I’ve been down these rivers before, I’ve smelled this tropical stink in a dozen different wars, this mixture of heat and fever and diarrhea, I’ve come across the same bloated bodies floating in the green water, I’ve seen the tiny dark men and their delicate women hacked apart a hundred times if I’ve seen it once. I’m a fucking war tourist. My bags have stickers on them from Cambodia, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Laos, El Salvador, and all the other pertinent points of no return. I keep telling myself, enough of this bullshit, your turn to cover the home front, where nobody gives a damn and you can write happy stories about girls with cute tits and no acting ability, in-depth features on spirit channeling and the latest in three-piece Republicans who do it to the public doggie-style and never lose that winning smile, but I always end up here again, whichever Here is in this year, sitting around the pool at the Holiday Inn and soaking up Absolut and exchanging cynical repartee with other halfwits of my breed, guys from UPI or AP, stringers from Reuters, and the odd superstar who’ll drop by from time to time, your Fill-In-The-Name-Of-Your-Favorite-Blow-Dried TV Creep, the kind of guy who’ll buy a few rounds, belch platitudes, and say crap like, Now Katanga, there was a real war, before going upstairs drunk to dictate three columns of tearstained human interest. I used to believe that I kept doing all this because I was committed, not a pervert or deluded, but I’m not too sure about that anymore.

A few years back I was in Guatemala City: Mordor with more sunshine and colonial architecture, diesel buses farting black smoke, and a truly spectacular slum that goes by the nineties-style name of Zone Five. I was just hanging out, doing yet another tragic piece on the disappeared, dodging carloads of sinister-looking hombres in unmarked Toyotas, and pretending to myself that what I was going to write would Make A Difference, when this colleague of mine, Paul DeVries, AP, a skinny, earnest little guy with whom all the Guatemalan girls are in love because he’s blond and sensitive and in every way the opposite of the local talent, who tend early on to develop beer guts along with a mania for sidearms and a penchant for left-hooking the weaker sex…DeVries says to me, “Hey, Carl, let’s haul our butts down to Sayaxché, I hear there’s been some kinda fuckup down there.”

“Sayaxché?” I say. “What could happen in Sayaxché?”

Sayaxché’s a joke between me and DeVries, one of many; we’ve been covering back-fence wars together for four years, and we’ve achieved a rapport based on making light of every little thing that comes our way. We call Sayaxché “the one-whore town,” because that’s how many ladies of the evening it supports, and she’s no bargain, with horrible acne scars and a foul mouth, screaming drunk all the time. The town itself is a dump on the edge of the Petén rain forest, with a hotel, a regional bank office, whitewashed hovels, an experimental agricultural farm, a ferry that carries oil trucks across the Río de la Pasión on their way to service the ranches farther east in the jungle, lots of dark green, lots of starving Indians, Joseph Conrad-land, what could happen?

“Forget it,” I tell DeVries at first.

But I’m getting fatigued with the disappeared, you know; I mean what’s the point, if they’d been disappeared by magic everyone would love to hear about it, but another tragedy, more endless nattering of miserable Third World gossip…ho hum, and so I end up hopping a DC-3 for Flores with DeVries, then it’s a bus ride on a potholed dirt road for an hour, and we are there, drinking beer and smoking on the screened verandah of the Hotel Tropical, a turquoise cube on the riverbank with three-dollar rooms and enormous cockroaches and framed photographs everywhere of Don Julio, the owner, a roan-colored man with gold chains and a paunch, posing proudly with a rifle and a variety of dead animals. We’re listening to ooh-ooh-ah-ah birds and howler monkeys from the surrounding jungle, staring at the murky green eddies of the River of Passion, trying to pry some information out of Don Julio, but he has heard of no fuckup. He’s a real stand-up guy, Don Julio. Hates commies. One of those patriotic souls who will in drunken moments flourish his mighty pistola and declaim, “Nobody takes this from me! A communist comes on my land, and he’s a dead man.” And so he’s doubtless lying to us in order to protect his pals, the secret police. He shrugs, offers more beer, and goes off to polish his bullets, leaving me and DeVries and a Canadian nurse named Sherril—she’s on her way south to do volunteer work in Nicaragua—to indulge in the town’s chief spectator sport, which is watching the oil trucks rolling off the ferry getting stuck in this enormous pothole, which is artfully placed at the end of the dock and the beginning of a steep incline so that it’s the rare truck that avoids getting stuck. In front of the bank across the street, a two-story building of pink cement block, some Indian soldiers with camo gear and SMGs are advising the driver of the current truck-in-distress on possible methods of becoming unstuck; they favor a combination of boards and sand beneath the tires, and rocking back and forth. The driver, who’s been frustrated now for more than an hour, is close to tears.

“Well, this is fucking terrific,” I say to DeVries; he’s ten years younger than me, and our relationship has been established so that I have the right to express stern fraternal disapproval. “There’s no end of newsworthy material to be found here.”

“Something might turn up,” he says. “Let’s hang for a while and see what surfaces.”

