The Return: A Novel (43 page)

He hugged her, the two of them swayed, he kissed on her cheek and breathed deeply of the air above her skin: a little perfume, a little meat smoke, a little chili, a little tequila, and beneath these the mysterious, the pheromones from the Pleistocene, the girl-stuff itself. He sighed out that breath and said, “Good night, sleep well,” and was turning away when he discovered she had hold of his belt, with her warm fingers inside his waistband.

“Oh, don’t be an idiot,” said the woman. “Take me to bed.”

*   *   *

Lying naked with him, she said, “There’s no moon tonight. There should be shafts of pale moonlight illuminating my perfect body.”

It’s true, he thought. The only light through the window came from distant stars shining over the sea, and there was a profound absence of vision, but this made the other senses, touch and smell and hearing, more keen. They touched therefore, and listened, and smelled.

“What’s that heavenly odor?” she asked, shifting slightly to better enable his current touch.

“It’s night-blooming cereus. The late Guzmán planted a patch of it under his bedroom window. Listen: What’s that sound?”

They listened. A rhythmic high-pitched cry, like the sound a mechanical bird might make, floated in through the open window, along with the rush of the surf.

“I think it must be Lourdes getting laid,” she said after a moment.

They listened for a full minute, stifling hilarity. “Well, they’re certainly putting us to shame,” he said. “Can you forgive me?”

“Oh, she’s faking that. Seventeen years old? She has no idea what an orgasm with a man is.”

“How can you tell?”

“My dear man, was I not once a hot seventeen-year-old Mexican girl, and not so long ago that I’ve forgotten how it was? One learns to masturbate, of course, and perhaps there is fooling around with one’s girlfriends, and one is puzzled and dismayed when the same thing doesn’t happen with the first man. There are other rewards, but not that. If she’s lucky, an older man will teach her about her body.”

“Skelly is certainly that,” said Marder.

“Yes, but he doesn’t really care about her, which is why I agreed to help get her out of here.”

“He seems to. I almost had a fight with him about it.”

“No, the fight was the
point.
You didn’t want him to have her, so naturally he had to have her. It’s all about you. Yes, he enjoys her youth and perfection, but at bottom everything he does with respect to her is about you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t. It’s one of the charming things about you, Marder, a kind of negative narcissism. You are blissfully unaware of affection or interest on the part of others, as if you were a leper. That’s why I had to drag you in here by your
chile
or nothing would have happened, and it’s why Skelly is in Playa Diamante risking his neck. He’s in love with you.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“It’s the case, whether you believe it or not. And you pay him no real attention and it drives him crazy, and so he does feats of heroism or prodigies of annoyance so that you
will
pay attention to him. And if you stop that stroking every time I say something that astonishes you, we will not get along. Thank you, that’s better.”

She writhed a little, and sighed, and said, “
Everyone
loves you, Marder. Amparo is your absolute slave; I see her watching you like old
campesinos
watch the monstrance with the blessed sacrament in a procession. Your daughter has sacrificed her whole life to be here with you. And I am here. Yes, I’m a journalist and this is, as you say, the story of the decade, but it’s mainly you. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like Richard Marder. It’s embarrassing to admit to fascination, but there it is. And I like the way you smell.”

“So fascination and smell were able to overcome your dislike of Americans. In my case, at least.”

“Oh, I fuck Americans all the time. Germans. Australians. It’s the Mexicans I avoid in that department. No, when I feel like getting off, I usually fly up to L.A. or New Orleans. I have a number of colleagues I frequent, nice men, occasionally married ones, no attachments, no job-related
caca
.”

“That seems unpatriotic, if you don’t mind me saying so. As an honorary Mexican, I am inclined to be offended. What’s wrong with Mexicans?”

