Lucius Shepard: Life During Wartime

‘I can’t do that,’ he said.

‘Why not? Don’t you believe me?’

‘It wouldn’t make any difference if I did.’

‘I…’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘This friend of mine, he’s always trying to convince me to desert, and there’ve been times I wanted to. But it’s just not in me. My feet won’t move that way. Maybe you don’t understand, but that’s how it is.’

‘This childish thing that you do with your two friends,’ she said after a pause. ‘That’s what’s holding you here, isn’t it?’

‘It isn’t childish.’

‘That’s exactly what it is. Like a child walking home in the dark and thinking that if he doesn’t look at the shadows, nothing will jump out at him.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said.

‘No, I suppose I don’t.’ Angry, she threw her napkin down on the table and stared intently at her plate as if reading some oracle from the chicken bones.

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ said Mingolla.

‘I have to go,’ she said coldly.

‘Because I won’t desert?’

‘Because of what’ll happen if you don’t.’ She leaned toward him, her voice burred with emotion. ‘Because knowing what I do about your future, I don’t want to wind up in bed with you.’

Her intensity frightened him. Maybe she had been telling the truth. But he dismissed the possibility. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk some more about it.’

‘You wouldn’t listen.’ She picked up her purse and got to her feet.

The waiter ambled over and laid the check beside Mingolla’s plate; he pulled a plastic bag filled with marijuana from his apron pocket and dangled it in front of Mingolla. ‘Gotta get her in the mood, man,’ he said. Debora railed at him in Spanish. He shrugged and moved off, his slow-footed walk an advertisement for his goods.

‘Meet me tomorrow then,’ said Mingolla. ‘We can talk more about it tomorrow.’

‘No.’

‘Why don’t you gimme a break?’ he said. ‘This is all coming down pretty fast, y’know. I get here this afternoon, meet you, and an hour later you’re saying, Death is in the cards, and Panama’s your only hope.’’ I need some time to think. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have a different attitude.’

Her expression softened, but she shook her head, no.

‘Don’t you think it’s worth it?’

She lowered her eyes, fussed with the zipper of her purse a second, and let out a rueful hiss. ‘Where do you want to meet?’

‘How ’bout the pier on this side? ’Round noon.’

She hesitated. ‘All right.’ She came around to his side of the table, bent down, and brushed her lips across his cheek. He tried to pull her close and deepen the kiss, but she slipped away. He felt giddy, overheated. You really gonna be there?’ he asked.

She nodded but seemed troubled, and she didn’t look back before vanishing down the steps.

Mingolla sat awhile, thinking about the kiss, its promise. He might have stayed even longer, but three drunken soldiers staggered in and began knocking over chairs, giving the waiter a hard time. Annoyed, Mingolla went to the door and stood taking in hits of humid air. Moths were loosely constellated on the curved plastic of the Fanta sign, trying to get next to the bright heat inside it, and he had a sense of relation, of sharing their yearning for the impossible. He started down the steps but was brought up short. The teenage boys had gone; however, their captive iguana lay on the bottom step, bloody and unmoving. Bluish gray strings spilled from a gash in its throat. It was such a clear sign of bad luck, Mingolla went back inside and checked into the hotel upstairs.

The hotel corridors stank of urine and disinfectant. A drunken Indian with his fly unzipped and a bloody mouth was pounding on one of the doors. As Mingolla passed him, he bowed and made a sweeping gesture, a parody of welcome. Then he went back to his pounding. Mingolla’s room was a windowless cell five feet wide and coffin-length, furnished with a sink and a cot and a chair. Cobwebs and dust clotted the glass of the transom, reducing the hallway light to a cold bluish white glow. The walls were filmy with more cobwebs, and the sheets were so dirty that they appeared to have a pattern. He lay down and closed his eyes, thinking of Debora. About ripping off that red dress and giving her a vicious screwing. How she’d cry out. That both made him ashamed and gave him a hard-on. He tried to think about making love to her tenderly. But tenderness, it seemed, was beyond him. He went flaccid. Jerking off wasn’t worth the effort, he decided. He started to unbutton his shirt, remembered the sheets, and figured he’d be better off with his clothes on.

In the blackness behind his lids he began to see explosive flashes, and within those flashes were images of the assault on the Ant Farm. The mist, the tunnels. He blotted them out with the image of Debora’s face, but they kept coming back. Finally he opened his eyes. Two… no, three fuzzy-looking black stars were silhouetted against the transom. It was only when they began to crawl that he recognized them as spiders. Big ones. He wasn’t usually afraid of spiders, but these particular spiders terrified him. If he hit them with his shoe, he’d break the glass and they’d eject him from the hotel. He didn’t want to kill them with his hands. After a while he sat up, switched on the overhead, and searched under the cot. There weren’t any more spiders. He lay back down, feeling shaky and short of breath. Wishing he could talk to someone, hear a familiar voice. ‘It’s okay,’ he said to the dark air. But that didn’t help. And for a long time, until he felt secure enough to sleep, he watched the three black stars crawling across the transom, moving toward the center, touching one another, moving apart, never making any real progress, never straying from their area of bright confinement, their universe of curdled, frozen light.

In the morning Mingolla crossed to the west bank and walked toward the airbase. It was already hot, but the air still held a trace of freshness and the sweat that beaded on his forehead felt clean and healthy. White dust was settling along the gravel road, testifying to the recent passage of traffic; past the town and the cutoff that led to the uncompleted bridge, high walls of vegetation crowded close to the road, and from within them he heard monkeys and insects and birds: sharp sounds that enlivened him, making him conscious of the play of his muscles. About halfway to the base he spotted six Guatemalan soldiers coming out of the jungle, dragging a couple of bodies; they tossed them onto the hood of their jeep, where two other bodies were lying. Drawing near, Mingolla saw that the dead were naked children, each with a neat hole in his back. He had intended to walk on past, but one of the soldiers—a gnomish copper-skinned man in dark blue fatigues—blocked his path and demanded to check his papers. All the soldiers gathered around to study the papers, whispering, turning them sideways, scratching their heads. Used to such hassles, Mingolla paid them no attention and looked at the dead children.

They were scrawny, sun-darkened, lying face-down with their ragged hair hanging a fringe off the hood; their skins were pocked by infected mosquito bites, and the flesh around the bullet holes was ridged up and bruised, judging by their size, Mingolla guessed them to be about ten years old; but then he noticed that one was a girl with a teenage fullness to her buttocks, her breasts squashed against the metal. That made him indignant. They were only wild children who survived by robbing and killing, and the Guatemalan soldiers were only doing their duty: they performed a function comparable to that of the birds that hunted ticks on the hide of a rhinoceros, keeping their American beast pest-free and happy. But it wasn’t right for the children to be laid out like game.