The Best of Lucius Shepard (7 page)

“The
chickenshit infantry should take ‘em,” the D.I. had said. “You bastards are
brave already. You’re born killers, right?”

“Right,
sir!” they had shouted.

“What
are you?”

“Born
killers, sir!”

But
Dantzler was not a born killer; he was not even clear as to how he had been
drafted, less clear as to how he had been manipulated into the Special Forces,
and he had learned that nothing was optional in Salvador, with the possible
exception of life itself.

The
platoon’s mission was reconnaissance and mop-up. Along with other Special
Forces platoons, they were to secure Morazán prior to the invasion of
Nicaragua; specifically, they were to proceed to the village of Tecolutla,
where a Sandinista patrol had recently been spotted, and following that they
were to join up with the First Infantry and take part in the offensive against
Leon, a provincial capital just across the Nicaraguan border. As Dantzler and
Moody walked together, they frequently talked about the offensive, how it would
be good to get down into flat country; occasionally they talked about the
possibility of reporting DT, and once, after he had led them on a forced night
march, they toyed with the idea of killing him. But most often they discussed
the ways of the Indians and the land, since this was what had caused them to
become buddies.

Moody
was slightly built, freckled, and red-haired; his eyes had the “thousand-yard
stare” that came from too much war. Dantzler had seen winos with such vacant,
lusterless stares. Moody’s father had been in ‘Nam, and Moody said it had been
worse than Salvador because there had been no real commitment to win; but he
thought Nicaragua and Guatemala might be the worst of all, especially if the
Cubans sent in troops as they had threatened. He was adept at locating tunnels
and detecting booby traps, and it was for this reason Dantzler had cultivated
his friendship. Essentially a loner, Moody had resisted all advances until
learning of Dantzler’s father; thereafter he had buddied up, eager to hear
about the field notes, believing they might give him an edge.

“They
think the land has animal traits,” said Dantzler one day as they climbed along
a ridgetop. “Just like some kinds of fish look like plants or sea bottom, parts
of the land look like plain ground, jungle... whatever. But when you enter
them, you find you’ve entered the spirit world, the world of
Sukias.”

“What’s
Sukias?”
asked Moody.

“Magicians.”
A twig snapped behind Dantzler, and he spun around, twitching off the safety of
his rifle. It was only Hodge—a lanky kid with the beginnings of a beer gut. He
stared hollow-eyed at Dantzler and popped an ampule.

Moody
made a noise of disbelief. “If they got magicians, why ain’t they winnin’? Why
ain’t they zappin’ us off the cliffs?”

“It’s
not their business,” said Dantzler. “They don’t believe in messing with worldly
affairs unless it concerns them directly. Anyway, these places—the ones that
look like normal land but aren’t—they’re called....” He drew a blank on the
name.
“Aya-something.
I can’t remember. But they have different laws.
They’re where your spirit goes to die after your body dies.”

“Don’t
they got no Heaven?”

“Nope.
It just takes longer for your spirit to die, and so it goes to one of these
places that’s between everything and nothing.”

“Nothin’,”
said Moody disconsolately, as if all his hopes for an afterlife had been
dashed. “Don’t make no sense to have spirits and not have no Heaven.”

“Hey,”
said Dantzler, tensing as wind rustled the pine boughs. “They’re just a bunch
of damn primitives. You know what their sacred drink is? Hot chocolate! My old
man was a guest at one of their funerals, and he said they carried cups of hot
chocolate balanced on these little red towers and acted like drinking it was
going to wake them to the secrets of the universe.” He laughed, and the
laughter sounded tinny and psychotic to his own ears. “So you’re going to worry
about fools who think hot chocolate’s holy water?”

“Maybe
they just like it,” said Moody. “Maybe somebody dyin’ just give ‘em an excuse
to drink it.”

