“Well,” Carbonell said after an awkward interval. “It’s been a pleasure, Colonel. But if you will pardon me, there is a lady in the back who demands my attention.”
They exchanged polite bows, then Carbonell went off with Canizales, who had stood by all the while, toward the rear of the establishment. The colonel finished his vodka and ordered another, wondering how much longer he needed to stay in order to satisfy the requirements of duty. He did not expend a great deal of thought upon Carbonell; he had known other brutal men during his days of service, and though he disapproved of their actions, he had accepted the fact that history seemed to require them. Three drinks, he decided. He would stay for three drinks. Maybe four. Perhaps it would not be too late to call his father.
“Colonel Galpa?” The slim brunette woman who had dragged Gammage off now took the barstool beside him. She was somewhat older than he had thought. Forty, perhaps. Attractive in a quiet way. Framed by her dark hair, her face was kept from being a perfect oval by a longish chin. With her small mouth and large brown eyes, she put him in mind of one of his high school teachers, a pretty, no-nonsense woman who had rarely smiled.
“I’m Margery Emmons,” she said. “CNN.”
The colonel saw his immediate future. An hour or two under hot lights, questions, a camera, an experience that would ultimately be reduced to a ten-second sound bite. Unpleasant, but it would thrill his nephews.
“I’d like to speak with you about Battalion Three-Sixteen,” Margery Emmons said.
That name put a notch in the colonel’s expectations and alerted him to danger. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I can’t help you.”
“You’ve never heard of Battalion Three-Sixteen?”
“You must realize, Miss Emmons, I’ve…”
“Margery… please.”
“Margery. You must realize that I have not been active in the affairs of my country since the war. Since my war. I am as you see. An exhibit, a public relations opportunity.”
“But you must have some knowledge of Three-Sixteen.”
“I probably know less than you. I know, of course, that they were closely involved with the contras during the eighties, taking their orders from the Americans, and that they have been accused of atrocities. That is all I know.” The colonel made his delivery more pointed. “As it was your country that commissioned these atrocities, you might do well to ask your questions in Washington. Information of this sort is widely disseminated there.”
“I hear you, colonel. But this is where the bodies are buried.”
He acknowledged the statement with a shrug and a “Yes, well…”
“If you knew anything, would you tell me?”
“That would depend on the circumstances under which you asked your questions.” He had not intended this to sound flirtatious, but now that it was out there, he could not come up with anything to say that would reduce its impact.
She smiled. “The question for me, then, would be, ‘Do I believe you know something that would be worth my creating such a circumstance?’”
“Probably not,” he said.
She patted down her hair, an unnecessary gesture—it was held by a gold barrette, not a strand out of place—and stood. “I’d better see to Jerry. I left him out back. He’s not feeling too well.” She extended her hand and he shook it, saying, “Good luck with your story.”
The colonel turned back to his drink, to a consideration of the woman. Margery. Perhaps, he thought, he had intended to flirt with her.
“Oh, colonel!”
She had stopped a few feet away.
“I’m staying at the Loma Linda.” Once again she smiled. “In case you remember something.”
When the colonel returned to his hotel that evening, he found the indigo lizard clinging to the wall beside the bathroom mirror. A little tipsy—it had been a while since he’d had four vodkas in such a short time—he put his face close to the lizard and asked, “Are you magic?”
The lizard did not appear to notice him.
“Do you eat flies, or do you consume?…” The colonel could not think of a word to finish his sentence; then he said, “Light. Do you consume light and breathe out fire? No?” He looked at himself in the mirror, at his ridiculous uniform and gilt-braided hat. His tired eyes. “To hell with you,” he said. He bent to the sink and splashed water onto his face; on straightening he discovered that the lizard had crawled onto the surface of the mirror and was staring at him. The stare affected the colonel profoundly, causing him to perceive his own woeful condition. Alone except for a lizard; half-drunk in a bathroom; on an endless fool’s errand. He resisted the easy allure of self-pity and stood rigid, almost at attention, until the feeling had passed. The lizard continued to watch him, and the colonel grew annoyed with those unblinking orange eyes. He clapped his hands, trying to drive it away, but it remained motionless, lifeless as a rubber toy. Its stare made him feel weak and unfocused, thoughts slopping about inside his skull, and he lifted his hand, intending to knock it from its perch. But before he could act, a curious lightness invaded his body, enfeebling him, and a burst of orange radiance blinded him, and for a moment, scarcely more than a second or two, he saw an enormous figure looming above. A darkly complected man wearing a hat, one hand upraised. His vision cleared and he felt once again the weight of flesh and bone; he saw his reflection in the mirror. A befuddled little man in a silly hat, standing with his hand upraised.
The lizard was gone.
The colonel hurriedly undressed and switched off the lights and slipped beneath the sheets. He could not put from mind the absurd notion that he had seen himself briefly from the lizard’s perspective; he recalled the feeling of dizzy instability he had derived from looking into the lizard’s eyes, and wondered if the two experiences had been connected. But what did this speculation imply? That somehow his soul had been trapped for an instant inside the lizard’s skin? Even more absurd. And yet he could think of nothing else to explain such an extreme disassociation. Though the colonel did not subscribe to a view of creation that accepted explanations of this kind, neither did he demand logic of the world, and he refused to let the experience ruin his sleep. He closed his eyes, said a hasty prayer for the souls of the three pilots he had shot from the sky, and soon drifted off into a black peace that lasted well into the day.
The colonel did not arrive at the Drive-In Puerto Rico until nine o’clock the next morning. Most of the tables on the deck were occupied. At one sat Margery Emmons; she was talking to a thin, balding man in a pale yellow guayabera who now and then cast anxious glances to the side. Her eyes slid toward the colonel as he took a seat in the corner of the deck closest to the water, but she did not smile, and gave no other sign of recognition. The colonel held a tiny mental burial for the minor fantasy he had conjured concerning her, and had a few sips of the strong black coffee that Tomas’s girl, unbidden, brought to his table.
Beyond the break the heavy swells glittered in patches, as if irradiated by the backs of glowing swimmers threatening to surface as they pushed their way in toward shore, shattering into white plumes of spray that rose and fell with the abandon of wild horses, and to the east, Punta Manabique stretched out into darker waters like a long green witch’s finger with a palm tree at its tip, its trunk forced by the wind to grow almost horizontal to the ground, so that at the distance it resembled a curving talon. The amiable chatter of the other patrons seemed part of nature, a random counterpoint to the percussive surf. A sweetish smell was borne on the north wind, overwhelming the scents of beans, eggs, and sausage, and the colonel imagined that a great ship filled with spices had been breached just over the horizon, its hull leaking streams of cinnamon and myrrh. The day held too much beauty for his troubled cast of mind, and he gazed down into his coffee, at the trembling incomplete reflection of his face, an image perfect in its summation of his mood. When Tomas dropped into the seat opposite him, the colonel asked him immediately about the lizard.