“What’re you guys looking for?” Sherril asks. She’s long, she’s tall, she’s looking good, she’s got light brown hair and no bra, and she’s waiting for this guy who promised to paddle her upriver to the Mexican border to see the Mayan ruins at Yaxchilán but hasn’t showed up yet and, being two days late, probably won’t show at all; she acts very engaged-disengaged, very feminine-in-control, like I want to do my thing with the rebels so I can live with myself, you know, and then raise my children to love animals and never say bad words in Calgary or somewhere, and me, I’m beginning to think that if she’s stupid enough to go paddling up the River of Doom with some sleaze she met in an Antigua bar, she’ll be idealistic enough to choose to sleep with a war-torn journalist such as myself. I can tell she’s impressed by my repertoire of cynicisms, and there is definitely a mutual attraction.

“We heard there was some trouble here,” I say. “Soldiers all over.”

“Oh, you must mean out at the farm,” she says.

DeVries and I exchange glances and say as one, “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” she says, “but a lot of soldiers were out there the other day. I think they’re still there. They’d have to come back through here if they left.”

The farm is, like Sayaxché, a kind of joke, though not so funny as the one-whore bit. Some years before in a canny exercise of graft, the Banco Americano Desarrollo, the leading development bank in the region and thus first among many in the economic villainy that maintains the status quo of death squads and inhuman poverty throughout Central America, all in the cause of keeping the USA safe from Communism and the killer bees or whatever, negotiated an agreement with the then chief of corruption in Guatemala, a president by the name of Ydigoras Fuentes; this agreement traded the rights in perpetuity to oil leases in the Petén in return for what the agreement called an aggressive US policy directed toward land reform and agricultural development, a policy that—behind a veil of wonderfully vague promises—actually promised only to establish one experimental farm, this being the one in Sayaxché. It employs thirty Guatemalans and is considered a model of sanitation and efficiency; land reform and agricultural development are, needless to say, still a good ways off.

Wellsir, DeVries and I are hot to trot on out to the farm and see what’s cooking, but Sherril tells us we’ll never make it…not in the daytime, anyway. Too many soldiers blocking the roads. She knows a way, however; if we wait until night, she’ll take us. It seems that while waiting for her tardy tour guide, she ran into a right-wing nasty from Guat City who owned a ranch downriver and was dumb enough to go for a jungle walk with him. All he talked of were the discos, Cadillacs, his many girlfriends, and she thought him a fool, not recognizing that such fools are dangerous. When he tried to put a move on her, she was forced to run away and lose him in the jungle, and so discovered a nifty secret route to Ye Olde Experimental Farm, which appeared to be heavily guarded.

There are journalistic ethics involved here, we realize. Should two guys who’re wise to the way of the world let this naïve Calgarette lead us into the mouth of hell at the risk of her all and everything? Probably not. But this is show biz, right, and so, rationalizing the shit out of the situation, we say, okay, honey, what an adventure we’ll have! We drink beers, watching oil trucks buck and hump in the Pothole of Death, and we wait for nightfall. Toward dusk I take a little walk with Sherril, tell her sad stories about the death of grunts, and am rewarded for my valorous past by several deep wet kisses and proof positive of her no-bralessness. “God!” she says, flushed and dewy with delight, as we stroll arm in arm toward the hotel. “God, I never expected to meet somebody like you in this awful place.” There is, I realize, vast potential here. Who says Canadians can’t kiss?

At this point it all stopped being a joke. It really hadn’t been much of a joke up until then, but this is show biz, right, and I just wanted to get you to here. I don’t know what to tell you people. I’m probably coming off in all this as wearing the moral superiority hat, but it’s only defensiveness. See, I’m just so used to waxing passionate and having you look down your noses at me as if to say, Interesting Specimen, or My Goodness, he’s certainly opinionated, or Yawn, boring, so the West is in decline, so what, know where we can cop some Ecstasy, or Jeez, I mean it’s too bad and all, but I don’t wanna hear it, I work hard all the livelong while that lucky old sun just rolls ’round heaven all day, and when I get home at night, I wanna kick back, pop a cold one, and be entertained. So what do I tell you people? I can’t argue with you. You either give a shit or you don’t, and nothing I say is going to change your mind. But if it’s entertainment you want, I suggest you take a walk around, say, the vicinity of Tolola in El Salvador, where you can see the intriguing results of a foreign policy that has Apache helicopters dropping forty thousand pounds of bombs on the countryside every month, repeating the tactic we used in Vietnam to destroy popular support for the VC (oh, yeah!), in this case, the FMLN, and in the process causing one-fifth of an entire nation to become refugees. It would be a most entertaining walk. See the empty towns littered with skeletons! See the curious collection of left hands rotting in a basket in front of the bombed church! See the village of legless men! If you liked The Killing Fields, you’ll love Tolola!

Seriously, folks, it will live in your memory.

The smell alone will make it An Experience.

But I digress. Maybe the fact is that in the United States it’s become easy to achieve moral superiority, even for fuckups like myself. In that case, I suppose I would do well to finish my story quickly and let you get back to your MTV.

