Eternity and Other Stories

THE DRIVE-IN PUERTO RICO

Things went well for Colonel Galpa after the war. Indeed, they went so well that wherever he traveled he became the object of a celebration. Whether in the north of the country with its gloomy mountain villages, or in the volcanic central region, or in the jungles along the coast, his arrival was a signal for the townspeople to set aside their daily concerns and honor the national spirit that had produced such a remarkable hero. For ten years he rarely passed a night without a splendid hotel room, a surfeit of food and drink, and a beautiful woman for a companion, these the gifts a grateful citizenry offered in tribute to the defining act of his heroism, the shooting down of three enemy jets during the single air battle of the war with Temalagua. Sometimes, upon learning the specifics of the colonel’s heroism, strangers might suggest that a tally of three was insufficient to warrant such prolonged reverence; but their judgment failed to take into account the fact that the country was small, with a tradition poor in heroes (unmartyred ones, at any rate), and when viewed in this light, Colonel Galpa’s hour in the sky assumed Herculean proportions.

At one point nearly a dozen years after his moment of glory, the colonel returned to his parents’ home in San Pedro Sula, intending to settle there and assist his father in running the family flour mill. The mill was in financial straits, yet this was not Colonel Galpa’s sole motive for returning. He was weary of parties, of boring speeches and floral tributes offered by schoolgirls; he wanted a family of his own, and friends. The ordinary consolations of an ordinary life. But at the time the government was undergoing a crisis of confidence, and by promising that certain valuable contracts would be awarded to his father, the leaders of the party in power persuaded him to go back out onto the road so as to remind the people of their one actual achievement: the winning of a back-fence war. In truth, there were many—notably the owners of the bars and clubs and hotels frequented by the colonel—who would have been happier had he remained in San Pedro. Like the colonel, albeit for more venal reasons, they had reached the conclusion that enough was enough, and they frequently expressed the opinion that the colonel’s heroism must have been an aberration, that he was at heart a freeloader; yet none dared to voice such complaints in public, where they might have had some effect, and so, despite this attendant irony, due in large part to politics and inertia—estates often confused for one another—the colonel continued on his joyless rounds.

On occasion, someone unacquainted with the colonel would ask the identity of the slender graying man with the complexion of an Indio puro sitting quietly in a secluded corner of a noisy party, and when they were told this was the famous Mauricio Galpa, they might say, “What curious behavior for the guest of honor!” “Oh, the colonel’s simply tired,” would be the response. Or, “The colonel’s got a touch of dysentery.” Or perhaps the person to whom the comment had been directed would make a fist with his thumb extended and put the thumb to his lips, implying that the colonel had overindulged in drink. But the reality of the situation was that while Colonel Galpa had once exulted in his good fortune and availed himself of every pleasurable opportunity, he had come to the conclusion that there was something ghoulish about these quasi-ritualistic bacchanals inspired by the deaths of three men whose faces he had never seen. He felt a certain disquiet regarding his fame, and had taken to remembering the three men in his prayers; but since he was not a particularly religious sort, this merely exacerbated his emotional state and caused him to think of himself as a hypocrite.

In August of the millennial year, as he had done for the previous nineteen years, Colonel Galpa traveled to Puerto Morada on the Caribbean coast. Each August, bureaucrats from the capital who could not afford better would swarm into the town to take their vacations—vacations in name only, because they spent their days sitting on the porches of the little hotels along the beach, typing reports commissioned by their superiors who had fled to Cannes or Majorca or Buenos Aires to escape the heat. With the bureaucrats came the whores, hundreds of them from every corner of the country, and following the whores came the journalists, both groups seeking a drunken bureaucrat from whom they could extort something of value. From the government’s perspective, August in Puerto Morada was the perfect showcase for the colonel. There were any number of gatherings at which he might be feted, and usually one or two unoccupied journalists could be persuaded to feature him in a nostalgia piece. For these exact same reasons Colonel Galpa loathed visiting the town and always managed to arrive late at night, when no one was likely to notice him.

The hotel where the colonel stayed each August was a venerable two-story colonial of white stucco with a red tile roof, shaded by bougainvilleas and palms. When he had first checked in nineteen years before, he had been given a fine bedchamber and sitting room overlooking the beach; these days, however, he chose to occupy the smallest room on the ground floor facing inland; this was not a consequence of his diminished status, but due to the fact that it housed a considerable population of lizards, many of which crawled in over the palmetto fronds that drooped through the window. Wherever he spent the night, be it Puerto Morada or the capital or a village in the Miskitia, the colonel enjoyed sitting on his bed with a single lamp lit and watching the lizards that clung to the walls, their bright sides pulsing with breath. He had no scholarly interest in them; he could barely tell a skink from a chameleon. He liked them because they decorated his solitude without disturbing it. Over the years he had developed a peculiar affinity with them. When he entered the room they neither froze nor kept their distance as they might in the presence of another human being, but instead perched on his nightstand and ran across his feet and otherwise continued on their tremulous mosquito hunts. Though he was a practical man who rejected the animist traditions of his forefathers, he allowed himself to flirt with the notion that lizards might be spiritual functionaries whose purpose was to oversee the travels of those fated to be exiles in the country of their birth.

On this particular evening, Colonel Galpa’s attention was captivated by a large indigo lizard with delicate black markings on its face that from several feet away resembled the fanciful mask of a harlequin. When he examined it at close range, bending so that his head was level with its own, it stared back at him, unblinking and serene, its pupils expanding to cover nearly all the retinal surfaces, so that the eyes resembled tiny orange suns in total eclipse. He derived from the stare a startling sense of energy and presence, its intensity such as one might receive from looking into the eyes of a child. Though he assumed this to be a misapprehension, the result of fatigue, the longer he regarded the lizard, the sharper this impression became.

“Who are you?” he asked playfully.

The lizard craned its neck toward him, and the colonel felt as if a hook had snagged in the silk of his soul and was tugging gently, seeking to draw him forth, like a thread drawn through the eye of a needle. Dizzy, he straightened, and felt instantly steadier. Still curious, he bent again to the lizard, and again was possessed by the sense that he was in danger of spilling out of his body. A checkup, he thought, might be in order. The dizziness could be a symptom of some difficulty with the inner ear. With a last glance at the lizard, he switched off the light and got into bed, where he lay awake for a while watching the frilly shadow of a palmetto frond nodding on the white sheets. The idle churning of his thoughts dredged up recent memories, trivial plans, old preoccupations. He recalled a woman with whom he had danced in Trujillo; he decided that after breakfast he would return to his room and unplug his phone; and he saw a sectioned-off panel of deep blue sky, sunlight dazzling the scuffmarks on a plastic canopy, and felt an immense vibration. He closed his eyes against this vision, concentrated on the darkness behind his lids, but did not pray.

In the morning, before even the most zealous of the bureaucrats were awake, Colonel Galpa set forth along the beach, heading for the Drive-In Puerto Rico. It was his favorite place in Puerto Morada, a bar-restaurant constructed of lime green concrete block, three walls and a metal awning that was rolled down each night to make a fourth, with a service bar and a jukebox inside, a room out back where the owner lived, and a wooden deck out front, furnished with red picnic tables, where one could sit shaded by coco palms, and gaze out across the Caribbean. The place had no discernable connection with either drive-ins or Puerto Rico, except for the fact that it faced eastward toward that captive island, and thus most people assumed that the name reflected the idiosyncratic nature of its proprietor, Tomas Quu, an elderly Miskitia Indian reputed to be an hechicero, one who listened to the spirits and could work small charms. A wizened man with a long gray braid and a face as wrinkled and dark as an avocado, he had once been a soldier and had, according to rumor, performed his duty with exceptional valor. On occasion the colonel tried to draw him out on his experiences, but Tomas was not inclined to speak on the subject. That morning the old man was on his knees inside the restaurant, painting a corner of the mural that spread across the rear wall.

This mural, the work of many years, depicted in bright, primitive imagery the history of the country from earliest times—Mayan pyramids and minor conquistadors; Yankee traders and soldiers of fortune, the most famous of whom had been executed in front of Santa Maria del Onda, the cathedral that shadowed the heart of the town; the white ships of the fruit company that had controlled the politics of the region; volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the great hurricane of 1998, and so on. The thing the colonel liked best about the mural was that his role in history was represented by a tiny gray airplane suspended in a lozenge of turquoise, with no reference to missiles or enemy aircraft. The thing he liked least was that on each successive visit he discovered that Tomas had added horrid details: a young girl curled up around the syringe protruding from her arm; the bodies of several dead children strung up like fish and a man masked by a bandana standing proudly beside them, his rifle ported. Emblems of the country’s recent unfortunate leap into the modern world. To his surprise, the colonel saw that Tomas had painted a lizard on an unexploited section of the wall, in the lower right-hand corner, a lizard very like the specimen that had caught his attention the night before, indigo, with delicate black markings and orange eyes. Beneath the lizard was an uncompleted face, bearded and pale, with one glaring eye and a sketched-in eyebrow—the space where the second eye should have been was occupied by the lizard’s tail. Tomas rarely included the face of a specific man or woman in the mural, yet this had the look of a portrait in progress.

“Oye, Tomas!” The colonel took a seat on the deck. “Por favor, un café!”

The old man glanced toward the colonel and shaded his eyes. He waved and spoke to someone in the shadows. Then he went back to his painting. Soon a barefoot brown-skinned girl wearing an embroidered blouse and a long red skirt brought coffee and a sweet roll, and the colonel sat happily watching combers rolling in from the deep green swells beyond Punta Manabique, regarding the palm-lined ochre curve of the beach and the town set along it, the stucco and tile of the tourist places, the grim eminence of the cathedral thrusting up from the central plaza, and the rusted tin roofs of Barrio Clarin, in front of which a small herd of piebald cows had strayed onto the sand and were nudging at mounds of seaweed in hopes of uncovering something edible.

When Tomas quit work on the mural he joined the colonel at his table and the colonel told him that he had recently seen a lizard resembling the one in the mural.

“How odd,” said Tomas. “For there are no such lizards. It is a magical creature born in the imagination.”

“My imagination… or yours?”

“We are of the same blood. Our imaginations sing the same song. What is in my mind, lives also in yours, needing only to be awakened.”

“Well, there is at least one flesh-and-blood lizard. I saw it clinging to the wall of my room last night.”

“One is very like none,” Tomas said. “There is only the slightest difference between these values. The difference between the ordinary and the magical. It is easy to mistake the two.”

The colonel decided that Tomas was playing with him, let the subject drop, and asked who the half-completed face was intended to represent.

“Satan.” Tomas spat over the railing to indicate distaste.

“So…” The colonel leaned back and tilted his face to the sun. “Satan is a gringo, eh?”

“Pale, yes. A gringo, no,” said Tomas. “But like you he is a colonel.”

Colonel Galpa saw that the old man was not joking and asked him to explain.

“Surely you have heard of him?” Tomas asked, and when the colonel said he had not, the old man said, “It is too pleasant a day to speak of such things.”

A romantic song, strings and guitars underscoring a passionate tenor, issued from the jukebox inside the restaurant, and the girl who had served them could be seen dancing by herself, her head inclined to one side, holding her long skirt up to her ankles. The sun had risen high enough to illuminate the crates of lime and orange and grape and strawberry soda stacked beside the jukebox, causing the bottles to glow with gemmy brilliance.

“I know what you are thinking,” Tomas said. “You are thinking how beautiful women are when they are sad, and how that sadness might give way to something more beautiful yet if a man with the proper respect and temper were to happen along. Be wary, my friend. Let a woman wound you with her sadness, and you will carry that wound until the day of your death.”

“When was the last time you were with a woman?” the colonel asked.

The old man squinted at the glittering sea. “It was nineteen eighty-three. The summer the army went up into Olanchito. When all the drug dealers came running out of the mountains, she came with them. She stayed five months.” He gave a mournful shake of his head. “Your way is best, my friend. A few days, a week, then adios.”

“You’re a cynic, Tomas,” the colonel said; and Tomas said, “Not at all. I have reached a venerable age and am secure in the things I know. Yet like a fool I fall in love every day. I am merely too old to be a consummate fool. It is you who are the cynic.”

“I?” The colonel laughed. “First you accuse me of being a romantic, then a cynic. Surely there is a contradiction involved?”

