”I hear you.“
”But that ain't why Sonny's back.“ I stared at him, open-mouthed. His eyes had the dead quality of ball bearings. He breathed loudly through his nose.
”Back?“ I said.
”Get you some Q-Tips, open up the wax. Don't tell me what I seen.
Look, chief, till you been down in the bush with the Indians, done a few mushrooms with these fuckers, I'm talking about on a stone altar where their ancestors used to tear out people's hearts, don't knock what somebody else tells you he sees.“
”You lost me.“
”I saw him at a camp I use out in the Atchafalaya. I looked out in the trees, inside all this hanging moss, there was a swarm of moths or butterflies, except they were on fire, then they formed a big cluster in the shape of a guy, and the guy walked right through the trunk of a tree into the water. It was Sonny Marsallus, he was burning like hundreds of little tongues of flame under the water. I ain't the only one seen it, either.“
His hand was squeezed like a huge paw around his beer bottle, his mouth an expressionless slit.
”I think we're talking about an overload of acid or steroids, Emile,“ I said.
”You get word to Sonny,“ he said. ”That Mennonite's words .. . they were a curse. I'm saying maybe I'm damned. I need time to get out of it.“
His breath was rife with funk, his eyes jittering, riveted on mine.
”What Mennonite?“ I said.
Sometimes you pull aside the veil and look into the Pit. What follows is my best reconstruction of his words.
Chapter 26
I HAD THIRTY guys strung out on the trail in the dark. It sounded like a traveling junkyard. I stopped them at the river, told the translator, Look, we got a problem here, two more klicks we're in Pinkville South, know what I'm saying, we go in, make our statement, then boogie on back across the river, the beer is five hours colder and we let the dudes from Amnesty International count up the score. In and out, that's the rhythm, none of our people get hurt, even the volunteers we took out of the last ville don't need to walk through any toe-poppers. I'm talking to guys here who think the manual of arms is a Nicaraguan baseball player. Look, ace, you got to understand, I didn't target the ville, it targeted itself. They were giving food to the people who were killing us. We warned them, we warned the American priest running the orphanage. Nobody listened. I didn't have no grief with the Mennonite broad. I saw her in the city once, I tipped my hat to her. I admired her. She was a homely little Dutch wisp of a thing working in a shithole most people wouldn't take time to spit on. The trouble came from a couple of liaison guys, officers who spent some time at a special school for greasers at Benning, listen, chief, I was an adviser, got me,
I didn't get paid for interfering, you see these guys walk a dude into a tin shed that's got a metal bed frame in it, they close the door behind them, you'll hear the sounds way out in the jungle and pretend it's just monkeys shrieking. Ellos! they'd yell when we came into the ville, and then try to hide. That was our name. As far as these poor bastards knew, I could have been Pancho Villa or Stonewall Jackson.
Look, it got out of control. We were supposed to set up a perimeter, search for weapons, take one guy out in particular, this labor organizer, one object lesson, that's all, they used to call it a Christmas tree, a few ornaments hanging off the branches in the morning, you with me, but the guy runs inside the church and the priest starts yelling at our people out on the steps, and pop pop pop, what was I supposed to do, man? Suddenly I got a feeding frenzy on my hands. You got to look at the overview to see my problem. It's in a cup of mountains, with nobody to see what's going on. That can be a big temptation. In the center of the ville is this stucco church with three little bell towers on it. The priest looks like a pool of black paint poured down the steps. The streets run off in all directions, like spokes on a wheel, and the guys did the priest are scared and start popping anybody in sight. Before I know it, they're down all the spokes, deep in the ville, the circus tent's on fire and I'm one fucking guy. Geese and chickens are exploding out of the yards, pigs squealing, women screaming, people getting pulled into the street by their hair. She comes around a corner, like she's walking against a wind and it takes everything in her to keep walking toward the sounds that make most people cover their ears and hide. I ain't ever going to forget the look in her face, she had these ice blue eyes and hair like white corn silk and blood on her blouse, like it was thrown from an ink pen, but she saw it all, man, just like that whole street and the dead people in it zoomed right through her eyes onto a piece of film. The problem got made right there. I pushed her hard. She had bones like a bird, you could hold her up against a candle and count them with your finger, I bet, and her face was a little pale triangle and I knew why she was a religious woman and I shoved her again. ”This is an accident. It's ending now. You haul your butt out of here, Dutchie,“
I said.
I squeezed her arm, twisted her in the other direction, scraped her against the wall and saw the pain jump in her face. But they're hard to handle when they're light; they don't have any weight you can use against them. She pulled out of my hands, slipped past me, even cut me with her nails so she could keep looking at the things she wasn't supposed to see, that were going to mess all of us up. Her lips moved but I couldn't understand the words, the air between the buildings was sliced with muzzle flashes, like red scratches against the dark, and you could see empty shell casings shuttering across the lamplight in the windows. Then I heard the blades on the Huey before I felt the downdraft wash over us, and I watched it set down in a field at
the end of this stone street and the two officers from the special school at Benning waiting for me, their cigars glowing inside the door, and I didn't have any doubt how it was going to go.
They said it in Spanish, then in English. Then in Spanish and English together. ”It is sad, truly. But this one from Holland is communista.
She is also very se rio with friends in the left-wing press. Entiende, Senor Pogue?“
It wasn't a new kind of gig. You throw a dozen bodies out at high altitudes. Sometimes they come right through a roof. Maybe it saves lives down the line. But she was alive when they brought her onboard.
Look, chief, I wasn't controlling any of it. My choices were I finish the mission, clean up these guys' shit and not think about what's down below, because the sun was over the ridges now and you could see the tile roof of the church and the body of the labor organizer hanging against the wall and Indians running around like an ants' nest that's been stepped on, or stay behind and wait for some seriously pissed-off rebels to come back into the ville and see what we'd done.
Two guys tried to lift her up and throw her out, but she fought with them. So they started hitting her, both of them, then kicking her with their boots. I couldn't take it, man. It was like somebody opened a furnace door next to my head. This stuff had to end. She knew it, too, she saw it in my eyes even before I picked her up by her shoulders, almost like I was saving her, her hands resting on my cheeks, all the while staring into my eyes, even while I was carrying her to the door, even when she was framed against the sky, like she was inside a painting, her hair whipping in the wind, her face jerking back toward the valley floor and what was waiting for her, no stopping any of it now, chief, and I could see white lines in her scalp and taste the dryness and fear on her breath, but her lips were moving again while I squeezed her arms tighter and moved her farther out into a place where nobody had to make decisions anymore, her eyes like holes full of blue sky, and this time I didn't need to hear the words, I could read them on her mouth, they hung there in front of me even while the wind tore her out of my hands and she became just a speck racing toward the earth: You must change your way.
Chapter 27
AND I had breakfast the next morning at Victor's on Main. It was cool inside, and the overhead fans made shadows on the stamped tin ceiling.
”What'd he do then?“ Clete said. ”Got in his car and drove away.“
”He confesses to a murder, tells you he sees flames burning under the water, then just drives away?“
”No, he repeated the Mennonite woman's words, then said, “How's that for a mind-fuck, chief?”