The Best of Lucius Shepard (22 page)

The Rio Duke
was a wide blue river, heaving with a light chop. Thick jungle hedged its banks,
and yellowish reed beds grew out from both shores. At the spot where the gravel
road ended was a concrete pier, and moored to it a barge that served as a
ferry; it was already loaded with its full complement of vehicles—two
trucks—and carried about thirty pedestrians. Mingolla boarded and stood in the
stern beside three infantrymen who were still wearing their combat suits and
helmets, holding double-barreled rifles that were connected by flexible tubing
to backpack computers; through their smoked faceplates he could see green
reflections from the readouts on their visor displays. They made him uneasy,
reminding him of the two pilots, and he felt better after they had removed
their helmets and proved to have normal human faces. Spanning a third of the way
across the river was a sweeping curve of white cement supported by slender
columns, like a piece fallen out of a Dali landscape: a bridge upon which
construction had been halted. Mingolla had noticed it from the air just before
landing and hadn’t thought much about it; but now the sight took him by storm.
It seemed less an unfinished bridge than a monument to some exalted ideal, more
beautiful than any finished bridge could be. And as he stood rapt, with the
ferry’s oily smoke farting out around him, he sensed there was an analogue of
that beautiful curving shape inside him, that he, too, was a road ending in
mid-air. It gave him confidence to associate himself with such loftiness and
purity, and for a moment he let himself believe that he also might have—as the
upward-angled terminus of the bridge implied—a point of completion lying far
beyond the one anticipated by the architects of his fate.

On the west
bank past the town the gravel road was lined with stalls: skeletal frameworks
of brushwood poles roofed with palm thatch. Children chased in and out among
them, pretending to aim and fire at each other with stalks of sugar cane. But
hardly any soldiers were in evidence. The crowds that moved along the road were
composed mostly of Indians: young couples too shy to hold hands; old men who
looked lost and poked litter with their canes; dumpy matrons who made outraged
faces at the high prices; shoeless farmers who kept their backs ramrod-straight
and wore grave expressions and carried their money knotted in handkerchiefs. At
one of the stalls Mingolla bought a sandwich and a Coca Cola. He sat on a stool
and ate contentedly, relishing the hot bread and the spicy fish cooked inside
it, watching the passing parade. Gray clouds were bulking up and moving in from
the south, from the Caribbean; now and then a flight of XL-16s would arrow
northward toward the oil fields beyond Lake Ixtabal, where the fighting was
very bad. Twilight fell. The lights of the town began to be picked out sharply
against the empurpling air. Guitars were plucked, hoarse voices sang, the
crowds thinned. Mingolla ordered another sandwich and Coke. He leaned back,
sipped and chewed, steeping himself in the good magic of the land, the
sweetness of the moment. Beside the sandwich stall, four old women were
squatting by a cooking fire, preparing chicken stew and corn fritters; scraps
of black ash drifted up from the flames, and as twilight deepened, it seemed
these scraps were the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that were fitting together
overhead into the image of a starless night.

Darkness
closed in, the crowds thickened again, and Mingolla continued his walk,
strolling past stalls with necklaces of light bulbs strung along their frames,
wires leading off them to generators whose rattle drowned out the chirring of
frogs and crickets. Stalls selling plastic rosaries, Chinese switchblades, tin
lanterns; others selling embroidered Indian shirts, flour-sack trousers, wooden
masks; others yet where old men in shabby suit coats sat cross-legged behind
pyramids of tomatoes and melons and green peppers, each with a candle cemented
in melted wax atop them, like primitive altars. Laughter, shrieks, vendors
shouting. Mingolla breathed in perfume, charcoal smoke, the scents of rotting
fruit. He began to idle from stall to stall, buying a few souvenirs for friends
back in New York, feeling part of the hustle, the noise, the shining black air,
and eventually he came to a stall around which forty or fifty people had
gathered, blocking all but its thatched roof from view. A woman’s amplified
voice cried out,
“LA MARIPOSA!”
Excited squeals from the crowd. Again
the woman cried out,
“EL CUCHILLO!”
The two words she had called—the
butterfly and the knife—intrigued Mingolla, and he peered over heads.

Framed by
the thatch and rickety poles, a dusky-skinned young woman was turning a handle
that spun a wire cage: it was filled with white plastic cubes, bolted to a
plank counter. Her black hair was pulled back from her face, tied behind her
neck, and she wore a red sundress that left her shoulders bare. She stopped
cranking, reached into the cage and without looking plucked one of the cubes;
she examined it, picked up a microphone and cried,
“LA LUNA!”
A bearded
guy pushed forward and handed her a card. She checked the card, comparing it to
some cubes that were lined up on the counter; then she gave the bearded guy a
few bills in Guatemalan currency.

The
composition of the game appealed to Mingolla. The dark woman; her red dress and
cryptic words; the runelike shadow of the wire cage; all this seemed magical,
an image out of an occult dream. Part of the crowd moved off, accompanying the
winner, and Mingolla let himself be forced closer by new arrivals pressing in
from behind. He secured a position at the corner of the stall, fought to
maintain it against the eddying of the crowd, and on glancing up, he saw the
woman smiling at him from a couple of feet away, holding out a card and a
pencil stub. “Only ten cents Guatemalan,” she said in American-sounding
English.

