Life During Wartime (12 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mingolla waited.

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

‘Maybe,’ Mingolla said.

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

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

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

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

‘What’s goin’ on?’ Mingolla asked.

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

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

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

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

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

‘They’re buildin’ it now.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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