Travellers May Still Return Page 3

  When I’m almost back at the house, I remember I’ve forgotten to frame a question. What did I want? This morning it had seemed clear. After Pit Meadows, Jesse never wanted another plan. A plan’s effectiveness, she said, as with any tool, demands participation, discussion, pros and cons, practice, agreement. And what’s the use?

  “Are you happy?” Sucre jumped from his blistering machine to my side. Something in me leapt, too, engaged with the fire behind his eyes. “Jesse is happy,” he said. “See?”

  We both watched Jesse slide down into the mud, barefoot, wearing floral cut-offs and a tank top.

  “What about you, lazy dog? Do you know why we are so happy?”

  I didn’t answer, and Sucre laughed. He and Jesse walked together toward the house.

  “A man is here,” I yelled. “A guy from a university.”

  Shouts and crashes came from the shack where Berman had spent the afternoon. A man screamed and a woman answered with single words in a low voice. An old woman ran from the adjacent hut, entered the fight briefly, then reappeared with the wrapped baby. She stood in the doorway, rocking the child. Behind her the young mother’s husband emerged roaring and Berman scrambled out holding his boots, avoided a kick, blinked at the sun, and wove in our direction.

  Sucre looked back at me, eyebrows raised, then turned to Berman. “Who are you?”

  Berman looked confused and rumpled. He kicked over a bucket, sat on it, and began to pull on his boots.

  “Who are you?” Sucre repeated.

  “My name is Berman. This road.” Berman shook back his hair and stared. “The road you are building is illegal, Mr Sucre. You will have to stop. We have notified Pedrarias. Call him, he will tell you to suspend work. The defiance of a court order would mean serious trouble for him and for you.”

  Sucre wrinkled his nose at Berman. “You have a court order?”

  “I have a letter from the head of my department.”

  Sucre winked at Jesse. “My wife will show you every courtesy,” he said. “I must thank you to keep away from me.” He thrust a finger in the direction of the jungle. “As for my road — I am tired. I have had a hard day. My wife will see to you. You have already met her brother.”

  Berman stood, sinking his heels into the boots. A smile played about his lips. “Mr Sucre, this is not your wife.”

  Sucre ignored him.

  “I understand you have a satellite phone,” Berman said.

  “Tomorrow. You and I may talk tomorrow. Before you leave.”

  And Sucre’s sausage fingers settled round Jesse’s neck, gently turning her, and they stepped across the deep ruts toward the house. Just then the husband flew from the shack and leapt onto Berman’s back, leapt away into the trees. A knife dangled from Berman’s shoulder. For a moment the violence seemed phoney, the knife a gimmick, a toy. The husband had embraced Berman, surely, only lightly touched the front of the white shirt inside his coat lapels. But the knife was real and Berman, stabbed, fell to his knees in the mud. The mother dashed forward from her hut, stopped just short of me and bent almost double, her hands vanishing into the long skirt between her legs. When I reached Berman, blood was quickly soaking the soft beige padded shoulder of his jacket.

  The middle of the night is completely silent. The utter stillness of two oceans and an arching sky. Silence that descends from stars meets in us a frightened silence. Five million years ago the land bridge wasn’t even here.

  The night sky that seemed, when I first saw it through those windows and that door, like a stage backdrop — such cool stars! — seemed real now.

  We were jammed into Sucre’s big hammock. I couldn’t get out even if I wanted to. We were trapped in Panama, trapped on this estate, trapped in Sucre’s hammock. Berman was groaning in my bunk at the back of the house. The village medicine woman had cleaned and dressed his wound after removing the knife and picking rust from deep inside. Now he slept face up, pale, in my bunk.

  The tide was high, nearly at the house poles; I could hear it churning. Jesse was asleep against my side. Sucre was soundlessly asleep half on top of her. His weight pinned both of us. I knew it was almost exactly between yesterday and tomorrow. After the weeping and discussion that had gone on late into the night, the shacks were quiet at last, the estate and village as peaceful as those spilled bones alongside Sucre’s road.

  “You didn’t ask your question, now it’s too late.” Less words than a curdling of the silence. Not unexpected, yet I was wrong about him being asleep. “Are you homesick, little dog?”

