Life During Wartime

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ruy Barros was a bad man. Everybody in the town of Livingston would testify to this. Consider, they’d say, that Ruy has often been seen wearing watches and gold chains resembling those once belonging to his passengers. Consider, too, that his wife embarked upon one voyage heavy with child and returned with neither a big belly nor an infant. Does this not suggest that Ruy, who has no patience with the weak and infirm, found the child a nuisance and cast him over the side? Is this not borne out by the fact that his wife left him shortly thereafter and went to live with her family in Puerto Barrios? And consider the woman with whom he has since taken up, a slut with a mystic rose in place of her eye of wizardly power. Should proof be needed of his evil nature, consider his cargoes. Cocaine, deserters, antiquities. No, they told Mingolla, you would do well to take passage on another boat… though the Ensorcelita is the only boat in the harbor that will bear you to Panama, and who but God knows when another will present itself. It might be best, señior, for you to rethink your travel plans.

The men and women who offered these warnings were Caribes, who dwelled in white casitas, who swam in a tiered waterfall in the green hills above the town, and the peacefulness of their lives in such close proximity to the battle zone was a perfect evidence of the war’s artificial character. From their words Mingolla had conjured a piratical image of Ruy Barros—grizzled, scarred, tattooed, with gold teeth—and the Ensorcelita was a battered old fishing tub that might well have belonged to such a character: a forty-footer with a dark green hull, four cramped cabins belowdecks, and a refrigerated storage compartment aft. Its wheelhouse, which was canted about five degrees out of true, had not been painted in many years, yet retained a yellow stippling that from a distance lent it a polka-dotted gaiety. The decks were strewn with rags, greasy machine parts, coils of rope, holed gas cans, and much of the planking was speckled with dry rot. But while Ruy’s personality accorded with the dilapidated state of the boat, his appearance did not. He was a gangly hollow-chested man in his late twenties, with fashionably cut black hair lying flat to his neck, and a lean horsey face that—despite its homeliness—showed evidence of breeding and struck Mingolla as familiar. Maybe because Ruy’s handsome face reminded him of Goya’s court portraits of dour, long-nosed, thick-lipped dukes and marquesses.

On the morning they boarded, a chill overcast morning with banks of fog crumbling out to sea, Ruy met them at the rail with a refined bow whose effect was dispelled by his greeting. ‘I told you seven o’clock,’ he said. ‘What you think, man? This a goddamn taxi? My other passenger, he been on board for a fuckin’ hour.’

Mingolla was about to ask, What other passenger, when a huge black man hove into view from behind the wheelhouse and came toward them, beaming. Gray flecks in his crispy hair, wearing a red baseball cap and jeans and a T-shirt stretched by his muscular arms and chest. Hook-shaped pink scar above one eye. Mingolla couldn’t believe it was Tully, but then, accepting the fact, he whipped out the automatic that had been tucked under his shirt.

‘Put that bitch away!’ said Ruy, backing.

Tully stood his ground. ‘You lookin’ strong, Davy. And feelin’ strong, too. Dat I can tell.’ He gave Debora the onceover. ‘Dis dat Cifuentes woman, huh? She fah from unsightly, mon.’

‘What’re you doing here?’ said Mingolla.

‘Same like you, mon. Panama!’ The way Tully sounded the name, it had a ring of destiny, of great deeds in the offing. ‘I been puttin’ two and two toget’er, and Panama de sum I’rive at.’

Ruy had backed to the door of the wheelhouse and was about to slip inside; Mingolla told him to stay put.

‘Who’s he?’ Debora asked; she had her own gun out.

‘Davy never tell ya ’bout Tully Ebanks?’

Tully came a step closer, and Mingolla, realizing he didn’t need the gun, tucked it back into his waistband. ‘Be wise, Tully,’ he said. ‘I can handle ya, no problem.’

‘I been ever knowin’ dat, Davy. Weren’t it me sayin’ you was goin’ to be somethin’ special? I seen dis moment from de back-time. And I still fah you, mon.’

‘Uh-huh, sure.’

Ruy started into the wheelhouse again, and Mingolla cautioned him. ‘I’m gonna start this motherfucker up,’ Ruy said. ‘You bastards wanna kill each other, go ’head. I got the fog to worry ’bout.’ He ducked into the wheelhouse, and a moment later a grumble vibrated the hull, black smoke spewed from the stern.

‘You gonna shoot me, Davy?’ Tully asked, and grinned.

‘I might,’ said Mingolla. ‘Tell me why you’re going to Panama.’

‘Ain’t nowhere else to go. Must be a fool, took me so long to figure t’ings out.’

‘What things?’

‘T’ings I been hearin’… from Izaguirre and de rest. It alla sudden start makin’ sense.’

Mingolla picked his way through the debris on the deck and confronted Tully from an arm’s length away. Tully grinned down at him, his seamed face as massive as an idol’s. Then his grin faded as Mingolla pushed into his mind, brushing aside his defenses and influencing him toward honesty. He asked Tully again his reasons for traveling to Panama, and Tully gave back a fragmented tale of clues, hints, things overheard, all leading to the same conclusions that Debora and Mingolla had reached.

‘Christ God Almighty!’ said Tully afterward, staring at him in awe. ‘What de fuck happen wit’ you?’

‘Practice,’ said Mingolla. From his brush with Tully’s mind he had gained an image of greed and strength, and underlying that, an essential good-heartedness that had been weakened by drugs and power. He thought he could trust him, but he was having trouble sorting out his feelings for him: an amalgam of camaraderie and antagonism.

‘Listen, Davy.’ Tully adopted a conspiratorial tone. ‘We got to talk, mon. Work somet’ing out ’bout dis Panama trip. ’Cause I’m feelin’ it’s gonna be deep down there. We gonna need each ot’er.’

‘Yeah, we’ll talk.’ Mingolla turned to Debora. ‘He was my trainer, he’s okay.’

She dropped her gun into a tote bag, favored Tully with a suspicious stare, then went forward. The Ensorcelita rattled and lurched in the gray chop, leaving Livingston behind. I hate dis fuckin’ sea,’ said Tully, staring out over the water. Damn, I hate it!’ He moved close to Mingolla and draped an arm about his shoulders. ‘Been too long, ain’t it, Davy?’

Mingolla muttered agreement, but shook off Tully’s arm. ‘What you wanna talk about?’

‘Well…’ Tully leaned on the rail, adopted a stern tone. ‘To start wit’ you might wanna tell me ’bout why you messed wit’ my ‘Lizabeth.’

Mingolla didn’t place the name at first. ‘Oh, yeah… I don’t know, man. I was pretty loose back then. Sorry.’

‘Mon, dat little girl be cryin’ for a month ’bout you.’

‘I told ya I was sorry,’ Mingolla said, irritated. ‘What you want me to do, go back to the island and fix her?’

‘I coulda done dat. But I lef’ her the way she was… figured dat her feelin’s keep off de ot’er flies. Naw, I just wantin’ to know if your conscience been vexin’ you.’

‘Not a lot,’ said Mingolla. ‘I’ve been busy.’

‘You always did enjoy actin’ hard,’ said Tully. ‘And now you hard fah true. But dere’s good in ya, mon. Dat’s clear.’

‘I don’t need my character analyzed, man. Tell me what you got in mind… y’got something in mind, don’t ya?’

Ruy came out of the wheelhouse to stand beside Debora, who was looking back at the receding town.

‘Yeah, I got somethin’ in mind,’ Tully said. ‘Back when I was fishin’, I spend some months in Panama. Got to know de country some. ’Case t’ings go sour down dere, dere’s dis place I know up in Darién. Kinda place where a mon can lose heself.’

Ruy was talking, gesturing wildly, and his hand flicked across Debora’s breast, causing her to jump back.

Mingolla brushed past Tully and, kicking garbage aside, stalked toward Ruy. ‘You better watch where you put your fuckin’ hands, man!’

‘It was an accident, David.’ Debora stepped between him and Ruy, and Ruy smiled, shrugged.

‘Don’t get excited, hombre,’ he said. ‘I got my own woman. Hey, Corazon! C’mere!’

A woman popped her head up from the hatch that led to the cabins. Ruy beckoned, and she came up onto the deck. She was a little plump, but sexy nonetheless, with Indian coloring, regular mestizo features, and long black hair weaved into a single braid. She radiated a psychic’s heat, and in her left eye was the holograph of a dewy rose floating against a starless night.

‘Yeah,’ said Ruy. ‘I need a squeeze, Corazon she gimme one.’ He waggled a finger at her. ‘Open it up.’

Corazo dropped her eyes and started undoing the buttons of her blouse.

‘Don’t do that,’ Mingolla said.

But Corazon didn’t stop.

‘You tell your woman what to do,’ Ruy said. ‘Not mine.’

The blouse fell open, Corazon’s heavy breasts spilled out.

‘Let’s go,’ said Mingolla, guiding Debora toward the hatch.

Behind them, Ruy’s voice was filled with amusement. ‘C’mon back and give her a squeeze, man! Y’don’t know what you missin’!’

They sailed close to the shore, avoiding the cordon of warships that fortressed the deep water. The overcast held, and whenever the sun pierced the clouds, its vague light layered the sea with a flat uniform shine, making it seem they were crossing an ocean of fresh gray housepaint. The only event to break the monotony of the voyage was Ray’s ongoing attempt to seduce Debora. Each time she came on deck, he would pin her against the rail and regale her with testimony to his revolutionary zeal, tell stories about his villainy in service of the cause. When Mingolla asked if she wanted him to put a stop to this, she said, ‘He’s crude, but he’s harmless. And he’s really not so bad. At least his political conscience is genuine.’ Her attitude was at odds with Mingolla’s: genuine was the last word he would have used to describe Ruy, and besides, he was mightily offended by Ruy’s treatment of Corazon.

His initial impression of her had been that she was more than pretty, but he subtracted from that impression the exotic bauble embedded in her eye. You were drawn first to look at the eye, only then at the rest of her, and it seemed that the surreal beauty of the rose had created an illusion of beauty, that she was in reality quite ordinary. This secondary impression was enhanced by her doglike obedience to Ruy’s whims. Once, for instance, he had her dress in black pumps and an evening gown, pile her hair high and fix it with glittering jeweled pins that resembled bunches of tiny flowers, and set her to scrubbing the decks, a chore that took her most of the night and left her dress in tatters. She went about with her head down, rarely speaking to anyone, and would flinch at the sound of Ruy’s step.

But one night as Mingolla walked along the companionway belowdecks, heading for his cabin, he heard Corazon’s voice coming from Tully’s door, which was cracked an inch open. ‘No, I don’t feel nothin’,’ she was saying.

‘Hell you don’t,’ Tully said. ‘Can’t fool me ’bout dat.’

Through the door, Mingolla saw Corazon standing by Tully’s bunk, wearing only panties. Lantern light flashed off the rose in her eye.

‘Why you want me to feel?’ she said. ‘Feelin’ don’t mean nothin’. I don’t wanna feel.’

‘Dat’s horseshit,’ said Tully. ‘Dat’s just how Ruy want you to be… he like you to be dat way. And for some reason I can’t unnerstan’, you t’ink dat’s upful.’

‘I have to go.’ She shrugged into her blouse.

Tully, hopeless-sounding: ‘You be back?’

Mingolla didn’t wait for the answer, ducking into the vacant cabin next door. When he heard Corazon’s footsteps retreating, he crossed to Tully’s door and pushed on in. ‘You’re playing with fire, man,’ he said. ‘We don’t need trouble with Ruy.’

‘Ain’t gonna be no trouble,’ said Tully, lying back on his bunk. ‘And if dere is, den we fix he head for him.’

‘I just as soon not scramble the brains of a man who’s sailing reef waters,’ said Mingolla.

‘Don’t be worryin’.’ Tully heaved a forlorn sigh. ‘Mon know alla ’bout me and Corazon. Fact it were his idea, her comin’ to me. He like to have her tell ’bout how it is wit’ ot’er men.’ He slammed his fist into the mattress.

‘What’s the matter?’

The lines on Tully’s face appeared to be etched deeper than before, like cracks spreading through his substance. ‘Damn fool, me,’ he said. ‘To get taken wit’ some squint at my age… ’specially one dat ain’t even taken wit’ herself.’ He made the muscles of his forearm bunch and writhe, watched their play. ‘She enjoy t’inkin’ ’bout herself like she a doorstop or somethin’. And the damn t’ing is, I know she feel fah me, ’cept she won’t ’mit it.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t feel anything,’ Mingolla suggested. ‘Maybe you’re kidding yourself.’

‘Naw, she feel it all right. She just shamed by the feelin’. Goddamn women, dere feelin’s is most all de power dey got, so dey likes to go fuckin’ ’round wit’ ’em, y’know. See how fuckin’ twisted dey can make ’em, and den get a mon all cotched up in dem.’ He hit the mattress again. ‘Can’t figger how she got dat way.’

‘Could be Ruy’s doing.’

‘I don’t t’ink so. De woman been t’rough de therapy, she got no reason to bow down to Ruy. Naw, ut strike me she been like dis awhile.’ Tully held up his fist to the light, examined it: like an alchemist inspecting a strange root in the rays from his alembic. ‘But, mon, I could have fun fah a few minutes alone wit’ dat son of a bitch.’

‘That wouldn’t be real smart,’ Mingolla said. ‘We need him right now.’

‘What “smart” got to do wit’ anyt’ing?’ Tully glowered at Mingolla. ‘You t’ink it’s smart de way you carryin’ on wit’ dat Cifuentes woman? T’ink dat don’t ’fect your judgments?’

‘Least she’s not spoken for.’

‘Naw, but Ruy he gotta yearnin’ fah her.’

‘He’s just flirting.’

‘Dat not what Corazon say, she say de mon have fall hard.’

‘Then that’s his tough luck.’

Tully snorted, stared at the ceiling. ‘You sure as shit still gotta lot to learn, Davy.’

Mingolla perched on the edge of the bunk. ‘So tell me ’bout Panama, man. This place you talking ’bout.’

‘Dat’ll keep.’

‘What you got better to do… brood?’

Tully said nothing for several seconds, but finally sat up. ‘Guess you gotta point. All right, I tell you. Dere’s dis little village name of Tres Santos up in de Darién Mountains. Here’—he grabbed pencil and paper from the table by the bunk—‘I draw a map.’ He kept talking as he drew. ‘It ’bout four, five hours from Panama City… less dere’s mist. Den you could be a week gettin’ dere. Or maybe you take de coast road ’long de Pacific and come at Tres Santos from de west. Less mist dat way.’

‘What’s there?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Not’in’ ’cept Indians. But in case t’ings go to hell in Panama City, Tres Santos be a good place to start a run.’

‘Shit, they’d find us there.’

‘Dat’s true… Tres Santos open to the sky. But from dere you can cotch a trail dat lead into de cloud forest. And once you up in de clouds, you can’t be stayin’ dere, neither. But you can hide your tracks. De Indians dey be helpful and you say to dem my name. Dey show you de secret ways, and no matter who will follow, you take dem ways and you will be far away ’fore de dogs can trace your scent.’ He held up the paper, studied it. ‘Dere… you hang on to dat ’case t’ings don’t work out in Panama.’

Mingolla tucked the map into his shirt pocket. ‘What were you doing up in the mountains? Thought you were fishing.’

‘I were fishin’ all right… fishin’ under de meanest mot’erfucker dat ever put on a braided cap. We hit Colón, mon, I were over de side and runnin’ fah he cut the engines. Had me a time, too. Dat Darién some wild country.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Most of it just wilderness, but de cloud forest now, dat’s somet’in unusual fah true.’ Tully folded his arms behind his head. ‘Dere’s villages up dere where de sun never comes… even on de brightest day dere’s mist, and the air look like it fulla some kinda shiny atoms, y’know. And when you see a mon walkin’ toward you, wit’ de mist swirlin’ ’round him and de sun givin’ him a halo, it make you t’ink you gone to Jesus. And it’s quiet. Every sound’s muffled by de mist, and you cannot judge de distances ’tween t’ings. You get de feelin’ dat de place is made of mist, and dat de distances is always changin’. You will hear wings beatin’ and see only shadows, and de jungle ’pear like it movin’ slow, all de vines writ’in and twistin’ like snakes. And dere’s brujos. Witch men. You can see dere fires in de night, bloomin’ out in de solitudes, in de high places. Hear dere chantin’. And when de chantin’ cease, dere may come a black dog strollin’ t’rough de village, a dog dat belong to nobody, and dey say if you look in he eye, den you will learn of de mysteries.’

A cold uneasiness had stolen over Mingolla as Tully spoke, but he denied it and merely said that the place sounded interesting.

‘Oh, it dat all right. But dat ain’t why I told you ’bout it.’ Tully propped himself on an elbow and stared at Mingolla. ‘I got a feelin’ dat you gonna come dere someday, and dat’s de reason fah I make de map.’

‘I s’pose I might get up that way,’ Mingolla said, affecting casualness.

‘Dat ain’t my meanin’, Davy,’ said Tully. ‘You know what I’m talkin’ ’bout. I got me a real deep feelin’.’

It wasn’t until the second week of the voyage that Mingolla entered into another conversation with Ruy. He had been sitting beside Debora, who was sunning herself in a pale leakage of light through the overcast, watching the blackish green line of the Honduran coast, when Ruy came out of the wheelhouse carrying a cassette player and sat down by the door; he lit a cigarette and switched on the player. The volume was low, but Mingolla recognized Prowler’s rhythms and Jack Lescaux’s vocal style. He moved along the rail to within twenty feet of Ruy and pretended to be studying the shore, pleased to hear something familiar in all this foreign emptiness.

‘Like that music, man?’ said Ruy, cutting the volume. ‘I do.’

Mingolla said it was okay.

‘Bet the little lady down there, she like it. Maybe I invite her over to have a listen. She look so sad, I bet it cheer her up.’

‘I doubt it.’ Mingolla turned a baleful eye on Ruy.

‘That Debora, she’s a nice littte lady,’ said Ruy expansively. ‘Real nice! She tell me you in love, but I know that’s the crap you gotta hand ’em to make ’em do de backstroke.’

Mingolla hardened his stare but said nothing.

‘Love!’ Ruy sniffed and flipped his cigarette over the rail; he shielded his eyes from the glare and peered toward Debora. ‘Yeah, she sure is nice. I’m tellin’ ya, man, this ain’t casual with me. I’m really feelin’ somethin’ for her. I’m thinkin’ ol’ Ruy can put a smile on her face.’

‘All you done so far is bore the hell outta her.’

‘Then maybe I try harder.’ Ruy squinted up at him. ‘Tell ya what, we make a trade, okay? I’ll send Corazon to your cabin tonight, and you lemme see what I can do for the little lady.’

