Life During Wartime (18 page)

‘How de night, Tully?’ Elizabeth asked.

‘It’s goin’ all right,’ said Tully. ‘And you?’

‘Not’in special, y’know.’ Elizabeth was sexy, tall, and had Tully’s coal-black skin; her heavy-lidded eyes and pouting mouth and broad nose reminded Mingolla of statuettes he’d seen in displays of African folk art. Nancy elbowed her, and she performed the introduction.

Mingolla grunted, gouged a trench in the sand with his toe.

‘Well,’ said Elizabeth after an uncomfortable silence. ‘Guess we’ll be marchin’. You come see us, Tully.’

‘Dat I will.’

The two girls ambled off, whispering, and Mingolla watched the roll of Elizabeth’s hips. Tully shoved him, knocking him off the log. ‘What’s wrong wit’ you, mon? T’ought you was after some squint?’

‘Not her, man … she’s ugly.’

‘Shit! You got eyes ’tween your legs? C’mon!’ Tully hauled Mingolla to his feet. ‘We goin’ to de Hole. Dey got bitches dere will tie a knot in it for you!’

They returned to the hotel, where Tully changed into slacks
and a rayon shirt with the silk-screened photo of a blonde in a bikini on the back. He broke out a bottle of rum, and they drank from it as they hurtled over the bumpy hill road in the hotel’s Land Rover, swerving around tight corners, driving blind through patches of mist, past thatched farmhouses and banana plots, once nearly hitting a cow whose horns were silhouetted against the lesser blackness of the sky and faint stars. They seemed to be pulling the night along with them, to have the kind of delirious momentum that Mingolla associated with freeway flying, with speeding into nowhere, an angel in the backseat, a fortune in your veins, following the white lines to some zero point behind the horizon, the end of a black rainbow where the wrecked cars were piled to heaven and smiling corpses leaked golden blood. Tully sang reggae in a hoarse raucous voice, and Mingolla, not knowing the words, pounded a drumbeat on the dash. Then he sang a Prowler song: ‘Got see-thru windows, hyperventilation in my ride, and little Miss Behavior in a coma by my side …’

‘What kinda hollerin’ dat?’ said Tully. ‘Dat ain’t no damn song!’

And Mingolla laughed, knowing it was going to be a good time.

In Coxxen Hole, the yellow dirt streets were ablaze with glare from weathered shanties that perched on their pilings like ancient hens straining at empty nests, their slatboard shutters wobbling one-hinged, plastic curtains belling, rusted tin roofs curled at the edges. On the main street stood a two-story frame hotel. Hotel Coral, painted pink, with a light pole lashed to its second-floor balcony, and a cinderblock office building patrolled by Indian soldiers in camouflage fatigues. Between the offices and the hotel, a concrete pier extended out into the blackness of the sea; two stubby turtling boats with furled sails were moored at its extremity. Heat lightning flashed orange above the Honduran coast thirty miles away. Music blared from the shanty bars; fat women in print dresses and turbans to match waddled in stately pairs, staring down the black men – most as skinny as stick figures – who accosted them. Dogs skulked among the pilings, nosing at crab shells and broken bottles.

There was so much activity that Mingolla – accustomed to the peace of the hotel – became flustered and in order to escape the
confusion went with the first prostitute who happened along. She led him into the back room of a large shanty whose sole designation as a bar was a hand-lettered sign nailed above the entrance that said
FRENLY CLUB – NO RIOT
. She stripped off all her clothes except her brassiere and lay down on a straw mattress that crackled like flames beneath her and held out her arms. She was mud colored, fat in the hips and thighs, with a face that might once have been pretty but had gone matronly and dull with – Mingolla thought – lack of expectation. For some reason her hopelessness aroused him. He tried to take off her bra, but she pushed his hands away. He squeezed her breasts, and she closed her eyes, enduring the pressure. He envisioned cancers or scars hidden by the brassiere, and he did not insist on her removing it. He fucked her quickly and hard, imagining that the drunken shouts from the bar were cheering him on. Her movements were mechanical, uninspired, and after he had rolled off, she wasted no time in pulling on her dress and sat on the mattress, lacing her tennis shoes. They hadn’t exchanged a word since he had asked her price. He resented her indifference, and although he hadn’t touched her mind during the act, now he made her sleepy. She yawned, passed a hand across her eyes.

