Life During Wartime

CHAPTER ONE

One of the new Sikorsky gunships, an element of the First Air Cavalry with the words Whispering Death painted on its side, gave Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco de Juticlan, a small town located inside the green zone, which on the latest maps was designated Free Occupied Guatemala. To the east of this green zone lay an undesignated band of yellow that crossed the country from the Mexican border to the Caribbean. The Ant Farm was a firebase on the eastern edge of the yellow band, and it was from there that Mingolla—an artillery specialist not yet twenty-one years old—lobbed shells into an area that the maps depicted in black-and-white terrain markings. And thus it was that he often thought of himself as engaged in a struggle to keep the world safe for primary colors.

Mingolla and his buddies could have taken their R and R in Rio or Caracas, but they had noticed that the men who visited these cities had a tendency to grow careless upon their return; they understood from this that the more exuberant your R and R, the more likely you were to end up a casualty, and so they always opted for the lesser distractions of the Guatemalan towns. They were not really friends; they had little in common, and under different circumstances they might well have been enemies. But taking their R and R together had come to be a ritual of survival, and once they had reached the town of their choice, they would go their separate ways and perform further rituals. Because the three had survived so much already, they believed that if they continued to perform these same rituals they would complete their tours unscathed. They had never acknowledged their belief to one another, speaking of it only obliquely—that, too, was part of the ritual—and had this belief been challenged they would have admitted its irrationality; yet they would also have pointed out that the strange character of the war acted to enforce it.

The gunship set down at an airbase a mile west of town, a concrete strip penned in on three sides by barracks and offices, with the jungle rising behind them. At the center of the strip another Sikorsky was practicing takeoffs and landings—a drunken, camouflage-colored dragonfly—and two others were hovering overhead like anxious parents. As Mingolla jumped out, a hot breeze fluttered his shirt. He was wearing civvies for the first time in weeks, and they felt flimsy compared to his combat gear; he glanced around nervously, half-expecting an unseen enemy to take advantage of his exposure. Some mechanics were lounging in the shade of a chopper whose cockpit had been destroyed, leaving fanglike shards of plastic curving from the charred metal. Dusty jeeps trundled back and forth between the buildings; a brace of crisply starched lieutenants was making a brisk beeline toward a forklift stacked high with aluminum coffins. Afternoon sunlight fired dazzles on the seams and handles of the coffins, and through the heat haze the distant line of barracks shifted like waves in a troubled olive-drab sea. The incongruity of the scene—its what’s-wrong-with-this-picture mix of the horrid and the commonplace—wrenched at Mingolla. His left hand trembled, and the light seemed to grow brighter, making him weak and vague. He leaned against the Sikorsky’s rocket pod to steady himself. Far above, contrails were fraying in the deep blue range of the sky: XL-16s off to blow holes in Nicaragua. He stared after them with something akin to longing, listening for their engines, but heard only the spacy whisper of the Sikorsky’s.

Gilbey hopped down from the hatch that led to the computer deck behind the cockpit; he brushed imaginary dirt from his jeans, sauntered over to Mingolla, and stood with hands on hips: a short muscular kid whose blond crewcut and petulant mouth gave him the look of a grumpy child. Baylor stuck his head out of the hatch and worriedly scanned the horizon. Then he, too, hopped down. He was tall and rawboned, a couple of years older than Mingolla, with lank black hair and pimply olive skin and features so sharp that they appeared to have been hatcheted into shape. He rested a hand on the side of the Sikorsky, but almost instantly, noticing that he was touching the flaming letter W in Whispering Death, he jerked the hand away as if he’d been scorched. Three days before there had been an all-out assault on the Ant Farm, and Baylor had not recovered from it. Neither had Mingolla. It was hard to tell whether Gilbey had been affected.

One of the Sikorsky’s pilots cracked the cockpit door. ‘Y’all can catch a ride into Frisco at the PX,’ he said, his voice muffled by the black bubble of his visor. The sun shone a white blaze on the visor, making it seem that the helmet contained night and a single star.

‘Where’s the PX?’ asked Gilbey.

The pilot said something too muffled to be understood.

‘What?’ said Gilbey.

Again the pilot’s response was muffled, and Gilbey became angry. ‘Take that damn thing off!’ he said.

‘This?’ The pilot pointed to his visor. ‘What for?’

‘So I can hear what the hell you saying.’

‘You can hear now, can’tcha?’

‘Okay,’ said Gilbey, his voice tight. ‘Where’s the goddamn PX?’

The pilot’s reply was unintelligible; his faceless mask regarded Gilbey with inscrutable intent.

Gilbey balled up his fists. ‘Take that son of a bitch off!’

‘Can’t do it, soldier,’ said the second pilot, leaning over so that the two black bubbles were nearly side by side. ‘These here doobies’—he tapped his visor—‘they got microcircuits that beams shit into our eyes. ’Fects the optic nerve. Makes it so we can see the beaners even when they undercover. Longer we wear ’em, the better we see.’

Baylor laughed edgily, and Gilbey said, ‘Bullshit!’ Mingolla naturally assumed that the pilots were putting Gilbey on, or else their reluctance to remove the helmets stemmed from a superstition, perhaps from a deluded belief that the visors actually did bestow special powers. But given a war in which combat drugs were issued and psychics predicted enemy movements, anything was possible, even microcircuits that enhanced vision.

‘You don’t wanna see us, nohow,’ said the first pilot. ‘The beams fuck up our faces. We’re deformed-lookin’ mothers.’

‘Course you might not notice the changes,’ said the second pilot. ‘Lotsa people don’t. But if you did, it’d mess you up.’

Imagining the pilots’ deformities sent a sick chill mounting from Mingolla’s stomach. Gilbey, however, wasn’t buying it. ‘You think I’m stupid?’ he shouted, his neck reddening.

‘Naw,’ said the first pilot. ‘We can see you ain’t stupid. We can see lotsa shit other people can’t, ’cause of the beams.’

‘All kindsa weird stuff,’ chipped in the second pilot. ‘Like souls.’

‘Ghosts.’

‘Even the future.’

‘The future’s our best thing,’ said the first pilot. ‘You guys wanna know what’s ahead, we’ll tell you.’

They nodded in unison, the blaze of sunlight sliding across both visors: two evil robots responding to the same program.

Gilbey lunged for the cockpit door. The first pilot slammed it shut, and Gilbey pounded on the plastic, screaming curses. The second pilot flipped a switch on the control console, and a moment later his amplified voice boomed out, ‘Make straight past that forklift till you hit the barracks. You’ll run right into the PX.’

It took both Mingolla and Baylor to drag Gilbey away from the Sikorsky, and he didn’t stop shouting until they drew near the forklift with its load of coffins: a giant’s treasure of enormous silver ingots. Then he grew silent and lowered his eyes. They wangled a ride with an MP corporal outside the PX, and as the jeep hummed across the concrete, Mingolla glanced over at the Sikorsky that had transported them. The two pilots had spread a canvas on the ground, had stripped to shorts, and were sunning themselves. But they had not removed their helmets. The weird juxtaposition of tanned bodies and black heads disturbed Mingolla, reminding him of an old movie in which a guy had gone through a matter transmitter along with a fly and had ended up with the fly’s head on his shoulders. Maybe, he thought, the pilots’ story about the helmets was true: they were impossible to remove. Maybe the war had gotten that strange.

The MP corporal noticed him watching the pilots and let out a barking laugh. ‘Those guys,’ he said, with the flat emphatic tone of a man who knew whereof he spoke, ‘are fuckin’ nuts!’

Six years before, San Francisco de Juticlan had been a scatter of thatched huts and concrete-block structures deployed among palms and banana leaves on the east bank of the Río Dulce, at the junction of the river and a gravel road that connected with the Pan American Highway; but it had since grown to occupy substantial sections of both banks, increased by dozens of bars and brothels: stucco cubes painted all the colors of the rainbow, with a fantastic bestiary of neon signs mounted atop their tin roofs. Dragons; unicorns; fiery birds; centaurs. The MP corporal told Mingolla that the signs were not advertisements but coded symbols of pride; for example, from the representation of a winged red tiger crouched among green lilies and blue crosses, you could deduce that the owner was wealthy, a member of a Catholic secret society, and ambivalent toward government policies. Old signs were constantly being dismantled, and larger, more ornate ones erected in their stead as testament to improved profits, and this warfare of light and image was appropriate to the time and place because San Francisco de Juticlan was less a town than a symptom of war. Though by night the sky above it was radiant, at ground level it was mean and squalid. Pariah dogs foraged in piles of garbage, hardbitten whores spat from the windows, and, according to the corporal, it was not unusual to stumble across a corpse, likely a victim of the gangs of abandoned children who lived in the fringes of the jungle. Narrow streets of tawny dirt cut between the bars, carpeted with a litter of flattened cans and feces and broken glass; refugees begged at every corner, displaying burns and bullet wounds. Many of the buildings had been thrown up with such haste that their walls were tilted, their roofs canted, and this made the shadows they cast appear exaggerated in their jaggedness, like shadows in the work of a psychotic artist, giving visual expression to a pervasive undercurrent of tension. Yet as Mingolla moved along, he felt at ease, almost happy. His mood was due in part to his hunch that it was going to be one hell of an R and R (he had learned to trust his hunches); but it spoke mainly to the fact that towns like this had become for him a kind of afterlife, a reward for having endured a harsh term of existence.

The corporal dropped them off at a drugstore, where Mingolla bought a box of stationery, and then they stopped for a drink at the Club Demonio: a tiny place whose whitewashed walls were shined to faint phosphorescence by the glare of purple light bulbs dangling from the ceiling like radioactive fruit. The club was packed with soldiers and whores, most sitting at tables around a dance floor not much bigger than a king-size mattress. Two couples were swaying to a ballad that welled from a jukebox encaged in chicken wire and two-by-fours; veils of cigarette smoke drifted with underwater slowness above their heads. Some of the soldiers were mauling their whores, and one whore was trying to steal the wallet of a soldier who was on the verge of passing out; her hand worked between his legs, encouraging him to thrust his hips forward, and when he did this, she pried with her other hand at the wallet stuck in the back pocket of his tight-fitting jeans. But all the action seemed listless, halfhearted, as if the dimness and syrupy music had thickened the air and were hampering movement. Mingolla took a seat at the bar. The bartender glanced at him inquiringly, his pupils becoming cored with purple reflections, and Mingolla said, ‘Beer.’

‘Hey, check that out!’ Gilbey slid onto an adjoining stool and jerked his thumb toward a whore at the end of the bar. Her skirt was hiked to mid-thigh, and her breasts, judging by their fullness and lack of sag, were likely the product of elective surgery.

‘Nice,’ said Mingolla, disinterested. The bartender set a bottle of beer in front of him, and he had a swig; it tasted sour, watery, like a distillation of the stale air.

Baylor slumped onto the stool next to Gilbey and buried his face in his hands. Gilbey said something to him that Mingolla didn’t catch, and Baylor lifted his head. ‘I ain’t goin’ back,’ he said.

‘Aw, Jesus!’ said Gilbey. ‘Don’t start that crap.’

In the half-dark Baylor’s eye sockets were clotted with shadows. His stare locked onto Mingolla. ‘They’ll get us next time,’ he said. ‘We should head downriver. They got boats in Livingston that’ll take you to Panama.’

‘Panama!’ sneered Gilbey. ‘Nothin’ there ’cept more beaners.’

‘We’ll be okay at the Farm,’ offered Mingolla. ‘Things get too heavy, they’ll pull us back.’

‘“Too heavy”?’ A vein throbbed in Baylor’s temple. ‘What the fuck you call “too heavy”?’

‘Screw this!’ Gilbey heaved up from his stool. ‘You deal with him, man,’ he said to Mingolla. He gestured at the big-breasted whore. ‘I’m gonna climb Mount Silicon.’

‘Nine o’clock,’ said Mingolla. ‘The PX. Okay?’

Gilbey said, ‘Yeah,’ and moved off. Baylor took over his stool and leaned close to Mingolla. ‘You know I’m right,’ he said in an urgent whisper. ‘They almost got us this time.’

‘Air Cav’ll handle ’em,’ said Mingolla, affecting nonchalance. He opened the box of stationery and unclipped a pen from his shirt pocket.

‘You know I’m right,’ Baylor repeated.

Mingolla tapped the pen against his lips, pretending to be distracted.

‘Air Cav!’ said Baylor with a despairing laugh. ‘Air Cav ain’t gonna do squat!’

‘Why don’t you put on some decent tunes?’ Mingolla suggested. ‘See if they got any Prowler on the box.’

‘Dammit!’ Baylor grabbed his wrist. ‘Don’t you understand, man? This shit ain’t workin’ no more!’

Mingolla shook him off. ‘Maybe you need some change,’ he said coldly; he dug out a handful of coins and tossed them on the counter. ‘There! There’s some change.’

‘I’ m tellin’ you…’

‘I don’t wanna hear it!’ snapped Mingolla.

‘You don’t wanna hear it?’ said Baylor, incredulous. He was on the verge of losing control, his dark face slick with sweat, one eyelid fluttering. He pounded the countertop for emphasis. ‘Man, you better hear it! ’Cause we don’t pull somethin’ together soon, real soon, we’re gonna fuckin’ die! You hear that, don’tcha?’

Mingolla caught him by the shirtfront. ‘Shut up!’

‘I ain’t shuttin’ up!’ Baylor shrilled. ‘You and Gilbey, man, you think you can save your ass by stickin’ your head in the sand. But I’m gonna make you listen.’ He threw back his head, and his voice rose to a shout. ‘We’re gonna die!’

The way he shouted it—almost gleefully, like a kid yelling a dirty word to spite his parents—pissed Mingolla off. He was sick of Baylor’s scenes. Without planning it, he hit him, pulling the punch at the last instant. Kept a hold of his shirt and clipped him on the jaw, just enough to rock back his head. Baylor blinked at him, stunned, his mouth open. Blood seeped from his gums. At the opposite end of the counter, the bartender was leaning beside a choirlike arrangement of liquor bottles, watching Mingolla and Baylor, and some of the soldiers were watching, too: they looked pleased, as if they had been hoping for a spot of violence to liven things up. Mingolla felt debased by their attentiveness, ashamed of his bullying. ‘Hey, I’m sorry, man,’ he said. ‘I…’

‘I don’t give a shit ’bout you’re sorry,’ said Baylor, rubbing his mouth. ‘Don’t give a shit ’bout nothin’ ’cept gettin’ the hell outta here.’

‘Leave it alone, all right?’

But Baylor wouldn’t leave it alone. He continued to argue, adopting the long-suffering tone of someone carrying on bravely in the face of great injustice. Mingolla tried to ignore him by studying the label on his beer bottle: a red and black graphic portraying a Guatemalan soldier, his rifle upheld in victory. It was an attractive design, putting him in mind of the poster work he had done before being drafted; but considering the unreliability of Guatemalan troops, he perceived the heroic pose as a bad joke. Mingolla gouged a trench through the center of the label with his thumbnail.

At last Baylor gave it up and sat staring down at the warped veneer of the counter. Mingolla let him sit a minute; then, without shifting his gaze from the bottle, he said, ‘Why don’t you put on some decent tunes?’

Baylor tucked his chin onto his chest, maintaining a stubborn silence.

‘It’s your only option, man,’ Mingolla went on. ‘What else you gonna do?’

‘You’re crazy,’ said Baylor; he flicked his eyes toward Mingolla and hissed it like a curse. ‘Crazy!’

‘You gonna take off for Panama by yourself? Un-unh. You know the three of us got something going. We come this far together, and if you just hang tough, we’ll go home together.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Baylor. ‘I don’t know anymore.’

‘Look at it this way,’ said Mingolla. ‘Maybe we’re all three of us right. Maybe Panama is the answer, but the time just isn’t ripe. If that’s true, me and Gilbey will see it sooner or later.’

With a heavy sigh, Baylor got to his feet. ‘You ain’t never gonna see it, man,’ he said dejectedly.

Mingolla had a swallow of beer. ‘Check if they got any Prowler on the box. I could relate to some Prowler.’

Baylor stood for a moment, indecisive. He started for the jukebox, then veered toward the door. Mingolla tensed, preparing to run after him. But Baylor stopped and walked back over to the bar. Lines of strain were etched deep in his forehead. ‘Okay,’ he said, a catch in his voice. ‘Okay. What time tomorrow? Nine o’clock?’

‘Right,’ said Mingolla, turning away: ‘The PX.’

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Baylor cross the room and bend over the jukebox to inspect the selections. He felt relieved. This was the way all their R and Rs had begun, with Gilbey chasing a whore and Baylor feeding the jukebox while he wrote a letter home. On their first R and R he had written his parents about the war and its bizarre forms of attrition; then, realizing that the letter would alarm his mother, he had torn it up and written another, saying merely that he was fine. He would tear this letter up as well, but he wondered how his father would react if he were to read it. Most likely with anger. His father was a firm believer in God and country, and though Mingolla understood the futility of adhering to any moral code in light of the insanity around him, he had found that something of his father’s tenets had been ingrained in him: he would never be able to desert as Baylor kept insisting. He knew it wasn’t that simple, that other factors, too, were responsible for his devotion to duty; but since his father would have been happy to accept the responsibility, Mingolla tended to blame it on him. He tried to picture what his parents were doing at that moment—father watching the Mets on TV, mother puttering in the garden—and then, holding those images in mind, he began to write.

