The Compass of His Bones (And Other Stories)

  If he saw a hummingbird now, he might not recover.

  Even in letters to his wife Isabel, a beauty with raven hair that he has not seen in several years, Gaspar cannot express what he has seen. He sits in his office near the barracks and stares at her portrait on the wall — an image more real to him than her face in his memory. Behind her, a window, and through the window, a wide lawn, with a church in the background. Sometimes he wishes he could step through the portrait back into Spain. Sometimes he wonders why the scene in the portrait seems so unfamiliar to him. He searches his memory for that moment, sun-drenched and far away, but cannot find it. Maybe someday it will find him.

  Gaspar reads poorly, and his writing is painful, simple. It is Manuel who takes the words from his Captain’s mouth and translates them into missives Isabel might appreciate, if read to her by their son’s tutor. The first time Gaspar wrote to her after the Emperor’s death, it seemed like a confession. Although Gaspar could not tell her, through Manuel, what had really happened to him. The closest he came was this: “After the Emperor would not divulge his secrets, Manuel administered the last rites and we brought him to Cuzco in an ox cart.” Something in this statement seems true. Something in what it denied calms him even now.

  Later, when he is alone, he tries to compose his own letters to his wife, his fingers soon black with ink, raw. He does not want Manuel writing for him anymore. He knows the priest changes things, although he does not know what. He knows that he himself has changed, but he does not know how. The clues are few enough. Finally he gives up, lets the ink dry on his hands. Lets the sweat trickle down his back.

  The Viceroy requested Gaspar’s presence, to report on the taking of Vilcapampa, as soon as he returned to Cuzco. Gaspar has resisted the request for days, uncertain of what he might say to the man. What was the truth? What would be seen as lies? He knows what the Viceroy wants. He does not want to give it to him.

  Gaspar hears a flurry of beating wings, but when he looks up, the sky is empty.

  Two days later, Tupac Amaru’s skull graces the top of a pole fastened through a stirrup on Gaspar’s horse. Everywhere Gaspar rides through the cobblestone streets, the light of the Spanish conquest shines within the burnt skull of the Incan Emperor. As Gaspar wanders without purpose, without need, it seems for long moments that he stares through the Emperor’s eye sockets.

  The gleam of gold has spread across so many eyes in Cuzco that it unnerves even Gaspar. Many of his soldiers use the blankness of the Quichua stare to justify their plunder, yet have become blind to the film of gold closing over their own pupils. Sometimes Gaspar wonders if he controls his men or if they control him. Already, many of them want to be released from duty to pursue the dream of an encomienda. Gaspar refuses to share these concerns with Manuel. What if the priest accuses him of weakness?

  At dusk, he pretends he stares through the Emperor’s eyes at the torches lining the streets.

  “I must take you to the Viceroy,” Manuel finally tells him, on the fourth day of Gaspar’s random journeys across the city with the Emperor’s skull.

  Gaspar laughs. The portrait of his wife is particularly distant that morning as they stand in the middle of a street, gutters filthy with the entrails of slaughtered chickens and soggy decaying tobacco leaves. His beard holds evidence of two nights haunting military barracks and their homemade wineries. The inside of his mouth feels raw and viscous. Although he does not have the staff with him, he can feel the presence of the skull, there, in the street with him.

  “It’s simple enough, Manuel. You can tell the Viceroy yourself. ‘After the Emperor would not divulge his secrets, we administered the last rites. And although the Emperor seemed dead to the world, we hauled him back to Cuzco in an ox cart, where we burned him to death.’ What more is there for me to tell?”

  Manuel shrugs. “Not much, of course, but you must tell it to him in person.”

  Gaspar sits down on an overturned barrel to conceal a shudder. For a moment, Manuel’s face had been a death’s head, a leering vision of the enemy.

  “Manuel, did anything else happen?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Up there. Vilcapampa. While we were with Tupac.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean,” Manuel says. Gaspar can feel his frown.

  Around them stagger badly hung-over soldiers who gambled away their pay the night before. Beyond, the mountains, a searing white.

  The next morning, Gaspar meets with the Viceroy. The Viceroy is an expressionless man with a big belly, who has taken to consorting with prostitutes. According to the physician Gaspar and the Viceroy both share, the Viceroy is already displaying symptoms: a burning when he pisses and sores upon his member.

