In Flames (13 page)

“Why not, you're the most valuable thing we have.”

“Then more water,
por favor
.” The potbellied one, Elaine's molester, sidled up behind the yellow-face man, holding a bottle of rum and grinning. His thoughts weren't difficult to decipher. “Just water, please. If I drink alcohol, it'll make me throw up the pill. Some other time we'll share a drink.” I forced myself to smile back, and pointed to the box of medications. “Help yourselves. These give you peace. And these over here give you rest. Together they're better than any rum. Please, take some, there's plenty, a two-week supply at least, and I've only got a few days.”

Potbelly examined the meds packages. He looked at his rum bottle, shrugged and took away the entire box to show his comrades. At first it sounded as though they were planning something, and while I couldn't understand what they were saying, a glance at their faces convinced me they weren't saying anything that really mattered, they were only talking for talking's sake, carried along by meaningless words and gestures and the sound of their own voices. They amused themselves almost like children, gabbing away without caring what it meant.

“What are they talking about?” I said to the tall one.

“Probably you.”

“Where's the padre?”

“Sleeping, señor. He does the last watch, he wakes us in the morning. You too. You play chess?”

“Yes, why?”

“I have a pocket set here. Take your mind off things.”

“Sure.” And why not, a friendship might grow, a lowering of the guard, an opportunity. We sat on my plastic sheet with the tiny board between us in the glow of his flashlight on the ground. He set out the pieces, and I said, “I used to play with members at the Club Saint Ignatius. We were playing the other evening, while we were waiting for the right hour to go up in the hills for the Santería ceremony. Where you captured the wrong prey.”

“Are they good players?”

“They beat me that night. I lost money,” I lied, anything to win his friendship. He was a cocky chess player, moving too quickly, and when I took my time over a move, he started humming. “Please, don't,” I said, “it's distracting.”

“
Hola
, I got you now, señor.”

“Not quite. Check.”

“I can correct that.”

“Check again…and mate.” We played another game, and by pretending a slipup that cost me my queen, I allowed him a victory, and he said, “Checkmate,” with a sigh of pride and belief in himself.

“You're pretty good, señor, you should play
el comandante
sometime.”

“If you let me live through the night. What will you do with my body, after I'm dead?”

“You'll live, señor.
El comandante
says they're ready to accept a settlement soon. And then you'll go home. Don't you want to live?” My chess opponent sounded genuinely perplexed by my pessimism.

“Sure, I want to live, who doesn't…”
I want to live to see justice, see Elaine on trial. And I want to get the hell out of here before you kill me, because no one is paying a dime for my sorry ass, my hours are numbered.

“Good, señor, I wish you good sleep.”

“Can I have more water? And some fruit.”

The tall one obeyed, grumbling. “No hotel here, señor.” He plunked down a banana and a canteen beside my plastic sheet.

“If this were a hotel,” I said, “I'd hang a Do Not Disturb sign outside my door. Try the Prozac in that box, the Xanax too, for you and your friends, go ahead, it reduces agitation, gives you peace, I recommend both.”

“Maybe. Sleep I know. Peace I don't.”

I smiled at him, as friendly a smile as I could fake. It might be difficult for them to shoot a friendly person in cold blood. That was my ploy, my pathetic prayer, as simple and desperate as that.

Over the chess player's shoulder, I thought I could see the outline of his commander's sleeping body partly in shadow near the base of the great tree. Padre Cardenio looked deceptively small, curled up like a mummy freshly dug from forest ground, beside him a few of his most valued possessions laid out as if for a journey into an afterlife, a machete, rifle, book—was the book a breviary, a book of prayers? Did the book give instructions for a proper religious ritual when burying an executed prisoner in a mountain forest?

“Good night, señor.” The tall one turned his back and went off to lie down.

A last pale light faded, and humid breathless air leaked from surrounding green walls, hardly a cool air, though not as hot as during the day.

A mist descended and spectacular noises shattered the air, a chorus of insects sang out, the tropical forest's incessant night music.

I coughed, and coughed again more loudly. No one seemed to hear me, not even the tall one sleeping closest. I coughed a third time, testing, and my captors didn't stir. Nothing in the camp grove moved, no one jabbered any longer. They left me unbound, so I could sleep easily, and they posted no guard over me. And why not, I'd been a model captive. No one in his right mind would attempt an escape in a mountain rainforest at night.