Off we went, trudging through the jungle, following Sherril’s perfect denim-clad butt through the slimy night air. It took us almost two hours of steady humping to reach the farm, vampire mosquitos, creepy scuttlings, and when we spotted lights shining through the foliage, we crept up to the margin of the jungle, went flat on our stomachs, and peered through a bed of ferns. Personnel carriers with M-60s mounted on the rear, about a dozen altogether, ringed a one-story building of white stucco: the farm office. The lights proved to be spotlights and were aimed at a field of what appeared to be agave…though God only knew why anyone would want to cultivate agave. About fifty or sixty soldiers were visible, and none of them looked to be having big fun; they were all on alert, fanned out in front of the office, their guns trained on the field. It was very weird.

I don’t know what we would have done. Nothing, probably. No way I was planning to get any closer. The chances are we would have gone back to town and done a little investigative reporting. But free will did not turn out to be an option. A few minutes after we had reached the farm I heard at my back the distinctive snick of an automatic weapon being readied for fire, and then a voice telling us in Spanish to lie with our faces down and our arms spread. Moments later, we were hauled to our feet, blinded with flashlights, and, despite crying, “Americanos, Americanos,” we were herded roughly by a group of soldiers toward the farm and into the office building. Laid out in the dirt beside the door was one of your basic Central American vistas: a row of bullet-riddled naked bodies. The soldiers hustled us past the bodies before we could get a good look at them. Sherril started to object, but I pushed her along, whispering for her to keep quiet. Inside, we were met by another basic CA element, your sadist officer, this one a major named Pedroza who would have scored high in a General Noriega look-alike contest: the pitted skin, the vaguely Oriental cast to the features. He gazed dreamily at us, visions of cattle prods and Louisville Sluggers dancing in his head; his eyes lingered upon Sherril.

It may seem that I was leaping to conclusions concerning the major, but not really. He had attained high rank in one of the most conscienceless and brutal military forces in existence, and one does not do that without having caused a world of torment; his face had the cruel sleekness of someone who has indulged in torture and enjoyed it. There is a slowness, a heaviness, attaching to such men, a bulky slovenly grace like that of an overfed jungle predator, one whose kills have come too often and too easily. To anyone who has seen them in action, they are inimitable; their evil dispositions as manifest as are their beribboned and bemedaled chests.

Pedroza asked us a number of questions and was, I believe, about to begin getting physical, when a distinguished silver-haired man in his early fifties entered the room. On seeing him, I felt greatly relieved. He was Duncan Shellgrave, a vice president with the development bank. His nephew was a friend of mine, and I’d stayed at his house in Guat City on a couple of occasions.

“What the hell’s going on here, Duncan?” I said, hoping aggressiveness would establish some tenuous spiritual credential.

“Just take it easy, Carl,” he said, and told the major in Spanish that he’d take care of this.

The major, with a despondent sigh, said, “As you will,” and Shellgrave led us into the adjoining office, a white room with a window of frosted glass and an air-conditioned chill.

“We’re having a little problem,” Shellgrave said, favoring us with his best loan-denied smile, indicating that we should take chairs. “I’m afraid you’ll have to sit it out in here. Otherwise Major Pedroza will be quite annoyed.”

There were two folding chairs; I left them to Sherril and DeVries, and perched on the edge of the desk. “What kind of problem?” I asked.

Another smile, hands spread in a show of helplessness.

I should tell you a story about Shellgrave to illustrate his character. A week after the Nicaraguan revolution, which I’d covered for a number of leftist rags, I was passing through Guat City when I ran into Shellgrave’s nephew and he suggested we take dinner at his uncle’s; he thought it would do his uncle a world of good to hear the straight shit concerning the state of affairs in Managua. Well, we got to the house, typical American paranoid chic with guard dogs, high walls topped with broken glass, and lots of electronic security, and when Shellgrave heard I’d just come from Managua, he said, “My God! You’re lucky to be alive. They’re slaughtering people in the streets down there.”

I knew that this was absolutely not the case, but when I attempted to persuade Shellgrave of this, he put on that bland smile and said, “You must not have seen it. They were probably steering you away from the action.”

I assured him that I’d been all over the streets; I’m no chump for the Sandinistas, but as revolutions go, Nicaragua had started out as a pretty clean one, and nothing like Shellgrave had suggested was going on. Still, I wasn’t able to convince him. The fact that I’d just come from Managua seemed completely irrelevant to him; he gave his CIA informants ultimate credibility and me none. It didn’t suit his basic thesis to believe anything I said, and so he didn’t. He wasn’t stonewalling me, he wasn’t playing games. He simply didn’t believe me. Men like Shellgrave, and you’ll find them all over Latin America, they have a talent for belief; they know they’re right about the important things, the big picture, and thus they understand that any information they receive to the contrary must be tainted. They thrive on the myth of realpolitik, they dance with who brung ’em, and their consciences are clear. They are very scary people. Perhaps not so scary as Major Pedroza and his ilk, but in my opinion it’s a close call either way.

I knew there was no use in badgering him for details; I stared at the white walls, tried to cheer up Sherril with a wink and a smile.

DeVries started questioning Shellgrave, and I told him, “Don’t waste your time.”