“Perhaps ‘cynic’ is not the correct word. Though I can think of no better word for someone so obdurate as to deny the tradition that bred him.”

The old man was referring, the colonel knew, to their Indian blood and to his skeptical attitude toward Tomas’s mystical bent, his magical interpretation of the world, a view he believed that Colonel Galpa would do well to adopt.

“Must we always argue about this?” the colonel asked.

“No,” said Tomas, giving the colonel’s hand a fatherly pat. “I merely find it amusing to do so.”

The colonel spent the day reading in his room; the telephone rang on several occasions but he did not pick it up. At twilight he lay on his bed and watched the rain-swept peaks in the west darken from gray to a soft purple. Once night had settled over the town, he dressed and went forth to do his duty, to mingle with the whores and journalists and bureaucrats who would be gathered at the Club Atomica, a discotheque on the edge of Barrio Clarin.

By the time he arrived the dance floor was overflowing with a confusion of men and women whose clumsy movements made them appear to be struggling to keep their feet, as if dazed by the flashing lights and deafening music. He found a stool at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka rocks from a pretty girl wearing a mesh blouse through which her breasts were visible. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. On turning he was pleased to see Jerry Gammage, an American journalist whom he found generally agreeable, apart from Gammage’s habit of addressing him as “Maury.”

“Hey, Maury!” Gammage clapped him on the shoulder. “They still got you out riding the circuit, huh?”

The colonel shrugged as if to say, “What else?” and had a sip of his drink. He watched Gammage, a big sloppy blond man in jeans and a faded “Just Say No” T-shirt, lean across the counter and flirt with the barmaid, making a clownish face when she playfully pushed him away.

“Every fucking year this place gets a little more like Vegas,” Gammage said, settling beside the colonel. “It’s a damn shame. But what the hell. These are the end times. Can’t sweat the small stuff, right?” He clinked glasses with the colonel and drank. Judging by the slackness of his features and the expansiveness of his gestures, Gammage was a good ways along the road to being very drunk.

“Got any hot flashes for me?” Gammage asked, wobbling on his stool. “Any pews that’s nit to frint?”

“I saw a manta ray near the point this morning,” the colonel said. “It may have been the shadow from a school of mackerel, but I don’t think so.”

Gammage drank. “I’d love to write it. Beats the hell out of shit like Six Priests Found Murdered With Brains Missing. Wha’cha think about all that, anyway?”

“About what?”

“About Six Priests Found Murdered With Brains Missing.” Gammage leaned close, as if inspecting the colonel’s face for unsightly flaws. “Aw, man! Where you been? It’s the big story out of the capital.”

“Six priests were murdered in the capital?”

“And found with their brains missing, no less. If we luck out, we’ll get a shot at seeing the man s’posed to be responsible tonight. Word has it he’s in town.”

“The man who killed them? Why isn’t he in jail?”

“Because”—Gammage leaned close again—“he’s a fucking hero. Not like you, Maury. This guy’s your basic New World Order hero. A specialist in what’s being billed as ‘internal security.’ These honchos don’t get the free lunch treatment, but they know the secret handshake. And nobody fucks with ’em.” He signaled the barmaid with his empty glass. “I don’t know why I’m giving you grief. You’re one of the good guys. I’m just tired of this shit. You come to expect it in Salvador, Guatemala, Panama. But somehow I thought this place would be immune.”

The colonel thought of the new addition to Tomas’s mural. “What is this man’s name?” he asked, but Gammage did not appear to have heard.

“Y’know”—he accepted a fresh drink from the barmaid—“I’m ready to become a card-carrying freako. Know what I’m saying? Get my hand mirror, stand out on the desert at noon and heliograph the fucking mother ship.”

The colonel was accustomed to Gammage’s despairing tone, but this outburst appeared to signal a new and unhealthy level of disillusionment.

“Speak of the devil,” said Gammage. “Here’s the man of the hour now.”

Hector Canizales, the portly owner of the cantina, was pushing his way through the crowd, and in his wake, walking with immense dignity, as if he were the actual owner and Hector merely a flunky, came a pale heavyset man resplendent in a dark blue uniform that bore a colonel’s insignia. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the club; his hair was black and oily, combed straight back from a forehead so high and smooth and white, like a slab of marble, it seemed to warrant an inscription, and his thick eyebrows were so dark by contrast with the pallor of his skin, they appeared more decorative than functional. His face was squarish and had a soft, hand-carved look; his nose was aquiline, and his eyes large, set widely apart, and his full mouth put Colonel Galpa in mind of portraits he had seen of the old Spanish court—the mouth of a voluptuary, vaguely predatory and given to expressions of contempt. More to the point, he had no doubt that this was the face Tomas was painting on the wall of the Drive-In Puerto Rico.

“Colonel Mauricio Galpa,” said Hector, mopping his brow with a paisley handkerchief. “Allow me to present Colonel Felix Carbonell.”

“Mucho gusto,” said Carbonell, shaking the colonel’s hand. “I am honored.”

“Wow,” said Gammage, gesturing with his drink. “This is fucking massive. The veritable confluence of past and future.”

As he stood there enveloped by the overpowering sweetness of Carbonell’s cologne, the colonel was mesmerized by his opposite number’s face; despite its calm expression and regularity of feature, he derived from it a sense of tension, as if there were another face beneath it, one fiercely animated and straining to shatter the pale mask that held it in check. Though he had never before met the man, he had met with his reputation. The name Carbonell was associated with the worst excesses of the regime. With brutality and terror and slaughter.

“You might even say it’s kinda mythical,” Gammage went on. “Or do I mean mystical? Whatever. I’m talking the meeting of the twain, y’know. Yin and yang. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.”

Carbonell’s eyes slid toward Gammage.

“I’d love a shot of this.” Gammage gave Carbonell a jolly smile. “You do show up in photographs, don’tcha?”

“Excuse me!” A slim brunette in slacks and a white blouse grabbed Gammage by the elbow and yanked him away from the two colonels. “Jerry, I need you over here!”

Carbonell watched them disappear into the crowd; when he turned back to the colonel, he said. “Drunks, gringos, journalists. The new trinity.”

Colonel Galpa felt a gulf between them, as palpable in its own right as he might feel standing at the edge of a deep canyon, struck by a chill vacancy inspired by the thought of a misstep. He pretended to be amused by Carbonell’s comment and sipped his vodka.

“Well,” Carbonell said after an awkward interval. “It’s been a pleasure, Colonel. But if you will pardon me, there is a lady in the back who demands my attention.”

They exchanged polite bows, then Carbonell went off with Canizales, who had stood by all the while, toward the rear of the establishment. The colonel finished his vodka and ordered another, wondering how much longer he needed to stay in order to satisfy the requirements of duty. He did not expend a great deal of thought upon Carbonell; he had known other brutal men during his days of service, and though he disapproved of their actions, he had accepted the fact that history seemed to require them. Three drinks, he decided. He would stay for three drinks. Maybe four. Perhaps it would not be too late to call his father.

“Colonel Galpa?” The slim brunette woman who had dragged Gammage off now took the barstool beside him. She was somewhat older than he had thought. Forty, perhaps. Attractive in a quiet way. Framed by her dark hair, her face was kept from being a perfect oval by a longish chin. With her small mouth and large brown eyes, she put him in mind of one of his high school teachers, a pretty, no-nonsense woman who had rarely smiled.

“I’m Margery Emmons,” she said. “CNN.”

The colonel saw his immediate future. An hour or two under hot lights, questions, a camera, an experience that would ultimately be reduced to a ten-second sound bite. Unpleasant, but it would thrill his nephews.

“I’d like to speak with you about Battalion Three-Sixteen,” Margery Emmons said.

That name put a notch in the colonel’s expectations and alerted him to danger. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I can’t help you.”

“You’ve never heard of Battalion Three-Sixteen?”

“You must realize, Miss Emmons, I’ve…”

“Margery… please.”

“Margery. You must realize that I have not been active in the affairs of my country since the war. Since my war. I am as you see. An exhibit, a public relations opportunity.”

“But you must have some knowledge of Three-Sixteen.”

“I probably know less than you. I know, of course, that they were closely involved with the contras during the eighties, taking their orders from the Americans, and that they have been accused of atrocities. That is all I know.” The colonel made his delivery more pointed. “As it was your country that commissioned these atrocities, you might do well to ask your questions in Washington. Information of this sort is widely disseminated there.”

“I hear you, colonel. But this is where the bodies are buried.”

He acknowledged the statement with a shrug and a “Yes, well…”

“If you knew anything, would you tell me?”

“That would depend on the circumstances under which you asked your questions.” He had not intended this to sound flirtatious, but now that it was out there, he could not come up with anything to say that would reduce its impact.

She smiled. “The question for me, then, would be, ‘Do I believe you know something that would be worth my creating such a circumstance?’”

“Probably not,” he said.

She patted down her hair, an unnecessary gesture—it was held by a gold barrette, not a strand out of place—and stood. “I’d better see to Jerry. I left him out back. He’s not feeling too well.” She extended her hand and he shook it, saying, “Good luck with your story.”

The colonel turned back to his drink, to a consideration of the woman. Margery. Perhaps, he thought, he had intended to flirt with her.

“Oh, colonel!”

She had stopped a few feet away.

“I’m staying at the Loma Linda.” Once again she smiled. “In case you remember something.”

When the colonel returned to his hotel that evening, he found the indigo lizard clinging to the wall beside the bathroom mirror. A little tipsy—it had been a while since he’d had four vodkas in such a short time—he put his face close to the lizard and asked, “Are you magic?”

The lizard did not appear to notice him.

“Do you eat flies, or do you consume?…” The colonel could not think of a word to finish his sentence; then he said, “Light. Do you consume light and breathe out fire? No?” He looked at himself in the mirror, at his ridiculous uniform and gilt-braided hat. His tired eyes. “To hell with you,” he said. He bent to the sink and splashed water onto his face; on straightening he discovered that the lizard had crawled onto the surface of the mirror and was staring at him. The stare affected the colonel profoundly, causing him to perceive his own woeful condition. Alone except for a lizard; half-drunk in a bathroom; on an endless fool’s errand. He resisted the easy allure of self-pity and stood rigid, almost at attention, until the feeling had passed. The lizard continued to watch him, and the colonel grew annoyed with those unblinking orange eyes. He clapped his hands, trying to drive it away, but it remained motionless, lifeless as a rubber toy. Its stare made him feel weak and unfocused, thoughts slopping about inside his skull, and he lifted his hand, intending to knock it from its perch. But before he could act, a curious lightness invaded his body, enfeebling him, and a burst of orange radiance blinded him, and for a moment, scarcely more than a second or two, he saw an enormous figure looming above. A darkly complected man wearing a hat, one hand upraised. His vision cleared and he felt once again the weight of flesh and bone; he saw his reflection in the mirror. A befuddled little man in a silly hat, standing with his hand upraised.

The lizard was gone.

The colonel hurriedly undressed and switched off the lights and slipped beneath the sheets. He could not put from mind the absurd notion that he had seen himself briefly from the lizard’s perspective; he recalled the feeling of dizzy instability he had derived from looking into the lizard’s eyes, and wondered if the two experiences had been connected. But what did this speculation imply? That somehow his soul had been trapped for an instant inside the lizard’s skin? Even more absurd. And yet he could think of nothing else to explain such an extreme disassociation. Though the colonel did not subscribe to a view of creation that accepted explanations of this kind, neither did he demand logic of the world, and he refused to let the experience ruin his sleep. He closed his eyes, said a hasty prayer for the souls of the three pilots he had shot from the sky, and soon drifted off into a black peace that lasted well into the day.

The colonel did not arrive at the Drive-In Puerto Rico until nine o’clock the next morning. Most of the tables on the deck were occupied. At one sat Margery Emmons; she was talking to a thin, balding man in a pale yellow guayabera who now and then cast anxious glances to the side. Her eyes slid toward the colonel as he took a seat in the corner of the deck closest to the water, but she did not smile, and gave no other sign of recognition. The colonel held a tiny mental burial for the minor fantasy he had conjured concerning her, and had a few sips of the strong black coffee that Tomas’s girl, unbidden, brought to his table.

