Wild Cards: Aces Abroad

  “Xibalba.” He spoke only to his brother.

  “Yes.” Hunapu nodded. “The gods have grown hungry. Our blood was not enough. They want more blood, blood with power. A king’s blood.”

  “Do you think they would accept a general’s blood? A war captain’s?” Xbalanque looked over his shoulder at the army on the other side of the dirt mound.

  The guerrillas were following the exchange closely, looking for a reason to hope for victory. Both nodded at the thought.

  “If you can take the general, things will fall apart down the line. They’re draftees out there, not volunteers.” The man wiped dusty black hair out of his eyes and shrugged. “It’s the best idea I’ve heard.”

  “Where is the war captain?” Hunapu’s eyes fixed on a distant goal. “I will bring him back. It must be done correctly or the gods will not be pleased.”

  “He’ll be in the rear. I saw a truck back there with lots of anten­nas, a communications center. Over to the east.” Xbalanque looked at his brother uneasily. Something felt wrong about him. “Are you all right?”

  “I serve my people and my gods.” Hunapu walked a few steps away and vanished with a soft clok.

  “I’m not so sure that this was a good idea.” Xbalanque won­dered what Hunapu had in mind.

  “Got a better one? He’ll be okay.” The rebel started to shrug but was stopped with shoulders lifted by the sound of helicopters.

  “Xbalanque, you’ve got to take them. If they can attack from the air, we’re dead.” Before the other man had finished, Xbal­anque was running back toward the helicopters and the middle of Kaminaljuyu. As the brace of Hueys came into sight, he picked up a rock the size of his head and launched it. The helicopter to the left exploded in flames. Its companion pulled up and away from the camp. But Xbalanque hadn’t realized the position of the heli­copter he had destroyed. Burning debris fell on his huddled fol­lowers, causing as much death and pain as a government rocket.

  Xbalanque turned away, cursing himself for being oblivious to his people, and saw Hunapu atop the tallest mound. His brother held a limp figure, half-sprawled on the ground, beside Maria’s altar. Xbalanque ran toward the temple.

  From the other side Akabal had seen Hunapu appear with his captive. Akabal had been separated from the Twins in the melee following the first mortar strike. Now he turned his back to the mass of followers jammed together around the central dirt mounds. Maxine Chen’s tug on his arm stopped him. She joined him, her face filthy and sweating and her two-man crew looking haggard. Robert had reclaimed his camera and filmed everything he could get as he moved around Kaminaljuyu.

  “What’s going on?” She had to shout to be heard over the crowd and the guns. “Who’s that with Hunapu? Is it Xbalanque?”

  Akabal shook his head and kept moving, followed by Chen. When she saw that Akabal intended to climb the mound in the open, she and Robert hesitated and followed him. The sound man shook his head and crouched at the base of the temple. Xbalanque had been met by Maria, and they scrambled up the other side. The cameraman stepped back and began filming as soon as all six had made it to the top.

  Seeing Xbalanque, Hunapu lifted his face and began to chant to the sky. He no longer had his knife, and the dried blood that cov­ered much of his face looked like ceremonial paint. Xbalanque lis­tened for a moment and then shook his head. In an archaic Maya he argued with Hunapu, who continued his chant, oblivious to Xbalanque’s interruption. Maxine asked Akabal what was happen­ing, but he shook his head in confusion. Maria had hauled the Guatemalan general onto the earthen altar and began to strip off his uniform.

  The guns ceased firing at the same moment Hunapu ended his chant and held out his hand to Xbalanque. In the silence Maxine put her hands to her ears. Maria knelt beside the general, holding the offering bowl in front of her. Xbalanque backed away, shaking his head. Hunapu sharply thrust his arm out at Xbalanque. Look­ing over Hunapu’s shoulder, Xbalanque saw the government tanks roll forward, tearing apart the fence and crushing the Indians under their treads.

  As Xbalanque hesitated, the general woke up. Finding himself stretched out on an altar, he cursed and tried to roll off. Maria shoved him back onto it. Noting her feathers, he held himself away from her as if he could be contaminated. He began haranguing Hunapu and Xbalanque in Spanish.

  “What the hell do you think you are doing? The Geneva con­vention clearly states that officer prisoners of war are to be treated with dignity and respect. Give me back my clothes!”