  The Viceroy, dressed in opulent waistcoat and scented wig, seems to float behind his desk, hovering just off the floor. The staff with the Emperor’s head upon it stands beside Gaspar’s chair. Dust-heavy light flows from the open window. From below, Gaspar hears the sounds of slaughter that have followed him from Vilcapampa.

  Patches of light and dark across the floor. Does the staff rise above the ground?

  Gaspar leans forward. “I bring you the skull of our enemy.”

  The Viceroy smiles, ignores Gaspar’s shaking, outstretched hand, ignores the skull.

  Gaspar begins to shiver. “The Emperor’s wounds,” he says. “They seemed to . . . close . . . to heal . . . and out of them came . . . birds . . . hummingbirds . . . ”

  The floating Viceroy smiles but does not reply.

  Outside the window, an old Quichua stands atop a crumbling watchtower, watching him. The armies of the Inca have gathered. The world is silent.

  The next day, Gaspar sets out toward the heart of the cloud forests that cling to the Andean mountainsides. He has told Manuel that the Viceroy has granted his request to lead his men on another expedition. Perhaps the Viceroy did, perhaps he didn’t.

  The priest sits high upon his horse of sable and Gaspar rides beside him, the skull of his enemy atop its pole. In front of them, slowing their passage, fifty foot soldiers, their armor and thick leathers dull from constant use, their faces pinched from breathing in the thin air, their expressions, by necessity, grim.

  They follow a dirt path fashioned by the Quichua that, like the Vilcapampa River, changes course year after year, traveling where it will or where human feet tread upon it. The dirt clings to the horses’ shoes. It smells to Gaspar like the sharp bite of Spanish whiskey just opened from the flask. The branches of low trees that soon surround and then cover them brush against his forearms and leave their smell in the form of crushed leaves. The sunlight grows mottled and indistinct through the branches. The rising humidity sucks away his breath, makes him sweat more heavily beneath his leathers.

  They have food for ten days; when Manuel asked him why not more, Gaspar waved off his concern, says, “We can live off the land.”

  When Manuel asks why Gaspar has chosen this particular path, the horses nervous under them, the men uncertain as to their mission, Gaspar tells him, “It is as good any other.” His thoughts are already drifting to his wife, back to Barcelona. Fantasies of returning there drift pleasantly through his head.

  The path leads through the southern Andes and into an area of intense jungle through which flows the westernmost branches of a mighty river patrolled by Amazons. He could, he thinks, have told Manuel that it is the route most likely to be used by fleeing members of Tupac’s court, or of other refugees flushed out by the destruction of Vilcapampa. But that is not why he has chosen the path. He has chosen it because it provides the quickest way to leave both Cuzco and Vilcapampa behind.

  As they trek, hours turn, liquid and fetid, into days. The slap of leather against armor has taken on a rhythmic quality. It mesmerizes with its certainty. Gaspar finds his gaze wandering as he ignores Manuel’s increasing concern over their path. They have not encountered anyone for four days. They have been traveling for six days. How long should they continue before turning
back?

  But Gaspar finds his gaze drifting. Insects capture his attention. He remembers the Viceroy once telling him that Spain’s greatest scientists believed decaying bodies turned into insects and beetles. If this was true, could they also turn into hummingbirds?

  Gaspar’s gaze becomes more precise. He cannot focus on Manuel at his side, or his complaining soldiers, but he can see a rhinoceros beetle lumbering away across the forest floor, its horned head swinging blindly, the metallic hue of its back catching glints of sunlight. Clever-quick snout beetles with long heads that become a down-curved beak with green pincers, and undulating along the trunks of trees, benchua: slugs thin as a wafer until they suck blood and become sated, their sharp mouthparts grinding away against flesh; treehoppers with the gold and black of the executioner’s axe upon their heads; springtails, primitive, wingless creatures pinhead small, black and fuzzy; walking stick grasshoppers with close-set eyes, antennae concentrated on a narrow extension, wingless, mute, and deaf, with long, thin back legs; blue-green darners or “mosquito hawks” zipping in and out of swarms of midges . . .

