die in Honduras. And perhaps that is what happened, and for two years Koko has lain in a hurriedly dug grave, shot by the police or a gang of thieves or the militia or a drunken farmer or a frightened boy with a gun. He had work to do, and it is possible that the work was to find his own death. Maybe this time the mob caught him, pulled him to pieces, and scattered his body in a greasy field.
STOP.
PLAY.
I flew to New Orleans and went to the counter where the man calling himself Roberto Ortiz had bought a one-way ticket to Tegucigalpa. I bought a ticket to Tegucigalpa. Two hours later, I boarded the little plane and three hours after that we touched down in Belize. Heat rolled in through the hatch when the few passengers bound for Belize left the cabin. When the men in brown uniforms opened the back of the plane to take out a few pieces of luggage, hard flat light struck the white concrete and bounced straight into the cabin. The plane was sealed again, and we flew to San Pedro de Sula, where I saw the boxy white terminal with its dispirited flag. Hondurans with orange boarding passes joined the flight. We went up in the air again and almost as quickly came down again at La Cieba.
I pulled my overnight bag off the rack and moved forward in the cabin. The indifferent stewardess swung open the hatch, and I walked down a movable staircase into the world that Koko had chosen. Heat, dust, motionless light. Across the tarmac stood a low building, up on a platform like a loading dock, that could have been a bar or a failed inn, of unpainted grey boards. This was the terminal. Koko had walked across this tarmac toward the terminal, and I walked toward it and climbed the wooden steps to pass through the building.
The dark-haired girls in the blue airlines uniform sat on packing cases, their handsome legs thrust out before them. Koko too walked past these lounging girls. A uniformed boy soldier holding a rifle nearly as tall as himself barely glanced at him, his boredom too profound to be shaken by a white North American male. He did not even glance at my boarding pass. His contempt for
We were in a long, hot, crowded space. Every seat was filled, fat brown mothers and fat brown babies everywhere. Latino men in broad-brimmed hats stood at the dusty bar, a few empty-eyed young soldiers yawned and stretched, a couple of pink North Americans looked up, looked away. We are not there anymore, we have disappeared.
Before me in both space and time, Koko passes through the entrance of Goloson Airport and returns to the strong direct sunlight. He blinks; he smiles. Sunglasses? No, not yet, his departure has been too hurried for sunglasses. I remove mine, which have round black lenses the size of quarters, from my shirt pocket and hook the ends of the wire temples around my ears. In darkened tones, I can see what Koko saw—the landscape that claimed him. He walks away from the terminal easily, loosely, not looking back. He does not know that at the distance of a year and then some I am watching his confident step take him down the narrow country road. Before us is a flat foreshortened landscape, a no-place, very green and very hot. A series of low, sparsely wooded hills rises up from the plain less than a mile distant. I think of Charlie Parker leaning as if into an embrace into the conditions that surrounded him; I think of the fat old Henry James throwing open the door and rushing forward; I wish I could flood my pages with the complicated joy of these images. The long, nearly leafless branches of the jacaranda trees droop in the punishing heat. It is the forest of no-place, of no significance in itself: simply the forest that grows on the low hills, and toward which the small lean figure is moving, a step now at a time.
PETER STRAUB
Peter Straub is the
