The Best of Lucius Shepard (20 page)

Mingolla and
his buddies could have taken their r&r in Ri6 or Caracas, but they had
noticed that the men who visited these cities had a tendency to grow careless
upon their return; they understood from this that the more exuberant your
r&r, the more likely you were to wind up a casualty, and so they always
opted for the lesser distractions of the Guatemalan towns. They were not really
friends: they had little in common, and under different circumstances they
might well have been enemies. But taking their r&r together had come to be
a ritual of survival, and once they had reached the town of their choice, they
would go their separate ways and perform further rituals. Because they had
survived so much already, they believed that if they continued to perform these
same rituals they would complete their tours unscathed. They had never
acknowledged their belief to one another, speaking of it only obliquely—that,
too, was part of the ritual—and had this belief been challenged they would have
admitted its irrationally; yet they would also have pointed out that the
strange character of the war acted to enforce it.

The gunship
set down at an airbase a mile west of town, a cement strip penned in on three
sides by barracks and offices, with the jungle rising behind them. At the
center of the strip another Sikorsky was practicing take-offs and landings—a
drunken, camouflage-colored dragonfly—and two others were hovering overhead
like anxious parents. As Mingolla jumped out a hot breeze fluttered his shirt.
He was wearing civvies for the first time in weeks, and they felt flimsy
compared to his combat gear; he glanced around, nervous, half-expecting an
unseen enemy to take advantage of his exposure. Some mechanics were lounging in
the shade of a chopper whose cockpit had been destroyed, leaving fanglike
shards of plastic curving from the charred metal. Dusty jeeps trundled back and
forth beneath the buildings; a brace of crisply starched lieutenants were
making a brisk beeline toward a fork-lift stacked high with aluminum coffins.
Afternoon sunlight fired dazzles on the seams and handles of the coffins, and
through the heat haze the distant line of barracks shifted like waves in a
troubled olive-drab sea. The incongruity of the scene—its What’s-Wrong-With-This-Picture
mix of the horrid and the commonplace—wrenched at Mingolla. His left hand
trembled, and the light seemed to grow brighter, making him weak and vague. He
leaned against the Sikorsky’s rocket pod to steady himself. Far above, contrails
were fraying in the deep blue range of the sky: XL-16s off to blow holes in
Nicaragua. He stared after them with something akin to longing, listening for
their engines, but heard only the spacy whisper of the Sikorskys.

Gilbey
hopped down from the hatch that led to the computer deck behind the cockpit; he
brushed imaginary dirt from his jeans and sauntered over to Mingolla and stood
with hands on hips: a short muscular kid whose blond crewcut and petulant mouth
gave him the look of a grumpy child. Baylor stuck his head out of the hatch and
worriedly scanned the horizon. Then he, too, hopped down. He was tall and
rawboned, a couple of years older than Mingolla, with lank black hair and
pimply olive skin and features so sharp that they appeared to have been hatcheted
into shape. He rested a hand on the side of the Sikorsky, but almost instantly,
noticing that he was touching the flaming letter W in Whispering Death, he
jerked the hand away as if he’d been scorched. Three days before there had been
an all-out assault on the Ant Farm, and Baylor had not recovered from it.
Neither had Mingolla. It was hard to tell whether or not Gilbey had been
affected.

One of the
Sikorsky’s pilots cracked the cockpit door. “Y’all can catch a ride into
‘Frisco at the PX,” he said, his voice muffled by the black bubble of his
visor. The sun shined a white blaze on the visor, making it seem that the
helmet contained night and a single star.

“Where’s the
PX?” asked Gilbey.

The pilot
said something too muffled to be understood.

“What?” said
Gilbey.

Again the
pilot’s response was muffled, and Gilbey became angry. “Take that damn thing
off!” he said.

“This?” The
pilot pointed to his visor. “What for?”

“So I can
hear what the hell you sayin’.”

“You can
hear now, can’tcha?”

