Life During Wartime (6 page)

Finally Gilbey had had enough. ‘I’m gonna hang out with Big Tits,’ he said. ‘Meetcha at the PX tomorrow.’ He started to walk off, but turned and added, ‘You wanna get in touch ’fore tomorrow, I’ll be at the Club Demonio.’ He had an odd expression on his face. It was as if he was trying to smile reassuringly, but – due to his lack of practice – it looked forced and foolish and not in the least reassuring.

Around eleven o’clock Mingolla wound up leaning against a pink stucco wall, watching out for Baylor in the thickening crowds. Beside him, the sun-browned fronds of a banana tree were feathering in the wind, making a crispy sound whenever a gust blew them back into the wall. The roof of the bar across the street was being repaired: sheets of new tin alternating with narrow patches of rust that looked like enormous strips of bacon laid there to fry. Now and then he would let his gaze drift up to the unfinished bridge, a great sweep of magical whiteness curving into the blue, rising above the town and the jungle and the war. Not even the heat haze rippling from the tin roof could warp its smoothness. It seemed to be orchestrating the stench, the mutter of the crowds, and the jukebox music into a tranquil unity, absorbing those energies and returning them purified, enriched. He thought that if he stared at it long enough, it would speak to him, pronounce a white word that would grant his wishes.

Two flat cracks – pistol shots – sent him stumbling away from the wall, his heart racing. Inside his head the shots had spoken the two syllables of Baylor’s name. All the kids and beggars had vanished. All the soldiers had stopped and turned to face the direction from which the shots had come: zombies who had heard their master’s voice.

Another shot.

Some soldiers milled out of a side street, talking excitedly. … Fuckin’ nuts!’ one was saying, and his buddy said, ‘It was Sammy, man! You see his eyes?’

Mingolla pushed his way through them and sprinted down the side street. At the end of the block a cordon of MPs had sealed off access to the right-hand turn, and when Mingolla ran up, one of them told him to stay back.

‘What is it?’ Mingolla asked. ‘Some guy playing Sammy?’

‘Fuck off,’ the MP said mildly.

‘Listen,’ said Mingolla. ‘It might be this friend of mine. Tall, skinny guy. Black hair. Maybe I can talk to him.’

The MP exchanged glances with his buddies, who shrugged and acted otherwise unconcerned. ‘Okay,’ he said. He pulled Mingolla to him and pointed out a bar with turquoise walls on the next corner down. Go on in there and talk to the captain.’

Two more shots, then a third.

‘Better hurry,’ said the MP. ‘Ol’ Captain Haynesworth there, he don’t put much stock in negotiations.’

It was cool and dark inside the bar; two shadowy figures were flattened against the wall beside a window that opened onto the cross street. Mingolla could make out the glint of automatic pistols in their hands. Then, through the window, he saw Baylor pop up from behind a retaining wall: a three-foot-high structure of mud bricks running between an herbal-drug store and another bar. Baylor was shirtless, his chest painted with reddish brown smears of dried blood, and he was standing in a nonchalant pose, with his thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets. One of the men by the window fired at him. The report was deafening, causing Mingolla to flinch and close his eyes. When he looked out the window again, Baylor was nowhere in sight.

‘Fucker’s just tryin’ to draw fire,’ said the man who had shot at Baylor. ‘Sammy’s fast today.’

‘Yeah, but he’s slowin’ some,’ said a lazy voice from the darkness at the rear of the bar. I do believe he’s outta dope.’

‘Hey,’ said Mingolla. ‘Don’t kill him! I know the guy. I can talk to him.’

‘Talk?’ said the lazy voice. ‘You kin talk till yo’ ass turns green, boy, and Sammy ain’t gon’ listen.’

Mingolla peered into the shadows. A big sloppy-looking man was leaning on the counter; brass insignia gleamed on his beret. ‘You the captain?’ he asked. ‘They told me outside to talk to the captain.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said the man. ‘And I’d be purely delighted to talk with you, boy. What you wanna talk ’bout?’

The other men laughed.

‘Why are you trying to kill him?’ asked Mingolla, hearing the pitch of desperation in his voice. ‘You don’t have to kill him. You could use a trank gun.’

‘Got one comin’,’ said the captain. ‘Thing is, though, yo’ buddy got hisself a coupla hostages back of that wall, and we get a chance at him ’fore the trank gun ’rives, we bound to take it.’

‘But—’ Mingolla began.

