Life During Wartime (49 page)

‘Cut that shit out,’ said Mingolla.

Bobby Boy turned his stunned moonboy gaze on him. ‘What say?’

‘Hey!’ Eddie gave him a shove. ‘Lowrate, will ya, cool? You got that dingy Spec Four redhead bitch for postholin’, man. Leave these folks be.’

‘She lookin’ nice,’ said Bobby Boy in the same tone he had used to talk about razors.

‘C’mere, lady,’ said Sebo. ‘Little talk ain’t gonna hurt nobody.’

‘Got somethin’ better to do with my tongue than talk to her,’ said Bobby Boy.

Ruy got to his feet, menacing Bobby Boy. This is insupportable,’ he said, and then, to Eddie: ‘Can’t you control him?’

Eddie shrugged.

A smile melted up from Bobby Boy’s face. ‘Thank ya, Jesus,’ he said. ‘This here’s Bobby Boy Macklin praisin’ your name for givin’ me this scrawny bastard to mess over.’

‘I tol’ you to lowrate, man,’ said Eddie anxiously, and Mingolla, realizing that Bobby Boy was very much on the edge, set himself for a fight. No way was he going to try to influence Bobby Boy: Ruy must know how hard it was to influence someone behind Sammy.

‘Sebo!’ Eddie maneuvered himself between Ruy and Bobby Boy. ‘Know what I’s just thinkin’ ’bout? ’Member that ol’ girlfriend of yours, one who wrote you the letter ’cusin’ you of bein’ a killer?’ He gave Mingolla a friendly elbow. ‘We wrote her back, faked the colonel’s signature, and tol’ her Sebo was a fuckin’ hero, went ’round feedin’ the starvin’ kids and all. Shit! Woman wrote back, sounded like she ’bout ready to air mail her snatch to ol’ Sebo.’

‘Get outta my way, Eddie,’ said Bobby Boy. ‘I’m gonna crumble this Frito.’

‘Fuck you are!’ Eddie glanced around wildly as if hoping to light on a solution. ‘Know what, man? Know what we can do? We can run a game!’ He shouted to some soldiers gathered by the wreckage of the next hut. ‘Where that prisoner at? Bring his ass!’

One of the soldiers grabbed a shadowed figure lying on the ground, hauled him up, and hustled him over. Flung him down. A kid of about eighteen, skinny, long black hair flopping in his eyes. Crop of pimples straggling across his chin. He was shirtless, his ribs showing. On his right shoulder was a bloodstained bandage.

‘How ’bout it, Bobby Boy?’ said Eddie. ‘Sebo? How ’bout a game?’

‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ said Bobby Boy sulkily.

‘Awright!’ said Sebo, sitting up straighter.

Bobby Boy punched the kid in his injured shoulder, and the kid cried out, rolled away.

‘Bastard!’ said Debora. ‘Leave him alone!’

Bobby Boy stared at her and made a throaty sound that might have been a laugh.

‘Listen up, lady,’ said Eddie. ‘Bobby Boy
will
fuck with you, so you better let him have his fun.’

She looked to Mingolla, and he shook his head.

Some of the soldiers moved off along the street, planting what appeared to be large seeds, covering them with dirt, patting it smooth. Planting lots of seeds.

Bobby yanked the kid up to a sitting position. ‘What’s your name, Frito?’

The kid spread his hands in helplessness.
‘No entiendo.’

‘Somebody ask him in Spanish,’ said Bobby Boy.

Mingolla did the duty.

‘Manolo Caax.’ The kid looked around hopelessly at the others, then lowered his eyes.

‘Cash … huh! The beaner’s named for fuckin’ money,’ said Bobby Boy as if this were the height of insanity.

Sebo giggled, his eyes glassy from painkillers. ‘I’m bettin’ on ol’ Frito,’ he said, ‘I do believe Frito’s got what it takes.’

The others began making bets.

‘Ask him if he got any information,’ said Bobby Boy.

When Mingolla asked, the kid said, ‘I know nothing. What are you going to do? Are you going to kill me?’

Mingolla didn’t answer; he found it easy to reject the kid and realized this was because he had already given up on him.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked Eddie.

‘Got frags buried all over,’ said Eddie. ‘Coupla guys get behind the beaner, fire at his heels to keep him movin’, and we see if he can run the street without triggerin’ a frag. He don’t move fast ’nough, the boys’ll wax him.’ He grinned, but sounded more tense than enthusiastic.

Debora leaned close, whispered, ‘I’m going to stop it.’

‘No, don’t.’ He caught her arm.

‘We can’t let them do this!’ she said. ‘I don’t care if …’

‘You better care,’ he said. ‘You better just leave it alone. We can’t save everybody. All right?’

