“How’s your neck?” I asked Santiago.
“Can’t feel a thing,” he replied.
Santiago turned and walked back down to the beach, Zeller and I trailing along behind him.
“What do you know about ships?” Santiago said, asking no one in particular. Neither Zeller nor I responded. “I’ve always wanted to build my own boat,” he continued. “One of those boats you can sail around the world. The only problem is that I don’t know shit about boats. Still, I’ve always wanted to do that.”
I couldn’t imagine how he could possibly talk with his neck torn open like that. He should have been a memory by now.
Slowly the outskirts of the city gave way to run-down shacks and tents that looked like creatures crawling out into the night to die. Fires burned here and there in the alleys between them, and I could see the shapes of dogs passing low in the dim light. From where we stood, none of the fires appeared to be tended.
“Look at that,” Zeller said, “there’s a fire burning in a garbage can.”
And sure enough, there it was, surrounded by a cluster of tents. We stopped and stared for a moment.
When I turned back around I could see lightning far out over the ocean. We stood there letting the wind wash over us. The night was slowly turning the color of mud.
“I guess that guy was right,” said Santiago. “It really is going to rain.”
We heard a few people yelling in the distance. Santiago said he needed to rest for a moment. He fell down in the sand, and was asleep almost immediately.
I looked at the wound on his neck by moonlight as best as I could. It was covered in dirt. Here and there, blood or sweat had pushed the dirt aside. The bandage was falling off, and it too was covered in filth. The mixture of blood and dirt was the color of tar.
“We need to keep moving,” Zeller said. “It’ll be morning soon.”
“Just let him rest a minute,” I said. “He’s in bad shape.”
“Do you think he’ll be all right?” he asked.
“He’ll be fine,” I said.
“You’re in charge if he dies,” he said. “You got a plan?”
I nodded.
Then the yelling seemed to be getting closer. We tried to wake Santiago, but he didn’t move. He was in the deepest sleep I’d ever seen. His chest rose and fell heavily.
The wind and the ocean played tricks with the sounds of the distant voices. One minute they sounded like laughter, then they were bitter and resonated with hate. Zeller said it was my turn to go see what was going on, that he’d stood watch at the hospital. He assured me he couldn’t carry Santiago by himself anyway, so there was no way they were going anywhere.
“What if something goes wrong?” I asked.
He looked out over the ocean and shrugged. Then after a moment’s silence he mumbled, “Fire a shot or something.”
“Like in the movies,” I said. I outranked Zeller, and I could have ordered him to go, but I decided not to. I knew it wasn’t right to ask more of him at this point.
But I also knew that I wouldn’t fire a shot if anything happened.
I moved out into one of the alleys, creeping along as if I were entering the voices themselves. When I had gone a mile or so from the shore, I took a knee in the wreckage of a small, bombed-out building, and peeked over the top half of what remained of a wall.
I saw the vague outlines of a man and a woman approaching me. A small crowd of seven or eight men and women followed along behind them, and they appeared to be agitated. Then they all stopped, some fifty yards away from me.
At first I thought it was a wedding, the way the crowd was following the couple. I concealed myself in the rubble and settled in to watch.
Suddenly a tall man stepped forward and slapped the back of the head of the man who had been walking ahead of the others with the woman. He staggered a bit, but stayed on his feet. The tall man hit him again, harder this time, and the couple started moving forward again. They held each other stiffly as they walked, like children playing at their first dance. But there was no music and the others didn’t make a sound.
I could hear the ocean far off in the night, and then I watched as the crowd surrounding the couple grew more animated. They looked to be arguing. While the man and the woman walked ahead, the others erupted into recriminations.
I realized that the couple was in serious trouble. They had obviously done something terribly wrong. They looked down at the ground as they shuffled along.
Then the tall man hit the other man again and said something incomprehensible. The man who had been struck didn’t move. He looked both exhausted and terrified.
I could see that there was only one other woman there in addition to the woman who had been walking ahead with the man, and at that point she stepped out to join her. The two women cowered away from the men.
The man who had been struck was now alone, and he looked frantically to the men surrounding him. When he began begging them for mercy, I knew that he was guilty of something unforgivable.
The woman who had stepped forward began arguing with the tall man. The other woman, the one who looked to be guilty of something along with the man, stood back away from the crowd, her head bowed. She was young, and I could see that she was the only one there who wasn’t wearing shoes. Her feet looked tiny and delicate, and she appeared to be crying.
I could tell that the woman who had come forward was frightened by