‘Little tired?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you get some rest?’

She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘De room ain’t paid for.’

‘I’ll pay for it,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘Why you do dat, mon?’

‘I’ll come back later and see you.’ He said this with menace, but she was too groggy to notice. She yawned again and flopped on the mattress. ‘Sleep tight,’ he said, and slammed the door behind him.

He paid the barman for the room, for a bottle of rum, and sat at a corner table, waiting for Tully, blinking against the light from an unshaded ceiling fixture. Red and black posters advertising local bands were taped to the board walls; a record player on the counter – unfinished planks laid over packing crates – ground out warped reggae tunes, their lyrics lost in the uproar. A black man was slumped face down across the table next to Mingolla’s, and crowding the rest of the tables were thirty or so black men who
looked on their way to joining him; they were waving dog-eared aces and queens, shaking their fists, shouting. Their eyes rolled, they spilled drinks on their shirts and jetted smoke from their nostrils. Scuffles broke out, were put down, and new scuffles broke out between the peacemakers. Mingolla slugged back shot after shot, trying for a level of drunkenness to suit the environment. But the noise became more and more aggravating. And it wasn’t only the noise that bothered him, it wasn’t merely a hangover of bad temper from the prostitute. His anger seemed funded by a less identifiable yet more poignant offense, and he wanted quiet in which to figure out what it could be. To that end he began to orchestrate calm, muting rages, soothing ruffled sensibilities, conjuring smiles in the place of frowns. Before long, the bar was a scene of hushed conversations and polite debates over misplays.

‘I know de trey of clubs were played, Byrum,’ said a man nearby. ‘I ’member it were right ’fore Spurgeon lay de black queen.’ And Byrum, a grizzled old man in a captain’s hat from which most of the braid had been worn, said maybe so, but he just couldn’t recollect how the trey had sneaked into his hand.

Mingolla was delighted by the ease with which he had accomplished this, but was dissatisfied with the aesthetic result. What was needed, he thought, was not a sedate bridge-club atmosphere, but a diminution of the previous riot, a formal statement of its potential. He set the men at one table to laughing, those at another to weeping; then he sipped his rum, studying the effect and considering further changes. He kindled a shouting match between Byrum and another old man with a tobacco-stained prophet’s beard, provoked them to point fingers and throw ineffectual punches over the shoulders of the men keeping them apart. The needle of the record player stuck, and Mingolla convinced the barman that everything was fine, left him smiling, nodding his head in time to the repeated scratchy phrase. By the time he had completed these adjustments, Mingolla’s anger had faded. He sat contentedly, effecting decorative touches, modulating glee and despair, until the bar had acquired a theatrical atmosphere, that of a play set in the dayroom of an asylum, with the lunatics compartmentalized in different sections of the room according to the degree and character of their maladies.

‘Goddammit!’

Tully came weaving his way among the tables toward Mingolla, scowling; he rested his fists on the back of a chair and said, ‘Mon, you crazy! You straighten dis out right now!’ His fly was at half-mast, his shirt hung open, and he was having difficulty in focusing.

‘I like it like this,’ said Mingolla.

An instant later he had an urge to comply with Tully, with his good friend and mentor, a man who had always been the caretaker of his best interests. He felt shame at having let him down. But recognizing the sudden onset of these feelings and the vagueness accompanying them to be symptomatic of Tully’s influence, he shaped a wrecking ball of an emotion, of fear and insecurity, and launched it at Tully. Saw him wobble, catch the table for support. Tully fought back, and for a moment Mingolla could sense a border between them, a meeting ground of two streams of heat and electricity; but then that border crumbled, and Tully pulled back, slumped into the chair. Mingolla, too, pulled back. Had a sip of rum, smiled at Tully, who was rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘Straighten dis out,’ he said.

‘Why should I?’

‘Ain’t everybody on de island your friend, mon? T’ink dere ain’t spies ’round, t’ink dey ain’t watchin’ for signs?’

Mingolla parodied his accent. ‘Den better you get to straight-enin’, mon, ‘cause I weary.’

Tully glowered, then lowered his eyes, scraping at the label on the rum bottle with his thumbnail. All around them the bar began to regain its previous level of noise and discord. Card games back in full swing, record player fixed, voices raised in complaint. A tide of normalcy covering up Mingolla’s folly. His pleasure at having defeated Tully ebbed. Tully’s superiority had been a buffer, an assurance of protection; now that he was top gun, he felt leery and at risk.

