Life During Wartime (61 page)

‘Goddamn you, Davy!’ he said. ‘You ever was low on de spirit.’

‘Listen,’ said Mingolla. ‘She tried to shoot me. What else could I do?’

‘Why she shoot you, mon?’ Tully was trembling, his finger poised on the trigger. ‘She got no cause to shoot you.’

‘I don’t know, man. Maybe somebody put something in her head that made her want to do it … or maybe she was just crazy, too sick to think straight. I don’t know.’

‘You tellin’ me she like dem ot’ers, dem empty shells dat de Sotomayors pump fulla dere shit? Don’t be tellin’ me dat! I know her, mon. Dere were more dan dat in her!’

Suddenly Mingolla wanted Tully to pull the trigger, to end the
suspense. ‘What was I s’posed to do?’ he yelled, ‘
let her kill me?
Let you get all fucking soulful ’bout me dead? This is crap, man! You wanna kill me, go ahead! Go on! Pull the fucking trigger! Maybe somebody put something in your goddamn head, told you to do it. Maybe this whole fucking shuck ’bout Tres Santos is just more Sotomayor bullshit!’ He pushed his chest to the window, puffed it out, daring Tully. ‘C’mon, man!’

‘You t’ink I won’t?’ said Tully. ‘Ain’t but one t’ing holdin’ me back, and dat’s de knowin’ how I helped make you dis way.’

Instead of Tully, Mingolla saw a big black shadow, a creature of blackness, empty, hateful, a nothing with muscles and a sweaty forehead and bloodshot eyes. ‘Fuck you, Tully,’ he said, and focused his anger in a stream of poisonous energy that sent Tully reeling. Tully’s gun discharged. Wild misses aimed at the ceiling, the walls, the floor. He tried to bring the gun to bear on the window, dropped it, clutched his head, letting out a hiss that turned into a scream. Then he fell across the bed, twisted onto his side, his fingers shaking at his temples as if trying to push thoughts back inside, thoughts crowded out by the anger roiling in his skull. And then he was gone. Winked out, truly empty, his blind eyes staring at a cross of black wood on the wall, like an incision into a region of darkness.

Mingolla was crying. He knew it by the wetness on his face and by no other sign, because he felt almost nothing. The tears might have merely been an excess, as if he had been filled to overflowing and was experiencing a necessary spillage. He turned from the window, and the bandy-legged little men moved back from him, staring incuriously, betraying neither fear nor any sort of strong emotion. They had, he realized, seen nothing out of the ordinary. Tears and violent death were part of their millieu, and though they might not comprehend the specifics of the situation, they understood that it was none of their business; they already had a sufficiency of tears and death, and had no interest in sharing the grief of strangers or involving themselves in moral judgments. All this he saw in their faces, all this he perceived as admirable and right.

From the bank of a narrow stream at the base of the hill, Mingolla
could look back and see the edge of the village less than a hundred yards away. He could see all its sweetness, the bougainvillea in window planters, smoke curling from a jointed tin chimney, an old man picking his way among the ruts. The view was unobstructed, but Mingolla knew this was an illusion. Doors had been closed, and there was no going back. He looked up at the hill, its green slope as imposing as the hill of the Ant Farm. But this hill was even more menacing. Its blank, silent enormity presaged the grimness of a five-year-plan with no joyful goal at the end, and Mingolla was reluctant to set foot upon it.

‘Are you thinking about Tully?’ Debora asked.

‘No,’ he said.

She looked surprised.

‘I don’t know why,’ he said. ‘The thoughts just aren’t coming.’

‘I know how it is … sometimes you can’t think about important things right away. You have to let them diminish.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe it wasn’t important.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘You don’t know what I’m feeling.’

‘Yes, I do.’ Her eyes were wide, her mouth tight, as if she was trying to hide some emotion. ‘I know exactly how you feel.’

They sat awhile on a boulder by the stream, gathering themselves for the climb. The stream was the only thing of energy in the entire landscape. Its tea-colored water raced over a stony bottom, foaming at the breaks into lacy white threads; orange iron-bearing rocks thrust up from the surface, and midges danced above them. Clumps of small flowers fringed the bank, the blossoms a pale creamy yellow with a magenta splash at the center, the stems furred with dark filaments. Wherever Mingolla turned, his eye met with an infinity of detail, with complicated mosaics of life, with patterns too intricate to unravel, and this complexity afflicted his sense of competence, made him aware of the ineptitude of his judgments, the fallibility of his hates and loves. It might be best just to sit there, he thought, and wait for the ones who soon would be hunting them. The sun’s light came grayish white and watery through a rift in the clouds, and seemed to search out all the fine stems and tendrils and cottony fibers, to course along them and fill the air with a single disturbance, a
constant fluctuation of pressure and heat that unsettled Mingolla as might have a background of slow shadows or shouts in many languages. Nothing was clear, not even the urge to sit and wait. But at last he was moved by some vague impulse to stand and begin the climb.

