Life During Wartime

the chief had counseled. Rather than spending hours in a preflight check, he would arrive minutes before takeoff and taxi away without even inspecting the fuel gauge. His recklessness came to be the talk of the capital. Obeying the president’s every whim, he flew in gales and in fogs, while drunk and drugged, and during those hours in the air, suspended between the laws of gravity and fate, he gained a new appreciation of life. Once back on the ground, he engaged in living with a fierce avidity, making passionate love to his wife, carousing with friends, and staying out until dawn. Then one day as he was preparing to leave for the airport, an American man came to his house and told him he had been replaced. ‘If we let the president fly with so negligent a pilot, we’ll be blamed for anything that happens,’ said the American. The pilot did not have to ask whom he had meant by ‘we.’ Six weeks later the president’s plane crashed in the Darien Mountains. The pilot was overjoyed. Panama had been rid of a villain, and his own life had not been forfeited. But a week after the crash, after the new president—another smuggler with CIA connections—had been appointed, the commandant of the air force summoned the pilot, told him that the crash would never have occurred had he been on the job, and assigned him to fly the new president’s plane.

All through the afternoon Mingolla listened and drank, and drunkenness fitted a lens to his eyes that let him see how these stories applied to him. They were all fables of irresolution, cautioning him to act, and they detailed the core problems of the Central American people who—as he was now—were trapped between the poles of magic and reason, their lives governed by the politics of the ultrareal, their spirits ruled by myths and legends, with the rectangular, computerized bulk of North America above and the conch-shell-shaped continental mystery of South America below. He assumed that Debora had orchestrated the types of stories Tio Moises told, but that did not detract from their potency as signs: they had the ring of truth, not of something tailored to his needs. Nor did it matter that his hand was shaking, his vision playing tricks. Those things would pass when he reached Panama.

Shadows blurred, insects droned like tambouras, and twilight washed down the sky, making the air look grainy, the chop on the river appear slower and heavier. Tio Moises’s granddaughter served plates of roasted corn and fish, and Mingolla stuffed himself. Afterward, when the old man signaled his weariness, Mingolla and Debora strolled off along the stream. Between two of the huts, mounted on a pole, was a warped backboard with a netless hoop, and some young men were shooting baskets. Mingolla joined them. It was hard dribbling on the bumpy dirt but he had never played better. The residue of drunkenness fueled his game, and his jump shots followed perfect arcs down through the hoop. Even at improbable angles, his shots felt true. He lost himself in flicking out his hand to make a steal, in feinting and leaping high to snag a rebound, becoming—as dusk faded—the most adroit of the arm-waving, jitter-steeping shadows.

The game ended and the stars came out, looking like holes punched into fire through a billow of black silk overhanging the palms. Flickering chutes of lamplight illuminated the ground in front of the huts, and as Debora and Mingolla walked among them, he heard a radio tuned to the armed forces network giving a play-by-play of a baseball game. There was a crack of the bat, the crowd roared, and the announcer cried, ‘He got it all!’ Mingolla imagined the ball vanishing into the darkness above the stadium, bouncing out into parking-lot America, lodging under a tire where some kid would find it and think it a miracle, or rolling across the street to rest under a used car, shimmering there, secretly white and fuming with home-run energies. The score was three to one, top of the second. Mingolla didn’t know who was playing and didn’t care. Home runs were happening for him, mystical jump shots curved along predestined tracks. He was at the center of incalculable forces.

One of the huts was unlit, with two wooden chairs out front, and as they approached, something about it blighted Mingolla’s mood. Its air of preparedness, of being a little stage set. Just paranoia, he thought. The signs had been good so far, hadn’t they? When they reached the hut, Debora took the chair nearest the door and invited him to sit next to her. Starlight pointed her eyes with brilliance. Visible inside the doorway was a sack from which part of a wire cage protruded. ‘What about your game?’ he asked.

‘I wanted to be with you tonight,’ she said.