Beyond the break the heavy swells glittered in patches, as if irradiated by the backs of glowing swimmers threatening to surface as they pushed their way in toward shore, shattering into white plumes of spray that rose and fell with the abandon of wild horses, and to the east, Punta Manabique stretched out into darker waters like a long green witch’s finger with a palm tree at its tip, its trunk forced by the wind to grow almost horizontal to the ground, so that at the distance it resembled a curving talon. The amiable chatter of the other patrons seemed part of nature, a random counterpoint to the percussive surf. A sweetish smell was borne on the north wind, overwhelming the scents of beans, eggs, and sausage, and the colonel imagined that a great ship filled with spices had been breached just over the horizon, its hull leaking streams of cinnamon and myrrh. The day held too much beauty for his troubled cast of mind, and he gazed down into his coffee, at the trembling incomplete reflection of his face, an image perfect in its summation of his mood. When Tomas dropped into the seat opposite him, the colonel asked him immediately about the lizard.

“You have seen it again… or another like it?” asked Tomas in a guileless tone that caused the colonel to suspect that Tomas knew something he himself did not; but then he thought that even if Tomas knew nothing, he would wish to give the impression that he did.

He told Tomas of his experiences the previous evening; when he had finished his story, Tomas said, “Hmm… curious.”

“‘Curious’?” said the colonel. “I expected more of a reaction. A lecture on spirit lizards, perhaps.”

“There are no such things. At least not that I’m aware of.”

“What is it, then?” the colonel asked after a pause.

“The lizard?” Tomas made a casual gesture, writing with his forefinger a sequence of quick little loops in the air. “How would I—a poor deluded hechicero—understand such a phenomenon? I think you should seek the help of a real expert. Perhaps there is someone at the Botanical Station who will advise you.”

The colonel refused to rise to this bait. “You painted a lizard on your wall like the one I saw. A lizard of a type neither of us have seen before. Can you explain it?”

“I was kneeling by a corner of the mural, trying to think what I should put in the space directly above the space where I intended to paint the face of Satan. It came into my mind to paint a lizard. An indigo lizard. With orange eyes. I recall that I felt rather strongly about this decision. Certain that it was correct. Since my artistic choices do not usually incur such a feeling of certitude, I made note of the fact. Apart than that… the world is replete with these strange correspondences. Who can guess their cause or their meaning?”

The girl set a plate of fried eggs, tortillas, and peppers in front of the colonel and asked Tomas if wanted something.

“Aguardiente,” he told her.

“Drinking so early?” The colonel tore off a piece of tortilla and dipped it in yolk.

“Early for one is late for another. All my life I have been a sober man. Now, at life’s end, I wish to be drunk. There are things to be learned from both conditions.”

“You’ll outlive us all, Tomas,” said the colonel, chewing.

“You speak as if you know, yet you know nothing.”

Tomas seemed aggravated; the colonel let the subject drop.

“I’m certain there’s no connection between the lizard I saw and the one you painted,” he said. “But nonetheless…”

“Do you know why you have come here this morning? You want me to tell you that the lizard is magical. It climbed down from my wall and sought you out. It is a message, a supernatural being compressed into the shape of a message. It has great import in your life. It is a sending from Oxala or Jesus or some primitive black shape whose name has the sound of a bubble squeezed up through jungle water from some terrible netherworld. It wants you to see yourself as it sees you. Henceforth, you must always give homage to this lizard and the god who sent it. That is what you want me to tell you. Because hearing such shit will make you believe nothing happened to you last night. That it was a dream, a mental slip. Then you’ll be comfortable. You’ll be able to ignore it.”

The girl handed Tomas a glass and an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid. He poured a stiff measure. Startled by his vehemence, the colonel could not think what to say. At a nearby table a blond girl in a navy blue T-shirt with the word “Wolverines” printed on the chest collapsed in laughter and shrilled, “I just can’t believe you said that!” Margery, the colonel saw, had departed.

Tomas drank, let out a sigh, wiped his mouth on his forearm.

“I apologize if I’ve angered you,” said the colonel.

The old man made a popping sound with his lips and shook his head sadly. “When I came to Puerto Morada many years ago, I liked this place.” He tapped the table top. “This right here. This stretch of beach, I liked it very much. I knew I had to build my restaurant here. It was simple as that. I did not say to myself, This is a magic place, and if I build here, it will be a magic restaurant. Magic is an unwieldy word. It fails to communicate its true meaning. It has come to mean great works. A system of spells, a logic of supernatural connections. I am an hechicero, not a magician. I have no system, no history of great works. I see things, I feel things. I sometimes recognize certain sights and feelings that may have slightly more significance than certain others. Because I have done this for many years, on occasion I can create small effects. So small you might not notice them. But I cannot paint a lizard and cause it to come alive. I cannot ask it to seek you out and make you see through its eyes. If I played any part in what happened to you, I was acting without intent or forethought. This does not mean, however, that what happened was not magical.”

Two small boys ran past on the beach, yelling and waving their arms, chasing a skeletal yellow pariah dog that was so weak on its legs, it barely could outrun them; it stopped to catch its wind, panting, its body curled, gazing with desolate eyes back at its pursuers, then loped off as the boys drew near.

“It may have no importance,” said Tomas. “This lizard of yours. It may signify nothing. The energy of the world will sometimes express itself in singular ways and for no apparent reason. But you must try to understand it. It is yours alone to understand.”

The colonel thought that the old man’s advice about going to the Botanical Station was the most salient thing he had said. He wished now he had never mentioned the lizard. Tomas would likely go on at length about the subject of magic, its subtle nature, and the colonel did not want to be rude. But Tomas only looked about at the tables, at the bar, and said, “Tell me, Mauricio. Have you ever had a place that was yours? Not a place owned, or a place occupied. I’m speaking about one that called to your heart, your soul. One where you felt you absolutely belonged.”

“Not for a long time, certainly.”

Tomas poured another glass of aguardiente. “But you like my restaurant, eh? The place itself, not just the food and drink.”

“I come here as often as I can, don’t I? Of course I like it. You’re a fortunate man to have such a beautiful home.” As an afterthought, the colonel asked, “Why did you name it the Drive-In Puerto Rico?”

“The words have a pretty sound.” Tomas touched the edge of the colonel’s plate. “Your eggs are cold.”

The Botanical Station, operated by Princeton University, was located some miles from the center of town. Several dozen acres of plantation were enclosed by a hurricane fence and centered by a long, low building of pale brown concrete block, topped by a shingle roof edged in darker brown. Air conditioners were mounted beneath each window. The glass panes spotless, the lawn out front manicured. A healthy-looking parrot sat on a ring perch beside the door, clucking gently to itself. Automatic sprinklers whirled. It was so thoroughly American a place, everything so shiny and neat, that when the colonel stepped into the frosty interior, he felt that he had crossed a border illegally, bringing with him the dust of a poorer land. He pictured the beads of sweat on his brow popping like champagne bubbles.

He presented himself at the reception desk, inquiring if there was anyone about who had some expertise in herpetology, and moments later he was standing in an office, leaning over the shoulder of one Dr. Timothy Hicks, a sunburned young man with shoulder-length brown hair, looking at pictures of lizards on a computer screen.

“See anything?” Dr. Hicks asked.

“They all look the same,” said the colonel. “No… wait. There. That one there.”

On the screen was a photograph of a lizard whose shape resembled the one that had been haunting the colonel’s hotel room.

“Norops bicarum.” Dr. Hicks punched the keys and the photo vanished, then reappeared magnified several times over. “One of the anoles.”

Reading the information printed beneath the photo, the colonel was disappointed to learn that norops bicarum grew to lengths of only five inches.

“The one I saw was considerably larger,” he said. “Eight or nine inches long. And it was indigo in color.”

“Solid indigo?”

“Yes… except for some black markings around the face.”

Dr. Hicks tapped the side of his keyboard. “Well, I’m stumped. If you can catch it, I’d love to have a look at it. There are thirty-six known varieties of anole in this part of Central America. Who knows? Maybe you’ve found number thirty-seven.”

He gestured toward a chair on the other side of the desk, and the colonel took a seat.

“What do lizards see?” the colonel asked.

“They have excellent vision. They see colors… it’s very much like human vision. This fellow here is monoscopic. His eyes are set so that he sees in different directions. Two distinct visual fields. Some chameleons are able to see both ahead of them and behind them at the same time. But some types of anole have stereoscopic vision. They see a single image.”

Disappointed that he had not resolved the mystery, the colonel thanked Dr. Hicks, promising to bring the lizard to him if he could catch it, and returned to his hotel. He plumped up his pillows and lay on the bed, opened the book he had been reading, but his mind would not fit onto the page, and after a few minutes he set the book down. Loneliness at that moment struck him as less a passing condition than as an environment in which he was trapped. The sounds of life from without—traffic, the cries of vendors—seemed to arise from a great distance, and he had the thought that if he were to shout, no one would hear him. For an antidote, he picked up his cell phone, a recent acquisition that he rarely used, and called his father’s house in San Pedro Sula.

His sister answered in a strained voice. “Dígame!”

“Hola, Teresa!”

“Oh… Mauricio.”

“How are things?”

“Fine,” she said.

In the background he heard a commotion.

“It sounds as if you’ve got company.”

“Is that how it sounds? Like I’m entertaining?” Teresa scoffed at the notion. “That’s right. I’m always entertaining. Fabulous guests. Champagne brunches. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Is there something wrong?”

A brief silence. “How can you ask that question? Oh, I forgot. You’re never here. You don’t know the unending joy of our life.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Where shall I start? Your father. Do you know he’s running around with a twenty-two-year-old woman? Una puta sucia! He brings her here. To our mother’s house. He carries on in front of your nephews. And your nephews…” She moved the receiver away from her mouth and shouted at someone to be quiet. “Your nephews. They’re doing wonderfully. Here. I’ll let them tell you themselves.”

A second later, a sullen boyish voice said, “What do you want?”

“Emilio?”

Silence.

“Are you being difficult with your mother?”

“Fuck yourself,” Emilio said.

Immediately thereafter, Teresa said, “Do you see how well he’s doing? He’s a drug addict, Mauricio! He’s like you. He’s hardly ever here. And when he does come home, it’s only to steal money for his cocaine! And your other nephew… your precious Pepe! He told me the other day that it is his ambition to become a homosexual. His ambition! God knows, I do not judge those people, but I don’t believe that homosexuality should be an ambition!” A pause during which he heard her breathing hard; then, her voice sugary, she asked, “So how are you? Where are you?”

“Puerto Morada,” he said. “Listen, Teresa. I’m sorry things aren’t going well. I’ll try to get back home soon.”

“No, please! Not on our account. It would be criminal to interrupt your world tour.”

“You know I’m not doing this by choice.”

“You’ve been away twenty years, and you say it’s not by choice? That’s a lifetime, Mauricio. Twenty years. I married, had children. My husband died. Mother died, and our father grew old. You don’t know any of it. Just the dates. The birthdays, the funerals. Now and then you get lonely and you’ll call or drop in for a visit and pretend you’re part of our family. But you’re not… you’re a stranger. A ghost who haunts us at Christmas and Easter.”

“You know why I’m…” he began.

“Don’t tell me it’s the business! It can’t be just the business that’s kept you away so long.”

Resentful, yet at the same time knowing there was some truth to Teresa’s words, that his own indulgent nature had been in play, the colonel said nothing.

“I have to go. I have things…” Teresa broke off; then she said, “I love you, Mauricio. But I hardly know you. I… I’m sorry.”

After hanging up, the colonel sat on the edge of his bed, unable to clear his sister’s words from mind. A ghost. It was an apt image. While struggling with this new conception of his relationship with his family, he noticed the indigo lizard on the wall above the bathroom door; he was so depressed, he could not rouse himself to attempt its capture. The light dimmed; scattered raindrops began to fall. He lay down and let the seething of the rain on the palmetto fronds lull him to sleep. Shortly before three o’clock that afternoon he was wakened by a pounding on his door. “Who is it?” he called.

“Maury! Let me in!”

When he opened the door, Jerry Gammage piled into the room, followed by Margery Emmons. They both began talking at once.

“Man, I need your help…”

“I’m sorry to intrude…”

Margery succeeded in outvoicing Gammage. “Jerry’s in some trouble.”

“I think they mighta spotted me on the beach,” Gammage said.

