The Return: A Novel (44 page)

“What did you do?”

“I lay flat on the ground and cried and pissed in my pants. After it was over, I got up and found Skelly. He was bleeding from lots of little wounds and he was concussed, completely out of it. The village was gone, not even ruins, a field of craters, and … well, four, five hundred people—it’s hard to actually dispose of that much human flesh, so there were pieces, gobbets, I guess you could call them, all over where the village had been and on the outskirts where we were. Mostly unidentifiable, like in a butcher’s shop, but also the occasional piece where you could tell what it was despite the dust—a shoulder and part of an arm or a torso with breasts on it or a little kid’s head. Some of it was stuck on Skelly and I picked it off him, bits of people he’d known and loved, courtesy of the USAF. Well, mistakes happen, what can you do?
There it is
, as we all used to say in the war. I kept saying it like a mantra all that first day when I had Skelly on my back and was walking to Vietnam.”

“How far was it?” asked the good reporter. She made no sympathetic comment, for which he was grateful, although he wished he could see her face. Should he light a candle? No, he had to have the dark to tell this.

“A little over twenty-five klicks,” he said after a longish pause. “I was heading for a Special Forces camp I knew they had at Quang Loc. I had a compass but no maps, no radio, of course, no weapons but my sidearm and Skelly’s K submachine gun, a couple of C-rats, and four canteens of water. Also I had to actually walk across the Ho Chi Minh Trail and find my way through thousands of active PAVN and Vietcong.”

“And you survived, obviously. The two of you survived.”

“Our bodies survived,” he corrected. “Even that was ridiculous, when you think about it. I was in pretty good shape and I’m big enough, but I certainly wasn’t a SOG elite soldier, and Skelly was in and out of consciousness. The route led straight through a dozen miles of thick rain forest. I couldn’t use the trails and I had to pick the steepest routes, because those were where I had the best chance of avoiding patrols.” He stopped.

“Go on,” she said.

“I can’t,” he replied. “I’m starting to sweat and I’m getting nauseous. I think this was a mistake. The only thing I can think about now is getting away from here and finding a small white room and spending the rest of my life in it, never talking to anyone.”

“Yes, but you’re here now and you can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have a firm grip on your sexual organ.”

He laughed, and his tension faded a little. “Yes, the classic barrier to male flight. Okay, think of the hardest thing you ever did—physically, I mean—and up it by a factor of ten. After the first day, I was wiped and we’d made it maybe two klicks. It was like walking through sheets of drywall; every foot of vines and bushes and bamboo had to be hacked through with Skelly’s Ka-Bar knife. I’d dump him on the ground and make a five-meter tunnel and then go back and pick him up and lay him down and take a drink of water and start hacking again. And it wasn’t even hacking, really, because I couldn’t make any noise; I was terrified of being found and shut up in a little cage. I had to slowly slice through every fucking branch. At the end of the second day I sat down to die. It is simply a technically impossible feat to cut your way through twenty-five kilometers of triple-canopy highland Asian forest with a knife, while carrying an unconscious man, on essentially no food or water.”

“But you did it.”

He swallowed several times and willed calm upon his heaving belly. “No, that’s just the point. I didn’t do it. I had supernatural help.”

“What! You’re saying
God
made a miraculous tunnel through the forest?”

“More or less. I was lying there waiting to die, with my nose and mouth covered in insects, bitten all to hell, and I heard a voice in my head that wasn’t me. If this has never happened to you, it’s impossible to convey the reality of it, but there it was, as real as your voice coming to me in this dark room.”

“So you’re saying that God, after letting however many millions of people die in that miserable war, just decided that Richard Marder and Patrick Skelly were indispensable in his great scheme of things?”