Disgusted, Mingolla turned away.

‘Hey, you gettin’ the best of the deal, man,’ said Ruy. ‘That Corazon, she got tricks that’ll notch your pistol.’

Something occurred to Mingolla, something he’d been intending to ask Ruy about. ‘You remember a guy named Gilbey?’ he said. ‘Short blond guy ’bout my age. He traveled with you ’round eight or nine months ago.’

‘Gilbey,’ said Ruy. ‘Naw, uh-uh.’

Mingolla searched his face for a hint of a lie. ‘You’d remember this guy. He was surly, y’know… had a bad attitude. Wouldn’t take shit from anybody.’

‘What you think?’ said Ruy with menace. I dump him over the side?’

‘Did you?’

‘You been talkin’ to them dumb cunts back in Livingston, that it?’ Ruy climbed to his feet, adopted a challenging pose. ‘Listen, friend. I ain’t a nice guy, I’m a fuckin’ criminal! But I don’t throw nobody over the side ’less they begging for it.’

‘Maybe Gilbey begged for it.’

‘Then I’d remember him.’

‘How ’bout your baby, you remember your baby, don’tcha?’

Ruy spat at Mingolla’s feet. ‘My baby’s born dead, man. I get rid of it ’cause my woman she can’t stand to be ’round it.’

‘If you say so.’

‘That’s what I say. Those bullshit savages back in Livingston, what they know ’bout Ruy Barros. What they know ’bout my work for the cause. I work my butt off for the cause, I do things nobody else got the belly for.’

‘That right?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Ruy went chest-to-chest with Mingolla. ‘But what’s a fuckin’ gringo like you know ‘bout shit. You…’

Mingolla gave Ruy a push. ‘How you know I’m American?’

Ruy grinned. Debora, she tell me.’

‘That’s crap,’ said Mingolla. ‘How’d you know?’

‘Huh! Ruy Barros, he can smell a fuckin’ gringo. That’s a nice paint job, man, and you got the language down… but you walk gringo, you act gringo, and the things you say is gringo. And you don’t see that the cause is for all the people. For priests, murderers, whatever.’ He shook his fist at the sun. ‘La Violencia! Lemme tell ya, man. This war ain’t gonna end ’till we win it.’

Despite himself, Mingolla was impressed by Ruy’s vehemence, by the honest zeal it appeared to embody.

‘You don’t unnerstan’ nothin’, gringo,’ Ruy continued. And that’s why me and the little lady gonna work things out. ’Cause in her heart she know I unnerstan’ her.’

The time had come, Mingolla decided, to stake out his claim. You talk a lot, man, I like that. Guys who talk a lot, that’s all they’re up for.’

Ruy rubbed his chin, his long face grew thoughtful. ‘You sayin’ you can take me, man?’

‘Absolutely.’ Mingolla gestured at Debora. ‘And y’know what? She can take ya, too. You ain’t a threat at all, beaner. So set it out, give it a shot.’

Ruy’s shoulders tensed as if he were preparing to throw a punch, but he must have thought better of it. He hitched up his pants, scowled at Mingolla, and went into the wheelhouse. Mingolla picked up the cassette player, held it up to show Ruy, who looked away, attending to the business of steering. Then he walked back to the stern, turning up the volume of a ballad.

‘What’s that?’ said Debora, frowning at the player as Mingolla sat beside her.

‘Prowler… like it?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘It’s old,’ he said. ‘From four or five years ago. And not typical. They do mostly uptempo stuff. I’ll find something else.’

‘No, I’m starting to like it.’ She leaned into him.

‘What were you and Ruy talking about?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘You sounded angry.’

‘He’s an asshole.’

Debora’s hair drifted into his face, and it seemed he was breathing her in with the same rhythm as that of the swells lifting the Ensorcelita. Seaweed floated on the swells, clumped reddish brown beard-lengths with black bean-shaped seeds. The sun beat down, wedging silvery between the clouds, and a dark bird wheeled above the shore, then dived and vanished into the palms.

‘I guess he is,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Ruy… an asshole. But I still think he means well.’

‘Meaning well doesn’t matter when you’re that much of an asshole.’

Ruy poked his head out of the wheelhouse, glaring at them, his lean cruel face a badge of enmity, a reminder of all they had endured, all they were going toward. But Mingolla felt so content, so removed from the world of trials and disasters, that—not stopping to think how Ruy might take it—he grinned and gave him a cheerful wave.

The next day they were stopped by a patrol boat, but it was no big deal. Ruy paid a bribe, and they went on their way, sailing along the Honduran littoral. However, they spent the day after that moored in a deep cove, and Ruy informed them that they would be traveling at night for a while; he claimed he was ‘illegal’ in this part of Honduras and didn’t want to risk being spotted by the militia. He continued to pursue Debora, and although his pursuit was somewhat more circumspect, Mingolla believed it had become more intense, more driven. From watching him, from further information that Debora had passed to Tully, he realized that as a byproduct of his confrontation of Ruy, Ruy’s feelings had acquired validity, and he thought this involved a conscious decision on Ruy’s part, that he had elevated simple lust to an obsessive level, as if the idea of the unattainable had inspired a passion.

To avoid Ruy, he and Debora kept to their cabin, and as a result they engaged more and more in their fierce mental communion. There was tangible proof that their powers were still increasing, but even had there been no proof Mingolla would have known it. Standing in the bow one night, at the extreme end of a road of rippling gold light that stretched across the black water to the newly risen moon, he felt as he had on the riverbank their last evening in Fire Zone Emerald, that he could look past the horizon and grasp the essence of the days to come; this time the feeling was freighted with clarity, and he believed that were he to exert the slightest effort, he might launch himself into another vision. But he was afraid of visions, of visionary knowledge. He wanted to inhabit this long oceangoing moment and never arrive anywhere, and so he restrained himself from testing his strength.

A further consequence of their retreat was that they gained new insights into each other. Though the things Mingolla had already learned about Debora implied the existence of a complex personality, he saw now that her growth had been interrupted by the war, her complexity channeled into the simple pragmatism of the revolutionary; her incarnation of the revolutionary spirit was childlike, capable of aligning everything she perceived into rudimentary categories, black and white, pro and con, and whether she continued to grow would depend on how much longer her natural processes were constrained. He sensed a similar inhibition in himself, but pictured his process as being less constrained than trained into specific patterns of growth, the way Japanese gardeners bind the limbs of trees to make them spread crookedly and sideways.

The smell of gasoline was always thick in the cabin, and they could feel the vibration of waves against the hull. There were two bunks, no lights, and the close quarters and darkness acted to enforce intimacy. One night as they lay together, Debora’s buttocks cupped spoon-style by Mingolla’s hips, he started to turn her onto her stomach, to enter her from behind, and inside his head he heard a shrill, No! Heard it clearly, enunciated in Debora’s voice. The message was so sharp and peremptory, it stimulated him to answer in kind, What is it? What’s wrong?

‘I heard you,’ she said, shifting to face him.

‘I heard you, too. Let’s try it again.’

After several minutes they gave it up.

‘Maybe it didn’t happen,’ she said.

‘It happened, and it’ll happen again. We just can’t push it.’

The grinding of the engine, the mash of waves shouldering the hull. Debora settled against him, and he put an arm around her. ‘What was wrong?’ he asked. ‘What’d I do?’

‘It’s not important.’

‘If you don’t wanna tell me…’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that things are so good for us, I don’t want to spoil it by bringing up the past.’

The pitch of the engines dropped to an articulated grumble, and Ruy shouted.

‘Maybe I should tell you,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’ll explain why I was so reticent with you at first.’

‘Back in Emerald?’

‘Yes… you see there were a lot of reasons I didn’t want to get involved with you like this, and one was I was afraid it wouldn’t be any good between us.’

‘You mean sex?’

She nodded. ‘It hadn’t ever been good for me, and I thought nothing could change that, not even being in love. But it is good, and I keep getting scared it won’t last.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s so perfect… the way you fit me, how you touch me. And everything before was so imperfect.’ She turned away as if embarrassed. ‘When they brought us in for interrogation… the government…’

‘Your family?’

‘Yes.’ She let out a sigh. ‘When they brought us in, I knew they’d rape me. That’s what they always do. I prepared for it, and every day that passed, every day it didn’t happen, I grew more afraid. I thought they must be saving me for something special, some special horror. Finally this man came to see me. Major Armangual. He was very young to be a major, and not too badlooking. He spoke politely, softly. He made me feel hope. He explained that he’d interceded on my behalf with the government, and that he’d take me out of prison that same day if I’d cooperate with him. I was sure that cooperation included sex, but I didn’t care. The prison was awful. Other women screaming all the time, bodies being carried past my cell. And I thought if I was out, I might be able to help my family. So I told him, Yes, I’d do anything. He smiled at that and said I wouldn’t have to do much at all, that his requirements were limited and specific. Just some office work.’

Debora gave a tired-sounding laugh, plumped up the pillow beneath her head. ‘It was the weekend, and he was off duty, so we went back to his house. A fancy house in Zone One, near the big hotels. There was a pool, maids. He installed me in a room on the second floor, and I expected him to come to me that night. But no such thing. I ate dinner with him, and afterward he said he had papers to go over and suggested I get some sleep. The whole weekend was like that. It was as if I were a houseguest. I considered trying to escape, but the grounds were patrolled by dogs, and I still hoped I could do something for my family… even though I didn’t have much hope left.’ Her voice faltered, steadied. ‘Monday morning I rode to work with him. He was in the air force, and he had an office at the airport. Do you know Guatemala City?’

‘Not well.’

‘There’s a small military airport across from the civilian one, and that’s where the office was. All morning I sat in the reception room with his aide, staring at the walls. Around noon the aide brought me a sandwich and a soda. I ate, waited some more. I was beginning to think the major just wanted me to sit there and look nice. Then about two o’clock he came to his door and said, ‘Debora, I need you now.’ Just the way he’d ask a secretary in to take dictation, just that offhanded tone. I went into the office, and he told me to take off my underwear. Still very polite. Smiling. I was afraid, but like I said, I’d prepared for this, and so I did what he asked. He told me to get down on my hands and knees beside the desk. I did that, too. I shed a few tears, I remember, but I managed to stop them. He pulled out a tube from his drawer, some kind of jelly, and… and he lubricated me. That was almost the worst part. And then he dropped his trousers and came inside me from behind, the way you…’

‘I’m sorry;’ said Mingolla. ‘I didn’t…’

‘No, no!’ Debora’s hands fluttered in the dark, found his face, cupped it. ‘Sometimes I want you to do that, but…’ She sighed again. ‘Let me tell the whole story.’

‘All right.’

‘I thought he’d make love to me roughly. I’m not sure why. Maybe I figured that his good treatment had been to lull me, to undermine my preparation. But he didn’t. For a long time he didn’t even move. Just kneeled behind me, inside me, his hands on my hips. There was a bottle of whiskey on his desk, and after a couple of minutes he had a drink from it. Then he moved a little, but only a few times. He had another drink, moved some more. It went on like that for about a half-hour. Then somebody knocked on the door. The major yelled for them to come in. It was another officer. He looked at me, but didn’t seem surprised by what was going on. After that first look, he didn’t pay any attention to me, just discussed business with the major, something about scheduling, and then he left. It kept on like this for the rest of the afternoon. The major having a few drinks, moving now and again, conducting business. At the end of the day he pulled out of me and masturbated. He didn’t insist I watch, he didn’t seem to care what I was doing. He finished, wiped it up with a rag. Then he drove me back to his house, and that night over dinner he treated me as if I were his houseguest again.’

Mingolla rested his head on her shoulder, bitter, wishing he could take the memory from her.

‘It was the same every workday,’ she said. ‘In the beginning I felt relieved that he wasn’t hurting me, but before long… I don’t know how to explain what I was feeling. Humiliation was there, the fact that I was being used like a piece of furniture. Guilt that it wasn’t worse. The feeling of being a nonperson. Sometimes I’d hate myself for not hating it worse than I did, and sometimes I’d almost enjoy it. I’d have a sense of being freed by it, that once he was inside me I’d go floating off into some other universe, invisible, made different, unique. Then I’d worry that he’d get tired of me and put me back in prison. I remember once when I was worrying about that, I started to make love to him, to take an active part… you know, to give him a better time. But he didn’t want that. He reprimanded me, told me to hold still or he’d punish me. My feelings for him changed, too. Back and forth. One day I’d be repelled by him, I’d dream about killing him. And the next day I’d be thankful that he was sparing me from worse. I’d actually look forward to the office, to the chance to prove myself to him. I’d make bright conversation at dinner, bring him presents. For a while I was actually in love with him, at least I felt something like love. And I think that’s why he finally released me, I think my attachment to him didn’t suit his needs. I was terribly distracted, close to a breakdown, and I’d begun to tell him how I felt. Trying to widen our range of communication. I guess I thought he’d be interested. Like a scientist, you know, I thought he might want to take notes on the disintegration of my personality. But he wasn’t interested. God knows what did interest him.’

She was silent a long time, and Mingolla asked what had happened.

‘One morning I was waiting for him, and two soldiers came instead. They drove me out of town, north toward Antigua. I knew they were going to kill me, throw my body in a barranca. But they just dropped me off by the side of the road. I felt lost, I didn’t know what to do. I walked back and forth, laughing and crying. I didn’t realize they’d left me off at a bus stop until the bus pulled up. I got on the bus… it seemed the only choice. I never saw the major again. Two years later, after I’d gone through the therapy, I tried to find him. But I learned he was dead. Assassinated.’

‘Did you want to kill him?’

‘There was more to it than that. I think I wanted to understand what he’d been trying to do with me… ifit wasn’t just a matter of his own perversity. I’m not sure what I would have done to him. Probably killed him… I don’t know.’

The engines had slowed, and Mingolla could hear the bubbling of the Ensorcelita’s wash; he was grateful for the sound, because its sudden incidence alleviated the need for speech. Minutes went by with no communication between them other than touches. Debora’s breathing grew deep and regular. Then she said, ‘Make love to me.’

‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘I was… but I was dreaming we were making love.’

‘Aren’t you too sleepy?’

‘Maybe, but we can try.’

He pulled her close, kissed her. Her response was tentative at first, and he wondered if she was testing herself against the bad memory. Soon, though, she lost herself in the foreplay. But when he entered her, she lay motionless beneath him and he started to withdraw.

‘I want you to finish,’ she said.

‘You’re too sleepy.’

‘No, it’s good. Sometimes when I don’t move I can feel you more. I like that.’

He felt irrationally aloft, distant from her, and this gave him an inarticulate concern; but then concern vanished as he heard her voice call to him in the quiet of his mind.

Once she had fallen asleep he lay back, listening to the engines. Something was bothering him, and he realized that he still felt distant from her. He knew if he were to turn and embrace her, the distance would vanish, and he would feel drifty, at peace. But knowing that changed nothing. He had the idea that his insights into her were somehow in error. As were her insights into him. It seemed to him that they had become shifty characters to each other, that their mode of honesty—these sudden bouts of revelation and confession—were smokescreens. Not that they were lies, but rather that by being framed so dramatically they became less than truths, a means of obscuring some truth that perhaps they themselves didn’t understand. That must be it, he decided. That they didn’t understand themselves well enough to practice honesty… or else they were frightened of self-discovery. Self-discovery was an unpleasant chore. He could look back a mere matter of weeks and see what an idiot he had been. Like in Emerald. His role of hard-ass creep, his lovesickness. Roles poorly conceived and poorly acted. And God only knew what sort of idiot he was being now. He turned onto his side, facing away from her. Their problems likely had something to do with how they had begun; though for the most part he had been able to put that behind him, it was always there beneath the surface, always a cause for doubt. He sighed, and the sigh coincided with an enormous swell lifting the Ensorcelita, and for an instant he felt that the coincidence of tide and breath would carry them in a gravitiless arc beyond Panama to a dark country where silent cowled figures with burning eyes awaited their arrival. He turned onto his back again, causing Debora to stir and mumble. He tried to resurrect his train of thought, but it no longer seemed important. None of it mattered, none of it had real weight. He lay awake a long time, unable to think of anything that did.

The engines broke down the next night while Ruy was attempting to impress Debora with the fervor of his revolutionary convictions, with his inside information concerning secret matters. The moon, almost full, hung low above the coast, and they were close enough to shore that Mingolla could make out the separate crowns of palms silvered by its light. Ruy was leaning against the wheelhouse door, and inside, visible through his opaque reflection, Corazon stood at the wheel. She turned toward Mingolla, her left eye glinting redly. He tried to read her face, and she held his gaze without a hint of challenge, as if willing to let him learn all he could.

‘Yeah,’ Ruy was saying. ‘Don’t matter to me if the revolution’s dead. I start it all over myself if I have to, unnerstan’? And anyway’—he shook a finger at Debora—‘why you keep tellin’ me that shit ’bout it’s dead? You think that, why you goin’ to Panama? You runnin’? Naw, that’s not it! You and this Yankee come on board, act like you gonna kill this black man, and then the next minute you actin’ like old friends. It don’t make sense. You got some kinda plan. A fool can see that. And lately there’s been too many strange motherfuckers headin’ for Panama. Gotta be somethin’ big happenin’ down there.’

‘How you figure?’ Mingolla asked.

‘I told ya, lotsa strange fuckers travelin’ these days.’ Ruy fingered a cigarette from his shirt pocket ‘Wonder what’ goin’ on.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Debora. ‘People have been running to Panama since the war began.’

‘Not this kinda people.’ Ruy cupped a match, lit up. He threw back his head and blew smoke, affording Debora a view of his sharp profile.

With every gesture, he was—Mingolla thought—projecting the image of the Romantic Smuggler, layering it with his Zorro-like commitment. The pose was laughable, but Mingolla was coming to believe that Ruy knew this, that he was using the image to disguise a real commitment. He had been operating too long in dangerous waters to be the buffoon he pretended, and besides, Mingolla had a bad feeling about him, about his whole act.

‘Yeah,’ Ruy said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘I been smellin’ somethin’ funny for a while now. Been hearin’ things, too.’

‘You fulla shit, mon.’ Tully, perched on the rail, turned his head; the moonlight washed over half his face. ‘Ain’t nobody be tellin’ a chump like you nothin’.’