But
Dantzler was no longer listening. A moment before, as they emerged from pine
cover onto the highest point of the ridge, a stony scarp open to the winds and
providing a view of rumpled mountains and valleys extending to the horizon, he
had popped an ampule. He felt so strong, so full of righteous purpose and
controlled fury, it seemed only the sky was around him, that he was still
ascending, preparing to do battle with the gods themselves.

*
* * *

Tecolutla was a village of
whitewashed stone tucked into a notch between two hills. From above, the
houses—with their shadow-blackened windows and doorways—looked like an unlucky
throw of dice. The streets ran uphill and down, diverging around boulders.
Bougainvilleas and hibiscuses speckled the hillsides, and there were tilled
fields on the gentler slopes. It was a sweet, peaceful place when they arrived,
and after they had gone it was once again peaceful; but its sweetness had been
permanently banished. The reports of Sandinistas had proved accurate, and
though they were casualties left behind to recuperate, DT had decided their
presence called for extreme measures. Fu gas, frag grenades, and such. He had
fired an M-60 until the barrel melted down, and then had manned the
flamethrower. Afterward, as they rested atop the next ridge, exhausted and
begrimed, having radioed in a chopper for resupply, he could not get over how
one of the houses he had torched had come to resemble a toasted marshmallow.

“Ain’t
that how it was, man?” he asked, striding up and down the line. He did not care
if they agreed about the house; it was a deeper question he was asking, one
concerning the ethics of their actions.

“Yeah,”
said Dantzler, forcing a smile. “Sure did.”

DT
grunted with laughter. “You
know
I’m right, don’tcha, man?”

The
sun hung directly behind his head, a golden corona rimming a black oval, and
Dantzler could not turn his eyes away. He felt weak and weakening, as if
threads of himself were being spun loose and sucked into the blackness. He had
popped three ampules prior to the firefight, and his experience of Tecolutla
had been a kind of mad whirling dance through the streets, spraying erratic
bursts that appeared to be writing weird names on the walls. The leader of the
Sandinistas had worn a mask—a gray face with a surprised hole of a mouth and
pink circles around the eyes. A ghost face. Dantzler had been afraid of the
mask and had poured round after round into it. Then, leaving the village, he
had seen a small girl standing beside the shell of the last house, watching
them, her colorless rag of a dress tattering in the breeze. She had been a
victim of that malnutrition disease, the one that paled your skin and whitened
your hair and left you retarded. He could not recall the name of the
disease—things like names were slipping away from him—nor could he believe
anyone had survived, and for a moment he had thought the spirit of the village
had come out to mark their trail.

That
was all he could remember of Tecolutla, all he wanted to remember. But he knew
he had been brave.

*
* * *

Four days later, they headed up
into a cloud forest. It was the dry season, but dry season or not, blackish
gray clouds always shrouded these peaks. They were shot through by ugly
glimmers of lightning, making it seem that malfunctioning neon signs were
hidden beneath them, advertisements for evil. Everyone was jittery, and Jerry
LeDoux—a slim dark-haired Cajun kid—flat-out refused to go.

“It
ain’t reasonable,” he said. “Be easier to go through the passes.”

“We’re
on recon, man! You think the beaners be waitin’ in the passes, wavin’ their
white flags?” DT whipped his rifle into firing position and pointed it at
LeDoux. “C’mon, Louisiana man. Pop a few, and you feel different.”

As
LeDoux popped the ampules, DT talked to him.

“Look
at it this way, man. This is your big adventure. Up there it be like all them
animal shows on the tube. The savage kingdom, the unknown. Could be like Mars
or somethin’. Monsters and shit, with big red eyes and tentacles. You wanna
miss that, man? You wanna miss bein’ the first grunt on Mars?”

Soon
LeDoux was raring to go, giggling at DT’s rap.

Moody
kept his mouth shut, but he fingered the safety of his rifle and glared at DT’s
back. When DT turned to him, however, he relaxed. Since Tecolutla he had grown
taciturn, and there seemed to be a shifting of lights and darks in his eyes, as
if something were scurrying back and forth behind them. He had taken to wearing
banana leaves on his head, arranging them under his helmet so the frayed ends
stuck out the sides like strange green hair. He said this was camouflage, but
Dantzler was certain it bespoke some secretive irrational purpose. Of course DT
had noticed Moody’s spiritual erosion, and as they prepared to move out, he
called Dantzler aside.