“Nothing. A noble race. Perhaps I just had a run of bad luck. No, keep doing what you were doing. No, further in. Yes. Well, my Mexican horror stories. They court you, you’re the moon and the stars, and then after they fuck you you’re just a
chingada
, a kind of human garbage that they don’t have to consider. I have been with Mexican men who have called their wives on their cell phones, sitting naked on the side of my bed while their semen was still dripping out of me. The very last one I had was doing me from behind, and I recall thinking that my feet were feeling a little rough and that it was time for a pedicure—and, by the way, foreplay to these guys is a couple of drinks at the bar—when his cell warbled. It was
La Paloma
, if you can believe it, and he actually picked it up. While he was fucking me. And had a conversation with his wife. Why was he out of breath, she asked. Oh, the elevator was broken, he had to walk up six flights. This is the kind of romantic interaction I have had innumerable times with my countrymen, God bless them!”

Her speech was now interpersed with heavier breathing and sounds indicative of the catlike pleasure she was apparently capable of and desired, and which, Marder believed, had not been part of her liaisons all that often.

“So which is it?” he asked. “Marder is unique or just another in a line of non-Mexican rigid objects?”

“Oh, closer to unique. I can usually figure out what makes a man tick before the coffee cools, but not you. And I tried. I used every likely contact I have in New York to find out who you were, and I drew a blank. You’re no one special, it seems. But now you’re in the middle of a drug war with a lot of money that doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. You take the part of a bunch of
pelados
that no one has ever given a shit about, and you defy the two major drug gangs in the neighborhood—not one but
two
—and turn your house into a fort and stock it with heavy weaponry—and where did
that
come from, she wonders—and get the whole thing organized by a fairly serious mercenary and drug-lord bodyguard—and, let me tell you,
he’s
something special anyway—and …
and
you proceed to shaft not only El Gordo, your chief ally, but also shoot the best pal of the meanest
narco
in the area, this totally dangerous felon, because of a teenage girl you barely know, out of what appears to be sheer decency. Such things don’t happen,
querido
, not in Mexico.”

“They happen everywhere. As you point out, I’m no one special, yet here I am. Skelly is special, but he’s here too, which I find only a little short of miraculous. I’m surprised, by the way, that you were able to uncover much about him in your researches. He tends to keep a low profile.”

“Not low enough. His war record is fairly public, and as for his career afterward—well, let’s say I’m part of the reportorial fraternity that spends a lot of time looking into the doings of the big drug cartels. I specialize in Mexico, obviously, but I know the people who know the narcos of Asia and Russia and so on. Did you know he worked for Khun Sa?”

“I had no idea. He’s mentioned the name.”

“The lord of the Golden Triangle. He could eat El Gordo dipped in salsa. In any case, your Skelly’s a mercenary. He sets up security operations for the worst people in the world. You would imagine him to be on a moral plane with someone like Servando Gomez, and yet here he is, the best friend of a man I would call … I suppose ‘saintly’ would be the wrong word considering what you’re doing at the moment. But don’t stop! And kiss me a little here.”

*   *   *

“Mother of God, that was wonderful,” she said after an extended nonverbal interval. “I haven’t had anything like this in ages.”

“I’m surprised you stopped talking.”

She laughed. “Oh, the talking is what
makes
it wonderful. And you’ll have noted the difference in the audio effects from what came in through the window from little Lourdes.”

“More full-throated, I’d judge,” he said, “more sincere, less influenced by hard-core porn. Speaking of which, what do you think of Fuentes’s notion in
The Old Gringo
that the old
hacendados
had their peasants whipped if they made any sounds of pleasure during lovemaking? Did that really happen?”

“Assuredly. Their ladies insisted on it. It was intolerable for peasants to have something that was denied to them by their status and their Church, and the masters complied, because they, of course, had all the sex they wanted from those very peasant women. And when the
patrón
had such a woman, it went without saying that she could not share any pleasure with that farm animal, her husband, ever again. However, thanks to our glorious revolution, I have no hesitation about making any sounds that … yes, keep doing that, press harder … yes, oh, that’s excellent. Viva Zapata!”

*   *   *

Somewhat later, she shifted position, drew a line of small kisses down his belly; he felt the fall of her hair following this damp line. Then some moist noises and again her voice from the darkness, “So, about Skelly: How do you come to be such buddies? You were in the war together, yes?”

“Yes. It’s a long story, and how will you continue the interview if your mouth is full?”

“I will take small breaks. I find it enhances the lubricity.”

