Lucius Shepard - Life During Wartime

Dust was in Mingolla’s mouth, his nostrils. He heard shouts, grunts. Still dazed, he propped himself onto an elbow. A short way off, khaki arms and legs and butts were thrashing around in a cloud of dust. Like a comic-strip fight. You expected asterisks and exclamation points overhead to signify profanity. Somebody grabbed his arm, hauled him upright. The MP captain, his beefy face flushed. He frowned reprovingly as he brushed dirt from Mingolla’s clothes. ‘Real gutsy, boy,’ he said. ‘And real, real stupid. He hadn’t been at the end of his run, you’d be drawin’ flies ’bout now.’ He turned to a sergeant standing nearby. ‘How stupid you reckon that was, Phil?’

The sergeant said that it beat him.

‘Well,’ the captain said, ‘I figger if the boy here was in combat, that’d be ’bout Bronze Star stupid.’

That, allowed the sergeant, was pretty goddamn stupid.

‘ ’Course here in Frisco’—the captain gave Mingolla a final dusting—‘it don’t get you diddley-shit.’

The MPs were piling off Baylor, who lay on his side, bleeding from his nose and mouth. Blood as thick as gravy filmed over his cheeks.

‘Panama,’ said Mingolla dully. Maybe it was an option. He saw how it would be… a night beach, palm shadows a lacework on the white sand.

‘What say?’ asked the captain.

‘He wanted to go to Panama,’ said Mingolla.

‘Don’t we all,’ said the captain.

One of the MPs rolled Baylor onto his stomach and handcuffed him; another manacled his feet. Then they rolled him back over. Yellow dirt had mired with the blood on his cheeks and forehead, hitting him with a blotchy mask. His eyes snapped open in the middle of that mask, widening when he felt the restraints. He started to hump up and down, trying to bounce his way to freedom. He kept on humping for almost a minute; then he went rigid and—his gone eyes fixed on the molten disc of the sun—he let out a roar. That was the only word for it. It wasn’t a scream or a shout, but a devil’s exultant roar, so loud and full of fury it seemed to be generating all the blazing light-and-heat dance. Listening to it had a seductive effect, and Mingolla began to get behind it, to feel it in his body like a good rock ’n’ roll tune, to sympathize with its life-hating exuberance.

‘Whoo-ee!’ said the captain, marveling. ‘They gon’ have to build a whole new zoo for that boy.’

After giving his statement and letting a corpsman check his head, Mingolla caught the ferry to meet Debora on the east bank. He sat in the stern, gazing out at the unfinished bridge, this time unable to derive from it any sense of hope or magic. Panama kept cropping up in this thoughts. Now that Baylor was gone, was it really an option? He knew he should try to figure things out, plan what to do, but he couldn’t stop seeing Baylor’s bloody, demented face. He’d seen worse, Christ yes, a whole lot worse, guys reduced to spare parts, so little of them left that they didn’t need a shiny silver coffin, just a black metal can the size of a cookie jar. Guys scorched and one-eyed and bloody, clawing blindly at the air like creatures out of a monster movie, but the idea of Baylor trapped forever in some raw, red place inside his brain, in the heart of that raw, red noise he’d made, maybe that idea was worse than anything Mingolla had seen. He didn’t want to die; he rejected the prospect with the impassioned stubbornness a child displays when confronted with a hard truth. Yet he would rather die than endure madness. Compared to what Baylor had in store, death and Panama seemed to offer the same peaceful sweetness.

Someone sat down beside Mingolla: a kid who couldn’t have been older than eighteen. A new kid with a new haircut, new boots, new fatigues. Even his face looked new, freshly broken from the mold. Shiny, pudgy cheeks; clear skin; bright, unused blue eyes. He was eager to talk. He asked Mingolla about his home, his family, and said, ‘Oh, wow, it must be great living in New York, wow.’ But he appeared to have some other reason for initiating the conversation, something he was leading up to, and finally he spat it out.