He got angry at me for that; he pushed back that blond forelock that drove all the girls at the University of San Carlos to delirium, and said, “Hey, you may have burned out, man, but not me. This is more than a little hinkey here, y’know. This is some bad shit. Don’t you smell it?”

“The man”—I pointed at Shellgrave—“is not responsible. For him, heaven’s a room with a view of Wall Street. He doesn’t know from hinkey. He’s eaten so many people he thinks it’s normal.”

Shellgrave’s smile never wavered; he may actually have been pleased by my characterization.

“See there,” I said to DeVries. “He’s fucking beatific. He knows the empire’s crumbling, and that it’s his sacred duty to hold on to the last crumb for as long as he can.”

But DeVries, God bless him, was a believer; he kept after Shellgrave, though without intelligent result.

The shooting began about ten minutes after we’d entered the white room. Caps popping, that’s what it sounded like above the shuddery hum of the air conditioner, and then the heavier beat of the M-60s. Sherril jumped to her feet, and Shellgrave, smiling, told her not to worry, everything was all right. He believed it. He wanted us to believe it. For our own good.

“So what’s that?” I asked him. “The sound of Democracy in Action?”

He shook his head in bemusement: I was an incorrigible, and he just didn’t know what to do with me.

The screaming began about three minutes after the shooting, and Shellgrave’s reaction to this was not so calm. He stood, tried peering through the frosted glass, and that failing, started for the door, stopped, then went for it and locked it tight.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “Everything’s all right.”

Sherril said, “What is it? What’s happening?”

Her face was the color of cheesecloth, and her hands were twisting together; DeVries, too, looked shaky, and I wasn’t feeling so hot myself.

“Yeah, what is happening?” DeVries asked Shellgrave.

Shellgrave was standing at the center of the room, his head tilted up and to the side, like a man who hears a distant call.

The screams were horrid, throat-tearing screams of pure agony and fear; they were either drowning out most of the gunfire, or else there weren’t as many people firing as there had been. Then somebody screamed right outside the window, and at that Shellgrave bolted for a filing cabinet, threw it open, and began stacking papers on the desk. I picked one up, saw the word mutagenic before he snatched it from my hand.

I still believed we were going to survive, but my faith was dwindling, and maybe that was why I decided to live in ignorance no longer. I shoved Shellgrave hard, knocking him to the floor, and began leafing through the papers. He tried to come at me again, and I kicked him in the stomach.

DeVries and Sherril came to stand beside me. I couldn’t make much sense out of the papers, but they appeared to outline a project that had been going on for twenty years, something to do with a new kind of food and its effects on a local settlement of Indians, who—being severely malnourished—had probably leaped at the chance to eat the shit.

“Jesus Christ!” said Sherril, staring at one of the documents.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Wait!” She began going through more of the papers.

Shellgrave groaned, said, “Those are classified,” and this time it was DeVries who kicked him.

There was a sudden intensification of gunfire, as if the tide of battle had turned.

“God,” said Sherril weakly, and dropped into Shellgrave’s chair.

“Tell us, damn it!” DeVries said.

“I think,” she said, and faltered; she drew a steadying breath. “I don’t believe this.” She looked at us hollow-eyed. “Mutants. The food’s worked terrible changes on the second generation. The brain tissue’s degenerated. The children of the ones who first ate the food, they’re idiots. There’s some stuff here I can’t understand. But there’ve been changes in the skin and the blood, too. And I think…I think they’ve become nocturnal. Their eyes…” She swallowed hard. “They’re killing them. They’ve stopped feeding them, and they can’t eat anything else but the plant they grow here.”

I kneeled beside Shellgrave. “And now they’re trying to kill your ass. That’s them outside, right?”

He was having trouble breathing, but he managed a nod; he pointed to the papers. “Burn ’em,” he wheezed.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Sure thing.”

It suddenly struck me as being metaphorical, us being in that cool white room, insulated from the screams and the gunfire and the monstrous dying that was happening out in the humid heat of the jungle. It was very American Contemplative, it was the classic American circumstance. All my years of filing horror stories, stories that had nothing of the bizarre technological horror of this one, yet were funded by equally demonic evil, stories that ended up in some city editor’s wastebasket…I guess it was all this that allowed me then to editorialize my own existence. This was, you see, a particularly poignant moment for me. I realized the horror that was transpiring outside was in character with all the other horrors I’d witnessed. I’m sure that reading this as fiction, which is the only way I can present it, some will say that by injecting a science-fictional element, I’m trivializing the true Central American condition. But that’s not the case. What was going on was no different from a thousand other events that had happened over the previous hundred and fifty years or so. This was not the exception, this was the rule. And it displayed by its lack of contrast to other horrors the hideous nature of that rule. The excesses of United Fruit, the hellish sadism of men such as Torrijos, Somoza, D’Aubuisson, and thousands of less renowned minions, the slaughters, the invasions, the mass graves, the dumps piled high with smoldering corpses, cannibalism, rape, and torture on a national scale, all thoroughly documented and all thoroughly ignored, all orchestrated by a music of screams like that now playing…this was merely part of that, a minor adagio in a symphony of pain, the carrying-forward of a diseased tradition.

