Life During Wartime (54 page)

Jack hummed, broke off, then rocked back and forth, smacking a hand against his thigh as if trying to recapture a rhythm. ‘Wish I had a billion dollars,’ he sang. ‘I’d buy myself …’ He made a fist, pressed it to his head. ‘I got a little of it,’ he said. ‘Little bit.’

‘Let’s hear ’er. Jack,’ said Gilbey.

Jack, a stressed look on his face, sang out again.

‘Wish I had a billion dollars, I’d buy myself an armory.

I’d deploy my men, get high and then I’d fuck with history.

I’d build a palace out of skulls, eat steak, screw beauty queens.

And every other week I’d go on nationwide TV,

and make a speech entitled ‘That’s What America Means To Me …’ ”

He faltered, appearing worried. ‘There’s more. I … I can’t get it.’

‘Take your time, man,’ said Mingolla.

After a minute, Jack sang some more.

‘Wish I had my own religion, I’d be a brand new kind of god. I’d burn down all the churches and give Las Vegas to the poor …’

Again he faltered, and Mingolla boosted his good feeling, started him singing a third time, but singing a different song, softer, almost chanted.

‘Angel, angel, are you receiving,

won’t you try to answer me?

Has my signal grown weaker than moonlight,

does this transmission convey my grief?

We are lost in wars and silence,

dark November colors all our lives,

strangers pass by without speaking

of the important sadness in their eyes.

Many of us have taken refuge in religion or in lies,

But I know we can’t last much longer

without the truth that only you supply.

Angel, angel, it’s getting darker,

the wind is bringing shocks and flowers,

and black ice forms beneath my nails.

I never meant my heart to matter,

especially to a girl like you,

I swear I’ll fix all that I’ve broken

if you’ll only answer me.

Angel, angel, are you in Heaven,

or are you in prison, longing to be free,

huddled for warmth, afraid of breathing,

too weak to press the transmit key …’

‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘Lots more.’

‘Y’should write it down, man,’ said Gilbey, pretending to write with the point of his machete. ‘Get some paper, and write it down.’

‘Yeah, okay,’ said Jack, scratching his head, and then burst into tears.

Mingolla put far more effort into Gilbey. Once, thinking a sexual experience might enhance his work, he dug up a woman for him, primed her with horniness, and staked her out in one of the empty buildings, a room with depressions in carpets of gray dust that testified to the long-ago presence of chairs and tables. The woman was pudgy, worn-looking, and Gilbey said, She’s a fuckin’ beast, man. I dunno ’bout this.’

The woman smiled and jerked her hips in invitation.

‘Well,’ said Gilbey. ‘I guess she got okay tits.’

Mingolla left them alone, and when he returned he found them both asleep, Gilbey’s hand resting in proprietary fashion on her hip. He wasn’t sure anything had happened, but afterward Gilbey did seem more his old self.

That same evening they walked out behind the palace, a spot from which they could see the barricade: a long flimsy wall of planks nailed into a gapped barrier ten feet high, with two guardhouses of equally crude construction behind it. Like kid’s clubhouses. A dirt road led across a grassy meadow from the barricade toward green hills in the distance, and Mingolla imagined stealing a jeep, ramming through the wall, and heading up into those hills. It was a pleasant fantasy, but he knew Debora would never go along with it. And anyway, it was likely they’d be killed in the process.

Jack curled up in the dust, and Mingolla and Gilbey sat on the rear steps of the palace. Mingolla could make out riflemen pacing behind the barricade. Twilight had thickened to dusk, and a scatter of stars picked out the slate-colored sky. The windows of the buildings set away from the palace showed black and unreflective,
rectangles of obsidian set into palely glowing stone; the breeze drifted scraps of cellophane along the asphalt, and a scrawny cat with scabs dotting its marmalade coat came prowling past and stopped to regard them with cold curiosity.

Gilbey had stumbled across a splintered baseball bat, one that had probably been used as a weapon, and he was turning it in his hands. ‘Be neat, y’know,’ he said.

‘What?’ Mingolla was watching the shadowy figures of the riflemen.

Gilbey was silent for such a long time that Mingolla wondered if he had lost his train of thought. Get up a game,’ he said at last. ‘Be neat to get up a game. Think we could.’

‘A baseball game?’

‘Yeah, we could get some guys.’ He stared at the bat, gave it a tentative swing.

The idea of Gilbey with his dulled reflexes playing baseball depressed Mingolla. He pictured the ratty blond hair sheared away, the grime washed from the cheeks, the expression firmed into one of sour indulgence. But it didn’t work. The old Gilbey was dead, and the new Gilbey was moribund.

‘We could, uh … we could …’ Gilbey waggled the bat. ‘What’s wrong with me, man? Somethin’s fucked-up wrong, ain’t it?’

‘How ya figure?’

‘With me … wrong with me. And you’re tryin’ to fix it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla. ‘Somethin’s wrong.’

‘Can ya fix it?’

Mingolla didn’t feel like lying. ‘I don’t think so.’

Jack stirred in a dream, muttered, and Gilbey let out a thready sigh. ‘I couldn’t play too good, anyhow,’ he said, the words coming slowly, one at a time, like dollops of thick syrup. ‘Be okay to try, though. I could maybe play right field. Nobody ever hits one out there.’ He tapped the head of the bat against the asphalt. ‘Be okay, y’know. Right field’s not so bad … y’can see a lot from right field.’

Mingolla drew up his knees, rested his forehead on them, and closed his eyes, wishing he could shut himself down.