  When he wakes from this reverie, he finds himself alone on his horse and no longer on the path. Vaguely, he remembers an argument with Manuel, his soldiers’ attempts to make him go home with them. Finally, when he drew his sword, they abandoned him.

  He feels hollow inside, short of breath. The light around him is distant, cold. The skull of his enemy still rests atop a pole protruding from his left stirrup.

  He shakes his head. He thinks of dead bodies and insects rising from them. He thinks of how the flesh has to fall away for the insects to come forth; he imagines a body falling into a hundred butterflies, a hundred thousand moths, until only the eyes remain, soon scuttling away like beetles.

  And the thought brings him to . . .

  The thought brings him to . . .

  Later, he is walking through the night, clutching the pole with the Emperor’s skull moon-white atop it. His horse is gone. He cannot remember what happened to it. He was on the verge of remembering something. Remembering something fully. He fumbles at his pockets, wondering if he has paper enough to write a letter to his wife. No paper. No ink. No plume. Where has Manuel gone? Where are his soldiers? The old Quichua won’t stop staring at him from the crumbling watchtower.

  Gaspar stumbles through the darkness, branches scratching his face. He crosses a river, but the water isn’t cool: it’s hot. He cannot stop sweating. The darkness frightens him. How did he get here? The floating body of the Viceroy hangs before him, silent. Or is it the moon through the trees?

  He is choking now. Choking on words. But he holds onto the Emperor’s skull.

  The stars above him are so different from those above Barcelona. Around him the insects sing, but all Gaspar sees are the red-and-black hummingbirds coming out of the Emperor’s wounds.

  “No!” he says. “No,” and moans and falls to the ground, the staff beneath him.

  He stares into the eye sockets of the skull. The Emperor stares back.

  When Gaspar wakes in the early morning, he is calm. Grit on his tongue, muscles aching, he feels every vein and artery in his body pumping blood. As if the insects are inside of him, as if the forest is inside of him. He still hears a river flowing somewhere behind him. The fading stars seem familiar.

  Beside him lies the staff. Rising, he picks it up, follows the sounds of the river. He no longer sweats. He no longer thinks of Isabel, the Viceroy, or Manuel. The hummingbirds no longer trouble him. As he trudges toward Vilcapampa, he mutters to himself about vengeance.

  FALLING INTO THE ARMS OF DEATH

  "Once there were a few proud men," David MacDiarmid remembered reading many years before, but he did not feel proud as he and his six hundred sixty-five fellows of the 13th Airborne plunged through the Bananama night sky, seeking the lights of the capital. Sky Gods they, Southern Command having gotten it into their heads that Santa suits on Christmas Eve would disguise their real intent. On the shores, a battalion of Roman Catholic priests was establishing a beachhead. MacDiarmid thought the idea suicidally stupid, but no one had consulted him. His buddies laughed it off, but beneath the laughter was an edginess and an obedience to superstition.

  Tumbling, MacDiarmid's belly shook like a bowl full of jelly and he ho-ho-hoed his lunch into space. The fake beard tangled in his parachute straps. He cursed while he waited for the chute to open. He had a sudden flash of his ex-wife, Julie, laughing—at him? at herself?—while the kid, Mark, watched, waiting for her to stop. Waiting. When his chute ballooned above him, he screamed triumphantly into the humid night air, not caring who heard him.

  Only one choice interested him now: light or dark, the rendezvous site or the jungles beyond. No moon to guide him. No gleams of water, nor the silhouettes of fellow paratroopers. He could hear them, but not see them: the swish of silk as a shadow sailed by, a glimpse of a Santa Claus cap exploding up and past him. The wind cut his face. His mouth was dry. He clutched the M-16 like a crucifix against disaster. Mark would have loved this; Mark would have eaten it up and spit it out because he just didn't know any better.

  Floating, MacDiarmid wanted only to forget his mission. He thought of wheat fields and stalled tractors, lonely places without people and skies without a hint of mortar fire. As far from Bananama as he could imagine or dream about.

  His tenth Latin American adventure, and it was starting to get old.