A Prowler tune blasted from the jukebox, and Mingolla broke off writing to listen: it was a furious, jittery music, fueled—it seemed—by the same aggressive paranoia that had generated the war. People shoved back chairs, overturned tables, and began dancing in the vacated spaces; they were crammed together, able to do no more than shuffle in rhythm, but their tread set the light bulbs jiggling at the ends of their cords, the purple glare slopping over the walls. A slim, acne-scarred whore came to dance in front of Mingolla, shaking her breasts, holding out her arms to him. Her face was corpse-pale in the unsteady light, her smile a dead leer. Trickling from one eye, like some exquisite secretion of death, was a black tear of sweat and mascara. Mingolla couldn’t be sure he was seeing her right. His left hand started trembling, and for a couple of seconds the entire scene lost its cohesiveness. Everything looked scattered, unrecognizable, embedded in a separate context from everything else: a welter of meaningless objects bobbing up and down on a tide of deranged music. Then somebody opened the door, admitting a wedge of sunlight, and the room settled back to normal. Scowling, the whore danced away. Mingolla breathed easier. The tremors in his hand subsided. He spotted Baylor near the door talking to a scruffy Guatemalan guy… probably a coke connection. Coke was Baylor’s panacea, his remedy for fear and desperation. He always returned from R and R bleary-eyed and prone to nosebleeds, boasting about the great dope he’d scored. Pleased that he was following routine, Mingolla went back to his letter.

It was nearly sunset by the time Mingolla left the bar to begin the second part of his ritual, to wander innocent as a tourist through the native quarter, partaking of whatever fell to hand, maybe having dinner with a Guatemalan family, or buddying up with a soldier from another outfit and going to church, or hanging out with some young guys who’d ask him about America. He had done each of these on previous R and Rs, and his pretense of innocence always amused him. If he were to follow his inner directives, he would burn out the horrors of the firebase with whores and drugs; but on that first R and R—stunned by the experience of combat and needing solitude—a protracted walk had been his course of action, and he was committed not only to repeating it but to recapturing his dazed mental set: it would not do to half-ass the ritual. In this instance, given recent events at the Ant Farm, he did not have to work very hard to achieve confusion.

The Río Dulce was a wide blue river, heaving with a tight chop. Thick jungle hedged its banks, and yellowish reed beds grew out from both shores. At the spot where the gravel road ended was a concrete pier, and moored to it a barge that served as a ferry; it was already loaded with its full complement of vehicles—two trucks—and carried about thirty pedestrians. Mingolla boarded and stood in the stern beside three infantrymen who were still wearing their combat suits and helmets, holding doublebarreled rifles that were connected by flexible tubing to backpack computers; through their smoked faceplates he could see green reflections from the readouts on their visor displays. They made him uneasy, reminding him of the two pilots, and he felt better after they had removed their helmets and proved to have normal human faces. Spanning a third of the way across the river was a sweeping curve of white concrete supported by slender columns, like a piece fallen out of a Dali landscape: a bridge upon which construction had been halted. Mingolla had noticed it from the air just before landing and hadn’t thought much about it; but now the sight took him by storm. It seemed less an unfinished bridge than a monument to some exalted ideal, more beautiful than any finished bridge could be. And as he stood rapt, with the ferry’s oily smoke farting out around him, he sensed that there was an analogue of that beautiful curving shape inside him, that he, too, was a road ending in midair. It gave him confidence to associate himself with such loftiness and purity, and for a moment he let himself believe that he also might have—as the upward-angled terminus of the bridge implied—a point of completion lying far beyond the one anticipated by the architects of this fate.

On the west bank past the town the gravel road was lined with stalls: skeletal frameworks of brushwood poles roofed with palm thatch. Children chased in and out among them, pretending to aim and fire at one another with stalks of sugarcane. But hardly any soldiers were in evidence. The crowds that moved along the road were composed mostly of Indians: young couples too shy to hold hands; old men who looked lost and poked litter with their canes; dumpy matrons who made outraged faces at the high prices; shoeless farmers who kept their backs ramrod-straight and wore grave expressions and carried their money knotted in handkerchiefs. At one of the stalls Mingolla bought a fish sandwich and a Coca-Cola. He sat on a stool and ate contentedly, relishing the hot bread and the spicy meat cooked inside it, watching the passing parade. Gray clouds were bulking up and moving in from the south, from the Caribbean; now and then a flight of XL-16s would arrow northward toward the oil fields beyond Lake Izabal, where the fighting was very bad. Twilight fell. The lights of town began to be picked out sharply against the empurpling air. Guitars were plucked, hoarse voices sang, the crowds thinned. Mingolla ordered another sandwich and Coke. He leaned back, sipped and chewed, steeping himself in the good magic of the land, the sweetness of the moment. Beside the sandwich stall, four old women were squatting by a cooking fire, preparing chicken stew and corn fritters; scraps of black ash drifted up from the flames, and as twilight deepened, it seemed these scraps were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that were fitting together overhead into the image of a starless night.

Darkness closed in, the crowds thickened again, and Mingolla continued his walk, strolling past stalls with necklaces of light bulbs strung along their frames, wires leading off them to generators whose rattle drowned out the chirring of frogs and crickets. Stalls selling plastic rosaries, Chinese switchblades, tin lanterns; others selling embroidered Indian shirts, flour-sack trousers, wooden masks; others yet where old men in shabby suit coats sat cross-legged behind pyramids of tomatoes and melons and green peppers, each with a candle cemented in melted wax atop them, like primitive altars. Laughter, shrieks, vendors shouting. Mingolla breathed in perfume, charcoal smoke, the scents of rotting fruit. He began to idle from stall to stall, buying a few souvenirs for friends back in New York, feeling part of the hustle, the noise, the shining black air, and eventually he came to a stall around which forty or fifty people had gathered, blocking all but its thatched roof from view. A woman’s amplified voice cried out, ‘La mariposa!’ Excited squeals from the crowd. Again the woman cried out, ‘El cuchillo!’ The two words she had called—the butterfly and the knife—intrigued Mingolla, and he peered over heads.

Framed by the thatch and rickety poles, a dusky-skinned young woman was turning a handle that spun a wire cage: it was filled with white plastic cubes, bolted to a plank counter. Her black hair was pulled back from her face, tied behind her neck, and she wore a red sundress that left her shoulders bare. She stopped cranking, reached into the cage, and without looking plucked one of the cubes; she examined it, picked up a microphone, and cried, ‘La luna!’ A bearded man pushed forward and handed her a card. She checked the card, comparing it against some cubes that were lined up on the counter; then she gave the man a few bills of Guatemalan currency.

The composition of the game appealed to Mingolla. The dark woman; her red dress and cryptic words; the runelike shadow of the wire cage—all this seemed magical, an image out of an occult dream. Part of the crowd moved off, accompanying the winner, and Mingolla let himself be forced closer by new arrivals pressing in from behind. He secured a position at the corner of the stall, fought to maintain it against the eddying of the crowd, and, on glancing up, he saw the woman smiling at him from a couple of feet away, holding out a card and a pencil stub. ‘Only ten cents Guatemalan,’ she said in American-sounding English.

The people flanking Mingolla urged him to play, grinning and clapping him on the back. But he didn’t need urging. He knew he was going to win: it was the clearest premonition he had ever had, and it was signaled mostly by the woman herself. He felt a powerful attraction to her. It was as if she were a source of heat… not of heat alone but also of vitality, sensuality, and now that he was within range, that heat was washing over him, making him aware of a sexual tension developing between them, bringing with it the knowledge that he would win. The strength of the attraction surprised him, because his first impression had been that she was exotic-looking but not beautiful. Though slim, she was a little wide-hipped, and her breasts, mounded high and served up in separate scoops by her tight bodice, were quite small. Her face, like her coloring, had an East Indian cast, its features too large and voluptuous to suit the delicate bone structure; yet they were so expressive, so finely cut, that their disproportion came to seem a virtue. Except that it was thinner, the cheeks hollowed, the face might have belonged to one of those handmaidens found on Hindu religious posters, kneeling beneath Krishna’s throne. Very sexy, very serene. That serenity, Mingolla decided, wasn’t just a veneer. It ran deep. But at the moment he was more interested in her breasts. They looked nice pushed up like that, gleaming with a sheen of sweat. Two helpings of shaky pudding.

The woman waggled the card, and he took it: a simplified bingo card with symbols instead of letters and numbers. ‘Good luck,’ she said, and laughed, as if in reaction to some private irony. Then she began to spin the cage.

Mingolla didn’t recognize many of the words she called, but an old man cozied up to him and pointed to the appropriate square whenever he got a match. Soon several rows were almost complete. ‘La manzana!’ cried the woman, and the old man tugged at Mingolla’s sleeve, shouting, ‘Se ganó!’

As the woman checked his card, Mingolla thought about the mystery she presented. Her calmness, her unaccented English, and the upper-class background it implied made her seem out of place here. Could be she was a student, her education interrupted by the war… though she might be a bit too old for that. He figured her to be twenty-two or twenty-three. Graduate school, maybe. But there was an air of worldliness about her that didn’t support that theory. He watched her eyes dart back and forth between the card and the plastic cubes. Large heavy-lidded eyes. The whites stood in such sharp contrast to her dusky skin that they looked fake: milky stones with black centers.

‘You see?’ she said, handing him his winnings—about three dollars—and another card.

‘See what?’ Mingolla asked, perplexed.

But she had already begun to spin the cage again.

He won three of the next seven cards. People congratulated him, shaking their heads in amazement; the old man cozied up further, suggesting in sign language that he was the agency responsible for Mingolla’s good fortune. Mingolla, however, was nervous. His ritual was founded on a principle of small miracles, and though he was certain the woman was cheating on his behalf (that, he assumed, had been the meaning of, her laughter, her ‘You see?’), though his luck was not really luck, its excessiveness menaced that principle. He lost three cards in a row, but there-after won two of four and grew even more nervous. He considered leaving. But what if it was luck? Leaving might run him afoul of a higher principle, interfere with some cosmic process and draw down misfortune. It was a ridiculous idea, but he couldn’t bring himself to risk the faint chance that it might be true.

He continued to win. The people who had congratulated him became disgruntled and drifted off, and when there was only a handful of players left, the woman closed down the game. A grimy street kid materialized from the shadows and began dismantling the equipment. Unbolting the wire cage, unplugging the microphone, boxing up the plastic cubes, stuffing it all into a burlap sack. The woman moved out from behind the stall and leaned against one of the roof poles. Half-smiling, she cocked her head, appraising Mingolla, and then—just as the silence between them began to get prickly—she said, My name’s Debora.’

‘David.’ Mingolla felt as awkward as a fourteen-year-old; he had to resist the urge to jam his hands into his pockets and look away. ‘Why’d you cheat?’ he asked; in trying to cover his nervousness, he said it too loudly and it sounded like an accusation.

‘I wanted to get your attention,’ she said. ‘I’m… interested in you. Didn’t you notice?’

‘I didn’t want to take it for granted.’

She laughed. ‘I approve! It’s always best to be cautious.’

He liked her laughter; it had an easiness that made him think she would celebrate the least good thing.

Three men passed by arm in arm, singing drunkenly. One yelled at Debora, and she responded with an angry burst of Spanish. Mingolla could guess what had been said, that she had been insulted for associating with an American. Maybe we should go somewhere,’ he said. ‘Get off the streets.’

‘After he’s finished.’ She gestured at the boy, who was now taking down the string of light bulbs. It’s funny,’ she said. I have the gift myself, and I’m usually uncomfortable around anyone else who has it. But not with you.’

‘The gift?’ Mingolla thought he knew what she was referring to, but was leery about admitting to it.

‘What do you call it? ESP?’

He gave up the idea of denying it. ‘I never put a name on it,’ he said.

‘It’s strong in you. I’m surprised you’re not with Psicorps.’

He wanted to impress her, to cloak himself in a mystery equal to hers. How do you know I’m not?’

‘I could tell.’ She pulled a black purse from behind the counter. ‘After drug therapy there’s a change in the gift, in the way it comes across. It doesn’t feel as hot, for one thing.’ She glanced up from the purse. Or don’t you perceive it that way? As heat.’

‘I’ve been around people who felt hot to me,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t know what it meant.’

‘That’s what it means… sometimes.’ She stuffed some bills into her purse. ‘So, why aren’t you with Psicorps?’

Mingolla thought back to his first interview with a Psicorps agent: a pale, balding man with the innocent look around the eyes that some blind people have. While Mingolla had talked, the agent had fondled the ring Mingolla had given him to hold, paying no mind to what was being said, and had gazed off distractedly, as if listening for echoes. They tried hard to recruit me,’ Mingolla said. But I didn’t see much point. Those guys think they’re mental wizards or something, but all they do is predict stuff, and they’re wrong half the time. And I was scared of the drugs, too. I heard they had bad side-effects.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know… I heard they did bad stuff to your head, changed your personality.’

‘You’re lucky it was voluntary,’ she said. ‘Here they just snap you up.’

The boy said something to her; he swung the burlap sack over his shoulder, and after a rapidfire exchange of Spanish he ran off toward the river. The crowds were still thick, but more than half the stalls had shut down; those that remained open looked—with their thatched roofs and strung lights and beshawled women—like crude nativity scenes ranging the darkness. Beyond the stalls, neon signs winked on and off: a chaotic menagerie of silver eagles and crimson spiders and indigo dragons. Watching them burn and vanish, Mingolla experienced a wave of dizziness. Things were starting to appear disconnected as they had at the Club Demonio.

‘Don’t you feel well?’ she asked.

‘I’m just tired.’

She turned him to face her, put her hands on his shoulders. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s something else.’

The weight of her hands and the smell of her perfume helped to steady him. ‘There was an assault on the firebase a few days ago,’ he said. It’s still with me a little, y’know.’

She gave his shoulders a squeeze and stepped back. ‘Maybe I can do something.’ She said this with such gravity, he thought she must have something specific in mind. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

‘I’ll tell you at dinner… that is, if you’re buying.’ She took his arm, jollying him. You owe me that much, don’t you think, after all your good luck?’

‘Why aren’t you with Psicorps?’ he asked as they walked.

She didn’t answer immediately, keeping her head down, nudging a scrap of cellophane with her toe. They were moving along an uncrowded street, bordered on the left by the river—a channel of sluggish black lacquer—and on the right by the windowless rear walls of some bars. Overhead, behind a latticework of supports, a neon lion shed a baleful green nimbus. ‘I was in school in Miami when they started testing here,’ she said at last. ‘And after I came home, my family got on the wrong side of Department Six. You know Department Six?’

‘I’ve heard some stuff.’

‘Sadists don’t make efficient bureaucrats,’ she said. ‘There were a lot of people taken into the prison the same day we were. We were all supposed to be tested, but the guards started beating people, and everything got confused. No one was sure who’d been tested and who hadn’t. It ended up that some of us were passed through without the tests.’

Their footsteps crunched in the dirt; husky jukebox voices cried out for love from the next street over. ‘What happened?’ Mingolla asked.

‘To my family?’ She shrugged. ‘Dead. No one ever bothered to confirm it, but it wasn’t necessary. Confirmation, I mean.’ She went a few steps in silence. ‘As for me…’ A muscle bunched at the corner of her mouth. I did what I had to.’

He was tempted to ask for specifics, but thought better of it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and then kicked himself for having made such a banal comment.

They passed a bar lorded over by a grinning red-and-purple neon ape. Mingolla wondered it these glowing figures had meaning for guerrillas with binoculars in the hills: burned-out tubes signaling times of attack or troop movements. He cocked an eye toward Debora. She didn’t look despondent as she had a second before, and that accorded with his impression that her calmness was a product of self-control, that her emotions were strong but held in tight check and let out only for exercise. From the river came a solitary splash, some cold fleck of life surfacing briefly, then returning to its long, ignorant glide through the darkness… and his life no different really, though maybe less graceful. How strange it was to be walking beside this woman who gave off heat like a candle flame, with earth and sky blended into a black gas, and neon totems standing guard overhead.

‘Shit,’ said Debora under her breath.

It surprised him to hear her curse. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ she said wearily. ‘Just “shit.”’ She pointed ahead and quickened her pace. ‘Here we are.’

The restaurant was a working-class place that occupied the ground floor of a hotel: a two-story building of yellow concrete block with a buzzing Fanta sign hung above the entrance. Hundreds of moths swarmed about the sign, flickering white against the darkness, and in front of the steps stood a group of teenage boys who were throwing knives at an iguana. The iguana was tied by its hind legs to the step railing. It had amber eyes, a hide the color of boiled cabbage, and was digging its claws into the dirt and arching its neck like a pint-size dragon about to take flight. As Mingolla and Debora walked up, one of the boys scored a hit in the iguana’s tail and it flipped high into the air, shaking loose the knife. The boys passed around a bottle of rum to celebrate.

Except for the waiter—a pudgy young man leaning beside a door that opened into a smoke-filled kitchen—the place was empty. Glaring overhead lights shined up the grease spots on the plastic tablecloths and made the uneven thicknesses of the yellow paint appear to be dripping. The concrete floor was freckled with dark stains that Mingolla discovered to be the remains of insects. The food turned out to be decent, however, and Mingolla shoveled down a plateful of chicken and rice before Debora had half-finished hers. She ate delicately, chewing each bite a long time, and he had to carry the conversation. He told her about New York, his painting, how a couple of galleries had shown interest even though he was just a student. He compared his work to Rauschenberg, to Silvestre. Not as good, of course. Not yet. He had the notion that everything he told her—no matter its irrelevance to the moment—was securing the relationship, establishing subtle ties: he pictured the two of them enwebbed in a network of luminous threads that acted as conduits for their attraction. He could feel her heat more strongly than ever, and he wondered what it would be like to make love to her, to be swallowed by that perception of heat. The instant he wondered this, she glanced up and smiled, as if sharing the thought. He wanted to ratify his sense of intimacy, to tell her something he had told no one else, and so—having only one important secret—he told her about the ritual.

She laid down her fork and gave him a penetrating look. ‘You can’t really believe that,’ she said.

‘I know it sounds—’

‘Ridiculous,’ she broke in. ‘That’s how it sounds.’

‘It’s the truth,’ he said defiantly.

