Life During Wartime (45 page)

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.’