Ruy ignored him. ‘This one man I carry south, he don’t think mucha me. And that’s good, ’cause when a man don’t think mucha you, he ain’t cautious.’ He blew smoke toward Tully. ‘So he say to me, “Ruy, there’s more to this war than meets the eye.” And I say, “Yeah? What you mean?” I’m pretendin’ I ain’t really interested, y’know. “Well,” he says, “I probably shouldn’t be talkin’ on this, but the peace is comin’ soon, and Panama is where it’s comin’ from.” And I say, “Wow! Peace, man! That’s fuckin’ terrific!” And the man’s all puffed up ’cause of how he’s astoundin’ me, y’know. “Oh, yeah,” he say. “People I know, they workin’ on the peace right this second. Negotiatin’, y’understan’.”’

Ruy folded his arms, cocked his head, and from that pose, the pose of a bemused lecturer pausing to consider the effect of his words, Mingolla recognized the man of whom Ruy reminded him. It should, he thought, have been obvious to him from the beginning. All Ruy’s little clues had been designed to give himself away.

‘Anyhow,’ Ruy went on, ‘I start pressin’ this man… not so he’d notice, y’unnerstan’. Just workin’ on him. And he tells me that, yeah, dey workin’ on a peace in Panama, but dere’s fightin’ still. Armies in the streets. I ask him who’s fightin’, and he act like it’s a big secret, like he’s really doin’ me a favor by tellin’ me, y’know, and he say he ain’t clear on the whole story, but he give me a name and say this name got a lot to do with it.’ He put on a sly smile, swept all of them with a glance. ‘ “Sotomayor,” he say to me. “You ’member that name. Sotomayor. That name, it’s the key to everything.”’

Mingolla met his eyes, and though Ruy was not smiling, Mingolla could sense his secret amusement. He was about to call Ruy, to demand an accounting; but at that moment the engines stopped.

‘Fuck!’ Ruy threw down his cigarette, flung open the door to the wheelhouse. ‘What’d you do?’

‘Nothin’,’ said Corazon. ‘I don’t do nothin’. It just stop.’

Ruy stomped forward, heaved off the hatch of the engine compartment; he put his hands on his hips and stared down into the darkness. ‘Corazon!’ he bawled. ‘Bring the flashlight!’

Corazon went forward with a flashlight, and Ruy grabbed it, lowered himself into the compartment. The rest of them gathered around Corazon. Below, Ruy swept the beam across a maze of grease-smeared metal. He held the beam steady a second, then banged the side of the compartment. ‘Son of a bitch! Motherfucker!’

‘Can’t you fix it?’ Debora asked.

Ruy banged the wall again, hauled himself back onto the deck. ‘Take parts to fix this cunt! And I ain’t got no parts.’ He looked as if he were about to throw the flashlight, but only smacked it against his hip. ‘Man, this some real fuckin’ shit!’

‘Look like we gonna have to put into port,’ said Tully.

Ruy’s face was wild, the muscles knotting at the corner of his mouth. ‘I told ya, I’m illegal ’round here. They blow my fuckin’ head off if they catch me.’

‘Run up the sail,’ Mingolla suggested.

‘Sure, man! That way we be right off Truxillo come daybreak, and that son of a bitch Dominguez, he be smilin’ ear to ear when he see the Ensorcelita. Shit!’ Ruy clutched his forehead. ‘What the fuck am I gonna do?’

‘You can’t fix it for sure?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Ain’t you listenin’, man?’ Ruy spun around to face him, his fists balled.

‘Den we got no choice but to ’bandon dis washtub,’ said Tully. ‘I go look fah somethin’ to wrap de guns.’

Ruy shoved him. ‘We ain’t abandonin’ shit, man!’

Tully knocked him against the side of the wheelhouse and engulfed his throat in a one-handed chokehold. ‘Don’t be ’busin’ me, mon. Got dat?’ He gave Ruy a squeeze, and Ruy’s eyes bugged. ‘Now you wanna stay wit’ de ship, dat’s fine. We don’t need you.’

Mingolla looked at the shore, at the shadowed hills rising inland. ‘What’s out there?’

‘Too many fuckin’ soldiers,’ said Ruy, massaging his throat ‘That’s what.’

‘Olancho,’ said Tully. ‘Mountains, jungle. Dat’s where de war begin, but dene’s no fightin’ now. Hard to say what’s out dere.’

‘Maybe there’s a way,’ said Ruy. ‘If we can get past the checkpoints, then maybe I can get you to Panama. And maybe I can get financin’ for another boat.’

‘We do fine by ourselves, mon,’ Tully said.

‘Fuck you will!’ But Ruy moved away from him. ‘You be lost ’fore you go ten miles. But there’s ways I know. Military roads, old contra trails. ’Fore I got the Ensorcelita I used to travel that route.’

Mingolla stared out at the coast, then at Ruy. It might be best, he thought, to hold back on calling Ruy, see what he had in mind. ‘Are those ways still open?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Ruy. ‘But we need a truck or somethin’. Maybe one of them off-road vehicles. Won’t be hard to find somethin’. Lotsa these farmers ’round here, they fix up their trucks with extra gas tanks so they can go huntin’ in the hills.’

‘How long will it take?’ Debora asked.

‘Depends what we get into,’ Ruy said, sidling up to her, solicitous. ‘But I tell ya one thing. Time we come to Panama, we gonna have a few stories to tell.’

Two miles from where they came ashore, tucked in among the ranks of coconut palms, stood a copra plantation: tall wooden racks for drying coconut fiber; three tin-roofed sheds in which the product was stored; and a long ranch-style building of whitewashed stone with a red tile roof. This last served as living quarters and office for the owner, Don Julio Saldivar. Parked around the corner of the building was a venerable Ford Bronco with an auxiliary gas tank welded into the luggage compartment. Don Julio met them at the door with an automatic pistol in hand, but Mingolla persuaded him to amiability and generosity, telling him that they were government agents on secret assignment. The plantation owner offered him use of the Bronco, camping equipment, and offered Debora, whose clothes had been lost during the swim to shore—no lifeboat on the Ensorcelita –the old clothes belonging to his daughter who was off at the university in San Pedro Sula. Mingolla had Ruy and Tully check out the Bronco, and sat with Don Julio in the kitchen, a cramped room with an old-fashioned gas stove and a motel icebox and photographs of Don Julio standing over a variety of slaughtered game animals decorating the pebbled white walls. Don Julio set about drawing a map of the coastal hills, tracing the roads that would lead them away from the checkpoints.

‘What’s here?’ Mingolla asked, indicating a section on the map where the roads vanished. ‘You haven’t marked anything down.’

‘There’s nothing to mark,’ said Don Julio. ‘Just ghosts and jungle.’

He was short and paunchy, in his late fifties, mahogany-skinned, and dressed in baggy shorts and a guayabera unbuttoned to display his smooth chest; his head was massive, jowly, and his thick black hair was frosted at the temples. The stern prideful lines of his face put Mingolla in mind of his own father, and from the prideful blustery way Don Julio spoke of his daughter’s devotedness Mingolla got the idea he was lying, that his daughter really hated him. Don Julio’s conversation veered into politics. He patted his gun, vowed eternal vigilance against the Red Menace: there was something more than a little pathetic about the combination of his machismo, his self-portraits with dead jaguars and tapirs, and the emptiness of his house. He spoke of his youth. He’d owned a ranch in the Petén. It had been a chore, he said, to keep the guerrillas off the land, but he’d managed. And, oh, what a man he’d been for the ladies! His Cadillac, his nights at the Guatemala City discos. Was there a town in all the world as fine as Guatemala City? Mingolla withheld comment. He himself had spent three days in the city. One night he had been standing in a pachinko parlor on Sixth Avenue, a major downtown artery, playing the machines; he had been lost in playing, and when he had turned around to get more change, he had discovered that not only was the parlor empty, but that Sixth Avenue, which moments before had been thronged with crowds and traffic, was completely deserted. He’d run all the way back to his hotel, and none of the Guatemalans there had wanted to talk about what was going on. Guatemala City, to Mingolla’s mind, was brimstone country. Death squads patroling in their unmarked Toyotas, sirens and distant gunfire, and up in Zone 5, where people lived in houses built of tires and mud, young boys dreamed of making rich men bleed.

‘I warned my friends about the Reds,’ said Don Julio, returning to his favorite topic. ‘Once I took some of them down to the beach in Tela… you know Tela?’

‘No,’ said Mingolla.

‘Nice little town up the coast,’ said Don Julio. ‘Government people vacation there in the summers. But that didn’t stop the Commies from making their mark. Defacing the walls with slogans. Anyway, I took my friends down to the beach. These friends, they were liberals’—he made an obscenity of the word –‘they believed in freedom of speech! Pah! And I pointed out the slogans on the walls of the bars. Look, I told them. Now that communism has spread to the grassroots, all its fine philosophy has been reduced to these misspelled words. Stupid passions like the ones aroused by a soccer match are invading the political process. Up with Liberty! Down with Injustice! As if poverty and disease were something you could stamp out by a score of two to nothing. Aren’t the lessons of history plain, I asked them. Just consider Nicaragua. They invited in the Cubans, and now the whole country’s nothing but an armed camp of goose-stepping snitches and assassins. And what’s the revolution done for the poor? The only difference is that nowadays when they crap on the streets, they do it single-file and sing songs about brotherhood.’ Don Julio sighed. ‘But they wouldn’t listen, and you see what happened. Six years of hell.’ He patted Mingolla’s arm. ‘Thank God for men like you and me. Communists know better than to come around us, they know what they’ll get.’

Debora entered the room in time to hear these last words, and she shot Don Julio a venomous look. She had on a gray skirt and a print blouse, and unmindful of her hostility, Don Julio said, ‘You look breathtaking, señorita! Lovely!’

She let the comment pass. ‘The car’s ready.’

‘You’re leaving so soon?’ Don Julio stood. ‘What a pity! I get so little company since my wife died. Ah, well.’ He pumped Mingolla’s hand. ‘I’m proud to have made your acquaintance, and I’ll pray for the success of your mission.’

He stood in the door waving as they went around the corner. Dawn was breaking, and in its gray light the beach was revealed to be foul with animal wastes and coconut debris, the tidal margin heaped with piles of foam and clumps of seaweed that at a distance had the appearance of dead bodies cast up by the surf. The Ensorcelita was a dark stain bobbing beyond the breakwater.

Mingolla opened the driver’s door, then realized he had forgotten the map. ‘Forgot something,’ he said. ‘Be right back.’

Ruy, sitting in the back beside Corazon and Tully, looked as if he were about to say something; then turned away.

The front door was open, and as Mingolla entered he heard Don Julio talking in the kitchen, saying in a dull monotone, ‘I have a message for him.’

Mingolla moved cautiously into the kitchen. The plantation owner was speaking into a wall phone, his back to the door.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They have just left.’

‘Put the phone down,’ said Mingolla.

Don Julio whirled around, his left hand going to his holster, and Mingolla struck at him, expecting an easy victory. But as he penetrated Don Julio’s mind, he was stunned by the emergence of a powerful pattern. A frail tide of emotion washed over him, a seepage of anger, and it seemed that the pattern—which he perceived as a serpentine form of crackling silver—was breeding its double inside his skull, influencing his thoughts to glide in a slow hypnotic rhythm. It was so easy just to go with the pattern, to loop and loop, to let his head nod and wobble, to listen to the droning that came to his ears from within his head, a shrill oscillating sound like the whine of a nervous system on the fritz. And maybe that’s what it was, maybe it was, maybe that’s… He saw Don Julio’s hand slipping toward his holster, and tried to shake himself alert. But the seductive rhythms of the pattern were all through him, lulling him, convincing him of his security. Don Julio, moving very slowly as if submerged in thick syrup, unsnapped the holster. Mingolla took a feeble step toward him, stumbled, and whacked the side of his head hard against the wall; the pain blinded him for a moment, but acted to disperse the pattern, and before it could be reestablished, he generated a charge of fear. Don Julio staggered backward, and Mingolla kept up the assault, sending waves of fear, of loathing at being touched so intimately by a strange mind. The plantation owner whimpered and fell in a heap, his eyes rolling back.

Mingolla picked up the phone and listened.

‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice through long-distance static. ‘Hello.’

‘Who is this?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Why, David! Congratulations! You must have passed your test.’

‘Izaguirre?’

‘At your service.’

‘You set this up?’

‘I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I assume Don Julio attempted to subdue you with his mental gift… am I right?’

‘No,’ said Mingolla. ‘I came in and he was on the phone, so I hit him.’

‘I think you’re fibbing, David. How is Don Julio? Salvageable?’

Mingolla looked down at the plantation owner: he was in bad shape, pasty, sweating, and breathing shallowly. A little toy rightist with a silver snake in his head.

‘No matter,’ said Izaguirre. ‘I’ll send someone to check.’

‘You’re not too fucking clever,’ Mingolla said. ‘Don’t you think I know Ruy led us here? I see what’s going on.’

‘There’s no need to be clever. Whether or not you’re aware of your situation has no bearing on the dangers you may face.’

‘And I’m sure you’ve set plenty of traps.’

‘The world is a trap. You just happened to stumble into one of mine. Perhaps you’ll avoid the rest.’ Izaguirre chuckled. ‘I have better things to do than worry about you. You’re very strong, David, but you’re really not very important. There are only a few of your kind and many of us. We can control you.’

He hung up, and Mingolla knelt beside Don Julio, who arched his eyebrows, strained to speak. Groaned. Mingolla set about trying to wake him, but as he made contact, Don Julio’s mind winked out… like the hummingbird on the beach at Roatán. He felt for a pulse. Don Julio’s skin was remarkably cool, as if he’d been dead a long time.

‘What’s goin’ on?’ said Ruy behind him; he was flanked by Tully and Debora.

‘Heart attack or something,’ said Mingolla.

He added an imaginary gray goatee and wrinkles to Ruy’s face. No doubt about it. The resemblance to Dr Izaguirre was unmistakable.

‘Is he dead?’ Debora asked.

‘Yeah.’ Mingolla picked up Don Julio’s gun and stood. ‘Guess they don’t make right-wingers like they used to,’ he said, searching Ruy’s face for a reaction.

Ruy nudged the dead man’s arm with his foot. ‘Cono!’ he said, and spat. He smiled at Mingolla. ‘What you do, man? Scare him to death?’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the gray light, the hills of Olanchito showed a ghostly leached green. Dirt trails wound through them, petering out into thickets and ledges, as if what they had once led to had been magicked away. Those nearest the sea were mounded sugarloaf hills, their crests bristling with stubby palms that from the coast road looked like growths of electrified hair; those farther inland were sharper, faced with granite, their peaks shrouded in rainclouds. For two days they followed the roads, and then they drove beyond the end of the roads into a wilderness whose jungles had overgrown the worst ravages of the war, but still displayed its passage in ways both subtle and distinct. For the most part—although occasionally they came across a ruin or a crater filled with ferns—everything looked normal. Trees were green, birds and insects clamored, streams plunged into waterfalls. Yet there was an air of evil enchantment to the place. It seemed the jut and tumble of the hills had been built up over a series of immense skeletons whose decaying bones pervaded every growth with wrongness. That wrongness was in the air, pressuring them, adding a leaden tone to the sunniest of days, heavying their limbs and making breathing a toil.

The Honduran hills gave way without visible demarcation to the hills of Nicaragua, and traveling through them took a further toll on their spirits; even Ruy grew silent and morose. It was slow going. They inched down steep defiles, got stuck in streambeds, spent hours getting unstuck, were blinded by squalls that transformed the windows into smeared opacities. Each time they chanced across a bombed village, it seemed a relief to have this hard evidence of war in that it dispelled the supernatural aura. Some of the villages were inhabited, and in these they would buy red gas that was stored in oil drums and was full of impurities. The people of the villages were timorous, living like monkeys in the ruins, peeking from behind shattered walls until their visitors had left, and nowhere did they receive a sincere welcome.

There was little privacy to be had, what with Ruy’s obsessiveness toward Debora and Tully’s ongoing need to discuss his troubles with Corazon; but sometimes at night Mingolla and Debora were able to slip away, to walk out from the campsite, to talk and make love. Mingolla continued to be confused by their relationship. The fact that love constituted for them an actual power obscured the more commonplace fact that love required a sequence of resolutions in order to prosper; and given the tenuousness of the circumstance, none of the usual resolutions merited real consideration. But he couldn’t help thinking about them, and when he did, when he looked at her and tried to imagine a future, it seemed inconceivable that they should have one. They were, he realized, scarcely more than children with guns, faced with a problem whose fantastic nature beggared logic; despite the proofs, he experienced moments when he was sure that everything they had learned was somehow in error. Trying to hold all this in focus, he would feel at sea, and forgetting the war, the unreliability of their companions, he would cling to Debora, as she did to him.

Nine days after leaving the coconut plantation, they came across a road. Not a track or an old contra trail, but an honest-to-God road of yellow dirt, wide and wonderful to drive, beginning in the middle of nowhere and winding off through the hills. Mingolla assumed it was a military road intended to connect bases that had never been constructed, because though it was plain from the wildness of the bordering jungle that it had been long since abandoned, no weeds or any other growth marred its smooth surface, and this testified to the use of chemicals available to army engineers for just that purpose. They came to the road at sunset, and while they might have traveled on into the night with such a road, Mingolla decided it would be good psychology to make camp; that way, if the road ended after a few miles, they would at least have a bit of momentum with which to ease the rest of the next day’s travel. He pulled the Bronco up onto a hillside several hundred feet above the road, and they pitched their tents by a stream that had carved a ferny trench in the rock.

That night Mingolla and Debora walked down the hill and sat in the fringe of the jungle; from this vantage they could look down the road to where it curved up into a notch between the two adjoining hills. An egg-shaped moon lay on its side in the notch, and in its light the yellow dirt appeared richly mineral and moist, not like gold, but like manure of some sort, or the track of a giant snail that had gone south ahead of them. No insects, only the hissing vowels of the wind. The presence of the road made the emptiness bearable, and the quiet was so pervasive and deep, Mingolla imagined he could hear the great humming vibration of the earth. It felt wrong to talk amid this stillness, and they sat with their arms around each other, admiring the road as if it were something miraculous. Debora tucked her head onto his chest, and smelling her hair, feeling the steady hits of her heart, almost audible in the silence, it seemed that everything he had in life had acquired a comprehensible value. He believed he understood love. Not so as to be able to write a definition. But he thought that from this moment on he would be able to call it to mind as a conglomerate of imagery and sensory detail. Whatever love was, it was here, right now, conjured in identifiable form by the silence and the road and Debora’s heartbeat, by a thousand other variables.

She sat up, shaking back her hair. ‘I heard something.’

‘Probably the wind.’

She came to her knees, smoothing her skirt, brushing off dew. She pointed toward the opposite slope, where mist was accumulating in thick bands. ‘We won’t be able to see soon.’