The people
flanking Mingolla urged him to play, grinning and clapping him on the back. But
he didn’t need urging. He knew he was going to win: it was the clearest
premonition he had ever had, and it was signaled mostly by the woman herself.
He felt a powerful attraction to her. It was as if she were a source of heat
... not of heat alone but also of vitality, sensuality, and now that he was
within range, that heat was washing over him, making him aware of a sexual
tension developing between them, bringing with it the knowledge that he would
win. The strength of the attraction surprised him, because his first impression
had been that she was exotic-looking but not beautiful. Though slim, she was a
little wide-hipped, and her breasts, mounded high and served up in separate scoops
by her tight bodice, were quite small. Her face, like her coloring, had an East
Indian cast, its features too large and voluptuous to suit the delicate bone
structure; yet they were so expressive, so finely cut, that their disproportion
came to seem a virtue. Except that it was thinner, it might have been the face
of one of those handmaidens you see on Hindu religious posters, kneeling
beneath Krishna’s throne. Very sexy, very serene. That serenity, Mingolla
decided, wasn’t just a veneer. It ran deep. But at the moment he was more
interested in her breasts. They looked nice pushed up like that, gleaming with
a sheen of sweat. Two helpings of shaky pudding.

The woman
waggled the card, and he took it: a simplified Bingo card with symbols instead
of letters and numbers. “Good luck,” she said, and laughed, as if in reaction
to some private irony. Then she began to spin the cage.

Mingolla
didn’t recognize many of the words she called, but an old man cozied up to him
and pointed to the appropriate square whenever he got a match. Soon several
rows were almost complete.
“LA MANZANA!”
cried the woman, and the old
man tugged at Mingolla’s sleeve, shouting,
“Se gano!”

As the woman
checked his card, Mingolla thought about the mystery she presented. Her calmness,
her unaccented English and the upper class background it implied, made her seem
out of place here. Maybe she was a student, her education interrupted by the
war ... though she might be a bit too old for that. He figured her to be
twenty-two or twenty-three. Graduate school, maybe. But there was an air of
worldliness about her that didn’t support that theory. He watched her eyes dart
back and forth between the card and the plastic cubes. Large, heavy-lidded
eyes. The whites stood in such sharp contrast to her dusky skin that they
looked fake: milky stones with black centers.

“You see?”
she said, handing him his winnings—about three dollars—and another card.

“See what?”
Mingolla asked, perplexed.

But she had
already begun to spin the cage again.

He won three
of the next seven cards. People congratulated him, shaking their heads in
amazement; the old man cozied up further, suggesting in sign language that he
was the agency responsible for Mingolla’s good fortune. Mingolla, however, was
nervous. His ritual was founded on a principle of small miracles, and though he
was certain the woman was cheating on his behalf (that, he assumed, had been
the meaning of her laughter, her “You see?”), though his luck was not really
luck, its excessiveness menaced that principle. He lost three cards in a row,
but thereafter won two of four and grew even more nervous. He considered
leaving. But what if it
were
luck? Leaving might run him afoul of a
higher principle, interfere with some cosmic process and draw down misfortune.
It was a ridiculous idea, but he couldn’t bring himself to risk the faint
chance that it might be true.

He continued
to win. The people who had congratulated him became disgruntled and drifted
off, and when there were only a handful of players left, the woman closed down
the game. A grimy street kid materialized from the shadows and began
dismantling the equipment. Unbolting the wire cage, unplugging the microphone,
boxing up the plastic cubes, stuffing it all into a burlap sack. The woman
moved out from behind the stall and leaned against one of the roofpoles.
Half-smiling, she cocked her head, appraising Mingolla, and then—just as the
silence between them began to get prickly—she said, “My name’s Debora.”

“David.” Mingolla
felt as awkward as a fourteen-year-old; he had to resist the urge to jam his
hands into his pockets and look away.

“Why’d you
cheat?” he asked; in trying to cover his nervousness, he said it too loudly and
it sounded like an accusation.

“I wanted to
get your attention,” she said. “I’m ... interested in you. Didn’t you notice?”

“I didn’t
want to take it for granted.”

She laughed.
“I approve! It’s always best to be cautious.”

He liked her
laughter; it had an easiness that made him think she would celebrate the least
good thing.

Three men
passed by arm-in-arm, singing drunkenly. One yelled at Debora, and she
responded with an angry burst of Spanish. Mingolla could guess what had been
said, that she had been insulted for associating with an American. “Maybe we
should go somewhere,” he said. “Get off the streets.”

“After he’s
finished.” She gestured at the kid, who was now taking down the string of light
bulbs. “It’s funny,” she said. “I have the gift myself, and I’m usually
uncomfortable around anyone else who has it. But not with you.”

“The gift?”
Mingolla thought he knew what she was referring to, but was leery about
admitting to it.

“What do you
call it? ESP?”

He gave up
the idea of denying it. “I never put a name on it,” he said.

“It’s strong
in you. I’m surprised you’re not with Psicorp.”

He wanted to
impress her, to cloak himself in a mystery equal to hers. “How do you know I’m
not?”

“I could
tell.” She pulled a black purse from behind the counter. “After drug therapy
there’s a change in the gift, in the way it comes across. It doesn’t feel as
hot, for one thing.” She glanced up from the purse. “Or don’t you perceive it
that way? As heat.”

“I’ve been
around people who felt hot to me,” he said. “But I didn’t know what it meant.”

“That’s what
it means ... sometimes.” She stuffed some bills into the purse. “So, why aren’t
you with Psicorp?”

Mingolla
thought back to his first interview with a Psicorp agent: a pale, balding man
with the innocent look around the eyes that some blind people have. While
Mingolla had talked, the agent had fondled the ring Mingolla had given him to
hold, paying no mind to what was being said, and had gazed off distractedly, as
if listening for echoes. “They tried hard to recruit, me,” Mingolla said. “But
I was scared of the drugs. I heard they had bad side-effects.”

“You’re
lucky it was voluntary,” she said. “Here they just snap you up.”