The Best of Lucius Shepard (19 page)

     
She sat for a minute without speaking, the whites of her eyes glowing in the
half-light. Finally she stood and walked off along the beach.

     
“Where are you going?” he called.

     
She turned back. “You speak so casually of losing me...” she began.

     
“It is not casual!”

     
“No!” She laughed bitterly. “I suppose not. You are so afraid of life, you call
it death and would prefer jail or exile to living it. That is hardly casual.”
She stared at him, her expression a cipher at that distance. “I will not lose
you, Esteban,” she said. She walked away again, and this time when he called
she did not turn.

* * * *

     
Twilight deepened to dusk, a slow fill of shadow graying the world into
negative, and Esteban felt himself graying along with it, his thoughts reduced
to echoing the dull wash of the receding tide. The dusk lingered, and he had
the idea that night would never fall, that the act of violence had driven a
nail through the substance of his irresolute life, pinned him forever to this
ashen moment and deserted shore. As a child he had been terrified by the
possibility of such magical isolations, but now the prospect seemed a
consolation for Miranda’s absence, a remembrance of her magic. Despite her
parting words, he did not think she would be back -- there had been sadness and
finality in her voice -- and this roused in him feelings of both relief and
desolation, feelings that set him to pacing up and down the tidal margin of the
shore.

     
The full moon rose, the sands of the barrio burned silver, and shortly thereafter
four soldiers came in a jeep from Puerto Morada. They were gnomish
copper-skinned men, and their uniforms were the dark blue of the night sky,
bearing no device or decoration. Though they were not close friends, he knew
them each by name: Sebastian, Amador, Carlito, and Ramón. In their headlights
Raimundo’s corpse -- startlingly pale, the blood on his face dried into
intricate whorls -- looked like an exotic creature cast up by the sea, and
their inspection of it smacked more of curiosity than of a search for evidence.
Amador unearthed Raimundo’s gun, sighted along it toward the jungle, and asked
Ramón how much he thought it was worth.

     
“Perhaps Onofrio will give you a good price,” said Ramón, and the others
laughed.

     
They built a fire of driftwood and coconut shells, and sat around it while
Esteban told his story; he did not mention either Miranda or her relation to
the jaguar, because these men -- estranged from the tribe by their government
service -- had grown conservative in their judgments, and he did not want them
to consider him irrational. They listened without comment; the firelight
burnished their skins to reddish gold and glinted on their rifle barrels.

     
“Onofrio will take his charge to the capital if we do nothing,” said Amador
after Esteban had finished.

     
“He may in any case,” said Carlito. “And then it will go hard with Esteban.”

     
“And,” said Sebastian, “if an agent is sent to Puerto Morada and sees how
things are with Captain Portales, they will surely replace him, and it will go
hard with us.”

     
They stared into the flames, mulling over the problem, and Esteban chose the
moment to ask Amador, who lived near him on the mountain, if he had seen
Encarnación.

     
“She will be amazed to learn you are alive,” said Amador. “I saw her yesterday
in the dressmaker’s shop. She was admiring the fit of a new black skirt in the
mirror.”

     
It was as if a black swath of Encarnación’s skirt had folded around Esteban’s
thoughts. He lowered his head and carved lines in the sand with the point of
his machete.

     
“I have it,” said Ramón. “A boycott!”

     
The others expressed confusion.

     
“If we do not buy from Onofrio, who will?” said Ramon. “He will lose his
business. Threatened with this, he will not dare involve the government. He
will allow Esteban to plead self-defense.”

     
“But Raimundo was his only son,” said Amador. “It may be that grief will count
more than greed in this instance.”

     
Again they fell silent. It mattered little to Esteban what was decided. He was
coming to understand that without Miranda, his future held nothing but
uninteresting choices; he turned his gaze to the sky and noticed that the stars
and the fire were flickering with the same rhythm, and he imagined each of them
ringed by a group of gnomish copper-skinned men, debating the question of his
fate.

     
“Aha!” said Carlito. “I know what to do. We will occupy Barrio Carolina -- the
entire company -- and we will kill the jaguar. Onofrio’s greed cannot withstand
this temptation.”

     
“That you must not do,” said Esteban.

     
“But why?” asked Amador. “We may not kill the jaguar, but with so many men we
will certainly drive it away.”

     
Before Esteban could answer, the jaguar roared. It was prowling down the beach
toward the fire, like a black flame itself, shifting over the glowing sand. Its
ears were laid back, and silver drops of moonlight gleamed in its eyes. Amador
grabbed his rifle, came to one knee, and fired: The bullet sprayed sand a dozen
feet to the left of the jaguar.

     
“Wait!” cried Esteban, pushing him down.

     
But the rest had begun to fire, and the jaguar was hit. It leaped high as it
had that first night while playing, but this time it landed in a heap,
snarling, snapping at its shoulder; it regained its feet and limped toward the
jungle, favoring its right foreleg. Excited by their success, the soldiers ran
a few paces after it and stopped to fire again. Carlito dropped to one knee,
taking careful aim.

     
“No!” shouted Esteban, and as he hurled his machete at Carlito, desperate to
prevent further harm to Miranda, he recognized the trap that had been sprung
and the consequences he would face.