  When MacDiarmid landed and cut away the parachute, the targeted street was empty, lit by a few overhanging lamps. Most had been broken by stones. The houses were low to the ground, single-storied, and made of concrete or adobe brick. Few had anything that could be called a yard; squares of dusty rubble and shadows that resisted the light. They looked alien to MacDiarmid, as if he had landed on the moon. Many times, he had come back home on leave to find his own yard rampant with the signs of his neglect—the weeds knee-high, the mower rusty in a corner. Sometimes he thought Julie planned it that way. Benevolent neglect.

  Sweat burned MacDiarmid's eyes and he wanted to discard his costume, but orders were orders were orders.

  Then, out of the silence and gloom and heat: Christmas. Dozens of marionette Santas on strings, until the parachute silks caught the lamp glow and enveloped them like treacherous jellyfish. Dozens of red-clad men armed with M-16s, anti-personnel rounds, and grenades. Most—unlike MacDiarmid—carried their superstitions on their sleeves: army-issue rabbit feet, four-leaf clovers embossed and dangling from chains.

  MacDiarmid sought out the Corporal in charge: a tight-lipped skeleton who was not at all jolly in his suit. The man handed MacDiarmid the map that would give him the second rendezvous coordinates and a grid for mortar strikes. The map smelled faintly of garlic. The C.O. smelled of embalming fluid.

  "Where's the rest of my patrol?" MacDiarmid asked, hoping there had not been another screw up. As he understood it, Operation La Bella Loca would infiltrate Bananama City in small units, backed up by tanks and heavy artillery, the goals being to capture the resident dictator Zapata-Carranza and pacify the country.

  "He's over there," the C.O. said, pointing. Against a tree stood the familiar shadow called Conrad, a wraith who had already discarded his Santa suit, if he had ever worn it.

  "What about the others? Where're the others?"

  The C.O. shrugged and sucked on his digits. His index finger was white from all the sucking he had done on it. The tip had begun to bleed. Obviously a career man.

  "Nowhere," the C.O. said, and grinned. This, then, was La Bella Loca. "Maybe down in the lakes. Maybe in the jungles. But not here." He smelled of embalming fluid, yes, but worse yet, he smelled of indifference.

  MacDiarmid left him to his sucking.

  Conrad, MacDiarmid's buddy in the worst of times, had been through Vietnam and four covert wars as well. He was still a private, but no one messed with him. The aftershock of countless firefights shone in his face: the cheekbones jutted where the skin and flesh receded, stretched tight. Th
e eyes were, of necessity, dead: a dull obsidian recessed deep into the orbits so that the white glimmered like a reflection from the past.

  "MacDiarmid," Conrad had once said when they were pinned down by sniper fire and the wounded screamed all around them, "MacDiarmid," he said in his death-rattle voice, "If I'm hit in the jungle and you run out of food, kill me and eat my flesh and make bullets from my bones. Promise me."

  MacDiarmid had promised and for that one moment, under the palm trees, rockets exploding in the dusky sky, they had come close to being close.

  That was before Guatemala. A lot of things had changed after Guatemala. Julie had divorced him. Mark had, no doubt, come to view him as a ghost who returned every few months to haunt them, not in any way a normal father. After Guatemala, Conrad was...different. He couldn't speak and his hair had gotten sparse, his fingers wrinkled and brittle. A former member of the platoon, Private Lightfoot, had remarked that the A.G. Conrad resembled an angel in remission.

  Approximately two thousand feet from the touch-down site, as they jitterbugged and side-stepped their way deeper into hostile territory, Conrad shone a flashlight on MacDiarmid's face, then down to his map.

  "Don't play games," MacDiarmid said. "You're distracting me."

  The street had begun to narrow to a point, the houses crowding them on both sides. But still no people.

  A few minutes later, Conrad's ruined face again surfaced in the flashlight's glow and implored him to look at the map. So he did.

  "Welcome to Bananama City," read the legend. "Vacation mecca of Central America." No grid. No rendezvous with other patrols. Just museums, ruins, amusement parks, and administrative buildings. Some shit in Washington had been jacking off again. MacDiarmid felt the same desperate sickness in his belly that he had endured during the darkest days of the divorce, when Julie had become as calm and serene as the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. and he was the one screaming. While Mark lay on the sofa with his thousand-yard-stare, the stare MacDiarmid had seen on corpses too many times before. The stare that made him stop screaming.