panama, and who but God knows when another will present itself. It might be best, señior, for you to rethink your travel plans.

The men and women who offered these warnings were Caribes, who dwelled in white casitas, who swam in a tiered waterfall in the green hills above the town, and the peacefulness of their lives in such close proximity to the battle zone was a perfect evidence of the war’s artificial character. From their words Mingolla had conjured a piratical image of Ruy Barros – grizzled, scarred, tattooed, with gold teeth – and the
Ensorcelita
was a battered old fishing tub that might well have belonged to such a character: a forty-footer with a dark green hull, four cramped cabins belowdecks, and a refrigerated storage compartment aft. Its wheelhouse, which was canted about five degrees out of true,
had not been painted in many years, yet retained a yellow stippling that from a distance lent it a polka-dotted gaiety. The decks were strewn with rags, greasy machine parts, coils of rope, holed gas cans, and much of the planking was speckled with dry rot. But while Ruy’s personality accorded with the dilapidated state of the boat, his appearance did not. He was a gangly hollow-chested man in his late twenties, with fashionably cut black hair lying flat to his neck, and a lean horsey face that – despite its homeliness – showed evidence of breeding and struck Mingolla as familiar. Maybe because Ruy’s handsome face reminded him of Goya’s court portraits of dour, long-nosed, thick-lipped dukes and marquesses.

On the morning they boarded, a chill overcast morning with banks of fog crumbling out to sea, Ruy met them at the rail with a refined bow whose effect was dispelled by his greeting. ‘I told you seven o’clock,’ he said. ‘What you think, man? This a goddamn taxi? My other passenger, he been on board for a fuckin’ hour.’

Mingolla was about to ask, What other passenger, when a huge black man hove into view from behind the wheelhouse and came toward them, beaming. Gray flecks in his crispy hair, wearing a red baseball cap and jeans and a T-shirt stretched by his muscular arms and chest. Hook-shaped pink scar above one eye. Mingolla couldn’t believe it was Tully, but then, accepting the fact, he whipped out the automatic that had been tucked under his shirt.

‘Put that bitch away!’ said Ruy, backing.

Tully stood his ground. ‘You lookin’ strong, Davy. And feelin’ strong, too. Dat I can tell.’ He gave Debora the onceover. ‘Dis dat Cifuentes woman, huh? She fah from unsightly, mon.’

‘What’re you doing here?’ said Mingolla.

‘Same like you, mon. Panama!’ The way Tully sounded the name, it had a ring of destiny, of great deeds in the offing. ‘I been puttin’ two and two toget’er, and Panama de sum I’rive at.’

Ruy had backed to the door of the wheelhouse and was about to slip inside; Mingolla told him to stay put.

‘Who’s he?’ Debora asked; she had her own gun out.

‘Davy never tell ya ’bout Tully Ebanks?’

Tully came a step closer, and Mingolla, realizing he didn’t need
the gun, tucked it back into his waistband. ‘Be wise, Tully,’ he said. ‘I can handle ya, no problem.’

‘I been ever knowin’ dat, Davy. Weren’t it me sayin’ you was goin’ to be somethin’ special? I seen dis moment from de back-time. And I still fah you, mon.’

‘Uh-huh, sure.’

Ruy started into the wheelhouse again, and Mingolla cautioned him. ‘I’m gonna start this motherfucker up,’ Ruy said. ‘You bastards wanna kill each other, go ’head. I got the fog to worry ’bout.’ He ducked into the wheelhouse, and a moment later a grumble vibrated the hull, black smoke spewed from the stern.

‘You gonna shoot me, Davy?’ Tully asked, and grinned.

‘I might,’ said Mingolla. ‘Tell me why you’re going to Panama.’

‘Ain’t nowhere else to go. Must be a fool, took me so long to figure t’ings out.’

‘What things?’

‘T’ings I been hearin’ … from Izaguirre and de rest. It alla sudden start makin’ sense.’

Mingolla picked his way through the debris on the deck and confronted Tully from an arm’s length away. Tully grinned down at him, his seamed face as massive as an idol’s. Then his grin faded as Mingolla pushed into his mind, brushing aside his defenses and influencing him toward honesty. He asked Tully again his reasons for traveling to Panama, and Tully gave back a fragmented tale of clues, hints, things overheard, all leading to the same conclusions that Debora and Mingolla had reached.

‘Christ God Almighty!’ said Tully afterward, staring at him in awe. ‘What de fuck happen wit’ you?’

‘Practice,’ said Mingolla. From his brush with Tully’s mind he had gained an image of greed and strength, and underlying that, an essential good-heartedness that had been weakened by drugs and power. He thought he could trust him, but he was having trouble sorting out his feelings for him: an amalgam of camaraderie and antagonism.