“Who spotted you?” asked the colonel.

“Carbonell’s men. They’re trying to kill me.”

“What possible reason…”

“I’ll explain everything, I promise,” Margery said. “Will you let us stay here for a while?”

“I know I got no papers on you, Maury,” Gammage said. “But I’m in the shit.”

The colonel closed the door and indicated that they should sit; they perched side-by-side on the foot of the bed, gazing at him like anxious children.

“Why does Carbonell want to kill you?” he asked.

“Battalion Three-Sixteen.” Gammage twisted his mouth into a gloomy shape. “I got tape, pictures… everything.”

Margery shot the colonel a guilty look, but did not speak.

“Somehow they got wind of it,” Gammage went on. “They been beating the bushes for me since yesterday afternoon. I can’t risk the airport. I’d never get past the checkpoints on the highway. Basically, I’m fucked.”

“You have this material with you?” asked the colonel.

Gammage nodded.

“Perhaps if you surrendered it…”

“I got pictures of Carbonell doing horror movie shit with men, women, little kids. He’s twenty years younger, but you can tell it’s him. He posed for the shots. The guy’s fucking Dracula. He’s not gonna let me bounce.”

“He’s not exaggerating,” Margery said. “I’ve seen some of the pictures.”

The colonel asked Gammage what he planned to do.

“Live through the evening,” said Gammage. “Rancher I know in Choluteca owes me. Guy’s got a private plane. Little single-engine job. If I can smuggle myself to Choluteca, I think he’ll fly me down to Bluefields.”

The colonel paced across the room, sat on the arm of the chair by the window, gazing out through the palmetto fronds at the empty sunstruck street. His thoughts moved like sentries back and forth between two points.

“What’s wrong?” Margery asked.

“You’ve put me in a difficult position,” he said. “By helping you, I’ll be committing treason.”

The room seemed to hold a faint humming; off along the street, a truck engine turned over, startling in its vulgar amplitude, like a beast clearing its throat. Then Gammage said, “I understand what you’re saying, Maury, but what Carbonell did, that goes way past treason.”

“These are citizens of your own country we’re talking about,” Margery said. “Innocents. Tortured and macheted. Buried alive.”

“I know!” The colonel stood, turning his back on them. “I know things like this have gone on. I…”

“They’re going on now,” Margery said.

“…I don’t condone them. But what will happen once you tell your story for the cameras? Will Carbonell be disgraced? Executed? Perhaps. But what will happen to those who sanctioned these abuses? Nothing. The world will look down their noses at us as they always have. Soon the story will be forgotten, and the men who gave Carbonell his license to slaughter, they will remain untouched.”

“I’m not going to try and kid you, Maury,” Gammage said. “I can’t guarantee anything. But even if it’s just Carbonell goes in the crapper, that’s gotta be a good thing, right?”

Men’s voices out in the hall, challenging, peremptory. A heavy knocking at a nearby door.

“Not condoning something,” Margery said. “Is that your idea of a moral stance? I don’t believe it. I believe you’re a good man.”

The colonel allowed himself a polite chuckle.

“If I’m off-base,” she said, “now’s the time to prove it.”

She was trying to manipulate him, but given the circumstances, that was forgivable. “‘Moral stance’ is an easy term to sling about when one’s own morality is not at issue,” he said.

He was not going to let Carbonell have them, and not merely because Gammage was his friend and Margery someone to whom he was attracted. It was personal between him and Carbonell. Even if the man were innocent of the crimes Gammage claimed for him, his cologne was offensive, his manner pompous, his smile the emblem of a vain and supercilious nature. The colonel’s distaste for him was funded as much by chemistry as by principle, and he wondered if all his life’s decisions had been informed by such trivial impulses.

“Go into the bathroom,” he said. “I’ll do what I can.”

Once they had sequestered themselves in the bathroom, the colonel waited on the bed. The fabric of his decision was paper-thin, but he knew it would hold. He had felt this same frail decisiveness during the war, and he had always maintained his resolve even in the face of battle. But his battles had been fought in the service of his country, and he was not certain in whose service he was preparing now to fight. His decision satisfied him, however. He was calm and controlled. Just as he had been when he flew a sortie.

A knock came at the door; a commanding voice called out.

“Momentito!” The colonel shrugged into his uniform jacket and opened the door. Standing before him was a squat black man wearing captain’s bars on his fatigues, sweat beading his forehead and shining in the creases of his neck. When he recognized the colonel, his stony expression faltered.

“Your pardon, Colonel,” he said. “But I have orders to search all the rooms.”

“I am alone,” said Colonel Galpa. “It will not be necessary.”

A soldier bearing an automatic rifle moved up behind the captain, who said, with more than a touch of desperation, “I intend no disrespect, sir, but I have my orders.”

The colonel threw open the door, permitting the captain to see the entire room. “Are you satisfied?”

The captain gestured at the soldier behind him. “Sir, you must allow my man to inspect the room. Someone may have obtained entrance while you were out.”

“I have been here all afternoon. It’s as I told you. I am alone.”

Letting his hand drop to his sidearm, the captain composed his features and said, “This is a matter of national security, Colonel. You must understand my position. I have no choice but to insist.”

“What is your name, captain?”

The captain straightened, squared his shoulders, but looked on the verge of tears. “José Evangelista. Please, sir. Will you stand aside?”

“Very well. But be quick!”

Reluctantly, his heart racing, he stepped back and the soldier, a mestizo, barely more than a boy with a wispy mustache and curly hair, entered the room and inspected the closet, poked under the bed.

“There,” said the colonel. “You have done your duty. Now will you give me my privacy?”

The soldier bent an ear toward the bathroom door, then gestured excitedly at it; the captain drew his sidearm and trained it on the colonel.

“Are you insane? What do you think you’re doing?” The colonel went face-to-face with the captain. “I promise… you will regret this!”

Crouching, his rifle at the ready, the soldier flung open the bathroom door, and Margery, who was standing behind it, dripping wet, her hair turbaned in a towel, holding another towel to cover herself, let out a shriek. The soldier recoiled, staring open-mouthed at her.

“Ay, Dios!” said Captain Evangelista.

“Are the needs of national security now satisfied?” the colonel asked him. “Then perhaps you would be so kind as to leave us alone.”

The captain barked an order and the soldier hurried from the room. Offering florid apology, the captain, too, retreated. Colonel Galpa slammed the door behind him. Margery started to speak, but the colonel put a finger to his lips, silencing her, and listened at the door. Once assured that the soldiers had left, he went to her and said, “They will make a report, and it’s very possible someone else will be sent to investigate.”

“What should we do?”

“If they’re suspicious, and we must assume they are, they will watch the hotel. There’s nothing we can do… not until dark.”

“The coast clear?” Gammage poked his head out from the bathroom. Fully clothed, he too, was wet.

“For the moment,” said the colonel.

“Do you really believe they’ll send someone else?” Margery asked.

“Considering the circumstances… yes.”

She finished tucking the edge of the towel beneath her arm, contriving of it a dress. “Jerry. I think you should stay hidden in the bathroom. If they do come back, we don’t want them to hear you running for cover.”

“Choluteca may not be the best option,” said the colonel. “The checkpoints will be on alert for at least a day or two. How much money do you have?”

“Couple hundred lempira,” said Gammage. “Maybe fifty bucks American.” And Margery said, “Forty dollars more-or-less.”

“I know someone who can arrange for a boat to take you down the coast,” the colonel said to Gammage. “Tonight, probably. It will cost several hundred dollars.”

“I can get it,” said Margery.

“Then our only problem is how to get Jerry to the boat. I suppose that can be arranged as well.”

“I owe you, Maury,” Gammage said. “I didn’t realize I’d be putting your ass on the line like this.”

“You know how you can repay me.”

“I’ll push the story hard as I can, man.”

Margery shooed Gammage back into the bathroom.

“All right, all right.” He grabbed a magazine off the colonel’s nightstand. “If you order food, get me something. I didn’t have time for breakfast.”

Margery closed the bathroom door, removed the towel from her hair; then she pulled back the bedcovers and slipped beneath them, while the colonel watched in bewilderment. She wriggled about, dropped the bath towel on the floor beside the bed. “If they come back, we better give them something juicy to report.” She smiled wickedly. “Well, don’t keep me waiting, Mauricio. Take off your clothes.”

To the colonel’s great discomfort, as he disrobed he realized he was wearing a pair of under shorts decorated with little jet planes, a humorous gift that someone had presented him the previous month when he was visiting Puerto Cortez. Seeing them, Margery affected amazement. “Oh, my!” she said. “Should I be afraid?”

The colonel felt himself blushing. He slid beneath the sheets on the opposite side of the bed and lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling. The tension of anxiety had been replaced by a different kind of tension. He wanted to turn his head toward her, but held himself rigid, attuned to the sound of Margery’s breath. Then the bathroom door burst open; he started up guiltily.

“Golly gee.” Gammage grinned down at them. “I was gonna say, ‘Get a room,’ but I guess you already got one.” He shuffled the magazines on the nightstand. “Got anything to read in English?”

“No,” said the colonel stiffly, and Margery said, “Get the hell outta here, Jerry!”

Gammage’s grin broadened. “Damn, I wish I had my camera. The guys back in Atlanta would pay serious bucks for this picture.”

“Jerry!”

“I’m gone.” He chose another magazine, looked down at them fondly. “You kids have fun.”

The bathroom door closed and the silence in the room seemed to thicken. The sun broke from the clouds, and pale yellow light cast a complicated shadow on the bed. A scent of gasoline drifted on the breeze. The colonel’s chest felt banded by heavy restraints.

“Try and relax,” Margery told him.

“I’m trying.”

After a second she touched his shoulder. He stiffened at the contact, but when she left her hand there, whispering, “Just take it easy, okay?” his nervousness began to ebb and his breathing became steady.

“Know what Jerry says about you?”

“I can only guess,” said the colonel.

“He says you’ve got the strangest life of anyone he’s ever met.”

“I suppose it must seem so.”

“He also says you’re the only honest man he knows.”

“He doesn’t have enough information to make that judgment.”

“You don’t think of yourself as honest?”

A thin stream of radio music trickled from the street, and the colonel caught the words “…you never returned to me…” before it faded. “Not especially,” he said.

“I think you’re honest. I’m not overlooking the tricks everyone plays on themselves, the little deceits that make up so much of our lives. They’re inescapable. But I think you’re honest when it counts.”

As she spoke he cut his eyes toward her. He had assumed she was looking at him, but she was on her side, with her eyes closed, as if she were talking to someone in her thoughts, not to him. He took in the white curve of her shoulder, the little shadow in the hollow of her throat. Her face seemed softer than it had the night before, dazed and girlish, and he had the idea that whomever she was thinking of, whether him or some other, her thoughts of that person were slow and reflective and warm.

“I hope we get a chance to talk sometime when things are different,” she said. “When we can concentrate on what we’re saying.”

The colonel wanted to say that he was fairly concentrated at that moment, but knew this would strike a wrong note. Her voice lulled him, and he closed his own eyes, listening.

“I’d like you to tell me about your life,” Margery went on. “Not so I can understand it. I’d just like to hear you tell about it.” She left a pause. “Do you know what a diorama is? This circular strip of metal… it’s not always metal. Sometimes it’s canvas and there are lights behind it. But it’s painted with all these little scenes from life, from one culture usually, and it goes around and around. And even if you watch for a long time, if you come to know which scenes are about to appear, after a while you realize you’re seeing them differently. Noticing different things about them. That’s how your life sounds to me. It’s like you’ve been living in a diorama. Viewing the same scenes over and over from this odd distance…” She sighed. “The adrenaline’s wearing off. I feel so tired.”

“Go to sleep, then.”

“I’m tired, not sleepy. How about you?”

“If you keep talking, I think I might sleep.”

“Am I that boring?”

“No, it’s the sound of your voice, it’s nice… it makes me peaceful.”

“Really? That’s sweet.” Some seconds glided by and then she said, “Now I can’t think of anything to talk about.”

“Tell me about your life.”

“God! Now that is boring!”

“It wasn’t boring today, was it?”

