Life During Wartime (35 page)

Not within range, anyway.

In the pale glow that came through the drapes, Debora looked worried, and he asked if she was thinking about the next day.

‘No … about the day after. About what we’ll do then.’

‘We’ll be okay.’

‘I know,’ she said, and turned away from him.

They awakened before dawn and ate breakfast in the diner next to the motel, a place called – according to its three-tiered neon sign –
EAT VERNA’S TEX-MEX DELICIOUS.
They had eggs-over-easy and bacon and toast and coffee, and sat in a booth of red vinyl sparkles, staring out through their reflections at the highway, the torrent of headlights and sleek dream machines westering, whispering toward the false dawn of Love City, piloted by men and women who wanted a good time then salvation and still believed this was possible, and thought maybe an immersion in the lingerie department of life would silver their hopes and streamline their wishes and send them home to boredom all chromed and supercharged with the horsepower of sexy experience. They lingered over their empty plates. No reason to hurry. Izaguirre wasn’t going anywhere, secure with his guards and his walls. There were no other customers, and when the waitress brought the check, she leaned on the booth and said, You folks goin’ or comin’?’

‘Coming,’ said Mingolla.

‘This your first time to Love City?’

‘Uh-huh.’

She nodded, a skinny fortyish woman with lines of sad wisdom on her face and rainbow stripes in her frizzy baby-chick-colored hair, an aging hillbilly punkette who had come late to a regretful morality, her disguise completed by a starched green uniform. ‘Ain’t nothin’ there you two couldn’t work out by yourself … if you take my meanin’,’ she said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, now. I ain’t preachin’ ’gainst L.C. God knows, I let it all wallow there a time or two. It’s just it don’t make nobody happy. Don’t make ’em sad, neither. It just sorta
is …
like everything else, y’know. So what’s the point?’

Debora murmured agreement; her response seemed casual, but Mingolla sensed between her and the waitress a woman-to-woman exchange to which he wasn’t attuned.

‘Where you folks comin’ from?’ the waitress asked, affecting deep interest.

‘Mexico,’ said Mingolla. ‘And Honduras before that.’ Made paranoid by the question, he checked her mind for signs of tampering and found her to be a mundane original.

‘Mexico!’ The way she said it, Mexico might have been something at the end of the boulevard of dreams, the distant glow of paradise. ‘Y’know, I sell Mex jewelry here’ – she hooked her thumb toward the display case beneath the cash register; it was filled with cheap onyx and silver – ‘and Mex food. Hell, I even had me a Mex boyfriend. That was ’fore the war, y’understand. But I never been down there. Always wanted to go. See the pretty boys and the lizards on the beaches and all. The ruins, too. Always wanted to see them ruins.’

Perky, feeling intimate with them now that she’d disclosed her heartfelt wish, she asked if they wanted more coffee … on the house. She brought the pot, poured, and plunked herself down beside Debora. She inquired about their backgrounds, said ‘uh-huh, uh-huh,’ in response to their minimal answers, impatient, eager to tell
her
story, the story she got to tell once every slow-predawn-while, the story that made her believe she’d lived that day.

‘This ol’ place probably looks pretty nothin’ to you folks,’ she said. ‘But believe me, you can see a thing or two here. The idea of gettin’ their Charlie doctored in Love City brings some strange ’uns thisaway.’

‘Oh?’ said Debora with polite interest. She glanced guiltily at Mingolla, and he checked his watch. They had time, and it would be okay to sit and listen and pretend for a little while that they weren’t going anywhere special, to have that much normalcy.

‘You wouldn’t believe some of ’em,’ said the waitress. And she told them about a man and a most unusual dog, and then about two women who’d looked as alike as two beans, pretty ol’ girls, y’know, like starlets, blondes, they was blondes, and it was surgery made them so alike, they’d told her about it, how they was
eye-dentical down to their moles, and they’d had their voices altered so they could harmonize even when they just talkin’, not singin’ or nothin’, they sounded buzzy and high-pitched together like a coupla birds who’d learned to speak English. It had been a real treat hearin’ them order the same thing simultaneous, waffles and cream and bacon, that’s what they’d had, and they’d done all this surgery just to make a big splash in Love City.