‘Nothing to see, anyway.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said after a moment. ‘About how I’ve changed. We haven’t been together that long, but if you measure the time in changes, it seems like years.’

‘How’ve you changed?’

‘I’m not as sure of things as I used to be. When I first thought about going to Panama, I just wanted to find out what was happening. And after we started learning what was happening, then I wanted to be part of it… even if it wasn’t my revolution, it was the revolution there was, and I knew there had to be one. I still believe that. But now sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the effort. I keep imagining us running away. Hiding, letting everybody else figure out the problems of the world.’

He laughed. ‘It’s the opposite with me.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah… I used to want to get away from everything. But the closer we come to Panama, the more I realize I can’t escape being involved. And the more angry I get at Izaguirre.’ He laughed again. ‘Maybe this is what they call growing together.’

‘Maybe,’ she said despondently. ‘At least you’re changing in the right direction.’

‘What do I know? I’ve taken the same dope as the fuck-ups who’re supposed to be making the movie.’

‘You still believe they’re fuck-ups?’

‘There’s no doubt about it. The way they’re handling us, all the games. If peace is their plan, they’ll probably fuck that up. Think about it. Here’s these two families who’ve been doing the drug for centuries. All that power, and they’re just now trying to pull it together. Doesn’t augur well for the peace process.’

‘I guess not.’

He studied her face, its exoticism as pronounced as the rose in Corazon’s eye. Just the sort of little treasure that would appeal to Ruy, to the man with everything… especially if it was beyond his reach, if his power couldn’t touch them. And Mingolla was certain they had grown that strong. They would have to be careful not to reveal too much to Ruy, because Izaguirre would be in contact with him, and he might panic if he thought they were too strong. Try to eliminate them. It might be time to confront Ruy. Mingolla had been hoping Ruy would give something away, some bit of information, but maybe the best tactic would be to bully him.

‘You act like you’re miles away, David.’

‘I’m back… just thinking.’

‘Well…’ She settled against him. ‘If they are fuck-ups, maybe we can do something.’

‘Given that they’re into playing God, the worst we can do is to inject some realism into the situation.’ He stared down the road, trying to identify a black object that had appeared in the notch. ‘Something’s coming.’ He helped her up, and they retreated farther into the fringe.

‘It’s stopped,’ she said.

‘Naw, look. It’s coming again.’

After a couple of minutes they realized that the object was in fact two objects, one light, one dark, and that they were advancing at a leisurely clip, moving forward fifty or sixty feet, stopping, then moving forward again; and after a couple more minutes they saw that the objects were a horse and a wagon. The wagon was a little house on wheels with a peaked roof, the walls painted dark blue and illuminated with five-pointed gold stars and a crescent moon; the horse was white, dappled with gray. No one was driving. The reins were lashed to a peg on the driver’s seat, and the window and door were black with shadow. There was something horrible about the wagon’s approach, the way it lurched emptily like a body without bones, and this, allied with its archaic appearance, lent it an omenical potency.

The wagon drew abreast of them and stopped. The horse shifted in its traces, eyes rolling, ablaze with moonlight; it was an old horse, its breath wheezy. When Mingolla stepped out onto the road, the horse tossed its head but stayed put: it was as if it wanted to run, but was obeying a set pattern of stopping and starting, and Mingolla had caught it just right. He grabbed the bridle, held its head. The horse’s eye swiveled, regarding him with fear, and Mingolla—taken by its sculptural beauty, its madness—knew the horse had been trifled with by someone like him, some drugged genius of the new order, and had been coerced to move haltingly along this desolate road for no reason other than that of the most pitiful folly. He was more affected than he had been by the terrible human results of similar folly. Human beings were liable to such, but horses, as beautiful and stupid as they were, should not have to put up with that kind of crap.

Debora came up beside him, and he handed her the bridle. ‘See if you can gentle him,’ he said. Then he hauled himself onto the driver’s seat and ducked inside the wagon.

Before he determined the wagon’s contents, he knew by intuition that it held nothing good, that it held nothing much at all, and that whatever he found would be testimony to a knowledge not worth having. An instant later he felt dread. But that was just fancy. He realized that his first intuition had embodied the true essence of terror, the comprehension that everything we dread is simply a reminder of insignificance, one we assign a supernatural valence in order to boost our morale. An angle of moonlight cut across a pallet on the floor. There was a faint cloying smell as of something once alive and unhealthy. Mingolla hesitated, not sure he wanted to poke around more. He spotted a gleam in a rear corner and reached for it. His fingers touched a slick paper surface, and he picked up a sheaf of glossy photographs, each showing a black woman intimately involved with a fat white man. His toe struck something that rattled against the wall. He groped and came up with a handful of bones. Human bones, neither fractured nor exhibiting any other sign of injury. Finger bones and sections of spinal joint. They took the light and made it seem a decaying tissue stretched between floor and window. And that was all. Except for dust and the idea of dissolution. Whether the wagon and its contents were a contrivance, a message sent from one playful maniac to another, whether one recognized it as such, Mingolla was certain that its effect upon anyone would be to make him aware of his triviality, his unlovely organic essence. He climbed back onto the driver’s seat, feeling mild giddiness and nausea. The light was so vivid in contrast to the wagon’s darkness, he thought he might breathe it in and exhale shadow.

‘What’d you find?’ Debora asked.

‘It’s empty.’ He jumped down.

‘He’s better now,’ said Debora, stroking the horse’s nose.

‘I’m gonna unhitch him,’ Mingolla said. ‘Let him graze.’

They led the horse uphill through the accumulating mist to a clearing bounded by twisted spreading trees with black bark as wrinkled as the faces of old, old men, and they watched him graze, moving a step, munching, moving another step. Here he looked at home, serene and natural. His dappled coat blended with the mist, making it appear that he was either materializing from or disintegrating into the ghostly white ribbons clinging to his shoulders and haunches, his head sometimes vanishing when he bent to pull at a clump of grass. Moonlight slanted through the mist, haloing every object, creating zones of weird depth, coils of smoky glow, as if some magical force were dominating the clearing and illuminating its shapes of power. It was partly this perception of the magical that roused Mingolla’s desire, the hope that he could evoke a magic of his own and forget the foulness of the wagon. He pressed Debora against one of the trees, opened her blouse, and helped her skin down her panties. ‘It’s too damp,’ she said, pointing to the dewy grass. He lifted her a little to demonstrate an alternative. Her breasts were cool, gleaming with condensation, and felt buoyant in his hands; her eyes were aswim with lights. He drew up her skirt, lifted her again, and as he entered her, she threw her arms back around the trunk, her legs scissoring his waist. The stillness of the night was banished. The horse whuffling, munching, and the muffled noises from the jungle were gathered close, sharpened and orchestrated by the wet sounds of their lovemaking, their ragged breathing. It was a white act, seeming to kindle the moonlight to new brilliance. Mist curled from Debora’s mouth, tendriled her hair, and seeing her transformation, Mingolla felt that he, too, was being transformed, changing into a beast with golden eyes and talons, gaining in strength with every thrust, every cry she made. Afterward he supported her against the tree for a long time, too weak to talk or move, and when at last he withdrew, when he turned to the clearing, he expected to find that the horse had disappeared, that it had been dissolved by their good magic. But there it was, shoulder-deep in a white sea, staring at them without curiosity, merely watchful, knowing exactly what it had witnessed, its eyes steady and dark and empty of questions.

Several nights later Ruy invited Mingolla and Debora for coffee in his tent, while Tully and Corazon were gathering kindling. Ruy had apparently given up all rights to Corazon, preferring to concentrate on Debora, and though he had stopped making overt attempts at seduction, his eyes were always on her, and much of his conversation was suggestive. Mist curled through the tent flap, glowing in the radiance of a battery lamp, and Ruy lay on his sleeping bag, a coffee cup balanced on his stomach, talking about Panama, telling them more of what his long-ago passenger had purportedly told him. As he spoke, his language and his inflections grew more and more refined, and at last realizing that he was revealing himself to them, that there was no further use in circumspection, Mingolla asked, ‘What are you, man? Madradona or Sotomayor?’

Ruy set down his cup and sat up; shadows filled in the lines of his face, ‘Sotomayor,’ he said. ‘Of course most of us have grown accustomed to using other names.’

‘Why…’ Debora began.

‘Why haven’t I told you before? Why am I telling you now? Because I…’

‘Because it’s a game he’s playing,’ Mingolla said. ‘Everything’s a game to them.’ He wanted to ask Ruy about the horse, but was afraid he might lose his temper. ‘And we’re supposed to believe you playful fuckers are capable of making peace with one another.’

‘We have no choice,’ said Ruy haughtily. ‘You know a good bit of it. Would you like to hear the rest?’

‘Sure,’ said Mingolla. ‘Entertain us.’

‘Very well.’ Ruy sipped his coffee. ‘Toward the beginning of the last century, the wiser heads among us concluded that the world was headed for disaster. Nothing imminent, you understand. At least in terms of that generation’s happiness. But they could see the development of conflicts and forces that would menace everyone. They realized that the feud had to end, that we had to turn our energies toward dealing with these questions. And so we met in Cartagena and made a peace between the families.’

Mingolla spat out a laugh. ‘Altruists!’

‘That’s right,’ said Ruy. ‘You have no idea how great an altruism was required to overcome centuries of hatred. It wasn’t only that we had to end the feud; we had to become colleagues with our bitter enemies, because the logistics of creating a worldwide revolution were…’ He couldn’t find an appropriate term and shook his head. ‘We had to initiate breeding programs to begin with. The families were not large in those days, and we needed more manpower to infiltrate the political arena, the military, the intelligence communities. That’s been the purpose of programs like Psicorps and Sombra… to swell our ranks. It’s taken us more than a hundred years, but finally we’re ready for a takeover. There’s not an agency of any importance in Russia or the United States whose strings we can’t pull.’

‘Then why haven’t you pulled them?’ Debora asked.

‘We’ve made a number of mistakes over the years. Despite the accords of Cartagena, many of us were unable to put aside our bitterness, and from time to time the feud would flare up. We overlooked most of these flare-ups. After all, things were going well overall. But then’—Ruy let out a long, unsteady breath — ‘then we made a terrible mistake. About twenty of us were engaged in trying to neutralize the threat of the Palestinian terrorists, when the feud flared up again. Those twenty people became so involved in settling personal scores, they neglected their assignments. And as a result a terrorist plot to plant a nuclear device in Tel Aviv was carried out.’

‘Jesus!’ Mingolla started to say more, but sarcasm and insult seemed unequal to the enormity of the folly.

Ruy appeared not to notice his outburst. ‘We renewed the accords after Tel Aviv, but even so there continued to be flare-ups of trouble, especially among the younger generation. At last it was determined that all those who were keeping the feud alive—along with those of you from Sombra and Psicorps who were strong enough to help us shape a new world—would take up residence in Barrio Clarín and negotiate a separate peace. Once the peace was successfully negotiated, then and only then would we begin the takeover.’

‘What if you fail?’ Debora asked.

‘Then we’ll die, and the takeover will go on without us. I’m not sure how the sentence will be carried out. Carlito’s in charge of that. An air strike, I presume. But we won’t fail. We’re making progress every day.’

‘Who’s Carlito?’ asked Mingolla.

‘Dr Izaguirre,’ said Ruy. ‘My uncle.’

‘Right,’ said Mingolla. ‘We’re going to Panama so that crazy son of a bitch can blow us up. Sure we are.’

Ruy shrugged. ‘If you run, you’ll be tracked down. And besides’—he looked at Debora — ‘you want a voice in making a new world, don’t you?’

‘I’ll pass,’ said Mingolla. ‘What you’ve made so far doesn’t seem much of an improvement.’

‘You know nothing of what we’ve done.’

‘I know this goddamn war!’

‘We didn’t start the war! You did! What we’ve done over the past few years is to reduce it to a fraction of its previous scope. We’ve had to maintain it to an extent to cover our operations, and we don’t have enough people to influence specific battles, only the command structure. But once the peace is achieved, we will end it. And then we’ll pull the strings and end all wars.’ Ruy had another sip of coffee, made a sour face. ‘We’ve done shameful things, we’ve permitted shameful things to continue. But that’s the responsibility that comes with power. You do what you have to and live with the consequences. And if the result is good, all else is justified.’

‘Y’know,’ said Mingolla, ‘I believe you’re sincere, man. I really do. That’s what scares me. You’re so goddamn sincere, you think sincerity excuses everything. Every whim and atrocity.’

‘Your problem’s not with us, man.’ Ruy drew up his knees, rested his arms on them. ‘It’s with me. Debora here, she understands that the world has to change. She understands that no matter how bloody the path, things can’t go on as they have. But you’—he jabbed a finger at Mingolla—‘you can’t see that. You haven’t lived down here. You haven’t seen your country violated by development bankers, by corporations and their little Hitlers. Sooner or later that lack of understanding will split the two of you.’

‘And that’s when you move in, huh?’

Ruy smiled.

‘I wouldn’t count on anything,’ said Debora stiffly.

‘I’m counting on your commitment, guapa,’ said Ruy. ‘I know how deep it runs. And you can count on honesty from me.’

Mingolla snorted at that.

‘You think we’re dishonest because we’ve been cautious with you?’ said Ruy. ‘Don’t you know how hard it was for us to place trust in people too strong for us to control? But for the sake of the revolution, we did it.’ He lit a cigarette, blew a bluish plume of smoke that gave his comments visible pause. ‘The kind of power we’ve enjoyed… being able to take whatever you want. After a while it instills an inviolable morality. The things of this world lose their desirability, and work becomes the only passion. That’s why our revolution will be pure.’

‘What happens to that morality,’ said Debora, ‘when it encounters something it can’t have?’

‘You’re talking about you and me?’ Ruy asked.

‘Just about you… about the lack of seriousness implicit in a person who contrives a passion over something he can’t have. It’s childlike.’

Ruy stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe. ‘You figure that’s how it is with me?’

‘I know it.’

‘What’s it matter the way a passion begins?’ he said. ‘Believe me, Debora. I’m serious.’

‘We can’t deal with these people,’ said Mingolla.

‘No, he’s right about that much,’ she said. ‘We have to.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘I think,’ she said, ‘it makes more sense to be a part of this revolution than to deny it’s happening. I’ve always thought so… you know that.’

‘They’re lunatics, they’re…’

‘And your president isn’t? No, we have to deal with the families. But we may not have to deal with Ruy.’ She said this last coldly and then reached into Ruy’s pack and removed his handgun.

‘It would go hard with you if you killed me,’ said Ruy, undismayed.

Mingolla took the gun from Debora and let the barrel droop toward Ruy’s groin. ‘It’s likely to go hard with us anyway.’

Ruy couldn’t take his eyes off the gun.

‘Tell me some more about Panama,’ said Mingolla.

‘You’re being a fool,’ said Ruy. ‘Kill me, and they’ll never stop giving you pain.’

Mingolla essayed a deranged laugh. ‘Call me irresponsible.’ He cocked the gun. ‘Talk to me, Ruy, or I’m gonna blow away your spare parts.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Back on the boat you mentioned something ’bout armies in Barrio Clarín. Armies that did the fighting whenever the families had a squabble. Let’s hear ’bout them.’

Ruy’s words came in flurries, his eyes fixed on the gun. ‘The armies, yes… there are about a thousand, maybe more. We had no choice, you see. We couldn’t keep killing one another, and passions were running so high. We had to do something.’

‘Calm down,’ said Debora. ‘Take your time.’

‘Is he going to shoot?’

‘You can never tell what he’s going to do,’ she said. ‘Now what about these armies?’

‘They’re the damaged, the hopelessly damaged. The ones whose minds are almost gone.’

‘Damaged how?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Damaged by people like you… like me. Their minds disrupted by too many interactions. You know. Like the people at your hotel in Roatán. Except these are even more deteriorated. They can barely feed themselves.’ Their stares unnerved Ruy further. ‘We had no choice, don’t you see? If we didn’t use them, we’d be killing one another and there’d be no chance for a peace among us. We’re not proud of it, believe me! But it’s working. I swear it! There hasn’t been a battle in over a month.’

‘God,’ said Debora.

‘We don’t give them guns,’ said Ruy weakly. ‘No guns are permitted in Barrio Clarín.’

‘Gee, that’s swell of ya.’ Mingolla sighted along the barrel at Ruy’s chest.

Ruy’s voice broke. ‘Don’t do this.’

The gun seemed to be getting heavy in Mingolla’s hand, and he was tempted to lighten it by a bullet. But Ruy had value alive. If they could hide their power from him, he would make a good witness when they reached Panama, would testify to Izaguirre and the rest that Mingolla and Debora were strong, but nothing that couldn’t be handled. Mingolla was surprised that he hadn’t argued more with Debora against continuing their journey, and he realized that what was motivating him was anger at the Sotomayors and Madradonas. It puzzled him that he should give so much weight to anger, but the strength of the emotion was enough to satisfy him, to stifle the need for self-analysis.

‘I’m gonna let ya live, Ruy,’ he said. ‘Happy?’

Ruy maintained a hostile silence.

‘But we’re gonna pull your fangs.’ He picked up Ruy’s rifle, cradled it under one arm. ‘No point in letting you run around armed and everything like you were an adult.’

‘You’ve…’ Ruy stopped himself.

‘What say, man?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You thinking mean thoughts, Ruy. I can tell.’ Mingolla nudged Ruy’s knee with the rifle barrel. ‘C’mon, man. Spit it out.’

Ruy glared at him.

‘Well…’ Mingolla came up into a crouch, letting the barrel drift back and forth across Ruy’s chest. ‘Anytime you feel the need to talk, don’t be bashful.’ He put an arm around Debora. ‘Try to make it during the day, though, will ya? We keep pretty busy at night.’

Following this conversation, the character of Ruy’s attentions toward Debora underwent a transformation. He took to favoring her with ardent stares and despondent looks, to scribbling poems in a notebook, to gazing listlessly at the scenery: the very image of lovesickness. It was as if in revealing his true nature, he was also revealing the sappy core of his passion. Nothing except Debora commanded his interest, and though Mingolla was grateful for Ruy’s lassitude, preferring it to his previous aggressiveness, he found that he could no longer count on him for assistance in negotiating the wilderness. Ruy responded to Mingolla in monosyllables or not at all, and even when they encountered serious obstacles—obstacles as the town of Tecolutla—he exhibited no concern, but merely shrugged off Mingolla’s questions and said he didn’t care what they did.