He was drunk, so he told her the whole story, starting with Naked Fanny, and the voodoos, and Moon River, the montagnards, Joong, and what Skelly was, and the firefights on the trail, and the assault on the SOG outpost, and about all the dead. Then he stopped, and after a moment there came a sound amusingly similar to the withdrawing of a cork from a bottle.

“And what happened then? Did the communists attack again?”

“No, not exactly. What happened was, I got up in the morning after the assault. I was sleeping in one of the longhouses because all my stuff had been burned up in the attack. It was Joong’s father’s longhouse, as a matter of fact. I went out to piss and when I came back through the village I noticed that some kids were playing with a ball, throwing it back and forth, and some other kids were knocking another ball around with sticks, and a couple of real little kids had balls attached to strings that they were whirling around their heads. Everyone was having a great time, and it was strange that it took so long for it to occur to me that I’d never seen so many balls in the village before. Skelly was gone with the surviving Vietnamese rangers up the mountainside to the south to see if he could make contact with any bad guys, and I was poking through the ruins of the command hooch to see if there was any radio stuff that I could salvage, when a kid flung his ball and it bounced by me and I saw that it was a voodoo. Long story short: it turned out that the PAVN had been gathering these things for weeks. I mean, we put out thousands, and they’d picked up hundreds and left them in the village after the attack. That had been the real reason for the attack in the first place and also why they hadn’t pressed it harder. They didn’t have to: yet another way in which we’d underestimated our enemies. Also, the kids had been playing with them all morning, and therefore to the pinball wizards back in Naked Fanny, all those voodoos moving around must have looked like the central marshaling yard of the northern Ho Chi Minh Trail. If you keep that up I will lose interest in my story.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I suddenly find that telling this is more important than getting blown, because, while I’ve had a blow job before, I’ve never told this whole thing to anyone. Slide up here, would you?” After a moment, she did.

“That’s better,” he said.

“Never? Not even to your wife, during that long marriage?”

“No. Chole wasn’t interested in war stories, and besides … maybe I wanted to start fresh with her; we were both escapees from our lives. But now it’s not like real life; it’s the Day of the Dead, when everything is permitted, and I want to vomit out this lump of shit and you’re a woman who can take it, you’re the great chronicler of artistically dismembered corpses.”

“Can I do
this
?”

“Yes. Conservatively, if you please. Okay, so when I saw the voodoos there, I ran for the hills. I mean, I was nineteen, an air force electronics guy, and so I ran to find Skelly. He was the
man
, he had the voice of command, he had the training. I found him coming down a mountain track. He was alone, because the LLDBs had run off. They figured they could exfiltrate back to Vietnam by themselves, and they had no particular interest in defending a yard village or hanging out with a couple of Americans who had no radio contact anymore and hence no money and no resupply. They hadn’t found any sign of the PAVN. And then I told him about the voodoos and what I thought it meant. It took him a little while to get it, and as I looked at him … you know the expression ‘hollow eyes’? Yeah, we know what it means, the metaphor, but Skelly really had hollow eyes. His eyes are deep-sunk eyes anyway, but these didn’t look like any eyes I ever saw on a person before, a living human being. You saw a look like that occasionally on the wounded, the ones who knew they were goners. He’d lost all his friends at once, all these beautifully trained tough guys, invincible warriors, and some enemy mortars had caught a break and they were all dead. Oh, and I just found out why: one of our Vietnamese was a spy, and the whole mission was a setup, a joke. Ha-ha. I had to pull him, to yell at him that we needed to get back to the village and evacuate it, that they’d send the bombers in.

“So then he got it and we ran like madmen down the mountain. By that time the B-52s had probably already taken off from U Tapao in Thailand, maybe a forty-five-minute flight for an Arc Light mission, six planes, thirty tons of bombs per plane. They fly so high you can’t see or hear them, and you only know it’s happening when the bombs start to explode. We heard the first blasts when we were still in the forest, and when we came out into the open the whole area was full of smoke and dust and this overwhelming, colossal noise. Skelly kept going, just dived into the dust, and I figured later he must’ve got knocked down by the edge of the blast from a five-hundred-pound bomb. But I thought he’d been killed for sure, that I was alone on a mountain in Laos.”