stars. Kids drinking in the other cars, throwing bottles to smash against the sea wall. These thoughts cheered him. He had come through a bad time, but it was behind him now, and he had his memories back. All of them. He did a bladeful of frost to celebrate, and suddenly felt that he was David Mingolla, David fucking Mingolla, the guy he had nearly lost track of, the guy of whom great things had been predicted, his old self again… only more so.
FIRE ZONE EMERALD
…According to tradition, the abuse that led to the war between the Madradonas and the Sotomayors was the abduction of Juana Madradona de Lamartine by Abimael Sotomayor in the year 1612, but can one explain away centuries of bloodshed and malfeasance by the emotional reactions to this single act? Can one assign blame for the Slaughter of the Children in Bogota in 1915, or the bombing of the Sotomayor compound in Guatemala City in 1949 to the excesses of a man three centuries dead? No, the feud between the families was—like all great conflicts— nurtured by a lust for power, the power contained within an innocuous-looking weed that grew only in a valley west of Panama City divided by the border of their adjoining estates.
CHAPTER NINE
On their last night together in the Peten, Santos Garrido told Mingolla a story. It was an act neither of camaraderie nor of instruction, merely the answer to a casual question; but because of events that followed shortly thereafter, Mingolla came to assign it more than a casual meaning.
For three days they had been hiking through the jungle, leaving behind the village of Sayaxche, once a staging area for Cuban infantry, but now—the fight having moved north along the Mexican border—reverted to the sleepy unimportance of a stopover for the peddlers who traveled the Rio de la Pasion, selling tin lanterns and bolts of cheap cloth and striped plastic jugs. Mingolla’s previous experience of jungle had been limited to strolls through the fringe surrounding the Ant Farm, and this, the heart of the rain forest, surprised him by the hardships levied upon those who entered it. They walked along narrow paths of brown clay crossed by tiny grooves, the trails of leaf-cutter ants, and whenever Mingolla stopped to catch his breath, the ants would swarm up his legs and bite; because Garrido—his guide—would not wait for him to pick them off, he would beat at them as he went, creating deep bruises on his thighs. They encountered mattes of dead vines from which clouds of stinging flies and mosquitoes would rise, buzzing in Mingolla’s hair, invading his nose and mouth. They plunged down rocky defiles, crawling beneath toppled tree trunks, home to centipedes and spiders that dropped onto their necks. The heat was overwhelming at first. Mingolla’s mosquito repellent was sweated off in minutes, and he would have to wash with water in which Garrido had dissolved cigar tobacco, his theory being that nicotine was the most effective of all repellents… a theory that Mingolla to his own satisfaction disproved. But as they moved deeper into the Peten, it became cooler, clammy and dripping. Every leaf he brushed against left a wet print on his clothing, and even the cries of the monkeys sounded liquid. He began to notice the beauty of the jungle. Green light, green shadow. Cathedral pillars of giant figs and ceibas upholding a vaulted canopy, their boles furred with orange club moss, and butterflies with six-inch wingspans dappling their trunks. Prows of limestone bursting from the jungle floor, netted in vines, like petrified schooners saved from sinking into a long-vanished lake. Everywhere was the litter of war, and this added to nature a curious inorganic beauty. A combat helmet with a cracked, cobwebbed faceplate lying in a hollow like a strange egg; the rusted turret of a minitank protruding from a stand of bamboo, draped in flowering epiphytes; an unexploded missile so overgrown with scale and algae that it seemed a vegetable production, as if the jungle had mimicked the creatures of war, giving birth to a creature that could pass among them.
That third night, Mingolla and Garrido set up camp beneath a high limestone shelf, stringing their hammocks between three sapodilla trees, making a meal of cold beans and tortillas. Garrido was a wizened yet hale man in his early sixties, his hair still black and his dark brown skin underlaid with a rosy tint. The only words he had addressed to Mingolla had been by way of caution or direction, and it was clear that he did not think much of Mingolla either as a colleague or as a man. Mingolla was untroubled by this opinion; in his eyes Garrido was merely a tool.
He spent the hour after dinner cleaning his machine pistol; then he took out a packet of frost and got high. Moonlight filtered through the canopy, puddling silver over the limestone and the surrounding foliage, and it looked like they were sitting in a fold of black cloth imprinted with an abstract design. Insects and frogs started an eerie chorus that had the sound of music made by hollowed bamboo and bubbling water. Mingolla paused to listen, balancing a heap of white powder on the tip of his knife.
‘Why do you take that?’ Garrido asked.
Mingolla inhaled, tipped back his head to let the frost drain. ‘It makes things sharper.’ He gave a brittle laugh. ‘And it keeps off the bugs.’
‘Are you an addict?’
‘I have a slight dependency.’
Garrido was silent for a bit. ‘When we set out,’ he said finally, ‘I didn’t think I understood you. I thought you were different from the other Americans I’ve guided. Why, I asked myself, does this young man hunt with such zeal? I sensed something in you that doesn’t accord with this sort of hunt. But I was wrong. You’re the same as the others. You look at things the same way.’
‘And how’s that?’
‘Without emotion.’
Mingolla’s sniff was partly to clear his nose, partly a reaction: to be emotionless seemed to him an ideal.
‘As if,’ Garrido continued, ‘emotion were an impediment to your master plan.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘It’s best to make plain where one stands when going into dangerous territory.’
‘You saying you won’t back me up?’
‘Simply defining the limits of my responsibility.’
The music of the jungle was growing louder, closing in around them, and Mingolla imagined the darkness to be a trillion open throats ringing the camp. ‘Why bother?’ he asked.
Garrido fingered a cigar from his shirt pocket and lit up. The coal illuminated his mouth and the glints of his eyes. ‘Once a friend and I found a jade cup in an unexcavated mound. A Mayan cup. Our fortunes were made. But I wanted it all for myself, and I ran off with it. Later I learned that my friend had died of the fever… without money for medicine. Since then I’ve been honest with my companions. Honesty prevents that sort of misunderstanding.’
He said this with a degree of feeling, and Mingolla tried to see his expression, but could not. ‘What ’bout the cup?’
‘It was stolen… by an American.’
‘Which explains why you don’t like us.’ Mingolla dug into the packet of frost again.
‘That’s not it. I understand Americans, and it’s hard to care about anything you understand.’
‘It must really be a chore for you,’ Mingolla said, ‘walking around so fulla crap all the time. I know it is for me. I know when I look inside myself and see all the ridiculous crud and opinion I think are wise, it makes me fucking sick to realize I ever bought any of it. But then the next minute, there I go spouting it all over again.’ He inhaled from the knife, spat mucus. ‘Excuse me. It’s just that when I hear major bullshit like “I understand Americans,” I tend to get amused. ’Specially when it’s followed up with, “It’s hard to care ’bout anything you understand.” I mean that’s very deep. That’s, y’know, like philosophy.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Garrido. ‘But what I’ve said tonight is true enough for you and me.’
‘Whatever.’