  Xbalanque heard the tanks and screams behind him as the Guatemalan army officer cursed him. He tossed his obsidian knife to Hunapu and grabbed the general’s flailing arms.

  “Let me go. What do you savages think you’re doing?” As Hunapu raised the knife, the man’s eyes widened. “You can’t do this! Please, this is 1986. You’re all mad. Listen, I’ll stop them; I’ll call them off. Let me up. Please, Jesus, let me up!”

  Xbalanque pinned the general back against the altar and looked up as Hunapu brought the knife down.

  “Hail, Mary, full of g—”

  The obsidian blade cut through flesh and cartilage, spraying the brothers and Maria with blood. Xbalanque watched in horrified fas­cination as Hunapu decapitated the general, bearing down with the knife against the spine and severing the final connections before lifting the Ladino’s head to the sky.

  Xbalanque released the dead man’s arms and trembling, took the bowl filled with blood from Maria. Shoving the body off the altar, he set fire to the blood as Maria lit copal incense. He threw back his head and called the names of his gods to the sky. His voice was echoed by his people, gathered below with arms thrust into the air toward the temple. Hunapu placed the head, its eyes open and staring into Xibalba, on the altar.

  The tanks stopped their advance and began a lumbering retreat. The foot soldiers dropped their guns and ran. A few shot officers that tried to stop them, and the officers joined the flight. The gov­ernment forces disbanded in chaos, scattering into the city, aban­doning their equipment and weapons.

  Maxine had vomited at the sight of the sacrifice, but her cam­eraman had it all on tape. Shaking and pale, she asked Akabal what was happening. He looked down at her with wide eyes.

  “It is the time of the Fourth Creation. The birth of Huracan, the heart of heaven, our home. The gods have returned to us! Death to the enemies of our people!” Akabal knelt and stretched his hands toward the Hero Twins. “Lead us to glory, favored of the gods.”

  In room 502 of the Camino Real a tourist in flowered shorts and a pale blue polyester shirt stuffed the last souvenir weaving into his suitcase. He looked around the room for his wife and saw her at the window.

  “Next time, Martha, don’t buy anything that won’t fit into your suitcase.” He leaned his considerable weight on the bag and slid the catches closed. “Where is that boy? We must have called half an hour ago. What’s so interesting out there?”

  “The people, Simon. It’s some kind of procession. I wonder if it’s a religious occasion.”

  “Is it a riot? With all this unrest we’ve been hearing about, the sooner we get out of here the better I’m going to feel.”

  “No, they just seem to be going somewhere.” His wife continued to peer down at the streets filled with men, women, and children. “They’re all Indians too. You can tell by the costumes.”

  “My god, we’re going to miss our plane if they don’t get a move on.” He glared at his watch as if it was responsible. “Call again, will you? Where the hell can he be?”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF

  XAVIER DESMOND

  DECEMBER 15, 1986/EN ROUTE TO LIMA, PERU:

  I have been dilatory about keeping up my journal—no entry yester­day or the day before. I can only plead exhaustion and a certain amount of despondence.

  Guatemala took its toll on my spirit, I’m afraid. We are, of course, stringently neutral, but when I saw the televised news reports of the insurrection and heard some of the rhetoric being attrib
uted to the Mayan revolutionaries, I dared to hope. When we actually met with the Indian leaders, I was even briefly elated. They considered my presence in the room an honor, an auspicious omen, seemed to treat me with the same sort of respect (or lack of respect) they gave Hartmann and Tachyon, and the way they treated their own jokers gave me heart.

  Well, I am an old man—an old joker in fact—and I tend to clutch at straws. Now the Mayan revolutionaries have proclaimed a new nation, an Amerindian homeland, where their jokers will be welcomed and honored. The rest of us need not apply. Not that I would care much to live in the jungles of Guatemala—even an autonomous joker homeland down here would scarcely cause a ripple in Jokertown, let alone any kind of significant exodus. Still, there are so few places in the world where jokers are welcome, where we can make our homes in peace . . . the more we travel on, the more we see, the more I am forced to conclude that Jokertown is the best place for us, our only true home. I cannot express how much that conclusion saddens and terrifies me.