I understood that whoever won this battle would have little sympathy for journalists, and in this DeVries was way ahead of me. He’d dug out a pistol from the paperstorm of Shellgrave’s desk, and after sticking it in his belt, he picked up a folding chair, told us to head for the trees, and then swung the chair at the window, clearing away shards of frosted glass. I clambered through, helped Sherril out, then DeVries—he had a folder of pertinent papers in one hand. After the coolness of the room, the fetid heat nearly caused me to gag. Glancing at the field beyond the office building, I spotted dozens, no, hundreds of dark and curiously twisted naked figures scampering through the agave; some were kneeling and tearing at the leaves, and there were bodies scattered everywhere, many showing bloody in the spotlights—the sort of flash Polaroid that takes about a second to develop fully in your mind and stays with you forever after, clear in all its medieval witchiness and savage detail. It was about fifty yards to the trees, and I thought we were going to make it without incident; all the screams and shooting were coming from the front of the office building. But then there was an agonized shout behind me, and I saw Shellgrave, who had struggled out the window, being dragged down by a group of the twisted figures. Blood on his face. The next moment more of those figures were all around me.

Since the spotlights were aimed toward the field, it was fairly dark where we were, and I never did get a good look at our attackers. I had the impression of something resembling a hard bumpy rind covering their faces, of slit eyes and mouths, and punctures for nostrils. Even for Indians, they were tiny, dwarfish, and they couldn’t have been very strong, because I’m not very strong and I knocked them aside easily. There were, however, a lot of them, and if it hadn’t been for DeVries I’m sure we would have died. He started firing with Shellgrave’s pistol, and, as if death posed for them a great allure, they left off clutching at me and Sherril, and they went for DeVries. I grabbed Sherril’s arm and bolted for the jungle. We were about sixty or seventy feet in under the canopy when I heard DeVries scream.

I’d been friends with DeVries for—as I’ve said—four years, but our friendship went by the boards, replaced by panic, and with Sherril in tow, I kept running, busting down rocky defiles, scrambling up rises, stumbling, falling, yelling in fright at every hint of movement. We must have been in flight for about five or six minutes when after a spectacular fall, rolling halfway down a hill through decayed vegetation and ferns, I discovered the mouth of a cave.

The limestone foundation of the Petén is riddled with caves, and so this was no miraculous occurrence; but being out of breath and bone-tired, I viewed it as such at the time. The opening, into which my legs had wound up dangling at the end of my fall, was narrow, choked with vines, no more than a couple of feet wide, but I could sense a large empty space beyond. I cleared away the vines, caught Sherril’s hand, and led her inside. Cool musty smell, water dripping somewhere near. I held up my cigarette lighter for a torch, illuminating a portion of a large domed gallery, the walls white and smooth, except for the occasional volute of limestone; against one wall was a tarpaulin with the edge of a crate showing beneath it. I clicked off the lighter, felt my way toward the tarp; when I reached it, using the lighter again, I examined the crates—there were four of them, all stamped with code designations and marked US AIR FORCE. There was the distinct odor of machine oil.

“What are they?” Sherril asked.

“Smells like weapons,” I said. “Automatic rifles, I hope.”

I began working at one of the crates, prying at the boards, but I wasn’t making much headway. Then I heard a noise from outside the cave, something heavy moving in the brush. There was a large boulder beside the mouth, and in hopes that we could block the entrance with it, Sherril and I hurried back across the cave; but by the time we reached the entrance, the source of the noise was already halfway in, blocking out the faint gleam of moonlight from above. We flattened against the wall next to the opening. A shadow stepped into the cave, too big to be one of the Indians; a beam of light sprang from its hand. I made out camouflage gear, a holstered pistol, and knowing that we had no choice but to attack, I jumped the man, driving him onto his back. Sherril was right behind me, clawing at his face. The man cursed in Spanish, tried to throw me off, and he might have if Sherril hadn’t been bothering him. I managed to grab his hair; I smashed his head against the stone; after the third blow he went limp. I rolled away from him, catching my breath. Sherril picked up the flashlight and shined it on the man’s slack pitted face. It was Major Pedroza. That made sense to me—the major was likely stockpiling weapons for his own little coup, or else was making a neat profit selling to the contras or some other group of courageous freedom fighters.

While I hadn’t had time to absorb DeVries’s death, the whole affair of the experimental farm, it seemed those things were moving me now, that and everything else I’d seen over the years, all the bad history I’d reported to no avail, and it also seems that Sherril was directed by similar motives, by anger born of disillusionment. Although she hadn’t seen as much as I, although I hadn’t given her the respect she deserved, I realized she had the instincts I’d once had for compassion, for truth, for hope. Now, in a single night, all those instincts had been fouled.