“Okay,” said
Gilbey, his voice tight. “Where’s the goddamn PX?”

The pilot’s
reply was unintelligible; his faceless mask regarded Gilbey with inscrutable
intent.

Gilbey
balled up his fists. “Take that son of a bitch off!”

“Can’t do
it, soldier,” said the second pilot, leaning over so that the two black bubbles
were nearly side by side. “These here doobies”—he tapped his visor—”they got
micro-circuits that beams shit into our eyes. Affects the optic nerve. Makes it
so we can see the beaners even when they undercover. Longer we wear ‘em, the
better we see.”

Baylor
laughed edgily, and Gilbey said, “Bull!” Mingolla naturally assumed that the
pilots were putting Gilbey on, or else their reluctance to remove the helmets
stemmed from a superstition, perhaps from a deluded belief that the visors
actually did bestow special powers. But given a war in which combat drugs were
issued and psychics predicted enemy movements, anything was possible, even
micro-circuits that enhanced vision.

“You don’t
wanna see us, nohow,” said the first pilot. “The beams mess up our faces. We’re
deformed-lookin’ mothers.”

“ ‘Course
you might not notice the changes,” said the second pilot. “Lotsa people don’t.
But if you did, it’d mess you up.”

Imagining
the pilots’ deformities sent a sick chill mounting from Mingolla’s stomach.
Gilbey, however, wasn’t buying it. “You think I’m stupid?” he shouted, his neck
reddening.

“Naw,” said
the first pilot. “We can
see
you ain’t stupid. We can see lotsa stuff
other people can’t, ‘cause of the beams.”

“All kindsa
weird stuff,” chipped in the second pilot.

“Like
souls.”

“Ghosts.”

“Even the
future.”

“The
future’s our best thing,” said the first pilot. “You guys wanna know what’s
ahead, we’ll tell you.”

They nodded
in unison, the blaze of sunlight sliding across both visors: two evil robots
responding to the same program.

Gilbey
lunged for the cockpit door. The first pilot slammed it shut, and Gilbey
pounded on the plastic, screaming curses. The second pilot flipped a switch on
the control console, and a moment later his amplified voice boomed out: “Make
straight past that fork-lift ‘til you hit the barracks. You’ll run right into
the PX.”

It took both
Mingolla and Baylor to drag Gilbey away from the Sikorsky, and he didn’t stop
shouting until they drew near the fork-lift with its load of coffins: a giant’s
treasure of enormous silver ingots. Then he grew silent and lowered his eyes.
They wangled a ride with an MP corporal outside the PX, and as the jeep hummed
across the cement, Mingolla glanced over at the Sikorsky that had transported
them. The two pilots had spread a canvas on the ground, had stripped to shorts
and were sunning themselves. But they had not removed their helmets. The weird
juxtaposition of tanned bodies and shiny black heads disturbed Mingolla,
reminding him of an old movie in which a guy had gone through a matter
transmitter along with a fly and had ended up with the fly’s head on his
shoulders. Maybe, he thought, the helmets were like that, impossible to remove.
Maybe the war had gotten that strange. The MP corporal noticed him watching the
pilots and let out a barking laugh. “Those guys,” he said, with the flat
emphatic tone of a man who knew whereof he spoke, “are fuckin’ nuts!”