Mingolla did not want to enter Tecolutla. Even from the pine ridge above it, he could sense an ominous air to the place, one that the view through his binoculars did nothing to dispel. It was big for a high-country town, sprawling across the saddle between two hills, lorded over by a cathedral of crumbling gray stone with tilted vine-draped bell towers that had the look of vegetable chessmen whose board was in the process of being overthrown. The other buildings, the houses and shops, were not so imposing, but were equally ruinous, charred and broken and fettered with creepers, and under the thin mist that covered the valley, the town appeared insubstantial, to be either fading in or out of existence.

‘Ain’t no way ’round it,’ said Tully. ‘Anyhow, we might find us some gas down dere.’

‘I don’t see any movement.’ Debora lowered her binoculars. ‘It’s probably deserted.’

‘Y’ever here before?’ Mingolla asked the question of all of them.

‘It’s an Indian market town.’ Corazon nodded at Debora. ‘She’s probably right. I doubt anyone’s livin’ there. When the Indians abandon a place, they rarely come back.’

‘Okay,’ said Mingolla. ‘Let’s try it.’

They made two passes through the town before risking a stop; they roared down the empty streets, guns poked from the windows, the engine of the Bronco sounding incredibly loud in the stillness. Finally they pulled up to the cathedral, which fronted a shattered fountain in the main square. The doors of the cathedral were massive, cracked open a foot, the wood dark and studded with iron like the door of an ancient prison, as if the Catholic God were something to be kept under restraint. The square was cobbled, weeds protruding from breaks in the stone, and facing the church was a pink stucco cake of a hotel on whose facade was written in circus-style letters HOTEL CANCION DE LAS MONTANAS.Some rusted tables and shredded umbrellas sat out front, the remains of a sidewalk café.

‘Sometimes dese hotels got generators,’ Tully said. ‘Might be some gas lyin’ ’round in dere.’

Judging by the sumptuous rags of the draperies, the size of the reception desk, the silvercloth stripe visible in the moss-furred wallpaper, the hotel must have catered to the wealthy, but now it was tenanted only by lizards and insects. Thousands of slitherings stilled when they entered the lobby; their footsteps shook down falls of plaster dust. As they walked along a hallway past an elevator shaft choked with epiphytes, Mingolla turned to say something to Tully and saw that Corazon was missing. He asked where she was, but Tully hadn’t noticed her absence and had no idea.

‘I’ll fetch her,’ he said.

‘No, I’ll do it.’ Mingolla started toward the entrance, but Tully caught hold of him.

‘What’s de matter, mon? She likely just wanderin’.’

‘Maybe,’ said Mingolla.

‘You can trust her,’ Tully said.

‘Who says I don’t?’

‘Your face sayin’ it, mon.’

Mingolla pulled away from Tully. ‘I’ll check it out. You keep looking for gas.’

‘She ain’t up to not’in’!’ Tully said, but Mingolla just waved and sprinted back out into the square. Corazon was standing by the cathedral doors, peeking inside. He called to her, and she jumped.

‘You scare me,’ she said as he came up.

‘What’re you doing sneaking off like that?’

‘I wanna look in the church.’

The rose in her eye seemed to him—as it had in the past—a Sotomayor signature, a clever advertisement of power and folly.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Nobody.’

‘I’m not interested in your goddamn philosophy. I wanna know what you’re doing… who you’re working for.’

She stared at him deadpan.

‘I don’t trust you,’ he said. ‘So you better talk to me.’

‘You wanna know somethin’,’ she said, ‘why don’t you just look inside me? You strong enough to do what you want.’

‘I’ve already done that.’

She looked startled.

‘Back on the boat,’ he said. ‘I checked you out a coupla times. You seem okay. But there could be things hidden inside you I can’t get at. Traps. Commands. Things you don’t even know about.’

‘Well, if I don’t know ’bout ’em, I can’t help you.’ She pushed the door wider. ‘I’m goin’ in.’

He followed her into the nave, and they stood facing each other beside a stone baptismal font. In the half-light the rose appeared to be hovering deep within her skull, and the tip of her braid, hanging off the side of one shoulder, looked to have vanished in inky shadow. ‘So tell me ’bout yourself,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I ain’t doin’ nothin’ to Tully.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just livin’.’

Mingolla considered her minimalist nature, compared her to Nate and Don Julio and Amalia. it was quite possible that she was like them, a broken toy, and the fact that she professed minimalism as a policy would be just the sort of twist Izaguirre liked to employ in his creations. But he couldn’t be sure, and he was still hampered by morality in his judgments; he couldn’t act upon mere suspicion, especially where Tully’s woman was concerned.

Corazon pushed through the inner doors, and Mingolla hurried after her, gagging on a thick fecal odor. Sounds of grunting, clucking. He started to ask Corazon another question, but then noticed that the altar was illuminated by four candelabras: an island of light floating in a black void, centered by a filigreed silver cross big enough upon which to crucify an infant. Wings whirred above their heads, and from behind them came an echoing boom, the sound of the outer doors closing and being bolted. The scrape of a shoe on rough stone somewhere near, and someone tried to snatch Mingolla’s rifle. He wrenched it free, heard footsteps pattering off, and ducked behind a pew. Probing the dark, he contacted a number of minds. Maybe a dozen. He could have stunned them, but was unwilling to show his hand in front of Corazon. He fired a round into the air.

‘Don’t!’ Corazon pulled at the rifle. ‘There’s nothin’ bad in here. I can feel it.’

He shook her off, fired another round high. ‘I want lights in here!’ he shouted. ‘Or I’ll blow your butts away!’

‘Please!’ said Corazon. ‘Don’t you feel it! Nothin’ dangerous here.’

‘Don’t shoot!’ A man’s voice speaking in English from somewhere near the altar.

‘Then put on the damn lights!’

‘All right, all right… just a minute!’

…David…

Debora’s voice in his mind.

…I’m okay… stay back…

…what’s going on…

…I don’t know yet…

…David!…

…just hang on…

‘Hurry up with those lights!’ Mingolla called.

‘Wait a second, will ya!’

The man’s voice, Mingolla realized, was American… and not just American. It had a distinct New York City accent.

Dim yellow light flooded the church from fixtures along the walls, leaving the vaulted ceiling in shadow, and though Mingolla had expected to see something unusual, he wasn’t prepared for the extraordinary dilapidation of the church. Straw matting the floors, piles of animal waste, bird droppings speckling the pews. Swallows made looping flights overhead, swooping between the massive buttresses, flaring in the lights and vanishing. Two pigs were curled up in the center aisle, a black rooster was pecking at a dirt-filled seam between stones, and a goat was wandering along the altar rail. No one was in sight, but Mingolla could sense them hiding among the pews.

‘Jesus!’ said Corazon.

A priest in a black cassock came out of the entrance to a side altar some twenty yards away in the east wall, and approached them hesitantly. Skinny, with gray shoulder-length hair. He was one of the oddest-looking men Mingolla had ever seen. His features were firmly fleshed, youthful, yet his skin had the wrinkles and folds of someone in his sixties: like an actor made up to play an old man. He wore a necklace of white stones on which symbols had been scratched, and he fingered this as he might have a rosary.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘You can’t stay here.’

Mingolla gestured toward the pews with his rifle. ‘Tell the others to stand up.’

‘They’re frightened,’ said the priest. ‘They’re only girls.’

‘They can’t be too frightened,’ Mingolla said. ‘One tried to take my rifle.’

‘They were just trying to protect me.’

Again Mingolla motioned with the rifle. ‘Tell ’em.’

The priest called out in Spanish, and one by one the girls stood. They were all young, in their teens, and several were pregnant. Wearing white cotton shifts. With their dark skins and black hair and stoic faces, they might have been sisters.

‘What’s the story here?’ said Mingolla.

‘Huh! I tell you what’s the story!’ Corazon jabbed a finger at the priest’s face. ‘This motherfucker been feedin’ lies to these women to get ’em on their backs.’

‘No, that’s not…’

‘Don’t tell me no lies!’ said Corazon. ‘I was raised by bastards like you. Fuckin’ Catholic Church been screwin’ people here since they first come!’

‘I can’t deny…’ the priest began.

‘Goddamn right you can’t!’ Corazon paced away.

Mingolla was less interested in the priest’s explanation than in Corazon’s uncharacteristic passion, but he said, ‘Let him talk.’

‘I can’t deny the Church’s excesses,’ said the priest. ‘Though since before the war we have fought on the side of the people.’

Corazon sniffed.

‘But I assure you, I’m not taking advantage of the girls.’ He made a gesture of helplessness. ‘Something’s goin’ on here… it’s extraordinary. Hard to explain.’

‘I bet,’ said Corazon.

‘Who’s the father?’ Mingolla pointed to one of the pregnant girls.

‘I am,’ said the priest. ‘But…’

‘What I tell you?’ Corazon went chest to chest with the priest. ‘These holy men… I know some that fuck anything that moves. Women, boys.’ She stuck her nose in the priest’s face. ‘Animals!’

Something about Corazon’s vehemence rang false to Mingolla. It was as if she was performing for him, putting on a show to convince him of her humanity, her untampered soul. And maybe that was what his bad feeling about the place had been trying to tell him. Not that there was danger of bodily harm, but a danger that he might buy what Izaguirre was selling.

‘You’re from New York, aren’tcha?’ said Mingolla.

The priest looked blank for a moment, then nodded. ‘Brooklyn.’

‘I’m from Long Island.’

‘I hardly remember the place,’ said the priest absently. ‘So much has happened.’

‘Yeah? Like what? What’s happening now?’

…David…

…it’s okay… be out soon…

The priest heaved a sigh. ‘Maybe she’s right about me.’ He nodded at Corazon. ‘Maybe I’m only erecting a justification for violating the rule of celibacy. I wouldn’t be the first priest to suffer delusions.’

‘Delusions… bullshit!’ said Corazon. ‘The man ain’t got no delusion, he just wanna little pussy.’

‘But even if they’re delusions,’ the priest continued, ‘they still have substance. This place’—he looked up to the ceiling, following the flight of a swallow—‘the foundations are carved from an enormous boulder that the Indians claim has magical properties. Maybe it’s true. Even when I first came here I could sense life in these stones. It seems to attract life. Like the swallows. Generations that have never flown beyond these walls.’

‘Lotta churches like that,’ said Corazon.

‘True, but the swallows here…’ The priest gave a wave of his hand. ‘You wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Bet your ass,’ said Corazon.

‘Shut up!’ Mingolla told her.

‘The fuck I will! You don’t know these bastards!’

She was about to say more, but Mingolla cut her off and told the priest to go on.

‘Have you ever seen the murals they paint down here?’ asked the priest. ‘In bars and hotel lobbies? They’ll have ocean liners and volcanoes and racing cars and Jesus all in the same painting. It seems nonsensical, random. But I’ve come to believe that that tendency is at the heart of a syncretic process permeating the region. You see it—the process—at work in every area of life, and I believe it’s all reflective of something more important going through that same process.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘God… or at least the idea of God.’ The priest held up a hand as if to ward off ridicule. ‘I know, I know! Ludicrous, demented. But we—the girls and I—live every day in that process, in the syncretic blending of Christ and some Indian spirit.’ He rushed his words to override Corazon’s interruption. ‘You’d have to stay here to understand, to feel the truth of what I’m saying. But you must believe me! I haven’t coerced the girls… at least not knowingly. They were drawn here, just as I was drawn to violate my vow of celibacy. Drawn by dreams, voices. Intimations. The scheme of the new god is working itself out in us. Pagan and benign.’ He touched his necklace and muttered something in a language unfamiliar to Mingolla; he pointed to the girls. ‘Ask them if you want. They’ll tell you.’

‘Sure they will,’ said Corazon. ‘They fuckin’ brainwashed.’

‘What’s your new god alla ’bout?’ Mingolla asked.

‘It’s not yet clear,’ said the priest. ‘We keep adding to the image, and someday it’ll be complete. But…’

‘What image?’

‘Here, I’ll show you.’ The priest started off along the east aisle, beckoning, and they followed him toward the side altar. Standing at the back of the altar, mounted on a head-high pedestal and fronted by banks of flickering candles, was a twice-life-size statue of the Virgin clad in a stiff gilt gown whose folds looked like flows of golden lava. Gems encrusted the bodice, and a golden cross hung from her neck. Spiderwebs moored the statue to the walls, frail intricate supports billowing slightly in the wash of heat from the candles, and a beetle was crawling on the chipped forehead. Much of the pink plaster of her face had been eroded; painted symbols figured her cheeks and neck. A knife was taped to her left hand, and in her right she held a clump of flowering weeds. The dim lighting made her appear monstrous and decaying, yet there was a kind of organic magnificence about her; it seemed to Mingolla that the movement of the spiderwebs and the inconstant shadows cast by the candles were the result of imperceptible breathing.

‘You’ve seen all there is to see,’ said the priest. ‘Will you leave now… please?’

‘Why you want us to leave so bad?’ Corazon asked. ‘What you hidin’?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all. But you’re interfering with the process. We need solitude, we need to focus on the Conception.’

‘I s’pose we might as well,’ said Mingolla.

‘Ain’t you gonna do nothin’ ’bout these women?’ Corazon was outraged.

‘What should I do?’

‘Take ’em outta here, man! Get ’em ’way from this fucker!’

Mingolla turned to the body of the church, saw that the girls had gathered at the entrance to the side altar. ‘You ladies like it here?’ he asked. ‘Or you feel like leaving?’

They edged away, silent, their eyes looking as hard as obsidian.

‘Guess they’re happy,’ said Mingolla. ‘Thank you,’ said the priest.

‘You don’t know what you doin’!’ Corazon shook her finger at Mingolla. ‘These fuckin’ priests, they crazy! They get so desperate for God, they start thinkin’ they God themselves. That they know everything ’bout God. And then they mess with you. I know!’

‘How do you know?’ Mingolla asked.

Corazon drew a long breath. ‘When I was little, thirteen, this priest, man, he used to take me into the rectory… givin’ me special instruction, he tell my mama. Say he see somethin’ spiritual in me. At first he just tellin’ me ’bout the Mysteries, y’know. But then he start showin’ me. The Mysteries! Huh! After a year I know more ’bout the Mysteries than most married ladies.’

She was, Mingolla thought, quite convincing, and if what she was saying was true, it might explain much about her. But he couldn’t swallow it. Her opening up to him was too sudden, too coincidental with his growing lack of trust in her, and it might be best to act on impulse and get rid of her now. But then, he realized, he’d have to deal with Tully, and he didn’t want that. He could be wrong, after all, and even if he wasn’t, she would be no threat as long as he kept an eye on her.

Ignoring her railing, her emoting, he shoved her ahead of him toward the front door.

‘Go with God,’ said the priest, and then laughed. ‘Or whatever.’

Mingolla paused in the doorway, looking back at him, feeling a momentary sympathy for a fellow New Yorker. ‘This ain’t for real, man,’ he said. ‘Y’know that?’

‘Sometimes I feel that way,’ said the priest. ‘But’—he shrugged, grinned—‘I gotta be me.’

‘Well… good luck.’

‘Hey,’ said the priest. ‘How the Mets doing?’

‘I don’t follow ’em, I’m a Yankee fan.’

The priest adopted a stern expression. ‘Blasphemer,’ he said, and then, with a friendly wave, he closed the door.

Soon they began to see the war in the sky, eerie sunset glows visible at every hour of the day as swirls of pink and golden light bathing the clouds. The people in the villages where they bought gas told them that the battle zone stretched for miles and that no trails existed to circumvent it. That war should have such a lovely reflection made the prospect of encountering it all the more menacing, but there was nothing to do except to go forward. The jungle became less dense, the evidence of conflict increasingly apparent. Once they came to a grassy slope upon which lay dozens of yellowish brown shapes that at a distance resembled giant footprints, but on closer inspection were revealed to be dessicated corpses that had been pressed flat, perhaps by the passage of tanks; their faces were eyeless masks, their fingers splayed like those of the clay men Mingolla had fashioned as a child. Less than a day’s travel farther on, they discovered a mass grave that had been left uncovered, and that same evening they reached the base of a volcano that rose from the midst of an extensive stand of mahogany trees: Mingolla spotted large wooden platforms high in the trees, and as the Bronco threaded its way among the trunks, he saw men descending on ropes from the heights of the trees ahead of them. Though the men did not appear to be bearing arms, he threw off the safety of his rifle and told Debora to pull up. He and Tully and Debora climbed out, training their rifles on the two men who approached them.

‘Hello!’ one of the men called. He was a balding, stocky American in his fifties, wearing shorts and a tattered khaki shirt with a general’s star on the collar; he had the sort of healthy openness to his face that Mingolla associated with scoutmasters and camp directors. His companion was an Indian, older, wrinkled, dressed in jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, ‘God, it’s good to see new faces,’ said the stocky man. ‘Where you bound?’

‘Panama,’ said Debora.

‘Well, then you’ll have to stay the night, won’t you?’ said the American. ‘My name’s Blackford. Frank Blackford, US Army, retired. And this’—he gestured at the Indian—‘is Gregorio, my brother-in-law. You might say we’re co-mayors of our little community. Come on up. We’ll feed you and…’

‘Thanks,’ said Mingolla. ‘But we want to make a few more miles before dark.’

Blackford’s good cheer evaporated. ‘You can’t do that. You’ll be in great danger.’

‘From what?’ said Tully.

Gregorio muttered something in his own language. Blackford nodded and said, ‘There’s a rather large animal that inhabits this area. Nocturnal, and very fierce. Weapons don’t have much effect on it… which is why we’ve taken to the heights.’

‘What kind of animal?’ Debora asked.

‘Malo,’ said Gregorio. ‘Muy malo.’

‘That’s a long story,’ said Blackford. ‘Look, you can’t get much farther tonight. You’ll be right in the heart of the most dangerous area. Why not stay with us, and I’ll tell you about it.’

He seemed genuinely concerned for them, but, taking no chances, Mingolla reinforced his concern and that of Gregorio. ‘All right,’ he said. What about the car?’

‘Be perfectly safe here.’ Blackford chuckled. ‘The Beast has no use for it.’

‘The Beast?’ Debora glanced at Mingolla, alarmed.

‘Crazy motherfuckers,’ said Tully under his breath.

Blackford heard him. Crazy, perhaps. But alive! Alive! And in these times, that’s the only form of sanity worth recognizing.

From the edge of a wooden platform encircling the trunk of a mahogany tree, Mingolla could see other platforms through the interstices of the branches. Charcoal fires in iron braziers glowed like faceted orange jewels among sprays of dark green leaves; women were hunkered beside them, and children sat beneath lean-tos set closer to the trunks. The smells of cooking came on the breeze, mixed with the clean scent of the trees. Men slid from platform to platform on systems of ropes, passing one another in mid-air. Just below, water jumped like a silvery fish from the jagged end of a pipe, spilled into a trough that ran from tree to tree; a pump thudded somewhere nearby. Wind frayed the sounds of conversational voices and babies crying. The platform where Mingolla was standing was roofed with interlaced branches and furnished with pallets and cushions. Propped in one comer was a pale green combat suit and helmet, and after they had eaten a meal of beans and rice served in banana leaves, Mingolla asked Blackford about the suit.