She picked up her fork again, pushed around some grains of rice. ‘How is it for you,’ she said, ‘when you have a premonition? I mean, what happens? Do you have dreams, hear voices?’

‘Sometimes I just know things,’ he said, taken aback by her abrupt change of subject. ‘And sometimes I see pictures. It’s like with a TV that’s not working right. Fuzziness at first, then a sharp image.’

‘With me, it’s dreams. And hallucinations. I don’t know what else to call them.’ Her lips thinned; she sighed, appearing to have reached some decision. ‘When I first saw you, just for a second, you were wearing battle gear. There were inputs on the gauntlets, cables attached to the helmet. The faceplate was shattered, and your face… it was pale, bloody.’ She put her hand out to cover his. ‘What I saw was very clear, David. You can’t go back.’

He hadn’t described artilleryman’s gear to her, and no way could she have seen it. Shaken, he said, Where am I gonna go?’

‘Panama,’ she said. ‘I can help you get there.’

She suddenly snapped into focus. You could find her, dozens like her, in any of the R and R towns. Preaching pacifism, encouraging desertion. Do-gooders, most with guerrilla connections. And that, he realized, must be how she had known about his gear. She had probably gathered information on the different types of units in order to lend authenticity to her dire pronouncements. His opinion of her wasn’t diminished; on the contrary, it went up a notch. She was risking her life by talking to him. But her mystery had been dimmed.

‘I can’t do that,’ he said.

‘Why not? Don’t you believe me?’

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

‘I…’

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

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

‘It isn’t childish.’

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

‘You don’t understand,’ he said.

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

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

‘I have to go,’ she said coldly.

‘Because I won’t desert?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

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

‘Don’t you think it’s worth it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWO

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

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

The soldier gave back Mingolla’s papers. He was now all smiles, and—perhaps in the interest of solidifying Guatemalan-American relations, perhaps because he was proud of his work—he went over to the jeep and lifted the girl’s head by the hair so Mingolla could see her face. ‘Bandida!’ he said, arranging his features into a comical frown. The girl’s face was not unlike the soldier’s, with the same blade of a nose and prominent cheekbones. Fresh blood glistened on her lips, and the faded tattoo of a coiled serpent was centered on her forehead. Her eyes were open, and staring into them—despite their cloudiness—Mingolla felt that he had made a connection, that she was regarding him sadly from somewhere behind those eyes, continuing to die past the point of clinical death. Then an ant crawled out of her nostril, perching on the crimson curve of her lip, and the eyes looked merely vacant. The soldier let her head fall and wrapped his hand in the hair of a second corpse; but before he could lift it, Mingolla turned away and headed down the road toward the airbase.

There was a row of helicopters lined up at the edge of the landing strip, and walking between them, Mingolla saw the two pilots who had given him a ride from the Ant Farm. They were stripped to shorts and helmets, wearing baseball gloves, and they were playing catch, lofting high flies to each other. Behind them, atop their Sikorsky, a mechanic was fussing with the main rotor housing. The sight of the pilots didn’t disturb Mingolla as it had the previous day; in fact, he found their weirdness somehow comforting. Just then, the ball eluded one of them and bounced Mingolla’s way. He snagged it and flipped it back to the nearer of the pilots, who came loping over and stood pounding the ball into the pocket of his glove. With his black reflecting face and sweaty, muscular torso, he looked like an eager young mutant.

‘How’s she goin’?’ he asked. ‘Seem like you a little tore down this mornin’.’

‘I feel okay,’ said Mingolla defensively. ‘’Course’—he smiled, making light of his defensiveness—‘maybe you see something I don’t.’

The pilot shrugged; the sprightliness of the gesture seemed to convey good humor.

Mingolla pointed to the mechanic. You guys broke down, huh?’

‘Just overhaul. We’re goin’ back up early tomorrow. Need a lift?’

‘Naw, I’m here for a week.’

An eerie current flowed through Mingolla’s left hand, setting up a palsied shaking. It was bad this time, and he jammed the hand into his hip pocket. The olive-drab line of barracks appeared to twitch, to suffer a dislocation and shift farther away; the choppers and jeeps and uniformed men on the strip looked toylike: pieces in a really neat GI joe Airbase kit. Mingolla’s hand beat against the fabric of his trousers like a sick heart.

‘I gotta get going,’ he said.

‘Hang in there,’ said the pilot. ‘You be awright.’

The words had a flavor of diagnostic assurance that almost convinced Mingolla of the pilot’s ability to know his fate, that things such as fate could be known. ‘You honestly believe what you were saying yesterday, man?’ he asked. ‘’Bout your helmets? ’Bout knowing the future?’

The pilot bounced the ball on the concrete, snatched it at the peak of its rebound, and stared down at it. Mingolla could see the seams and brand name reflected on the visor, but nothing of the face behind it, no evidence either of normalcy or deformity. ‘I get asked that a lot,’ said the pilot. People raggin’ me, y’know. But you ain’t raggin’ me, are you, man?’

‘No,’ said Mingolla. ‘I’m not.’

‘Well,’ said the pilot, ‘it’s this way. We buzz round up in the nothin’, and we see shit on the ground, shit nobody else sees. Then we blow that shit away. Been doin’ it like that for ten months, and we’re still alive. Fuckin’ A, I believe it!’

Mingolla was disappointed. ‘Yeah, okay,’ he said.

‘You hear what I’m sayin’?’ asked the pilot. ‘I mean we’re livin’ goddamn proof.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Mingolla scratched his neck, trying to think of a diplomatic response, but thought of none. ‘Guess I’ll see you.’ He started toward the PX.

‘Hang in there, man!’ the pilot called after him. ‘Take it from me! Things gonna be lookin’ up for you real soon!’

The canteen in the PX was a big barnlike room of un-painted boards; it was of such recent construction that Mingolla could still smell sawdust and resin. Thirty or forty tables; a jukebox; bare walls. Behind the bar at the rear of the room, a sour-faced corporal with a clipboard was doing a liquor inventory, and Gilbey—the only customer—was sitting by one of the east windows, stirring a cup of coffee. His brow was furrowed, and a ray of sunlight shone down around him, making it look that he was being divinely inspired to do some soul-searching.

‘Where’s Baylor?’ asked Mingolla, sitting opposite him.

‘Fuck, I dunno,’ said Gilbey, not taking his eyes from the coffee cup. ‘He’ll be here.’

Mingolla kept his left hand in his pocket. The tremors were diminishing, but not quickly enough to suit him; he was worried that the shaking would spread as it had after the assault. He let out a sigh, and in letting it out he could feel all his nervous flutters. The ray of sunlight seemed to be humming a wavery golden note, and that, too, worried him. Hallucinations. Then he noticed a fly buzzing against the windowpane. ‘How was it last night?’ he asked.

Gilbey glanced up sharply. ‘Oh, you mean Big Tits. She lemme check her for lumps.’ A humorless smile nicked the comers of his mouth. He went back to stirring his coffee.

Mingolla was hurt that Gilbey hadn’t asked about his night; he wanted to tell him about Debora. But that was typical of Gilbey’s self-involvement. His narrow eyes and sulky mouth were the imprints of a mean-spiritedness that permitted few concerns aside from his own well-being. Yet, despite his insensitivity, his stupid rages and limited conversation, Mingolla believed that he was smarter than he appeared, that disguising one’s intelligence must have been a survival tactic in Detroit, where he had grown up. It was his craftiness that gave him away: his insights into the personalities of adversary lieutenants; his slickness at avoiding unpleasant duty; his ability to manipulate his peers. He wore stupidity like a cloak, and perhaps he had worn it for so long that it could not be removed. Still, Mingolla envied him its virtues, especially the way it had numbed him to the assault.

‘He’s never been late before,’ said Mingolla after a while.

‘So what, he’s fuckin’ late!’ snapped Gilbey, glowering. ‘He’ll be here!’

Behind the bar, the corporal switched on a radio and spun the dial past Latin music, past Top Forty, then past an American voice reporting the baseball scores. ‘Hey!’ called Gilbey. ‘Let’s hear that, man! I wanna see what happened to the Tigers.’ With a shrug, the corporal complied.

‘… White Sox six, A’s three,’ said the announcer. ‘That’s eight in a row now for the Sox…’

‘White Sox are kickin’ some ass,’ said the corporal, pleased.

‘The White Sox!’ Gilbey sneered. ‘What the White Sox got ’cept a buncha beaners hittin’ two hunnerd and some coke-sniffin’ niggers? Shit! Every fuckin’ spring the White Sox are flyin’, man. But then ’long comes summer and the good drugs hit the street and they fuckin’ die!’

‘Yeah,’ said the corporal, ‘but this year…’

‘Take that son of a bitch Caldwell,’ said Gilbey, ignoring him. ‘I seen him coupla years back when he had a trial with the Tigers. Man, that nigger could hit! Now he shuffles up there like he’s just feelin’ the breeze.’

‘They ain’t takin’ drugs, man,’ said the corporal testily. ‘They can’t take ’em ’cause there’s these tests that show if they’s on somethin’.’

Gilbey barreled ahead. ‘White Sox ain’t gotta chance, man! Know what the guy on TV calls ’em sometimes? The Pale Hose! The fuckin’ Pale Hose! How you gonna win with a name like that? The Tigers, now, they got the right kinda name. The Yankees, the Braves, the—’

‘Bullshit, man!’ The corporal was becoming upset; he set down his clipboard and walked to the end of the bar. ‘What ’bout the Dodgers? They got a wimpy name and they’re a good team. Your name don’t mean shit!’

‘The Reds,’ suggested Mingolla; he was enjoying Gilbey’s rap, its stubbornness and irrationality. Yet at the same time he was concerned by its undertone of desperation: appearances to the contrary, Gilbey was not himself this morning.

‘Oh, yeah!’ Gilbey smacked the table with the flat of his hand. The Reds! Lookit the Reds, man! Lookit how good they been doin’ since the Cubans come into the war. You think that don’t mean nothin’? You think their name ain’t helpin’ ’em? Even if they get in the Series, the Pale fuckin’ Hose don’t gotta prayer against the Reds.’ He laughed—a hoarse grunt. I’m a Tiger fan, man, but I gotta feelin’ this ain’t their year, y’know. The Reds are tearin’ up the NL East, and the Yankees is comin’ on, and when they get together in October, man, then we gonna find out alla ’bout everything. Alla ’bout fuckin’ everything!’ His voice grew tight and tremulous. ‘So don’t gimme no trouble ’bout the candyass Pale Hose, man! They ain’t shit and they never was and they ain’t gonna be shit till they change their fuckin’ name!’

Sensing danger, the corporal backed away from confrontation, and Gilbey lapsed into a moody silence. For a while there were only the sounds of chopper blades and the radio blatting out cocktail jazz. Two mechanics wandered in for an early morning beer, and not long after that three fatherly-looking sergeants with potbellies and thinning hair and quartermaster insignia on their shoulders sat at a nearby table and started up a game of rummy. The corporal brought them a pot of coffee and a bottle of whiskey, which they mixed and drank as they played. Their game had an air of custom, of something done at this time every day, and watching them, taking note of their fat, pampered ease, their old-buddy familiarity, Mingolla felt proud of his palsied hand. It was an honorable affliction, a sign that he had participated in the heart of the war as these men had not. Yet, he bore them no resentment. None whatsoever. Rather, it gave him a sense of security to know that three such fatherly men were here to provide him with food and liquor and new boots. He basked in the dull, happy clutter of their talk, in the haze of cigar smoke that seemed the exhaust of their contentment. He believed that he could go to them, tell them his problems, and receive folksy advice. They were here to assure him of the rightness of his purpose, to remind him of simple American values, to lend an illusion of fraternal involvement to the war, to make clear that it was merely an exercise in good fellowship and tough-mindedness, an initiation rite that these three men had long ago passed through, and after the war they would all get medals and pal around together and talk about bloodshed and terror with head-shaking wonderment and nostalgia, as if bloodshed and terror were old lost friends whose natures they had not fully appreciated at the time… Mingolla realized then that a smile had stretched his facial muscles taut, and that his train of thought had been leading him into spooky mental territory. The tremors in his hand were worse than ever. He checked his watch. It was almost ten o’clock. Ten o’clock! In a panic he scraped back his chair and stood.

‘Let’s look for him,’ he said to Gilbey.

Gilbey started to say something but kept it to himself. He tapped his spoon hard against the edge of the table. Then he, too, scraped back his chair and stood.

Baylor was not to be found at the Club Demonio or any of the bars on the west bank. Gilbey and Mingolla described him to everyone they met, but no one remembered him. The longer the search went on, the more insecure Mingolla became. Baylor was necessary, an essential underpinning of the platform of habits and routines that supported him, that let him live beyond the range of war’s weapons and the laws of chance, and should that underpinning be destroyed… In his mind’s eye he saw the platform tipping, he and Gilbey toppling over the edge, cartwheeling down into an abyss filled with black flames. Once Gilbey said, ‘Panama! The son of a bitch run off to Panama.’ But Mingolla didn’t think this was the case. He was certain that Baylor was close at hand. His certainty had such a valence of clarity that he became even more insecure, knowing that this sort of clarity often heralded a bad conclusion.

The sun climbed higher, its heat an enormous weight pressing down, its light leaching color from the stucco walls, and Mingolla’s sweat began to smell rancid. Only a few soldiers were on the streets, mixed in with the usual run of kids and beggars, and the bars were empty except for a smattering of drunks still on a binge from the night before. Gilbey stumped along, grabbing people by the shirt and asking his questions. Mingolla, however, terribly conscious of his trembling hand, nervous to the point of stammering, was forced to work out a stock approach whereby he could get through these brief interviews. He would amble up, keeping his right side forward, and say, I’m looking for a friend of mine. Maybe you seen him? Tall guy. Olive skin, black hair, thin. Name’s Baylor.’ He learned to let this slide off his tongue in a casual unreeling.

Finally Gilbey had had enough. ‘I’m gonna hang out with Big Tits,’ he said. ‘Meetcha at the PX tomorrow.’ He started to walk off, but turned and added, ‘You wanna get in touch ’fore tomorrow, I’ll be at the Club Demonio.’ He had an odd expression on his face. It was as if he was trying to smile reassuringly, but—due to his lack of practice—it looked forced and foolish and not in the least reassuring.

Around eleven o’clock Mingolla wound up leaning against a pink stucco wall, watching out for Baylor in the thickening crowds. Beside him, the sun-browned fronds of a banana tree were feathering in the wind, making a crispy sound whenever a gust blew them back into the wall. The roof of the bar across the street was being repaired: sheets of new tin alternating with narrow patches of rust that looked like enormous strips of bacon laid there to fry. Now and then he would let his gaze drift up to the unfinished bridge, a great sweep of magical whiteness curving into the blue, rising above the town and the jungle and the war. Not even the heat haze rippling from the tin roof could warp its smoothness. It seemed to be orchestrating the stench, the mutter of the crowds, and the jukebox music into a tranquil unity, absorbing those energies and returning them purified, enriched. He thought that if he stared at it long enough, it would speak to him, pronounce a white word that would grant his wishes.

Two flat cracks—pistol shots—sent him stumbling away from the wall, his heart racing. Inside his head the shots had spoken the two syllables of Baylor’s name. All the kids and beggars had vanished. All the soldiers had stopped and turned to face the direction from which the shots had come: zombies who had heard their master’s voice.

Another shot.

Some soldiers milled out of a side street, talking excitedly…. Fuckin’ nuts!’ one was saying, and his buddy said, ‘It was Sammy, man! You see his eyes?’

Mingolla pushed his way through them and sprinted down the side street. At the end of the block a cordon of MPs had sealed off access to the right-hand turn, and when Mingolla ran up, one of them told him to stay back.

‘What is it?’ Mingolla asked. ‘Some guy playing Sammy?’

‘Fuck off,’ the MP said mildly.

‘Listen,’ said Mingolla. ‘It might be this friend of mine. Tall, skinny guy. Black hair. Maybe I can talk to him.’

The MP exchanged glances with his buddies, who shrugged and acted otherwise unconcerned. ‘Okay,’ he said. He pulled Mingolla to him and pointed out a bar with turquoise walls on the next corner down. Go on in there and talk to the captain.’

Two more shots, then a third.

‘Better hurry,’ said the MP. ‘Ol’ Captain Haynesworth there, he don’t put much stock in negotiations.’

It was cool and dark inside the bar; two shadowy figures were flattened against the wall beside a window that opened onto the cross street. Mingolla could make out the glint of automatic pistols in their hands. Then, through the window, he saw Baylor pop up from behind a retaining wall: a three-foot-high structure of mud bricks running between an herbal-drug store and another bar. Baylor was shirtless, his chest painted with reddish brown smears of dried blood, and he was standing in a nonchalant pose, with his thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets. One of the men by the window fired at him. The report was deafening, causing Mingolla to flinch and close his eyes. When he looked out the window again, Baylor was nowhere in sight.

‘Fucker’s just tryin’ to draw fire,’ said the man who had shot at Baylor. ‘Sammy’s fast today.’

‘Yeah, but he’s slowin’ some,’ said a lazy voice from the darkness at the rear of the bar. I do believe he’s outta dope.’

‘Hey,’ said Mingolla. ‘Don’t kill him! I know the guy. I can talk to him.’

‘Talk?’ said the lazy voice. ‘You kin talk till yo’ ass turns green, boy, and Sammy ain’t gon’ listen.’

Mingolla peered into the shadows. A big sloppy-looking man was leaning on the counter; brass insignia gleamed on his beret. ‘You the captain?’ he asked. ‘They told me outside to talk to the captain.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said the man. ‘And I’d be purely delighted to talk with you, boy. What you wanna talk ’bout?’

The other men laughed.

‘Why are you trying to kill him?’ asked Mingolla, hearing the pitch of desperation in his voice. ‘You don’t have to kill him. You could use a trank gun.’