The hill was slow going. They tripped and stumbled as if their many uncertainties were posing an impediment. But on reaching the top and gazing out over the mountains of Darién, jungleshrouded and rumpled to the horizon, it seemed they had come to one of the strange green places of God where the structural immensity of life was made plain, all paths delineated. The low sun had broken clear in the west, and its heavy golden light, reflecting off ridges of state-gray cloud, mined a mineral brilliance from every color. The slopes were a luminous green, the air held a shine in every quarter, and the view was so intricate yet at the same time so comprehensible, it offered a promise of hope and magical possibility. Above one hill a rainbow arched into oblivion; a hawk circled another, and dark slants of rain stroked the summit of a third. Like signals, portents. As if each green dome were a separate identity with its own character and values. The sight boosted Mingolla’s spirits, and as they started downhill, his confidence returned. They walked swiftly, stealthily, twitching branches aside with their rifle barrels, moving with an efficiency that comes only with a surety of purpose, and it seemed to Mingolla that he was growing lighter, the past falling away with every step … and it was, he realized. The past was becoming weightless, frail, and they were leaving behind everything familiar, leaving friends and enemies …

… David …

… yes …

… you’re going too fast …

… it’s easy downhill … make time …

… it only feels easy, downhill’s harder on your legs than uphill … you’ll start to feel it soon …

… okay …

… leaving behind memories and attachments, honesty and duplicity …

… look, David … that bird …

… yeah, weird …

… did you see the tail, the ruby, feathers on the breast … it was a quetzal …

… so …

… they’re very rare … it’s good luck to see one …

… luck … yeah, sure …

… don’t make fun of luck … we’ve been lucky …

… Tully … luck?… Panama … luck? …

… luckier than most …

… leaving behind the fear of death and the desire for life, leaving hope and hopelessness …

… when Ifirst joined the movement …

… I don’t wanna hear this crap, Debora …

… no, you listen … when I was first in the movement, about thirty of us spent the rainy season in the Petén … it was awful, we lived like amphibious animals, our shelters rotting, our clothes mildewing … we caught fevers, dysentery … some of us had leishmaniasis …

… leaving behind the usual, the expected …

… what …

… it’s a parasite, it eats the cartilage in your ears, your nose … anyway, we were there for months … it seemed endless, and I lost sight of why we were there … we were just there, we were just part of the decay, the rain, and nothing I’d thought of achieving seemed worthwhile any longer … sometimes I was so depressed I could hardly lift my head, and then this kid came to the camp, this young boy from a village near Cobán, and he’d sing, he’d tell stories … lovely stories … I hated him at first, because it seemed immoral for him to be so happy, for him to make me forget my misery … misery was important to me, I saw it as integral to the revolutionary ethic …

… leaving behind dreams and the conception of dreaming, for dreams and reality were being fused into the idea of purpose …

… and once he told this story, I can’t remember what it was about, but I remember some of the words … they spoke to me … he was talking about someone who was very sad and they were thinking that there had to be another country after this, but the only one they could imagine was this secure dull place where life was as cozy as a Christmas kiss, and that wasn’t enough for some people, for this particular person, and the secret of living through the sadness …

… leaving sadness and joy behind …

… was to find a story, an emotion, a fable so alluring that it was like another country, a continent rising from the sea, with flamingos and golden melons and animals more beautiful than sin, one that gave you strength to be the person who you always pretended to be, even to yourself, and if you could do that, if you could search inside yourself and find that country, no matter if it was a lie, no matter if it was foolish and childlike, then you could survive all the terrible realities that denied it … at least for a little while … that’s what we’ve found …

… did the kid make it …

… no, but we survived the rains because of him, and after we left the jungle, we had the strength to keep fighting …

… leaving behind the thought of peace, and entering the precincts of a violent dutiful morality with its own continuum of behaviors and possibilities …

… do you understand, David …

… just more bullshit …

… of course it is …

… then why …

… I remember more of what the kid said … some of it had to do with a story a man was telling a woman in order to frighten her, to make her come close so he could seduce her … it was a story about the devil’s green cat, glowing in the darkness of the throne, how it prowls the earth and inspires sin … not just sin … extremes of life, of action … because although it belonged to the devil, like all cats it was independent, it had its own biases, its own idea of what was appropriate … and after the story ended, after the man had seduced the woman, they were lying together, happy, and the woman realized that the story had merely been a tactic, that she had been taken in, but she didn’t care, and when she asked the man if that was the case, if the story had just been a clever lie, he laughed and said, ‘No, there’s no such thing as the devil’s green cat that glows in the darkness of the throne, striking sparks with its claws from the stones of Hell, scenting the burning from the Pit, hissing a wind full of words, saying, Live or be lifeless, Love or be damned …’

…and leaving even love behind, at least for a while, because love was changing into its martial equivalent, denying of sentiment and admitting only to the virtues of its strength …

… don’t you see, David … it’s the same story with us, it’s always the same story … I love you, and it doesn’t matter why …

… leaving behind logic, leaving behind all ordinary truths …

… I love you …

…yet in the single-mindedness of their intent, the purity of their anger, and their lack of choice, they were taking with them everything that mattered.

Lucius Shepard (born August 21, 1947 in Lynchburg, Virginia) is an American writer. Classified as a science fiction and fantasy writer, he often leans into other genres, such as magical realism. His work is infused with a political and historical sensibility and an awareness of literary antecedents. 

Shepard's first short stories appeared in 1983, and his first novel, Green Eyes, appeared in 1984. At the time, he was considered part of the cyberpunk movement. Shepard came to writing late, having first enjoyed a varied career, including a stint playing rock and roll in the Midwest and extensive travel throughout Europe and Asia. Algis Budrys, reviewing Green Eyes, praised Shepard's "ease of narrative style that comes only from a profound love and respect for the language and the literatures that have graced it."