The Best of Lucius Shepard (32 page)

A whisper
drew him back from the edge of the world. At first he thought it had been his
imagination, and he continued staring at the sky, which had lightened to the
vivid blue of pre-dawn. Then he heard it again and glanced behind him. Strung
out across the bridge, about twenty feet away, were a dozen or so children.
Some standing, some crouched. Most were clad in rags, a few wore coverings of
vines and leaves, and others were naked. Watchful; silent. Knives glinted in
their hands. They were all emaciated, their hair long and matted, and Mingolla,
recalling the dead children he had seen that morning, was for a moment afraid.
But only for a moment. Fear flared in him like a coal puffed to life by a
breeze and died an instant later, suppressed not by any rational accommodation
but by a perception of those ragged figures as an opportunity for surrender. He
wasn’t eager to die, yet neither did he want to put forth more effort in the
cause of survival. Survival, he had learned, was not the soul’s ultimate
priority. He kept staring at the children. The way they were posed reminded him
of a Neanderthal grouping in the Museum of Natural History. The moon was still
up, and they cast vaguely defined shadows like smudges of graphite. Finally
Mingolla turned away; the horizon was showing a distinct line of green
darkness.

He had
expected to be stabbed or pushed, to pinwheel down and break against the Rio
Duke, its waters gone a steely color beneath the brightening sky. But instead a
voice spoke in his ear: “Hey, macho.” Squatting beside him was a boy of
fourteen or fifteen, with a swarthy monkeylike face framed by tangles of
shoulder-length dark hair. Wearing tattered shorts. Coiled serpent tattooed on
his brow. He tipped his head to one side, then the other. Perplexed. He might
have been trying to see the true Mingolla through layers of false appearance.
He made a growly noise in his throat and held up a knife, twisting it this way
and that, letting Mingolla observe its keen edge, how it channeled the
moonlight along its blade. An army-issue survival knife with a brass-knuckle
grip. Mingolla gave an amused sniff.

The boy
seemed alarmed by this reaction; he lowered the knife and shifted away. “What
you doing here, man?” he asked.

A number of
answers occurred to Mingolla, most demanding too much energy to voice; he chose
the simplest. “I like it here. I like the bridge.”

The boy
squinted at Mingolla. “The bridge is magic,” he said. “You know this?”

“There was a
time I might have believed you,” said Mingolla.

“You got to
talk slow, man.” The boy frowned. “Too fast, I can’t understan’.”

Mingolla
repeated his comment, and the boy said, “You believe it, gringo. Why else you
here?” With a planing motion of his arm he described an imaginary continuance
of the bridge’s upward course. “That’s where the bridge travels now. Don’t have
not’ing to do wit’ crossing the river. It’s a piece of white stone. Don’t mean
the same t’ing a bridge means.”

Mingolla was
surprised to hear his thoughts echoed by someone who so resembled a hominid.

“I come
here,” the boy went on. “I listen to the wind, hear it sing in the iron. And I
know t’ings from it. I can see the future.” He grinned, exposing blackened
teeth, and pointed south toward the Caribbean. “Future’s that way, man.”

Mingolla
liked the joke; he felt an affinity for the boy, for anyone who could manage
jokes from the boy’s perspective, but he couldn’t think of a way to express his
good feeling. Finally he said, “You speak English well.”

“Shit! What
you think? ‘Cause we live in the jungle, we talk like animals? Shit!” The boy
jabbed the point of his knife into the concrete. “I talk English all my life.
Gringos they too stupid to learn Spanish.”

A girl’s
voice sounded behind them, harsh and peremptory. The other children had closed
to within ten feet, their savage faces intent upon Mingolla, and the girl was
standing a bit forward of them. She had sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes; ratty
cables of hair hung down over her single-scoop breasts. Her hipbones tented up
a rag of a skirt, which the wind pushed back between her legs. The boy let her
finish, then gave a prolonged response, punctuating his words by smashing the
brass-knuckle grip of his knife against the concrete, striking sparks with
every blow.

“Gracela,”
he said to Mingolla, “she wants to kill you. But I say, some men they got one
foot in the worl’ of death, and if you kill them, death will take you, too. And
you know what?”

“What?” said
Mingolla.

“It’s true.
You and death”—the boy clasped his hands—”like this.”

“Maybe,”
Mingolla said.

“No ‘maybe.’
The bridge tol’ me. Tol’ me I be t’ankful if I let you live. So you be t’ankful
to the bridge. That magic you don’ believe, it save your ass.” The boy lowered
out of his squat and sat cross-legged. “Gracela, she don’ care ‘bout you live
or die. She jus’ go ‘gainst me ‘cause when I leave here, she going to be chief.
She’s, you know, impatient.”

Mingolla
looked at the girl. She met his gaze coldly: a witch-child with slitted eyes,
bramble hair, and ribs poking out. “Where are you going?” he asked the boy.

“I have a
dream I will live in the south; I dream I own a warehouse full of gold and
cocaine.”

The girl
began to harangue him again, and he shot back a string of angry syllables.

“What did
you say?” Mingolla asked.

“I say,”
Gracela, you give me shit, I going to fuck you and t’row you in the river.’ “
He winked at Mingolla. “Gracela she a virgin, so she worry ‘bout that firs’
t’ing.”

The sky was
graying, pink streaks fading in from the east; birds wheeled up from the jungle
below, forming into flocks above the river. In the half-light Mingolla saw that
the boy’s chest was cross-hatched with ridged scars: knife wounds that hadn’t
received proper treatment. Bits of vegetation were trapped in his hair, like
primitive adornments.

