The Best of Lucius Shepard (33 page)

“No,” said
Mingolla, realizing as he spoke that this was not at all wise.

“Take your
life,” said the boy sternly. “Walk away.” A long powerful gust of wind struck
the bridge; it seemed to Mingolla that the vibration of the bridge, the beating
of his heart, and Gracela’s trembling were driven by the same shimmering pulse.
He felt an almost visceral commitment to the moment, one that had nothing to do
with his concern for the girl. Maybe, he thought, it was an implementation of
his new convictions.

The boy lost
patience. He shouted at the other children, herding them away with slashing
gestures. Sullenly, they moved off down the curve of the bridge, positioning
themselves along the railing, leaving an open avenue. Beyond them, beneath a
lavender sky, the jungle stretched to the horizon, broken only by the
rectangular hollow made by the airbase. The boy hunkered at Gracela’s feet.
“Tonight,” he said to Mingolla, “the bridge have set us together. Tonight we
sit, we talk. Now, that’s over. My heart say to kill you. But ‘cause you stop
Gracela from cutting deep, I give you a chance. She mus’ make a judgmen’. If
she say she go wit’ you, we”—he waved toward the other children—”will kill you.
If she wan’ to stay, then you mus’ go. No more talk, no bullshit. You jus’ go.
Under-stan’?”

Mingolla
wasn’t afraid, and his lack of fear was not born of an indifference to life,
but of clarity and confidence. It was time to stop reacting away from
challenges, time to meet them. He came up with a plan. There was no doubt that
Gracela would choose him, choose a chance at life, no matter how slim. But
before she could decide, he would kill the boy. Then he would run straight at
the others: without their leader, they might not hang together. It wasn’t much
of a plan and he didn’t like the idea of hurting the boy; but he thought he
might be able to pull it off. “I understand,” he said.

The boy spoke
to Gracela; he told Mingolla to release her. She sat up, rubbing the spot where
Mingolla had pricked her with the knife. She glanced coyly at him, then at the
boy; she pushed her hair back behind her neck and thrust out her breasts as if
preening for two suitors. Mingolla was astonished by her behavior. Maybe, he
thought, she was playing for time. He stood and pretended to be shaking out his
kinks, edging closer to the boy, who remained crouched beside Gracela. In the
east a red fireball had cleared the horizon; its sanguine light inspired
Mingolla, fueled his resolve. He yawned and edged closer yet, firming his grip
on the knife. He would yank the boy’s head back by the hair, cut his throat.
Nerves jumped in his chest. A pressure was building inside him, demanding that
he act, that he move now. He restrained himself. Another step should do it,
another step to be absolutely sure. But as he was about to take that step,
Gracela reached out and tapped the boy on the shoulder.

Surprise
must have showed on Mingolla’s face, because the boy looked at him and grunted
laughter. “You t’ink she pick you?” he said. “Shit! You don’ know Gracela, man.
Gringos burn her village. She lick the devil’s ass ‘fore she even shake hands
wit’ you.” He grinned, stroked her hair. “ ‘Sides, she t’ink if she fuck me
good, maybe I say, ‘Oh, Gracela, I got to have some more of that!’ And who
knows? Maybe she right.”

Gracela lay
back and wriggled out of her skirt. Between her legs, she was nearly hairless.
A smile touched the corners of her mouth. Mingolla stared at her, dumbfounded.

“I not going
to kill you, gringo,” said the boy without looking up; he was running his hand
across Gracela’s stomach. “I tol’ you I won’ kill a man so close wit’ death.”
Again he laughed. “You look pretty funny trying to sneak up. I like watching
that.”

Mingolla was
stunned. All the while he had been gearing himself up to kill, shunting aside
anxiety and revulsion, he had merely been providing an entertainment for the
boy. The heft of the knife seemed to be drawing his anger into a compact shape,
and he wanted to carry out his attack, to cut down this little animal who had
ridiculed him; but humiliation mixed with the anger, neutralizing it. The
poisons of rage shook him; he could feel every incidence of pain and fatigue in
his body. His hand was throbbing, bloated and discolored like the hand of a
corpse. Weakness pervaded him. And relief.