“He
done found someplace inside his head that feel good to him,” said DT. “He’s
tryin’ to curl up into it, and once he do that he ain’t gon’ be responsible.
Keep an eye on him.”

Dantzler
mumbled his assent, but was not enthused.

“I
know he your fren’, man, but that don’t mean shit. Not the way things are. Now
me, I don’t give a damn ‘bout you personally. But I’m your brother-in-arms, and
thass somethin’ you can count on...y’understand.” To Dantzler’s shame, he did
understand.

They
had planned on negotiating the cloud forest by nightfall, but they had
underestimated the difficulty. The vegetation beneath the clouds was
lush—thick, juicy leaves that mashed underfoot, tangles of vines, trees with
slick, pale bark and waxy leaves—and the visibility was only about fifteen
feet. They were gray wraiths passing through gray-ness. The vague shapes of the
foliage reminded Dantzler of fancifully engraved letters, and for a while he
entertained himself with the notion that they were walking among the
half-formed phrases of a constitution not yet manifest in the land. They barged
off the trail, losing it completely, becoming veiled in spiderwebs and drenched
by spills of water; their voices were oddly muffled, the tag ends of words
swallowed up. After seven hours of this, DR reluctantly gave the order to pitch
camp. They set electric lamps around the perimeter so they could see to string
the jungle hammocks; the beam of light illuminated the moisture in the air,
piercing the murk with jeweled blades. They talked in hushed tones, alarmed by
the eerie atmosphere. When they had done with the hammocks, DT posted four
sentries—Moody, LeDoux, Dantzler, and himself. Then they switched off the
lamps.

It
grew pitch-dark, and the darkness was picked out by plips and plops, the entire
spectrum of dripping sounds. To Dantzler’s ears they blended into a gabbling
speech. He imagined tiny Santa Ana demons talking about him, and to stave off
paranoia he popped two ampules. He continued to pop them, trying to limit himself
to one every half hour; but he was uneasy, unsure where to train his rifle in
the dark, and he exceeded his limit. Soon it began to grow light again, and he
assumed that more time had passed than he had thought. That often happened
with the ampules—it was easy to lose yourself in being alert, in the wealth of
perceptual detail available to your sharpened senses. Yet on checking his
watch, he saw it was only a few minutes after two o’clock. His system was too
inundated with the drugs to allow panic, but he twitched his head from side to
side in tight little arcs to determine the source of the brightness. There
did not appear to be a single source; it was simply that filaments of the cloud
were gleaming, casting a diffuse golden glow, as if they were elements of a
nervous system coming to life. He started to call out, then held back. The
others must have seen the light, and they had given no cry; they probably had a
good reason for their silence. He scrunched down flat, pointing his rifle out
from the campsite.

Bathed
in the golden mist, the forest had acquired an alchemic beauty. Beads of water
glittered with gemmy brilliance; the leaves and vines and bark were gilded.
Every surface shimmered with light.. .everything except a fleck of blackness
hovering between two of the trunks, its size gradually increasing. As it
swelled in his vision, he saw it had the shape of a bird, its wings beating,
flying toward him from an inconceivable distance—inconceivable, because the
dense vegetation did not permit you to see very far in a straight line, and yet
the bird was growing larger with such slowness that it must have been coming
from a long way off. It was not really flying, he realized; rather, it was as
if the forest were painted on a piece of paper, as if someone were holding a
lit match behind it and burning a hole, a hole that maintained the shape of a
bird as it spread. He was transfixed, unable to react. Even when it had blotted
out half the light, when he lay before it no bigger than a mote in relation to
its huge span, he could not move or squeeze the trigger. And then the blackness
swept over him, He had the sensation of being borne along at incredible speed,
and he could no longer hear the dripping of the forest.