‘Got one comin’,’ said the captain. ‘Thing is, though, yo’ buddy got hisself a coupla hostages back of that wall, and we get a chance at him ’fore the trank gun ’rives, we bound to take it.’

‘But—’ Mingolla began.

‘Lemme finish, boy.’ The captain hitched up his gunbelt, strolled over, and draped an arm around Mingolla’s shoulder, enveloping him in an aura of body odor and whiskey breath. See,’ he went on, we had everything under control. Sammy there…’

‘Baylor!’ said Mingolla angrily. ‘His name’s Baylor.’

The captain lifted his arm from Mingolla’s shoulder and looked at him with amusement. Even in the gloom Mingolla could see the network of broken capillaries on his cheeks, the bloated alcoholic features. ‘Right,’ said the captain. ‘Like I’s sayin’, yo’ good buddy Mister Baylor there wasn’t doin’ no harm. Just sorta ravin’ and runnin’ ’round. But then ’long comes a coupla our Marine brothers. Seems like they’d been givin’ our beaner friends a demonstration of the latest combat gear, and they was headin’ back from said demonstration when they seen our little problem and took it ’pon themselves to play hero. Wellsir, puttin’ it in a nutshell, Mister Baylor flat kicked their ass. Stomped all over their esprit de corps. Then he drags ’em back of that wall and starts messin’ with one of their guns. And—’

Two more shots.

‘Shit!’ said one of the men by the window.

‘And there he sits,’ said the captain. ‘Fuckin’ with us. Now either the gun’s outta ammo or else he ain’t figgered out how it works. If it’s the latter case, and he does figger it out…’ The captain shook his head dolefully, as if picturing dire consequences. See my predicament?’

‘I could try talking to him,’ said Mingolla. ‘What harm would it do?’

‘You get yourself killed, it’s your life, boy. But it’s my ass that’s gonna get hauled up on charges.’ The captain steered Mingolla to the door and gave him a gentle shove toward the cordon of MPs. ‘’Preciate you volunteerin’, boy.’

Later Mingolla was to reflect that what he had done made no sense, because—whether or not Baylor had survived—he would never have been returned to the Ant Farm. But at the time, desperate to preserve the ritual, none of this occurred to him. He walked around the corner and toward the retaining wall. His mouth was dry, his heart pounded. But the shaking in his hand had stopped, and he had the presence of mind to walk in such a way that he blocked the MPs’ line of fire. About twenty feet from the wall he called out, ‘Hey, Baylor! It’s Mingolla, man!’ And as if propelled by a spring, Baylor jumped up, staring at him. It was an awful stare. His eyes were like bull’s-eyes, white showing all around the irises; trickles of blood ran from his nostrils, and nerves were twitching in his cheeks with the regularity of watch-works. The dried blood on his chest came from three long gouges; they were partially scabbed over but were oozing a clear fluid. For a moment he remained motionless. Then he reached down behind the wall, picked up a double-barreled rifle from whose stock trailed a length of flexible tubing, and brought it to bear on Mingolla.

He squeezed the trigger.

No flame, no explosion. Not even a click. But Mingolla felt that he’d been dipped in ice water. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘Baylor! It’s me!’ Baylor squeezed the trigger again, with the same result. An expression of intense frustration washed over his face, then lapsed into that dead man’s stare. He looked directly up into the sun, and after a few seconds he smiled: he might have been receiving terrific news from on high.

Mingolla’s senses had become wonderfully acute. Somewhere far away a radio was playing a country-and-western tune, and with its plaintiveness, its intermittent bursts of static, it seemed to him the whining of a nervous system on the blink. He could hear the MPs talking in the bar, could smell the sour acids of Baylor’s madness, and he thought he could feel the pulse of Baylor’s rage, an inconstant flow of heat eddying around him, intensifying his fear, rooting him to the spot. Baylor laid the gun down, laid it down with the tenderness he might have shown toward a sick child, and stepped over the retaining wall. The animal fluidity of the movements made Mingolla’s skin crawl. He managed to shuffle backward a pace and held up his hands to ward Baylor off. ‘C’mon, man,’ he said weakly. Baylor let out a fuming noise—part hiss, part whimper—and a runner of saliva slid between his lips. The sun was a golden bath drenching the street, kindling glints and shimmers from every bright surface, as if it were bringing reality to a boil.

Somebody yelled, ‘Get down, boy!’

Then Baylor flew at him, and they fell together, rolling on the hard-packed dirt. Fingers dug in behind his Adam’s apple. He twisted away, saw Baylor grinning down, all staring eyes and yellowed teeth. Strings of drool flapping from his chin. A Halloween face. Knees pinned Mingolla’s shoulders, hands gripped his hair and bashed his head against the ground. Again, and again. A keening sound switched on inside his ears. He wrenched an arm free and tried to gouge Baylor’s eyes; but Baylor bit his thumb, gnawing at the joint. Mingolla’s vision dimmed, and he couldn’t hear anything anymore. The back of his head felt mushy. It seemed to be rebounding very slowly from the dirt, higher and slower after each impact. Framed by blue sky, Baylor’s face looked to be receding, spiraling off. And then, just as Mingolla began to fade, Baylor disappeared.

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

The sergeant said that it beat him.

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

That, allowed the sergeant, was pretty goddamn stupid.

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

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

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

‘What say?’ asked the captain.

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

‘Don’t we all,’ said the captain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three other soldiers were leaning in, listening, and the kid was now addressing all of them, playing to his audience. He was so excited that he could barely keep his speech coherent, and Mingolla realized with disgust that he, too, was excited by the image of Baylor crouched on the sand. Baylor, who had cried after the assault. Baylor, who had been so afraid of snipers that he had once pissed in his pants rather than walk from his gun to the latrine.

Baylor, the Black Knight.

‘The jaguar’s screechin’ and snarlin’ and slashin’ at the air,’ the kid went on. ‘Tryin’ to put fear into the Knight. ’Cause the jaguar knows in his mind the Knight’s big trouble. This ain’t some jerk like Chaco, this is Sammy. The Knight moves to the center of the pit, still in a crouch.’ Here the kid pitched his voice low and dramatic. ‘Nothin’ happens for a coupla minutes, ’cept it’s tense. Nobody’s hardly breathin’. The jaguar springs a coupla times, but the Knight dances off the side and makes him miss, and there ain’t no damage either way. Whenever the jaguar springs, the crowd sighs and squeals, not just ’cause they’s scared of seein’ the Knight tore up, but also ’cause they can see how fast he is. Silky fast, man! Unreal. He looks ’bout as fast as the jaguar. He keeps on dancin’ away, and no matter how the jaguar twists and turns, no matter if he comes at him along the sand, he can’t get his claws into the Knight. And then, man… oh, it was so smooth! Then the jaguar springs again, and this time ’stead of dancin’ away, the Knight drops onto his back, does this half-roll onto his shoulders, and when the jaguar passes over him, he kicks up with both feet. Kicks up hard! And smashes his heels into the jaguar’s side. The jaguar slams into the pit wall and comes down screamin’, snappin’ at his ribs. They was busted, man. Pokin’ out the skin like tent posts.’

The kid wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and flicked his eyes toward Mingolla and the other soldiers to see if they were into the story. ‘We was shoutin’, man,’ he said. ‘Poundin’ the top of the pit wall. It was so loud, the guy I’m with is yellin’ in my ear and I can’t hear nothin’. Now maybe it’s the noise, maybe it’s his ribs, whatever… the jaguar goes berserk. Makin’ these scuttlin’ lunges at the Knight, tryin’ to get close ’fore he springs so the Knight can’t pull that same trick. He’s snarlin’ like a goddamn chain saw! The Knight keeps leapin’ and spinnin’ away. But then he slips, man, grabs the air for balance, and the jaguar’s on him, clawin’ at his chest. For a second they’re like waltzin’ together. Then the Knight pries loose the paw that’s hooked him, pushes the jaguar’s head back, and smashes his fist into the jaguar’s eye. The jaguar flops onto the sand, and the Knight scoots to the other side of the pit. He’s checkin’ the scratches on his chest, which is bleedin’ wicked. Meantime, the jaguar gets to his feet, and he’s fucked up worse than ever. His one eye’s fulla blood, and his hindquarters is all loosey-goosey. Like if this was boxin’, they’d call in the doctor. The jaguar figures he’s had enough of this crap, and he starts tryin’ to jump outta the pit. This one time he jumps right up to where I’m leanin’ over the edge. Comes so close I can smell his breath, I can see myself reflected in his good eye. He’s clawin’ for a grip, wantin’ to haul hisself up into the crowd. People are freakin’, thinkin’ he might be gonna make it. But ’fore he gets the chance, the Knight catches him by the tail and slings him against the wall. Just like you’d beat a goddamn rug, that’s how he’s dealin’ with the jaguar. And the jaguar’s a real mess now. He’s quiverin’. Blood’s pourin’ outta his mouth, his fangs is all red. The Knight starts makin’ these little feints, wavin’ his arms, growlin’. He’s toyin’ with the jaguar. People don’t believe what they’re seein’, man. Sammy’s kickin’ a jaguar’s ass so bad he’s got room to toy with it. If the place was nuts before, now it’s a fuckin’ zoo. Fights in the crowd, guys singin’ the Marine Hymn. Some beaner squint’s takin’ off her clothes. The jaguar tries to scuttle up close to the Knight again, but he’s too fucked up. He can’t keep it together. And the Knight, he’s still growlin’ and feintin’. A guy behind me is booin’, claimin’ the Knight’s defamin’ the purity of the sport by playin’ with the jaguar. But hell, man, I can see he’s just timin’ the jaguar, waitin’ for the right moment, the right move.’

Staring off downriver, the kid wore a wistful expression: he might have been thinking about his girlfriend. ‘We all knew it was comin’,’ he said. ‘Everybody got real quiet. So quiet you could hear the Knight’s feet scrapin’ on the sand. You could feel it in the air, and you knew the jaguar was savin’ up for one big effort. Then the Knight slips again, ’cept he’s fakin’. I could see that, but the jaguar couldn’t. When the Knight reels sideways, the jaguar springs. I thought the Knight was gonna drop down like he did the first time, but he springs, too. Feet first. And he catches the jaguar under the jaw. You could hear bone splinterin’, and the jaguar falls in a heap. He struggles to get up, but no way! He’s whinin’, and he craps all over the sand. The Knight walks up behind him, takes his head in both hands, and gives it a twist. Crack!’

As if identifying with the jaguar’s fate, the kid closed his eyes and sighed. Everybody’s been quiet till they heard that crack, then all hell broke loose. People chantin’, “Sam-mee, Sam-mee,” and people shovin’, tryin’ to get close to the pit wall so they can watch the Knight take the heart. He reaches into the jaguar’s mouth and snaps off one of the fangs and tosses it to somebody. Then Chaco comes in through the tunnel and hands him the knife. Right when he’s ’bout to cut, somebody knocks me over, and by the time I’m back on my feet, he’s already took the heart and tasted it. He’s just standin’ there with the jaguar’s blood on his mouth and his own blood runnin’ down his chest. He looks kinda confused, y’know. Like now the fight’s over and he don’t know what to do. But then he starts roarin’. He sounds the same as the jaguar did ’fore it got hurt. Crazy fierce. Ready to get it on with the whole goddamn world. Man, I lost it! I was right with that roar. Maybe I was roarin’ with him, maybe everybody was. That’s what it felt like, man. Like bein’ in the middle of this roar that’s comin’ outta every throat in the universe.’ The kid engaged Mingolla with a sober look. ‘Lotsa people go ’round sayin’ the pits are evil, and maybe they are. I don’t know. How you s’posed to tell ’bout what’s evil and what’s not down here? They say you can go to the pits a thousand times and see nothin’ like the jaguar and the Black Knight. I don’t know ’bout that, either. But I’m goin’ back just in case I get lucky. ’Cause what I saw last night, if it was evil, man, it was so fuckin’ evil it was beautiful, too.’

CHAPTER THREE

Debora was waiting at the pier, carrying a picnic basket and wearing a blue dress with a high neckline and a full skirt: a schoolgirl dress. Mingolla homed in on her. The way she had her hair, falling about her shoulders in thick dark curls, made him think of smoke turned solid, and her face seemed the map of a beautiful country with black lakes and dusky plains, a country in which he could hide. They walked along the river past the town and came to a spot where ceiba tress with massy crowns of slick green leaves and whitish bark and roots like alligator tails grew close to the shore, and there they talked and ate and listened to the water gulping against the clay bank, to the birds, to the faint noises from the airbase that at this distance sounded part of nature. Sunlight dazzled the water, and whenever wind riffled the surface, it seemed to be spreading the dazzles into a crawling crust of diamonds. Mingolla imagined that they had taken a secret path, rounded a corner of the world, and reached some eternally peaceful land. The illusion of peace was so profound that he began to see hope in it. Perhaps, he thought, something was being offered here. Some new magic. Maybe there would be a sign. Signs were everywhere if you knew how to read them. He glanced around. Thick white trunks rising into greenery, dark leafy avenues leading off between them… nothing there, but what about those weeds growing at the edge of the bank? They cast precise fleur-de-lis shadows in the clay, shadows that didn’t have much in common with the ragged configurations of the weeds themselves. Possibly a sign, though not a clear one. He lifted his gaze to the reeds growing in the shallows. Yellow reeds with jointed stalks bent akimbo, some with clumps of insect eggs like seed pearls hanging from loose fibers, and others dappled by patches of algae. That’s how they looked one moment. Then Mingolla’s vision rippled, as if the whole of reality had shivered, and the reeds were transformed into rudimentary shapes: yellow sticks poking up from flat blue. On the far side of the river, the jungle was a simple smear of Crayola green; a speedboat passing was a red slash unzippering the blue. It seemed that the rippling had jostled all the elements of the landscape a fraction out of kilter, revealing every object as characterless as a building block. Mingolla gave his head a shake. Nothing changed. He rubbed his brow. No effect. Terrified, he squeezed his eyes shut. He felt like the only meaningful piece in a nonsensical puzzle, vulnerable by virtue of his uniqueness. His breath came rapidly, his left hand fluttered.

‘David? Don’t you want to hear it?’ Debora sounded peeved.

‘Hear what?’ He kept his eyes closed.

‘About my dream. Weren’t you listening?’

He peeked at her. Everything was back to normal. She was sitting with her knees tucked under her, all her features in sharp focus. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was thinking.’

‘You looked frightened.’

‘Frightened?’ He put on a bewildered face. ‘Naw, just had a thought, is all.’

‘It couldn’t have been pleasant.’

He shrugged off the comment and sat up smartly to prove his attentiveness. ‘So tell me ’bout the dream.’

‘All right,’ she said doubtfully. The breeze drifted fine strands of hair across her face, and she brushed them back. You were in a room the color of blood, with red chairs and a red table. Even the paintings on the wall were done in shades of red, and…’ She broke off, peering at him. Do you want to hear this? You have that look again.’

‘Sure,’ he said. But he was afraid. How could she have known about the red room? She must have had a vision of it, and… Then he realized that she might not have been talking about the room itself. He’d told her about the assault, hadn’t he? And if she had guerrilla contacts, she would know that the emergency lights were switched on during an assault. That had to be it! She was trying to frighten him into deserting again, psyching him the way Christians played upon the fears of sinners with images of fiery rivers and torture. It infuriated him. Who the hell was she to tell him what was right or wise? Whatever he did, it was going to be his decision.

‘There were four doors in the room,’ she went on. ‘You wanted to leave the room, but you couldn’t tell which of the doors was safe to use. You tried the first door, and it turned out to be a facade. The knob of the second door turned easily, but the door itself was stuck. Rather than forcing it, you went to the third door. It was cold, and it frightened you. The knob of the fourth door was made of glass and cut your hand. After that you just walked back and forth, unsure what to do.’ She waited for a reaction, and when he gave none, she said, Do you understand?’

He kept silent, biting back anger.

‘I’ll interpret it for you,’ she said.

‘Don’t bother.’

‘The red room is war, and the false door is the way of your childish—’

‘Stop!’ He grabbed her wrist, squeezing it hard.

She glared at him until he released her. ‘Your childish magic,’ she went on. ‘The third door, the one that frightened you, that’s Psicorps.’

‘Maybe I’m not frightened of it anymore.’

‘Bad side effects, remember?’

‘What is it with you?’ he asked. ‘You have some kinda quota to fill? Five deserters a month, and you get a medal?’

She tucked her skirt down to cover her knees, fiddled with a loose thread. From the way she was acting, Mingolla wondered whether he had asked an intimate question and she was framing an answer that wouldn’t be indelicate. Finally she said, ‘Is that who you believe I am?’

‘Why else would you be handing me this bullshit?’

‘What’s the matter with you, David?’ She leaned forward, cupping his face in her hands. ‘Why…’

He pushed her hands away. ‘What’s the matter with me? This’—his gesture included the sky, the river, the trees—‘that’s what’s the matter. You remind me of my parents. They ask the same sorta ignorant questions.’ Suddenly he wanted to injure her with answers, to find an answer like acid to throw in her face and watch it eat away her tranquility. Know what I do for my parents when they ask dumb-ass questions like “What’s the matter?” I tell ’em a story. A war story. You wanna hear a war story? Something happened a few days back that’ll do for an answer just fine.’

‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ she said, discouraged.

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Be my pleasure.’