Ruy was looking at them with interest.

‘All right?’ Mingolla repeated, and Debora gave a resentful nod, looked away.

Tully sidled over, Corazon at his side, and said, ‘I can’t touch ’em, Davy. Can you do somethin’?’

‘Uh-uh.’

What you talkin’ ’bout?’ said Bobby Boy.

‘Just talkin’,’ said Tully. ‘Ain’t you got not’in’ better to do dan fuck wit’ dis kid?’

‘Naw,’ said Bobby Boy mildly. ‘Not a goddamn thing.’ He was almost as tall as Tully, with broader shoulders, and Mingolla thought Tully was a little afraid.

‘Buncha damn chickenshits, mon,’ said Tully. ‘Fuckin’ wit’ a kid.’

‘You could be next, nigger.’ Bobby Boy went eye to eye with him. ’How ‘bout that?’

‘Watch your mouth, man!’ Eddie stood and shoved Bobby Boy back from Tully.

Ruy tapped Debora’s arm. ‘Can’t you do anything?’

She turned a bitter glance on Mingolla, then said, ‘No.’

‘Hey,’ said Bobby Boy. ‘One of y’all ’splain to Frito how it’s gonna be.’

Again Mingolla did the interpreting.

The kid glared at him with stony hatred. Bobby Boy, his eyes aglitter in the moonlight, gave the kid an affectionate pat. ‘I know y’can do it, Frito. Don’t lemme down.’

Two soldiers led the kid toward the start of the course at the base of the hill about a hundred yards away, and he kept staring back over his shoulder at Mingolla as if he alone were responsible.

‘Hee-hee,’ said Bobby Boy. ‘This gonna be good!’

‘Does he have a chance?’ Debora asked.

‘Slim,’ said Eddie. ‘Frags all over, and they be drivin’ him toward ’em with fire. He be runnin’ too quick to be lookin’.’

Tully looked dubiously at Mingolla, and Corazon added the eerie weight of her stare. Mingolla fixed his eyes on the three
figures at the base of the hill, the two soldiers in their moonstruck helmets, the kid a darker and less distinct figure between them.

‘Let’s do ’er!’ Sebo shouted. ‘Get outta my way, Bobby Boy! I can’t see shit!’

With a mean glance at Sebo, Bobby Boy shuffled to the left.

The two soldiers at the end of the road shoved the kid forward and fired bursts behind him; the kid sprinted left toward a gap in the wreckage, but more fire cut off his escape, set one of the crumpled huts to burning. He came zig-zagging down the street, eyes to the ground, bullets throwing up dirt at his heels. Bobby Boy whooped, and Sebo was babbling. Debora buried her face in Mingolla’s shoulder, but Mingolla, full of self-loathing at his lack of moral strength, his pragmatic convictions, forced himself to watch. The kid tripped, went rolling, and Mingolla hoped one of the grenades would explode and end this cruelty. Gunfire pinned the kid down. He crawled, scrambled to his feet, was knocked sideways as a bullet detonated a grenade at his rear; he teetered beside a little mound of dirt, nearly stepped on it, but leaped aside. The soldiers followed him, their fire coming closer and closer. Eddie shifted up and down on his heels, cheering in secret, and Bobby Boy was giving out with breathy
yeahs
and shaking a balled fist, and Sebo was leaning forward, intent, his wound forgotten, and the stuttering fire was instilling a fierce tension in the air around them, and the kid sprawled, scrabbled, jittered, appearing to be moved by an invisible finger that pushed him in a dozen lucky directions, keeping him inches away from the little mounds of dirt with their gleaming seeds. It was as if he were doing a magical arm-waving dance, as if he were a crazy spirit from the heyday of the village, from the time when the sapling walls of the huts were freshly skinned and yellow, the thatch green and full of juice, and pigs were stealing mangos from the children’s plates, and even in the worst of times the men would gather around the well and smoke cigarettes that they bought for a penny apiece at the store on the hilltop and boast about the milk cows they planned to buy once the crops were in, and it really seemed the kid was going to make it, not only make it – Mingolla thought – but that his mad spinning run was carving a secret design that would resurrect the old gone days, the days before the war, bring
the gray wreckage into order, and restore it to color and motion and life, and everything would begin again, and the soldiers would vanish, and Mingolla would be a child dreaming of some unimaginable sweetness … But then the kid stopped running. Stopped dead less than fifty feet from the end of the course. The firing broke off, and Mingolla knew that the soldiers harrowing him must be thunderstruck by this sudden turn. The kid was breathing hard, his chest heaving, but his face was calm. Dark chips of eyes, mouth firmed and stoic. Looking at him, Mingolla believed he could see his thoughts. He realized that somewhere along the way the kid had understood that it didn’t matter whether he made it, that the course he was negotiating was one that had been negotiated for centuries by his countrymen, a device of excess and oppression, a bloody game for amused profit takers, and he just didn’t see any reason to continue. Maybe the kid didn’t know all this in words, maybe in his own mind he had simply reached a point of exhaustion and malaise, a point that Mingolla himself had reached from time to time. But that knowledge was in him, enervating, heavy as stone. He wasn’t going to run another foot, he was going to stand there, and by standing gain the only victory he could.