Mingolla tuned the waitress out, watched Debora, and realized that she was watching him. He seemed to connect with her as he had back in San Francisco de Juticlan, to all of a sudden notice her, know her, and for a moment it seemed to him she was looking through younger eyes, seeing the kid he had been. It was such a clean feeling, that startled recognition, it confused Min-golla … and that was also part of the moment, part of the past, because he had long since learned to deny confusion. The moment was gone almost before it had existed, and he knew better than to try to hang on to it. It was simply there on occasion, one of their minor resources. He found it amusing that Izaguirre – in his guise as divinity – had told them the moment would always be a salvation. They hadn’t believed him; what he’d said had sounded too fanciful to be true … though now Mingolla realized that he’d been talking about a matter of basic psychology. He wondered if the fact that Izaguirre had brought it up was evidence that he had planted the idea in them, that he was still manipulating them. Everything remained suspect. But whatever its nature, the moment
did
save Mingolla. He began to listen to the waitress, to like her, to see the good thing she wanted to be, the sweet ineptitude underlying her wishes, and he joined in the conversation, joined with all his heart, putting aside who he was and what he had to do, and they talked on into the gray morning, with dirty clouds piling up like seafoam on the horizon, they spoke of common sorrows and touched each other’s hands, they told lies and believed them, they made a passion of forgetting and they laughed.

Mauve streaked the eastern sky, a couple of truckers came into the diner, leaking cigarette smoke like steam, braying for coffee and steak. The waitress bawled the order out to the kitchen, brought more coffee, and sat back down, still full of stories. But
more customers pushed in through the glass doors, all as gray as the sky with fatigue, itchy with highway dirt, their underwear ridden up into their crotches from hours of sitting, and the waitress had to go back to work. Mingolla and Debora waited, hoping she’d have another break, but she kept getting busier and busier. They walked to the register, stood with money in hand, and at last she slopped steak and eggs in front of another trucker, and rushed up breathless to collect her bill. She told them to drop back, tell her how they’d liked L.C., and she’d sure enjoyed meeting them, wasn’t it funny how you could meet up with some people, perfect strangers, and next thing y’know you’d be like old friends talkin’? They promised to stop by again, tipped her big, and waved so-long. Then they went back to the motel and transferred the automatic rifles to the car …

Confused, wanting to reject what he was beginning to understand, Mingolla went out of the hut and stood taking in the dreary particulars of the village. Sunlight glittered on the thatch, still wet from last night’s rain; the puddles pocking the yellow dirt were leaden like pools of mercury. A man and a chicken passed each other on the street, the Indian heading for the jungle, the chicken toward the riverbank where it would hunt worms in the narrow margin of bright green grass. Mingolla recognized all the elements of the scene, knew their names and functions; yet there was a lack of coherence about it, and he came to realize that this incoherence stemmed not from any inherent wrongness in the village, but from the wrongness of his presence. He glanced back at Debora, who was tending to Amalia. Nothing incoherent about her.

Panama.

He remembered a brochure portrait of white skyscrapers and an aquamarine harbor, with Barrio Clarín somewhere behind, labyrinthine and silent.

It suddenly seemed right that he should go to Panama. More than right. It seemed he had a moral imperative, and studying Debora, he wondered if one side-effect of love was that it gave you a moral peg upon which to hang your fear and turned unacceptable risks into causes. Or maybe his desire to go was fueled by the sense of desolate triumph that had accompanied his vision, maybe
he just needed a victory, any victory, and now believed one could be gained. No, he thought. He didn’t believe that. Despite what he’d seen, he had the feeling that the future was never assured, no matter how clear your view of it.

Debora came out of the hut, shook her head when he asked about Amalia, and they walked toward the bank. The river was high from the rains, and the edge of the bank was mucky; they sat on an overturned canoe, and she began to talk distractedly of her home, her childhood in a wealthy barrio of Guatemala City, where the houses had fountains and walls topped with broken glass. He knew Panama was foremost on her mind, but now that they were lovers, she was less willing to make demands on him, less sure of what she wanted.

