‘Is he dead?’ Debora asked.
‘Yeah.’ Mingolla picked up Don Julio’s gun and stood. ‘Guess they don’t make right-wingers like they used to,’ he said, searching Ruy’s face for a reaction.
Ruy nudged the dead man’s arm with his foot.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the gray light, the hills of Olanchito showed a ghostly leached green. Dirt trails wound through them, petering out into thickets and ledges, as if what they had once led to had been magicked away. Those nearest the sea were mounded sugarloaf hills, their crests bristling with stubby palms that from the coast road looked like growths of electrified hair; those farther inland were sharper, faced with granite, their peaks shrouded in rainclouds. For two days they followed the roads, and then they drove beyond the end of the roads into a wilderness whose jungles had overgrown the worst ravages of the war, but still displayed its passage in ways both subtle and distinct. For the most part—although occasionally they came across a ruin or a crater filled with ferns—everything looked normal. Trees were green, birds and insects clamored, streams plunged into waterfalls. Yet there was an air of evil enchantment to the place. It seemed the jut and tumble of the hills had been built up over a series of immense skeletons whose decaying bones pervaded every growth with wrongness. That wrongness was in the air, pressuring them, adding a leaden tone to the sunniest of days, heavying their limbs and making breathing a toil.
The Honduran hills gave way without visible demarcation to the hills of Nicaragua, and traveling through them took a further toll on their spirits; even Ruy grew silent and morose. It was slow going. They inched down steep defiles, got stuck in streambeds, spent hours getting unstuck, were blinded by squalls that transformed the windows into smeared opacities. Each time they chanced across a bombed village, it seemed a relief to have this hard evidence of war in that it dispelled the supernatural aura. Some of the villages were inhabited, and in these they would buy red gas that was stored in oil drums and was full of impurities. The people of the villages were timorous, living like monkeys in the ruins, peeking from behind shattered walls until their visitors had left, and nowhere did they receive a sincere welcome.
There was little privacy to be had, what with Ruy’s obsessiveness toward Debora and Tully’s ongoing need to discuss his troubles with Corazon; but sometimes at night Mingolla and Debora were able to slip away, to walk out from the campsite, to talk and make love. Mingolla continued to be confused by their relationship. The fact that love constituted for them an actual power obscured the more commonplace fact that love required a sequence of resolutions in order to prosper; and given the tenuousness of the circumstance, none of the usual resolutions merited real consideration. But he couldn’t help thinking about them, and when he did, when he looked at her and tried to imagine a future, it seemed inconceivable that they should have one. They were, he realized, scarcely more than children with guns, faced with a problem whose fantastic nature beggared logic; despite the proofs, he experienced moments when he was sure that everything they had learned was somehow in error. Trying to hold all this in focus, he would feel at sea, and forgetting the war, the unreliability of their companions, he would cling to Debora, as she did to him.
Nine days after leaving the coconut plantation, they came across a road. Not a track or an old contra trail, but an honest-to-God road of yellow dirt, wide and wonderful to drive, beginning in the middle of nowhere and winding off through the hills. Mingolla assumed it was a military road intended to connect bases that had never been constructed, because though it was plain from the wildness of the bordering jungle that it had been long since abandoned, no weeds or any other growth marred its smooth surface, and this testified to the use of chemicals available to army engineers for just that purpose. They came to the road at sunset, and while they might have traveled on into the night with such a road, Mingolla decided it would be good psychology to make camp; that way, if the road ended after a few miles, they would at least have a bit of momentum with which to ease the rest of the next day’s travel. He pulled the Bronco up onto a hillside several hundred feet above the road, and they pitched their tents by a stream that had carved a ferny trench in the rock.
That night Mingolla and Debora walked down the hill and sat in the fringe of the jungle; from this vantage they could look down the road to where it curved up into a notch between the two adjoining hills. An egg-shaped moon lay on its side in the notch, and in its light the yellow dirt appeared richly mineral and moist, not like gold, but like manure of some sort, or the track of a giant snail that had gone south ahead of them. No insects, only the hissing vowels of the wind. The presence of the road made the emptiness bearable, and the quiet was so pervasive and deep, Mingolla imagined he could hear the great humming vibration of the earth. It felt wrong to talk amid this stillness, and they sat with their arms around each other, admiring the road as if it were something miraculous. Debora tucked her head onto his chest, and smelling her hair, feeling the steady hits of her heart, almost audible in the silence, it seemed that everything he had in life had acquired a comprehensible value. He believed he understood love. Not so as to be able to write a definition. But he thought that from this moment on he would be able to call it to mind as a conglomerate of imagery and sensory detail. Whatever love was, it was here, right now, conjured in identifiable form by the silence and the road and Debora’s heartbeat, by a thousand other variables.
She sat up, shaking back her hair. ‘I heard something.’
‘Probably the wind.’
She came to her knees, smoothing her skirt, brushing off dew. She pointed toward the opposite slope, where mist was accumulating in thick bands. ‘We won’t be able to see soon.’
‘Nothing to see, anyway.’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said after a moment. ‘About how I’ve changed. We haven’t been together that long, but if you measure the time in changes, it seems like years.’
‘How’ve you changed?’
‘I’m not as sure of things as I used to be. When I first thought about going to Panama, I just wanted to find out what was happening. And after we started learning what was happening, then I wanted to be part of it… even if it wasn’t my revolution, it was the revolution there was, and I knew there had to be one. I still believe that. But now sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the effort. I keep imagining us running away. Hiding, letting everybody else figure out the problems of the world.’
He laughed. ‘It’s the opposite with me.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah… I used to want to get away from everything. But the closer we come to Panama, the more I realize I can’t escape being involved. And the more angry I get at Izaguirre.’ He laughed again. ‘Maybe this is what they call growing together.’
‘Maybe,’ she said despondently. ‘At least you’re changing in the right direction.’
‘What do I know? I’ve taken the same dope as the fuck-ups who’re supposed to be making the movie.’
‘You still believe they’re fuck-ups?’
‘There’s no doubt about it. The way they’re handling us, all the games. If peace is their plan, they’ll probably fuck that up. Think about it. Here’s these two families who’ve been doing the drug for centuries. All that power, and they’re just now trying to pull it together. Doesn’t augur well for the peace process.’
‘I guess not.’
He studied her face, its exoticism as pronounced as the rose in Corazon’s eye. Just the sort of little treasure that would appeal to Ruy, to the man with everything… especially if it was beyond his reach, if his power couldn’t touch them. And Mingolla was certain they had grown that strong. They would have to be careful not to reveal too much to Ruy, because Izaguirre would be in contact with him, and he might panic if he thought they were too strong. Try to eliminate them. It might be time to confront Ruy. Mingolla had been hoping Ruy would give something away, some bit of information, but maybe the best tactic would be to bully him.
‘You act like you’re miles away, David.’
‘I’m back… just thinking.’
‘Well…’ She settled against him. ‘If they are fuck-ups, maybe we can do something.’
‘Given that they’re into playing God, the worst we can do is to inject some realism into the situation.’ He stared down the road, trying to identify a black object that had appeared in the notch. ‘Something’s coming.’ He