We went about tying up Pedroza with lengths of vine that I cut from around the cave mouth, using the knife I’d taken from him. I felt stony and emotionless, as if I were wrapping a package of meat. I turned him onto his belly and tied his arms behind him; then I tied his legs and connected them to a noose that fitted tightly around his neck. If he struggled, he would only succeed in strangling himself. I was sure of one thing—no matter what happened to me and Sherril, Pedroza was going to die. This may strike some as unfair. What certain knowledge, they may ask, did I have about him? He certainly had done nothing to me. But as I have detailed earlier, he was no innocent. In truth, it should have been Shellgrave whom I was preparing to kill; he was the true villain of the piece, or at least the emblem of true villainy. Pedrozas would be impossible without Shellgraves. But the major would do, he would satisfy. I tore my shirt to make a gag and stuffed it into his mouth, lashing it in place with my belt. This accomplished, Sherril and I pushed the boulder to seal off the entrance; then we sat down to wait.

Neither of us said much. I was busy dealing with my desertion of DeVries; I knew I could have done nothing for him, but knowing that was little help. I saw him in my mind’s eye firing Shellgrave’s gun, a glimpse of blond hair, a pale strained face, then I saw him swarmed by the Indians, and then I heard him scream. I should have been used to that sort of quick exit; I’d had it happen many times before, but this one wasn’t going down easily. Maybe I’d been closer to DeVries than I had realized, or maybe it was the nightmare surrounding his death that made it seem insurmountable.

I’m not sure what was running through Sherril’s mind, but I felt that the currents of our thoughts were somehow parallel. She began to shiver—it was dank in that cave—and I put an arm around her, let her lean against me. I asked her if she was okay, and she said, “Yeah,” and snuggled up close. Her clean girl smell made me wistful and weak. Soon after that I kissed her. She pulled away at first, and said, “No, don’t…not now.”

“All right,” I said evenly; in my mind I was ready to go along with her, but I kept my hand on her breast.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I don’t know, I just needed to touch you.”

I took my hand away, but after a moment she put it back, held it against her breast. She made a despairing noise.

“I guess I need it, too,” she said. “Isn’t that something?”

“What do you mean?”

“To want this now. Isn’t that”—she gave a dismayed laugh—“wrong or something.” Another laugh. “Wrong.” She said the word as if it had gained a whole new meaning, one she was only now capable of understanding.

I had no answers for her. I kissed her again, and this time she kissed back; not long after that we spread our clothing on the stone for a mattress and made love. It was the only hope we had, the only thing we could do to save ourselves from the blind shadows and bloody shouts thronging our heads, and as a result our lovemaking was rough, more an act of anger than one of compassion. Involved in it, too, was the mutuality we’d had to begin with, the thing that might have grown to health, but now—I thought—fed by the food of that grotesque night, would bloom twisted, dark, and futureless. And yet by engaging that mutuality, I had the sense that I was committing to it in a way from which it would be impossible to pull back.

It must have been while we were making love that the Indians found us, because when I surfaced from the heat and confusion that we had generated, I heard their voices: odd fluted whispers issuing not from the cave mouth but from somewhere overhead, leading me to realize there must be a second entrance. We struggled into our clothes, and I broke into the crates with Pedroza’s knife; I had his pistol, but I doubted that would be sufficient firepower. The first crate contained antipersonnel rockets; I had no idea of how to use them. The second, however, contained M-16s and full clips. I inserted a clip into one and made ready to defend. I was surprised that they hadn’t already attacked us, and when after several minutes they still hadn’t made a move, I shined Pedroza’s flashlight toward the ceiling.

In the instant before they ducked away from the second entrance, which was halfway up the side of the dome, I saw the glowing yellow cores of their eyes; the sight was so alarming, I nearly dropped the flashlight. I handed it to Sherril and fired a short burst at the opening; it wasn’t very big, a mere crack, but it might, I thought, be large enough to admit those twisted bodies. The drop was about forty feet.

“The papers,” I asked Sherril, “did they say anything about whether they’d be able to take a long fall?”

She thought it over. “There was some stuff about low calcium content. Their bones are probably pretty brittle.”

“They might think of lowering vines.”

“Maybe, but according to the papers they’re…they’re animals. Their IQs aren’t measurable.”

I heard a strangled noise and had Sherril shine the flashlight toward Pedroza; his eyes were bugged, his face suffused with blood.

“Be careful,” I advised him in Spanish. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

His eyes looked more baleful than those of the Indians.

“I think we’ll be all right,” Sherril said. “If we can hold them off till morning, we’ll be all right.”

“Because they’re nocturnals?”

“Uh-huh. They can’t take much light. They might be able to wait until midmorning, what with the canopy, but by noon they’d be in terrible pain.” The flashlight wavered in her hand. “They burrow.”

“What?” I said.

“They move around at night, and when daylight comes, wherever they are, they dig burrows in the dirt, they cover themselves with dirt and sleep…like vampires. They scarcely breathe at all when they’re asleep.”

“Christ,” I said, unable to absorb this, to feel any more revulsion than was already within me.

I glanced at Pedroza; he had a lot to answer for.

Sherril was looking at him, too, and from the loathing that registered in her expression, I knew that Pedroza would be in for a bad time even if I weren’t there.