  “Not with Jesse here,” I whispered back.

  “Good,” he said. “Her tits are getting plumper. She thrives on rice and mussels and beans. She eats up this place.” He chuckled. “Pedrarias has a shipping container filled with clothes for her. It’s with the car. You should know something. You should know. You should accept that the past is finished with you.”

  “Te rogamos . . . Nos permitimos . . . ” Berman’s voice a hollow moan in the dark room, dreaming, delirious. “Santisima Virgen Maria. ¡Para tu hijo!”

  “Do you hate me?” asked Sucre, his hands digging. “If I were you I would hate me.” He pushed Jesse against me, her limbs and body pliant. “Do you want to know something else? I will tell you. You will never have revenge on those who have used you.”

  “Jesse has never used anyone.”

  “Women grow into their use and their using. Go on. Do what you want. They learn to want what men take. They learn.” He bulldozed her body, now conscious, at me. “Can you not do what you want? I think you are a sissy.”

  “We trust each other. Jesse and me. We look after each other.”

  “I think she looks after you.”

  “¡Dios! Para el Mundo Immaculado . . . Concepsión sin fin, pequeño eje . . . Santisima Virgen Maria . . . ” Berman’s voice now was pitched high, each syllable separate.

  “Fuck her.” Sucre reached between Jesse’s legs, cupped his hand under my balls. I shut my eyes. He pulled my cock forward. “Sissy boy. Do it. We are happy because the road is nearly finished. We will drive to the old port, you and Jesse and me.”

  My cock slithered in his hand, against Jesse. Sucre began to grunt. “Put it inside. It doesn’t matter. The future will finish with all of us.”

  “Te rogamos . . . Nos permitimos . . . ”

  Jesse got up before dawn. I watched her bend over the cot, raise a ladle of water from the pail on the floor to Berman’s lips. When next I woke it was light and I was alone in the big hammock. The medicine woman was on the veranda, talking in a low voice to Sucre. He raised his hand impatiently and she squeaked. Coffee was bubbling on the stove, the smell of it sharp in my nostrils. Jesse padded naked across the room toward the door. Berman’s face, bathed in sweat, turned; his eyes, wide and clear, watched her pull the old dress over her head.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Jesse Green,” she said. “How do you feel?”

  “Get me the phone. Please.”

  Sucre’s feet thumped across the veranda and down the steps. The woman brought in a bowl of hot water in which floated large bright green leaves. Jesse peeled off the shoulder dressing, dipped a cloth in the bowl and wrung it out. First sun struck the mangrove pools. The shoulder was bruised blue. The woman applied the leaves in an elaborate design on top of the wound. The red cloth splashed in and out of the red bowl. I listened to Jesse and the women talking as I pissed behind the flimsy wall at the back of the house, and understood that the husband had beaten and forgiven his wife and gone off to his uncle’s village. There was a black widow in the top corner of the back door. Sucre’s earthmover grumbled into life.

  “Will he die?” I asked Jesse.

  “Not today,” she said. “Apparently, tonight he will be close. He might die.”

  Jesse made tea and we sat on the veranda and watched the village women on their way to the mussel grounds. Sucre’s machine vanished over the hill in a cloud of smoke.

  “Why didn’t you go wit
h him?”

  “He’s pissed off. He didn’t want me.”

  “So everything has changed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Berman changes things how?”

  “Sucre’s nervous. He’ll push the road through fast now. Did Berman tell you anything?”

  “He says burial sites have been discovered, very old ones. Not from the cemetery. He has found urns.” I got the satchel.

  Jesse turned the ceramic cover in her hands. “You didn’t do what Sucre wanted,” she said. “Last night.”

  “He can’t control us.”

  “No. But he has to think he can.” She stood up and stretched her arms above her head. “Yeah,” she said. “The ship with the car has arrived. Pedrarias will be at the port in a couple of days.”

  The laughter of playing children flowed in waves from the village through the compound. Dogs barked in the distance.

  “I’m supposed to stay here. Give him water. Clean the wound. Keep him cool.”