‘It’s mine,’ said Blackford.

‘I didn’t know generals took part in combat,’ Mingolla said.

‘They don’t,’ said Blackford; he flicked his starred collar. ‘This is what they give you for twenty-five years’ service with the quartermaster corps. The suit’—he seemed to be searching for the right words—it was part of a fantasy I once had. It comes in handy these days.’

‘How come you people livin’ wit’ de fuckin’ birds?’ Tully asked. He was sitting against the trunk, his arm around Corazon. Ruy was lying on a pallet, staring at Debora, who sat cross-legged beside Mingolla. Darkness was settling over the treetop village, and a few stars could be seen between the separations of the leaves; to the west, visible beneath a branch, the last of sunset was a neon scar on the horizon.

Blackford stretched out his legs, took a pull from a bottle of rum. ‘I guess I have time for a story before I get to work.’

‘You work at night?’ Debora asked.

He nodded, picked at the label of the bottle. ‘For most of my time down here,’ he said, ‘I was stationed in Salvador. I was a damn good organizer, but nothing of a military man, and that had always bothered me. I figured that if they’d give me the chance, I’d be as good as any of the glory boys. What was war, I asked myself, if not organized violence? If I could organize shipping schedules and deliveries, wouldn’t I be just as efficient at running a battle? I applied for front-line assignments, but they kept turning me down. Said I was more valuable where I was. But I heard their jokes. The thought of Frank T. Blackford in combat made them dizzy with laughter. So I decided that I’d show ’em.’

Blackford’s sigh accompanied a sudden dimming in the west. ‘Looking back, I can see what a foolish idea it was. I suppose I was a fool, then. At the least I was ignorant about war. Even though I should have known better, I saw war as opportunity, a field upon which a man could make his mark. And so to prove my mettle, I pulled some strings and wangled myself temporary command of a combat unit in Nicaragua, one of the long range recon patrols. This was done under an assumed name, you understand. I had some R & R coming, and my plan was to take the patrol and do great things. Impossible things. Then return to Salvador and shake my combat record under the noses of my superiors. Well, after three days in the field, I’d lost… I was about to say I’d lost control of my men, but the truth is I’d never had control. They’d just started using Sammy in those days, and the safe dosage was still a matter of conjecture. My men were lunatics, and once I began doing the drug with them, trying to be one of the boys, I became as crazy as they were. I remember coming into the villages, peaceful little places with fountains in the plazas. I moved through them spinning, a kind of mad dance, spraying bursts of fire that seemed to be writing weird names on the walls. I laughed at the men I shot. Shouted at them. Like a kid playing soldier.’

He lifted the bottle to his lips, but didn’t drink, just stared off into the leaves, ‘I couldn’t take it. No, that’s too easy to say. I could take it. I relished the chemical bravery, and no moral wakening brought me to my senses. I simply outstripped my men in madness, and they deserted me. Left me without drugs, without a radio, to wander the hill country. I walked back through some of the villages we’d destroyed, and then, only then, did it begin to come home to me where I was and what I’d been doing. I saw ghosts in the ruins. They chatted with me, followed me, and I would run and run, trying to escape them.’ Blackford had a drink, shivered as if the rum had hit a raw place inside him. ‘The nights were awful. I figured out why dogs howl at the moon. Because they’re answering it, because it’s a howl frozen up there, the end of a long yellow throat opened by terror and despair. I hid in the ruins, in holes in the ground. I hid from things that were there, things that weren’t. Once I lay in a ditch all night, and when the light started to gray I saw that what I’d thought was a log was actually a stiffened corpse. It had been staring at me the whole night, and I could feel the bad news its eyes had beamed into my head. I was inside madness. I’d reached the place where madness has its own continuum of correct actions and policies. The heights upon which you can sit and hold rational discourse with a sane man and be so madly fluent that you can win every point. And I would have traveled farther into madness, but I was fortunate.’

Blackford started to have another drink, but remembered his manners and passed the bottle to Tully. ‘It was the volcano that restored me to sanity. It was such an elementary sight, it seemed to offer the promise of simple truths. There it was, a perfect cone rearing into a blue sky, like something a child with crayons might have drawn if you’d told him about Nicaragua and how it used to be. Empty except for Indians and fire in the earth. I was so taken with it, I walked around it three times, admiring it, studying it. Buddhists do the same thing, you know. Circumnambulation, they call it. Maybe I remembered that, or maybe it’s just something your cells instruct you to do once you reach your magic mountain. Whatever… I loved the volcano, loved being under it, in its shadow. And all the time I was walking around, I never noticed anyone living nearby. Not until Gregorio decided to save me from the Beast. I thought Gregorio was madder than I. He’d never spotted the Beast, never seen its track. Yet he would have sworn to its existence. In a way the story he told charmed me; if it hadn’t I might have risked staying on the ground just for the sake of obstinacy, and I might have died. But I wanted to hear more, to learn about these curious people that lived in the trees.’

Blackford waved his bottle at the platforms below, ragged rafts of planking illuminated by the dimming fires; human shadows knelt by the fires, and each scene was enclosed by filigrees of leaves, giving them the otherworldly vitality of images materialized in magic mirrors. ‘Of course scarcely any of this existed at the time,’ Blackford said. ‘The place didn’t shape up until I got to work on it. Yet even then there seemed something eminently reasonable about the style of life, and after listening to Gregorio, after considering the principles embedded in his tale, I knew I’d found the field upon which I could make my mark.’ Blackford took back the bottle from Tully, drank, and wiped his mouth with his hand. He was intent now upon his story, his eyes fixing them not to see if they were listening, but rather—it seemed—to reinforce his words with the intensity of his stare. ‘What Gregorio told me was this. Years ago, a German man by the name of Ludens lived near the headwaters of the river that runs behind the volcano. No one understood why he had picked this particular spot to settle, but in those days solitary and eccentric Germans were the rule rather than the exception in Central America, and so not much attention was paid him. He ventured downstream only to resupply, and whenever he did, he would warn the Indians against penetrating to the headwaters, saying that a horrible creature dwelled there. A monster. Most heeded the warning, but naturally some wanted to test themselves and went in search of the Beast. Their mutilated bodies were found floating in the river, and soon nobody would dare journey as far upriver as Ludens’s house. This state of affairs continued until Ludens’s death, at which time it was learned that he had discovered a silver mine and had, according to his diaries, fostered the legend of the Beast in order to keep anyone from finding out his secret. He also wrote that he had murdered Indians so as to lend verisimilitude to the legend. Though the Indians believed that Ludens had been the murderer, this didn’t disabuse them of their belief in the Beast. Monsters, at least the Nicaraguan variety, are more subtle than their North American counterparts, and it seemed in complete accord with the Indians’ knowledge and tradition that the Beast had used Ludens as its proxy to kill those who violated its territory. They saw Ludens’s invention of the legend as a disguise masking a harder truth, the existence of a subtle and malefic demon. And so for years they avoided the forbidden territory. It took the violence of war to drive them from their homeland into the region of the headwaters, and even then they didn’t dare remain on the ground, but sequestered themselves high in the trees where the monster had no claim.’

Ruy laughed. ‘And now you think the Beast exists?’

‘It’s a seductive truth,’ said Blackford. ‘And like any truth, it’s most complicated in its efficacy. Consider that in all the years since Ludens’s death, no one has tested the legend by spending a night below. I would encourage you to test it, but what would that prove one way or another? Your survival wouldn’t diminish the legend; the Beast might be otherwise occupied. And your death wouldn’t more firmly establish belief. The only real test of a truth is whether or not it serves its adherents. And who could deny that the Beast serves us? Hasn’t he kept us from war? Hasn’t he inspired us to create this pleasant environment? His philosophical presence alone is enough to sustain belief.’ Blackford smiled. ‘You ask if I believe in his existence. I am his existence. All this you see is the geometry of his secret form, the precinct of his wish. If you’re asking me, Does he howl, does he rend and tear? my answer is, Listen. Find your own answer. I’ve found mine.’

Sleep came hard for Mingolla that night. He lay awake listening to the rustling leaves, the myriad sounds of the high canopy. Watching the dark figures of the others. Near midnight, one of those figures got stealthily to its feet and draped what looked to be a bulky shadow over its arm: the combat suit. It was Blackford. He moved to the edge of the platform, stepped into the cage of planking that was used for an elevator. The cage vanished, the ropes to which it was attached thrummed. Mingolla crept to the edge of the platform and peered over the side. Saw Blackford disembarking from the cage at the foot of the tree, clearly visible in the fall of moonlight. Blackford stripped off his shorts and shirt, and stepped into the combat suit. He put the helmet on, fastened the seals; then he walked off among the pillarlike columns of the mahogany trunks and was lost to view.

Mingolla crept back over to his pallet and lay down beside Debora, trying to make sense of what he had witnessed; after he had made a sort of sense out of it, he tried to decide whether Blackford’s actions were the mark of madness or were exemplary of an elusive and remarkably clearsighted form of sanity. Maybe, he thought, there was no difference between the two states. From the depths of the wood came a guttural wail that Mingolla recognized as the distress signal of a combat suit. It sounded three times and fell silent.

‘What was that?’ said Debora, clutching his arm. ‘Did you hear?’

‘Yeah.’ He pushed her back down gently. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘What was it?’

‘I don’t know.’

He held her until she had fallen asleep again, but he stayed awake, listening to the signal that sounded every so often, the roar of the Beast making its rounds.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

On the border of war stood a work of art, both a memorial to the way things had once seemed and an indictment of how they had really always been. The work of art was a sequence of murals painted on the stucco walls of a ruined village less than an hour’s drive from the front lines; it occupied the lower slope of a pine forested hill, and from the checkpoint on the road below, Min-golla could make out its bright colors through the trunks. It’s that guy, y’know, what’s he called… the War Painter,’ said the corporal who had just passed Mingolla and Debora through the checkpoint, believing them to be intelligence operatives. ‘Some museum asshole’s standin’ watch over the son of a bitch, but y’can scope it out if you want. We’ll give ya escort to headquarters when you’re ready.’

‘Maybe we’ll do that.’ Mingolla climbed out of the Bronco; he glanced inquiringly at Ruy, Corazon, and Tully in the backseat.

‘We hang out here,’ said Tully. ‘I don’t need to see no damn paintin’ ’bout war.’

Ruy, who was in a foul mood, having been shot down again that morning by Debora, offered no comment.

‘Take your rifles,’ said the corporal. ‘We get snipers ’round here sometimes.’

The morning was fresh, cool, the sunlight shining clear and whitish gold, glinting in the dew-hung pine needles, like a late September morning back in New York. As he and Debora made their way through the pines, he could see that the village was small, no more than fifteen or twenty houses, most roofless, and all missing at least one wall; but on coming out into the clearing where the village stood, he found that the poignancy of the painted images caused him to forget the damage. The exteriors of the walls were covered with scenes of daily life: a plump Indian woman balancing a jug on her head; three children playing in a doorway; some farmers walking to the fields, bandannas around their heads and machetes on their shoulders. The colors were pastellike acrylics, and the men and women were rendered in a representational style that deviated from the photo-real by its accentuation of the delicacy of feature, the balletic edge given to the villagers’ postures. Looking at them, Mingolla felt the artist had been trying to capture the moment when their fate first made itself known, when they first became aware of the whistle of incoming, before their expressions could register alarm or astonishment, before their bodies could react other than to begin to tense, to perfect their last unfearful poses. They were bright ghosts, still alive yet dead already, with not even the knowledge of death fully lodged in them. Wall after wall, each biting to the eye, and in their cumulative effect most difficult to bear. There appeared to be other murals painted on the interiors of the walls, and Mingolla was about to investigate these, when a fruity voice behind him said,…Isn’t it fantastic?’

Walking toward them was a thin, tall man in his late twenties, with olive skin and brown hair and a kind of pinched handsomeness to his features; he was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, and accompanying him was an older mestizo man, who was operating a video camera.

‘My name’s Craig Spurlow,’ said the tall man. ‘Metropolitan Museum. Hope you don’t mind if we record your visit… we’re keeping a record of the piece while it’s still in its natural environment.’

Mingolla introduced himself and Debora, said he didn’t mind. He doubted Spurlow had caught their names: the museum official was lost in contemplation, hands on hips, chin up, his stance conveying pride of possession.

‘Just amazing,’ Spurlow said. ‘We lost two men defusing the booby traps. And I suppose we could lose more once we start breaking it down for shipment. Who knows if we’ve found all the traps. But God! It’s almost worth it to have finally saved one. I know everyone up there’—he nodded toward the checkpoint—‘thinks it’s ludicrous to save it, what with everything.’ His sad smile and outspread hands seemed to offer apology for the condition of ‘everything,’ to define that condition as hopeless, and to deny that it was his fault. But you have to try to hold onto human values, don’t you? Simply because there’s a terrible war, you can’t pretend it doesn’t produce works of great beauty and power.’ He sighed, the aesthetician confronted by some essential boorishness that he felt to the quick. ‘And this one, this one’s special. Even the artist must have thought so… it’s the only one he ever titled.’

‘What’s it called?’ Mingolla asked.

‘“The Mechanics Underlying Superficial Reality,”’ Spurlow said, savoring each word.

‘That doesn’t seem very appropriate,’ said Debora.

‘Really, I…’ Spurlow smacked his forehead. ‘You haven’t been inside, have you? Come on! I’ll show you around. Believe me, I think you’ll find the title’s most apt.’

He ushered them through the door of the nearest house. Tall weeds and nettles grew from the dirt floor, dragonflies with zircon wings wobbled up among the long green stems, and the sunlight cut a sharp angle across one wall, but—because of the nature of the murals, because the walls seemed to be shedding cold—the light did not have much effect. They depicted a grotesque machinery worthy of Bosch or Breughel. Complex and filling every inch of paintable surface. Spurs of yellow ivory bone for gears; pulleys of unraveled heart muscle; ropes of tendons for string; weird assemblages of gristle. And in the darkly crimson interstices between the joints and corners of the machines were gnarled gnomish faces like those formed by grooved tree bark: it was difficult to tell whether the faces were productions of the paint or inadvertent contrivances of warping and shadow. Each time Mingolla turned his head, the machines appeared to shift into different alignments. He was reminded of jogging along a country road near his uncle’s farm one night, with fireflies fanned out across the cornfields; he’d been noticing the patterns they formed from second to second, jars and crescents and whatever, and—exhausted from his run—he’d become irrationally annoyed that these patterns were being imposed on him; he had tried not to see them, and just when he thought he had succeeded, a firefly had winked on right in front of him, and he had inhaled it. That was how these horrid machines affected him: he thought he would choke on each new pattern that came clear.

‘Do you feel it?’ Spurlow asked. ‘The commitment in the paint, the luminous presence of the artist, his eyes watching us.’ His own eyes flicked to the side, to make sure of the cameraman’s diligence.

They moved from room to room, house to house, Debora and Mingolla silent, the cameraman tracking them, and Spurlow carrying on an inane lecture. Of course,’ he said, every tour of the complex has a different starting point, a different finish. But we think the artist intended this house and this particular wall to be the focal point.’

The wall indicated by Spurlow depicted a bed where lay a man, his face to the wall, only his black hair and tanned shoulders visible, and a young woman who greatly resembled Debora in the East Indian cast of her features. The sheet had ridden down to expose her breasts, and her brown left arm hung off the side of the mattress. There was an energyless abandon to the attitude of the bodies that communicated the fact that they were dead, that they had succumbed to the evil processes embodied by the cables and gears of the bloody human remnants that could be seen in the shadows beneath the bed.

‘End of story,’ said Spurlow. ‘Painting as narrative redefined for our age. And redefined with thrilling power.’

Perhaps it was the woman’s resemblance to Debora that ignited Mingolla’s rage, but it seemed to him then that his passage through the labyrinth of painted rooms had been like the progress of a flame along a coil of fuse, and that he was essentially carrying out the wishes of the artist, obeying the angry impulse that had created the work and designed its destruction, and that the match that had lit him was Spurlow’s adenoidal voice. He lifted his rifle and opened fire, ignoring Spurlow’s panic-stricken shouts. He tracked fire across the wall top to bottom, chips of painted stucco flying, the bursts echoing, and when the clip had at last been emptied, all that remained of the painting was the woman’s brown arm hanging off the edge of the mattress.… Seeing it that way, isolated, Mingolla remembered that he had seen it before, the brief hallucination in Izaguirre’s office; the glimpse of a delicately rendered arm that had preceded the more detailed hallucination of the night street; and he became unnerved on realizing what that meant, how it ratified the sense of finality, of long years wound down into the future that had been implicit in the hallucination of pornographic America. With Spurlow still shouting at him, he went out of the room, out through a door and back into the street, where he breathed deeply of the clean sunlit air. Tully and a couple of the soldiers from the checkpoint came running through the pines. ‘What goin’ on?’ Tully yelled. ‘You all right?’

‘It’s okay… I just shot up the fucking painting!’

‘Didja, no shit?’ said one of the soldiers.

‘Yeah!’

The soldiers laughed. ‘Awright, man! Awright!’ They ran back up the slope to spread the news.

Debora moved up to stand beside him, to put a hand on his arm, as if accepting complicity, and behind him Spurlow was talking to the cameraman, saying, ‘Did you get it all?’ and then, ‘Well, at least that’s something.’

He walked over to Mingolla and confronted him. ‘Mind explaining why you did that?’ There was bitterness in his tone, along with a tired sarcasm. ‘Did you feel that was something you just had to do, did it satisfy some barbarous impulse? God!’

Mingolla could hear the camera whirring. It felt right… what can I tell ya?’

‘Do you know,’ said Spurlow, his voice tightening, ‘do you know what we’ve gone through to preserve it? Do you…’ He waved in disgust. ‘Of course you don’t.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mingolla said. ‘I mean you’ve got the statement down.’ He gestured at the camera. ‘This is better’n art, right?’

‘The loss…’ began Spurlow with pompous solemnity, but Mingolla—experiencing a surge of anger—cut him off by grabbing Decora’s rifle and training it on him.

‘You getting this?’ Mingolla asked the cameraman, and then said to Spurlow, ‘This is your big moment, guy. Any pronouncements on death as art, any last words on the creative process?’

Debora pulled at him, but he shook her off.

‘Don’t be actin’ dis way,’ Tully said. ‘De mon ain’t worth it.’