‘I used to play second … Babe Ruth League. That’s a tough
league, man. ’Specially in Detroit. Them niggers come in all spikes and bad grins to second base, y’know.’ He put the bat on his shoulder, setting himself for an imaginary pitch. ‘Jack’s worse off than me, huh?’

‘He’s not so hot.’

‘He could just watch, then … or sleep. He likes sleepin’.’

What would really be neat, Mingolla thought, would be to take a gun and line up the Madradonas and Sotomayors in a row. Shoot them from the legs up, kill them a piece at a time. Or trigger whatever attack Izaguirre had planned in case the talks failed: Mingolla realized he had been hoping the talks would fail, that they would glance up one day at the whistle of an incoming rocket.

‘I could probably still hit a little,’ said Gilbey.

‘Let’s talk about it later, okay?’ said Mingolla. His heart felt lumpy, made of something disgusting and oily like lard.

‘Sure, it’s awright. Sure.’

The stars had brightened, the sky gone cobalt. Somebody at the barricade switched on a spotlight; a shining sword of light dazzled the windows of the empty buildings, swung above their heads.

‘Mingolla?’

‘Whatcha need?’

‘Member Baylor? What happened to Baylor?’

‘He went Stateside.’

‘Stateside.’ Gilbey said the word several times as if by repetition he could comprehend it. ‘’Member all them books he used to read? That science stuff?’

‘Science fiction.’

‘Yeah, science fiction.’ He appeared to be considering the term. ‘They was dumb, y’know, them books.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘ ’Cept for one. I read this one was pretty good.’

The spotlight swept back over them; the cat scampered for cover, and Jack rolled onto his side away from the glare.

‘Yeah, there was this one,’ Gilbey said. ‘I got into it.’

‘Which one’s that?’

‘It’s ’bout this alien. There’s only one of ’em … I mean there’s more’n one of ’em somewhere, maybe, but far as we know there’s
only this one we found. And it don’t look like much. Kinda looks like this big brown rock, ’cept the surface of the rock is alla time movin’, shiftin’, and that’s cause it’s so fulla thoughts, the thoughts is pushin’ against its skin, y’know, makin’ it change shape a little.’

Out of boredom Mingolla had read most of Baylor’s books, and this one didn’t sound familiar. ‘So what happens?’

‘Nothin’ much,’ said Gilbey. ‘See, the thing is they wanna find out what the alien’s thinkin’, ’cause they found him driftin’ ’round out in space, and they figure he’s been ’bout everywhere, and they wanna see what it’s like where he’s been. So they look for somebody who can read his thoughts, but nobody can ’cause his thoughts are sharp, man! They hurt. It makes ya scream to feel his thoughts. But, anyway …’

Gilbey faded, and Mingolla rekindled him.

‘So did they find somebody?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Huh?’

‘Somebody to read the alien’s thoughts.’

‘Oh, yeah … yeah, they found this one guy who could stand the pain. And so he squats down beside the alien, touches him, y’know, and soon he realizes the alien’s thoughts ain’t nothin’ but memories shiftin’ ’round under his skin. Memories of every place in the universe, every place that ever was. This guy, now, he’s tough, but even so, man, he can’t take it for very long, and he can only stick with the alien a coupla minutes, long ’nough to get this one memory. After that he can’t deal with the alien no more, ’cause his … his … his tolerance, that’s it, his tolerance is all wore out. But he’s got this one memory, and that’s pretty good.’

‘What was it … the memory?’

‘It’s ’bout these people that live out on the edge of the galaxy, and when they die their bodies is stored on these big black ships that float ’round out in space, and once every while a captain comes on board each of the ships and starts flyin’ ’em toward the center of the universe, to this place where the stars is so thick there’s light all over. Big ol’ suns, man! Burnin’ every color, fuzzylookin’ like Japanese lanterns. The light from ’em kinda overlaps, y’know. Makes prisms and all. Energy’s flowin’ from everywhere. And the alien ain’t clear why this happens, why the bodies is shipped there. It ain’t ’cause alla energy and light gets ’em reborn
or nothin’. It just does somethin’ to the bodies, maybe changes them into somethin’ that gets used again or somethin’ … I dunno. But whatever, it’s a hard trip. Real hard. Mostly it’s hard ’cause it’s so bright, and the closer ya get to the center, the brighter it is. And it’s slow … the light slows things down. It’s so bright, it’s almost solid, the air out there, y’know. And the captains, as the voyage goes along, the less they see. They goin’ blind from the light. Their eyes get like crystals, hard and shiny and bustedlooking. And if they was by themselves, they wouldn’t be able to steer. But each of ’em’s gotta woman ’long with ’em, and as they come closer and closer to the center of the universe, the women they’re gettin’ more ’n’ more beautiful. And the captains, they so tight with these women, they love ‘em so much, it don’t matter none they blind, they can still see the women. The women they so beautiful, blind men can see ’em, and that’s how they steer, by keepin’ their eyes on the women, by watchin’ how beautiful they get, and what way they beautiful, and from that they can always tell where they are, what part of the center they travelin’ through. And in the end that’s how they come safe back to home.’

Mingolla had been trying to recall the book, but when the story broke off at this inconclusive point, he realized it must have been something of Gilbey’s own invention. It pleased him that his work with Gilbey had unearthed the story, for it substantiated his belief that Gilbey had always been hiding his intellect; but he was also saddened, because he had the feeling that the story was a core myth, a jewel Gilbey had been hoarding, and his having yielded it up now seemed a bad sign.

‘You made that up, didn’tcha, man?’ he said.

‘Naw, uh-uh.’ Gilbey ran a hand along the cylinder of the baseball bat. I read it somewheres.’

But in his face was sly delight, and Mingolla knew he was lying. ‘C’mon, man! You musta made that up.’