The Ant Farm was a large sugarloaf hill overlooking dense jungle on the eastern border of Fire Zone Emerald; jutting out from its summit were rocket and gun emplacements that at a distance resembled a crown of thorns jammed down over a green scalp. For several hundred yards around, the land had been cleared of all vegetation. The big guns had been lowered to maximum declension and in a mad moment had obliterated huge swaths of jungle, snapping off regiments of massive tree trunks a couple of feet above the ground, leaving a moat of blackened stumps and scorched red dirt seamed with fissures. Tangles of razor wire had replaced the trees and bushes, forming surreal blue-steel hedges, and buried beneath the wire was a variety of mines and detection devices. These did little good, however, because the Cubans possessed technology that would neutralize most of them. On clear nights there was scant likelihood of trouble; but on misty nights trouble could be expected. Under cover of the mist, Cuban and guerrilla troops would come through the wire and attempt to infiltrate the tunnels that honeycombed the interior of the hill. Occasionally one of the mines would be triggered, and a ghostly fireball would bloom in the swirling whiteness, tiny black figures being flung outward from its center. Lately some of these casualties had been found to be wearing red berets and scorpion-shaped brass pins, and from this it was known that the Cubans had sent in the Alacran Division, which had been instrumental in routing the American forces in Miskitia.

There were nine levels of tunnels inside the hill, most lined with little round rooms that served as living quarters (the only exception being the bottom level, which was given over to the computer center and offices); all the rooms and tunnels were coated with a bubbled white plastic that looked like hardened sea foam and was proof against antipersonnel explosives. In Mingolla’s room, where he and Baylor and Gilbey bunked, a scarlet paper lantern had been hung on the overhead light fixture, making it seem that they were inhabiting a blood cell: Baylor had insisted on the lantern, saying that the overhead was too bright and hurt his eyes. Three cots were arranged against the walls, as far apart as space allowed. The floor around Baylor’s cot was littered with cigarette butts and used Kleenex; under his pillow he kept a tin box containing a stash of pills and marijuana. Whenever he lit a joint he would always offer Mingolla a hit, and Mingolla always refused, feeling that the experience of the firebase would not be enhanced by drugs. Taped to the wall above Gilbey’s cot was a collage of beaver shots, and each day after duty, whether or not Mingolla and Baylor were in the room, he would lie beneath them and masturbate. His lack of shame caused Mingolla to be embarrassed by the pimply-youth quality of the objects taped above his own cot: a Yankee pennant; a photograph of his old girlfriend, and another of his senior-year high school basketball team; several sketches he had made of the surrounding jungle. Gilbey teased him constantly about this display, calling him the boy next door,’ which struck Mingolla as odd, because back home he had been considered something of an eccentric.

It was toward this room that Mingolla was heading when the assault began. Large cargo elevators capable of carrying sixty men ran up and down just inside the east and west slopes of the hill; but to provide quick access between adjoining levels, and also as a safeguard in case of power failures, an auxiliary tunnel corkscrewed down through the center of the hill like a huge coil of white intestine. It was slightly more than twice as wide as the electric carts that traveled it, carrying officers and VIPs on tours. Mingolla was in the habit of using the tunnel for his exercise. Each night he would put on sweat clothes and jog up and down the entire nine levels, doing this out of a conviction that exhaustion prevented bad dreams. That night, as he passed level Four on his final leg up, he heard a rumbling: an explosion, and not far off. Alarms sounded, the big guns atop the hill began to thunder. From directly above came shouts and the stutter of automatic fire. The tunnel lights flickered, went dark, and the emergency lights winked on.

Mingolla flattened against the wall. The dim red lighting caused the bubbled surfaces of the tunnel to appear as smooth as a chamber in a gigantic nautilus, and this resemblance intensified his sense of helplessness, making him feel like a child trapped within an evil undersea palace. He couldn’t think clearly, picturing the chaos around him. Muzzle flashes, armies of ant-men seething through the tunnels, screams spraying blood, and the big guns bucking, every shell burst kindling miles of sky. He would have preferred to keep going up, to get out into the open where he might have a chance to hide in the jungle. But down was his only hope. Pushing away from the wall, he ran full-tilt, arms waving, skidding around corners, almost falling, past level Four, level Five. Then, halfway between levels Five and Six, he nearly tripped over a dead man: an American lying curled up around a belly wound, a slick of blood spreading beneath him and a machete by his hand. As Mingolla stooped for the machete, he thought nothing about the man, only about how weird it was for an American to be defending himself against Cubans with such a weapon. There was no use, he decided, in going any farther. Whoever had killed the man would be somewhere below, and the safest course would be to hide out in one of the rooms on level Five. Holding the machete before him, he moved cautiously back up the tunnel.

Levels Five, Six, and Seven were officer country, and though the tunnels were the same as the ones above—gently curving tubes eight feet high and ten feet wide—the rooms were larger and contained only two cots each. The rooms Mingolla peered into were empty, and this, despite the sounds of battle, gave him a secure feeling. But as he passed beyond the tunnel curve, he heard shouts in Spanish from the rear. He peeked back around the curve. A skinny black soldier wearing a red beret and gray fatigues was inching toward the first doorway; then, rifle at the ready, he ducked inside. Two other Cubans—slim, bearded men, their skin sallow-looking in the bloody light—were standing by the arched entranceway to the auxiliary tunnel; when they saw the black soldier emerge from the room, they walked off in the opposite direction, probably to check the rooms at the far end of the level.

Mingolla began to operate in a kind of luminous panic. He realized that he would have to kill the black soldier. Kill him without any fuss, take his rifle and hope that he could catch the other two off guard when they came back for him. He slipped into the nearest room and stationed himself against the wall to the right of the door. The Cuban, he had noticed, had turned left on entering the room; he would have been vulnerable to someone positioned as Mingolla was. Vulnerable for a split second. Less than a count of one. The pulse in Mingolla’s temple throbbed, and he gripped the machete in his left hand. He rehearsed mentally what he would have to do. Stab; clamp a hand over the Cuban’s mouth; bring his knee up to jar loose the rifle. And he would have to perform these actions simultaneously, execute them perfectly.

Perfect execution.

He almost laughed out loud, remembering his paunchy old basketball coach saying, Perfect execution, boys. That’s what beats a zone. Forget the fancy crap. Just set your screen, run your patterns, and get your shots down.’

Hoops ain’t nothin’ but life in short pants, huh, Coach?

Mingolla drew a deep breath and let it sigh out through his nostrils. He couldn’t believe he was going to die. He had spent the past nine months worrying about death, but now when circumstances had arisen that made death likely, he had trouble taking that likelihood seriously. It didn’t seem reasonable that a skinny black guy should be his nemesis. His death should involve massive detonations of light, special Mingolla-killing rays, astronomical portents. Not some scrawny little fuck with a rifle. He drew another breath and for the first time registered the contents of the room. Two cots; clothes strewn everywhere; taped-up Polaroids and pornography. Officer country or not, it was your basic Ant Farm decor; under the red light it looked squalid, long abandoned. He was amazed at how calm he felt. Oh, he was afraid all right! But fear was tucked into the dark folds of his personality like a murderer’s knife hidden inside an old coat on a closet shelf. Glowing in secret, waiting its chance to shine. Sooner or later it would skewer him but for now it was an ally, acting to sharpen his senses. He could see every bubbled pucker on the white walls, could hear the scrape of the Cuban’s boots as he darted into the room next door, could feel how the Cuban swung the rifle left to right, paused, turned…

He could!

He could feel the Cuban, feel his heat, his heated shape, the exact position of his body. It was as if a thermal imager had been switched on inside his head, one that worked through walls.

The Cuban eased toward Mingolla’s door, his progress tangible, like a burning match moving behind a sheet of paper. Mingolla’s calm was shattered. The man’s heat, his fleshy temperature, was what disturbed him. He had imagined himself killing with a cinematic swiftness and lack of mess; now he thought of hogs being butchered and pile drivers smashing the skulls of cows. And could he trust this freakish form of perception? What if he couldn’t? What if he stabbed too late? Too soon? Then the hot, alive thing was almost at the door, and having no choice, Mingolla timed his attack to its movements, stabbing just as the Cuban entered.

He executed perfectly.

The blade slid home beneath the Cuban’s ribs, and Mingolla clamped a hand over his mouth, muffling his outcry. His knee nailed the rifle stock, sending it clattering to the floor. The Cuban thrashed wildly. He stank of rotten jungle air and cigarettes. His eyes rolled back, trying to see Mingolla. Crazy animal eyes, with liverish whites and expanded pupils. Sweat beads glittered red on his brow. Mingolla twisted the machete, and the Cuban’s eyelids fluttered down. But a second later they snapped open, and he lunged. They went staggering deeper into the room and teetered beside one of the cots. Mingolla wrangled the Cuban sideways and rammed him against the wall, pinning him there. Writhing, the Cuban nearly broke free. He seemed to be getting stronger, his squeals leaking out from Mingolla’s hand. He reached behind him, clawing at Mingolla’s face; he grabbed a clump of hair, yanked it. Desperate, Mingolla sawed with the machete. That tuned the Cuban’s squeals higher, louder. He squirmed and clawed at the wall. Mingolla’s clamped hand was slick with the Cuban’s saliva, his nostrils full of the man’s rank scent. He felt queasy, weak, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could hang on. The son of a bitch was never going to die, he was deriving strength from the steel in his guts, he was changing into some deathless force. But just then the Cuban stiffened. Then he relaxed, and Mingolla caught a whiff of feces.

He let the Cuban slump to the floor, but before he could turn loose the machete, a shudder passed through the corpse, flowed up the hilt, and vibrated his left hand. It continued to shudder inside his hand, feeling dirty, sexy, like a postcoital tremor. Something, some animal essence, some oily scrap of bad life, was slithering around in there, squirting toward his wrist. He stared at the hand, horrified. It was gloved in the Cuban’s blood, trembling. He smashed it against his hip, and that seemed to stun whatever was inside it. But within seconds it had revived and was wriggling in and out of his fingers with the mad celerity of a tadpole.

‘Teo!’ someone called. ‘Vamos!’

Electrified by the shout, Mingolla hustled to the door. His foot nudged the Cuban’s rifle. He picked it up, and the shaking of his hand lessened—he had the idea it had been soothed by a familiar texture and weight.

‘Teo! Dónde estás?’

Mingolla had no good choices, but he realized it would be far more dangerous to hang back than to take the initiative. He grunted, ‘Aqui!’ and walked out into the tunnel, making lots of noise with his heels.

‘Dase prisa, hombre!’

Mingolla opened fire as he rounded the curve. The two Cubans were standing by the entrance of the auxiliary tunnel. Their rifles chattered briefly, sending a harmless spray of bullets off the walls; they whirled, flung out their arms, and fell. Mingolla was too shocked by how easy it had been to feel relief. He kept watching, expecting them to do something. Moan, or twitch.

After the echoes of the shots had died, though he could hear the big guns jolting and the crackle of firefights, a heavy silence seemed to fill in through the tunnel, as if his bullets had pierced something that had dammed up silence. The silence made him aware of his isolation. No telling where the battle lines were drawn… if, indeed, they existed. It was conceivable that small units had infiltrated every level, that the battle for the Ant Farm was in microcosm the battle for Guatemala: a conflict having no patterns, no real borders, no orderly confrontations, but which, like a plague, could pop up anywhere at any time and kill you. That being the case, his best bet would be to head for the computer center, where friendly forces were sure to be concentrated.

He walked to the entrance and stared at the two dead Cubans. They had fallen, blocking his way, and he was hesitant about stepping over them, half-believing they were playing possum, that they would reach up and grab him. The awkward attitudes of their limbs made him think they were holding a difficult pose, waiting for him to try. Their blood looked purple in the red glow of the emergencies, thicker and shinier than ordinary blood. He noted their moles and scars and sores, the crude stitching of their fatigues, gold fillings glinting from their open mouths. It was funny, he could have met these guys while they were alive and they might have made only a vague impression; but seeing them dead, he had catalogued their physical worth in a single glance. Maybe, he thought, death revealed your essentials as life could not. He studied the dead men, wanting to read them. Couple of slim, wiry guys. Nice guys, into rum and the ladies and sports. He’d bet they were baseball players, infielders, a double-play combo. Maybe he should have called to them, Hey, I’m a Yankee fan. Be cool! Meetcha after the war for a game of flies and grounders. Fuck this killing shit. Let’s play some ball.

He laughed, and the high, cracking sound of his laughter startled him. Christ! Standing around here was just asking for it. As if to second that opinion, the thing inside his hand exploded into life, feeling and frisking about. Swallowing back his fear, Mingolla stepped over the two dead men, and this time, when nothing clutched at his trouser legs, he felt very relieved.

Below level six there was a good deal of mist in the auxiliary tunnel, and this implied to Mingolla that the Cubans had penetrated the hillside, probably with a borer mine. Chances were the hole they had made was somewhere close, and he decided that if he could find it, he would use it to get the hell out of the Farm and hide in the jungle. On level seven the mist was extremely thick; the emergency lights stained it pale red, giving it the look of surgical cotton packing a huge artery. Scorch marks from grenade bursts showed on the walls like primitive graphics, and quite a few bodies were visible beside the doorways. Most of them Americans, badly mutilated. Uneasy, Mingolla picked his way among them, and when a man spoke behind him, saying, ‘Don’t move,’ he let out a hoarse cry and dropped his rifle and spun around, his heart pounding.

A giant of a man—he had to go six-seven, six-eight, with the arms and torso of a weight lifter—was standing in a doorway, training a .45 at Mingolla’s chest. He wore khakis with lieutenant’s bars, and his babyish face, though cinched into a frown, gave an impression of gentleness and stolidity: he conjured for Mingolla the image of Ferdinand the Bull weighing a knotty problem. ‘I told you not to move,’ he said peevishly.

‘It’s okay,’ said Mingolla. ‘I’m on your side.’

The lieutenant ran a hand through his thick shock of brown hair; he seemed to be blinking more than was normal. ‘I’d better check,’ he said. Let’s go down to the storeroom.’

‘What’s to check?’ said Mingolla, his paranoia increasing.

‘Please!’ said the lieutenant, a genuine wealth of entreaty in his voice. ‘There’s been too much violence already.’

The storeroom was a long, narrow L-shaped room at the end of the level; it was ranged by packing crates, and through the gauzy mist the emergency lights looked like a string of dying red suns. The lieutenant marched Mingolla to the corner of the L, and turning it, Mingolla saw that the rear wall of the room was missing. A tunnel had been blown into the hillside, opening onto blackness. Forked roots with balls of dirt attached hung from its roof, giving it the witchy appearance of a tunnel into some world of dark magic; rubble and clods of earth were piled at its lip. Mingolla could smell the jungle, and he realized that the big guns had stopped firing. Which meant that whoever had won the battle of the summit would soon be sending down mop-up squads. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he told the lieutenant. ‘The Cubans’ll be back.’

‘We’re perfectly safe,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Take my word.’ He motioned with the gun, indicating that Mingolla should sit on the floor.

Mingolla did as ordered and was frozen by the sight of a corpse, a Cuban corpse, lying between two packing crates opposite him, its head propped against the wall. ‘Jesus!’ he said, coming back up to his knees.

‘He won’t bite,’ said the lieutenant. With the lack of self-consciousness of someone squeezing into a subway seat, he settled beside the corpse; the two of them neatly filled the space between the crates, touching elbow to shoulder.

‘Hey,’ said Mingolla, feeling giddy and scattered. ‘I’m not sitting here with this fucking dead guy, man!’

The lieutenant flourished his gun. ‘You’ll get used to him.’

Mingolla eased back to a sitting position, unable to look away from the corpse. Actually, compared to the bodies he had just been stepping over, it was quite presentable. The only signs of damage were blood on its mouth and bushy black beard, and a mire of blood and shredded cloth at the center of its chest. Its brass scorpion pin was scarred and tarnished. Its eyes were open, reflecting glowing red chips of the emergency lights, and this gave it a baleful semblance of life. But the reflections made it appear less real, easier to bear.

‘Listen to me,’ said the lieutenant.

Mingolla rubbed at the blood on his shaking hand, hoping that cleaning it would have some good effect.

Are you listening?’ the lieutenant asked.

Mingolla had a peculiar perception of the lieutenant and the corpse as dummy and ventriloquist. Despite its glowing eyes, the corpse had too much reality for any trick of the light to gloss over for long. Precise crescents showed on its fingernails, and because its head was tipped to one side, blood had settled onto that side, darkening its cheek and temple, leaving the rest of the face pallid. It was the lieutenant, with his neat khakis and polished shoes and nice haircut, who now looked less than real.

‘Listen!’ said the lieutenant vehemently. ‘I want you to understand that I have to do what’s right for me!’ The biceps of his gun arm bunched to the size of a cannonball.

‘I understand,’ said Mingolla, thoroughly unnerved.

‘Do you? Do you really?’ The lieutenant seemed aggravated by Mingolla’s claim to understanding. I doubt it. I doubt you could possibly understand.’

‘Maybe I can’t,’ said Mingolla. ‘Whatever you say, man. I’m just trying to get along, y’know.’

The lieutenant sat silent, blinking. Then he smiled. ‘My name’s Jay,’ he said. And you are…?’

‘David.’ Mingolla tried to bring his concentration to bear on the gun, wondering if he could kick it away, but the sliver of life in his hand distracted him.

‘Where are your quarters, David?’

‘Level three.’

‘I live here,’ said Jay. ‘But I’m going to move. I couldn’t bear to stay in a place where—’ He broke off and leaned forward, adopting a conspiratorial stance. Did you know it takes a long time for someone to die, even after their heart has stopped?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ The thing in Mingolla’s hand squirmed toward his wrist, and he squeezed the wrist, trying to block it.

‘It’s true,’ said Jay with vast assurance. ‘None of these people’—he gave the corpse a gentle nudge with his elbow, a gesture that conveyed to Mingolla a creepy sort of familiarity—‘have finished dying. Life doesn’t just switch off. It fades. And these people are still alive, though it’s only a half-life.’ He grinned. The half-life of life, you might say.’

Mingolla kept the pressure on his wrist and smiled, as if in appreciation of the play on words. Pale red tendrils of mist curled between them.

‘Of course you aren’t attuned,’ said Jay. ‘So you wouldn’t understand. But I’d be lost without Eligío.’