“Go,” said
the boy. He lay down beside Gracela, propped on an elbow, and began to tease
one of her nipples erect.

Mingolla
took a few hesitant steps away. Behind him, Gracela made a mewling noise and
the boy whispered something. Mingolla’s anger was rekindled—they had already
forgotten him!—but he kept going. As he passed the other children, one spat at
him and another shied a pebble. He fixed his eyes on the white concrete
slipping beneath his feet.

When he
reached the mid-point of the curve, he turned back. The children had hemmed in
Gracela and the boy against the terminus, blocking them from view. The sky had
gone bluish-gray behind them, and the wind carried their voices. They were
singing: a ragged, chirpy song that sounded celebratory. Mingolla’s anger
subsided, his humiliation ebbed. He had nothing to be ashamed of; though he had
acted unwisely, he had done so from a posture of strength and no amount of
ridicule could diminish that. Things were going to work out. Yes they were! He
would make them work out.

For a while
he watched the children. At this remove, their singing had an appealing
savagery and he felt a trace of wistfulness at leaving them behind. He wondered
what would happen after the boy had done with Gracela. He was not concerned,
only curious. The way you feel when you think you may have to leave a movie
before the big finish. Will our heroine survive? Will justice prevail? Will
survival and justice bring happiness in their wake? Soon the end of the bridge
came to be bathed in the golden rays of the sunburst; the children seemed to be
blackening and dissolving in heavenly fire. That was a sufficient resolution
for Mingolla. He tossed Gracela’s knife into the river and went down from the
bridge in whose magic he no longer believed, walking toward the war whose
mystery he had accepted as his own.

5

At the airbase, Mingolla took a stand beside the
Sikorsky that had brought him to San Francisco de Juticlan; he had recognized
it by the painted flaming letters of the words Whispering Death. He rested his
head against the letter G and recalled how Baylor had recoiled from the
letters, worried that they might transmit some deadly essence. Mingolla didn’t
mind the contact. The painted flames seemed to be warming the inside of his
head, stirring up thoughts as slow and indefinite as smoke. Comforting thoughts
that embodied no images or ideas. Just a gentle buzz of mental activity, like
the idling of an engine. The base was coming to life around him. Jeeps pulling
away from barracks; a couple of officers inspecting the belly of a cargo plane;
some guy repairing a fork-lift. Peaceful, homey. Mingolla closed his eyes,
lulled into a half-sleep, letting the sun and the painted flames bracket him
with heat real and imagined.

Some time
later—how much later, he could not be sure—a voice said, “Fucked up your hand
pretty good, didn’tcha?”

The two
pilots were standing by the cockpit door. In their black flight suits and
helmets they looked neither weird nor whimsical, but creatures of functional
menace. Masters of the Machine. “Yeah,” said Mingolla. “Fucked it up.”

“How’d ya do
it?” asked the pilot on the left.

“Hit a
tree.”

“Musta been
goddamn crocked to hit a tree,” said the pilot on the right. “Tree ain’t goin’
nowhere if you hit it.”

Mingolla
made a non-committal noise. “You guys going up to the Farm?”

“You bet!
What’s the matter, man? Had enough of them wild women?” Pilot on the right.

“Guess so.
Wanna gimme a ride?”

“Sure
thing,” said the pilot on the left. “Whyn’t you climb on in front. You can sit
back of us.”

“Where your
buddies?” asked the pilot on the right.

“Gone,” said
Mingolla as he climbed into the cockpit.

One of the
pilots said, “Didn’t think we’d be seein’ them boys again.”

