The Best of Lucius Shepard (30 page)

The scene
was horrid yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a
ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell. You could never paint
it, or if you could the canvas would have to be as large as the scene itself,
and you would have to incorporate the slow boil of the mist, the whirling of
the chopper blades, the drifting smoke. No detail could be omitted. It was the
perfect illustration of the war, of its secret magical splendor, and Mingolla,
too, was an element of the design, the figure of the artist painted in for a
joke or to lend scale and perspective to its vastness, its importance. He knew
that he should report to his station, but he couldn’t turn away from this
glimpse into the heart of the war. He sat down on the hillside, cradling his
sick hand in his lap, and watched as—with the ponderous aplomb of idols
floating to earth, fighting the cross-draft, the wind of their descent whipping
up furies of red dust—the Sikorskys made skillful landings among the dead.

4

Halfway through the telling of his story, Mingolla had
realized that he was not really trying to offend or shock Debora, but rather
was unburdening himself; and he further realized that by telling it he had to
an extent cut loose from the past, weakened its hold on him. For the first time
he felt able to give serious consideration to the idea of desertion. He did not
rush to it, embrace it, but he did acknowledge its logic and understand the
terrible illogic of returning to more assaults, more death, without any magic
to protect him. He made a pact with himself: he would pretend to go along as if
desertion were his intent and see what signs were offered.

When he had
finished, Debora asked whether or not he was over his anger. He was pleased
that she hadn’t tried to offer sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t really
angry at you ... at least that was only part of it.”

“It’s all
right.” She pushed back the dark mass of her hair so that it fell to one side
and looked down at the grass beside her knees. With her head inclined, eyes
half-lidded, the graceful line of her neck and chin like a character in some
exotic script, she seemed a good sign herself. “I don’t know what to talk to
you about,” she said. “The things I feel I have to tell you make you mad, and I
can’t muster any small-talk.”

“I don’t
want to be pushed,” he said. “But believe me, I’m thinking about what you’ve
told me.”

“I won’t
push. But I still don’t know what to talk about.” She plucked a grass blade,
chewed on the tip. He watched her lips purse, wondered how she’d taste. Mouth
sweet in the way of a jar that had once held spices. She tossed the grass blade
aside. “I know,” she said brightly. “Would you like to see where I live?”

“I’d just as
soon not go back to ‘Frisco yet.” Where you live, he thought; I want to touch
where you live.

“It’s not in
town,” she said. “It’s a village downriver.”

“Sounds
good.” He came to his feet, took her arm and helped her up. For an instant they
were close together, her breasts grazing his shirt. Her heat coursed around
him, and he thought if anyone were to see them, they would see two figures
wavering as in a mirage. He had an urge to tell her he loved her. Though most
of what he felt was for the salvation she might provide, part of his feelings
seemed real and that puzzled him, because all she had been to him was a few
hours out of the war, dinner in a cheap restaurant and a walk along the river.
There was no basis for consequential emotion. Before he could say anything, do
anything, she turned and picked up her basket.

“It’s not
far,” she said, walking away. Her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell.

They
followed a track of brown clay overgrown by ferns, overspread by saplings with
pale translucent leaves, and soon came to a grouping of thatched huts at the
mouth of a stream that flowed into the river. Naked children were wading in the
stream, laughing and splashing each other. Their skins were the color of amber,
and their eyes were as wet-looking and purplish-dark as plums. Palms and
acacias loomed above the huts, which were constructed of sapling trunks lashed
together by nylon cord; their thatch had been trimmed to resemble bowl-cut
hair. Flies crawled over strips of meat hung on a clothesline stretched between
two of the huts. Fish heads and chicken droppings littered the ocher ground.
But Mingolla scarcely noticed these signs of poverty, seeing instead a sign of
the peace that might await him in Panama. And another sign was soon
forthcoming. Debora bought a bottle of rum at a tiny store, then led him to the
hut nearest the mouth of the stream and introduced him to a lean, white-haired
old man who was sitting on a bench outside it. Tio Moises. After three drinks
Tio Moises began to tell stories.

The first story
concerned the personal pilot of an ex-president of Panama. The president had
made billions from smuggling cocaine into the States with the help of the CIA,
whom he had assisted on numerous occasions, and was himself an addict in the
last stages of mental deterioration. It had become his sole pleasure to be
flown from city to city in his country, to sit on the landing strips, gaze out
the window and do cocaine. At any hour of night or day, he was likely to call
the pilot and order him to prepare a flight plan to Colon or Bocas del Toro or
Penonome. As the president’s condition worsened, the pilot realized that soon
the CIA would see he was no longer useful and would kill him. And the most
obvious manner of killing him would be by means of an airplane crash. The pilot
did not want to die alongside him. He tried to resign, but the president would
not permit it. He gave thought to mutilating himself, but being a good
Catholic, he could not flout God’s law. If he were to flee, his family would
suffer. His life became a nightmare. Prior to each flight, he would spend hours
searching the plane for evidence of sabotage, and upon each landing, he would
remain in the cockpit, shaking from nervous exhaustion. The president’s
condition grew even worse. He had to be carried aboard the plane and have the
cocaine administered by an aide, while a second aide stood by with cotton swabs
to attend his nosebleeds. Knowing his life could be measured in weeks, the
pilot asked his priest for guidance. “Pray,” the priest advised. The pilot had
been praying all along, so this was no help. Next he went to the commandant of
his military college, and the commandant told him he must do his duty. This,
too, was something the pilot had been doing all along. Finally he went to the
chief of the San Bias Indians, who were his mother’s people. The chief told him
he must accept his fate, which—while not something he had been doing all
along—was hardly encouraging. Nonetheless, he saw it was the only available
path and he did as the chief had counseled. Rather than spending hours in a
pre-flight check, he would arrive minutes before take-off and taxi away without
even inspecting the fuel gauge. His recklessness came to be the talk of the
capitol. Obeying the president’s every whim, he flew in gales and in fogs,
while drunk and drugged, and during those hours in the air, suspended between
the laws of gravity and fate, he gained a new appreciation of life. Once back
on the ground, he engaged in living with a fierce avidity, making passionate
love to his wife, carousing with friends and staying out until dawn. Then one
day as he was preparing to leave for the airport, an American man came to his
house and told him he had been replaced. “If we let the president fly with so
negligent a pilot, we’ll be blamed for anything that happens,” said the
American. The pilot did not have to ask whom he had meant by “we.” Six weeks
later the president’s plane crashed in the Darien Mountains. The pilot was
overjoyed. Panama had been ridded of a villain, and his own life had not been
forfeited. But a week after the crash, after the new president—another smuggler
with CIA connections—had been appointed, the commandant of the air force
summoned the pilot, told him that the crash would never have occurred had he
been on the job, and assigned him to fly the new president’s plane.