“Today was unusual.” She shifted about, and her breath stirred his hair. “I did produce a feature once in Borneo. We spent nearly a month there. The forests were on fire—that’s what the feature was about. We were based in a town on the coast. Sumarinda. A nice air-conditioned hotel. But a lot of the time we were inland, closer to the fires. When the wind was right, ash fell from the sky and covered everything. The river, the land. There were days when all of us were gray. The Dayaks, the Americans… everyone. We were a single gray race. Except we were running around, shooting film, taking hits of oxygen, and the Dayaks were just hanging onto life. We ferried a few of them out on the helicopters, but the rest simply wouldn’t be moved, even though some of the old people were dying. Some of the footage we got was amazing. Once we were up near the edge of the fire. All you could hear was roaring and crackling. One of the cameramen waded across a river so he could shoot into the flames. He’d just found a good position when a deer broke from the trees nearby and began running alongside the bank. It was burning. A fringe of flame licking up from its back. Deer fur… it’s tough, you know. It’s not like cat fur. It wouldn’t burn easily. Maybe burning pitch drizzled down onto its back from a tree. Anyway, I couldn’t hear if it was making any cry, the fire was so loud, but it must have been crazy with pain. Just below where our cameraman crossed was a waterfall and a deep pool beneath it, and if the deer had gone into the water, it might have been all right. But it kept running parallel to the bank, leaping over fallen trees, avoiding burning branches, incredibly graceful, trying to outrun the pain. It almost seemed to be flying. Like the fire on its back was empowering it. I remember thinking it didn’t look real. Life never composed this kind of image, I told myself. It was something out of a book. A fantasy novel or a fairy tale. But when I was editing the footage I thought maybe this was how life works. Sometimes out of all the mess and clutter and sadness, it says something. It speaks what for us would be a word or a sentence or a poem, and mostly we don’t notice… or else we’re not around when it happens. But that one time we were there, we could bear witness. Out of all the smoke and flame and death, this perfect burning deer…”

When the colonel woke he was on his stomach, head turned toward the bedside table. Resting thereon was the indigo lizard, its tiny feet dark against the white shiny paper of a magazine ad, its orange eyes shining faintly in the twilight. The sight did not disturb him. If it was only a lizard, it was a pretty one; if it was something more, then he doubted it was dangerous. He had never thought that, he realized. It had merely unnerved him. Staring at it, he began to think of the eyes as lenses, and wondered what lay behind them. A speck of bloody tissue, or a scrap of unpredictable genius given form by some miraculous congruency… or was it both? He thought about Margery’s Borneo story. How unexpected it had been, seeming to arise from her like the deer from the burning forest. Perhaps in each instance it had been less a remarkable occurrence than a case of low expectations exceeded.

Margery began snoring. Delicate breaths edged with a glutinous phrasing. He rolled onto his back, careful not to wake her. The covers had slipped down about her waist, but she still lay on her side, one arm guarding her breasts, her hair undone, spilling over her cheek. At the point of her shoulder was a mole, perfectly round, like a period completing the milky phrase of her body. The sweet staleness of her breath, lips parted to reveal the bottom of a tooth. She seemed wholly unexpected. As unexpected as her story. It was not the sort of thing, he thought, that she would tell everyone, at least not in the way she had told it to him, and while he was not prepared to give this much weight, to derive from it any promise, it intrigued him nonetheless. Everything she had done until this moment could be explained in terms of a professional pragmatism, but the story was unmistakably an intimacy. His eyes went again to her breasts, and he suddenly longed to pull her against him, to feel her come awake in his arms. Yet longing was notched, not by a fear of rejection or by the awkwardness of the situation, but by his concern that this was only circumstantially different from dozens of evenings he had spent with women who were no more than joyless functionaries, expressions of public debt.

A light knock at the door alerted the colonel. Margery stirred, but continued to breathe deeply. He slipped out of bed and started to put on his trousers, then decided that whoever it was should see the whole show. He cracked the door. A tall young mestizo in a white waiter’s jacket was standing in the hall, holding a tray that bore two wine glasses and a green bottle in an ice bucket and a silver serving dish. “Con permiso…” the waiter began, but the colonel shushed him. The man nodded, pointed to the tray, and adopted an inquiring look. “Bueno… pase,” whispered the colonel, and opened the door to admit him, instructing him to set the tray on the chair by the window, and to do it quietly.

The waiter tiptoed across the carpet, his eyes roaming about the room. Though the colonel detected no bulge in the waiter’s jacket that would indicate a weapon, judging by his bearing, the economy of his movements, he suspected that beneath it the man was wearing a standard-issue army T-shirt. As the waiter turned to make his exit, his eyes dropped to the colonel’s under shorts and amusement grazed his lips. He pressed a small envelope into the colonel’s hand, and with a slight bow, not appearing to expect a tip, he slipped out the door and was gone.

Three words were printed on the card in the envelope:

Beneath this salutation, intended—the colonel knew—to make him aware of the all-seeing eye now focused on him, was a scrawled signature, a single name of which only a fancifully scripted capital C was legible. That Carbonell signed himself like an emperor did not surprise him, nor did he find it laughable—though emperors were out of fashion, despots were not, and of such stuff as Carbonell were despots made. The colonel put on his trousers, shifted the tray to the floor, and sat by the window as darkness came to Puerto Morada. Intimations of what might come of the night turned slowly in his head, like millwheels in a lazy stream, affording him a glimpse of every bladed consequence. The woman in his bed moaned weakly, as in a fever; her pale face was blurred and indefinite in the shadow, like a white stone glimpsed through running water. Two roaring lights passed on the street; sprightly music from a nearby cantina braided the hissing of the wind in the palmettos. The colonel’s stomach growled. He ate several of the shrimp contained within the serving dish, but did not open the wine.

Shortly after nine o’clock, the hour when the Drive-In Puerto Rico customarily closed, Margery and the colonel went to talk with Tomas, leaving Gammage hiding in the room. They walked along the verge of the beach, keeping to the shadow of a palm hammock. Drops of orange fire pointed the windows of little wooden houses tucked in among the sinuous trunks, each one also announced by the rattle of a generator, and on occasion a lesser shadow emerged from the dark, tipped its hat and wished them good evening. Off on the horizon a lopsided moon, like an ancient medal of bone, paved the sea with a dwindling silver road, and the swarm of stars in its wild glitter seemed to construct a constant flickering conversation, causing the colonel to think that if he could hear them, their voices would resemble those of crickets. Bats squeaked high in the fronds; invisible chickens clucked; a dog barked distantly, with neurotic regularity. The wind had died, and mosquitoes whined in the colonel’s hair.

“Tomas feels that women have been a misfortune in his life,” he said as they came in sight of the Drive-In Puerto Rico. “He may appear rude.”

Margery slapped at her neck. “Maybe I shouldn’t be with you.”

“No, it’s better he knows a woman is involved.”

“But what if he won’t help?”

“He will. His attitude toward women doesn’t reflect dislike, just a mistrust of their effect on him. As far as I know, he has never been able to refuse them anything.”

The lights on the deck of the restaurant had been switched off, and Tomas was leaning on the railing. On spotting Margery, he let fall the hand he had raised in greeting, and his face grew impassive. As they sat together and the colonel told him what was required and why, he merely grunted in response. Margery continued slapping at mosquitoes, and finally, annoyed by these interruptions, Tomas went into the restaurant and returned with a jar containing a translucent greenish paste, which he handed to Margery. She sniffed at it, wrinkled her nose.

“It is not perfume,” he said brusquely. “However, it will keep away the mosquitoes.”

She thanked him and began dabbing it onto her arms and neck.

With a dolorous sigh, Tomas sat with his back to the railing, his face angled toward the stars. “Benito Casamayor has a suitable boat. And he is in need of money. But he will want a good price to challenge the authority of Felix Carbonell.”

“How much?” Margery asked.

“A thousand might persuade him.”

“Lempira?”

“Dollars,” said Tomas.

“I can have it within an hour.”

Tomas sniffed, a sign—the colonel thought—of his contempt for anyone who could so easily promise a thousand dollars. “I’ll arrange for Benito to be at the end of Punta Manabique at two o’clock in the morning. That will give him time to prepare his boat.”

“How will we get Jerry to the boat?”

Tomas refitted his gaze to the horizon. Their edges gone diaphanous, all smoke and luminous mother-of-pearl, bulky clouds had closed in around the moon, framing it in glowing complexity, like angels heralding a glorious birth in a Rafael or a Titian. A fish splashed in the offing, a sickly generator stuttered to life among the palms.

“How big a man is your friend?” Tomas asked.

“About six feet,” Margery said. “Two hundred pounds, maybe.”

“A little more, I think,” said Colonel Galpa.

“There is a woman from the Bay Islands here in town,” said Tomas. “Maude Brooks. The people call her Sister Anaya. She tells fortunes at the hotels.”

“I think I’ve seen her,” Margery said. “A big black woman… wears a turban?”

Tomas nodded. “She will come to Mauricio’s hotel and provide your friend with a disguise. She will remain in the room, and he will leave, pretending to be her. But you will require something with which to color his skin.”

“I have boot polish,” said the colonel. “It’s brown, but in the dark no one is likely to notice.”

“Do we pay her, too?” Margery asked.

“She will tell you her price.” Tomas chuckled. “Bring a great deal of money.”

A flow of wind poured in off the water, growing stronger by the second, flapping the colonel’s jacket, twitching the end of Tomas’s braid. For the first time, he looked directly at Margery. His creased, leathery face seemed more an accidental pattern of nature than a human design, the sort of shape your eye might assemble from the strands in a mound of seaweed. “Give me your hand,” he said.

She glanced anxiously at the colonel, but complied.

Tomas did not hold her hand, simply let it rest on his palm. He kept his eyes on her and she on him. It appeared initially that they were engaged in a contest of wills; but then the colonel realized that neither one showed evidence of strain. Still, it made him uneasy, and he asked Tomas what he was doing.

“Looking.”

“Looking for what?”

“Must I look for something specific? Whenever you try too forcefully to order the world, you fail to see anything.”

Soon Tomas withdrew his hand, frowning.

“Is something wrong?” Margery asked.

The old man muttered several words in a language Colonel Galpa did not recognize, then his eyes downcast, said, “Mauricio. You will have to escort the American to meet Benito. Once he has disguised himself, the three of you must leave the hotel together. You,”—he gestured at Margery—“cannot go to Punta Manabique with them. Is there a place where your colleagues might gather at that hour?”

“Club Atomica,” she said.

“Then go there. It will seem that Mauricio is walking Madame Anaya home.” Tomas addressed himself to the colonel. “Do not accompany him all the way to the point. Leave him on the beach nearby. He will pass into the shadows of the trees. If anyone has followed, they will lose interest in him and follow you back to the club.” The plan sounded eminently workable to the colonel, but he was perturbed by Tomas’s subdued manner and asked if he felt ill.

Tomas took such a long time to respond, the colonel grew concerned that he had been stricken and rendered incapable of speech; but at last he said, “It is nothing. An intimation of ills to come. Men of my age often receive morbid signals of the future.” He patted the colonel’s hand, his own hand trembling. “It is you about whom I am concerned.”

“I’m perfectly well,” said the colonel. “Except for being hungry. I had only a few shrimp at dinner.”

“It is not your health that concerns me. I wonder if you are prepared for what may ensue should Carbonell discover what you have done.”

“Carbonell cannot hurt me. I have friends in the capital whom he will not wish to offend.”

“I think you underestimate him… and I am certain that you do not entirely comprehend his character. Men like Carbonell, beasts disguised by a thin dress of human behavior, they sometimes act without regard for consequence. As to your friends, ask yourself this, Who is more valuable to them—the hero of a war fought long ago, or a beast who wears their uniform, whose uncontrollable nature serves to strike fear into the hearts of the people, making them all the more malleable and accepting of their lot?”

Put this way, the question disheartened the colonel. He realized that—matters of principle aside—he was on the verge of risking everything for a man who, albeit a friend, was not a great friend, and for a woman whom he scarcely knew. And to what end? He had little conviction that Carbonell or his masters would be damaged by the revelations Gammage proposed to make. He wondered what his response might be if Margery were not sitting beside him. “I’ll be all right,” he told Tomas.

The old man made a clucking sound with his tongue. He stared at his hands, which rested flat on the table, the fingers lifting idly—like two ancient blind crabs seeking familiar purchase. “Then there’s nothing more to be said.”