     
The blade sliced across Carlito’s thigh, knocking him onto his side. He
screamed, and Amador, seeing what had happened, fired wildly at Esteban and
called to the others. Esteban ran toward the jungle, making for the jaguar’s
path. A fusillade of shots rang out behind him, bullets whipped past his ears.
Each time his feet slipped in the soft sand, the moonstruck façades of the
barrio appeared to lurch sideways as if trying to block his way. And then, as
he reached the verge of the jungle, he was hit.

     
The bullet seemed to throw him forward, to increase his speed, but somehow he
managed to keep his feet. He careened along the path, arms waving, breath
shrieking in his throat. Palmetto fronds swatted his face, vines tangled his
legs. He felt no pain, only a peculiar numbness that pulsed low in his back; he
pictured the wound opening and closing like the mouth of an anemone. The
soldiers were shouting his name. They would follow, but cautiously, afraid of
the jaguar, and he thought he might be able to cross the river before they
could catch up. But when he came to the river, he found the jaguar waiting.

     
It was crouched on the tussocky rise, its neck craned over the water, and
below, half a dozen feet from the bank, floated the reflection of the full
moon, huge and silvery, an unblemished circle of light. Blood glistened scarlet
on the jaguar’s shoulder, like a fresh rose pinned in place, and this made it
look even more an embodiment of principle: the shape a god might choose, that
some universal constant might assume. It gazed calmly at Esteban, growled low
in its throat, and dove into the river, cleaving and shattering the moon’s
reflection, vanishing beneath the surface. The ripples subsided, the image of
the moon re-formed. And there, silhouetted against it, Esteban saw the figure of
a woman swimming, each stroke causing her to grow smaller and smaller until she
seemed no more than a character incised upon a silver plate. It was not only
Miranda he saw, but all mystery and beauty receding from him, and he realized
how blind he had been not to perceive the truth sheathed inside the truth of
death that had been sheathed inside her truth of another world. It was clear to
him now.

     
It sang to him from his wound, every syllable a heartbeat. It was written by
the dying ripples, it swayed in the banana leaves, it sighed on the wind. It
was everywhere, and he had always known it: If you deny mystery -- even in the
guise of death -- then you deny life and you will walk like a ghost through
your days, never knowing the secrets of the extremes. The deep sorrows, the
absolute joys.

     
He drew a breath of the rank jungle air, and with it drew a breath of a world
no longer his, of the girl Encarnación, of friends and children and country
nights ... all his lost sweetness. His chest tightened as with the onset of
tears, but the sensation quickly abated, and he understood that the sweetness
of the past had been subsumed by a scent of mangoes, that nine magical days --
a magical number of days, the number it takes to sing the soul to rest -- lay
between him and tears. Freed of those associations, he felt as if he were
undergoing a subtle refinement of form, a winnowing, and he remembered having
felt much the same on the day when he had run out the door of Santa María del
Onda, putting behind him its dark geometries and cobwebbed catechisms and
generations of swallows that had never flown beyond the walls, casting off his
acolyte’s robe and racing across the square toward the mountain and
Encarnación: It had been she who had lured him then, just as his mother had
lured him to the church and as Miranda was luring him now, and he laughed at
seeing how easily these three women had diverted the flow of his life, how like
other men he was in this.

     
The strange bloom of painlessness in his back was sending out tendrils into his
arms and legs, and the cries of the soldiers had grown louder.

     
Miranda was a tiny speck shrinking against a silver immensity. For a moment he
hesitated, experiencing a resurgence of fear; then Miranda’s face materialized
in his mind’s eye, and all the emotion he had suppressed for nine days poured
through him, washing away the fear. It was a silvery, flawless emotion, and he
was giddy with it, light with it; it was like thunder and fire fused into one
element and boiling up inside him, and he was overwhelmed by a need to express
it, to mold it into a form that would reflect its power and purity. But he was
no singer, no poet. There was but a single mode of expression open to him.
Hoping he was not too late, that Miranda’s door had not shut forever, Esteban
dove into the river, cleaving the image of the full moon; and -- his eyes still
closed from the shock of the splash -- with the last of his mortal strength, he
swam hard down after her.

<>

*
* * *

R&R

The worst
thing that Latin-Amencan nations can do is to attempt to eliminate illiteracy,
to end corruption, and to bring about a more equitable distribution of the
land. This type of program induces undying fury in the chief executives of the
richest country in North America and sends them off on mad military and naval
crusades regardless of costs or consequences. Lucius Shepard, who knows his
Americas, brings authenticity to his projections of those countries in the
above political contexts. This novella, taking place just a few years into the
future, has the ring of reality. R&R, incidentally, is military jargon for
“Rest and Recreation.” You better believe it!

1

One of the new Sikorsky gunships, an element of the
First Air Cavalry with the words Whispering Death painted on its side, gave
Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco de
Juticlan, a small town located inside the green zone which on the latest maps
was designated Free Occupied Guatamala. To the east of this green zone lay an
undesignated band of yellow that crossed the country from the Mexican border to
the Caribbean. The Ant Farm was a firebase on the eastern edge of the yellow
band, and it was from there that Mingolla—an artillery specialist not yet
twenty-one years old—lobbed shells into an area which the maps depicted in
black and white terrain markings. And thus it was that he often thought of
himself as engaged in a struggle to keep the world safe for primary colors.