Life During Wartime (19 page)

He walked down to the landward end of the concrete pier. The turtling boats had sailed, and the sky above the mainland had cleared to a pale aqua. He could see a chain of low smoky hills on the horizon. He had a swallow of warm beer, gagged, and spat it out; he tossed the bottle into the harbor, watched it float among oil slick and streamers of kelp, drifting back to clink against the barnacled concrete. Heaps of sudsy gray foam lifted on the swells, and just beneath the surface something stick-thin and opaque blew from its tubular mouth what looked to be a little ectoplasmic fog. The scents of brine and sweet rot on the offshore wind. Mingolla decided he felt pretty good, considering.

‘See you made it, Davy!’ Tully came up beside him. His eyes were bloodshot, and a chalky pallor suffused his skin.

‘Rough night?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Dey all rough, you get my age. But I usually can find some bitch be kindly to an ol’ man.’ Tully flung a hand out toward the coast. ‘You checkin’ out de Iron Barrio, huh?’

‘What you mean?’

Tully pointed to the low-lying hills. ‘Dat dere’s smoke from de Barrio, Breakfast fires, and maybe burnin’ bodies. Dey like to hang de bodies on de roof and set dem afire.’

‘Oh,’ said Mingolla.

‘Yeah, dey makes a big stink over dere every mornin’.’

Mingolla squatted, tried to make out the definition of the smoke. Now that he knew what it was, it appeared to be wavering, betraying flashes of red, redolent of demonic activity. ‘This man I’m supposed to kill …’

‘What ’bout him?’

‘Who is he?’

‘Some Nicaraguan name of de Zedeguí. Opolonio de Zedeguí. He one of Sombra’s top agents, used to be a professor or somethin’ ’fore de therapy.’ Tully hawked and spat. ‘Mon crazy to go try and hide heself in a prison.’

‘Why’s he hidin’ out?’

‘Deserted, I ’spect. But de mon bound to be crazy, and he t’ink de Barrio goin’ to keep him safe.’

Mingolla gazed at the smoke, wondering what lay beneath it.

‘You worried, Davy?’

‘Some … but not as much as I thought I’d be.’

‘Dat’s a good balance. You keep dat frame of mind, you be all right. Just don’t be worryin’ too much. Time you hit de Barrio, you goin’ to be a dangerous mon.’ Tully grunted. ‘Hell, you a dangerous mon already.’

Between lessons, Mingolla spent the hours reading and prowling the beach; occasionally Hetti or another of the derelicts would tag along, but he had grown tired of their attentions and worked to discourage this. Twice he ran into Tully’s cousin Elizabeth on the beach, and once she shared her lunch with him, showing him how to eat cashew fruit by thumbing out the black seeds and sprinkling the sour pulp with salt. She seemed to like him, and he toyed with the idea of starting something with her, but was reluctant to go against Tully. Weeks went by, and he grew bored and restless, now feeling as confined by the island as he had been by the wall around the hotel. His sleep was troubled by dreams of Debora, and whenever these dreams would wake him, he would put himself back to sleep by imagining scenarios of sexual vengeance.

One afternoon a couple of weeks before he was scheduled to leave for La Ceiba, Izaguirre gave him a final booster injection of the drug. The shot left him achy and nervous, the inside of his head tender-feeling; and that night, unable to sleep, plagued by flash hallucinations of unfamiliar streets and people’s faces that melted away too quickly for him to identify, he wandered through the hotel, ending up in Izaguirre’s office, which was never kept locked. It was a small room just off the lobby, outfitted with a desk, two chairs, a bookcase, and a filing cabinet. Mingolla sat in the doctor’s chair and went through the files, too distracted to understand much of what he was reading, ignoring the typed material – the letters seemed to be scurrying around like ants – and concentrating on the marginalia penned in Izaguirre’s florid script. He continued to have hallucinations, and when he ran across a note describing Izaguirre’s concern that he might have
given Mingolla too large a dosage in the booster shot, the hallucinations grew more vivid. He saw part of a mural on a pebbled wall, a woman’s brown arm hanging off the edge of a mattress, rendered with a fey sensuality that put him in mind of Degas, and accompanying it, oppressive heat and the smell of dust and decay. This hallucination had the compelling clarity of a premonition, yet was so much more detailed than his usual premonitions that he became frightened. He stood up, felt queasy, dizzy, and shook his head. The walls darkened, whirled, brightened again, and he closed his eyes, trying to quell his nausea. Put his hand on the desk, and touched warm skin. Opened his eyes, saw a bag lady staring up at him from a curb, her fat cheeks webbed with broken capillaries, her nose bulbous, a scarf knotted so tightly under her chin, it warped her ruddy face into a knobbly vegetable shape.