  They were gone. All gone. Jesse left anyway and Berman was asleep or in a coma, so also gone. My face in the bit of mirror nailed to a post on the veranda told me nothing. In my old life I’d been the only familiar thing in an ocean of strangeness till I met Jesse who said she knew me as well as she knew what she looked like every second she was awake. A girl laughing in the cool meadows of my dad’s rented-out farm, drop-dead beautiful in faded jeans and halter-top, loose black hair caught with bits of straw. Sunlit, she worked alongside the men, as hard as they worked, and they took side looks at her supple body and her eyes flashed till sunset, and then yard lights, barn lights, dim lights inside the farmhouse brought out my fox caution. In the kitchen Mom and my sister kept vigil while we lay together in the dusty barn. When the farm was all mist, shadows and breathing cows, Jesse’d bare her teeth and tell me about the men who got her wasted and what they’d done to her. Each one a piece of shit, and okay, okay, and that way, and this way, and that’s how everything for us had fallen into a kind of shape. We said there was nothing in the universe but us. We didn’t need sex, and we would crow-fly to the equator. And now we were stuck at Estancia Pedrarias, empty. Sucre had his road, Berman his life, these women their village and children, Pedrarias his empire. Just for now. But Jesse was transforming. I was a homesick fox. Jesse said we can’t have children because we’re still kids and kids can’t have children. It was pissing rain. Tides swept in and out. Noise, silence. A confusion of colours, then darkness. I had thought the well water smelled like blood until the husband stabbed Berman and I got blood on my hands. Berman was more potent than water. He was like the men at home, and other men we’d met, vain and sly; yet he might have something special for us. Men, Jesse said, were vicious, therefore useful. What they want is in the earth, under the dirt, and they poke at the surface, shove it around, fuck it up. They make holes and tunnels, and you can sneak in and learn something and then crawl out when they’re busy filling their pockets. Jesse was the fledgling dragon on the whistle. The mangrove teeming with life, too wild, useless unless filled in. Maybe it was that simple. We just wanted to change, all of us, change into light, and it was time. Sucre said the convent sisters had been forgotten by God. Maybe they transcended. Jesse said we can all transcend if we let ourselves be. If we let ourselves be.

  After noon Sucre and Jesse returned. His eyes were glassy, and Jesse chattered like a bird. The road, they said, was rough, but complete and drivable, and tomorrow we’d leave for the docks to claim the car that’s been waiting for a week. We’d get to the car before Pedrarias landed at the airport on his private plane.

  Berman suddenly sat up. “Send the chopper, please send for it now.” Pale and crazy-eyed, he spat and crashed his teeth together. A boy outside was shouting: “New York City has been bombed!”

  Sucre went out to talk to the boy. Jesse removed the dry cloth from Berman’s forehead, rinsed it in cold water, wiped the sweat from his face and arms and chest.

  Berman said, “Call for the helicopter, I beg you,” and stared at her as she wet the cloth again, wrung it out, replaced it.

  “Ah, professor, you will not be able to sell your pots now,” Sucre said from the doorway. “This is the end of America, the beginning of freedom. We must party!” He slapped my back. “Lazy dog!” His arm dangling round my neck. “Americans are kids. They act and dress like kids. Surgeons make America look like a girl. That’s why everyone wants to fuck her. Jesus, bring wine!” He counted on his fingers who he had bribed: harbour police, customs, air traffic controllers, the ship’s captain, longshoremen. “Now I will take the car for myself,” he shouted. “And you know, Jesse, those clothes he bought for you? You will wear them for me. I will take you home, Jesse. And sissy-boy, I will take you home. We will all drive into the apocalypse.”

  5.

  In the night the young mother had gathered her belongings and child, Jesus told us at breakfast, and she’d walked with half the women of the village all the way to her husband’s village. Sucre, furious at this unauthorised use of his road, started drinking. He had been chugging beer on the veranda for an hour when Berman got up.

  “So professor, you stay with the living!”

  Berman sat on the top step of the veranda, very pale, his arm held stiffly to his side. “I will pay you to drive me to the hospital,” he said, without turning.

  Sucre lit a cheroot, blew smoke at the sun. “I would take you to the hospital, but I have no car, professor.”

