The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories (7 page)

"Seven armed men. Regulars, right?"

Conrad nodded.

"Disciplined. Tight formation?"

Conrad nodded again.

"Cover?"

A shrug. Conrad indicated a door ten feet ahead, across the street. It was open a slit.

"Let's do it."

As they sprinted for the doorway, doubled over, MacDiarmid cursed the army engineers whose job it had been to cut the power lines; the yellow glow from emergency generators still strobed over them, concealing, revealing, and concealing them all within seconds. Each time the light hit, MacDiarmid flinched, expecting enemy fire.

Inside, air conditioning pressed against MacDiarmid's skin and he fought an urge to sneeze. The antiseptic coolness took away the itchy, hot irritation. It made him sleepy.

Their flashlights revealed a long hallway with doors on either side. White stucco over wood. MacDiarmid turned off his flashlight as he pushed against the first door on the right. It opened.

"Perfect," MacDiarmid whispered to Conrad. A double-paned window at the room's far end reflected uneven yellow light. As they moved toward it, MacDiarmid stumbled over what appeared to be sacks. MacDiarmid edged up to the window and peered out onto the street.

The seven soldiers were disciplined types, no doubt taught in the U.S. when the President and Zapata were cock-to-balls close. Each soldier had a poultice tied around his neck, edged with feathers and pig's teeth, and they secured each foot of ground before advancing. MacDiarmid, palms sweating, found he feared their thoroughness. Their faces were blank and grim, set without compromise. The night became blacker in their wake and MacDiarmid let out his breath when they moved on, out of sight. Conrad even cracked a smile.

MacDiarmid never understood what happened next. Like his dream of wheat fields, it was something dimly luminous, diaphanous as the flickering lamps or the light in Conrad's eyes.

As he stepped away from the window, meaning to walk through the door, the room felt stuffier, rank,
lived-in
.

A voice said, "Feliz Navidad, Santa Claus."

MacDiarmid flicked on his flashlight. He shone it toward the voice. He saw disheveled black hair framing a pale, boyish face.

"Mark!"

It couldn't be Mark.

Someone—Conrad?—laughed and the boy's face fell away from the circle of light and MacDiarmid emptied his magazine, as though Conrad's laughter had decided everything for him, and when he finished with the first magazine, he clicked in another and kept firing until the second magazine was spent and his finger jammed on the trigger.

His hands shook. He heard the woman's voice saying, "In the red lights, in the red lights," Mark asking, "What's the army?," Julie saying nothing at all, staring out a window and smoking a cigarette as they finalized the divorce papers.

The flashlight hit the floor as MacDiarmid loaded a third magazine. At the sound, he seized up, his finger reflexively twitching like a lizard tail.

Conrad panned his flashlight across the room. Blood sprayed the walls in violet streaks. Viscera glistened from bellies. Arms had been torn off. Legs were a welter of bullet holes. The child who had spoken appeared to be asleep against a side wall, his brains spackled across his forehead. A mass sobbing rose from the wounded. In the murky light, they resembled ghosts or ghouls more than children. Bile scorched MacDiarmid's throat. The fields, the empty spaces, rushed away from him. For a long moment, he believed he might faint or die. But he did not.

Only when Conrad started to take trophies did MacDiarmid return, from a place so anonymous and frozen and unalive, that he could only vaguely remember the experience, or that such a place might exist within him.

"The soldiers!" MacDiarmid hissed in Conrad's ear. He shook Conrad as best he could shake a dead person. "They aren't fools!
You stupid fuck!
If they heard the..."

The moans. The crying.

They ran, Conrad reluctantly following MacDiarmid's lead. They doubled back, waded through streets where the plumbing had failed and rats swam through sewage. They scrambled over rooftops, jumped into backyards strewn with laundry lines. Mortar fire rocked the ground. The swish of helicopter blades cut up the sky. The blaze of neon signs from abandoned shops reminded MacDiarmid of Saigon. It was too dark, the night so thick with humidity that he was choking on it.

As they ran, Conrad listened to his shortwave. MacDiarmid heard "
Love
," "
...soldiers
," "
we want you...
," the silken thread of her voice, moist and quick.  