Enthroned in the chair by the window in the colonel’s room, rolls of fat squeezed out over the arms, her voluminous white dress emblazoned with tiny red skeletons, hair turbaned in this same material, her scowling black face diamonded with beads of sweat, Madame Anaya was not shy about voicing her displeasure. “Dere’s no television,” she said. “De ol’ mon tol’ me dere were a television.” She pursed her cherub lips; almost hidden behind her pouchy cheeks, her eyes gleamed like polished sea beans. “How you ’spect me to sit t’rough half de night wit’out some television?”

“I have magazines,” the colonel said. “Books.”

“Now what I wan’ to read fah? Ruinin’ my eyes wit’ dat tiny print! You bring me dat television de mon promise!”

“I’m afraid at this hour it’s impossible.”

Madame Anaya made a beastly noise in her throat, but held her tongue. A brief commotion arose in the bathroom, where Margery was helping Gammage put the finishing touches on his disguise.

“I believe the café is still open,” said the colonel. “I could bring you something to eat.”

“I gots my own.” Madame Anaya’s right hand, dangling off the chair arm, stirred, and she pointed with a sausage-like finger at her purse, which—so black and bulging, it seemed her familiar—rested beside the chair. “Nevuh trus’ Sponnish cookin’. Make you weak in de liver.” She glared at the colonel. “Dis de night dey be playin’ de duppy movies.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“On de television. Dey plays de duppy movies at midnight of a Saturday.”

The colonel checked his watch. “You’re not going to miss much. It’s almost over.”

“Dey be playin’ two of dem,” Madame Anaya said reprovingly. “Las’ one always de best.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Been two weeks and dey played dis one, Curse of de Blood Witch.”

“That was a good one?”

“It were domn funny! De people make it, dey don’t know de first t’ing ’bout witches. Mus’ be dey t’inkin’ magic somet’ing you catch from a book.”

The colonel made a non-committal noise, thinking ahead to the beach, the walk to Punta Manabique, the dangers it might present.

“Magic what people gots in dere bodies. Some gots it in de eye, some in de hand, some in de heart. You gots it all three places, den you a witch.”

“I see,” said the colonel distractedly, trying to decide whether or not to carry his sidearm. Crime was not unheard of on the beach, but generally it was perpetrated against tourists. Better to leave it in the room—he did not want to arouse suspicion. He glanced at Madame Anaya. Immense and motionless; eyes fixed. She did not appear to be breathing. Then two fingers of her right hand began to move in slow circles, as if she were stirring something. The colonel was drawn to watch them. His head felt warm, thickish, his thoughts subject to a drifty confusion, similar to the way he had felt on the rare occasions when he smoked marijuana. The air seemed to eddy in response to the stirring of Madame Anaya’s fingers, rippling outward, and as the ripples washed over him he came to feel increasingly stoned, a faint keening in his ears. She looked to have no depth, an exotic image painted on a liquid surface. Then, abruptly, the fingers stopped, and the colonel became aware that the ripples in her considerable flesh were caused by silent laughter.

“Curse of de Blood Witch,” she said, and chuckled. “Dat ain’t nowhere de way of it.”

The bathroom door opened and Margery, followed sheepishly by Gammage, entered. Gammage’s white dress and turban were of a piece with Madame Anaya’s, only his were decorated with tiny blue skulls; his face, arms, and sandaled feet were coated with mahogany boot polish. The effect was both gruesome and laughable.

“Oh, God!” said Madame Anaya.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” Gammage said sourly.

The colonel stood. “It’s twenty minutes’ walk to the point. We should go now.”

Gammage looked down at his glistening brown arms. “Man, I don’t know about this shit.”

Margery rubbed his shoulder. “It’ll be fine once you get out onto the beach.”

“Now you shed dat dress fah you leave de boat,” Madame Anaya said to Gammage as he moved toward the door. “And Benito he fetch it to me.”

“Hey, you’re welcome to it,” Gammage said with false bravado. “It doesn’t do a thing for my hips.”

She gave another quivery, silent laugh. “Darlin’, you hustle yo’self on down to Barrio Clarin, you gon’ get more action den you can handle.”

The colonel opened the door, peeked out to see if the corridor was clear, then beckoned to Margery and Gammage. They eased past him, and as he closed the door he heard Madame Anaya say, “You tell dat ol’ mon, I gon’ make him rueful ’bout de television.”

The wind that earlier had risen now swooped in off the water in long powerful gusts, giving roaring voice to the palms, their crowns tossing and swaying like an exalted crowd under a mesmeric preacher’s thrall. Surf pounded in over the break, exploding in phosphorescent sprays, and racing clouds cut just below the high-riding moon, now and then dimming, but not obscuring, its light. Through a gap between trunks, the colonel saw men and women moving their hips and waving their arms under the thatched canopy of a shanty bar to the rhythms of a small steel band. A rich yellow light englobed them, and beyond, for a backdrop, a deep green undulation of shrubs and sea grape, shaking their branches as if in mimicry. At that distance, unable to hear the liquid metallic arpeggios, the shouted vocals, it seemed to him that all the complicated grace of the dancers, the children chasing each other in and out among them, and the jittery attacks of the drummers served a more oblique principle than mere abandon, that their madness was orchestrated toward some end, a mysterious providence being invoked.

From the heat of late afternoon, the temperature must have dropped twenty-five degrees. The weather had driven most people inside, and so the colonel and Gammage came to the landward end of Punta Manabique without incident. “I’m not gonna hug you, Maury,” Gammage said as they stood together. “’Case somebody’s watching.”

“I appreciate that,” the colonel said. “Though it might do wonders for Madame Anaya’s reputation.” He gazed toward the seaward end; even in the strong moonlight, the thrashing foliage and shifting shadows made it impossible to determine if Benito Casamayor’s boat was at hand. “You’d better hurry.”

“I’m gone. But once Carbonell’s over, I’ll come back and we’ll hoist a few.”

Gammage stood there a moment longer, a vastly ludicrous figure with his turban, his boot-polish skin, and the dress alternately belling and molding to his thighs. The disguise failed to hide his anxiety. “See ya, Maury.” He hesitated another moment, turned, and went trudging off among the palms that bounded the little ridge guarding the point.

The colonel watched him out of sight. Then, head down against the wind, he started toward town, making slow progress in the tacky sand. He felt disconnected from the events of the night. Though concerned for Gammage, for Margery, he was unafraid of what might happen to him, and not because he was assured of his immunity. Either he did not especially care what happened, or else he believed he could do nothing about it. There was evidence to support both conclusions. Perhaps, he thought, they were more-or-less the same, related products of a larger mental circumstance. The wind chilled him; the concatenations of the surf were assaultive in their loudness, affecting his nerves. His unsettled mood deepened. Despite wanting to see Margery, he came to dread the noise and the crowd at the Club Atomica. Instead of going directly to the club, he decided he would first visit Tomas and let him know how the plan had turned out.

The corrugated metal door of the Drive-In Puerto Rico had been rolled almost all the way down, a half-foot-high gap of light showing beneath it. Tomas must be putting his bills in order, the colonel told himself, or working on his mural. He picked up his pace, slogging into the wind, eager to see the old man. As he came abreast of the steps that led up onto the deck, he made out a shadowy figure sitting at a table close by the door. “Tomas?” he called, mounting the steps. “What are you doing out here? Aren’t you cold?”

Someone pushed him hard, planted a hand between his shoulder blades and sent him reeling forward. He righted himself and saw a short dark man in fatigues standing at the top of the steps, training a pistol at his chest—his lined face had the vaguely oriental cast of a Mayan, and his jacket bore a sergeant’s insignia.

“Man, are you crazy?” Furious, the colonel took a step toward him. “I’ll have your balls!”

“Colonel Galpa!”

Carbonell had risen from his seat by the door. His presence was not completely unexpected, and the colonel was not shocked to see him; but he felt a kind of fatalistic incredulity, such as he might have experienced on hearing a gloomy prognosis from his doctor.

“Where is Tomas?” he asked.

“Where is the journalist… Gammage?” Carbonell came toward him, easy in his walk, like a cat sauntering toward his favorite chair after a big meal. The wind had not mussed a strand of his slicked-back hair. He folded his arms and waited for the colonel to respond, his face empty of emotion. He was in his shirtsleeves and on one of his cuffs was a dark spattering. In his left hand was a silvered automatic pistol.

“He is gone,” said the colonel. “Within a few hours, I imagine, the world will know what you are.”

“The world already knows. The world doesn’t care.”

“Then why concern yourself with Gammage?”

“A loose end,” said Carbonell. “I hate them.” He stepped back to the door, leaned down and rolled it up head-high. Inside the restaurant, Tomas was sitting on a cane-backed bar stool, lashed to it; his head was down, and there was blood on his shirt. Behind him, his mural had a zodiacal value, like those Hindu renderings of a higher plane, rife with gaudy emblems of illusion. A hurricane lamp rested on the bar, painting the scene with orange light and shadow, adding a gloss that made its brutality seem artful. The colonel could not tell if the old man was alive. Grief and rage contended in him.

“I’ll kill you for this,” he said to Carbonell.

“Please… let’s avoid histrionics,” said Carbonell. “We’re both soldiers. We both have our duties to perform.”

“You call this duty? This is the act of an animal!”

“At times it is my duty to act so.”

“Don’t hand me that!”

“Had you been ordered to fire your rockets into an enemy city, an action that would kill innocents, would you have obeyed? Of course you would. Now you can afford to speculate on the morality involved. But in the moment of war, you would not have hesitated. Your war may have ended, Colonel. But mine goes on.”

“There is no war except the one you prosecute against your own people. Even if there were, torturing an old man is not…”

“A traitor, not an old man!”

“An old man!” The colonel bunched his fists. “But what does it matter? An old man, a child, a pregnant woman…”

“Enough!”

The feral face that the colonel had glimpsed behind Carbonell’s polished exterior at the Club Atomica now surfaced. His teeth were bared, his eyes pointed with black light.

“There is no war? What could you know of it? A drunken fool who wanders the hinterlands in search of pleasure! You have no idea of the enemies I confront!”

He gestured sharply with his pistol, signaling the colonel to come inside, then instructed him to sit on the stool next to Tomas and ordered the sergeant to secure him.

“This is my fault,” Carbonell said as the sergeant lashed the colonel’s legs to the stool. “I failed to take you seriously. I so enjoyed watching the birth of your little conspiracy. I wanted to see who else would be pulled in. When I learned you had left the hotel with the black woman, I realized I had miscalculated. My men were fools not to follow you, but I should have expected them to be fools. I should have taken you into custody earlier.”

The sergeant finished his work, and Carbonell told him to return to his post. Once the sergeant had vanished into the dark, he rolled down the door and, his back to the colonel, asked, “Where is Gammage?” As he turned from the door, Tomas groaned. “Ah!” said Carbonell, as if delighted by this sign of life. He lifted Tomas’s head. One of the old man’s teeth had pierced his lower lip; his eyes were swollen shut. Fresh blood oozed from a cut at his scalp line.

“He’s not doing so well,” Carbonell said in a tone of mock concern. “Without medical treatment, I doubt there’s hope.”

The colonel started to vent his outrage, and Carbonell back-handed him with the butt of his pistol. White light shattered behind the colonel’s eyes, and he slumped toward unconsciousness, his mind filled with questions—then he realized the questions were all the same. Carbonell was asking about Gammage. Groggy, he said something, an answer, maybe the truth… he wasn’t sure what he had said. The words reverberated in his head, mushy, sonorous, like someone very large talking in his sleep. But if he had spoken the truth, it was apparent that learning the truth was not Carbonell’s primary motivation. Blow after blow rained upon the colonel’s face and chest. Pain no longer occurred in separate incidences; it was a continuum, a dark passage configured with intervals of hellish brightness. At one point he felt a burning in his knee, and at another he believed that his cheek had been bitten. It was as if he were being mauled, not interrogated. Carbonell had become a dimly perceived giant, an immense otherness that shouted and surrounded him with pain. In his mind’s eye he saw a black mouth opening, rushing to swallow him, and when he emerged from darkness into a ruddy orange glow, he noticed that the metal door had been raised and Carbonell was standing beneath it, smoking a cigarette, talking—it seemed—to no one in particular.