  Why must we draw these lines, these fine distinctions, these labels and barriers that set us apart? Ace and nat and joker, capi­talist and communist, Catholic and Protestant, Arab and Jew, Indian and Ladino, and on and on everywhere, and of course true humanity is to be found only on our side of the line and we feel free to oppress and rape and kill the “other,” whoever he might be.

  There are those on the Stacked Deck who charge that the Guatemalans were engaged in conscious genocide against their own Indian populations, and who see this new nation as a very good thing. But I wonder.

  The Mayas think jokers are touched by the gods, specially blessed. No doubt it is better to be honored than reviled for our various handicaps and deformities. No doubt.

  But . . .

  We have the Islamic nations still ahead of us . . . a third of the world, someone told me. Some Moslems are more tolerant than others, but virtually all of them consider deformity a sign of Allah’s dis­pleasure. The attitudes of the true fanatics such as the Shi’ites in Iran and the Nur sect in Syria are terrifying, Hitlerian. How many jokers were slaughtered when the Ayatollah displaced the Shah? To some Iranians the tolerance he extended to jokers and women was the Shah’s greatest sin.

  And are we so very much better in the enlightened USA, where fundamentalists like Leo Barnett preach that jokers are being pun­ished for their sins? Oh, yes, there is a distinction, I must remem­ber that. Barnett says he hates the sins but loves the sinners, and if we will only repent and have faith and love Jesus, surely we will be cured.

  No, I’m afraid that ultimately Barnett and the Ayatollah and the Mayan priests are all preaching the same creed—that our bodies in some sense reflect our souls, that some divine being has taken a direct hand and twisted us into these shapes to signify his pleasure (the Mayas) or displeasure (Nur al-Allah, the Ayatollah, the Fire-breather). Most of all, each of them is saying that jokers are different.

  My own creed is distressingly simple—I believe that jokers and aces and nats are all just men and women and ought to be treated as such. During my dark nights of the soul I wonder if I am the only one left who still believes this.

  Still brooding about Guatemala and the Mayas. A point I failed to make earlier—I could not help noticing that this glorious idealis­tic revolution of theirs was led by two aces and a nat. Even down here, where jokers are supposedly kissed by the gods, the aces lead and the jokers follow.

  A few days ago—it was during our visit to the Panama Canal, I believe—Digger Downs asked me if I thought the U.S. would ever have a joker president. I told him I’d settle for a joker congressman (I’m afraid Nathan Rabinowitz, whose district includes Jokertown, heard the comment and took it for some sort of criticism of his representation). Then Digger wanted to know if I thought an ace could be elected president. A more interesting question, I must admit. Downs always looks half asleep, but he is sharper than he appears, though not in a class with some of the other reporters aboard the Stacked Deck, like Herrmann of AP or Morgenstern of the Washington Post.

  I told Downs that before this last Wild Card Day it might have been possible . . . barely. Certain aces, like the Turtle (still missing, the latest NY papers confirm), Peregrine, Cyclone, and a handful of oth­ers are first-rank celebrities, commanding considerable public affection. How much of that could translate to the public arena, and how well it might survive the rough give-and-take of a presidential campaign, that’s a more difficult question. Heroism is a perishable commodity.

  Jack Braun was standing close enough to hear Digger’s question and my reply. Before I could conclude—I wanted to say that the whole equation had changed this September, that among the casualties of Wild Card Day was any faint chance that an ace might be a viable presidential candidate—Braun interrupted. “They’d tear him apart,” he told us.

  What if it was someone they loved? Digger wanted to know.

  “They loved the Four Aces,” Braun said.

  Braun is no longer quite the exile he was at the beginning of the tour. Tachyon still refuses to acknowledge his existence and Hiram is barely polite, but the other aces don’t seem to know or care who he is. In Panama he was often in Fantasy’s company, squiring her here and there, and I’ve heard rumors of a liaison between Golden Boy and Senator Lyons’s press secretary, an attractive young blonde. Undoubtedly, of the male aces, Braun is by far the most attractive in the conventional sense, although Mordecai Jones has a certain brooding presence. Downs has been struck by those two also. The next issue of Aces will feature a piece comparing Golden Boy and the Harlem Hammer, he informs me.

  THE TINT OF HATRED

  Part Three

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1986, RIO:

  Sara detested Rio.