Mingolla
strapped into the observer’s seat behind the co-pilot’s position. He had
assumed there would be a lengthy instrument check, but as soon as the engines
had been warmed, the Sikorsky lurched up and veered northward. With the
exception of the weapons systems, none of the defenses had been activated. The
radar, the thermal imager and terrain display, all showed blank screens. A
nervous thrill ran across the muscles of Mongolia’s stomach as he considered
the varieties of danger to which the pilots’ reliance upon their miraculous
helmets had laid them open; but his nervousness was subsumed by the whispery
rhythms of the rotors and his sense of the Sikorsky’s power. He recalled having
a similar feeling of secure potency while sitting at the controls of his gun.
He had never let that feeling grow, never let it rule him, empower him. He had
been a fool.

They
followed the northeasterly course of the river, which coiled like a length of
blue-steel razor wire between jungled hills. The pilots laughed and joked, and
the ride came to have the air of a ride with a couple of good oF boys going
nowhere fast and full of free beer. At one point the co-pilot piped his voice
through the onboard speakers and launched into a dolorous country song.

“Whenever we
kiss, dear, our two lips meet, And whenever you’re not with me, we’re apart.
When you sawed my dog in half, that was depressin’, But when you shot me in the
chest, you broke my heart.”

As the
co-pilot sang, the pilot rocked the Sikorsky back and forth in a drunken
accompaniment, and after the song ended, he called back to Mingolla, “You
believe this here son of a bitch wrote that? He did! Picks a guitar, too! Boy’s
a genius!”

“It’s a
great song,” said Mingolla, and he meant it. The song had made him happy, and
that was no small thing.

They went rocking
through the skies, singing the first verse over and over. But then, as they
left the river behind, still maintaining a northeasterly course, the co-pilot
pointed to a section of jungle ahead and shouted, “Beaners! Quadrant Four! You
got ‘em?”

“Got ‘em!”
said the pilot. The Sikorsky swerved down toward the jungle, shuddered, and
flame veered from beneath them. An instant later, a huge swath of jungle
erupted into a gout of marbled smoke and fire. “Whee-oo!” the co-pilot sang
out, jubilant. “Whisperin’ Death strikes again!” With guns blazing, they went
swooping through blowing veils of dark smoke. Acres of trees were burning, and
still they kept up the attack. Mingolla gritted his teeth against the noise,
and when at last the firing stopped, dismayed by this insanity, he sat slumped,
his head down. He suddenly doubted his ability to cope with the insanity of the
Ant Farm and remembered all his reasons for fear.

The co-pilot
turned back to him. “You ain’t got no call to look so gloomy, man,” he said. “You’re
a lucky son of a bitch, y’know that?”

The pilot
began a bank toward the east, toward the Ant Farm. “How you figure that?”
Mingolla asked.

“I gotta
clear sight of you, man,” said the co-pilot. “I can tell you for true you ain’t
gonna be at the Farm much longer. It ain’t clear why or nothin’. But I ‘spect
you gonna be wounded. Not bad, though. Just a goin’-home wound.”

As the pilot
completed the bank, a ray of sun slanted into the cockpit, illuminating the
co-pilot’s visor, and for a split-second Mingolla could make out the vague
shadow of the face beneath. It seemed lumpy and malformed. His imagination
added details. Bizarre growths, cracked cheeks, an eye webbed shut. Like a face
out of a movie about nuclear mutants. He was tempted to believe that he had
really seen this; the co-pilot’s deformities would validate his prediction of a
secure future. But Mingolla rejected the temptation. He was afraid of dying,
afraid of the terrors held by life at the Ant Farm, yet he wanted no more to do
with magic ... unless there was magic involved in being a good soldier. In
obeying the disciplines, in the practice of fierceness.

“Could be
his hand’ll get him home,” said the pilot. “That hand looks pretty fucked up to
me. Looks like a million-dollar wound, that hand.”

“Naw, I
don’t get it’s his hand,” said the co-pilot. “Somethin” else. Whatever, it’s
gonna do the trick.”