Night jungle noises gained strength. I was unaccustomed to the racket, and couldn't sleep even if I wanted to. Lying there on the plastic sheet, I felt a resurgence of energy, sensing muscles and sinews, how each moved, coiled, responded. I flexed my knees, readying myself.
I was a jungle cat
…seeing all, listening, nerves taut and alert. This was everything I had, all that lay between death and me when my captors awoke at dawn, and no money was paid, and they prepared to put a bullet in my brain. I considered this, and made the riverbank my destination.
What else did I have to aim for
…Going back the same route we'd carved to get into the campsite until I was far enough away, and only a couple of hours remained before my executioners awoke, and I could start slicing a path down to the river. That was it, my desperate strategy.

My eyes enlarged, drawing in the faintest light. Even smells enlivened me. In the ears of the angry and frantic, in my ears, every sound grew louder, a cacophony of noises from hell, a terrifying force for evil, death possible from any direction in the dark air.

I sensed the bodies around me, like the sleeping bodies of homeless beggars in the San Iñigo cathedral square, vagabonds and rebels dreaming perhaps the same dreams of revenge,
Do unto others as they've done to me
…But I'd done nothing, I didn't kill Vinny.

I thought of Elaine, her breasts in my hands, her smell on my sheets.
Get out of my way
…and in a few hours I might be out of her way for good, testimony eternally silenced, if I didn't escape my homicidal captors.

Their sleeping sounds became so peaceful I was convinced some of them had sampled the meds I'd offered. Or I wanted to believe they had. Their lack of movement encouraged me. And I thought of Elaine again and grew furious. I could no more imagine her intentions and motivations than I could the thoughts of a wild animal. Out of the dark I could nearly feel her eyes still fixed on me, and I realized what she'd been thinking all along,
He's a useful idiot
. Even in thought, Elaine enraged me with that steady gaze of hers. Maybe she had my number, and what she didn't know for sure, she was lucky at guessing. In bed in the middle of the night, she'd lie naked within my reach, and counting her breaths I'd touch her furtively, and she'd pretend she didn't notice. My anger with Elaine wasn't simply moral, it was physical, as if I started inhaling polluted air, and as I gasped for breath, survival reactions grew instinctive.

I trusted my reflexes.

I can't get stuck here
…Lying still in a dark jungle forest waiting for my moment, I dismissed Elaine. In her place in my mind, I tried composing an imaginary TSM to friends in New York…
Miss you dudes. Seems like decades since I left you back in NY…
And this was all I could write, anything else was repetition or paraphrase. Nothing more than a tweet I might send, if I were back at the gallery office. A sense of cosmic distance swelled and drowned out all the old details, sapped the connections between that remote wonderland past and myself.

There was only the terrible present.

If my captors spotted me slipping away, if they hunted me down and found me out there on the run, chances were excellent I'd be dead by first light. But if I stayed put, how much better was that. I thought about death, and it appeared as a vast bounteous stillness, an eternity in the lap of a huge white cloud. But this image, maybe something I'd heard from a kindly old nun in grade school, was too soothing, too dangerous to dwell on. And so I dismissed death. Under the spell of jungle reasoning, of desperation and instinct for survival, I rejected all these calming thoughts as unsound, and I prepared my next moves.

Around me I heard snoring, but detected no motion.

In the dimness, I saw—or believed I saw—the guard on duty leaning against the trunk of the giant tree. The guard slid down into a squat, nodding off, I was certain of this. The pills, Dr. Sánchez's meds, were at work. I wiped sweat from my forehead away from my eyes, and I convinced myself the brutes were on the point of obliviousness. The forest was taking over completely. The noises of insects and night creatures, hoots and screeches and incessant howls were camouflage. My brain and body hardened. Instead of death, in place of a fluffy white cloud, I glimpsed a lucid beacon like a falling star, a meteor, a comet shooting straight across the night, lighting my way out of mountain jungle.