“…will not tolerate a traitor,” he was saying. “That’s the big story, not Gammage’s…” He smiled. “Gammage’s archaeological finds. No, the story that will enthrall our people is that their hero has betrayed the nation. Betrayed them. What I have done will be buried in the shadow of that betrayal. But it is always best to avoid trouble, even if it is no great trouble. Tell me where Gammage is, and I will allow the woman to return to the United States.”

Margery was alive. Carbonell had her. Striking those two bits of information together produced a spark that nourished the colonel and restored a vague semblance of ambition and intent; but he could not build it to a blaze. Pain surged in his leg, and he understood he had been shot. Blood was leaking from the side of his knee.

“There was a time,” Carbonell said, “when I wanted to know you, Colonel Galpa. When I hoped to understand what sort of man it required to do what you have done. But it is clear to me that you no longer are that man. You have been made decadent and weak by constant adulation… constant indulgence. There is nothing left of you that I would wish to understand.” He grasped the handle of the door. “I am offering you a chance to be that man again. If you want to save the woman, tell me about Gammage. Otherwise I will give her to my men.” The door made a grating sound as he rolled it down behind him. “Take some time to think about it. But not too long, Colonel. Not too long.”

Alone, the colonel felt weaker and more clear-headed, as if Carbonell’s presence had been both a confusion and a strength. With effort, he lifted his head to Tomas and spoke his name. The old man gave no sign of having heard. The colonel’s left eye was filmed over with blood, making half the world red. He struggled with his bonds, but could not loosen them. The exertion left him dizzy. Something cooled his chin. Spittle, he realized. Then blackness. A curtain of it was drawn across the light, then opened again. They were going to die. This notion, poignant though it was, seemed nonsensical. A verity. He edited the thought. He was going to die, Margery was going to die, Tomas was going to die. Gammage, too… perhaps. There was nothing he could do about it. He lifted his head a second time, and, trying to ignore dizziness, the whining in his ears, the sense that his head contained a volume of liquid sloshing back and forth, he did his best to focus. After staring at Tomas for several seconds, subtracting his wobbliness and the general spin of things from what he saw, he became certain that the old man had stopped breathing. The blood seeping from his scalp had congealed. Weighted down by despair, the colonel let his head fall, and became without thought, his consciousness directed toward twinges, aches, fluctuations in pain. He resolved not to tell Carbonell anything. It was the only choice that remained. Not an easy resolution to keep, but Tomas obviously had done so. His eyelids drooped, and he thought he might be slipping away; then he felt a delicate pressure on his chest, a pressure unrelated to pain, and saw the indigo lizard clinging to his jacket, its orange eyes less than six inches away from his own.

“Go away,” said the colonel, not rejecting the lizard so much as embracing rejection, recognizing this to be his sustaining principle.

The lizard scooted closer. Comical in its wide-eyed fixation. Provoked by some deep systemic injury, the colonel’s body triggered a wave of numbness; his breath sobbed forth. The lizard stretched toward him, as if attracted by a new scent. The colonel did not know what he should do. Something, he felt, was required of him. The word “Magic” appeared on his mental screen. Orange letters outlined in pink and radiating a neonlike glow. Then a thought about Tomas dragged its shadow across the word, erasing it. He suddenly hated the lizard, perceived it as emblematic of his guilt. Unable to shout for fear of alerting Carbonell, he bugged his eyes, hoping to infuse his stare with sufficient venom to frighten it. The lizard inched closer yet, and the colonel pushed his face toward it, going nose-to-nose. This particularized view of its miniature saurian snout and pebbly skin defanged his hatred. He had a giddy apprehension of kinship, of life confronting life. What do you want? he thought. He made a mantra of the question, repeating it over and over. As suddenly as he had hated it, he now desired the lizard to be what Tomas had said it was: a singular event that was his alone to explore.

“Whatever…” he began.

He had been about to say something on the order of, “Whatever thing you want of me, whatever you must do, now is the time to let it be known,” more a foxhole utterance than a devout entreaty. Before he could finish the thought, however, as had happened that first night in Puerto Morada, a lightness pervaded his body and he was blinded by a flash of orange radiance, and he saw a pair of enormous eyes, the bridge of a huge nose. But this time, instead of being restored to a more typical perspective, his field of vision began to shift, changing so rapidly that he barely registered the details. He found himself moving at a jittery pace, heading toward a red column that angled up on the diagonal from a rough wooden surface. Then he was ascending the column; then he was turned briefly upside down; then he was atop a wide red wooden expanse, proceeding toward a tall pale man in his shirtsleeves, standing in front of a corrugated metal door, smoking a cigarette.

The colonel had no doubt that his vantage point was atop one of the picnic tables on the deck and that the man was Carbonell; and, although it was difficult to credit, he had very little doubt that he was seeing this from the perspective of an indigo lizard with orange eyes. Had he been able to think clearly, he might have been more rigorous in his doubt, but the fact was, he could scarcely think at all. It seemed he had undergone a compression, the entire complexity of his mind shriveled to a point of observance, the memory of pain, and the will to act in some direction… a direction not yet manifest. Everything else, even the fear that would naturally attend such a transference, had been subsumed.

Once again the lizard—and the colonel with it—began to move. Down from the table, across the deck, and out onto the sand. He was becoming oriented to the lizard’s wide field of vision, the hand-held camera effect of its paddling run, and was thus able to recognize that the white valleys through which he skipped and skittered were dimples in the sand, and that the forest-like fringe ahead was the grass at the foot of a cashew tree. He was vaguely aware of the light, the noise of wind and sea, and acutely aware of a spectrum of lesser noises, tiny ticks and hisses and scuttlings. Bitterly alluring scents came to him, and as he darted into the grass, he realized he was hungry. Fiercely hungry. The need to satisfy his hunger was becoming paramount, yet he knew that this was wrong. Something was required of him. Something important. Exerting his remnant of will, he pushed hunger aside and heard a trebly ratcheting sound, a cry that seemed to issue from inside him. He was running now, scooting along through grass and across moonstruck patches of sand, into frills of restless shadow, continuing to emit that thin cry. To what end he did this, the colonel could not guess, he only knew it accorded with his sense of responsibility. Hunger returned to goad him, but each time he managed to repress it, reminding himself of the trust placed in him, no matter its indeterminate nature, and finally, buoyed by a feeling of accomplishment, he went scurrying back across the dimpled, grainy surface of the world and saw before him the steps of the Drive-In Puerto Rico.

The man in shirtsleeves was no longer on the deck; but his feet were visible through a gap between the floorboards and the metal door. From the colonel’s vantage on the railing he spotted a smaller man standing perhaps fifty feet away, half-obscured in the shadow of the palms. The colonel heard himself emit another ratcheting cry, then another and another yet, and the smaller man began to shake his legs and arms with extreme agitation. He shouted, his voice shredded by the torment of wind and surf; he staggered away from the palms and into the light, followed by a dark tide that flowed in a channel to his feet, up his legs to his back and chest, and then his face. He whirled madly, blindly, grabbing at the air, plucking at himself, and fell. He scrambled to his hands and knees, but fell again, and the tide—composed, the colonel understood, of little four-footed ribbons with tails—washed over him, mounding higher and higher until the man was hidden beneath a dome of writhing, wriggling bits of flesh. Off along the beach, similar tides were filming out from the margin of the grass onto the sand, and as the colonel looked on, the stretch of bone-colored beach leading away from the restaurant was gradually eroded, transformed inch by inch into a stretch of dark seething life, gleaming faintly and then going all to shadow under the glow of the inconstant moon.

Atop his railing, the colonel experienced an appreciation of power that verged on the religious, as if he were the focal point not only of the infinite army of lizards now surrounding the Drive-In Puerto Rico, but of the sky and sea, the tumultuous wind, and the electric principle of the distant storm whose gentlest edge helped to choreograph the moment. He seemed to remember other moments, brighter ones, a bright blue scatter of occasions, when he had felt much the same, high and solitary, deadly weapons at his command… though none so pure, so devoid of hesitancy. With a ratcheting cry, he announced himself to his troops, not yet summoning them to act. Then the metal door rolled up and the man against whom his army was arrayed stepped onto the deck and lit a cigarette. He stood for a second, making sure that his smoke was going, then rolled down the door, hiding the two bloody figures slumped within. He sat at the end of a bench, resting an elbow on the railing, his cigarette coal brightening and fading, the picture of a man taking his ease after a spate of hard work, watching the sea and thinking about some trivial thing, an appointment, a debt owed, a soccer match. Serene in the midst of tribulation. An absolutely ordinary man, even to the blood on his hands.

The colonel gave his order.

The army’s scuttling rush was out-voiced by wind and water, and Carbonell did not notice he was under attack until a vanguard of anoles swarmed onto his leg. He jumped up, beating at them, his face aghast. But upon seeing the rest of the army, the instant before they, too, swarmed over him, he seemed less frightened than bewildered, suggesting that while an assault of several dozen was alarming, an aggression perpetrated by thousands, millions, posed a mystery to be considered. Lizards sheathed his limbs six and seven deep, hampering the flailing of his arms. He wore momentarily a lizardskin cap that slipped down over his face and unraveled, the separate threads of it nipping at his eyes and darting into his mouth when he screamed—he bit down, spat out fragments of meat and skin, clamped his lips, trying to walk with legs made cumbersome by hip-high boots of squirming flesh, then fell, striking his head on the corner of a bench, and lay still while the army mounded atop him, building its dome ever higher… until the colonel, who had scuttled to the edge of a table overlooking Carbonell, ordered them to stop.

The colonel peered down at his fallen enemy. His head exposed, body buried beneath a mound equal in height to the roof of the restaurant, Carbonell might have been one of his own victims. The humor of his right eye was burst; the tissue beneath it had been worried bloody; the eyelid itself was missing. His lips were chewed ragged, as was the strip of cartilage dividing his nostrils. But he was alive. Breath shuddered out of him. His good eye fluttered open. He tried to scream, but perhaps the weight on his chest was too great to allow the full expansion of his lungs, and the guttering sound that issued from his throat was almost inaudible. He rolled his eye, as if hoping to find an avenue of sight that offered promise. In doing so, he locked stares with the colonel. From that exchange, he must have gained no encouraging impression, for he immediately set to twisting his shoulders about, trying to work them free. Once he recognized the impossibility of this, he closed his eye and grimaced, straining upward against the weight. After half a minute or thereabouts, he desisted and allowed his head, which had been lifted in the effort, to fall back. He looked in his submission as if he were under a peaceful charm, a magical creature guarded in his sleep by the clever reptilian faces peeking from his hair.

A bright green lizard, barely an inch long, perhaps a day or two out of the egg, came to explore his left ear, inserting itself into the inner canal. Suddenly agitated, Carbonell redoubled his efforts to escape, heaving against the weight of the mound, shaking his head wildly, and the little green one partially withdrew. A much larger lizard, gray with a sagittal crest and spots of brighter color on its throat, placed the tip of its snout in the crease between Carbonell’s lips, giving rise to the notion that should the mouth open, it would be prepared to slip inside and slither down the throat. A striped lizard with an alligator-like head flattened against his cheek, as did a pale brown chameleon. Several others arranged themselves on his brow. It looked as though his face were the subject of a primitive design. He kept very still. Only when a blue skink stuck its head into a nostril, plugging it, did he react, twitching, huffing, attempting to expel it. When the second nostril was plugged by a second skink, he sucked in air through the corners of his mouth. Three tiny lizards—babies, it appeared—joined the large grayish-green sentry at his lips, seeking to push inside, and soon dozens more skittered down from the mound to englobe his head, covering it completely. At this juncture Carbonell abandoned himself to terror, twisting his neck with such force, it appeared he had in mind to unscrew it from his body. He took once again to shaking his head, then to beating it against the boards. Whether as a last futile exercise or an attempt to knock himself out, it was difficult to say. Whatever the level of his desperation, the battering grew faster and faster, coming to seem a convulsive movement and not in the least controlled, the autonomic reaction of a system in the throes of shutting down. Eventually, abruptly, it ceased.

