The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories (6 page)

When he wakes from this reverie, he finds himself alone on his horse and no longer on the path. Vaguely, he remembers an argument with Manuel, his soldiers’ attempts to make him go home with them. Finally, when he drew his sword, they abandoned him.

He feels hollow inside, short of breath. The light around him is distant, cold. The skull of his enemy still rests atop a pole protruding from his left stirrup.

He shakes his head. He thinks of dead bodies and insects rising from them. He thinks of how the flesh has to fall away for the insects to come forth; he imagines a body falling into a hundred butterflies, a hundred thousand moths, until only the eyes remain, soon scuttling away like beetles.

And the thought brings him to . . .

The thought brings him to . . .

Later, he is walking through the night, clutching the pole with the Emperor’s skull moon-white atop it. His horse is gone. He cannot remember what happened to it. He was on the verge of remembering something. Remembering something fully. He fumbles at his pockets, wondering if he has paper enough to write a letter to his wife. No paper. No ink. No plume. Where has Manuel gone? Where are his soldiers? The old Quichua won’t stop staring at him from the crumbling watchtower.

Gaspar stumbles through the darkness, branches scratching his face. He crosses a river, but the water isn’t cool: it’s hot. He cannot stop sweating. The darkness frightens him. How did he get here? The floating body of the Viceroy hangs before him, silent. Or is it the moon through the trees?

He is choking now. Choking on words. But he holds onto the Emperor’s skull.

The stars above him are so different from those above Barcelona. Around him the insects sing, but all Gaspar sees are the red-and-black hummingbirds coming out of the Emperor’s wounds.

“No!” he says. “No,” and moans and falls to the ground, the staff beneath him.

He stares into the eye sockets of the skull. The Emperor stares back.

When Gaspar wakes in the early morning, he is calm. Grit on his tongue, muscles aching, he feels every vein and artery in his body pumping blood. As if the insects are inside of him, as if the forest is inside of him. He still hears a river flowing somewhere behind him. The fading stars seem familiar.

Beside him lies the staff. Rising, he picks it up, follows the sounds of the river. He no longer sweats. He no longer thinks of Isabel, the Viceroy, or Manuel. The hummingbirds no longer trouble him. As he trudges toward Vilcapampa, he mutters to himself about vengeance.

FALLING INTO THE ARMS OF DEATH

"Once there were a few proud men," David MacDiarmid remembered reading many years before, but he did not feel proud as he and his six hundred sixty-five fellows of the 13th Airborne plunged through the Bananama night sky, seeking the lights of the capital. Sky Gods they, Southern Command having gotten it into their heads that Santa suits on Christmas Eve would disguise their real intent. On the shores, a battalion of Roman Catholic priests was establishing a beachhead. MacDiarmid thought the idea suicidally stupid, but no one had consulted him. His buddies laughed it off, but beneath the laughter was an edginess and an obedience to superstition.

Tumbling, MacDiarmid's belly shook like a bowl full of jelly and he ho-ho-hoed his lunch into space. The fake beard tangled in his parachute straps. He cursed while he waited for the chute to open. He had a sudden flash of his ex-wife, Julie, laughing—at him? at herself?—while the kid, Mark, watched, waiting for her to stop. Waiting. When his chute ballooned above him, he screamed triumphantly into the humid night air, not caring who heard him.

Only one choice interested him now: light or dark, the rendezvous site or the jungles beyond. No moon to guide him. No gleams of water, nor the silhouettes of fellow paratroopers. He could hear them, but not see them: the swish of silk as a shadow sailed by, a glimpse of a Santa Claus cap exploding up and past him. The wind cut his face. His mouth was dry. He clutched the M-16 like a crucifix against disaster. Mark would have loved this; Mark would have eaten it up and spit it out because he just didn't know any better.

Floating, MacDiarmid wanted only to forget his mission. He thought of wheat fields and stalled tractors, lonely places without people and skies without a hint of mortar fire. As far from Bananama as he could imagine or dream about.

His tenth Latin American adventure, and it was starting to get old.

When MacDiarmid landed and cut away the parachute, the targeted street was empty, lit by a few overhanging lamps. Most had been broken by stones. The houses were low to the ground, single-storied, and made of concrete or adobe brick. Few had anything that could be called a yard; squares of dusty rubble and shadows that resisted the light. They looked alien to MacDiarmid, as if he had landed on the moon. Many times, he had come back home on leave to find his own yard rampant with the signs of his neglect—the weeds knee-high, the mower rusty in a corner. Sometimes he thought Julie planned it that way. Benevolent neglect.

Sweat burned MacDiarmid's eyes and he wanted to discard his costume, but orders were orders were orders.