‘This ain’t America,’ she said dolefully. ‘America wouldn’t treat nobody like this.’

Mingolla staggered, had an incoherent impression of orange sky, a night sky above a city, diseased-looking palm trees with brown fronds and scales on their trunks, and rain-slick asphalt reflecting nebular blurs of neon, and bars with glowing words above them. Sinewy music whose rhythms seemed to be charting the fluctuations of his nerves. Somebody bumped into him, said, ‘Whoops,’ an oily fat man with a moon face, sticking out his pink meat of a tongue on which a cobra had been tattooed, then smiling and mincing off to a world where he was beautiful.

‘See what I tol’ ya,’ said the bag lady.

Gaudily dressed crowds shuffling in and out of the low glassfront buildings, a history of the American perverse … Hookers in day-glo hotpants, leather boys, floozies in slit skirts, topless teenage girls with
ANGEL
stamped on their left breasts, and all the faces pale in the baking heat, characters in a strange language, circular dominoes with significant arrangements of dark eyes and mouths, borne along on the necks of fleshy machines, one thought per brain like a prize in a plastic egg, doing a slow drag down the devil’s row of bars and sex shops and arcades, under the numinous clouded light, under the smears of red and yellow words melting into the air, their voices a gabble, their laughter a bad
noise, the rotten yolk of their senses streaking the night, and Mingolla knew the bag lady was wrong, that this was most definitely America, the void with tourist attractions, the Southern California bottomland experience, and somewhere or everywhere, maybe lurking behind a billboard, was a giant red-skinned flabby pig of a Satan, his gut hanging over his tights, horny and giggling, watching through a peephole the great undressing of his favorite bitch, the Idea of Order. …

The bag lady shook her head in despair. ‘We need a new Columbus, that’s what we need.’

‘Help out a vet,’ said a voice behind him, and Mingolla spun around to confront a weasly crewcut man on crutches, one-legged, wearing fatigues with a First Infantry Nicaragua patch, holding out a hand. In the darks of his eyes Mingolla saw the secrets of combat, the mysterious truths of shock.

‘Hey,’ said the vet. ‘Hey! I know you, man! ’Member me? The valley, man, the valley near Santander Jimenez.’ He hobbled a step forward, peering at Mingolla’s face. ‘Yeah, it’s you, man. You looked different … your hair was different or something. But yeah, I …’

‘Un-uh.’ Mingolla backed away, feeling unbelievably tall, worried that he might scrape his head on the orange sky; get wet with that polluted color. ‘You got the wrong guy.’

‘The fuck I do! You was there when I was hit, man. ’Member? The game with the beaner … y’gotta ’member the game!’

Mingolla stepped into the crowd, was carried away by their slow crush. He couldn’t remember the man, but then he couldn’t remember much of anything, and he was afraid someone else might recognize him, someone with an ax to grind.

‘You’re a vet, huh?’ A woman, a beautiful, pale, black-haired woman with carmine lips and high cheekbones, enormous eyes, and the voluptuous body used to mold pornographic beer glasses displayed beneath a full-length gown fabricated of tiny black-lace serpents and filmy mesh, a woman with silkburns on her hips and probably a really keen tattoo … she took his arm and pressed close. ‘I’m Sexula,’ she said. ‘And I’m free to vets.’

That started him laughing, thinking about the Gl Bill and benefits.

‘Hey, fuck you, Jim!’ She pushed him away. ‘I’m just tryin’ to be real, y’know. You some kinda faggot, get your ass over to The Boy’s Room!’

‘Faggot?’ Hilarity was peaking in him, graphing Himalayas of unvoiced laughter. ‘Want me to show you my dingus, prove my point? Want me to unholster my—’

‘I don’t have to listen this shit! Maybe the other rides like it, man, but not me. I …’

‘What you mean “rides”?’ The unfamiliar term brought him down to earth, reminded him that he was lost, that he’d lost … who the hell was it? The crowd moved them up against a window.

