Life During Wartime (41 page)

‘Den we got no choice but to ’bandon dis washtub,’ said Tully. ‘I go look fah somethin’ to wrap de guns.’

Ruy shoved him. ‘We ain’t abandonin’ shit, man!’

Tully knocked him against the side of the wheelhouse and engulfed his throat in a one-handed chokehold. ‘Don’t be ’busin’ me, mon. Got dat?’ He gave Ruy a squeeze, and Ruy’s eyes bugged. ‘Now you wanna stay wit’ de ship, dat’s fine. We don’t need you.’

Mingolla looked at the shore, at the shadowed hills rising inland. ‘What’s out there?’

‘Too many fuckin’ soldiers,’ said Ruy, massaging his throat ‘That’s what.’

‘Olancho,’ said Tully. ‘Mountains, jungle. Dat’s where de war begin, but dene’s no fightin’ now. Hard to say what’s out dere.’

‘Maybe there’s a way,’ said Ruy. ‘If we can get past the checkpoints, then maybe I can get you to Panama. And maybe I can get financin’ for another boat.’

‘We do fine by ourselves, mon,’ Tully said.

‘Fuck you will!’ But Ruy moved away from him. ‘You be lost ’fore you go ten miles. But there’s ways I know. Military roads, old contra trails. ’Fore I got the
Ensorcelita
I used to travel that route.’

Mingolla stared out at the coast, then at Ruy. It might be best, he thought, to hold back on calling Ruy, see what he had in mind. ‘Are those ways still open?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Ruy. ‘But we need a truck or somethin’. Maybe one of them off-road vehicles. Won’t be hard to find somethin’. Lotsa these farmers ’round here, they fix up their trucks with extra gas tanks so they can go huntin’ in the hills.’

‘How long will it take?’ Debora asked.

‘Depends what we get into,’ Ruy said, sidling up to her, solicitous. ‘But I tell ya one thing. Time we come to Panama, we gonna have a few stories to tell.’

Two miles from where they came ashore, tucked in among the ranks of coconut palms, stood a copra plantation: tall wooden racks for drying coconut fiber; three tin-roofed sheds in which the product was stored; and a long ranch-style building of whitewashed stone with a red tile roof. This last served as living quarters and office for the owner, Don Julio Saldivar. Parked around the corner of the building was a venerable Ford Bronco with an auxiliary gas tank welded into the luggage compartment. Don Julio met them at the door with an automatic pistol in hand, but Mingolla persuaded him to amiability and generosity, telling him that they were government agents on secret assignment. The plantation owner offered him use of the Bronco, camping equipment, and offered Debora, whose clothes had been lost during the swim to shore – no lifeboat on the
Ensorcelita
–the old clothes belonging to his daughter who was off at the university in San Pedro Sula. Mingolla had Ruy and Tully check out the Bronco, and sat with Don Julio in the kitchen, a cramped room with an
old-fashioned gas stove and a motel icebox and photographs of Don Julio standing over a variety of slaughtered game animals decorating the pebbled white walls. Don Julio set about drawing a map of the coastal hills, tracing the roads that would lead them away from the checkpoints.

‘What’s here?’ Mingolla asked, indicating a section on the map where the roads vanished. ‘You haven’t marked anything down.’

‘There’s nothing to mark,’ said Don Julio. ‘Just ghosts and jungle.’

He was short and paunchy, in his late fifties, mahogany-skinned, and dressed in baggy shorts and a guayabera unbuttoned to display his smooth chest; his head was massive, jowly, and his thick black hair was frosted at the temples. The stern prideful lines of his face put Mingolla in mind of his own father, and from the prideful blustery way Don Julio spoke of his daughter’s devotedness Mingolla got the idea he was lying, that his daughter really hated him. Don Julio’s conversation veered into politics. He patted his gun, vowed eternal vigilance against the Red Menace: there was something more than a little pathetic about the combination of his machismo, his self-portraits with dead jaguars and tapirs, and the emptiness of his house. He spoke of his youth. He’d owned a ranch in the Petén. It had been a chore, he said, to keep the guerrillas off the land, but he’d managed. And, oh, what a man he’d been for the ladies! His Cadillac, his nights at the Guatemala City discos. Was there a town in all the world as fine as Guatemala City? Mingolla withheld comment. He himself had spent three days in the city. One night he had been standing in a pachinko parlor on Sixth Avenue, a major downtown artery, playing the machines; he had been lost in playing, and when he had turned around to get more change, he had discovered that not only was the parlor empty, but that Sixth Avenue, which moments before had been thronged with crowds and traffic, was completely deserted. He’d run all the way back to his hotel, and none of the Guatemalans there had wanted to talk about what was going on. Guatemala City, to Mingolla’s mind, was brimstone country. Death squads patroling in their unmarked Toyotas, sirens and distant gunfire, and up in Zone 5, where people lived
in houses built of tires and mud, young boys dreamed of making rich men bleed.