Sanctuary took the form of a partly-looted appliance shop. MacDiarmid broke a window and they crawled inside, holed up near two televisions playing at low volume. MacDiarmid panted, his sides aching. He sagged against the wall and listened to the rumble of support planes as they dodged anti-aircraft fire. The
phpht phpht
of tracer bullets stitched itself into his eardrums.

"Deep shit," he said to Conrad. His voice, he knew, was lined with fatigue. "We're in deep shit if Southern Command ever finds out."

Conrad shrugged.

"Maybe you're right." MacDiarmid struggled out of his Santa suit and threw it to one side. It was flecked with mud and dirt and blood.

"Feliz Navidad,"
the boy said, his face shining under the circle of the flashlight.

MacDiarmid made a choking sound.

"Should we...we should just stay here until we get support, don't you think?" The sour ache had soaked into his bones. His hands shook, ever so slightly, and he could not control them.

Conrad shrugged again as he listened to his shortwave. He had turned the volume high and MacDiarmid heard her voice, saying, "You don't want to fight. You just want to lie down and go to sleep. You just want us to comfort you..."

Comfort.

"Turn it off, Conrad."

Conrad's gun-metal eyes bored into him.

"Turn it off, Conrad. Now."

They watched T.V. The set on the right showed the President at a press conference. MacDiarmid turned up the volume and realized the President was talking about their operation.

Even now, the evil dictator dragged from his blasphemous lair. Our brave boys stabilizing the region for democracy. Remember Beirut? Never again! Don't cry for Argentina. Not this cowhand. The United States' best interests are served. By proctating American lives, we relieve the people of Bananama of this disciple of Hitler. Pure evil, guys and girls. I tell you what. His job is sniffing drugs. Well, we can no longer tolerate such a-buses in Central America. Sending them to our young people here in the United States...

A warm glow settled over MacDiarmid. It was still comforting to be able to listen to the half-truths, as if the President was watching over his soldiers. Once he had believed everything, had even believed he could have the army and a family too—that he had joined the army to protect his family, like a knight in the age of chivalry—believed so utterly that he had had no use for the normal talismans, no use for rabbit's feet or four leaf clovers. And now...now he had Conrad.

"I had to kill you, Conrad," he said. "I had to."

He felt himself growing sleepy, tried to fight it.

"Feliz Navidad,"
the boy said, his face shining under the circle of the flashlight.

"You were out of control."

If only the President could watch over him, then perhaps he could resist the call of the woman, of
La Siesta De La Muerte
, until it was all over. Only the meaning of the words escaped him...

MacDiarmid woke from dreams of the woman, interwoven with the flat, desolate landscapes, until it was her body that formed the rolling mesas, her skin that he ached to explore. He had begun his dream thinking of the President and then Mark, whom he had not seen for six months, but they had faded quickly enough.

He nudged Conrad.

"Fifteen minutes to rendezvous. Guess we'll have to miss it." The grinning rictus of skull through the weathered skin seemed reassuring, like a stuffed bear or other token of childhood.

Guatemala. Everything had changed.

Conrad nodded, pointed to the television screens.

The President still spoke on the right, but the visage of Zapata himself leered on the left. He looked worse than in his press photos. The man's face was pock-marked and he had adorned his body with the same poultice of feathers and teeth MacDiarmid had seen on the Bananamanian soldiers. Zapata held a chicken's carcass over his head so that the blood could splash down onto his arms and shoulders. He mumbled something under his breath and looked right out at both of them as if he could see into the looted shop.

Conrad made a whining sound.

Zapata picked up a doll and drove a needle through it. MacDiarmid realized he was leveling a curse. The doll wore a Santa Claus suit. MacDiarmid could not help laughing then and Conrad laughed his silent laugh, too, more, MacDiarmid thought, because
he
was laughing than because Conrad found it funny. Zapata stuck more pins in the dolls and MacDiarmid relaxed, slumped against the wall.

"The dumb fuck. We're in the wrong uniforms. He can't hurt us."

The President still rambled on, spouting numbers and plans and condolences and well-wishes and one-liners. His brisk, clear speech formed a counterpoint to Zapata's mumblings.

Suddenly MacDiarmid knew, knew with chilling certainty, that the President was combating Zapata's magic with his own voodoo, that his talk of technology and ships and planes and strategy was crowding out the black magic, protecting all the soldiers in danger.

