“Damn if I don’t believe I can smell ’em,” Rickey said. “Y’know the smell I’m talking about? That oiled-up leather and aftershave smell them state pigs have?” He spat again. “You shouldn’t go fucking over your friends, man. It just don’t seem to never work out.”
I took another stab at explaining things to myself. Witches and spacemen and scum of the earth. Somewhere in all that slop of life was a true thing. I knew in my gut it was an amazing thing, unlike any you’d expect to meet up with on your way through hell, and I believed if I was to chew on it a time, jot down a list of what I saw and what I thought, I might understand who Ava and Carl and Squire were. But I’d always been bound for this patch of chilly ground. It wasn’t worth pursuing how I got there, whether it was some old dog of a reason bit my ass or fate jumped the curb and knocked me down an unknown road.
A thought of Leeli twinged my heart. Appeared I’d cared about that old girl somewhat deeper than I knew.
The air horn of an eighteen-wheeler bawled out on the highway, something huge going crazy, and trailing behind it, almost lost in the roar of tires and engine, a siren corkscrewed through the night.
Rickey spat up more blood.
Like they say, shit happens.
I figure that about tells it.
THE DRIVE-IN PUERTO RICO
Things went well for Colonel Galpa after the war. Indeed, they went so well that wherever he traveled he became the object of a celebration. Whether in the north of the country with its gloomy mountain villages, or in the volcanic central region, or in the jungles along the coast, his arrival was a signal for the townspeople to set aside their daily concerns and honor the national spirit that had produced such a remarkable hero. For ten years he rarely passed a night without a splendid hotel room, a surfeit of food and drink, and a beautiful woman for a companion, these the gifts a grateful citizenry offered in tribute to the defining act of his heroism, the shooting down of three enemy jets during the single air battle of the war with Temalagua. Sometimes, upon learning the specifics of the colonel’s heroism, strangers might suggest that a tally of three was insufficient to warrant such prolonged reverence; but their judgment failed to take into account the fact that the country was small, with a tradition poor in heroes (unmartyred ones, at any rate), and when viewed in this light, Colonel Galpa’s hour in the sky assumed Herculean proportions.
At one point nearly a dozen years after his moment of glory, the colonel returned to his parents’ home in San Pedro Sula, intending to settle there and assist his father in running the family flour mill. The mill was in financial straits, yet this was not Colonel Galpa’s sole motive for returning. He was weary of parties, of boring speeches and floral tributes offered by schoolgirls; he wanted a family of his own, and friends. The ordinary consolations of an ordinary life. But at the time the government was undergoing a crisis of confidence, and by promising that certain valuable contracts would be awarded to his father, the leaders of the party in power persuaded him to go back out onto the road so as to remind the people of their one actual achievement: the winning of a back-fence war. In truth, there were many—notably the owners of the bars and clubs and hotels frequented by the colonel—who would have been happier had he remained in San Pedro. Like the colonel, albeit for more venal reasons, they had reached the conclusion that enough was enough, and they frequently expressed the opinion that the colonel’s heroism must have been an aberration, that he was at heart a freeloader; yet none dared to voice such complaints in public, where they might have had some effect, and so, despite this attendant irony, due in large part to politics and inertia—estates often confused for one another—the colonel continued on his joyless rounds.
On occasion, someone unacquainted with the colonel would ask the identity of the slender graying man with the complexion of an Indio puro sitting quietly in a secluded corner of a noisy party, and when they were told this was the famous Mauricio Galpa, they might say, “What curious behavior for the guest of honor!” “Oh, the colonel’s simply tired,” would be the response. Or, “The colonel’s got a touch of dysentery.” Or perhaps the person to whom the comment had been directed would make a fist with his thumb extended and put the thumb to his lips, implying that the colonel had overindulged in drink. But the reality of the situation was that while Colonel Galpa had once exulted in his good fortune and availed himself of every pleasurable opportunity, he had come to the conclusion that there was something ghoulish about these quasi-ritualistic bacchanals inspired by the deaths of three men whose faces he had never seen. He felt a certain disquiet regarding his fame, and had taken to remembering the three men in his prayers; but since he was not a particularly religious sort, this merely exacerbated his emotional state and caused him to think of himself as a hypocrite.
In August of the millennial year, as he had done for the previous nineteen years, Colonel Galpa traveled to Puerto Morada on the Caribbean coast. Each August, bureaucrats from the capital who could not afford better would swarm into the town to take their vacations—vacations in name only, because they spent their days sitting on the porches of the little hotels along the beach, typing reports commissioned by their superiors who had fled to Cannes or Majorca or Buenos Aires to escape the heat. With the bureaucrats came the whores, hundreds of them from every corner of the country, and following the whores came the journalists, both groups seeking a drunken bureaucrat from whom they could extort something of value. From the government’s perspective, August in Puerto Morada was the perfect showcase for the colonel. There were any number of gatherings at which he might be feted, and usually one or two unoccupied journalists could be persuaded to feature him in a nostalgia piece. For these exact same reasons Colonel Galpa loathed visiting the town and always managed to arrive late at night, when no one was likely to notice him.
The hotel where the colonel stayed each August was a venerable two-story colonial of white stucco with a red tile roof, shaded by bougainvilleas and palms. When he had first checked in nineteen years before, he had been given a fine bedchamber and sitting room overlooking the beach; these days, however, he chose to occupy the smallest room on the ground floor facing inland; this was not a consequence of his diminished status, but due to the fact that it housed a considerable population of lizards, many of which crawled in over the palmetto fronds that drooped through the window. Wherever he spent the night, be it Puerto Morada or the capital or a village in the Miskitia, the colonel enjoyed sitting on his bed with a single lamp lit and watching the lizards that clung to the walls, their bright sides pulsing with breath. He had no scholarly interest in them; he could barely tell a skink from a chameleon. He liked them because they decorated his solitude without disturbing it. Over the years he had developed a peculiar affinity with them. When he entered the room they neither froze nor kept their distance as they might in the presence of another human being, but instead perched on his nightstand and ran across his feet and otherwise continued on their tremulous mosquito hunts. Though he was a practical man who rejected the animist traditions of his forefathers, he allowed himself to flirt with the notion that lizards might be spiritual functionaries whose purpose was to oversee the travels of those fated to be exiles in the country of their birth.