‘Rides, man!’ she said. ‘Like, y’know, this’ – her gesture took in the street – ‘this here’s the carnival, and I’m one of the rides.’ She caught up his hand. ‘You okay, man? You lookin’ pretty scorched.’

Laughter was mounting inside him again. He took in the woman’s body, incredible breasts, wild cherry nipples peeking from the twinings of black lace coils. Nice girl, he thought. A foreign student, no doubt. Working her way through junior college.

‘What’s in ya, man? Little too much frost?’

He remembered some more. ‘I’m looking for somebody … somebody’s looking for me.’

‘You found her,’ she said. ‘C’mon, let’s go see ’bout a room.’

He could use some rest, a place to get his thoughts together. Out from under the orange sky. But he didn’t trust her. He primed her for honesty, openness. ‘Why me?’

‘Like I said, man, you’re a vet … the town pays me for vets.’ She led him around the corner, through glass doors, along a carpet mapped with stains shaped like dark continents amid a burgundy sea, and into a narrow mirrored lobby at whose far end, hunched behind the reception desk, sat a gnomish old man with a beaked nose and tufts of white hair on the sides of his head reminiscent of goblin ears, and upon whose forehead the engraved word
finality
would not have been inappropriate. ‘Twenny for the room ya need drinks that’s more,’ he said without punctuation, without looking up, and Sexula said, ‘He’s a vet, Ludy.’

Ludy squinted at Mingolla, who could feel cracks spreading across his skin from the power of that blood-webbed blue eye. ‘Ya gotcha card?’ he asked.

‘Uh … I was mugged,’ said Mingolla.

‘Ain’t gotcha card gotta pay the twenny.’ Ludy turned the page of a magazine, and peeping over the edge of the desk, Mingolla saw photographs of naked young boys in sexy yet playful couplings.

‘Didn’tcha hear him.’ Sexula spanked the counter with her hand, calling Ludy back from gambols with pals named Jimmy and Butch and Sonny. ‘Man says he got mugged.’

Ludy scowled, an expression that caused his eyes nearly to vanish into folds of inflamed pink flesh, and said to her, ‘You wanna pay the twenny pay the twenny.’ He punctuated. ‘Don’t wanna pay get the fuck out.’

A tap on Mingolla’s shoulder, followed by a girlish, ‘Excuse me.’

Behind him stood a thin mousey girl of nineteen or twenty, whom Mingolla perceived to be at the peak of her good looks, poised between the incline of plainness and the decline of just plain ugly. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt bearing a rendering of the Last Supper and the legend
THIS IS MY BODY, GIVEN FOR YOU.
Toting a shopping bag. Her brown hair lusterless, her breasts with the conformation of upturned saucers.

‘The gift of love can be a transcendent experience, but not if paid for,’ she said, her words sounding rote. ‘I want to give to you, brother.’

‘Get outta here,’ said Sexula.

The girl ignored her. ‘I am qualified to give you everything she might, and I can give you—’

‘Give him a goddamn fatal disease, what with all the sleaze been poppin’ you.’ Sexula took a little walk around the girl, shaking her head in exaggerated disgust.

‘I can give you much more,’ the girl continued, swallowing back embarrassment. ‘Through the act of love, I can give you communion with our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in …’

‘These cunts come ’round sayin’ that ’cause they’re doin’ it for God, it’s pure,’ said Sexula. ‘But the truth is, they can’t get
laid ’less they give it away. They ain’t nothin’ but hips and a hole!’

Ludy laughed, a sound like something large and pulpy falling into an empty paper bag.

The girl’s face worked. ‘Jesus Christ, in whose service I’ve …’

Sexula sneered. ‘Jesus got nothin’ to do with it!’

That waxed it for the girl. ‘I don’t care what you say about me, but you … you …’ She hefted her shopping bag behind her back as if preparing to use it on Sexula. ‘What would you know ’bout Jesus? He’s never laid his hands on you!’

‘Man lays his hands on me,’ said Sexula with a wink to Ludy, ‘and I give him that ol’ time religion with a brand new twist.’

‘Please, don’t go with her!’ The girl’s hands fluttered at Mingolla’s chest. ‘The things I’ve seen the Lord do, the things that were done … the miracles! Miracles from ashes!’

Her speech grew more and more disconnected, her manner more pitiable, and Mingolla, suddenly concerned for her, touched her mind and listened to the static of her thought, a crackle of half-formed images and memories …