  From her room in the Luxor Hotel on Atlantica, the city looked like a curving Miami Beach: a display of gleaming, white high-rise hotels arrayed before a wide beach and gentle blue-green surf, all fading into a sun-hazed distance on either side.

  The majority of the junket had fulfilled their obligations quickly and were using the Rio stopover for R&R. After all, it was almost the holidays; a month on the tour had worn the idealism off most of them. Hiram Worchester had gone on a binge, eating and drink­ing his way through the city’s myriad restaurante. The press had opted for the local cervezaria and were sampling the native beers. American dollars exchanged into handfuls of cruzados and prices were low. The wealthier of the contingent had invested in the Brazilian gem market—there seemed to be a jewelry stall in every hotel.

  And yet Sara was aware of the reality. The standard tourist warnings were indication enough: Don’t wear any jewelry on the streets; don’t get on the buses, don’t trust the taxi drivers; be careful around children or any jokers; don’t go out alone, especially if you’re a woman; if you want to keep something, lock it up or stay with it. Beware. To Rio’s multitudes of poor, any tourist was rich and the rich were fair game.

  And reality intruded as, bored and restless, she left the hotel that afternoon, deciding to go see Tachyon at a local clinic. She hailed one of the ubiquitous black-and-yellow VW Beetle cabs. Two blocks in from the ocean, glittering Rio turned dark, moun­tainous, crowded, and miserable. Through the narrow alleys between buildings she could glimpse the old landmark, Corcovado, the gigantic statue of Christ the Redeemer atop a central peak of the city. Corcovado was a reminder of how the Wild Card had dev­astated this country. Rio had suffered a major outbreak in 1948. The city had always been wild and poor, with a downtrodden pop­ulation simmering under the veneer. The virus had let loose months of panic and violence. No one knew which disgruntled ace was responsible for Corcovado. One morning the figure of Christ had simply “changed,” as if the rising sun were melting a wax figurine. Christ the Redeemer became a joker, a misshapen, hunch-backed thing, one of his outstretched arms gone completely, the other twisted around to support the distorted body. Father Squid had celebrated a mass there yesterday; two hundred thousand peo­ple had prayed together under the deformed st
atue.

  She’d told the taxi driver to take her to Santa Theresa, the old section of Rio. There, the jokers had gathered as they had gathered in New York’s Jokertown, as if taking solace in their mutual afflictions in the shadow of Corcovado. Santa Theresa had been in the warnings too. Near Estrada de Redentor she tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Stop here,” she said. The driver said something in rapid Portuguese, then shook his head and pulled over.

  Sara found that this taxi driver was no different than the rest. She’d forgotten to insist that he turn on his meter when they’d left the hotel. “Quanto custa?” It was one of the few phrases she knew: How much? He insisted loudly that the fare was a thousand cruzados, forty dollars. Sara, exasperated and tired of constant small ripoffs, argued back in English. Finally she threw a hundred-cruzado bill at him, still far more than he should have received. He took it, then drove off with a screech of tires. “Feliz Natal!” he called sarcastically: Merry Christmas.

  Sara flipped him the finger. It gave her little satisfaction. She began looking for the clínica.

  It had rained that afternoon, the usual rainy-season squall that drenched the city for a few hours and then gave way to sunshine again. Even that hadn’t managed to quell the stench of Rio’s anti­quated sewage system. Walking up the steeply inclined street, she was pursued by fetid oders. Like the others, she walked in the cen­ter of the narrow street, moving aside only if she heard a car. She quickly felt conspicuous as the sun began to fall behind the hills. Most of those around her were jokers or those too poor to live anywhere else. She saw none of the police patrols here that routinely swept the tourist streets. A fox-furred snout leered at her as someone jostled past, what looked to be a man-size snail slithered along the sidewalk to her right, a twin-headed prostitute loitered in a doorway. She’d sometimes felt paranoid in Jokertown, but the intensity was nothing like she felt here. In Jokertown she would have at least understood what the voices around her were saying, she would have known that two or three blocks over lay the rela­tive security of Manhattan, she would have been able to call someone from a corner phone booth. Here there was nothing. She had only a vague notion of where she was. If she disappeared, it might be hours before anyone knew she was missing.