We sat down by the boulder, keeping our weight against it in case the Indians tried to move it; we kept the light shining on the entrance overhead, and we talked to drown out the incessant and unsettling fluting of their voices, not speech in all likelihood, mere noises, the music of a pitiless folly reverberating through the cave. I told Sherril stories, but they weren’t the stories I would have told her under other circumstances. They were stories about the brave good things I’d seen, stories that still hoped, stories that gave storytelling a good name, and not my usual rotten-with-disgust tales of Businessmen From Hell and their global sleights-of-hand. Those stories were the best parts of my life passing before my eyes, and it wasn’t that I was afraid of dying, because I thought we were going to make it; it was that the last of my foolish ideals were giving up the ghost, having their final say before wisping up into ectoplasmic nada. Although I’d convinced myself that I’d given up on my ideals a long time before, I believe it was then that I utterly surrendered to the evil of the world.

It was the same for Sherril. She talked about nursing, about the good feeling it gave her, she talked about her home, her old friends, but she kept lapsing. I would have to tune her in with questions as if her station were fading from the dial. I watched her face. She was more than pretty, so damn pretty I couldn’t believe that I’d had the fortune to make love to her—a stupid thing to consider, but stupid thoughts like that were occurring constantly. Her eyes were green with hazel flecks in the irises, her hair was silky, but her most attractive feature was that she knew what I knew. She was changing before my eyes, toughening, learning things that she shouldn’t have had to learn all at once; she was a nice girl, and it was a shame for her to have to understand so young what a shuck niceness was. All the while as I listened, I could hear the sick music of the doomed tribe wanting to kill us, Pedroza grunting as he tried to enlist our attention. None of that mattered. In a way, I was almost happy to be up against it, to know how bad it could get, and yet there I was, still able to look at a pretty woman and hope for something. I was aware that even this could be taken from me, but I was beyond being afraid. And I was learning, too. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, I was learning that you can fall in love through hate, by being with someone in a crucible of a moment when everything else is dying and the only thing left is to try to live. Or maybe it wasn’t love, maybe it was just the thing that takes the place of love for those who have surrendered.

Just before dawn, some of the Indians began dropping through the crack. About twenty of them in all made the jump, but no more than a third of that number survived the landing, and they were incapable of swift movement, their bones shattered. The first one down startled me and drew a shriek from Sherril; but after that it wasn’t even dramatic, merely pitiful. The wounded ones crawled toward us, their razor-slit mouths agape to reveal blood-red tongues within, their strangely unfinished faces displaying what struck me as a parody of desperation. I finished them off with bursts from the M-16. I didn’t know what had caused them to try, nor did I know why they had stopped, why they didn’t just keep coming like lemmings; perhaps both the jumping and the stopping had been stages along the path to their own surrender. When I was sure that no more would be coming, I dragged their bodies deeper into the cave, out of sight around a bend; I tried to avoid looking at them, but I couldn’t help noticing a few details. Shriveled genitalia; a faint bluish cast to the skin as if they suffered from cyanosis; the S-curved spines, the knotted shoulder blades. They were light, those bodies, like the bodies of hollow children.

The sun rose about a quarter of six that morning, making a dim red glow in the crack overhead, a slit evil eye, but the voices kept fluting for a while after that. Pedroza’s eyes pleaded with us; he had wet his pants, the poor soul. We watched him wriggle and grunt; we made it a game to see which of us could get him to produce the most interesting noise by doing things such as picking up the knife and walking behind him.

Eventually we let him alone and sat talking, planning what we’d do once we left the cave: avoid Sayaxché, strike out for Flores, maybe hitch a ride with an oil truck returning from the jungle.

Sherril looked at me and said, “What are you going to do afterward?”

“I’m not staying around here. The States…maybe I’ll go back to the States. How ’bout you? Nicaragua?”

She shook her head. “I can’t think of anywhere that sounds right. Maybe home.”

“Calgary.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s Calgary like?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, then laughed. “I don’t know.” Then after a pause. “The Rockies, they’re close by.”

I thought about the Rockies, about their clean, cold rectitude, their piney stillness, so different from the malarial tumult I had traveled in for all those years. I said their name out loud; Sherril glanced at me inquiringly.

“Just seeing if it sounded right,” I said.

It was almost noon before we decided it was absolutely safe to leave the cave. I went over to Pedroza and unplugged his mouth. He had to lick his lips and work his jaw for a few moments in order to speak; then he said, “Please…I…please.”

“Please what?” I asked him.

His eyes darted to Sherril, back to me.

“Don’t shoot me,” he said. “I have money, I can help you.”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” I said. “I’m going to leave you tied up here.”

That was a test to see his reaction, to determine whether he had any allies left alive; if he flunked I intended to shoot him. His fear was no act, he was terrified. He babbled, promising everything, he swore to help us. I hated him so much, I cannot tell you how much I hated him. He was all the objects of my hate.

“I could shoot you,” I said. “But I think I’ll just leave you here. Of course you’ve got an option. I bet if you jerk real hard with your legs, you can probably kill yourself.”

“Listen,” he began.

I clubbed him in the jaw with the rifle butt; the blow twisted his head, and he had to fight to keep from overreacting and strangling himself. I kept talking to him, I told him if he confessed his sins I might give him a chance to live. I was very convincing in this. He was reluctant at first, but then his sins came pouring out: rape, massacre, torture, everything I’d expected. He seemed emptied afterward, drained of strength, as if the secret knowledge of his crimes had been all that sustained him.

