He swerved out from behind the shack and across the meadow. Bullets zipped past, one striking sparks from the frame of the windshield, and for the first time Mingolla was afraid. His asshole clenched, and a cold spot formed between his shoulder blades.
Debora knelt in the seat, facing behind them, and began to fire. In the rearview mirror he saw three sets of headlights in pursuit. He floored the jeep, and they went sailing over depressions in the meadow, skipping like a stone. The windshield was blown out by a round, and Mingolla threw the jeep into a zigzag course, sending Debora into his lap. She righted herself and kept firing.
‘Head north!’ shouted the man in the backseat.
‘Why?’ said Mingolla, hunching his shoulders, turtling his neck, expecting a bullet at any second.
‘There’s a road! Trails! You can lose them there!’ The man’s head poked between the seats. ‘Make for that big hill!’
An explosion at their rear, and in the mirror Mingolla saw a fire burning in the meadow, two sets of headlights giving it a wide berth.
‘Damn!’ Debora’s rifle had jammed. She flung it down, picked up the second rifle.
With every jolt and bounce, the jeep felt as if it were going to take flight, and Mingolla urged it to stay earthbound with body English and wishes. He made promises to God, get me out of this, Jesus, and I’ll sin no more, and his heart was hammering to the rhythm of Debora’s fire, and the hill was swelling huge and black above them, and the man in the backseat was shouting directions, and then they were swerving up into thick jungle along a narrow dirt track.
‘Pull over… here!’ Debora elbowed him, pointed to a shadowed avenue leading off between two large trees. He did as she instructed, shut down the engine. She propped her rifle on the top of the windshield, covering the road, and as another jeep, its headlights piercing the darkness, swung around the curve, she opened fire. Screams, silhouetted figures against a flash of flame, and the jeep flipped over, the husk of a dead olive-drab beetle crackling in its own juices. ‘There’s one more,’ she said. ‘They must have seen.’
Mingolla reached with his mind. Found three frail minds less than a hundred yards away. He made them afraid… so afraid that they whirled, flared bright, and winked out one by one.
‘We’re okay now,’ he said.
Everything was still, a stream chuckling somewhere near, insects and frogs bubbling, and even the crackling of the flames was compatible with the stillness. All the dark confusion of the escape might never have happened. The shapes of branches and leaves overhead were sharp in the moonlight, and Mingolla felt the aches and tremors of adrenaline as if the moon were illuminating his weaknesses, pointing up their isolation. It seemed that none of what he remembered of the past hour had happened, that they had been disgorged from a nightmare and left on this hillside to sort out reality.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ said a voice from the backseat.
Mingolla had forgotten their hostage. The man was sitting up, looking alert but not afraid; he had a feline cleverness of feature and crispy black hair. Mingolla saw in him an opportunity for some good, a last chance to practice mercy.
‘You can go,’ he said.
‘We can’t…’ Debora began.
‘Let him go.’ Mingolla laid a hand on her rifle. ‘Just let him go.’
The man climbed out of the jeep. ‘I won’t tell anybody,’ he said as he backed away.
Mingolla shrugged.
The man backed, stumbled, and broke into a run, his figure standing out for a second against the flames of the jeep, then vanishing around the curve.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Debora; but her voice tacked conviction.
Mingolla fired up the engine. He didn’t want to look at her, he didn’t want her to see his face for fear of what might be written there. As he pulled out onto the road, her hip pressed against his; she left it there, and the contact made him feel close to her. Yet he also felt that the closeness wasn’t important, or if it was, it was of memorial importance, because things were changing between them. That, too, he could feel. Old postures were being redefined, connections tearing loose and reforming, shadowy corners of their souls coming to light. He put it from mind, put everything from mind, and concentrated on the road, driving north toward Darién.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
By five o’clock the next afternoon, after two car changes to throw off pursuit, they were high in the Darién Mountains, their pace slowed to a crawl by a dense mist. Visibility was no more than a few feet, and Mingolla had to clear condensation from the windshield to see even that far. Finally he gave up and pulled off the road. Debora went to sleep in the backseat, and he sat staring out into the mist, at vague green loops of vines and foliage that resembled fragments of a florid script, the signatures—he imagined—on a constitution not yet manifest in the land. Now and then he heard cries from the mist, cries that seemed as complex and strange as the shapes of the foliage. Birds, he figured. But recalling Tully’s stories of the region, the brujos and ghosts, he pictured little brown men sitting in huts, sending out winged spirits; and once the moon had risen, setting the mist aglow, he thought he could feel them fluttering around the car, dispersing into eddies and streamers whenever he turned his eye their way. He was only a little afraid of spirits; he was much more afraid of his memories and potentials.
After a half-hour he nodded off and was awakened sometime later by a tremendous feeling of anxiety. Something had happened, something bad. He tried to dismiss the feeling as the hangover from a dream, but that wouldn’t wash. His heart was pounding, he was sweating, and when Debora spoke from the backseat, he jumped at the sound.
‘I just had a terrible feeling,’ she said. ‘A dream or something.’
‘Yeah… me too.’
She sat up. ‘Do you…’
‘What?’
‘I wonder if something happened back in the city.’
It rang true, but he didn’t want to think about the city, about anything that lay behind them. ‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘Come and sit with me… all right?’
He crawled over the seat, and once he had gotten settled, she lay down, resting her head in his lap.
…David…
‘I’m here,’ he said, rejecting the easy solace offered by that kind of intimacy.
…I love you…
Her sending had a wistful flavor, as if she were trying to resurrect the emotion.
‘I love you.’ His voice sounded flat, tinny, like a recorded message.
She shifted to a more comfortable position, and out of reflex his hand slipped down to cup her breast. He thought he could go for years without touching her that way, and his palms would remember the weight of her breasts, their exact conformation. The contact relaxed him.
…my father used to love places like this…
…you told me…
…high, misty…
…you like them…
…I can’t help liking them, I’ve spent so much time in them with my father… we used to visit a village in the Cuchamatanes Mountains called Cahuatla, it was so strange, the men wore shirts with big floppy embroidered collars and monkey-skin hats, and some of them looked a little like monkeys, they were all tiny and wizened-looking, even the young ones… and when they’d come out of the mist at you, you imagined they were monkey spirits… we’d go there every May for this festival, my father was amused by it, he couldn’t see it too many times…
…what sort of festival…
…it was really nothing special, all the men would ride horses from one end of the village to the other, and at each end they’d drink some aguardiente, and then they’d ride back and drink some more, and they’d keep getting drunker and drunker… the whole thing was to see who could stay on their horse the longest…