‘Lemme finish, boy.’ The captain hitched up his gunbelt, strolled over, and draped an arm around Mingolla’s shoulder, enveloping him in an aura of body odor and whiskey breath. See,’ he went on, we had everything under control. Sammy there …’

‘Baylor!’ said Mingolla angrily. ‘His name’s Baylor.’

The captain lifted his arm from Mingolla’s shoulder and looked at him with amusement. Even in the gloom Mingolla could see the network of broken capillaries on his cheeks, the bloated alcoholic features. ‘Right,’ said the captain. ‘Like I’s sayin’, yo’ good buddy Mister Baylor there wasn’t doin’ no harm. Just sorta ravin’ and runnin’ ’round. But then ’long comes a coupla our Marine brothers. Seems like they’d been givin’ our beaner friends a demonstration of the latest combat gear, and they was headin’ back from said demonstration when they seen our little problem and took it ’pon themselves to play hero. Wellsir, puttin’ it in a nutshell, Mister Baylor flat kicked their ass. Stomped all over their esprit de corps. Then he drags ’em back of that wall and starts messin’ with one of their guns. And—’

Two more shots.

‘Shit!’ said one of the men by the window.

‘And there he sits,’ said the captain. ‘Fuckin’ with us. Now either the gun’s outta ammo or else he ain’t figgered out how it works. If it’s the latter case, and he does figger it out …’ The
captain shook his head dolefully, as if picturing dire consequences. See my predicament?’

‘I could try talking to him,’ said Mingolla. ‘What harm would it do?’

‘You get yourself killed, it’s your life, boy. But it’s my ass that’s gonna get hauled up on charges.’ The captain steered Mingolla to the door and gave him a gentle shove toward the cordon of MPs. ‘’Preciate you volunteerin’, boy.’

Later Mingolla was to reflect that what he had done made no sense, because – whether or not Baylor had survived – he would never have been returned to the Ant Farm. But at the time, desperate to preserve the ritual, none of this occurred to him. He walked around the corner and toward the retaining wall. His mouth was dry, his heart pounded. But the shaking in his hand had stopped, and he had the presence of mind to walk in such a way that he blocked the MPs’ line of fire. About twenty feet from the wall he called out, ‘Hey, Baylor! It’s Mingolla, man!’ And as if propelled by a spring, Baylor jumped up, staring at him. It was an awful stare. His eyes were like bull’s-eyes, white showing all around the irises; trickles of blood ran from his nostrils, and nerves were twitching in his cheeks with the regularity of watch-works. The dried blood on his chest came from three long gouges; they were partially scabbed over but were oozing a clear fluid. For a moment he remained motionless. Then he reached down behind the wall, picked up a double-barreled rifle from whose stock trailed a length of flexible tubing, and brought it to bear on Mingolla.

He squeezed the trigger.

No flame, no explosion. Not even a click. But Mingolla felt that he’d been dipped in ice water. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘Baylor! It’s me!’ Baylor squeezed the trigger again, with the same result. An expression of intense frustration washed over his face, then lapsed into that dead man’s stare. He looked directly up into the sun, and after a few seconds he smiled: he might have been receiving terrific news from on high.

Mingolla’s senses had become wonderfully acute. Somewhere far away a radio was playing a country-and-western tune, and with its plaintiveness, its intermittent bursts of static, it seemed to
him the whining of a nervous system on the blink. He could hear the MPs talking in the bar, could smell the sour acids of Baylor’s madness, and he thought he could feel the pulse of Baylor’s rage, an inconstant flow of heat eddying around him, intensifying his fear, rooting him to the spot. Baylor laid the gun down, laid it down with the tenderness he might have shown toward a sick child, and stepped over the retaining wall. The animal fluidity of the movements made Mingolla’s skin crawl. He managed to shuffle backward a pace and held up his hands to ward Baylor off. ‘C’mon, man,’ he said weakly. Baylor let out a fuming noise – part hiss, part whimper – and a runner of saliva slid between his lips. The sun was a golden bath drenching the street, kindling glints and shimmers from every bright surface, as if it were bringing reality to a boil.

Somebody yelled, ‘Get down, boy!’