“Say a hundred Hail Marys,” I told him, and made the sign of the cross in the air. “Jesus forgives you.”

He started to say something, but I stuffed the gag back in.

Sherril was staring at him, her face cold, unrelenting.

I kissed her, intending to cheer her, boost her spirits, but when I looked at Pedroza, I had the idea that the kiss had wounded him. I kissed her again, touched her breasts. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them very wide; he wriggled a bit. Sherril knew what I was up to, and she was all for it; her antipathy for the major was as strong as mine. We spread our clothes on the stones and we made love a second time, showing Pedroza the sweetness that life can be, letting him understand the entire pain of his fate—once again it seemed the only thing we could do. He was nothing to us, he was simply everything, an abstract, a target as worthlessly neutral as a president.

By chance, we were making love beneath the crack in the limestone, and a slant of dusty sun like those you might see falling through a high cathedral window fell across Sherril, painting a strange golden mask over her eyes and nose, the sort of half-mask worn by women at carnivals and fancy balls, creating of her face a luminous mystery. And what we were doing did seem mysterious, directed, inspired. It was no performance; it was ritual, it was a kind of hateful worship. We were very quiet, even at the end we stifled our cries, and the silence intensified our pleasure. Afterward, though I could hear the glutinous noise of Pedroza’s breath, it was as if we were alone with our god in that holy dome of stillness, the white cold walls like the inside of a skull, and we were its perfect thoughts. I felt incredibly tender. I caressed and kissed her, I accepted her caresses and kisses, bathed in that streak of gold, illuminated, blessed in our purpose. I suppose we were mad at that moment, but we were mad like saints.

We dressed, smiling at each other, unmindful of Pedroza, and it wasn’t until we began shifting the stone back in front of the cave mouth that we looked at him. He was still pleading with his eyes, wriggling toward us and whining, making choked gargling noises. I felt no sympathy for him. He deserved whatever was in store for him. He was trying to nod, aiming his eyes at the gun, begging me to shoot him.

“Adiós,” I said—a word that means “to God,” an ironic conceit of the language in these godless times.

We shifted the stone into place.

Before we set out for Flores we were brought up short by what we saw just beyond the mouth of the cave. The side of the adjoining hill was dotted with mounds of black dirt, each one about five feet long. There were hundreds of them, tucked in among ferns, under rotten logs, beneath bushes. Like infestations of ants I’d seen in South America. It was horrible to see, and thinking about those tiny deformed bodies lying moribund beneath the dirt, I became sick and dizzy. The ultimate attitude of surrender. I suppose I could have been merciful and shot them as they lay; the crates in the cave contained a sufficiency of death. But someone might have heard, and, too, I had gone beyond the concepts of mercy and humanitarian aid. I wasn’t in the game anymore. I felt bad about that, but at least I’d tried, I had spent years trying, whereas most people surrender without even making an effort. There was nothing I could do except to leave. So we walked away from the cave, from Sayaxché, from Guatemala, from those pathetic little things with slit eyes and malfunctioning brains in their sleep of dirt and nightmares, from Major Pedroza in the final white church of his terror, from the whole damn world. And because we had nowhere we wanted to go any longer, we went there together.

Sometimes I look at Sherril, and she looks at me, and we both wonder why we stay together. We’re still in love, but it doesn’t seem reasonable that love should survive an act of surrender as complete as the one we made, and we keep expecting some vile mutation to occur, the product of that night in the jungle beyond Sayaxché. I suppose that’s why we don’t have any children. We don’t think about all this very much, however. Life is sweet. We’ve got money, food, a future, a cabin in the Rockies not far from Calgary, work we care about—though perhaps not with the same passion we once evinced. It’s good to make love, to walk, to smell the wind and watch the sun on the evergreens. We’re not really happy, too much has happened for us to buy that chump; but we neither one of us ever required happiness. It’s too great a chore to be happy when the world is going down the tubes, when the shitstorm is about ready to come sweeping in from the backside of creation and surprise us with a truly disastrous plague or cosmic rays from hell, and there are signs in the sky that it’s time to get right with God or maybe make a few moves to change things, and all you hear is the same placid generic bullshit about shoring up the economy and possibly kicking a few bucks over to the extremists who would kind of like to have breathable air and keep the ice caps from melting and would prefer not to alienate the rest of humanity by supporting every sadistic tumor in a uniform who decides he’s going to be God of Mangoland and run the cocaine franchise for the South Bronx in return for saying No to the Red Menace. Central America isn’t just Central America. It’s what’s happening, it’s coming soon to your local theater, and if you think I’m overstating the case, if you don’t see the signs, if you haven’t been taking notes on the inexorable transformation of the Land of the Free into just another human slum…well, that’s cool. Just kick back, and pop yourself a cold one, maybe catch that ABC special on the Starving Man and get a little misty-eyed, it’ll make you feel cozier when it’s time for “Monday Night Football” or “Miami Vice,” like you’ve paid your dues by almost feeling something.

And don’t worry, everything’s all right.

I promise I won’t mention any of this again.

Adiós.