"I hope the President has the balls for it," he said, to hear himself say it. The sweat was dripping into MacDiarmid's eyes—again. He saw the boy's pale face in the moment before the M-16 ripped him apart.

"It's hot," he said to Conrad. "Too damn hot."

Conrad said nothing.

On the TV, Zapata scowled and threw the doll across the room, off the monitor. Conrad nudged MacDiarmid in the ribs, a feather-light touch. Through the window, MacDiarmid could sense the night growing
thinner
, as if some vast presence, blotting out the stars, had stared in at them, until Zapata dismissed it with the same flick of his wrist that dismissed the doll.

Zapata took out another doll and another, until he had a dozen on the table in front of him, none with eyes or mouths, and all of them looking like a dog had chewed on them. The drug lord stitched them back together and then stitched each doll to the next until they formed one creature. The President began spouting instructions for microwave ovens—a spell with nonsense words—and the press began to fidget. They wanted world affairs, not cooking, but the President, his speech slurring, plowed on. The Secretary of State, visibly worried, came to stand behind the President. MacDiarmid felt nervousness uncoil from deep inside him. Zapata grinned. He held up the dolls. An aide poured blood over them. Zapata's eyes, small and dark, looked directly into him.

Then the power clicked off.

But Zapata's face hovered in the darkness of the TV screen and MacDiarmid heard the woman's voice saying, out of the night, "Soldiers. In the red lights. We love you. We love you..."

It was only after about ten seconds that MacDiarmid's legs responded to his will and lifted him up and he ran, out of the shop and into the street. Conrad followed close behind.

On the street, a mob blocked the way: a hundred or so civilians armed with machetes and rocks and baseball bats. Conrad trained his M-16 on them and, after a moment's hesitation, so did MacDiarmid.

Silent but for the tramp of feet, the mob began to advance. Their faces were pasty white and their expressions blank. Conrad tensed, standing his ground, but MacDiarmid motioned him to step back.

"Too many, Conrad. There're too many"

He did not have the stomach for more carnage.

Conrad glanced over at MacDiarmid and slid the safety off of his M-16. MacDiarmid felt a compulsion to do the same.

From behind them, MacDiarmid heard, "Santa Claus? Feliz Navidad, Santa Claus?": the whisper of a death song, the echo of a cry from deep below the surface of a lake.

Conrad began to shake when he heard the low, quavery voice.

They turned together, as one, as they had in Guatemala, before MacDiarmid had put the bullet through Conrad's head and left him to die.

Conrad retched. But MacDiarmid laughed at first, for not only had each child been stitched back together, but they had been stitched to each other so that they formed a vast tableau of withered and decaying flesh, with a hundred eyes and fifty mouths, legs falling over legs, arms grappling, flailing, and still, somehow, moving forward, toward them. The beast left a trail of organs and limbs behind it, blood trickling from its bodies to coagulate in the soil. The hundred eyes focused on MacDiarmid and the fifty wounded mouths, the curved smiles, sang "Feliz Navidad" with a perverse innocence.

MacDiarmid felt a puff of air against his right ear and looked over in time to see Conrad, a hole blown in his head by his own .38, toppling to the ground. Conrad's mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping for air, and then there was only a smoke ring where his mouth used to be, and then dust.

Relief surged deep into MacDiarmid's sour muscles and gave him the energy to scream. His talisman and burden was gone. He had no protection now, to hold off the children or the night.

The
thing
made of dead children rolled and stumbled forward. He popped a flare and sent it arching into the sky, hoping that a Huey would see the flare. He emptied another magazine over the heads of the mob. It did not slow them.

The children began to howl, a sound he had heard only in nightmares, when his empty fields became fields of corpses.

The numbness sent a chill deep into his bones. His M-16 slid from his hands to the ground.

Then they were all around him, wet breath and clawing hands and small mouths with biting teeth. He flailed out, losing his balance, falling into the cold arms of the children. He thought he could see the lights of a Huey above him, far away, and hear the tremor of its breath, smell its gasoline musk, enticing: an angel armed with machine guns. He whipped his neck around so that they could not strangle him, but could not get free to signal the Huey.