‘There’s no reason to get upset,’ said Spurlow. ‘We…’

‘There’s plenty of reason,’ said Mingolla. ‘All the reason in the world.’ He hadn’t been this angry for a long time, not since the Barrio, and although he didn’t quite understand the anger—something to do with the painting, with its validation of the sorry future—he liked the feeling, liked its sharpness, its unrepentant exuberance. He switched off the safety, and Spurlow blanched, backed away.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘Wish I could help ya,’ said Mingolla. ‘But just now I’m so caught up in the coils of creativity, I’m afraid mercy’s not in the cards. Don’t you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we’re talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work’s formal imperative.’

‘I’m outta film,’ said the mestizo cameraman. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and Mingolla told him to go ahead, load up. Both Debora and Tully began pleading with him to stop, and he told them to shut up.

‘For God’s sake!’ Spurlow looked left and right for help, found none. ‘You’re going to kill me… you can’t!’

‘Me?’ Mingolla tapped his chest. ‘That’s not the way you should see it, man. I’m merely the shaped inspiration of the work, the…’

‘Ready,’ said the cameraman.

‘Great!’ Mingolla’s thoughts were singing, whining with the pitch of the sunlight, the droning of insects, and he said to himself, I’m really going to waste this chump, why, just because he irritates me, because he’s so goddamn stupid he believes…

‘Stop it, David.’ Debora pushed the barrel aside, pressed close to him. ‘Stop it,’ she said softly. Calm seemed to flow from her, and though Mingolla wanted to reject it, he couldn’t. He lowered the gun, looked over her head at Spurlow, who was frozen, stifflegged. ‘Fuck,’ he said, realizing how close he had come to losing it, to reverting to his old insanity.

Spurlow scuttled behind the cameraman and, using him for a shield, made for a doorway. Once inside, he poked out his head and said, ‘You’re out of your mind, you know that? You better get him some help, lady! You better get him some help!’ It looked as if his head had been added to the frieze of figures on the wall beside him: a young couple arm in arm, and two old men who were apparently whispering about them. Mingolla had the urge to make his own movie. Hound Spurlow through the ruins day after day, filming his fearful decline, taping his increasingly incoherent rants on the state of art, rants that made more and more sense in relation to both the project of the film and the artifact of its setting. Call it The Curator. But he supposed there must be better things to do… though at the moment he couldn’t think of any.

‘Let’s go,’ said Debora, taking his hand.

They started off up the slope toward the Bronco, where a group of soldiers had gathered.

‘That’s right!’ Spurlow screamed. ‘Walk away! You’ve desecrated a work of art, and now you just walk away.’ He came a few steps out of the doorway, encouraged by their distance. ‘Don’t come back! You do, and I’ll be ready! I’ll get a gun! It doesn’t take intelligence to fire a gun!’ He came farther toward them, shaking his fist, the last defender of his little painted fortress. He said something to the cameraman, then continued his shouting, his voice growing faint, almost lost in the crush of their footsteps on the carpet of pine needles. ‘You laugh!’ he called out to them. You laugh at me, you think I’m a fool to care about beauty, about the power of these walls! You think I’m crazy!’

Spurlow waited until the cameraman had moved around to get an angle on him that would incorporate the murals.

‘But I’m not!’ he shrieked, scuttling toward them a few steps, then darting away.

From the crest of a high hill, they could see the body of the war. A green serpentine valley stretched from the base of the hill, cut by trails so intricately interwoven that they looked to be the strands of an ocher web, and scattered among them, like the husks of the spider’s victims, were charred tanks and fragments of jeeps and the shells of downed helicopters. Dark smoke veiled the crests of the distant hills, leaked up in black threads from fresh craters, and directly below, an armored personnel carrier had been blown onto its side and was gushing smoke and flame from a ragged hole in its roof. Several dead men in combat suits lay around the carrier, and a group of men in olive-drab T-shirts and fatigue pants were loading body bags, while two others were spraying foam from white plastic backpacks onto the flames. All the smoke threw a haze over the sun, reducing it to an ugly yellow-white glare, the color of spoiled buttermilk. Choppers were swarming everywhere—close by, in the middle distance, and thick as flies at the extreme curve of the valley. Hundreds of them. Their whispering beats seemed to convey an agitated rhythm to the movements of the firefighters and body baggers. Now and then a far-off explosion, a crump, a new billow of smoke, and the choppers would flurry around it, fire lancing from their rocket pods. Despite all the activity, despite the urgency of the men below, the sounds of battle, Mingolla sensed a lassitude to the scene, a kind of unhurried precision that accrued to the responses of both choppers and men, and he was not surprised to learn that the battle for the valley had been many months in progress.

‘Can’t nobody figure why, neither,’ said the sergeant who escorted the four of them on an elevator down through the middle of the hill. ‘Seem like we coulda overrun the beaners anytime, but we keep holdin’ back. Guess ya gotta have faith somebody knows what the fuck they doin’.’

The sergeant was a short, balding army lifer in his late forties, pale, thick-armed, and potbellied, and was obviously a man to whom faith was not a casual affair. He wore two silver crosses around his neck, he pretended to be knocking on wood whenever he said something optimistic, and on his right biceps were tattooed the words ALLEGED FAST LUCK,surrounded by representations of cornucopias, dollar signs, arrow-pierced hearts, and the number 13 surrounded by wavy radiating lines to indicate its sparkling magical qualities. He was a bit slow on the uptake, scratching his head at their every question, and when not talking, he vagued out, staring dully at the elevator door. Mingolla recognized the signs.

The corridor into which they emerged from the elevator was covered with white foam like the tunnels of the Ant Farm, and was thronged with harried-looking junior-grade officers. The sergeant conducted them through a door at the end of the corridor, and told the corporal at the desk that the I-Ops were here to see Major Cabell. The corporal punched a buzzer, an inner door swung open to a round white room with a desk and chairs, charts on the walls, and a cot in one corner.

Major Cabell was in her thirties, a tanned reedy woman whose lusterless brown hair and strained expression had hardened her good looks into a spinsterly primness redolent—Mingolla thought—of a frontier schoolmarm who had been forsaken by her lover and left to age in the prairie winds. She threw on a dressing gown over her T-shirt and fatigue pants, and invited them in. She agreed to send them across the valley with a recon patrol the next morning; but when he suggested a chopper she told him that they’d be safer with a patrol: they lost a lot of choppers on missions to the far side of the valley. She checked her watch, offered them the use of bunks and shower facilities, but asked Mingolla if he would mind staying behind and talking. Official business, she said. Once the others had gone off with her aide, she unwound, seeming to drop four or five years along with her brittle air; she broke out a bottle of gin and pulled up a chair beside Mingolla, who was becoming unsettled by her attitude toward him.

‘I hope you don’t mind talking,’ she said, filling Mingolla’s glass. ‘It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk with a man.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘This place… the intrigues are unbelievable. It’s medieval! Lieutenants scheming against captains, captains against each other, against me. It’s because there’s no resolution to the battle. People get bored, and for lack of anything else to do they start planning career moves.’

‘You serious?’

‘Oh, yes! If they’d let me win the battle—and I could, in a matter of days—everything would be all right. But command insists upon a holding action. God knows why!’ She began to rub the ball of her right thumb across the knuckles of her left hand. ‘It’s really unbelievable. People trying to make fools of one another… that gets a lot of them killed. They write reports on each other’s eccentricities, and sometimes things get back to the injured party. I’ve caught some of the reports they’ve written about me. If I did half what they say…’ She gave a dramatic shudder. ‘And so I’m cut off from any possible… relationships. Stuck in this room. I have this recurring nightmare about it. I’m on a beach… White sand, heat. I live in a house in the dunes. I’m always exhausted from walking on the beach, because it’s so boring. There’s nothing to look at… even the colors are all bleached and ugly. I’m not helping anyone by being there. It’s not an escape or a retreat. I’m just supposed to be there. It’s like my profession. No one needs me, no one speaks to me. In fact, I don’t even know how to speak. I’ve always been there.’ She gave a nervy little laugh. ‘It’s not far from the truth. So’—she affected casualness—‘you’re from New York. God, it’s been years since I’ve been in New York.’

‘Been a while for me, too,’ he said, glancing around the room. There was a stack of confession magazines on a night table beside the cot, and set beneath it was a small TV, a VCR, and a number of videotapes, the word Love prominent in many of the titles. There was a dominant pattern in the major’s thoughts, one that had obviously been trifled with, and from the contents of the room it was clear what particular delusion the pattern reflected.

To fend her off—she had begun trailing her fingers across his arm and knee—he asked about her background. He didn’t want to reject her outright, to hurt her. Despite her delusion, there was something impressive about the major, a core dignity and strength that forced you to disregard her flaws, to relate to her without pity. It had been a long time since he had met anyone whom he didn’t pity.

‘I enlisted because my mother died,’ she said. ‘People do the damnedest things under pressure. God knows what I was thinking. It seems now that I wanted structure. Structure!’ She laughed. ‘The army’s got all the structure in the world, but it’s all topsy-turvy.’

She described her mother’s illness, how she’d coped. ‘I did labor,’ she said. ‘I built a masonry wall around the house. I worked in the garden. Cutting away rotten roots… tough as clenched knuckles.’ She swirled the gin in her glass, stared into it as if hoping the liquid would reveal some oracle. ‘People are so simple, really. When I came home to take care of her, she put my clothes away in a drawer she’d cleared. No big deal. Just this simple inclusion in her life. Sometimes she’d ball all her pain up into a simple order, get rid of it that way. I remember once she said, “See the seeds of that lily… balanced on the leaves. Get the big ones. Don’t let them dry out too much. Plant them on the far side of the garden.” And after I’d done it, she felt better.’ The major freshened Mingolla’s drink. ‘My sister came to help out. I hadn’t seen her for years. She’d acquired a southern accent and had taken to wearing a gold map of Texas on a necklace. She said she loved me, and I hardly recognized her. She’d married this Texas boy who wrote horror novels. I read some of them. They were okay, but I didn’t care for it. At best it was this sort of sensual pessimism. Maybe I just couldn’t identify with the self-loathing of vampires.’

She got up, walked to the door, and stood looking back at him over her shoulder; when he met her eyes, she paced away. ‘I can’t understand how I wound up in charge here,’ she said. ‘I can see the events that led to it, the colonel dying and all. But it doesn’t make sense.’ She laughed. ‘Of course I’m not in charge. Nobody is… or if they are, they don’t have much of a plan. You know I lose over a hundred men a day even when it’s slow. A hundred men!’ She walked back to the door, fiddled with the knob. ‘I shouldn’t be talking this way to an I-Op. You might report me.’

‘I’m not going to report you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, coming toward him. ‘I didn’t mean that. I’m just having trouble being around you.’

‘Maybe I should go.’

‘Maybe you should.’ She dropped into a chair. ‘Why does this keep happening?’

‘What keeps happening?’

She turned away, embarrassed. ‘I keep being attracted to… to men, to strangers. It’s… it’s not even a real attraction. I mean I can feel it beginning, y’know. Feel my body reacting. And I try to control it. My mind’s not involved, y’see. Not at first, anyway. But I can’t stop it, I can’t slow it down at all. And then my mind is involved… though even then I know it’s not real, it’s just… I don’t know what it is. But it’s not real.’ She seemed to be asking for reassurance.

‘I might be able to help,’ he said.

‘How could you possibly? You don’t know what’s wrong, and even if you did…’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, and began to make her drowsy.

‘Who’re you working for?’ she said, then yawned.

Among the patterns of her mind was one that showed evidence of tampering, its structure more resilient and less easy to influence than the rest, and as she nodded in her chair, he worked at modifying the pattern, reducing its dominance. The work was painstaking. He realized he could easily go too far and destroy the pattern. Destroy her mind, turn her into a clever reconstruction of human wreckage like Don Julio and Amalia and Nate. A feeling of serenity stole over him as he worked, and accompanying this serenity was a new comprehension of the mind’s nature. He sensed that the patterns of thought were obeying some master template, that over the span of a life they weaved an intricate preordained shape that was linked to those of a myriad other minds; and he wondered if his old belief in magic and supernatural coincidences had not been a murky perception of the processes of thought, and if the mystical character he had assigned reality had actually had some validity. There was so much to think about, to try to understand. The woman’s arm in the mural, the Christian girl he’d treated in some possible future; the idea that he had somehow dealt with Izaguirre. Even the serenity he felt was something that needed to be understood; it seemed a symptom of a deeper and more complete understanding that lay yet beyond him. And these things taken together implied a universe whose complexity defied categorization, whose true character could not be fitted inside the definitions of magic or science. He doubted he would ever understand it all, but he thought he might someday understand more than he had once believed plausible.

When he awakened the major, she sat up, looking confused. ‘You must have been dead tired,’ he said.

She laughed dispiritedly. I’m always tired.’ She pressed her palms against her temples.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Clearer, maybe.’ She probed him with a stare. ‘You did do something to me.’

‘No, I swear… Sleep must have been what you needed.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘A minute ago I was desperate to…’

‘Probably stress,’ he suggested. ‘That’s all. Stress can do funny things.’

‘God, that’s what this place does to you,’ she said. ‘It even makes you suspicious of feeling good.’

‘Do you still want me to leave?’

She appeared to be checking inside herself, sounding for an answer. No,’ she said, brightening. Why don’t you have another drink and tell me about New York. About yourself. You’ve hardly told me anything. Of course that’s always how it is with I-Ops… they’re secretive even about trivialities.’ She reached for the gin bottle, paused. ‘But you’re no I-Op, are you?’

‘What gives you that idea?’

‘Every I-Op I’ve ever met has been cold and given to drinking bourbon and gazing moodily toward the Red Menace as if he was yearning to have a Commie in his sights. You’re not like that.’

‘I guess I’m a new breed.’

She studied him for a long time before pouring. ‘I just bet you are,’ she said.

The patrol that escorted them across the valley consisted of ten men, bulky and alien-looking in their combat gear, their faceplates aglow with green letters and numerals from the computer displays inside the helmets, their minds awhirl with Sammy. There was no moon at first, but as they moved through the thickets, hugging the side of a hill, flares burst above them, explosions sent blooms of orange flame boiling up toward the clouds, and iridescent rains of tracers poured down from circling gunships: a constant incidence of roaring light that silhouetted twigs and leaves, and shimmered in blazes on the faceplates of the soldiers. When the moon sailed clear of the clouds, its radiance was almost unnoticeable. Mingolla and the rest had been outfitted with throat mikes and miniature speakers affixed to their ears so they could communicate with the soldiers, and he listened to their tinny voices with amazement, wondering at their delight in this environment, which seemed to him infernal.

‘Son of a bitch!’ said one, a kid named Bobby Boy. ‘See that muthafucka go, man! Musta hit a fuel cell.’

And the sergeant of the patrol, a wiry light-skinned black named Eddie, said, ‘That ain’t shit, man! Wait’ll you see one of them little tanks get it. Man, one of them goes, it’s the fuckin’ Fourth of July. All them missiles touchin’ off… red and green streaks of fire. That’s somethin’, that’s really somethin’.’

‘I seen that,’ said Bobby Boy querulously. ‘You tryin’ to say I ain’t seen that? I been here ’bout as long as you, man.’

Eddie grunted. ‘You be so fuckin’ high, you liable to see anything.’

‘Hey,’ said another voice. ‘You fuckers watch yo’ mouth! We got us a lady present.’

‘Shut the fuck up, Sebo,’ came back Bobby Boy. ‘That ol’ girl’s I-Op. They probably bugged her yummy ’fore they sent her out here. They… Wow! Awright! See that bitch blow, man? See that gold color in the heart? That’s fuckin’ weird! Wonder what the Fritos got burns gold.’

‘Probably all the grease they eat,’ said somebody new.

Mingolla, made uneasy by all this, walked closer to Debora. In the flashes of the explosions, her eyes burned red, her shadow hands looked to be seven-fingered. ‘You okay,’ he said, just to say something, forgetting the throat mike.

‘I do believe,’ said Bobby Boy, ‘those two I-Ops got a little somethin’ goin’.’

‘Bet she knows how to throw it,’ said Sebo. ‘Bet I-Op teaches ’em all kinda slick tricks.’

‘Shut ya hole!’ said Eddie.

‘Bet she gotta educated love muscle… make ya shoot silver bullets.’

‘I tol’ ya, shut up!’

‘Can’t stop me from dreamin’,’ said Sebo. ‘I dreamin’ ’bout both of ’em, slim there and the one with the rose eye.’

‘You can dream,’ said Tully. ‘But you be watchful, or dere gonna be one big nigger in your dream… unnerstan’?’

‘Wouldn’t mess with him, Sebo,’ said Eddie. ‘The man sound serious.’

‘Serious? Shit!’ Sebo giggled. ‘This the wrong goddamn war for serious.’

‘I think,’ said Ruy nervously, ‘it would be best for everyone to keep their minds on the crossing.’

‘That’s that skinny beaner talkin’, ain’t it?’ said Billy Boy. ‘Hey, Frito! I don’t like you, man! You gimme the excuse, you ain’t gonna have to worry ’bout no crossin’.’

An explosion nearby shook the ground, orange light illuminated the figures of the soldiers, freezing them in a tableau, transforming the outlines of trees and shrubs into a bizarre menagerie of shapes. Mingolla and Debora crouched behind a bush, but the soldiers turned their faces to the light like pilgrims brought hard upon their central mystery. The explosion seemed to calm them, and once the glare had faded, they continued on in silence.

They crossed the valley without incident, but as they crested a rise overlooking the ruined village where they would await transport to Panama, a soldier about twenty yards ahead of Mingolla was flipped into the air by a burst of flame beneath his feet, and rifle fire began striking around them. Mingolla pulled Debora down, going flat. Screams and agitated voices came over the transmitter. His mouth was full of dirt, and he was very afraid. He aimed his rifle at the shadowy brush and opened up; the sound of his fire was drowned out by the crump of high explosive ammunition. The voices and the gunfire seemed to be speaking as one, blending into a weird percussive language. So much noise and fury, Mingolla felt a hot wind was blowing at hurricane force, driving red splinters of fear through him. Debora wrangled her rifle out from beneath her and began to fire; he could feel its heat and vibration on his face. Then it was over. The guns fell quiet, and the moonlight appeared to reassemble, to fit around every shape, making them sharp and recognizable again. Cooling the air. Normal voices filtered in. A groan.

‘Got a live beaner here!’

‘Bring him, man!’

‘Sebo! You in there, man? You awright?’

‘It’s his leg… suit’s gone tight to his leg.’

‘Gimme his numbers, goddammit! What’s his numbers say?’