Then Baylor flew at him, and they fell together, rolling on the hard-packed dirt. Fingers dug in behind his Adam’s apple. He twisted away, saw Baylor grinning down, all staring eyes and yellowed teeth. Strings of drool flapping from his chin. A Halloween face. Knees pinned Mingolla’s shoulders, hands gripped his hair and bashed his head against the ground. Again, and again. A keening sound switched on inside his ears. He wrenched an arm free and tried to gouge Baylor’s eyes; but Baylor bit his thumb, gnawing at the joint. Mingolla’s vision dimmed, and he couldn’t hear anything anymore. The back of his head felt mushy. It seemed to be rebounding very slowly from the dirt, higher and slower after each impact. Framed by blue sky, Baylor’s face looked to be receding, spiraling off. And then, just as Mingolla began to fade, Baylor disappeared.

Dust was in Mingolla’s mouth, his nostrils. He heard shouts, grunts. Still dazed, he propped himself onto an elbow. A short way off, khaki arms and legs and butts were thrashing around in a cloud of dust. Like a comic-strip fight. You expected asterisks and exclamation points overhead to signify profanity. Somebody grabbed his arm, hauled him upright. The MP captain, his beefy face flushed. He frowned reprovingly as he brushed dirt from Mingolla’s clothes. ‘Real gutsy, boy,’ he said. ‘And real, real stupid. He hadn’t been at the end of his run, you’d be drawin’
flies ’bout now.’ He turned to a sergeant standing nearby. ‘How stupid you reckon that was, Phil?’

The sergeant said that it beat him.

‘Well,’ the captain said, ‘I figger if the boy here was in combat, that’d be ’bout Bronze Star stupid.’

That, allowed the sergeant, was pretty goddamn stupid.

‘ ’Course here in Frisco’ – the captain gave Mingolla a final dusting – ‘it don’t get you diddley-shit.’

The MPs were piling off Baylor, who lay on his side, bleeding from his nose and mouth. Blood as thick as gravy filmed over his cheeks.

‘Panama,’ said Mingolla dully. Maybe it was an option. He saw how it would be … a night beach, palm shadows a lacework on the white sand.

‘What say?’ asked the captain.

‘He wanted to go to Panama,’ said Mingolla.

‘Don’t we all,’ said the captain.

One of the MPs rolled Baylor onto his stomach and handcuffed him; another manacled his feet. Then they rolled him back over. Yellow dirt had mired with the blood on his cheeks and forehead, hitting him with a blotchy mask. His eyes snapped open in the middle of that mask, widening when he felt the restraints. He started to hump up and down, trying to bounce his way to freedom. He kept on humping for almost a minute; then he went rigid and – his gone eyes fixed on the molten disc of the sun – he let out a roar. That was the only word for it. It wasn’t a scream or a shout, but a devil’s exultant roar, so loud and full of fury it seemed to be generating all the blazing light-and-heat dance. Listening to it had a seductive effect, and Mingolla began to get behind it, to feel it in his body like a good rock ’n’ roll tune, to sympathize with its life-hating exuberance.

‘Whoo-ee!’ said the captain, marveling. ‘They gon’ have to build a whole new zoo for that boy.’

After giving his statement and letting a corpsman check his head, Mingolla caught the ferry to meet Debora on the east bank. He sat in the stern, gazing out at the unfinished bridge, this time unable to derive from it any sense of hope or magic. Panama kept
cropping up in this thoughts. Now that Baylor was gone, was it really an option? He knew he should try to figure things out, plan what to do, but he couldn’t stop seeing Baylor’s bloody, demented face. He’d seen worse, Christ yes, a whole lot worse, guys reduced to spare parts, so little of them left that they didn’t need a shiny silver coffin, just a black metal can the size of a cookie jar. Guys scorched and one-eyed and bloody, clawing blindly at the air like creatures out of a monster movie, but the idea of Baylor trapped forever in some raw, red place inside his brain, in the heart of that raw, red noise he’d made, maybe that idea was worse than anything Mingolla had seen. He didn’t want to die; he rejected the prospect with the impassioned stubbornness a child displays when confronted with a hard truth. Yet he would rather die than endure madness. Compared to what Baylor had in store, death and Panama seemed to offer the same peaceful sweetness.

Someone sat down beside Mingolla: a kid who couldn’t have been older than eighteen. A new kid with a new haircut, new boots, new fatigues. Even his face looked new, freshly broken from the mold. Shiny, pudgy cheeks; clear skin; bright, unused blue eyes. He was eager to talk. He asked Mingolla about his home, his family, and said, ‘Oh, wow, it must be great living in New York, wow.’ But he appeared to have some other reason for initiating the conversation, something he was leading up to, and finally he spat it out.