‘I warned my friends about the Reds,’ said Don Julio, returning to his favorite topic. ‘Once I took some of them down to the beach in Tela … you know Tela?’

‘No,’ said Mingolla.

‘Nice little town up the coast,’ said Don Julio. ‘Government people vacation there in the summers. But that didn’t stop the Commies from making their mark. Defacing the walls with slogans. Anyway, I took my friends down to the beach. These friends, they were liberals’ – he made an obscenity of the word –‘they believed in freedom of speech! Pah! And I pointed out the slogans on the walls of the bars. Look, I told them. Now that communism has spread to the grassroots, all its fine philosophy has been reduced to these misspelled words. Stupid passions like the ones aroused by a soccer match are invading the political process. Up with Liberty! Down with Injustice! As if poverty and disease were something you could stamp out by a score of two to nothing. Aren’t the lessons of history plain, I asked them. Just consider Nicaragua. They invited in the Cubans, and now the whole country’s nothing but an armed camp of goose-stepping snitches and assassins. And what’s the revolution done for the poor? The only difference is that nowadays when they crap on the streets, they do it single-file and sing songs about brotherhood.’ Don Julio sighed. ‘But they wouldn’t listen, and you see what happened. Six years of hell.’ He patted Mingolla’s arm. ‘Thank God for men like you and me. Communists know better than to come around us, they know what they’ll get.’

Debora entered the room in time to hear these last words, and she shot Don Julio a venomous look. She had on a gray skirt and a print blouse, and unmindful of her hostility, Don Julio said, ‘You look breathtaking, señorita! Lovely!’

She let the comment pass. ‘The car’s ready.’

‘You’re leaving so soon?’ Don Julio stood. ‘What a pity! I get so little company since my wife died. Ah, well.’ He pumped Mingolla’s hand. ‘I’m proud to have made your acquaintance, and I’ll pray for the success of your mission.’

He stood in the door waving as they went around the corner.
Dawn was breaking, and in its gray light the beach was revealed to be foul with animal wastes and coconut debris, the tidal margin heaped with piles of foam and clumps of seaweed that at a distance had the appearance of dead bodies cast up by the surf. The
Ensorcelita
was a dark stain bobbing beyond the breakwater.

Mingolla opened the driver’s door, then realized he had forgotten the map. ‘Forgot something,’ he said. ‘Be right back.’

Ruy, sitting in the back beside Corazon and Tully, looked as if he were about to say something; then turned away.

The front door was open, and as Mingolla entered he heard Don Julio talking in the kitchen, saying in a dull monotone, ‘I have a message for him.’

Mingolla moved cautiously into the kitchen. The plantation owner was speaking into a wall phone, his back to the door.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They have just left.’

‘Put the phone down,’ said Mingolla.

Don Julio whirled around, his left hand going to his holster, and Mingolla struck at him, expecting an easy victory. But as he penetrated Don Julio’s mind, he was stunned by the emergence of a powerful pattern. A frail tide of emotion washed over him, a seepage of anger, and it seemed that the pattern – which he perceived as a serpentine form of crackling silver – was breeding its double inside his skull, influencing his thoughts to glide in a slow hypnotic rhythm. It was so easy just to go with the pattern, to loop and loop, to let his head nod and wobble, to listen to the droning that came to his ears from within his head, a shrill oscillating sound like the whine of a nervous system on the fritz. And maybe that’s what it was, maybe it was, maybe that’s … He saw Don Julio’s hand slipping toward his holster, and tried to shake himself alert. But the seductive rhythms of the pattern were all through him, lulling him, convincing him of his security. Don Julio, moving very slowly as if submerged in thick syrup, unsnapped the holster. Mingolla took a feeble step toward him, stumbled, and whacked the side of his head hard against the wall; the pain blinded him for a moment, but acted to disperse the pattern, and before it could be reestablished, he generated a charge of fear. Don Julio staggered backward, and Mingolla kept up the assault, sending waves of fear, of loathing at being
touched so intimately by a strange mind. The plantation owner whimpered and fell in a heap, his eyes rolling back.

