Life During Wartime (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I suppose.’

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

‘David?’ Apprehension in her voice.

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

‘I …’

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

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

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

‘I told you … I’ve never been there.’

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

‘David!’

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

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

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

Frog voice, devil voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m gone to Panama. You want to make that trip, check out a man in Livingston named Ruy Barros. He’ll fix you up. Maybe I’ll see you.

G.

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