Then, out of the silence and gloom and heat: Christmas. Dozens of marionette Santas on strings, until the parachute silks caught the lamp glow and enveloped them like treacherous jellyfish. Dozens of red-clad men armed with M-16s, anti-personnel rounds, and grenades. Most—unlike MacDiarmid—carried their superstitions on their sleeves: army-issue rabbit feet, four-leaf clovers embossed and dangling from chains.

MacDiarmid sought out the Corporal in charge: a tight-lipped skeleton who was not at all jolly in his suit. The man handed MacDiarmid the map that would give him the second rendezvous coordinates and a grid for mortar strikes. The map smelled faintly of garlic. The C.O. smelled of embalming fluid.

"Where's the rest of my patrol?" MacDiarmid asked, hoping there had not been another screw up. As he understood it, Operation La Bella Loca would infiltrate Bananama City in small units, backed up by tanks and heavy artillery, the goals being to capture the resident dictator Zapata-Carranza and pacify the country.

"He's over there," the C.O. said, pointing. Against a tree stood the familiar shadow called Conrad, a wraith who had already discarded his Santa suit, if he had ever worn it.

"What about the others? Where're the others?"

The C.O. shrugged and sucked on his digits. His index finger was white from all the sucking he had done on it. The tip had begun to bleed. Obviously a career man.

"Nowhere," the C.O. said, and grinned. This, then, was La Bella Loca. "Maybe down in the lakes. Maybe in the jungles. But not here." He smelled of embalming fluid, yes, but worse yet, he smelled of indifference.

MacDiarmid left him to his sucking.

Conrad, MacDiarmid's buddy in the worst of times, had been through Vietnam and four covert wars as well. He was still a private, but no one messed with him. The aftershock of countless firefights shone in his face: the cheekbones jutted where the skin and flesh receded, stretched tight. The eyes were, of necessity, dead: a dull obsidian recessed deep into the orbits so that the white glimmered like a reflection from the past.

"MacDiarmid," Conrad had once said when they were pinned down by sniper fire and the wounded screamed all around them, "MacDiarmid," he said in his death-rattle voice, "If I'm hit in the jungle and you run out of food, kill me and eat my flesh and make bullets from my bones. Promise me."

MacDiarmid had promised and for that one moment, under the palm trees, rockets exploding in the dusky sky, they had come close to being close.

That was before Guatemala. A lot of things had changed after Guatemala. Julie had divorced him. Mark had, no doubt, come to view him as a ghost who returned every few months to haunt them, not in any way a normal father. After Guatemala, Conrad was...different. He couldn't speak and his hair had gotten sparse, his fingers wrinkled and brittle. A former member of the platoon, Private Lightfoot, had remarked that the A.G. Conrad resembled an angel in remission.

Approximately two thousand feet from the touch-down site, as they jitterbugged and side-stepped their way deeper into hostile territory, Conrad shone a flashlight on MacDiarmid's face, then down to his map.

"Don't play games," MacDiarmid said. "You're distracting me."

The street had begun to narrow to a point, the houses crowding them on both sides. But still no people.  

A few minutes later, Conrad's ruined face again surfaced in the flashlight's glow and implored him to look at the map. So he did.

"Welcome to Bananama City," read the legend. "Vacation mecca of Central America." No grid. No rendezvous with other patrols. Just museums, ruins, amusement parks, and administrative buildings. Some shit in Washington had been jacking off again. MacDiarmid felt the same desperate sickness in his belly that he had endured during the darkest days of the divorce, when Julie had become as calm and serene as the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. and he was the one screaming. While Mark lay on the sofa with his thousand-yard-stare, the stare MacDiarmid had seen on corpses too many times before. The stare that made him stop screaming.

The sweat, the itchiness of his suit became unbearable. He wanted to hit someone, but there was only Conrad.

"Christ, Conrad," he said. "If we need a jolly green giant or a medivac, we are out of luck. We're out of luck anyway."

Conrad stared at him from eyes that never blinked and waited for instructions.

"No use turning back," MacDiarmid said. Conrad nodded, a puppet parodying strings. "But let me try HQ first."

Static on the shortwave. He adjusted the dial.

The silkiest, smoothest Latin voice he had ever heard cut through the static: "Soldiers. This is the voice of Bananama City and if you want peace come down to
La Siesta De La Muerte
and we will kiss you. We will lick you. We will love you until you are limp."

The voice gave him an erection. He thought of Guatemala, of corpses stacked together like knots of firewood. He changed the frequency. No use.

"Soldier," the voice crooned, and he shivered. "We love you," and his body tensed, his eyes half-closing. "Soldiers, come to us at
La Siesta De La Muerte
," and MacDiarmid shuddered, almost fell. He put a hand to his crotch, thought better of it, and danced on one leg as he untangled himself from the shortwave's wires. Finally, he managed to turn it off.

