Mingolla picked up the phone and listened.
‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice through long-distance static. ‘Hello.’
‘Who is this?’ Mingolla asked.
‘Why, David! Congratulations! You must have passed your test.’
‘Izaguirre?’
‘At your service.’
‘You set this up?’
‘I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I assume Don Julio attempted to subdue you with his mental gift… am I right?’
‘No,’ said Mingolla. ‘I came in and he was on the phone, so I hit him.’
‘I think you’re fibbing, David. How is Don Julio? Salvageable?’
Mingolla looked down at the plantation owner: he was in bad shape, pasty, sweating, and breathing shallowly. A little toy rightist with a silver snake in his head.
‘No matter,’ said Izaguirre. ‘I’ll send someone to check.’
‘You’re not too fucking clever,’ Mingolla said. ‘Don’t you think I know Ruy led us here? I see what’s going on.’
‘There’s no need to be clever. Whether or not you’re aware of your situation has no bearing on the dangers you may face.’
‘And I’m sure you’ve set plenty of traps.’
‘The world is a trap. You just happened to stumble into one of mine. Perhaps you’ll avoid the rest.’ Izaguirre chuckled. ‘I have better things to do than worry about you. You’re very strong, David, but you’re really not very important. There are only a few of your kind and many of us. We can control you.’
He hung up, and Mingolla knelt beside Don Julio, who arched his eyebrows, strained to speak. Groaned. Mingolla set about trying to wake him, but as he made contact, Don Julio’s mind winked out… like the hummingbird on the beach at Roatán. He felt for a pulse. Don Julio’s skin was remarkably cool, as if he’d been dead a long time.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ said Ruy behind him; he was flanked by Tully and Debora.
‘Heart attack or something,’ said Mingolla.
He added an imaginary gray goatee and wrinkles to Ruy’s face. No doubt about it. The resemblance to Dr Izaguirre was unmistakable.
‘Is he dead?’ Debora asked.
‘Yeah.’ Mingolla picked up Don Julio’s gun and stood. ‘Guess they don’t make right-wingers like they used to,’ he said, searching Ruy’s face for a reaction.
Ruy nudged the dead man’s arm with his foot. ‘Cono!’ he said, and spat. He smiled at Mingolla. ‘What you do, man? Scare him to death?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the gray light, the hills of Olanchito showed a ghostly leached green. Dirt trails wound through them, petering out into thickets and ledges, as if what they had once led to had been magicked away. Those nearest the sea were mounded sugarloaf hills, their crests bristling with stubby palms that from the coast road looked like growths of electrified hair; those farther inland were sharper, faced with granite, their peaks shrouded in rainclouds. For two days they followed the roads, and then they drove beyond the end of the roads into a wilderness whose jungles had overgrown the worst ravages of the war, but still displayed its passage in ways both subtle and distinct. For the most part—although occasionally they came across a ruin or a crater filled with ferns—everything looked normal. Trees were green, birds and insects clamored, streams plunged into waterfalls. Yet there was an air of evil enchantment to the place. It seemed the jut and tumble of the hills had been built up over a series of immense skeletons whose decaying bones pervaded every growth with wrongness. That wrongness was in the air, pressuring them, adding a leaden tone to the sunniest of days, heavying their limbs and making breathing a toil.
The Honduran hills gave way without visible demarcation to the hills of Nicaragua, and traveling through them took a further toll on their spirits; even Ruy grew silent and morose. It was slow going. They inched down steep defiles, got stuck in streambeds, spent hours getting unstuck, were blinded by squalls that transformed the windows into smeared opacities. Each time they chanced across a bombed village, it seemed a relief to have this hard evidence of war in that it dispelled the supernatural aura. Some of the villages were inhabited, and in these they would buy red gas that was stored in oil drums and was full of impurities. The people of the villages were timorous, living like monkeys in the ruins, peeking from behind shattered walls until their visitors had left, and nowhere did they receive a sincere welcome.
There was little privacy to be had, what with Ruy’s obsessiveness toward Debora and Tully’s ongoing need to discuss his troubles with Corazon; but sometimes at night Mingolla and Debora were able to slip away, to walk out from the campsite, to talk and make love. Mingolla continued to be confused by their relationship. The fact that love constituted for them an actual power obscured the more commonplace fact that love required a sequence of resolutions in order to prosper; and given the tenuousness of the circumstance, none of the usual resolutions merited real consideration. But he couldn’t help thinking about them, and when he did, when he looked at her and tried to imagine a future, it seemed inconceivable that they should have one. They were, he realized, scarcely more than children with guns, faced with a problem whose fantastic nature beggared logic; despite the proofs, he experienced moments when he was sure that everything they had learned was somehow in error. Trying to hold all this in focus, he would feel at sea, and forgetting the war, the unreliability of their companions, he would cling to Debora, as she did to him.
Nine days after leaving the coconut plantation, they came across a road. Not a track or an old contra trail, but an honest-to-God road of yellow dirt, wide and wonderful to drive, beginning in the middle of nowhere and winding off through the hills. Mingolla assumed it was a military road intended to connect bases that had never been constructed, because though it was plain from the wildness of the bordering jungle that it had been long since abandoned, no weeds or any other growth marred its smooth surface, and this testified to the use of chemicals available to army engineers for just that purpose. They came to the road at sunset, and while they might have traveled on into the night with such a road, Mingolla decided it would be good psychology to make camp; that way, if the road ended after a few miles, they would at least have a bit of momentum with which to ease the rest of the next day’s travel. He pulled the Bronco up onto a hillside several hundred feet above the road, and they pitched their tents by a stream that had carved a ferny trench in the rock.
That night Mingolla and Debora walked down the hill and sat in the fringe of the jungle; from this vantage they could look down the road to where it curved up into a notch between the two adjoining hills. An egg-shaped moon lay on its side in the notch, and in its light the yellow dirt appeared richly mineral and moist, not like gold, but like manure of some sort, or the track of a giant snail that had gone south ahead of them. No insects, only the hissing vowels of the wind. The presence of the road made the emptiness bearable, and the quiet was so pervasive and deep, Mingolla imagined he could hear the great humming vibration of the earth. It felt wrong to talk amid this stillness, and they sat with their arms around each other, admiring the road as if it were something miraculous. Debora tucked her head onto his chest, and smelling her hair, feeling the steady hits of her heart, almost audible in the silence, it seemed that everything he had in life had acquired a comprehensible value. He believed he understood love. Not so as to be able to write a definition. But he thought that from this moment on he would be able to call it to mind as a conglomerate of imagery and sensory detail. Whatever love was, it was here, right now, conjured in identifiable form by the silence and the road and Debora’s heartbeat, by a thousand other variables.