  “You have a bulldozer.”

  “You owe us the favour of enjoying the life we have saved and not making demands.”

  “You should ask how much I would pay you.”

  “You should shut up and listen. Everything is changed today. Let me tell you. Do you know what happened when you were dreaming? Something big.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ah, now. Shall we tell him, Ken?”

  Jesse came out with a bowl and perched beside him and offered rice on her spoon.

  He ignored her. “I can get my hands on a lot of money.”

  “Are you stupid? You will die before you can pay me back. New York is gone. America is fucked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “New York is gone. The banks, Wall Street, disco dancing, tall hotels. I built the fucking road and I will use it once. The magic is to use things once, my friend. My road is cleared to the port. We will get Pedrarias’s car and drive north and scavenge through the ruins.”

  “That’s fine. Just get me to the port.”

  Sucre shrugged. “It’s out of my hands, professor. I’m not the one to bait, not any more. Try Pedrarias. He is a powerful man. Speak to him.”

  “Bring me the phone.”

  “Perhaps,” Sucre said.

  “What if Mr Pedrarias picks up the car before we get there?” Jesse said.

  Sucre set his empty bottle on the deck. “I took you in, didn’t I? Even this lazy dog. I built the road. Don’t forget.” He plucked the cigar from his lips, waved at the huts and trees, ocean and hills. “I was born here. This is my land. You are small people because you were born in a feeble land. You are small. You mean nothing.”

  He got up and stamped down the steps and went around back to piss. Berman sprawled against the wall, eyes closed. I looked at Jesse. I couldn’t take my eyes off Jesse. Light was splashing off her. She looked excited. Her eyes were glittering.

  When Sucre returned he took another beer from the cooler, drank from the bottle. He kicked Berman’s leg. “Was she worth being stabbed for, professor?”

  Berman opened his eyes and nodded slowly. Each sighed heavily. I had the feeling that Jesse and I were watching a movie, and that if one bad guy were to vanish it would destroy the other. It made me feel spaced, dizzy. Except for beer, I was empty, had no weight, so required no support. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know what I was and didn’t know what these men were, because they didn’t have a clue either, and they didn’t even know they didn’t know. They swaggered, heavy wit
h their lives, but right then they seemed quaint creatures, tender as snails.

  “She was simple,” said Berman, looking up, sly. “Simple.”

  “These peasants feel much.” Sucre dug his fingers into Berman’s good shoulder. “Was she as good as the wound is bad?”

  Berman flinched.

  “Look at this one.” Sucre pointed his thumb at Jesse. “You stay here and rot and she is turned on.”

  He started to laugh. He laughed and laughed, then Berman joined in. They were both laughing. Skeletal cows appeared on the crest of the hill, brown heads above the corn pointing this way and that. Berman groaned and cupped his sore shoulder.

  “It’s better to feel,” Jesse said.

  The men laughed harder. The cattle reminded me of the funeral urn — a living rim design on the horizon. Sucre got another two beers from the cooler, perched on the edge of his chair to open them. “Come on, drink, professor. If I tell you women are the second thing on every man’s mind, you’ll know the first thing is money, and working for it keeps you busy till you’ve used yourself up and you’re so tired you can’t even think about women. You were careless, but at least you are alive to tell the tale. So say to me,” he said, “how much can you promise me?”

  6.

  I didn’t learn the names of the trees. I didn’t learn the flowers or the birds. I didn’t learn the use of anything or the meaning of anything. I knew that this wasn’t Pit Meadows, didn’t need flowers or birds or trees to tell me that. Quick as a fox in only one way, I knew nothing except Jesse. She could topple towers in New York. She could mean anything, make anything happen. Next morning Sucre herded us like sheep into the glassed-in cab of his machine, crowded with screens and buttons. Berman lay propped up against our packs behind Sucre’s chair. He was awake at first, then, as we got going, climbing and falling like a cockroach across a bombed field, the blood quit his face and he went lily white, dozing, his head drooping forward as if he was curious about something, trying to make out a detail in an invisible book or map. Sucre, after all his talking, was quiet, his fingers tight on the controls, staring straight ahead. Jesse rode between his knees and I stood beside his armrest.