As the army made its disorganized retreat, flowing off across the sand in gradually dwindling streams, a black lake draining into rivulets and animated puddles, the colonel lost interest in the corpse and went pattering over the boards and beneath the metal door and up the leg of a barstool, then onto a trouser leg and higher, until he was gazing at a pair of enormous eyes directly above him. The eyes were shut, and this frustrated the colonel. Unclear as to how he should proceed, he gave in to hunger and started to descend, intent upon returning to the grass, where he had scented food. But as he clung to the trouser cuff, preparing to drop to the floor, it occurred to him that his duty was not done. There was one thing left to do. He scooted back up to hang beneath those lidded eyes, awaiting an opportunity for dutiful action.

Over the next minutes, ten of them at least, and each one seeming longer than average, the urge to hunt became increasingly powerful, but he succeeded in resisting it, demanding of himself a familiar rigor, growing comfortable with denial. It was as if some old discipline were helping to armor him against the depredations of repetition and boredom. He involved himself in examining the oily creases in the skin surrounding the eyes, the shallow fissures in the lips, the graying stubble sprouting above them. Turning back to the eyes he found that they had come partly open, but the irises were angled upward, as if about to slide back beneath the lids. He crept higher, extending his neck so that his snout was scant millimeters from the right eye, and gave a grating cry. The lid shuttered down, then up; the eye shifted, focused on him, and after a brief period of disorientation, he came to feel sodden and dull. Agony lanced his knee, like a lightning bolt expelled from an all-encompassing ache. Staring at him, its snout almost touching his skin, was an indigo lizard with orange eyes. The colonel recalled the lizard hanging in this exact position earlier that evening, and could not imagine how it had managed to remain there throughout the beating that he had received. Less reasonable memories sprang to mind, muddying his understanding of what had taken place. He wanted to look about and locate Carbonell, but was afraid to move. Everything inside him felt broken, contused. Nevertheless, he raised his eyes and saw the rolled-down door. Which meant that Carbonell must be outside. Smoking and talking to his sergeant. Another memory surfaced… or not a memory. A dream. Carbonell’s face with one eye missing, a pulp of blood and tissue occupying its place. Startled, half convinced it was not a dream, the colonel straightened. The exertion brought dark shapes swimming up to cloud his vision. The glare of the lamp beside him grew wavering and pointy like a Christmas star… dimming, receding. Pain spiked his temple, and he went sliding away from the world in the grip of an irresistible slippage.

During the colonel’s first week in the hospital, he received many visitors and learned many things. He learned that Tomas was dead, as he had feared, and that Margery had been released, thanks to the actions of a young lieutenant, Jaime Arguello, who had been proclaimed a national hero for his single-handed assault on the barracks where she had been held by soldiers loyal to the traitor, Carbonell. “Traitor” was what the newspapers called him now that his atrocities had become newsworthy. Policemen asked questions of the colonel, most of which he was unable to answer. His memories had been beaten out of him, but the process of questioning dredged up a few details, and the policemen supplied others. For instance, when asking about Carbonell’s death, one of the policemen told the colonel that the autopsy had revealed several lizards in Carbonell’s esophagus, and wanted to know how this might have occurred. The colonel had no information on the subject, but he recalled the indigo lizard and had the idea that it had played some part in the event. When he said as much to the representative of the air force who came to gauge his fitness for duty, the representative appeared to view the statement as a symptom of unsoundness—two days later the colonel received notification that he was to be retired on full pension, this an entirely misleading term for the pittance he was due.

Having no real income and no prospects, alienated from his family, the colonel’s view of the future, never rosy, turned bleak indeed. In the bathroom mirror he observed that the lines in his face had deepened and that the gray in his hair, formerly a salting, had spread to cover his entire scalp. He was old. Grown old in a single terrible night. What possible future could he have? But during his second week in the hospital, he was visited by a lawyer bearing Tomas’s will and the deed to the Drive-In Puerto Rico, who informed him that he, Mauricio Galpa, was now sole owner and proprietor of the restaurant. This legacy caused the colonel—until that moment benumbed by his experiences—to weep and to remember all the kindnesses done him by Tomas, and then to think that perhaps the old man, too, had played a part in what had happened. He tried to piece it all out, but medication and headaches impeded thought and he made little progress.

Several days before he was released from the hospital, he received a phone call from Margery in the States. She thanked him effusively for what he had done to help Gammage and said that she had wanted to see him, but the news bureau, fearing for her safety, had flown her out of the country; and now the government—the colonel’s government—had declared her persona non grata.

“I tried to call you,” she said. “But I couldn’t get through until today.”

“I’m glad you’re safe,” the colonel said.

“Sooner or later they’ll grant me another visa. Then I’ll come visit.”

“That would be nice.”

“This is so…” She made a frustrated noise. “I hate the telephone.”

The colonel waited for her to continue.

“I know there was something between us,” she said. “Not just a moment. Something I’d like to understand. You know?”

“I felt something, too,” the colonel said.

“Maybe you could visit me.”

“I’ll be undergoing treatment for a while. Physical therapy. But yes, it’s a possibility.”

“You sound so distant.”

“It’s the pills. They give me so many pills, it’s hard to think.” He reached for a glass of water on the bed table and took a sip. “What are you doing now?”

“Oh… I’m going to be flying to Israel next week. We’re doing a piece on the elections. The period leading up to them.”

“Israel. That’s very far away.”

“I’ll only be there a month.”

A vague emotion possessed the colonel, a nondescript sadness that seemed attached to no specific thing, but to all things, like weather blown in from the sea.

“They’re paging me. I have to go,” Margery said. “But we’ll get together. I’ll come visit you. I promise.”

“I know,” said the colonel.

The day before he was released, the colonel hired a man to transfer his belongings to Tomas’s room behind the Drive-In Puerto Rico, and the next morning, dressed in civilian clothes, going slowly with his cane, having to stop every couple of minutes to restore his equilibrium and catch his breath, he walked down to the beach and sat on the deck of the restaurant, watching the placid sea. Inside the break the water was the color of aquamarine; beyond it, a dark lapis lazuli. Gulls skied against the blue heavens, and confections of white cloud, bubbled like meringue, moved leisurely west to east along the horizon. Combers plumed at the seaward end of Punta Manabique. The glorious peace of the day overwhelmed the colonel. He rested his head in his hands, his mind flocked with things half felt and half remembered, with shades of sorrow, bright spikes of relief. Tears filled his eyes. He wiped them away and, steadier, he unlocked the corrugated metal door, rolled it up, and stepped into the restaurant.

The place had been cleaned, the bar stools washed free of blood and set in a neat row, and there was a note from Tomas’s girl, who signed herself Incarnacion, giving her telephone number and saying that she would be ready to work whenever he needed her. But it was the rear wall that held the colonel’s notice—the mural was missing. Gone. The lime green background color did not appear to have been painted over, but the volcanoes and cruise ships and Carbonell’s face and the gray airplane, they were all gone… except for the image of an indigo lizard high in the left-hand corner. The colonel was unclear about many things, but he was certain the image of the lizard had previously occupied the lower right-hand corner of the wall. He did not find this dissonance as disturbing as once he might. It seemed that by way of compensation for his lack of clarity concerning his personal life, he was now able to grasp some of what Tomas had told him over the years and, though he could not have articulated it at the time, he recognized a strange circularity in the events that had led to his ownership of the restaurant.

He switched on the generator to cool the beer, made coffee, and taking a cup, returned to the deck. In the verge of the palms, hummingbirds blurred the air above a hibiscus bush; the breeze wafted steam from his cup. A lapidary fineness of well-being settled about the colonel, as if land and sea and air had conformed to his physical shape and emotional configuration, and he thought of what Tomas had said about finding a place you knew was yours. It did not escape him that the old man might have known more than he had claimed about the world and magic, that he might have anticipated their fates, and may even have had a hand in directing them. Nor did the colonel fail to acknowledge the significance of the vanished mural, the blank wall that had been left for him, perhaps, to fill with his own images. Once he would have sought to explain this away, to debunk any less than traditionally rational explanation; but now he wanted to understand it, and he realized that in order to do so he would first have to accept the uniqueness of the circumstance.

Approaching from the direction of the colonel’s hotel, a man drew near and ascended the steps of the deck. Young, dark with the blood of the Miskitia; carrying a lieutenant’s dress jacket and hat. “Is it too early?” he asked.

“I have coffee,” said the colonel. “And some pastries… though they may be stale. This is my first day. I’ve had no time to organize.”

“Bueno… cafe.” The young man sat at a table removed by two from the colonel. He leaned against the railing and let his head fall back. The strain that had been apparent in his face dissolved. “Dios! The sun feels good.”

“Would you mind serving yourself?” The colonel indicated his bad knee. “I have an injury.”

The young man went inside and poured a coffee. On his return, after a moment’s hesitation, he sat on the bench opposite the colonel. He offered a friendly smile, blew steam from his cup. His mustache had not grown in fully, like the mustache of a pubescent boy, yet lines of stress tiered his brow and his eyes seemed worn, like dark coins from which the symbols of the realm had been effaced.

“What brings you out so early?” the colonel asked.

“I couldn’t sleep in my hotel. It’s all the reporters, the officials. They keep me awake half the night, and afterward I can’t sleep.”

“Reporters? Are you famous?”

“No, I… no. I’m only doing some appearances. Publicity for the army. They tell me I’ll be back with my unit in a month or two.”

“That’s not so long.”

“You have no idea how long a single day with these people can last.”

“I can imagine,” said the colonel. “Surely there must be some benefit attendant to these appearances.”

“The girls.” The young man smiled shyly. “That part of it’s all right.”

The colonel laughed, then introduced himself as Mauricio.

“Mucho gusto,” said the young man. “Jaime.”

They began to speak of other matters. The weather, the fishing, the quality of the national soccer team, the girls of Puerto Morada. And though the colonel suspected that the young man was his country’s latest hero, perhaps the next in a curious tradition of heroes whose lives were somehow connected to this stretch of beach with its hummingbirds, lizards, and wandering cows, he did not invest the notion with much thought and immersed himself in the conversation.

The sun climbed higher; warmth cored the colonel’s bones. The sky paled to an eggshell blue, the swells beyond the break grew heavier. A shadow glided through the water near Punta Manabique. He could not tell if it was a manta ray, but the shadow was itself validation of a kind, implying that beneath the surface of things there was always a beautiful monster waiting to rise.

“Do you think there are places that know us?” he asked the young man, and in asking the question, he felt the presence of Tomas, felt his old friend’s amiable yet pointed inquisitiveness occupying his flesh like a perfume, then drifting on, but leaving its trace. “It is a common enough question to ask if one knows such and such a place. ‘Do you know Fuengirola? Do you know Roatan?’ But do they have a sense of us? I wonder. Does their vitality affect us in ways we cannot conceive?”

The young man looked puzzled. “Are you implying that we are acted upon by the ground beneath our feet? I don’t believe it. Our fates are not controlled by mysterious forces. A man carries his fate with him.”

“That was not precisely my implication. But I must say I’m not so certain of things as you appear to be. I am beginning to believe there are places made for us in this world, and if we find them, we may understand patterns in our lives, in all life, that are immune to straightforward analysis.”

A tall black woman in a red blouse and a denim skirt emerged from the sea grape beside the restaurant, bearing atop her head a bowl covered by a white cloth, and began walking along the beach toward the town, establishing a human comparative to the swaying of the palms—this graceful juxtaposition of man and nature caused the colonel to contrast his generally dismaying impression of the world with his impression of it now.

“This place, for instance,” he said. “I have only been here a short time, but already I know a few things I did not know before.”

The young man, who had been staring apprehensively toward the hotel, turned to him, his face once more full of strain, and said, “I’m sorry… I was preoccupied. You said something about this place? I don’t think I understood you.”

A breeze drifted the grit that had accumulated on the table top, rearranging the grains into a slender crescent of glittering specks, and though some small portion of the colonel’s mind resisted the idea, he imagined a similar shift must have happened inside him, that all the grit of his desultory past had been realigned to suit a larger purpose. He wanted to deny this, but to do so he would have had to deny the feeling that then engulfed him. A feeling of calm satisfaction, of happiness. He had an urge to confide in the young man, to explain the simplicity of the thing it had taken him nearly twenty years to learn; but he realized that the years were necessary to the lesson.

“It’s not important,” he said, patting the young man’s hand. “It is enough to understand that whatever comes to you in life, you will always find a welcome here.”