‘He’s alive! Leg looks fucked, but he’s alive.’

‘Get the I-Ops down the hill!’

‘His medipac’s doin’ for the leg.… He’s cool. Hell, he ain’t feelin’ nothin’.’

‘You okay, Sebo. You hit a mine but you okay.’

‘His leg’s fucked! Check the readout… just little bits of bone floatin’ ’round in there.’

‘Dumbass shit! Shut up!’

‘You talkin’ ’bout my leg, man?’

Two of the soldiers hauled Mingolla and Debora up, hustled them down the hill toward the village. Behind them, Sebo shouted, ‘Whaddaya mean… what’s wrong with my leg?’

The village—a few acres of huts and dirt streets—looked to have been trampled by a giant: roofs staved in, walls crumpled, poles splintered. Ruy and Mingolla and Debora sat beneath the overhang of a canted roof. Tully and Corazon sat apart from them, and farther off stood a group of soldiers. Under the strong moonlight, the snapped poles and crushed thatch took on a dirty grayish black color, and the street glowed lavender gray. All the shadows were sharp and crooked like they might be in Hell. Rocket bursts flickered above the distant hills.

‘Almost home,’ said Ruy.

‘You stupid fuck!’ Mingolla had to make an effort to keep from hitting him. ‘This bullshit tour ’bout gets us killed, and you sit there mouthin’ off ’bout home.’

Ruy, a cross-legged shadow, gave no reply.

‘When will the plane come?’ Debora asked.

‘First light,’ said Ruy. ‘It’ll fly us to an airstrip near the city, and we’ll enter the barrio after dark.’

Three more soldiers came down the street, two of them supporting Sebo, whose leg dragged in the dirt. His combat suit was scorched to the knees. They sat him down between Ruy and Mingolla and removed his helmet. He had close-cropped black hair and a weasly dark face dirtied by a growth of stubble. Mingolla recognized him as the vet who had accosted him in his hallucination, who had recognized him. Sebo was sweating freely, lines of strain bracketing his mouth. The other two soldiers—Bobby Boy and Eddie—removed their helmets and went to their knees beside him.

‘Your suit juice ya up ’nough?’ Bobby Boy asked. He was a hulking kid, crewcut and moon-faced, his features small and regularly spaced, giving him a bland moronic look.

‘Yeah, I’m makin’ it.’ Sebo slurred the words.

Mingolla stared at him, trying to put his presence together with the arm in the mural, with everything else.

‘Chopper can’t get here for a while, man,’ said Eddie, settling back on his haunches. ‘But you be fine.’

Sebo gazed off into the sky, wetted his lips.

Eddie took out a packet of C-ration cookies. He split one of the cookies in half, licked the filling of white icing. Offered one to Mingolla, then to Debora and Ruy. They all refused. ‘Don’t know what you’re missin’,’ said Eddie. ‘These ol’ sugar things make ya tranquil. Ain’t that so, Bobby Boy?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Yeah,’ said Eddie. ‘Cool ya right down, these fuckers. Just the thing after a firefight.’ He grinned, winked, his face cinching into lines of wily good humor. ‘Maybe they lemme do a commercial once I get home, man. I say, “Suckin’ the middles out these doobies got me through the great war.” How ’bout that?’

‘Probably sell a million,’ said Mingolla. He looked around at the village, the sad gray wreckage, still holding a faint smell of animals and men. The ghost of a smell. Wind feathered the thatch, making the shadows tremble.

‘Razors,’ said Bobby Boy dreamily. ‘Man, they cut so smooth you cain’t even feel ’em. Cain’t even feel when you hangin’ open. Don’t know you bad off till blood’s comin’ in your eye. Man, you can make somebody think twice ’bout hookin’ wit’cha if you gotta razor, man. ’Cause he don’t want nothin’ to touch him he cain’t feel how bad it is. Razors,’ said Bobby Boy. Smooth.’

His lazy tone of voice gave Mingolla a shiver.

‘Don’t be talkin’ that shit!’ said Eddie. ‘Fuck! Boy never had no dealin’s with razors. He just stoned and like hearin’ hisself talk mighty. You bullshit to the bone, Bobby Boy.’ He licked the icing from another cookie. ‘To the bone!’

‘Maybe,’ said Bobby Boy. ‘But I know ’bout razors now, see. From thinkin’ ’bout ’em, I know ’em. Gonna get me one when I get home.’

‘Fuckin’ retard,’ said Eddie, and winked at Mingolla again. ‘Hey, Bobby Boy! ’Member when we first come to this ol’ village?’

Bobby Boy turned to him, the movement slow and distracted. He ejected an ampule from a dispenser in his hand, popped it under his nose, and breathed deep. His face seemed to lengthen, grow leaner.

‘Hear what I say, Bobby Boy?’ Eddie asked.

‘Yeah, I ’member.’

‘That was ol’ Bobby Boy’s baptism of fire,’ said Eddie. ‘He didn’t know what to make of this shit. He be poppin’ Sammy every coupla minutes, screamin’ and blowin’ holes in the smoke. Then when he calm down a little, he wanders into one of them huts. He’s gone for like minutes, y’know, and finally he comes back, he says, “Somethin’ fuckin’ weird’s in there, man,” he says. “What’s that?” I ax him, and he say, “There’s this beaner, man, he’s sittin’ there. Gotta hole in his forehead, and his brain, it’s sittin’ there in his fuckin’ lap.” He gawks at me. Like he’s holdin’ it, y’know. Like he’s wantin’ to put it back in. Y’oughta come see, man.” And I say to him, “Bullshit, man! Ain’t nothin’ make a wound like that.”’Course I know the caseless ammo these rifles fire, man, they blow a shallow hole. I seen this kinda shit plenty of times. I just woofin’ with ol’ Bobby Boy. And he gets real upset. “Man,” he say. “Man, I’m tellin’ the goddamn truth. Dude’s sittin’ there with his fuckin’ brain in his fuckin’ lap.” And I tell him, “Naw, Sammy’s got you all confused.” Well, lemme tell ya, ol’ Bobby Boy, he’s screamin’, tellin’ me how weird it is, how it’s true, and meantime, I give the signal to my man Rat to torch the goddamn hut. And when the hut goes up, I thought Bobby Boy was gonna bust out in tears. “I seen it,” he says, “I swear I did.” We had the boy believin’ he was crazy for ’most a week. That was really fresh, that was. ’Member all that, man?’

Bobby Boy nodded and said gravely, ‘I was a fool.’

Eddie chuckled. ‘Sometime the boy come close to makin’ sense, don’t he? Yeah, well. We all fools to be sittin’ ’round in the middle of this mess.’

‘Hey,’ said Sebo. ‘Hey, lady.’

Debora looked over at him. ‘Yes?’

‘C’mere, lady.’ Sebo’s face was shiny with sweat, his grin was without mirth. ‘Hurt so bad, I need me some sweet talkin’. C’mere and talk at me, huh?’

‘Wouldn’t be doin’ that, woman,’ said Eddie. ‘Old Sebo, he just wanna grab holda your jaloobies. That’s all he be wantin’. Sebo, he get horny when he hurt.’

‘Me, too,’ said Bobby Boy; he reached out a hand toward Debora, moved the hand around, like an artist gauging the balance of different sections of his work.

‘Cut that shit out,’ said Mingolla.

Bobby Boy turned his stunned moonboy gaze on him. ‘What say?’

‘Hey!’ Eddie gave him a shove. ‘Lowrate, will ya, cool? You got that dingy Spec Four redhead bitch for postholin’, man. Leave these folks be.’

‘She lookin’ nice,’ said Bobby Boy in the same tone he had used to talk about razors.

‘C’mere, lady,’ said Sebo. ‘Little talk ain’t gonna hurt nobody.’

‘Got somethin’ better to do with my tongue than talk to her,’ said Bobby Boy.

Ruy got to his feet, menacing Bobby Boy. This is insupportable,’ he said, and then, to Eddie: ‘Can’t you control him?’

Eddie shrugged.

A smile melted up from Bobby Boy’s face. ‘Thank ya, Jesus,’ he said. ‘This here’s Bobby Boy Macklin praisin’ your name for givin’ me this scrawny bastard to mess over.’

‘I tol’ you to lowrate, man,’ said Eddie anxiously, and Mingolla, realizing that Bobby Boy was very much on the edge, set himself for a fight. No way was he going to try to influence Bobby Boy: Ruy must know how hard it was to influence someone behind Sammy.

‘Sebo!’ Eddie maneuvered himself between Ruy and Bobby Boy. ‘Know what I’s just thinkin’ ’bout? ’Member that ol’ girlfriend of yours, one who wrote you the letter ’cusin’ you of bein’ a killer?’ He gave Mingolla a friendly elbow. ‘We wrote her back, faked the colonel’s signature, and tol’ her Sebo was a fuckin’ hero, went ’round feedin’ the starvin’ kids and all. Shit! Woman wrote back, sounded like she ’bout ready to air mail her snatch to ol’ Sebo.’

‘Get outta my way, Eddie,’ said Bobby Boy. ‘I’m gonna crumble this Frito.’

‘Fuck you are!’ Eddie glanced around wildly as if hoping to light on a solution. ‘Know what, man? Know what we can do? We can run a game!’ He shouted to some soldiers gathered by the wreckage of the next hut. ‘Where that prisoner at? Bring his ass!’

One of the soldiers grabbed a shadowed figure lying on the ground, hauled him up, and hustled him over. Flung him down. A kid of about eighteen, skinny, long black hair flopping in his eyes. Crop of pimples straggling across his chin. He was shirtless, his ribs showing. On his right shoulder was a bloodstained bandage.

‘How ’bout it, Bobby Boy?’ said Eddie. ‘Sebo? How ’bout a game?’

‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ said Bobby Boy sulkily.

‘Awright!’ said Sebo, sitting up straighter.

Bobby Boy punched the kid in his injured shoulder, and the kid cried out, rolled away.

‘Bastard!’ said Debora. ‘Leave him alone!’

Bobby Boy stared at her and made a throaty sound that might have been a laugh.

‘Listen up, lady,’ said Eddie. ‘Bobby Boy will fuck with you, so you better let him have his fun.’

She looked to Mingolla, and he shook his head.

Some of the soldiers moved off along the street, planting what appeared to be large seeds, covering them with dirt, patting it smooth. Planting lots of seeds.

Bobby yanked the kid up to a sitting position. ‘What’s your name, Frito?’

The kid spread his hands in helplessness. ‘No entiendo.’

‘Somebody ask him in Spanish,’ said Bobby Boy.

Mingolla did the duty.

‘Manolo Caax.’ The kid looked around hopelessly at the others, then lowered his eyes.

‘Cash… huh! The beaner’s named for fuckin’ money,’ said Bobby Boy as if this were the height of insanity.

Sebo giggled, his eyes glassy from painkillers. ‘I’m bettin’ on ol’ Frito,’ he said, ‘I do believe Frito’s got what it takes.’

The others began making bets.

‘Ask him if he got any information,’ said Bobby Boy.

When Mingolla asked, the kid said, ‘I know nothing. What are you going to do? Are you going to kill me?’

Mingolla didn’t answer; he found it easy to reject the kid and realized this was because he had already given up on him.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked Eddie.

‘Got frags buried all over,’ said Eddie. ‘Coupla guys get behind the beaner, fire at his heels to keep him movin’, and we see if he can run the street without triggerin’ a frag. He don’t move fast ’nough, the boys’ll wax him.’ He grinned, but sounded more tense than enthusiastic.

Debora leaned close, whispered, ‘I’m going to stop it.’

‘No, don’t.’ He caught her arm.

‘We can’t let them do this!’ she said. ‘I don’t care if…’

‘You better care,’ he said. ‘You better just leave it alone. We can’t save everybody. All right?’

Ruy was looking at them with interest.

‘All right?’ Mingolla repeated, and Debora gave a resentful nod, looked away.

Tully sidled over, Corazon at his side, and said, ‘I can’t touch ’em, Davy. Can you do somethin’?’

‘Uh-uh.’

What you talkin’ ’bout?’ said Bobby Boy.

‘Just talkin’,’ said Tully. ‘Ain’t you got not’in’ better to do dan fuck wit’ dis kid?’

‘Naw,’ said Bobby Boy mildly. ‘Not a goddamn thing.’ He was almost as tall as Tully, with broader shoulders, and Mingolla thought Tully was a little afraid.

‘Buncha damn chickenshits, mon,’ said Tully. ‘Fuckin’ wit’ a kid.’

‘You could be next, nigger.’ Bobby Boy went eye to eye with him. ’How ‘bout that?’

‘Watch your mouth, man!’ Eddie stood and shoved Bobby Boy back from Tully.

Ruy tapped Debora’s arm. ‘Can’t you do anything?’

She turned a bitter glance on Mingolla, then said, ‘No.’

‘Hey,’ said Bobby Boy. ‘One of y’all ’splain to Frito how it’s gonna be.’

Again Mingolla did the interpreting.

The kid glared at him with stony hatred. Bobby Boy, his eyes aglitter in the moonlight, gave the kid an affectionate pat. ‘I know y’can do it, Frito. Don’t lemme down.’

Two soldiers led the kid toward the start of the course at the base of the hill about a hundred yards away, and he kept staring back over his shoulder at Mingolla as if he alone were responsible.

‘Hee-hee,’ said Bobby Boy. ‘This gonna be good!’

‘Does he have a chance?’ Debora asked.

‘Slim,’ said Eddie. ‘Frags all over, and they be drivin’ him toward ’em with fire. He be runnin’ too quick to be lookin’.’

Tully looked dubiously at Mingolla, and Corazon added the eerie weight of her stare. Mingolla fixed his eyes on the three figures at the base of the hill, the two soldiers in their moonstruck helmets, the kid a darker and less distinct figure between them.

‘Let’s do ’er!’ Sebo shouted. ‘Get outta my way, Bobby Boy! I can’t see shit!’

With a mean glance at Sebo, Bobby Boy shuffled to the left.

The two soldiers at the end of the road shoved the kid forward and fired bursts behind him; the kid sprinted left toward a gap in the wreckage, but more fire cut off his escape, set one of the crumpled huts to burning. He came zig-zagging down the street, eyes to the ground, bullets throwing up dirt at his heels. Bobby Boy whooped, and Sebo was babbling. Debora buried her face in Mingolla’s shoulder, but Mingolla, full of self-loathing at his lack of moral strength, his pragmatic convictions, forced himself to watch. The kid tripped, went rolling, and Mingolla hoped one of the grenades would explode and end this cruelty. Gunfire pinned the kid down. He crawled, scrambled to his feet, was knocked sideways as a bullet detonated a grenade at his rear; he teetered beside a little mound of dirt, nearly stepped on it, but leaped aside. The soldiers followed him, their fire coming closer and closer. Eddie shifted up and down on his heels, cheering in secret, and Bobby Boy was giving out with breathy yeahs and shaking a balled fist, and Sebo was leaning forward, intent, his wound forgotten, and the stuttering fire was instilling a fierce tension in the air around them, and the kid sprawled, scrabbled, jittered, appearing to be moved by an invisible finger that pushed him in a dozen lucky directions, keeping him inches away from the little mounds of dirt with their gleaming seeds. It was as if he were doing a magical arm-waving dance, as if he were a crazy spirit from the heyday of the village, from the time when the sapling walls of the huts were freshly skinned and yellow, the thatch green and full of juice, and pigs were stealing mangos from the children’s plates, and even in the worst of times the men would gather around the well and smoke cigarettes that they bought for a penny apiece at the store on the hilltop and boast about the milk cows they planned to buy once the crops were in, and it really seemed the kid was going to make it, not only make it—Mingolla thought—but that his mad spinning run was carving a secret design that would resurrect the old gone days, the days before the war, bring the gray wreckage into order, and restore it to color and motion and life, and everything would begin again, and the soldiers would vanish, and Mingolla would be a child dreaming of some unimaginable sweetness… But then the kid stopped running. Stopped dead less than fifty feet from the end of the course. The firing broke off, and Mingolla knew that the soldiers harrowing him must be thunderstruck by this sudden turn. The kid was breathing hard, his chest heaving, but his face was calm. Dark chips of eyes, mouth firmed and stoic. Looking at him, Mingolla believed he could see his thoughts. He realized that somewhere along the way the kid had understood that it didn’t matter whether he made it, that the course he was negotiating was one that had been negotiated for centuries by his countrymen, a device of excess and oppression, a bloody game for amused profit takers, and he just didn’t see any reason to continue. Maybe the kid didn’t know all this in words, maybe in his own mind he had simply reached a point of exhaustion and malaise, a point that Mingolla himself had reached from time to time. But that knowledge was in him, enervating, heavy as stone. He wasn’t going to run another foot, he was going to stand there, and by standing gain the only victory he could.

‘Run, dammit!’ Bobby Boy shouted.

The kid shifted his weight, let his arms dangle, waiting. To Mingolla’s eyes, he appeared to be growing more solid and substantial against the background of wasted gray shapes.

‘Kill his ass!’ Bobby Boy shrilled.

Nobody fired, nobody moved.

‘Kill him!’ Bobby went a couple of paces toward the kid and waved angrily at the soldiers. ‘Y’hear me? Kill him!’

Reluctantly, it seemed, the soldiers lifted their rifles and opened fire. The bullets blew the kid forward in a staggering run, and he collapsed between two of the mounds. Black blood webbed his back, puddled beneath his mouth. His left leg beat a tattoo against the dirt, and his entire body humped up once, then was still.

Ruy sighed, and Mingolla let out the breath he’d been holding; it felt hot in his throat. Debora’s hand was tremulous on his arm, as if she were poised for flight. ‘Shit,’ said Eddie. ‘Shit.’ Corazon’s mystic eye looked to be glowing, and Tully was stone-faced. Sebo, spent and sweaty, leaned against the hut, his mouth open, eyes slitted… Chinese eyes.

Bobby Boy walked over and kicked the kid in the side. He turned back, his features warped by a scowl, giving his round face the appearance of a nasty man-in-the-moon. ‘I ain’t payin’,’ he said to the other soldiers. ‘Muthafucka didn’t play fair.’

‘You better fuckin’ pay,’ said somebody. ‘You’d make us pay.’

‘Yeah, man,’ said somebody else. ‘You be squawkin’ at us, sayin’ that the bastard didn’t make it, and that was what counted.’

‘Pay up, Bobby Boy! Y’ain’t got no reason not to!’

‘Hell you say!’ Bobby Boy stalked back to the group beside the hut. ‘Hey, Eddie,’ he said. ‘You with me on this, ain’tcha? Tell ’em the rules, man. Tell ’em what’s right. The son of a bitch didn’t even try.’