His heart quivered against his ribcage. He tried to slow his breathing. He could see the woman's face as clearly as if she had been standing beside him. He could see her face superimposed over images from his dreams: the desolate places on the edge of nowhere towns, miles of wheat where he could hide and be safe.

"All right," MacDiarmid said, taking slow, deep breaths. "All right." Moistness spread down his leg. The woman's voice echoed in his memory and he shivered.

Conrad nodded, a blade-length grin spreading across his face as he turned on his own shortwave, a slightly older model, and held it to his ear. MacDiarmid knew he was listening to the woman, could probably hear her more clearly, understand her on an intuitive level. He wanted to hear her voice, but fear stopped him. If he listened to her again, he might never listen to anything else.

Fifteen minutes later, they had still seen no one. Not a single drunk or bag lady or beggar. The hairs on MacDiarmid's neck began to rise. Conrad's nervous tic had come back from its Guatemalan grave, so that his head twitched from side to side, lessening only when he pressed the short wave to his ear. Sporadic small arms fire flared up in the distance, rose to a fevered pitch, and ended abruptly. To MacDiarmid, it felt like the calm before a storm, when the pressure drops and electricity crackles across the skin.

They came upon a courtyard overhung with banana trees and furnished with benches. A flashing neon sign advertised
La Siesta De La Muerte
and gave directions to the place in Spanish. The street lamps kept humming and going out.

About two dozen dead Santas lay sprawled across the far end of the courtyard in knots and tangles of limbs; army-issue flashlights shone against their faces. To one side, a portable radio played Madonna's "Material Girl."

MacDiarmid crouched under the courtyard archway, Conrad so exactly mimicking his position that he might have been MacDiarmid's shadow. They waited. Five, ten minutes. The
La Siesta De La Muerte
sign sparked red, crickets jumping up against it.

At nineteen minutes, a shape stirred among the bodies. MacDiarmid and Conrad both shot it, though MacDiarmid believed only he had been on target. Conrad covered MacDiarmid's back while MacDiarmid examined the body.

"Shit!" He rocked back on one knee and laid down his M-16. "It's a GI, Conrad." A Santa Claus. A real sailor-boy type in MacDiarmid's book: blue eyes, blond hair, perfect teeth, with two M-16 rounds buried in his guts. The flashlight gave him a shadow smile. Friendly fire. Every time it happened, MacDiarmid recoiled, had to remind himself that the weapons were too deadly to kill just the enemy. But it never helped much. What he hated as he rose was that it had begun to seem routine, that as he turned to face Conrad, he was already thinking of other things. What Julie and Mark were doing on Christmas Eve. Probably bundled up next to the fireplace like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Conrad laughed his head off as MacDiarmid took the grunt's pulse. A dry, soundless laugh as MacDiarmid let the arm drop to the tile floor: laughing until the tears glistened on his midnight face, the eyes so distant MacDiarmid could see only a hint of pupil against the bone of forehead and orbit.

On the radio, the song ended and the voice of the seductress, ten times more alluring than Madonna caressed the airwaves: "Poor, confused soldiers. So confused. So alone. You should come to us to relax. Put down your weapons and come to
La Siesta De La Muerte
. In the red lights,
waiting for you
."

MacDiarmid groaned and fell into a crouch beside the body. This time the feeling went deeper, into the core of who he imagined himself to be: love, not lust. The voice was sugar on satin, sweeter than he could imagine; yet it turned him inside out. In her voice, he saw the faces of the thousand women he had desired in his lifetime. In her voice, he saw the women he had made love to. He saw a fallow field, the ridged lines of dirt reaching to the horizon. He saw himself walking in the field, the wind blowing through him. Far, far away from the battles and the marching boots and the uniforms starched tight. The Dream. It made him tremble. It made him doubt his sanity as he knelt over the dead G.I.

He shot the radio, and felt better. The neon sign hissed and spat. He shot that, too.

Silence.

Except for Conrad, laughing as if he really were Santa Claus.

MacDiarmid's hatred of Conrad boiled over and he knew that he wanted—needed—to shoot Conrad. Conrad was part of the problem. But shooting Conrad wouldn't solve anything. He had already shot Conrad, in Guatemala, and it had only made things worse.

"Shut up," MacDiarmid said. Just that small rebellion, "Shut up," and it did not feel like nearly enough. A ghost at his back. A ghost on his back. A ghost on his shortwave with a voice like deep penetration.

As they left the courtyard, the night pressing in around them, MacDiarmid tried not to think about the dead men. None of them had even a flesh wound. Just a GI with two M-16 clips in him.

And still, not a soul on the streets.

A half-mile later, MacDiarmid heard a hissed word, "
Chingada!
," from ahead of them, and hit the ground, Conrad beside him. Conrad pointed past a wall lined with ragged Rambo posters. He held up seven fingers, shadow-puppeted a rifle.