Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

It’s been ten days since they took out Andy. He’s buried by now, or cremated, or whatever it is they do around here. Eaten in some Mayan ceremony, for all I know. No one has said anything to us about him. No one’s said anything to us about anything, but I imagine now we’re pretty much screwed sideways. A dead gringo-that can’t be something you’d want the world outside to know about. They’ll bury the case, do nothing about us, let us rot. I mean, they couldn’t hush this up if we ever got out to tell the papers. I really don’t see how they can bail us now, of course. It’s the word of a drug smuggler, but the whole thing would still stink. I haven’t said anything about this to the others. Scotchy probably has his outside hopes still pinned to his friendship with Darkey, and Fergal’s energy is concentrated on his silly little pick.

We’ve been out to the yard several times and no one has bothered us. I think Andy got killed because they were after our clothes. It sounds stupid, but now that they have our shoes they’re leaving us alone. We got some straw for bedding, and for a while Scotchy had us making an attempt to clean the cell out a bit. He’s stopped in the last couple of days. It’s not the futility of the thing; rather, I think, he just doesn’t have the energy to boss us and keep himself together.

So there’s Scotchy sleeping, Fergal filing the belt buckle against the concrete. The flies, caterpillars, roaches, the sweat on my skin, and of course the ceiling.

The movie’s over, and it’s only four hours until dinner. The narrative kicks in without me. Agriculture, herds of animals. The dust rising from pilgrims coming to wash in the sacred river. Millions of them. The primary cult of the two kingdoms is shared by the majority of the population, but like the Endians, they hector one another over trivialities. One says you bathe only up to the waist, the other that the head must sink beneath the water. Scholars at universities debate it. Everyone wears turbans, incidentally, but some tie at the front and others at the back. They argue over that, too, it’s crazy. It’s like that Frank Gorshin episode of Star Trek .

There are hunting parties, dare raids over the divide, and occasionally kids are captured like Gary Powers, and there’s a whole ta-do. It’s tense, and everyone’s bored with their life and this is bringing on war fever. People grumble, and there’s hysteria mounting in the press. A prime minister of the left continent is debating with his cabinet the consequences of mobilization. They’re at a country house in an island group near the continental divide. The peace party thinks there will be universal slaughter if war breaks out; they’re right, of course. The peace party recalls to memory the events of the last border war. He’s talking and they’re listening, jaws agape. It’s not my story now, it’s Granpa Sam’s, the mudbath shambles of July 1916, shit and skulls. The Ulster Division slaughtered by companies and then by battalions and then by week’s end there is no one left at all. From the picture on the piano Granpa Sam loses forty-five friends, forty-five out of fifty, in the first twenty minutes. The piano and the brown photographs and a sword and a violin. How rigid everyone is, how formal. Were they like that, were they not profane like the rest of us?

And now where have these thoughts come from? Home. War. It’s a universe away. An ocean. But the sheugh is wide. Aren’t we still in the New World? Possibilities.

I leave them there in the mud, poison gas drifting back into their own trenches. I’m back with the farmers of the window continent. Mechanization has not yet hit. Neither has enclosure. There is proper crop rotation and the fields are left fallow in winter and every seventh year. The crops are hardy and adaptable and disease in this kingdom is rare. They have malaria in the swamps, but they have discovered quinine. There’s a light rain, a sun shower; people are tilling soft drumlins and in the background there’s a blue lough. They’re wearing woolen trousers and cotton shirts, flat tweed caps. They have butter and buttermilk and potato bread and veda. Yes, that’s better. For breakfast there is a toasted slice of soda with Dromona and Lyle’s Golden Syrup. And then, bejesus, you’re out in the crisp morning and into the fields. The sun’s out over the lough and it’s a wee bit like County Down. There’s a church and a tractor, and you’re baling hay. I don’t mind being back here. A big ganch with a blue face is driving the tractor and we’re on the ground with forks shoveling it up onto the back of the truck. Sweating and cursing and spinning yarns. It’s lunch and we’re only thirteen, but the oul boy’s wife has brewed us cider and we’re half tore from just the smell of it. Big jam pieces on batch bread with butter and homemade blackcurrant. Yeah, that’ll do. I close my eyes and drift.

Later.

Sitting up. Both boys are sleeping now. Scotchy: a scrawny red beard, hollow eyes, lank, slablike skin. Fergal: bloody fingers from his pick and a wild untrimmed beard like that of an insane man. Hair sticking out everywhere-I think the Indians are frightened of him. Fuck knows how I look. Never had a beard before. Got one now with no mirror to see how it becomes me.

In a wee while, Scotchy will wake and scratch himself, crotch first and then feet and then hair and then the rest of him. He’ll do that for half an hour and talk to himself for a minute or two and then, if he’s got the energy, he’ll talk to me. He’ll pare down his fingernails and scratch himself some more. Fergal will wake and lie still; you won’t be able to tell when he’s conscious or not. He’ll lie there, off in some private place. He’ll speak even less than Scotchy, and if he has his energy he’ll work on his pick. Of course, our hair will start to fall out soon. Scotchy informs us that vitamin C is stored in the body only for about six weeks. After that, it’s scurvy.

I’m thinking logically, trying to get a grip. Blacker thoughts. Things do not stand well. We’ve lost weight and we’re weaker, and I know for a certainty that I’m starting to get bedsores. My nails are brittle and my throat’s cracked and I’m crippled by lethargy. If they would only give us some limes it would make a huge difference.

Mealtime. We eat rice and drink water. I keep waiting for variation, but it’s not coming. Scotchy mumbles something about eating the crickets for protein, but I’m not there yet.

A day or two later, he orders us to do it. It’s a joke to think that Scotchy is in a position to give orders, but he has a point. The crickets are easy to catch, and it’s diverting. You crunch them and pretend they’re potato chips. You crunch them well, otherwise they writhe about on the way down your throat. The mantises, if anything, are worse for that behavior. Fergal refuses to eat the insects, and Scotchy laughs and says that that’s more for the rest of us.

Fergal goes back to his filing, Scotchy to his rage and mumbling. I go back to nothing. Nothing and then thoughts, regrets, fear.

Night.

Morning, we pick the lice out of each other’s hair. My story, the farmers, the war, the movie. Mealtime again. Evening coming so fast, and then the night again. And every night and day it’s louder out there. All the noises of the forest that go on forever, stopping only to pause and tease us, for an hour or two, in the hottest part of the day.

The morning comes, and there are no cockcrows or songbirds, just the end of that nighttime roar and the beginning of the daytime one. Back to my other place. Late summer and the harvest is coming in and the window people are fat and happy and unprepared and the door continent is envious as its people tug and pull at the dry earth.