Mingolla picked up the phone and listened.

‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice through long-distance static. ‘Hello.’

‘Who is this?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Why, David! Congratulations! You must have passed your test.’

‘Izaguirre?’

‘At your service.’

‘You set this up?’

‘I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I assume Don Julio attempted to subdue you with his mental gift … am I right?’

‘No,’ said Mingolla. ‘I came in and he was on the phone, so I hit him.’

‘I think you’re fibbing, David. How is Don Julio? Salvageable?’

Mingolla looked down at the plantation owner: he was in bad shape, pasty, sweating, and breathing shallowly. A little toy rightist with a silver snake in his head.

‘No matter,’ said Izaguirre. ‘I’ll send someone to check.’

‘You’re not too fucking clever,’ Mingolla said. ‘Don’t you think I know Ruy led us here? I see what’s going on.’

‘There’s no need to be clever. Whether or not you’re aware of your situation has no bearing on the dangers you may face.’

‘And I’m sure you’ve set plenty of traps.’

‘The world is a trap. You just happened to stumble into one of mine. Perhaps you’ll avoid the rest.’ Izaguirre chuckled. ‘I have better things to do than worry about you. You’re very strong, David, but you’re really not very important. There are only a few of your kind and many of us. We can control you.’

He hung up, and Mingolla knelt beside Don Julio, who arched his eyebrows, strained to speak. Groaned. Mingolla set about trying to wake him, but as he made contact, Don Julio’s mind winked out … like the hummingbird on the beach at Roatán. He felt for a pulse. Don Julio’s skin was remarkably cool, as if he’d been dead a long time.

‘What’s goin’ on?’ said Ruy behind him; he was flanked by Tully and Debora.

‘Heart attack or something,’ said Mingolla.

He added an imaginary gray goatee and wrinkles to Ruy’s face. No doubt about it. The resemblance to Dr Izaguirre was unmistakable.

‘Is he dead?’ Debora asked.

‘Yeah.’ Mingolla picked up Don Julio’s gun and stood. ‘Guess they don’t make right-wingers like they used to,’ he said, searching Ruy’s face for a reaction.

Ruy nudged the dead man’s arm with his foot.
‘Cono!
’ he said, and spat. He smiled at Mingolla. ‘What you do, man? Scare him to death?’

In the gray light, the hills of Olanchito showed a ghostly leached green. Dirt trails wound through them, petering out into thickets and ledges, as if what they had once led to had been magicked away. Those nearest the sea were mounded sugarloaf hills, their crests bristling with stubby palms that from the coast road looked like growths of electrified hair; those farther inland were sharper, faced with granite, their peaks shrouded in rainclouds. For two days they followed the roads, and then they drove beyond the end of the roads into a wilderness whose jungles had overgrown the worst ravages of the war, but still displayed its passage in ways both subtle and distinct. For the most part – although occasionally they came across a ruin or a crater filled with ferns – everything looked normal. Trees were green, birds and insects clamored, streams plunged into waterfalls. Yet there was an air of evil enchantment to the place. It seemed the jut and tumble of the hills had been built up over a series of immense skeletons whose decaying bones pervaded every growth with wrongness. That wrongness was in the air, pressuring them, adding a leaden tone to the sunniest of days, heavying their limbs and making breathing a toil.

The Honduran hills gave way without visible demarcation to the hills of Nicaragua, and traveling through them took a further toll on their spirits; even Ruy grew silent and morose. It was slow going. They inched down steep defiles, got stuck in streambeds, spent hours getting unstuck, were blinded by squalls that transformed the windows into smeared opacities. Each time they chanced across a bombed village, it seemed a relief to have this hard evidence of war in that it dispelled the supernatural aura.
Some of the villages were inhabited, and in these they would buy red gas that was stored in oil drums and was full of impurities. The people of the villages were timorous, living like monkeys in the ruins, peeking from behind shattered walls until their visitors had left, and nowhere did they receive a sincere welcome.