He listened to her happily; he didn’t want to dwell on anything serious, and he enjoyed learning about her life. But a source of greater pleasure were the things he himself had told her over the past days, memories he hadn’t believed consequential, but that seemed integral to the person he was becoming with her. The summer he’d spent on his uncle’s farm in Nebraska, for instance. He’d been fascinated by the corn. He’d never thought of it as other than yellow ears dripping with butter, but standing in the midst of a cornfield he’d discovered that the plants were odd creatures with leaves that cut like stiff paper and white roots so powerful that you couldn’t pull them from the soil. And you could hear them grow. The thick end of each leafwhere it met the stalk would emit a soft quacking sound, this sometimes caused by the wind shifting them, but also when there was no wind, no motive force whatsoever. So much green around him, it had made him claustrophobic. And then there was the winter his great-grandmother had died. Cancer. He’d been going on twelve, and he had taken turns with his mother and grandmother caring for her. His father not disposed to such ministrations. Tumors hard in her neck. He’d had to massage her. Her muscles so tight, she’d felt like a rock with just a flicker of life beneath. Teeth grinding, eyelashes growing inside her lids, adding to her hurt. Eyes as hopeless and empty as crossed-out circles. He remembered her good times. Never talking much, order spreading around her in the form of baked goods and surfaces suddenly clean. She’d
married a stunt flier, a guy who’d flown through barns and brought whiskey in from Canada. But she’d remembered none of that, gone inside to nothing. Once he’d stopped massaging her, and her hand had shot out, grabbed him, holding him tightly, and that night he’d dreamed about trying to kill a tiger with a spear. A beautiful young tiger with sleek muscles. It hadn’t moved quickly, but very intelligently, and he’d seen it was trying to show him things as he killed it. Later he’d realized that the tiger’s muscles had the same hardness as the tumors in his great-grandmother’s neck.

The sluggish current carried bits of vegetable debris to nudge and clutter against the bank, and watching them be sucked beneath the murky green chop, Mingolla came to a decision.

‘Debora,’ he said, breaking in. ‘When you wanna start?’

She looked up, uncomprehending.

‘For Panama,’ he said.

Her face remained blank, but after a second a thin smile surfaced and she gave him a hug. It was a weak, sheltering hug, and in concert with the smile it seemed she was accepting him into the arms of her sadness.

‘It’ll take me a few days to get things ready,’ she said, and then, after a pensive silence, she asked why he’d changed his mind.

‘Does it matter?’

‘No, I’m just curious.’

He knew she wanted to hear that it was because of a commitment to truth and justice, or some shit; but he couldn’t lie. ‘Because of you, because I can’t let you go alone.’

She took his hand, toyed with his fingers, and finally, in a little-girl voice, shy and somewhat perplexed, she said, ‘Thank you.’

Two days before they left, Mingolla visited the computer. Though he had rejected it, he at least wanted to acknowledge its existence with a farewell, for it had played a part in his coming to terms with many things. Debora scoffed at the idea, her rationality offended, but she went along to humor him. It was late afternoon when they reached the hollow, and the blades of golden light skewering the chopper were so defined by dust and moisture, they
looked like transmuted chords of music, the sort of light that accumulates above organs and choir stalls in vast cathedrals. The skeleton of the pilot looked gilded and smiling, and the computer’s voice seemed the implementation of a rich silence, of words saved up for centuries.

‘You have my blessing for your journey,’ it said.

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Debora.

‘You’re wrong,’ the computer said. ‘Lovers need blessings. Their rectitude is not enough to counter the loveless process of the world. They must depend on the strength of the moment, and if they do, then they are blessed. Look around you. A machine has become the Host. Light has been transformed into something rarefied. Even death has been transfigured. What you see here is an ordinary beauty made extraordinary by a moment that has outlasted its advent. And that is the best definition of love, the one most pertinent to you in your peril. Your moment lingers. You have hauled yourself up onto it and are living upon it even now. Sooner or later you will be pulled down, but that height is always there for you. Always reachable, always offering salvation. What the heart makes, the mind cannot destroy.’