All through
the afternoon Mingolla listened and drank, and drunkenness fitted a lens to his
eyes that let him see how these stories applied to him. They were all fables of
irresolution, cautioning him to act, and they detailed the core problems of the
Central American people who—as he was now—were trapped between the poles of
magic and reason, their lives governed by the politics of the ultrareal, their
spirits ruled by myths and legends, with the rectangular computerized bulk of
North America above and the conch-shell-shaped continental mystery of South
America below. He assumed that Debora had orchestrated the types of stories Tio
Moises told, but that did not detract from their potency as signs: they had the
ring of truth, not of something tailored to his needs. Nor did it matter that
his hand was shaking, his vision playing tricks. Those things would pass when
he reached Panama.

Shadows
blurred, insects droned like tambouras, and twilight washed down the sky,
making the air look grainy, the chop on the river appear slower and heavier.
Tio Moises’ granddaughter served plates of roast corn and fish, and Mingolla
stuffed himself. Afterward, when the old man signaled his weariness, Mingolla
and Debora strolled off along the stream. Between two of the huts, mounted on a
pole, was a warped backboard with a netless hoop, and some young men were
shooting baskets. Mingolla joined them. It was hard dribbling on the bumpy
dirt, but he had never played better. The residue of drunkenness fueled his
game, and his jump shots followed perfect arcs down through the hoop. Even at
improbable angles, his shots fell true. He lost himself in flicking out his
hands to make a steal, in feinting and leaping high to snag a rebound,
becoming—as dusk faded—the most adroit of ten arm-waving, jitter-stepping
shadows.

The game
ended and the stars came out, looking like holes punched into fire through a
billow of black silk overhanging the palms. Flickering chutes of lamplight
illuminated the ground in front of the huts, and as Debora and Mingolla walked
among them, he heard a radio tuned to the Armed Forces Network giving a
play-by-play of a baseball game. There was a crack of the bat, the crowd
roared, the announcer cried, “He got it all!” Mingolla imagined the ball
vanishing into the darkness above the stadium, bouncing out into parking-lot
America, lodging under a tire where some kid would find it and think it a
miracle, or rolling across the street to rest under a used car, shimmering
there, secretly white and fuming with home run energies. The score was
three-to-one, top of the second. Mingolla didn’t know who was playing and
didn’t care. Home runs were happening for him, mystical jump shots curved along
predestined tracks. He was at the center of incalculable forces.

One of the
huts was unlit, with two wooden chairs out front, and as they approached, the
sight of it blighted Mingolla’s mood. Something about it bothered him: its air
of preparedness, of being a little stage set. Just paranoia, he thought. The
signs had been good so far, hadn’t they? When they reached the hut, Debora sat
in the chair nearest the door and looked up at him. Starlight pointed her eyes
with brilliance. Behind her, through the doorway, he made out the shadowy
cocoon of a strung hammock, and beneath it, a sack from which part of a wire
cage protruded. “What about your game?” he asked.

“I thought
it was more important to be with you,” she said.

That, too,
bothered him. It was all starting to bother him, and he couldn’t understand
why. The thing in his hand wiggled. He balled the hand into a fist and sat next
to Debora. “What’s going on between you and me?” he asked, nervous. “Is
anything gonna happen? I keep thinking it will, but ... “ He wiped sweat from
his forehead and forgot what he had been driving at.

“I’m not
sure what you mean,” she said.

A shadow
moved across the yellow glare spilling from the hut next door. Rippling,
undulating. Mingolla squeezed his eyes shut.

“If you mean
... romantically,” she said, “I’m confused about that myself. Whether you
return to your base or go to Panama, we don’t seem to have much of a future.
And we certainly don’t have much of a past.”

It boosted
his confidence in her, in the situation, that she didn’t have an assured
answer. But he felt shaky. Very shaky. He gave his head a twitch, fighting off
more ripples. “What’s it like in Panama?”

“I’ve never
been there. Probably a lot like Guatemala, except without the fighting.”

Maybe he
should get up, walk around. Maybe that would help. Or maybe he should just sit
and talk. Talking seemed to steady him. “I bet,” he said, “I bet it’s
beautiful, y’know. Panama. Green mountains, jungle waterfalls. I bet there’s
lots of birds. Macaws and parrots. Millions of ‘em.”

“I suppose
so.”