realizing what that meant, how it ratified the sense of finality, of long years wound down into the future that had been implicit in the hallucination of pornographic America. With Spurlow still shouting at him, he went out of the room, out through a door and back into the street, where he breathed deeply of the clean sunlit air. Tully and a couple of the soldiers from the checkpoint came running through the pines. ‘What goin’ on?’ Tully yelled. ‘You all right?’
‘It’s okay… I just shot up the fucking painting!’
‘Didja, no shit?’ said one of the soldiers.
‘Yeah!’
The soldiers laughed. ‘Awright, man! Awright!’ They ran back up the slope to spread the news.
Debora moved up to stand beside him, to put a hand on his arm, as if accepting complicity, and behind him Spurlow was talking to the cameraman, saying, ‘Did you get it all?’ and then, ‘Well, at least that’s
He walked over to Mingolla and confronted him. ‘Mind explaining why you did that?’ There was bitterness in his tone, along with a tired sarcasm. ‘Did you feel that was something you just
Mingolla could hear the camera whirring. It felt right… what can I tell ya?’
‘Do you know,’ said Spurlow, his voice tightening, ‘do you know what we’ve gone through to preserve it? Do you…’ He waved in disgust. ‘Of course you don’t.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mingolla said. ‘I mean you’ve got the statement down.’ He gestured at the camera. ‘This is better’n art, right?’
‘The loss…’ began Spurlow with pompous solemnity, but Mingolla—experiencing a surge of anger—cut him off by grabbing Decora’s rifle and training it on him.
‘You getting this?’ Mingolla asked the cameraman, and then said to Spurlow, ‘This is your big moment, guy. Any pronouncements on death as art, any last words on the creative process?’
Debora pulled at him, but he shook her off.
‘Don’t be actin’ dis way,’ Tully said. ‘De mon ain’t worth it.’
‘There’s no reason to get upset,’ said Spurlow. ‘We…’
‘There’s plenty of reason,’ said Mingolla. ‘All the reason in the world.’ He hadn’t been this angry for a long time, not since the Barrio, and although he didn’t quite understand the anger—something to do with the painting, with its validation of the sorry future—he liked the feeling, liked its sharpness, its unrepentant exuberance. He switched off the safety, and Spurlow blanched, backed away.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘Wish I could help ya,’ said Mingolla. ‘But just now I’m so caught up in the coils of creativity, I’m afraid mercy’s not in the cards. Don’t you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we’re talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work’s formal imperative.’
‘I’m outta film,’ said the mestizo cameraman. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and Mingolla told him to go ahead, load up. Both Debora and Tully began pleading with him to stop, and he told them to shut up.
‘For God’s sake!’ Spurlow looked left and right for help, found none. ‘You’re going to kill me… you can’t!’
‘Me?’ Mingolla tapped his chest. ‘That’s not the way you should see it, man. I’m merely the shaped inspiration of the work, the…’
‘Ready,’ said the cameraman.
‘Great!’ Mingolla’s thoughts were singing, whining with the pitch of the sunlight, the droning of insects, and he said to himself,
‘Stop it, David.’ Debora pushed the barrel aside, pressed close to him. ‘Stop it,’ she said softly. Calm seemed to flow from her, and though Mingolla wanted to reject it, he couldn’t. He lowered the gun, looked over her head at Spurlow, who was frozen, stifflegged. ‘Fuck,’ he said, realizing how close he had come to losing it, to reverting to his old insanity.
Spurlow scuttled behind the cameraman and, using him for a shield, made for a doorway. Once inside, he poked out his head and said, ‘You’re out of your mind, you know that? You better get him some help, lady! You better get him some help!’ It looked as if his head had been added to the frieze of figures on the wall beside him: a young couple arm in arm, and two old men who were apparently whispering about them. Mingolla had the urge to make his own movie. Hound Spurlow through the ruins day after day, filming his fearful decline, taping his increasingly incoherent rants on the state of art, rants that made more and more sense in relation to both the project of the film and the artifact of its setting. Call it
‘Let’s go,’ said Debora, taking his hand.
They started off up the slope toward the Bronco, where a group of soldiers had gathered.
‘That’s right!’ Spurlow screamed. ‘Walk away! You’ve desecrated a work of art, and now you just walk away.’ He came a few steps out of the doorway, encouraged by their distance. ‘Don’t come back! You do, and I’ll be ready! I’ll get a gun! It doesn’t take intelligence to fire a gun!’ He came farther toward them, shaking his fist, the last defender of his little painted fortress. He said something to the cameraman, then continued his shouting, his voice growing faint, almost lost in the crush of their footsteps on the carpet of pine needles. ‘You laugh!’ he called out to them. You laugh at me, you think I’m a fool to care about beauty, about the power of these walls! You think I’m crazy!’
Spurlow waited until the cameraman had moved around to get an angle on him that would incorporate the murals.
‘But I’m not!’ he shrieked, scuttling toward them a few steps, then darting away.
From the crest of a high hill, they could see the body of the war. A green serpentine valley stretched from the base of the hill, cut by trails so intricately interwoven that they looked to be the strands of an ocher web, and scattered among them, like the husks of the spider’s victims, were charred tanks and fragments of jeeps and the shells of downed helicopters. Dark smoke veiled the crests of the distant hills, leaked up in black threads from fresh craters, and directly below, an armored personnel carrier had been blown onto its side and was gushing smoke and flame from a ragged hole in its roof. Several dead men in combat suits lay around the carrier, and a group of men in olive-drab T-shirts and fatigue pants were loading body bags, while two others were spraying foam from white plastic backpacks onto the flames. All the smoke threw a haze over the sun, reducing it to an ugly yellow-white glare, the color of spoiled buttermilk. Choppers were swarming everywhere—close by, in the middle distance, and thick as flies at the extreme curve of the valley. Hundreds of them. Their whispering beats seemed to convey an agitated rhythm to the movements of the firefighters and body baggers. Now and then a far-off explosion, a
‘Can’t nobody figure why, neither,’ said the sergeant who escorted the four of them on an elevator down through the middle of the hill. ‘Seem like we coulda overrun the beaners anytime, but we keep holdin’ back. Guess ya gotta have faith somebody knows what the fuck they doin’.’
The sergeant was a short, balding army lifer in his late forties, pale, thick-armed, and potbellied, and was obviously a man to whom faith was not a casual affair. He wore two silver crosses around his neck, he pretended to be knocking on wood whenever he said something optimistic, and on his right biceps were tattooed the words ALLEGED FAST LUCK,surrounded by representations of cornucopias, dollar signs, arrow-pierced hearts, and the number 13 surrounded by wavy radiating lines to indicate its sparkling magical qualities. He was a bit slow on the uptake, scratching his head at their every question, and when not talking, he vagued out, staring dully at the elevator door. Mingolla recognized the signs.
The corridor into which they emerged from the elevator was covered with white foam like the tunnels of the Ant Farm, and was thronged with harried-looking junior-grade officers. The sergeant conducted them through a door at the end of the corridor, and told the corporal at the desk that the I-Ops were here to see Major Cabell. The