“Yeah, I am. I’m sorry if it doesn’t make journalistic sense, but that’s how it was. Anyway, I got up and started to cut again, and somehow it was easier. It was like I was out of my exhausted body; I could see the patterns of the vines and shit blocking our way, and I found myself passing through them with the bare minimum of effort. I felt like I wasn’t alone there in my tunnel—there were
beings
in there with me. And when we got to the bottoms, I just knew when and where to cross the streams. And the roads. I actually crossed branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Patrols and convoys went by us and no one ever saw us. The voice told me when to move and when to stay still. After that we only moved at night, and I was guided through the night too. I didn’t step on a mine, or fall off a dike, and again no one saw us. It must have taken us a week. And then I was sleeping, or not really sleeping but in a deeper trance. I have a sense of what I was seeing in the trance, but I don’t have words to describe it, only this being supported by
powers
.

“And then I felt that they were leaving me and I cried out, like don’t leave, don’t leave me! It turned out I was actually yelling, because I woke to find a hand across my mouth. It was Skelly. He’d come to sometime in the night, and he was the old Skelly again. He asked me where we were and I said I thought we were about two klicks southeast of route 14 and if we hit the road where I thought we would, we’d be less than five klicks south of Quang Loc. He just nodded like this was a routine report. He told me I looked like shit and that he’d get me back alive, and not to worry. And it was like he’d been in charge and he’d been carrying
me
all that way. I was so glad not to be responsible anymore that I just fell into it and that was the story we told when we ran into a patrol out of the Special Forces base later that day. He got a Silver Star for that, by that way.”

“And you never told him the truth.”

“What, that angels had guided me through the jungle? No, as a matter of fact I didn’t mention that part, because everyone in the army knew for a fact that if a SOG operative and an air force puke had to get out of a situation, it’d be the SOG guy who led the way, eating snakes and being the total warrior that he was. And so I left it at that and later … it’s hard to explain, I sort of sank into passivity. My dad got me a job with his sister in the restaurant she owned up by Columbia, and I fell into a marriage with a girl I liked well enough but didn’t really love, and so life went on, until one day I woke up and there was a voice telling me, go to Mexico. Which I did, and I met Chole and had that life. It was Chole who made me go back to school. I got a degree from General Studies at Columbia and went to work in a big publishing house and worked my way up through the editorial ranks.”

“Until she killed herself, and what then? Another voice telling you to come to Mexico?”

“Something like that. Now you know all.”

“Not quite all, I think.”

“No, not quite,” he agreed.

“Well, maybe you’ll tell me another time. If there’s another time. Do you think they’ll come? I mean in force.”

“I expect so, as early as the day after tomorrow, in fact. You really should get out while you can.”

“No, I’ll stay, if you don’t mind. I’m tired of being a pretty face reading the news. I had to fuck a Mexican to get this pissy little assignment doing commentary on gang murders. After this story breaks, as you keep telling me, I’ll be a made woman, an actual reporter, like Christiane Amanpour or Alex Crawford. War impresses people—risking life, hearing the bullets fly.”

“And won’t have to fuck any more Mexicans ever.”

A giggle in the dark. “No, I just said that to annoy you. I didn’t really have to, but I had to crawl, which was even worse, if you want to know. But we could die. I mean if Cuello gets his hands on me, it’s over, and not in a pleasant way.”

“Because you shoot video and talk about his murders?”

“No, because of El Cochinillo, his kid. You don’t know this story? Okay, El Cochinillo, it turns out, once demanded a bride, a girl who’d won a local beauty contest. Nothing like our Lourdes, but young, pretty, and sweet, and El Cochinillo went to the father and said the wedding would take place on such and such a day, and what could the guy do? And so it took place, a huge affair, gangsters and politicians from all over. Unfortunately, the girl hanged herself on her wedding night, still a virgin. One has to wonder about the foreplay.”

“That was the story?”

“No. The story was that when El Cochinillo found her hanging there, he was so enraged that he fucked the corpse. And he got a taste for it. Girls have disappeared off the streets. We think he—”

“Yes, I get it,” said Marder. “But if I jump on you now, will you stop talking about murder, evil, and depravity?”

“Yes, I will,” she said.

