Life During Wartime

around Corazon. Ruy was lying on a pallet, staring at Debora, who sat cross-legged beside Mingolla. Darkness was settling over the treetop village, and a few stars could be seen between the separations of the leaves; to the west, visible beneath a branch, the last of sunset was a neon scar on the horizon.

Blackford stretched out his legs, took a pull from a bottle of rum. ‘I guess I have time for a story before I get to work.’

‘You work at night?’ Debora asked.

He nodded, picked at the label of the bottle. ‘For most of my time down here,’ he said, ‘I was stationed in Salvador. I was a damn good organizer, but nothing of a military man, and that had always bothered me. I figured that if they’d give me the chance, I’d be as good as any of the glory boys. What was war, I asked myself, if not organized violence? If I could organize shipping schedules and deliveries, wouldn’t I be just as efficient at running a battle? I applied for front-line assignments, but they kept turning me down. Said I was more valuable where I was. But I heard their jokes. The thought of Frank T. Blackford in combat made them dizzy with laughter. So I decided that I’d show ’em.’

Blackford’s sigh accompanied a sudden dimming in the west. ‘Looking back, I can see what a foolish idea it was. I suppose I was a fool, then. At the least I was ignorant about war. Even though I should have known better, I saw war as opportunity, a field upon which a man could make his mark. And so to prove my mettle, I pulled some strings and wangled myself temporary command of a combat unit in Nicaragua, one of the long range recon patrols. This was done under an assumed name, you understand. I had some R & R coming, and my plan was to take the patrol and do great things. Impossible things. Then return to Salvador and shake my combat record under the noses of my superiors. Well, after three days in the field, I’d lost… I was about to say I’d lost control of my men, but the truth is I’d never had control. They’d just started using Sammy in those days, and the safe dosage was still a matter of conjecture. My men were lunatics, and once I began doing the drug with them, trying to be one of the boys, I became as crazy as they were. I remember coming into the villages, peaceful little places with fountains in the plazas. I moved through them spinning, a kind of mad dance, spraying bursts of fire that seemed to be writing weird names on the walls. I laughed at the men I shot. Shouted at them. Like a kid playing soldier.’

He lifted the bottle to his lips, but didn’t drink, just stared off into the leaves, ‘I couldn’t take it. No, that’s too easy to say. I could take it. I relished the chemical bravery, and no moral wakening brought me to my senses. I simply outstripped my men in madness, and they deserted me. Left me without drugs, without a radio, to wander the hill country. I walked back through some of the villages we’d destroyed, and then, only then, did it begin to come home to me where I was and what I’d been doing. I saw ghosts in the ruins. They chatted with me, followed me, and I would run and run, trying to escape them.’ Blackford had a drink, shivered as if the rum had hit a raw place inside him. ‘The nights were awful. I figured out why dogs howl at the moon. Because they’re answering it, because it’s a howl frozen up there, the end of a long yellow throat opened by terror and despair. I hid in the ruins, in holes in the ground. I hid from things that were there, things that weren’t. Once I lay in a ditch all night, and when the light started to gray I saw that what I’d thought was a log was actually a stiffened corpse. It had been staring at me the whole night, and I could feel the bad news its eyes had beamed into my head. I was inside madness. I’d reached the place where madness has its own continuum of correct actions and policies. The heights upon which you can sit and hold rational discourse with a sane man and be so madly fluent that you can win every point. And I would have traveled farther into madness, but I was fortunate.’

Blackford started to have another drink, but remembered his manners and passed the bottle to Tully. ‘It was the volcano that restored me to sanity. It was such an elementary sight, it seemed to offer the promise of simple truths. There it was, a perfect cone rearing into a blue sky, like something a child with crayons might have drawn if you’d told him about Nicaragua and how it used to be. Empty except for Indians and fire in the earth. I was so taken with it, I walked around it three times, admiring it, studying it. Buddhists do the same thing, you know. Circumnambulation, they call it. Maybe I remembered that, or maybe it’s just something your cells instruct you to do once you reach your magic mountain. Whatever… I loved the volcano, loved being under it, in its shadow. And all the time I was walking around, I never noticed anyone living nearby. Not until Gregorio decided to save me from the Beast. I thought Gregorio was madder than I. He’d never spotted the Beast, never seen its track. Yet he would have sworn to its existence. In a way the story he told charmed me; if it hadn’t I might have risked staying on the ground just for the sake of obstinacy, and I might have died. But I wanted to hear more, to learn about these curious people that lived in the trees.’