‘You know the Sammy that went animal back there?’ he said, ‘I seen him pitted last night. Little place in the jungle west of the base. Guy name Chaco owns it. Man, it was fuckin’ incredible!’

Mingolla had only heard of the pits third- and fourth-hand, but what he had heard was bad, and it was hard to believe that this kid with his air of home-boy innocence could be an aficionado of something so vile. And, despite what he had just witnessed, it was even harder to believe that Baylor could have been a participant.

The kid didn’t need prompting. ‘It was pretty early on,’ he said. ‘There’d been a coupla bouts, nothin’ special, and then this guy walks in lookin’ real twitchy. I knew he was Sammy by the way he’s starin’ at the pit, y’know, like it’s somethin’ he’s been wishin’ for. And this guy with me, friend of mine, he gives me a poke and says, “Holy shit! That’s the Black Knight, man! I seen him fight over in Reunion a while back. Put your money on him,” he says. “The fucker’s an ace!”’

Their last R and R had been in Reunion. Mingolla tried to frame a question but couldn’t think of one whose answer would have any meaning.

‘Well,’ said the kid, ‘I ain’t been down long, but I’d even heard ’bout the Knight. So I went over and kinda hung out near him, thinkin’ maybe I can get a line on how he’s feelin’, y’know, ’cause you don’t wanna just bet the guy’s rep. Pretty soon Chaco comes over and asks the Knight if he wants some action. The Knight says, “Yeah, but I wanna fight an animal. Somethin’ fierce, man. I wanna fight somethin’ fierce.” Chaco says he’s got some monkeys and shit, and the Knight says he hears Chaco’s got a jaguar. Chaco, he hems and haws, says maybe so, maybe not, but it don’t matter ’cause a jaguar’s too strong for Sammy. And the Knight tells Chaco who he is. Lemme tell ya, Chaco’s whole fuckin’ attitude changed. He could see how the bettin’ was gonna go for somethin’ like the Black Knight versus a jaguar. And he goes, like, “Yes, sir, Mister Black Knight, sir! Anything you want!” And he makes the announcement. Man, the place goes nuts. People wavin’ money, screamin’ odds, drinkin’ fast so’s they can get ripped in time for the main event, and the Knight’s just standin’ there, smilin’, like he’s feedin’ off the confusion. Then Chaco lets the jaguar in through the tunnel and into the pit. It ain’t a full-growed jaguar, half-growed maybe. But that’s all you figure even the Knight can handle.’

The kid paused for breath; his eyes seemed to have grown brighter. ‘Anyway, the jaguar’s sneakin’ ’round and ’round, keepin’ close to the pit wall, snarlin’ and spittin’, and the Knight’s watchin’ him from up above, checkin’ his moves, y’know. And everybody starts chantin’, “Sam-mee, Sam-mee, Sam-mee,” and after the chant builds up loud the Knight pulls three ampules outta his pocket. I mean, shit, man! Three! I ain’t never been ’round Sammy when he’s done more’n two. Three gets you clear into the fuckin’ sky! So when the Knight holds up these three ampules, the crowd’s tuned to burn, howlin’ like they’s playin’ Sammy themselves. But the Knight, man, he keeps his cool. He is so cool! He just holds up the ampules and lets ’em take the shine, soakin’ up the noise and energy, gettin’ strong off the crowd’s juice. Chaco waves everybody quiet and gives the speech, y’know, ’bout how in the heart of every man there’s a warrior-soul waitin’ to be loosed and shit. I tell ya, man, I always thought that speech was crap before, but the Knight’s makin’ me buy it a hunnerd percent. He is so goddamn cool! He takes off his shirt and shoes, and he ties this piece of black silk ’round his arm. Then he pops the ampules, one after another, real quick, and breathes it all in. I can see it hittin’, catchin’ fire in his eyes. Pumpin’ him up. And soon as he’s popped the last one, he jumps into the pit. He don’t use the tunnel, man! He jumps! Twenty-five feet down to the sand, and lands in a crouch.’