That bothered him. It was all starting to bother him, and he couldn’t understand why. The thing in his hand wiggled. He balled the hand into a fist and sat down. ‘What…’ he began, and then lost track of what he had been about to ask her. He wiped sweat from his forehead. A shadow moved across the yellow glare spilling from the hut opposite them. Rippling, undulating. Mingolla shut his eyes. ‘What, uh…’ Once again he forgot his subject, and to cover up he asked the first question that occurred to him. ‘What’s happenin’ here… between you and me? I keep thinkin’…’ He broke off. Christ, what an idiot thing to say! Too bold, man! He’d probably just blown his chances with her.

But she didn’t back away from it. ‘You mean romantically?’ she asked.

Nicely put, he thought. Very delicate. Much better than saying, You mean are we gonna fuck? Which was about the best he could have managed at the moment. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Whether you go to Panama or back to your base, we don’t seem to have much of a future. But’—her voiced softened—maybe that’s not important.’

It boosted his confidence in her that she didn’t have an assured answer. He opened his eyes. Gave his head a twitch, fighting off more ripples. So what is important?’ he asked, and was pleased with himself. Very suave, Mingolla. Let her be the one to say it. Very suave, indeed! He wished he didn’t feel so shaky.

‘Well, there’s obviously a strong attraction.’

Attraction? I guess so, he thought. I wanna rip your damn dress off!

‘And,’ she went on, ‘maybe something more. I wish we had time to find out what.’

Clever! Knocked the ball right back into his court. He tried to focus on her, had to close his eyes again, and saw Panama. White sand, cerulean water deepening to cobalt toward the horizon. ‘What’s it like in Panama?’ he asked, then kicked himself for having changed the subject.

‘I’ve never been there. Probably not much different from here.’

Maybe he should stand up, walk around. Maybe that would help. Or maybe he should just sit and talk. Talking seemed to steady him. I bet it’s beautiful, y’know,’ he said. Green mountains, jungle waterfalls. I bet there’s lots of birds. Macaws, parrots. Millions of ’em.’

‘I suppose.’

‘And hummingbirds. This friend of mine was down there once on a hummingbird-collectin’ expedition. Said there was a million kinds. I thought he was sort of a creep for bein’ into collectin’ hummingbirds. I didn’t think it was very relevant to the big issues, y’know.’

‘David?’ Apprehension in her voice.

‘You get there by boat, right?’ The smell of her perfume was more cloying than he remembered. ‘Must be a pretty big boat. I’ve never been on a real boat. Just this rowboat my uncle had. He used to take me fishin’ off Coney Island. We’d tie up to a buoy and catch all these poison fish. You shoulda seen some of ’em. Like mutants. Rainbow-colored eyes, weird growths all over. Scared the hell outta me to think about eatin’ fish.’

‘I…’

‘I used to think about the ones that musta been down there too deep for us to catch. Giant blowfish, genius sharks, whales with hands. I’d see ’em swallowin’ the boat, and…’

‘Calm down, David.’ She kneaded the back of his neck, sending a shiver down his spine.

‘I’m okay.’ He shrugged off her hand. Didn’t need shivers along with everything else. ‘Lemme hear some more about Panama.’

‘I told you… I’ve never been there.’

‘Oh, yeah. How ’bout Costa Rica? You been to Costa Rica.’ Sweat was popping out all over his body. Maybe he should go for a swim, cool off. He’d heard there were manatees in the Rio Dulce. ‘Ever seen a manatee?’

‘David!’

She must have leaned close, because he could feel her heat spreading through him, and he thought maybe that would help, smothering in her heat, in heavy motion. Get rid of the shakiness. He’d take her into the hut and see just how hot she got. How hot she got, how hot she got. The words did a train rhythm inside his head. Afraid to open his eyes, he reached out blindly and pulled her to him. Bumped faces, searched for her mouth. She kissed back, and his hand slipped up to cup a breast. Jesus, she felt good! She felt like salvation, like Panama, like what you fall into when you sleep.

But then the feeling changed. Changed so slowly that he didn’t notice until it was almost complete, until her tongue was no longer quick and darting in his mouth, but squirmed as thick and stupid as a snail’s foot, and her