18

Hungover and afflicted by uncertainty about what had occurred on the previous night, Marder lolled miserably in the shotgun seat of Father Santana’s venerable VW Kombi, as the van rolled from the causeway out onto the beach road, its destination the private cemetery at the former d’Ariés estate, Las Palmas Floridas, at La Huacana, up north in the
tierra caliente.
Marder was going to inter the ashes of his wife, which now rested in a ceramic urn on his lap. The car carried an uncomfortable company, all unresponsive to the priest’s cheerful morning chatter. In the back, Carmel Marder and Pepa Espinoza sat at opposite ends of the seat, both of them frowsy, glum, and silent.

They were probably hungover too, Marder thought, as he tried to make sense of the memories of the previous night. How much had been fantasy and how much real? His body told him that he had engaged in a sexual extravaganza, but he had awakened in his own bed, and La Espinoza had not with either word or look this morning given him the impression that there was any change in their relationship beyond that of reporter and subject. Statch had been a little cool this morning too, and Amparo had been all formality as she dished out breakfast, calling him El Señor, as in, Would El Señor like some more coffee?

Perhaps it was the occasion; perhaps there was a social taboo in Mexico against screwing one’s brains out on the eve of burying one’s wife, even though one’s wife was three years dead and one hadn’t had any sex at all in the period. Marder wished that he had garnered more of his late wife’s confrontational style. Had her ashes retained the power of speech, there would had been a barrage of
“Qué pasas?”
rattling around the bus, the reasons for the glumness would have been wormed out of each unwilling heart, advice would have been dispensed, tears shed, guts wrenched, shoulders dampened, and hearts eased.

At the occasion during which that woman had actually become the present ashes, Marder had impressed or dismayed his loved ones by his stoicism—not a sob from Marder at the crowded funeral service, not even when the casket had rolled through the curtain to the flames. The kids had been howling and clutching each other, but not Marder. Now he felt something collapsing inside him; his hands trembled around the urn, he found it hard to speak. He wondered if this was it: he would fall into fragments and Mr. Thing would pop and perhaps they could just leave him there at the cemetery with her, perhaps this was yet another of God’s happy jests.

He looked over his shoulder. Pepa had her eyes closed, her head jammed in the corner between the top of the bench seat and the van body. She had put together a funeral outfit—black skirt and a matching jacket over a bloodred shirt. Carmel was wearing loose dark trousers and one of her many safari shirts, this one charcoal, untucked, and on top of that was a garment that for Marder had no name but resembled a kind of duster. It came down to her knees and had a very large number of buttons. He thought she looked good in it, but Marder thought she looked good in everything, so his opinion did not count. He caught her eye, and she smiled wanly at him before also closing her eyes and assuming the position that Pepa was in, on the opposite side of the seat.

The car stopped in front of the Cangrejo Rojo cantina. This was part of the escape plan, for Lourdes could not be seen leaving the
casa
with the funeral party. Instead, Amparo had taken her in the back of her old pickup truck, concealed under a tarp, and dropped her at the cantina on the way to Mass. Now the girl came bubbling from the door of the cantina and into the car, carrying a huge wreath of Mexican marigolds. Instantly the mood of the passengers lifted. Lourdes was happy, and therefore the world had to be happy, and her talent was such that the world could not but comply. Nearly against his will, Marder found himself smiling; one would have had to be a corpse not to bask in the radiance of her delight. Marder thanked her for the flowers, feeling irritated at himself for forgetting to buy any. Her smile flashed out as she gave him the
de nada
.

The noise of the old VW prevented Marder from following the conversation among the three in the rear seat. The priest was saying that he hoped there was not going to be much traffic on 37 north or in the city of Lázaro Cárdenas, because he had to get back for a special Mass at five-thirty. Roads were often crowded on the second Day of the Dead, as families visited their deceased members in various cemeteries and went to the favorite shrines. Besides that, El Día was a prime time for religious visions and there would be a line of people at the rectory this evening, all claiming to have seen wonders and miracles.

Marder had been letting the priest’s chatter wash over him, like the noise of the tires and the wind, but this remark caught his attention. “That’s interesting,” he said. “How do you tell if they’re real?”

“You mean visions?”

“Yes, like a sense of God or angels directing you, telling you things. I mean, lots of people hear voices, and generally we lock them up and medicate their heads for them. But obviously the Church believes that kind of thing is not all craziness, no?”