“Tell me,
gringo,” said the boy. “I hear in America there is a machine wit’ the soul of a
man. This is true?”

“More or
less,” said Mingolla.

The boy
nodded gravely, his suspicions confirmed. “I hear also America has builded a
metal worl’ in the sky.”

“They’re
building it now.”

“In the
house of your president, is there a stone that holds the mind of a dead
magician?”

Mingolla
gave this due consideration. “I doubt it,” he said. “But it’s possible.”

Wind thudded
against the bridge, startling him. He felt its freshness on his face and
relished the sensation. That—the fact that he could still take simple pleasure
from life—startled him more than had the sudden noise.

The pink
streaks in the east were deepening to crimson and fanning wider; shafts of
light pierced upward to stain the bellies of some low-lying clouds to mauve.
Several of the children began to mutter in unison. A chant. They were speaking
in Spanish, but the way their voices jumbled the words, it sounded guttural and
malevolent, a language for trolls. Listening to them, Mingolla imagined them
crouched around fires in bamboo thickets. Bloody knives lifted sunwards over
their fallen prey. Making love in the green nights among fleshy Rousseau-like
vegetation, while pythons with ember eyes coiled in the branches above their
heads.

“Truly,
gringo,” said the boy, apparently still contemplating Mingolla’s answers.
“These are evil times.” He stared gloomily down at the river; the wind shifted
the heavy snarls of his hair.

Watching
him, Mingolla grew envious. Despite the bleakness of his existence, this little
monkey king was content with his place in the world, assured of its nature.
Perhaps he was deluded, but Mingolla envied his delusion, and he especially
envied his dream of gold and cocaine. His own dreams had been dispersed by the
war. The idea of sitting and daubing colors onto canvas no longer held any real
attraction for him. Nor did the thought of returning to New York. Though
survival had been his priority all these months, he had never stopped to
consider what survival portended, and now he did not believe he could return.
He had, he realized, become acclimated to the war, able to breathe its toxins; he
would gag on the air of peace and home. The war was his new home, his newly
rightful place.

Then the
truth of this struck him with the force of an illumination, and he understood
what he had to do.

Baylor and
Gilbey had acted according to their natures, and he would have to act according
to his, which imposed upon him the path of acceptance. He remembered Tio
Moises’ story about the pilot and laughed inwardly. In a sense his friend—the
guy he had mentioned in his unsent letter—had been right about the war, about
the world. It was full of designs, patterns, coincidences, and cycles that
appeared to indicate the workings of some magical power. But these things were
the result of a subtle natural process. The longer you lived, the wider your
experience, the more complicated your life became, and eventually you were
bound in the midst of so many interactions, a web of circumstance and emotion
and event, that nothing was simple anymore and everything was subject to
interpretation. Interpretation, however, was a waste of time. Even the most
logical of interpretations was merely an attempt to herd mystery into a cage
and lock the door on it. It made life no less mysterious. And it was equally
pointless to seize upon patterns, to rely on them, to obey the mystical
regulations they seemed to imply. Your one effective course had to be
entrenchment. You had to admit to mystery, to the incomprehensibility of your
situation, and protect yourself against it. Shore up your web, clear it of
blind corners, set alarms. You had to plan aggressively. You had to become the
monster in your own maze, as brutal and devious as the fate you sought to
escape. It was the kind of militant acceptance that Tio Moises’ pilot had not
had the opportunity to display, that Mingolla himself—though the opportunity
had been his—had failed to display. He saw that now. He had merely reacted to
danger and had not challenged or used forethought against it. But he thought he
would be able to do that now.

He turned to
the boy, thinking he might appreciate this insight into “magic,” and caught a
flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. Gracela. Coming up behind the
boy, her knife held low, ready to stab. In reflex, Mingolla flung out his
injured hand to block her. The knife nicked the edge of his hand, deflected
upward and sliced the top of the boy’s shoulder.

The pain in
Mingolla’s hand was excruciating, blinding him momentarily; and then as he
grabbed Gracela’s forearm to prevent her from stabbing again, he felt another
sensation, one almost covered by the pain. He had thought the thing inside his
hand was dead, but now he could feel it fluttering at the edges of the wound,
leaking out in the rich trickle of blood that flowed over his wrist. It was
trying to worm back inside, wriggling against the flow, but the pumping of his
heart was too strong, and soon it was gone, dripping on the white stone of the
bridge.

Before he
could feel relief or surprise or any way absorb what had happened, Gracela
tried to pull free. Mingolla got to his knees, dragged her down and dashed her
knife hand against the bridge. The knife skittered away. Gracela struggled
wildly, clawing at his face, and the other children edged forward. Mingolla
levered his left arm under Gracela’s chin, choking her; with his right hand, he
picked up the knife and pressed the point into her breast. The children stopped
their advance, and Gracela went limp. He could feel her trembling. Tears
streaked the grime on her cheeks. She looked like a scared little girl, not a
witch.

“Pitta! “
said
the boy. He had come to his feet, holding his shoulder, and was staring daggers
at Gracela.

“Is it bad?”
Mingolla asked. “The shoulder?” The boy inspected the bright blood on his
fingertips. “It hurts,” he said. He stepped over to stand in front of Gracela
and smiled down at her; he unbuttoned the top button of his shorts. Gracela
tensed.

“What are
you doing?” Mingolla suddenly felt responsible for the girl.

“I going to
do what I tol’ her, man.” The boy undid the rest of the buttons and shimmied
out of his shorts; he was already half-erect, as if the violence had aroused
him.