Six years
before, San Francisco de Juticlan had been a scatter of thatched huts and
concrete block structures deployed among palms and banana leaves on the east
bank of the Rio Dulce, at the junction of the river and a gravel road that
connected with the Pan American Highway; but it had since grown to occupy
substantial sections of both banks, increased by dozens of bars and brothels:
stucco cubes painted all the colors of the rainbow, with a fantastic bestiary
of neon signs mounted atop their tin roofs. Dragons; unicorns; fiery birds;
centaurs. The MP corporal told Mingolla that the signs were not advertisements
but coded symbols of pride; for example, from the representation of a winged
red tiger crouched amidst green lilies and blue crosses, you could deduce that
the owner was wealthy, a member of a Catholic secret society, and ambivalent
toward government policies. Old signs were constantly being dismantled, and
larger, more ornate ones erected in their stead as testament to improved
profits, and this warfare of light and image was appropriate to the time and
place, because San Francisco de Juticlan was less a town than a symptom of war.
Though by night the sky above it was radiant, at ground level it was mean and
squalid. Pariah dogs foraged in piles of garbage, hardbitten whores spat from
the windows, and according to the corporal, it was not unusual to stumble
across a corpse, probably a victim of the gangs of abandoned children who lived
in the fringes of the jungle. Narrow streets of tawny dirt cut between the
bars, carpeted with a litter of flattened cans and feces and broken glass;
refugees begged at every corner, displaying burns and bullet wounds. Many of
the buildings had been thrown up with such haste that their walls were tilted,
their roofs canted, and this made the shadows they cast appear exaggerated in
their jaggedness, like shadows in the work of a psychotic artist, giving visual
expression to a pervasive undercurrent of tension. Yet as Mingolla moved along,
he felt at ease, almost happy. His mood was due in part to his hunch that it
was going to be one hell of an r&r (he had learned to trust his hunches);
but it mainly spoke to the fact that towns like this had become for him a kind
of afterlife, a reward for having endured a harsh term of existence.

The corporal
dropped them off at a drugstore, where Mingolla bought a box of stationery, and
then they stopped for a drink at the Club Demonio: a tiny place whose
whitewashed walls were shined to faint phosphorescence by the glare of purple
light bulbs dangling from the ceiling like radioactive fruit. The club was
packed with soldiers and whores, most sitting at tables around a dance floor
not much bigger than a king-size mattress. Two couples were swaying to a ballad
that welled from a jukebox encaged in chicken wire and two-by-fours; veils of
cigarette smoke drifted with underwater slowness above their heads. Some of the
soldiers were mauling their whores, and one whore was trying to steal the
wallet of a soldier who was on the verge of passing out; her hand worked
between his legs, encouraging him to thrust his hips forward, and when he did
this, with her other hand she pried at the wallet stuck in the back pocket of
his tight-fitting jeans. But all the action seemed listless, half-hearted, as
if the dimness and syrupy music had thickened the air and were hampering
movement. Mingolla took a seat at the bar. The bartender glanced at him
inquiringly, his pupils becoming cored with purple reflections, and Mingolla
said. “Beer.”

“Hey, check
that out!” Gilbey slid onto an adjoining stool and jerked his thumb toward a
whore at the end of the bar. Her skirt was hiked to mid-thigh, and her breasts,
judging by their fullness and lack of sag, were likely the product of elective
surgery.

“Nice,” said
Mingolla, disinterested. The bartender set a bottle of beer in front of him,
and he had a swig; it tasted sour, watery, like a distillation of the stale
air.

Baylor
slumped onto the stool next to Gilbey and buried his face in his hands. Gilbey
said something to him that Mingolla didn’t catch, and Baylor lifted his hand.
“I ain’t going back,” he said.

“Aw, Jesus!”
said Gilbey. “Don’t start that crap.”

In the
half-dark Baylor’s eye sockets were clotted with shadows. His stare locked onto
Mingolla. “They’ll get us next time,” he said. “We should head downriver. They
got boats in Livingston that’ll take you to Panama.”

“Panama!”
sneered Gilbey. “Nothin’ there ‘cept more beaners.”

“We’ll be
okay at the Farm,” offered Mingolla. “Things get too heavy, they’ll pull us
back.”

“Too heavy?”
A vein throbbed in Baylor’s temple. “What the fuck you call ‘too heavy?’ “

“Screw
this!” Gilbey heaved up from his stool. “You deal with him, man,” he said to
Mingolla; he gestured at the big-breasted whore. “I’m gonna climb Mount
Silicon.”