‘Who’s Eligío?’

Jay nodded toward the corpse. ‘We’re attuned, Eligío and I. That’s how I know we’re safe. Eligío’s perceptions aren’t limited to the here and now any longer. He’s with his men at this very moment, and he tells me they’re all dead or dying.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Mingolla, tensing. He had managed to squeeze the thing in his hand back into his fingers, and he thought he might be able to reach the gun. But Jay disrupted his plan by shifting the gun to his other hand. His eyes seemed to be growing more reflective, acquiring a ruby glaze, and Mingolla realized this was because he had opened them wide and angled his stare toward the emergency lights.

‘It makes you wonder,’ said Jay. ‘It really does.’

‘What?’ said Mingolla, easing sideways, shortening the range for a kick.

‘Half-lives,’ said Jay. If the mind has a half-life, maybe our separate emotions do, too. The half-life of love, of hate. Maybe they still exist somewhere.’ He drew up his knees, shielding the gun. Anyway, I can’t stay here. I think I’ll go back to Oakland.’ His tone became whispery. Where are you from, David?’

‘New York.’

‘Not my cup of tea,’ said Jay. ‘But I love the Bay Area, I own an antique shop there. It’s beautiful in the mornings. Peaceful. The sun comes through the window, creeping across the floor, y’know, like a tide, inching up over the furniture. It’s as if the original varnishes are being reborn, the whole shop shining with ancient lights.’

‘Sounds nice,’ said Mingolla, taken aback by Jay’s lyricism.

‘You seem like a good person.’ Jay straightened up a bit. ‘But I’m sorry. Eligío tells me your mind’s too cloudy for him to read. He says I can’t risk keeping you alive. I’m going to have to shoot.’

Mingolla set himself to kick, but then listlessness washed over him. What the hell did it matter? Even if he knocked the gun away, Jay could probably break him in half. Why?’ he said. Why do you have to?’

‘You might inform on me.’ Jay’s soft features sagged into a sorrowful expression. Tell them I was hiding.’

‘Nobody gives a shit that you were hiding,’ said Mingolla. ‘That’s what I was doing. I bet there’s fifty other guys doing the same damn thing.’

‘I don’t know.’ Jay’s brow furrowed. ‘I’ll ask again. Maybe your mind’s less cloudy now.’ He turned his gaze to the dead man.

Mingolla noticed that the Cuban’s irises were angled upward and to the left—exactly the same angle to which Jay’s eyes had drifted earlier—and reflected an identical ruby glaze.

‘Sorry,’ said Jay, leveling the gun. ‘I have to.’ He licked his lips. ‘Would you please turn your head? I’d rather you weren’t looking at me when it happens. That’s how Eligío and I became attuned.’

Looking into the aperture of the gun’s muzzle was like peering over a cliff, feeling the chill allure of falling. It was more out of contrariness than a will to survive that Mingolla popped his eyes at Jay and said, ‘Go ahead.’

Jay blinked, but he held the gun steady. ‘Your hand’s shaking,’ he said after a pause.

‘No shit,’ said Mingolla.

‘How come it’s shaking?’

‘Because I killed someone with it,’ said Mingolla. ‘Because I’m as fucking crazy as you are.’

Jay mulled this over. ‘I was supposed to be assigned to a gay unit,’ he said finally. ‘But all the slots were filled, and when I had to be assigned here they gave me a drug. Now I… I…’ He blinked rapidly, his lips parted, and Mingolla found that he was straining toward Jay, wanting to apply body English, to do something to push him over this agonizing hump. ‘I can’t… be with men anymore,’Jay finished, and once again blinked rapidly; then his words came easier. ‘Did they give you a drug, too? I mean I’m not trying to imply you’re gay. It’s just they have drugs for everything these days, and I thought that might be the problem.’

Mingolla was suddenly, unutterably sad. He felt that his emotions had been twisted into a thin black wire, that the wire was frayed and spraying black sparks of sadness. That was all that energized him, all his life. Those little black sparks.

‘I always fought before,’ said Jay. ‘And I was fighting this time. But when I shot Eligío…I just couldn’t keep going.’

‘I really don’t give a shit,’ said Mingolla. ‘I really don’t.’

‘Maybe I can trust you.’ Jay sighed. ‘I just wish you were attuned. Eligío’s a good soul. You’d appreciate him.’

Jay kept on talking, enumerating Eligío’s virtues, and Mingolla tuned him out, not wanting to hear about the Cuban’s love for his family, his posthumous concerns for them. Staring at his bloody hand, he had a magical overview of the situation. Sitting in the root cellar of this evil mountain, bathed in an eerie red glow, a scrap of a dead man’s life trapped in his flesh, listening to a deranged giant who took his orders from a corpse, waiting for scorpion soldiers to pour through a tunnel that appeared to lead into a dimension of mist and blackness. It was insane to look at it that way. But there it was. You couldn’t reason it away; it had a brutal glamour that surpassed reason, that made reason unnecessary.

‘… And once you’re attuned,’ Jay was saying, ‘you can’t ever be separated. Not even by death. So Eligío’s always going to be alive inside me. Of course I can’t let them find out. I mean’—he chuckled, a sound like dice rattling in a cup—talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy!’

Mingolla lowered his head, closed his eyes. Maybe Jay would shoot. But he doubted that. Jay only wanted company in madness.

‘You swear you won’t tell them?’ Jay asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla. ‘I swear.’

‘All right,’ said Jay. ‘But remember, my future’s in your hands. You have a responsibility to me.’

‘Don’t worry.’

Gunfire crackled in the distance.

‘I’m glad we could talk,’ said Jay. ‘I feel much better.’

Mingolla said he felt better too.

They sat without speaking. It wasn’t the most secure way to pass the night, but Mingolla no longer put any store in the concept of security. He was too weary to be afraid. Jay seemed entranced, staring at a point above Mingolla’s head, but Mingolla made no move for the gun. He was content to sit and wait and let fate take its course. His thoughts uncoiled with vegetable sluggishness.

They must have been sitting a couple of hours when Mingolla heard the whisper of helicopters and noticed that the mist had thinned, that the darkness at the end of the tunnel had gone gray. ‘Hey,’ he said to Jay. ‘I think we’re okay now.’ Jay offered no reply, and Mingolla saw that his eyes were angled upward and to the left just like the Cuban’s eyes, glazed over with ruby reflection. Tentatively, he reached out and touched the gun. Jay’s hand flopped to the floor, but his fingers remained clenched around the butt. Mingolla recoiled, disbelieving. It couldn’t be! Again he reached out, feeling for a pulse. Jay’s wrist was cool, still, and his lips had a bluish cast. Mingolla had a flutter of hysteria, thinking that Jay had gotten it wrong about being attuned: instead of Eligío’s becoming part of his life, he had become part of Eligío’s death. There was a tightness in Mingolla’s chest, and he thought he was going to cry. He would have welcomed tears, and when they failed to materialize he grew both annoyed at himself and defensive. Why should he cry? The guy had meant nothing to him… though the fact that he could be so devoid of compassion was reason enough for tears. Still, if you were going to cry over something as commonplace as a single guy dying, you’d be crying every minute of the day, and what was the future in that? He glanced at Jay. At the Cuban. Despite the smoothness of Jay’s skin, the Cuban’s bushy beard, Mingolla could have sworn they were starting to resemble each other the way old married couples did. And, yep, all four eyes were fixed on exactly the same point of forever. It was either a hell of a coincidence or else Jay’s craziness had been of such magnitude that he had willed himself to die in this fashion just to lend credence to his theory of half-lives. And maybe he was still alive. Half-alive. Maybe he and Mingolla were now attuned, and if that was true, maybe… Alarmed by the prospect of joining Jay and the Cuban in their deathwatch, Mingolla scrambled to his feet and ran into the tunnel. He might have kept running, but on coming out into the dawn light he was brought up short by the view from the tunnel entrance.

At his back, the green dome of the hill swelled high, its sides brocaded with shrubs and vines, an infinity of pattern as eyecatching as the intricately carved facade of a Hindu temple; atop it, one of the gun emplacements had taken a hit: splinters of charred metal curved up like peels of black rind. Before him lay the moat of red dirt with its hedgerows of razor wire, and beyond that loomed the blackish green snarl of the jungle. Caught on the wire were hundreds of baggy shapes wearing bloodstained fatigues; frays of smoke twisted up from the fresh craters beside them. Overhead, half-hidden by the lifting gray mist, three Sikorskys were hovering. Their pilots were invisible behind layers of mist and reflection, and the choppers themselves looked like enormous carrion flies with bulging eyes and whirling wings. Like devils. Like gods. They seemed to be whispering to one another in anticipation of the feast they were soon to share.

The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell. You could never paint it, or if you could the canvas would have to be as large as the scene itself, and you would have to incorporate the slow boil of the mist, the whirling of the chopper blades, the drifting smoke. No detail could be omitted. It was the perfect illustration of the war, of its secret magical splendor, and Mingolla, too, was an element of the design, the figure of the artist painted in for a joke or to lend scale and perspective to its vastness, its importance. He knew that he should report to his station, but he couldn’t turn away from this glimpse into the heart of the war. He sat down on the hillside, cradling his sick hand in his lap, and watched as—with the ponderous aplomb of idols floating to earth, fighting the cross-draft, the wind of their descent whipping up furies of red dust—the Sikorskys made skillful landings among the dead.

CHAPTER FOUR

Halfway through the telling of his story, Mingolla had realized he was not really trying to offend or shock Debora, but rather was unburdening himself; and he further realized that by telling it he had to an extent cut loose from the past, weakened its hold on him. For the first time he felt able to give serious consideration to the idea of desertion. He did not rush to it, embrace it, but he did acknowledge its logic and understand the terrible illogic of returning to more assaults, more death, without any magic to protect him. He made a pact with himself: he would pretend to go along as if desertion were his intent and see what signs were offered.

When he had finished, Debora asked whether he was over his anger. He was pleased that she hadn’t tried to offer sympathy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t really angry at you… at least that was only part of it.’

‘It’s all right.’ She pushed back the dark mass of her hair so that it fell to one side and looked down at the grass beside her knees. With her head inclined, eyes half-lidded, the graceful line of her neck and chin like that of a character in some exotic script, she seemed a good sign herself. ‘I don’t know what to talk to you about,’ she said. ‘The things I feel I have to tell you make you mad, and I can’t muster any small talk.’

‘I don’t want to be pushed,’ he said. ‘But believe me, I’m thinking about what you’ve told me.’

‘I won’t push. But I still don’t know what to talk about.’ She plucked a grass blade, chewed on the tip. He watched her lips purse, wondered how she’d taste. Mouth sweet in the way of a jar that had once held spices. And down below, she’d taste sweet there, too: honey gone a little sour in the comb. She tossed her grass blade aside. ‘I know,’ she said brightly. ‘Would you like to see where I live?’

‘I’d just as soon not go back to Frisco yet.’ Where you live, he thought; I want to touch where you live.

‘It’s not in town,’ she said. ‘It’s a village downriver.’

‘Sounds good.’ He came to his feet, took her arm, and helped her up. For an instant they were close together, her breasts grazing his shirt. Her heat coursed around him, and he thought if anyone were to see them, they would see two figures wavering as in a mirage. He had an urge to tell her he loved her. Though most of what he felt was for the salvation she might provide, part of his feelings seemed real, and that puzzled him, because all she had been to him was a few hours out of the war, dinner in a cheap restaurant, and a walk along the river. There was no basis for consequential emotion. Before he could say anything, do anything, she turned and picked up her basket.

‘It’s not far,’ she said, walking away. Her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell.

They followed a track of brown clay overgrown by ferns, overspread by saplings with pale translucent leaves, and soon came to a grouping of thatched huts at the mouth of a stream that flowed into the river. Naked children were wading in the stream, laughing and splashing each other. Their skins were the color of amber, and their eyes were as wet-looking and purplish dark as plums. Palms and acacias loomed above the huts, which were constructed of sapling trunks lashed together by nylon cord; their thatch had been trimmed to resemble bowl-cut hair. Flies crawled over strips of meat hung on a clothesline stretched between two of the huts. Fish heads and chicken droppings littered the ocher ground. But Mingolla scarcely noticed these signs of poverty, seeing instead a sign of the peace that might await him in Panama. And another sign was soon forthcoming. Debora bought a bottle of rum at a tiny store, then led him to the hut nearest the mouth of the stream and introduced him to a lean, white-haired old man who was sitting on a bench outside it. Tio Moíses After three drinks Tio Moíses began to tell stories.

The first story concerned the personal pilot of an ex-president of Panama. The president had made billions from smuggling cocaine into the States with the help of the CIA, whom he had assisted on numerous occasions, and was himself an addict in the last stages of mental deterioration. It had become his sole pleasure to be flown from city to city in his country, to sit on the landing strips, gaze out the window, and do cocaine. At any hour of night or day, he was likely to call the pilot and order him to prepare a flight plan to Colón or Bocas del Toro or Penonomé. As the president’s condition worsened, the pilot realized that soon the CIA would see the man was no longer useful and would kill him. And the most obvious manner of killing him would be by means of an airplane crash. The pilot did not want to die alongside him. He tried to resign, but the president would not permit it. He gave thought to mutilating himself, but being a good Catholic, he could not flout God’s law. If he were to flee, his family would suffer. His life became a nightmare. Prior to each flight, he would spend hours searching the plane for evidence of sabotage, and upon each landing he would remain in the cockpit, shaking from nervous exhaustion. The president’s condition grew even worse. He had to be carried aboard the plane and have the cocaine administered by an aide, while a second aide stood by with cotton swabs to attend his nosebleeds. Knowing his life could be measured in weeks, the pilot asked his priest for guidance. ‘Pray,’ the priest advised. The pilot had been praying all along, so this was no help. Next he went to the commandant of his military college, and the commandant told him he must do his duty. This, too, was something the pilot had been doing all along. Finally he went to the chief of the San Blas Indians, who were his mother’s people. The chief told him he must accept his fate, which—while not something he had been doing all along—was hardly encouraging. Nonetheless, he saw it was the only available path and he did as the chief had counseled. Rather than spending hours in a preflight check, he would arrive minutes before takeoff and taxi away without even inspecting the fuel gauge. His recklessness came to be the talk of the capital. Obeying the president’s every whim, he flew in gales and in fogs, while drunk and drugged, and during those hours in the air, suspended between the laws of gravity and fate, he gained a new appreciation of life. Once back on the ground, he engaged in living with a fierce avidity, making passionate love to his wife, carousing with friends, and staying out until dawn. Then one day as he was preparing to leave for the airport, an American man came to his house and told him he had been replaced. ‘If we let the president fly with so negligent a pilot, we’ll be blamed for anything that happens,’ said the American. The pilot did not have to ask whom he had meant by ‘we.’ Six weeks later the president’s plane crashed in the Darién Mountains. The pilot was overjoyed. Panama had been rid of a villain, and his own life had not been forfeited. But a week after the crash, after the new president—another smuggler with CIA connections—had been appointed, the commandant of the air force summoned the pilot, told him that the crash would never have occurred had he been on the job, and assigned him to fly the new president’s plane.

All through the afternoon Mingolla listened and drank, and drunkenness fitted a lens to his eyes that let him see how these stories applied to him. They were all fables of irresolution, cautioning him to act, and they detailed the core problems of the Central American people who—as he was now—were trapped between the poles of magic and reason, their lives governed by the politics of the ultrareal, their spirits ruled by myths and legends, with the rectangular, computerized bulk of North America above and the conch-shell-shaped continental mystery of South America below. He assumed that Debora had orchestrated the types of stories Tio Moíses told, but that did not detract from their potency as signs: they had the ring of truth, not of something tailored to his needs. Nor did it matter that his hand was shaking, his vision playing tricks. Those things would pass when he reached Panama.

Shadows blurred, insects droned like tambouras, and twilight washed down the sky, making the air look grainy, the chop on the river appear slower and heavier. Tio Moíses’s granddaughter served plates of roasted corn and fish, and Mingolla stuffed himself. Afterward, when the old man signaled his weariness, Mingolla and Debora strolled off along the stream. Between two of the huts, mounted on a pole, was a warped backboard with a netless hoop, and some young men were shooting baskets. Mingolla joined them. It was hard dribbling on the bumpy dirt but he had never played better. The residue of drunkenness fueled his game, and his jump shots followed perfect arcs down through the hoop. Even at improbable angles, his shots felt true. He lost himself in flicking out his hand to make a steal, in feinting and leaping high to snag a rebound, becoming—as dusk faded—the most adroit of the arm-waving, jitter-steeping shadows.

The game ended and the stars came out, looking like holes punched into fire through a billow of black silk overhanging the palms. Flickering chutes of lamplight illuminated the ground in front of the huts, and as Debora and Mingolla walked among them, he heard a radio tuned to the armed forces network giving a play-by-play of a baseball game. There was a crack of the bat, the crowd roared, and the announcer cried, ‘He got it all!’ Mingolla imagined the ball vanishing into the darkness above the stadium, bouncing out into parking-lot America, lodging under a tire where some kid would find it and think it a miracle, or rolling across the street to rest under a used car, shimmering there, secretly white and fuming with home-run energies. The score was three to one, top of the second. Mingolla didn’t know who was playing and didn’t care. Home runs were happening for him, mystical jump shots curved along predestined tracks. He was at the center of incalculable forces.

One of the huts was unlit, with two wooden chairs out front, and as they approached, something about it blighted Mingolla’s mood. Its air of preparedness, of being a little stage set. Just paranoia, he thought. The signs had been good so far, hadn’t they? When they reached the hut, Debora took the chair nearest the door and invited him to sit next to her. Starlight pointed her eyes with brilliance. Visible inside the doorway was a sack from which part of a wire cage protruded. ‘What about your game?’ he asked.

‘I wanted to be with you tonight,’ she said.