In the window of the canopy surrounding the giant tree, the pale reflection of a rising full moon shone on one side of the treetop opening. I rolled off the plastic ground sheet and rose to a crouch. About ten feet from me, the tall one slept on his side, his knees raised to his chest, stone still, like an aged fetus that had failed to be born. Strapped to his hip was the pistol he rapped across my mouth, an impossible risk trying to steal it now. But between my sleeping captor and me, alongside his motionless body, was the machete on a shaft, the spear that cut the lead path through dense green chaos, a perfectly formed weapon, carved and sanded smooth, about six feet in length. Squatting, I shifted slowly over to the pole, grasping it in one hand, and holding my own small machete in the other. As far as I could tell, no one else was moving in the grove. I didn't linger, but slipped straight from the campsite, sliding off into dense vegetation. My silent quick prayer, that I was heading out parallel to the river somewhere on my left.

In seconds, forest darkness enveloped me, my plan, thin as it was, propelling me forward. This and the inescapable fact of spending the rest of the night alone in a tropical forest, searching for a river, this new awareness of where I was jolted me, and I felt galvanized into decisive action. I listened for a river current, but heard only the nocturnal life of the rainforest, and it sounded like sheer electricity. I'd never had to exist on pure energy before. An immense calmness descended, a low steady tremor of consciousness, humming through a thousand nerves and muscles and tendons, adding up to a sort of mad equipoise, a balance between all nature and me, a kind of delirious justice.
I'm not the guilty one
…Reckless, maybe utter folly, but this desperate self-acquittal was all I had to seize on, and it passed for reason. This made my arms and legs move in long flowing motions, showed me where chokers and snags hung, kept me from slippery roots and dark holes waiting to trip me and break my leg. This made me a genius of the jungle, the equal if not the better of my captors. Leaves and vines flickered in pale moonlight filtered through vegetation, all secret points and shadowy ropes. I held the machete spear out in front, pushing aside cobwebs, sweeping past vines and elephant leaves fallen back into place since we'd passed there only hours before. With a swoosh, vegetation closed in behind me, quick and tight, as if a heavy curtain fell, a door shut, and living walls formed around my body.

Night sounds grew louder. Forest beasts alarmed by my intrusion warned each other, signaling my progress, tracking the direction of my slow penetration into their dark world. I stopped again to listen for the river. Beneath whistles and shrieks of the animal chorale, I heard a steady liquid drone. I believed in this, I swore the sound was there. Keep the river as my guide. Lose this, and I'd wander forever.

I clambered over a high buttresslike root, entangling my face and arms in spiderwebs. I slipped and fell hard against the tree, scraping my leg and side. The leg throbbed, and I sat on the soft earth, my back against the root that rose several feet over my head, the bark smooth and featureless. And again I heard river song, although still a faraway sound, my heart swelled with such satisfaction, I could ignore my injury. I wasn't totally lost, the river was where it should be, though far from close, the sound too remote.

My eyes adjusted, and I stood. With many small movements of my feet and body, I measured the site that appeared more open than elsewhere. I positioned myself close to the tree where I'd fallen, resting my cheek on the trunk. I leaned the spear against it and placed my small machete on the ground. Raising my hands up over bark as smooth as the root, I let my fingers slide around on their own, exploring in darkness that could kill me. I needed a place to wait until light appeared, somewhere to save my strength, a hiding spot where they'd never think to find me if they came for me in night. I looked up at the tree, and some branches appeared as large as platforms. If anyone approached, I'd hear him before he spotted me up there. Down on the forest floor, in rotting vegetation, was their world, where green chaos devoured everyone's energies and attention. My mad prayer, that if someone saw me, I'd make the bastard pay, I'd own the high ground. I tested the spear blade in the earth, in the tree trunk, slashing at vegetation, shaving bark off in quick violent strokes. Insane, this calculus convincing me a makeshift spear was a perfect killing weapon, but I had nothing else. I dropped my small machete into brush. Boosting myself with the spear shaft, I placed my foot on top of the tree root, running my right hand up over bark until I felt a bulge in the tree, a spot offering a secure grip. Using the spear shaft as support, its end firmly on the ground, the blade an arm's length from my face, I rose slowly on one leg, lifting my other leg up onto the root and leaning into the trunk. My arm and leg muscles quivered, and I paused, the tip of the blade now a few inches below my chin.