Blackford waved his bottle at the platforms below, ragged rafts of planking illuminated by the dimming fires; human shadows knelt by the fires, and each scene was enclosed by filigrees of leaves, giving them the otherworldly vitality of images materialized in magic mirrors. ‘Of course scarcely any of this existed at the time,’ Blackford said. ‘The place didn’t shape up until I got to work on it. Yet even then there seemed something eminently reasonable about the style of life, and after listening to Gregorio, after considering the principles embedded in his tale, I knew I’d found the field upon which I could make my mark.’ Blackford took back the bottle from Tully, drank, and wiped his mouth with his hand. He was intent now upon his story, his eyes fixing them not to see if they were listening, but rather—it seemed—to reinforce his words with the intensity of his stare. ‘What Gregorio told me was this. Years ago, a German man by the name of Ludens lived near the headwaters of the river that runs behind the volcano. No one understood why he had picked this particular spot to settle, but in those days solitary and eccentric Germans were the rule rather than the exception in Central America, and so not much attention was paid him. He ventured downstream only to resupply, and whenever he did, he would warn the Indians against penetrating to the headwaters, saying that a horrible creature dwelled there. A monster. Most heeded the warning, but naturally some wanted to test themselves and went in search of the Beast. Their mutilated bodies were found floating in the river, and soon nobody would dare journey as far upriver as Ludens’s house. This state of affairs continued until Ludens’s death, at which time it was learned that he had discovered a silver mine and had, according to his diaries, fostered the legend of the Beast in order to keep anyone from finding out his secret. He also wrote that he had murdered Indians so as to lend verisimilitude to the legend. Though the Indians believed that Ludens had been the murderer, this didn’t disabuse them of their belief in the Beast. Monsters, at least the Nicaraguan variety, are more subtle than their North American counterparts, and it seemed in complete accord with the Indians’ knowledge and tradition that the Beast had used Ludens as its proxy to kill those who violated its territory. They saw Ludens’s invention of the legend as a disguise masking a harder truth, the existence of a subtle and malefic demon. And so for years they avoided the forbidden territory. It took the violence of war to drive them from their homeland into the region of the headwaters, and even then they didn’t dare remain on the ground, but sequestered themselves high in the trees where the monster had no claim.’

Ruy laughed. ‘And now you think the Beast exists?’

‘It’s a seductive truth,’ said Blackford. ‘And like any truth, it’s most complicated in its efficacy. Consider that in all the years since Ludens’s death, no one has tested the legend by spending a night below. I would encourage you to test it, but what would that prove one way or another? Your survival wouldn’t diminish the legend; the Beast might be otherwise occupied. And your death wouldn’t more firmly establish belief. The only real test of a truth is whether or not it serves its adherents. And who could deny that the Beast serves us? Hasn’t he kept us from war? Hasn’t he inspired us to create this pleasant environment? His philosophical presence alone is enough to sustain belief.’ Blackford smiled. ‘You ask if I believe in his existence. I am his existence. All this you see is the geometry of his secret form, the precinct of his wish. If you’re asking me, Does he howl, does he rend and tear? my answer is, Listen. Find your own answer. I’ve found mine.’

Sleep came hard for Mingolla that night. He lay awake listening to the rustling leaves, the myriad sounds of the high canopy. Watching the dark figures of the others. Near midnight, one of those figures got stealthily to its feet and draped what looked to be a bulky shadow over its arm: the combat suit. It was Blackford. He moved to the edge of the platform, stepped into the cage of planking that was used for an elevator. The cage vanished, the ropes to which it was attached thrummed. Mingolla crept to the edge of the platform and peered over the side. Saw Blackford disembarking from the cage at the foot of the tree, clearly visible in the fall of moonlight. Blackford stripped off his shorts and shirt, and stepped into the combat suit. He put the helmet on, fastened the seals; then he walked off among the pillarlike columns of the mahogany trunks and was lost to view.

Mingolla crept back over to his pallet and lay down beside Debora, trying to make sense of what he had witnessed; after he had made a sort of sense out of it, he tried to decide whether Blackford’s actions were the mark of madness or were exemplary of an elusive and remarkably clearsighted form of sanity. Maybe, he thought, there