That bothered him. It was all starting to bother him, and he couldn’t understand why. The thing in his hand wiggled. He balled the hand into a fist and sat down. ‘What…’ he began, and then lost track of what he had been about to ask her. He wiped sweat from his forehead. A shadow moved across the yellow glare spilling from the hut opposite them. Rippling, undulating. Mingolla shut his eyes. ‘What, uh…’ Once again he forgot his subject, and to cover up he asked the first question that occurred to him. ‘What’s happenin’ here… between you and me? I keep thinkin’…’ He broke off. Christ, what an idiot thing to say! Too bold, man! He’d probably just blown his chances with her.

But she didn’t back away from it. ‘You mean romantically?’ she asked.

Nicely put, he thought. Very delicate. Much better than saying, You mean are we gonna fuck? Which was about the best he could have managed at the moment. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Whether you go to Panama or back to your base, we don’t seem to have much of a future. But’—her voiced softened—maybe that’s not important.’

It boosted his confidence in her that she didn’t have an assured answer. He opened his eyes. Gave his head a twitch, fighting off more ripples. So what is important?’ he asked, and was pleased with himself. Very suave, Mingolla. Let her be the one to say it. Very suave, indeed! He wished he didn’t feel so shaky.

‘Well, there’s obviously a strong attraction.’

Attraction? I guess so, he thought. I wanna rip your damn dress off!

‘And,’ she went on, ‘maybe something more. I wish we had time to find out what.’

Clever! Knocked the ball right back into his court. He tried to focus on her, had to close his eyes again, and saw Panama. White sand, cerulean water deepening to cobalt toward the horizon. ‘What’s it like in Panama?’ he asked, then kicked himself for having changed the subject.

‘I’ve never been there. Probably not much different from here.’

Maybe he should stand up, walk around. Maybe that would help. Or maybe he should just sit and talk. Talking seemed to steady him. I bet it’s beautiful, y’know,’ he said. Green mountains, jungle waterfalls. I bet there’s lots of birds. Macaws, parrots. Millions of ’em.’

‘I suppose.’

‘And hummingbirds. This friend of mine was down there once on a hummingbird-collectin’ expedition. Said there was a million kinds. I thought he was sort of a creep for bein’ into collectin’ hummingbirds. I didn’t think it was very relevant to the big issues, y’know.’

‘David?’ Apprehension in her voice.

‘You get there by boat, right?’ The smell of her perfume was more cloying than he remembered. ‘Must be a pretty big boat. I’ve never been on a real boat. Just this rowboat my uncle had. He used to take me fishin’ off Coney Island. We’d tie up to a buoy and catch all these poison fish. You shoulda seen some of ’em. Like mutants. Rainbow-colored eyes, weird growths all over. Scared the hell outta me to think about eatin’ fish.’

‘I…’

‘I used to think about the ones that musta been down there too deep for us to catch. Giant blowfish, genius sharks, whales with hands. I’d see ’em swallowin’ the boat, and…’

‘Calm down, David.’ She kneaded the back of his neck, sending a shiver down his spine.

‘I’m okay.’ He shrugged off her hand. Didn’t need shivers along with everything else. ‘Lemme hear some more about Panama.’

‘I told you… I’ve never been there.’

‘Oh, yeah. How ’bout Costa Rica? You been to Costa Rica.’ Sweat was popping out all over his body. Maybe he should go for a swim, cool off. He’d heard there were manatees in the Río Dulce. ‘Ever seen a manatee?’

‘David!’

She must have leaned close, because he could feel her heat spreading through him, and he thought maybe that would help, smothering in her heat, in heavy motion. Get rid of the shakiness. He’d take her into the hut and see just how hot she got. How hot she got, how hot she got. The words did a train rhythm inside his head. Afraid to open his eyes, he reached out blindly and pulled her to him. Bumped faces, searched for her mouth. She kissed back, and his hand slipped up to cup a breast. Jesus, she felt good! She felt like salvation, like Panama, like what you fall into when you sleep.

But then the feeling changed. Changed so slowly that he didn’t notice until it was almost complete, until her tongue was no longer quick and darting in his mouth, but squirmed as thick and stupid as a snail’s foot, and her breast was jiggling, trembling with the same wormy juice that had invaded his left hand. He pushed her off, opened his eyes. Saw crude-stitch eyelids sewn to her cheek. Lips parted, mouth full of bones. Blank face of meat. He got to his feet, pawing the air, wanting to rip away the film of ugliness that had settled over him.

‘David?’ She warped his name, gulping the syllables as if trying to swallow and talk at once.

Frog voice, devil voice.

He whirled around, caught an eyeful of black sky, spiky trees, and a pitted bone-knob moon trapped in a web of leaves and branches. Dark warty shapes of the huts, doors opening into yellow flame, with crooked shadow men inside. He blinked, shook his head. It wouldn’t vanish, it was real. What was this place? Not a village, naw, un-unh! A strangled grunt came from his throat, and he backed away, backed away from everything. She walked after him, croaking his name. Wig of black straw, shining dabs of jelly for eyes. Some of the shadow men were herky-jerked out of their doors, gathering behind her. Croaking. Long-legged, licorice-skinned demons with drumbeat hearts, faceless nothings from the dimension of sickness. They’d be on him in a flash.

‘I see you,’ he said, backing another few steps. ‘I know what you are.’

‘No one’s trying to hurt you. It’s all right, David,’ she said, and smiled.

She thought he’d buy that smile, but he wasn’t fooled. It broke over her face the way something rotten melts through the bottom of a grocery sack after it’s been in the garbage a week. Gloating smile of the Queen Devil Bitch. She had done this to him! Teamed up with the bad life in his hand and played witchy tricks on his head.

‘I see you,’ he said again, and tripped. Stumbled backward, clawing for balance, and going with his momentum, came up running toward the town.

Ferns whipped his legs, branches slashed at his face. Webs of shadow fettered the trail, and the shrilling insects had the sound of a metal edge being honed. He ran out of control, bashing into trees, nearly falling, his breath shrieking. But then he spotted a big moonstruck ceiba tree up ahead, standing on a rise overlooking the water. A grandfather tree, a white magic tree. It summoned him. He stopped beside it, sucking in air. The moonlight cooled him, drenched him in silver, and he thought he understood the purpose of the tree. Fountain of whiteness in the dark wood, shining for him alone. He made a fist of his left hand, and the thing inside it eeled frantically as if it knew what was coming. He studied the mystic grainy patterns of the bark, found their point of confluence. Steeled himself. Then he drove his fist into the trunk. Bright pain lanced up his arm, and he cried out. But he hit the trunk again, hit it a third time. He held the hand tight against his chest to muffle the pain, it was already swelling, becoming a knuckleless cartoon hand; but nothing moved inside it. The riverbank, with its shadows and rustlings, no longer menaced him, transformed into a place of ordinary lights and darks. Even the whiteness of the tree seemed diminished.

‘David!’ Debora’s voice, and not far off.

Part of him wanted to wait, to see whether she had changed for the innocent, for the ordinary. But he couldn’t trust her, couldn’t trust himself, and after a brief hesitation he took off running once again.

Mingolla caught the ferry to the west bank, thinking that he would find Gilbey, that a dose of Gilbey’s belligerence would ground him in reality. He sat in the bow next to a group of five other soldiers, one of whom was puking over the side, and to avoid a conversation he turned away and looked down into the black water slipping past. Moonlight edged the wavelets with silver, and among those crescent gleams it seemed he could see reflected the broken curve of his life: a kid living for Christmas, drawing pictures, receiving praise, growing up mindless to high school, sex, and drugs; growing beyond that, beginning to draw pictures again, and then, right where you might expect the curve to assume a more meaningful shape, it was sheared off, left hanging, its entire process demystified and explicable. He realized how foolish the idea of the ritual had been. Like a dying man clutching a vial of holy water, he had clutched at magic when the logic of existence had proved untenable. Now the frail linkages of that magic had been dissolved, and nothing supported him: he was falling through the dark zones of the war, waiting to be snatched by one of its monsters. He lifted his head and gazed at the west bank. The shore toward which he was heading was as black as a bat’s wing and inscribed with arcana of violent light. Rooftops and palms were cast in silhouette against a rainbow haze of neon; gassy arcs of bloodred and lime green and indigo were visible between them: fragments of glowing beasts. The wind bore screams and wild music. The soldiers beside him laughed and cursed, and the one guy kept on puking. Mingolla rested his forehead on the wooden rail, just to feel something solid.

At the Club Demonio, Gilbey’s big-breasted whore was sitting at the bar, staring into her drink. Mingolla pushed through the dancers, through heat and noise and veils of lavender smoke. When he walked up to her, the whore put on a professional smile and made a grab for his crotch. He fended her off and asked if she’d seen Gilbey. She looked befuddled at first, but then the light dawned. ‘Meen-golla?’ she said, and when he nodded, she fumbled in her purse and pulled out a folded paper. ‘Ees frawm Geel-bee. Forr me, five dol-larrs.’

He handed her the money and took the paper. It proved to be a Christian pamphlet with a pen-and-ink sketch of a rail-thin, aggrieved-looking Jesus on the front, and beneath the sketch, a tract whose opening line read, The last days are in season.’ He turned it over and found a handwritten note on the back. The note was pure Gilbey. No explanation, no sentiment. Just the basics:

Mingolla had believed that his confusion had peaked, but the fact of Gilbey’s desertion wouldn’t fit inside his head, and when he tried to make it fit, the rank and file of his thoughts was thrown into disarray. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what had happened. He understood perfectly; in fact, he might have predicted it. Like a crafty rat who had seen his hole blocked by a trap, Gilbey had simply chewed a new hole and vanished into the woodwork. The thing that confused Mingolla was his total lack of reference. He and Gilbey and Baylor had triangulated reality, located one another within a coherent map of duties and places and events. Now that they both were gone, he felt utterly bewildered. Outside the club, he let the crowds push him along. Stared at the neon animals atop the bars. Giant blue rooster; golden turtle; green bull with fiery eyes. Great identities regarding his aimless course with dispassion. Bleeds of color washed from the signs, staining the air to a garish paleness, giving everyone a mealy complexion. Amazing, Mingolla thought, that you could breathe such grainy discolored stuff, that it didn’t start you choking. It was all amazing, all nonsensical. Everything he saw struck him as unique and unfathomable, even the most commonplace of sights. He found himself staring at people—whores, street kids, an MP who was patting the fender of his jeep as if it were his big olive-drab pet—and trying to figure out what they were really doing, what special significance their actions held for him, what clues they presented that might help him unravel the snarl of his own existence. At last, realizing that he needed peace and quiet, he set out toward the airbase, intending to find an empty bunk in some barracks. But when he reached the cutoff that led to the unfinished bridge, he turned down it, deciding that he wasn’t ready to deal with sentries and duty officers. Dense thickets abuzz with crickets narrowed the cutoff to a path, and at its end stood a line of sawhorses. He climbed over them and soon was mounting a sharply inclined curve that appeared to lead to a point not far below the oblate silvery moon.

Despite a litter of rubble and cardboard sheeting, the concrete looked pure under the moon, blazing bright, like a fragment of snowy light not quite hardened to the material; and as he ascended he thought he could feel the bridge trembling to his footsteps with the sensitivity of a white nerve. He seemed to be walking into darkness and stars, a solitude the size of creation. It felt good and damn lonely, maybe a little too much so, with the wind flapping pieces of cardboard and the sounds of the insects left behind. After a few minutes, he glimpsed the ragged terminus ahead. When he reached it, he sat down carefully, letting his legs dangle. Wind keened through the exposed girders, tugging at his ankles. His hand throbbed and was fever-hot. Below, multicolored brilliance clung to the black margin of the east bank like a colony of biotuminescent algae. He wondered how high he was. Not high enough, he thought. Faint music was fraying on the wind—the inexhaustible delirium of San Francisco de Juticlan—and he imagined that the flickering of the stars was caused by this thin smoke of music drifting across them.

He tried to think what to do. Not much occurred. He pictured Gilbey in Panama. Whoring, drinking, fighting. Doing just as he had in Guatemala. That was where the idea of desertion failed Mingolla. In Panama he would be afraid; in Panama—though his hand might not shake—some other malignant twitch would develop; in Panama he would resort to magical cures, because he would be too imperiled by the real to derive strength from it. And eventually the war would come to Panama. Desertion would have gained him nothing. He stared out at the moon-silvered jungle, and it seemed that some essential part of him was pouring from his eyes, entering the flow of the wind and rushing away past the Ant Farm and its smoking craters, past guerrilla territory, past the seamless join of sky and horizon, being pulled irresistibly toward a point into which the world’s vitality was emptying. He felt himself emptying as well, growing cold and vacant and slow. His brain became incapable of thought, capable only of recording perceptions. The wind brought green scents that made his nostrils flare. The sky’s blackness folded around him, and the stars were golden pinpricks of sensation. He didn’t sleep, but something in him slept.

A whisper drew him back from the edge of the world. At first he thought it had been his imagination, and he continued to stare at the sky, which had lightened to the vivid blue of a predawn darkness. Then he heard the whisper again and glanced over his shoulder. Strung out across the bridge about twenty feet away, a dozen or so children. Some crouched, some standing. Most were clad in rags, a few wore coverings of leaves and vines, and others were naked. Watchful; silent. They were all emaciated, their hair long and matted. Knives glinted in their hands. Recalling the dead children he had seen that morning, Mingolla was for a moment afraid. But only for a moment. Fear flared in him like a coal puffed alight by a breeze and died an instant later, suppressed not by any rational accommodation, but by a perception of these ragged figures as an opportunity for surrender. He had no desire to put forth more effort in the cause of survival. Survival, he had learned, was not the soul’s ultimate priority. He studied the children. The way they were posed reminded him of a Neanderthal grouping in the Museum of Natural History. The moon was still graphite. Finally Mingolla turned back to face the horizon, now showing as a distinct line of green darkness.

He had expected to be stabbed or pushed, to pinwheel down and break against Río Dulce, its water gone a steely color beneath the brightening sky. But instead, a voice spoke in his ear. Hey, macho!’

Squatting beside him was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, his swarthy monkeylike face framed by tangles of shoulder-length black hair. Wearing tattered shorts. Coiled serpent tattooed on his brow. He peered at Mingolla, tipping his head first to one side, then the other, perplexed: he made a growly noise, held up a knife. Twisted it this way and that, letting Mingolla see its keen edge, how it channeled the moonlight along its grooved blade. An army-issue survival knife with a brass-knuckle grip. Mingolla gave an amused sniff.

The boy lowered the knife and nodded as if he had expected such a reaction. ‘What you doin’ here, man?’ he asked.

Most of the answers that occurred to Mingolla demanded too much energy to voice. He chose the simplest. I like the bridge,’ he said.

Again the boy nodded. ‘The bridge is magic,’ he said. ‘You know this?’

‘There was a time I might have believed you,’ Mingolla said.

‘Talk slow,’ said the boy. ‘Too fast, I can’t understan’.’

Mingolla repeated his comment, and the boy laughed. ‘Sure you believe it, man. Why else you here?’ With a planing gesture of his hand, he described an imaginary continuance of the bridge’s upward course. ‘That’s where the bridge travels now. Don’t have not’ing to do wit’ crossin’ the river, don’t mean the same t’ing a bridge means. You know what I’m sayin’?’

‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla, surprised to hear his own thoughts echoed by someone who so resembled a hominid.

‘I come here,’ said the boy, ‘and I listen to the wind. Hear it sing in the iron. And I know t’ings from it. I see the future.’ He grinned, exposing blackened teeth, and pointed toward the Caribbean. ‘Future’s that way, man.’

Mingolla liked the joke. He felt an affinity for the boy, for anyone who could manage jokes from the boy’s perspective, but he couldn’t think of an appropriate means of expressing his feelings. ‘You speak good English,’ he said at last.

‘Shit! What you t’ink? ’Cause we live in the jungle, we talk like animals? Shit!’ The boy spat off the edge of the bridge. ‘I talk English all my life. Gringos, they too stupid to learn Spanish.’

A girl spoke behind them, her voice harsh and peremptory. The other children had closed to within ten feet, their savage faces intent upon Mingolla, and the girl was standing a bit forward of the rest. Sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes. Ratty cables of hair hung down over her breasts. Her hipbones tented up a rag of a skirt, which the wind pushed back between her legs. The boy let her finish, then gave a lengthy response, punctuating his phrases by smashing the brass-knuckle grip of his knife against the concrete, striking sparks with every blow.

‘Gracela,’ the boy said to Mingolla, ‘she wanna kill you. But I say some men they got one foot in the worl’ of death, and if you kill them, death will take you, too. And you know what?’

Mingolla waited.

‘It’s the truth,’ said the boy. He clasped his hands, enlaced his fingers, and twisted them to show how firmly locked they were. You and death like this.’

‘Maybe,’ Mingolla said.

‘No, it’s the truth,’ the boy insisted. ‘The bridge tol’ me. Tol’ me I be t’ankful if I let you live. So you be t’ankful to the bridge, ’cause that magic you don’ believe, it save your ass.’ He dropped out of his squat, swung his legs over the end of the bridge. Gracela don’ care ’bout you live or die. She just goin’ ’gainst me ’cause when I leave, she’s goin’ to be chief, and she’s, you know, impatient.’

The girl met Mingolla’s gaze coldly: a witch-child with slitted eyes and bramble hair and ribs poking out. ‘Where you goin?’ he asked the boy.

‘I dream I will live in the south,’ said the boy. ‘I will own a warehouse full of gold and cocaine.’

The girl began to harangue him again, and he shouted back.

‘What’s goin’ on?’ Mingolla asked.

‘More bullshit. I telt Gracela if she don’ stop, I goin’ to fuck her and t’row her in the river.’ He winked at Mingolla, ‘Gracela she’s a virgin, so she worry ’bout that firs’ t’ing.’