‘Run, dammit!’ Bobby Boy shouted.

The kid shifted his weight, let his arms dangle, waiting. To Mingolla’s eyes, he appeared to be growing more solid and substantial against the background of wasted gray shapes.

‘Kill his ass!’ Bobby Boy shrilled.

Nobody fired, nobody moved.

‘Kill him!’ Bobby went a couple of paces toward the kid and waved angrily at the soldiers. ‘Y’hear me? Kill him!’

Reluctantly, it seemed, the soldiers lifted their rifles and opened fire. The bullets blew the kid forward in a staggering run, and he collapsed between two of the mounds. Black blood webbed his back, puddled beneath his mouth. His left leg beat a tattoo against the dirt, and his entire body humped up once, then was still.

Ruy sighed, and Mingolla let out the breath he’d been holding; it felt hot in his throat. Debora’s hand was tremulous on his arm, as if she were poised for flight. ‘Shit,’ said Eddie. ‘Shit.’ Corazon’s
mystic eye looked to be glowing, and Tully was stone-faced. Sebo, spent and sweaty, leaned against the hut, his mouth open, eyes slitted … Chinese eyes.

Bobby Boy walked over and kicked the kid in the side. He turned back, his features warped by a scowl, giving his round face the appearance of a nasty man-in-the-moon. ‘I ain’t payin’,’ he said to the other soldiers. ‘Muthafucka didn’t play fair.’

‘You better fuckin’ pay,’ said somebody. ‘You’d make us pay.’

‘Yeah, man,’ said somebody else. ‘You be squawkin’ at us, sayin’ that the bastard didn’t make it, and that was what counted.’

‘Pay up, Bobby Boy! Y’ain’t got no reason not to!’

‘Hell you say!’ Bobby Boy stalked back to the group beside the hut. ‘Hey, Eddie,’ he said. ‘You with me on this, ain’tcha? Tell ’em the rules, man. Tell ’em what’s right. The son of a bitch didn’t even try.’

The world is not a solid body, but rather is a point in time and space upon which a myriad of beams of light are shining, beams of every color and intensity, some waxing in brilliance, some waning, and the character of this particular point is therefore always in flux, always becoming something new. Thus it may be said that the world has ended many times, but few men have ever noticed.

–Attributed to the San Blas Indians

The armies of the Madradonas and the Sotomayors – more than a thousand strong – lived in the streets of Barrio Clarín, in doorways and gutters, under benches in public squares, in pitiful shelters made of cardboard or beneath no shelter at all; and every morning Mingolla would walk out among them and minister to their needs, plying them with his strength, inducing temporary frameworks of happiness and well-being. He derived little satisfaction from the work; the armies were unsalvageable, and the best he could do was briefly to restore their humanity; their minds retained scarcely any structure, and the process of their thoughts was slow and turgid like porridge slopping in a bowl. Though he gained a measure of redemption from these kindnesses, he was less trying to assuage guilt than to evade it. It seemed to him that he was suffering a peculiarly American form of guilt in that he did not want to be perceived as who he was, and thought that by disguising himself as a do-gooder, he might be able to confound whatever all-seeing moral eye governed the region.

Most of the streets in the barrio were narrow, one lane of potholed asphalt, and forked at odd angles between dilapidated four- and five-story buildings of whitewashed stone … old colonial-style dwellings with vented French doors opening onto ironwork balconies, and bands of faded blue and green painted along their bases like stratifications. It was the rainy season, and every day began with drizzles and ended in downpours. Swollen gray clouds passed so low overhead that their bellies appeared to be sagging between the roofs; and this, along with the extreme overhangs of the roofs, produced a claustrophobic effect, making it look that the buildings were leaning together, being pressed
down by the heavy skies. Faint traffic noises could be heard from beyond the barricades, and occasionally a jeep would pass, bearing a clutch of Madradonas or Sotomayors. But there were no babies crying, no radios playing, no matrons leaning on the balcony railings to gossip with their neighbors. The apartments were empty, as were the little stores with murals on their pastel facades depicting disembodied shirts and hats, sparkling kitchen appliances, floating loaves of bread, and sewing machines the size of mastiffs.