‘What de hell’s crawled up your asshole, mon?’ said Tully, leaning close. ‘And don’t gimme no bullshit answer! Dis ain’t your teacher axin’ why you cut class, dis serious business.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mingolla sullenly.

‘Damn, you better start knowin’, Davy. You goin’ to be meat on somebody’s table, and you keep up dis messin’ … understand?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘All dis crap have soured my stomach!’ Tully shifted his chair, looking glum; he cocked an eye toward Mingolla. ‘You never take me if I been sober.’

‘Probably.’ Mingolla nudged the rum bottle toward him. ‘Have a drink.’

Tully took a swig, wiped his mouth. ‘Probably! Ain’t no probably ’bout it, mon!’ He had another swig, sighed. ‘Better be headin’ home soon.’

‘I wanna stay,’ said Mingolla. ‘All right?’

Tully chewed on the thought.

‘I won’t fuck up again.’

‘Can I trust dat?’

‘Far as I know.’

‘Far as you know … huh!’ Tully peeled away the rum label, wadded it. ‘Well, I got a little somethin’ waitin’ down de street, so I don’t mind. What you goin’ to do?’

‘I got somethin’ goin’ here.’

‘Somethtn’ in de back room?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘What I tell you ’bout dese island girls? Dey work out de kinks or don’t dey?’

‘They’re okay,’ said Mingolla.

‘Aw, hell!’ Tully levered up from the table. ‘You have your fun, mon. But just ’member … start messin’ again, and it goin’ to be your bones dat gets gnawed on, not mine.’

Mingolla had intended to return to the prostitute with a vengeance, to make her crazy in sex and learn the awful secrets of her breasts; but his need for vengeful action had passed. She was still asleep. Curled up on the mattress, dress bunched around her thighs, a chubby, unlovely woman cornered by poverty and inanition: the grain of the silvery gray floorboards seemed a script spelling out her sad story. The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room, and not wanting to disturb her, Mingolla
sat on the floor, listening to the shouts from the bar gradually subside into muffled chatter. It began to rain, a heavy downpour that drummed so loudly on the tin roof, he thought it would wake the prostitute. But she slept on under his spell, and the rhythms of the rain soon made him drowsy. His thoughts came and went one at a time, without logical attachments or chains of causation, like hawks circling an empty sky. Thoughts of Debora, of his power, of Tully and Izaguirre, of home and war. And from their isolation, their profound disunity, he concluded that a mind was not something grown or evolved, but was a mosaic, a jackdaw’s nest of baubles and bits of glass between which lightning flickered now and again, connecting and establishing the whole for fractions of seconds, creating the illusion of a man, of a man’s rational and emotional convictions. Years before, months before, he might have denied this conception, put forward a romantic conception in its stead. But the constituency of his mind, his jackdaw’s nest, had changed, with war and prostitutes replacing home-cooking and girlfriends, and though a younger Mingolla would have rejected the bleakness of this self-knowledge, the current one found in it a source of strength, a justification for conscienceless action, for contempt of sentiment. Yet even this cold and contemplative stance was wedded to sentiment. He would have liked to curl up with the prostitute, to hold her. She was a fit consort for someone of his disposition. She would smell of clay and rain. His arms would gouge her malleable flesh, sink into her, merging with her substance, and they would dissolve in the rain, a brown fluid running out between the boards, puddling beneath the shanty, soaking into the earth and serving to hasten the hatching of insect and lizard eggs, sending forth a horde of mindless things to take their place.

He waked with a pale dawn light leaking through gaps in the shutter and went out into the bar. His head ached, his mouth felt dirty. He plucked a half-f beer from the counter and walked down the shanty stairs into the street. The sky was milky white, but the puddles of rainwater were a shade more gray, as if they held a soured residue; the slant of the roofpeaks looked askew and witchy. A dog slunk away from Mingolla as he headed for the center of town; crabs scuttled beneath an overturned dory, and a
black man was passed out beneath one of the shanties, dried blood streaking his chest. Sleeping on a stone bench beside the pink hotel was an old man with a rifle in his lap. It seemed the tide of events had withdrawn, leaving the bottom dwellers exposed.