The sky was graying, pink streaks fading in from the east. Birds wheeled up from the jungle, forming into flocks above the river. The boy shook the hair from his eyes, sighed, and settled himself more comfortably. Mingolla saw that his chest was cross-hatched with ridged scars: knife wounds that hadn’t received proper treatment. Bits of vegetation were trapped in his hair, and some were actually tied in place by pieces of twine: primitive adornments.

‘Tell me, gringo,’ said the boy in a man-to-man tone of voice. ‘I hear in America there is a machine wit’ the soul of a man. This is true?’

‘I guess that’s one way of lookin’ at it,’ said Mingolla. ‘Yeah.’

The boy nodded gravely, his suspicions confirmed. ‘I hear also America has builded a metal worl’ in the sky.’

‘They’re buildin’ it now.’

‘And in the house of your president, is there a stone that holds the mind of a dead magician?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Mingolla after due consideration. ‘But who knows… maybe.’

The pink streaks in the east were deepening to crimson, fanning wider. Shafts of light pierced upward to stain the bellies of some low-lying clouds to mauve. Several of the children began to mutter in unison: a chant. They were speaking Spanish, but their voices jumbled the words, making it sound guttural and malevolent, a language for trolls. Listening to the chant, Mingolla imagined them crouched around fires in bamboo thickets. Bloody knives lifted sunward over their fallen prey. Huddled together in the green nights amid Rousseau-like vegetation, while pythons with ember eyes coiled in the branches above.

‘Shit, gringo,’ said the boy. ‘This a weird motherfuckin’ time to be alive.’ He stared gloomily down at the river; the wind shifted the heavy snarls of his hair.

Watching him, Mingolla grew envious. Despite the bleakness of his existence, this little monkey-king was content with his place in the world, assured of its nature. Perhaps he was deluded, but Mingolla envied his delusion, and he especially envied his dream of gold and cocaine. His own dreams had been dispersed by the war. The idea of sitting and daubing colors onto canvas no longer held any real attraction for him. Nor did the thought of returning to New York. Though survival had been his priority all these months, he had never stopped to consider what survival portended, and now he did not believe he could return. He had, he realized, become acclimated to the war, able to breathe its toxins; he would gag on the air of peace and home. The war was his new home, his newly rightful place.

Then the truth of this struck him with the force of an illumination, and he understood what he had to do.

Baylor and Gilbey had acted according to their natures, and he would have to act according to his, which imposed upon him the path of acceptance. He remembered Tio Moíses’s story about the pilot and laughed inwardly. In a sense his friend—the guy he had mentioned in his unsent letter—had been right about the war, about the world. It was full of designs, patterns, coincidences, and cycles that appeared to indicate the workings of some magical power. But these things were the result of a subtle natural process. The longer you lived, the wider your experience, the more complicated your life became, and eventually you were bound in the midst of so many interactions, a web of circumstance and emotion and event, that nothing was simple anymore and everything was subject to interpretation. Interpretation, however, was a waste of time. Even the most logical of interpretations was merely an attempt to herd mystery into a cage and lock the door on it. It made life no less mysterious. And it was equally pointless to seize upon patterns, to rely on them, to obey the mystical regulations they seemed to imply. Your one effective course had to be entrenchment. You had to admit to mystery, to the incomprehensibility of your situation, and protect yourself against it Shore up your web, clear it of blind corners, set alarms. You had to plan aggressively. You had to become the monster in your own maze, as brutal and devious as the fate you sought to escape. It was the kind of militant acceptance that Tio Moíses’s pilot had not the opportunity to display, that Mingolla himself—though the opportunity had been his with Psicorps—had failed to display. He saw that now. He had merely reacted to danger and had not challenged or used forethought against it. But he thought he would be able to do that now.

He turned to the boy, thinking he might appreciate this insight into ‘magic,’ and caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. Gracela. Coming up behind the boy, her knife held low, ready to stab. In reflex, Mingolla flung out his injured hand to block her. The knife nicked the edge of his hand, deflected upward, and sliced the top of the boy’s shoulder.

The pain in Mingolla’s hand was excruciating, blinding him momentarily; and then as he grabbed Gracela’s forearm to prevent her from stabbing again, he felt another sensation, one almost covered by the pain. He had thought the thing inside his hand was dead, but now he could feel it fluttering at the edges of the wound, leaking out in the rich trickle of blood that flowed over his wrist. It was trying to worm back inside, wriggling against the flow, but the pumping of his heart was too strong, and soon it was gone, dripping on the white stone of the bridge.

Before he could feel relief or surprise or in any way absorb what had happened, Gracela tried to pull free. Mingolla got to his knees, dragged her down, and dashed her knife hand against the bridge. The knife skittered away. Gracela struggled wildly, clawing at his face, and the other children edged forward. Mingolla levered his left arm under Gracela’s chin, choking her; with his right hand, he picked up the knife and pressed the point into her breast. The children stopped their advance, and Gracela went limp. He could feel her trembling. Tears streaked the grime on her cheeks. She looked like a scared little girl, not a witch.

‘Puta!’ said the boy. He had come to his feet, holding his shoulder, and was staring daggers at Gracela.

‘Is it bad?’ Mingolla asked. ‘The shoulder?’

The boy inspected the bright blood on his fingertips. ‘It hurts,’ he said. He stepped over to stand in front of Gracela and smiled down at her; he unbuttoned the top of his shorts.

Gracela tensed.

‘What are you doing?’ Mingolla suddenly felt responsible for the girl.

‘I’m going to do what I tol’ her, man.’ The boy undid the rest of the buttons and shimmied out of his shorts; he was already half-erect, as if the violence had aroused him.

‘No,’ said Mingolla, realizing as he spoke that this was not at all wise.

‘Take your life,’ said the boy sternly. ‘Walk away.’

A long powerful gust of wind struck the bridge; it seemed to Mingolla that the vibration of the bridge, the beating of his heart, and Gracela’s trembling were driven by the same shimmering pulse. He felt an almost visceral commitment to the moment, one that had nothing to do with his concern for the girl. Maybe, he thought, it was an implementation of his new convictions.

The boy lost patience. He shouted at the other children, herding them away with slashing gestures. Sullenly, they moved off down the curve of the bridge, positioning themselves along the railing, leaving an open avenue. Beyond them, beneath a lavender sky, the jungle stretched to the horizon, broken only by the rectangular hollow made by the airbase. The boy hunkered at Gracela’s feet. Tonight,’ he said to Mingolla, the bridge have set us together. Tonight we sit, we talk. Now, that’s over. My heart say to kill you. But ’cause you stop Gracela from cutting deep, I give you a chance. She mus’ make a judgmen’. If she say she go wit’ you, we’—he waved toward the other children—‘will kill you. If she wan’ to stay, then you mus’ go. No more talk, no bullshit. You jus’ go. Understan’?’

Mingolla wasn’t afraid, and his lack of fear was not born of an indifference to life, but of clarity and confidence. It was time to stop reacting away from challenges, time to meet them. He came up with a plan. There was no doubt that Gracela would choose him, choose a chance at life, no matter how slim. But before she could decide, he would kill the boy. Then he would run straight at the others: without their leader, they might not hang together. It wasn’t much of a plan, and he didn’t like the idea of hurting the boy; but he thought he might be able to pull it off. ‘I understand,’ he said.

The boy spoke to Gracela; he told Mingolla to release her. She sat up, rubbing the spot where Mingolla had pricked her with the knife. She glanced coyly at him, then at the boy; she pushed her hair back behind her neck and thrust out her breasts as if preening for her two suitors. Mingolla was astonished by her behavior. Maybe, he thought, she was playing for time. He stood and pretended to be shaking out his kinks, edging closer to the boy, who remained crouched beside Gracela. In the east a red fireball had cleared the horizon; its sanguine light inspired Mingolla, fueled his resolve. He yawned and edged closer yet, firming his grip on the knife. He would yank the boy’s head back by the hair, cut his throat. Nerves jumped in his chest. A pressure was building inside him, demanding that he act, that he move now. He restrained himself. Another step should do it, another step to be absolutely sure. But as he was about to take that step, Gracela reached out and tapped the boy on the shoulder.

Surprise must have showed on Mingolla’s face, because the boy looked at him and grunted laughter. ‘You t’ink she pick you?’ he said. ‘Shit! You don’ know Gracela, man. Gringos burn her village. She lick the devil’s ass ’fore she even shake hands wit’ you.’ He grinned, stroked her hair. ‘’Sides, she f’ink if she fuck me good, maybe I say, “Oh, Gracela, I got to have some more of that!” And who knows? Maybe she right.’

Gracela lay back and wriggled out of her skirt. Between her legs, she was nearly hairless. A smile touched the corners of her mouth. Mingolla stared at her, dumbfounded.

‘I not going to kill you, gringo,’ the boy said without looking up; he was running his hand across Gracela’s stomach. ‘I tol’ you I won’ kill a man so close wit’ death.’ Again he laughed. ‘You look pretty funny trying to sneak up. I like watching that.’

Mingolla was stunned. All the while he had been gearing himself up to kill, shunting aside anxiety and revulsion, he had merely been providing entertainment for the boy. The knife seemed to be drawing his anger into a compact shape, and he wanted to carry out his attack, to cut down this little animal who had ridiculed him; but humiliation mixed with the anger, neutralizing it. The poisons of rage shook him; he could feel every incidence of pain and fatigue in his body. His hand was throbbing, bloated and discolored like the hand of a corpse. Weakness pervaded him. And relief.

‘Go,’ said the boy. He lay down beside Gracela, propped on an elbow, and began to tease one of her nipples erect.

Mingolla took a few hesitant steps away. Behind him, Gracela made a mewling noise and the boy whispered something. Mingolla’s anger was rekindled—they had already forgotten him! –but he kept going. As he passed the other children, one spat at him and another shied a pebble. He fixed his eyes on the white concrete slipping beneath his feet.

When he reached the midpoint of the curve, he turned back. The children had hemmed in Gracela and the boy against the terminus, blocking them from view. The sky had gone bluish gray behind them, and the wind carried their voices. They were singing: a ragged, chirpy song that sounded celebratory. Mingolla’s anger subsided, his humiliation ebbed. He had nothing to be ashamed of; though he had acted unwisely, he had done so from a posture of strength, and no amount of ridicule could diminish that. Things were going to work out. Yes, they were! He would make them work out.

For a while he watched the children. At this remove their singing had an appealing savagery, and he felt a trace of wistfulness at leaving them behind. He wondered what would happen after the boy had done with Gracela. He was not concerned, only curious. The way you feel when you think you may have to leave a movie before the big finish. Will our heroine survive? Will justice prevail? Will survival and justice bring happiness in their wake? Soon the end of the bridge came to be bathed in the golden rays of the sunburst; the children seemed to be blackening and dissolving in heavenly fire. That was a sufficient resolution for Mingolla. He tossed Gracela’s knife into the river and went down from the bridge in whose magic he no longer believed, walking toward the war whose mystery he had accepted as his own.

CHAPTER FIVE

At the airbase Mingolla took a stand beside the Sikorsky that had brought him to San Francisco de Juticlan; he had recognized it by the painted flaming letters of the words Whispering Death. He rested his head against the letter g and recalled how Baylor had recoiled from the letters, worried that they might transmit some deadly essence. Mingolla didn’t mind the contact. The painted flames seemed to be warming the inside of his head, stirring up thoughts as slow and indefinite as smoke. Comforting thoughts that embodied no images or ideas. Just a gentle buzz of mental activity, like the idling of an engine. The base was coming to life around him. Jeeps pulling away from barracks; a couple of officers inspecting the belly of a cargo plane; some guy repairing a forklift. Peaceful, homey. Mingolla closed his eyes, lulled into a half-sleep, letting the sun and the painted flames bracket him with heat, real and imagined.

Sometime later—how much later, he could not be sure—a voice said, ‘Fucked up your hand pretty good, didn’tcha?’

The two pilots were standing by the cockpit door. In their black flight suits and helmets they looked neither weird nor whimsical, but creatures of functional menace. Masters of the Machine. ‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla. ‘Fucked it up.’

‘How’d ya do it?’ asked the pilot on the left.

‘Hit a tree.’

‘Musta been goddamn crocked to hit a tree,’ said the pilot on the right ‘Tree ain’t goin’ nowhere if you hit it.’

Mingolla made a noncommittal noise. ‘You guys going up to the Farm?’

‘You bet! What’s the matter, man? Had enough of them wild women?’ Pilot on the right.

‘Guess so. Wanna gimme a ride?’

‘Sure thing,’ said the pilot on the left. ‘Whyn’t you climb on in front. You can sit back of us.’

‘Where your buddies?’ asked the pilot on the right.

‘Gone,’ said Mingolla as he climbed into the cockpit.

One of the pilots said, ‘Didn’t think we’d be seein’ them boys again.’

Mingolla strapped into the observer’s seat behind the copilot’s position. He had assumed there would be a lengthy instrument check, but as soon as the engines had been warmed, the Sikorsky lurched up and veered northward. With the exception of the weapons systems, none of the defenses had been activated. The radar, the thermal imager, and terrain display all showed blank screens. A nervous thrill ran across the muscles of Mingolla’s stomach as he considered the varieties of danger to which the pilots’ reliance upon their miraculous helmets had laid them open; but his nervousness was subsumed by the whispery rhythms of the rotors and his sense of the Sikorsky’s power. He recalled having a similar feeling of secure potency while sitting at the controls of his gun. He had never let that feeling grow, never let it empower him. He had been a fool.

They followed the northeasterly course of the river, which coiled like a length of blue steel razor wire between jungled hills. The pilots laughed and joked, and the flight came to have the air of a ride with a couple of good ol’ boys going nowhere fast and full of free beer. At one point the copilot piped his voice through the onboard speakers and launched into a dolorous country song:

As the copilot sang, the pilot rocked the Sikorsky back and forth in a drunken accompaniment, and after the song ended, he called back to Mingolla, You believe this here son of a bitch wrote that? He did! Picks a guitar, too! Boy’s a genius!’

‘It’s a great song,’ said Mingolla, and he meant it. The song had made him happy, and that was no small thing.

They went rocking through the skies, singing the first verse over and over. But then, as they left the river behind, still maintaining a northeasterly course, the copilot pointed to a section of the jungle ahead and shouted, ‘Beaners! Quadrant four! You got ’em?’

‘Got ’em!’ said the pilot. The Sikorsky swerved down toward the jungle, shuddered, and flame veered from beneath them. An instant later, a huge swath of jungle erupted into a gout of marbled smoke and fire. ‘Whee-oo!’ the copilot sang out, jubilant. ‘Whisperin’ Death strikes again!’ With guns blazing, they went swooping through blowing veils of dark smoke. Acres of trees were burning, and still they kept up the attack. Mingolla gritted his teeth against the noise, and when at last the firing stopped, dismayed by this insanity, he sat slumped, his head down. He suddenly doubted his ability to cope with the insanity of the Ant Farm and remembered all his reasons for fear.

The copilot turned back to him. ‘You ain’t got no call to look so gloomy, man,’ he said. ‘You’re a lucky son of a bitch, y’know that?’

The pilot began a bank toward the east, toward the Ant Farm. ‘How you figure that?’

‘I gotta clear sight of you, man,’ said the copilot. ‘I can tell you for true you ain’t gonna be at the Ant Farm much longer. It ain’t clear why or nothin’. But I ’spect you gonna be wounded. Not bad, though. Just a goin’ home wound.’

As the pilot completed the bank, a ray of sun slanted into the cockpit, illuminating the copilot’s visor, and for a split second Mingolla could make out the vague shadow of the face beneath. It seemed lumpy and malformed. His imagination added details. Bizarre growths, cracked cheeks, an eye webbed shut. Like a face out of a movie about nuclear mutants. He was tempted to believe that he had really seen this; the copilot’s deformities would validate his prediction of a secure future. But Mingolla rejected the temptation. He was afraid of dying, afraid of the terrors held by life at the Ant Farm, yet he wanted no more to do with magic… unless there was magic involved in being a good soldier. In obeying the disciplines, in the practice of fierceness.

‘Could be his hand’ll get him home,’ said the pilot. ‘That hand looks pretty fucked up to me. Looks like a million-dollar wound, that hand.’

‘Naw, I don’t get it’s his hand,’ said the copilot. ‘Somethin’ else. Whatever, it’s gonna do the trick.’

Mingolla could see his own face floating in the black plastic of the copilot’s visor; he looked warped and pale, so thoroughly unfamiliar that for a moment he thought the face might be a bad dream the copilot was having.

‘What the hell’s with you, man?’ the copilot asked. ‘You don’t believe me?’

Mingolla wanted to explain that his attitude had nothing to do with belief or disbelief, that it signaled his intent to obtain a safe future by means of securing his present; but he couldn’t think how to put it into words the copilot would accept. The copilot would merely refer again to his visor as testimony to a magical reality or perhaps would point up ahead where—because the cockpit plastic had gone opaque under the impact of direct sunlight—the sun now appeared to hover in a smoky darkness: a distinct fiery sphere with a steaming corona, like one of those cabalistic emblems embossed on ancient seals. It was an evil, fearsome-looking thing, and though Mingolla was unmoved by it, he knew the pilot would see in it a powerful sign.

‘You think I’m lyin’?’ said the copilot angrily. You think I’d be bullshittin’ you ’bout somethin’ like this? Man, I ain’t lyin’! I’m givin’ you the good goddamn word!’

They flew east into the sun, whispering death, into a world disguised as a strange bloody enchantment, over the dark green wild where war had taken root, where men wearing brass scorpions on their berets, where crazy lost men wandered the mystic light of Fire Zone Emerald and mental wizards brooded upon things not yet seen. The copilot kept the black bubble of his visor angled back toward Mingolla, waiting for a response. But Mingolla just stared, and before too long the copilot turned away.