Dead I Well May Be

8: SUR DE LA FRONTERA

Out of the waste and in the prodigal rain nothing animate breathes or moves or lives above the height of man…

The abyss, emptiness, a scorched and sunken earth. An abandoned quarter. A place out of a nightmare. A slough over a hard ground and an impenetrable sky. Night and day are indistinguishable and become one long dread universe outside of time. The rain is cold and falling with such force and mettle that it makes divots in the clay. The wind with it whips and buries itself into every groove and crevice on the ground. It veers and backs and brings the rain horizontal and slantwise and sometimes, in mock of physical laws, upwards.

Nature has cast itself as the destroyer, as the scourge, Shiva wiping the slate clean. And here, out here in the wild land, it is being born again of water.

It’s the hurricane and everything has a burrow.

Well, nearly everything…

Above is a vast black cloud out of which comes terrible light and the downpour, which leaches out loam and color and washes everything away. An awful wind that carries seawater, stones, bicycle parts, branches.

The topography is frozen into fragile inclines and declines and a horizonless perspective. A vast steppe devoid of beings and every living thing. Underneath there are sharp stones and lava rocks and here and there are ghosts of trees and a ruined house, as if from the days of the famine.

Another Ireland, the far northwest, the Sperrins, the bogland around Slemish Mount.

A pulverized sheet of ground and a landscape so familiar and yet unfamiliar that there can be naught but an epidemic of memory. Coffins of wet glassy stones and withered alphabets and celestial tracks in the red clay.

And everything punctuated by wind and rain. Rain, especially that.

Another mile, another ten, and over this hill ancient pylons are clambering on the terrain like a virus, following a line of steel and wire, clumping together perhaps in the direction of a settlement. In the country that is and can be. Civil and uncivil and metallic. But you’re on the run and that way is barred, if it is the way of people.

West, then. A green land of slabber, an invisible mesa on the world’s edge. A rise and a valley, hours of movement and a lake that did not exist a week before. There are scrubby bushes and reeds and suffocated trees. The world postdiluvian with water everywhere. No lizard or insect or belly crawler remains above the ground. Their homes are inundated and battle-scarred, gone into the book of insurance agents and loss adjusters. Mars has used his influence and braised the globe closer to the fastness underneath.

It’s the hurricane and rain is unceasing. Aye, it’s obvious now. Apparent in the signs and portents. The rain is a baptism and a cleansing agent. There is transparency in its coldness. The wind, too, speaks. It casts up euphonies of the dead. They have promises and they make you swear. Their talk is easy and reposed, but such are the words of phantoms, for they have time on their hands and are removed from the pressures of the Earth. They haunt you and urge you on. Pressure you, hint. It isn’t the banshee, there’s no death, at least not yet. Just voices. Their talk is Spanish and Mayan and Olmec and languages that have died here long ago but whose parallel exists somewhere in Kamchatka or Mongolia or the Aleutians. They murmur softly and tug your beard and trip your feet.

Paddy fields, a river valley, a collapsed stone wall for shelter. A cough and an adjourned heartbeat. Your eyes close and reopen again slowly, with sleep in them. The grass makes a hole for you.

The rivers rise and the rain and wind come so loud you lose yourself. The trees are less (or more) than dead now, they are stone: fossils, and around them the smell of sage becomes overwhelming. It’s almost enough to make you long for the jungle. But it’ll come again. You’ll see.

One foot in front of another. Pain that is no longer there. It has ceased to exist, for how can there be pain when there cannot be that intensity of feeling. It is possible to move to a plane beyond pain and beyond hunger. It is possible to exist just barely above the level of the realm about us. To coast on a slender splinter of consciousness. That’s how a shadow moves. A ghost.

How many days?

Half a week?

A skeleton, a specter, sliding across the land.

A hill, a river, and now a place where humans have been-evidence in the dead wood of telegraph poles. Ancient pines that have been blackened and grooved by weathering and that have numbers on them and strange symbols and the cracks of heat and cold.

But no birds on the wire or the uprights, for the animal realm entire is disappeared; indeed, only the simpler forms of plants survive: sage and small grasses and shrubs and blue lichen and black mosses that coat themselves thinly over a hard, dark soil and bare rock.

Where are compassionate stars, where the sequences of people, the friendly cows and horses? It’s the hurricane, and they have all abandoned ship, deserted and left behind only their music and their trace.

Inclines, rolling valleys.

Scrub that eventually gives way to high grasses.

Fields flooded and everywhere the tracks of creatures making for higher ground. A corn crop ruined. Maize. A commonplace field of potatoes. You dig them up, those livid white tubers.

It’s still night, it’s always night. You can’t see the moon, or Orion, you can’t see where anything is. At least is this still the Earth? Or is it some new place conceived and brought forth by the ocean? These are answers to impossible questions.

A day of this and the contour lines are narrowing and there are palms, and before it is even announced, the forest is there again like a wall. Dense and vine-covered and resistant a little to the gale and rain. The trees whisper to themselves in a vocabulary that no human will understand. They are talking about water and the brown volcanic earth between their toes and the wind that tears through the upper branches and kills the young and very old.

You can’t follow it but you are enough now of a jungle creature to get the gist. The trepidation. The excitement. The waxy creatures with a thousand eyes and ears. The forest thickens and darkens and there is some cover from the weather. Unlit, and there are demons here. Black, coiled snakes. Jaguars, panthers, monkeys, and the beasts of childhood dreams. Great el tigre above you and fantastic beings: griffin and hawkman and things from the last book of Gulliver.

Run-off golden water, wild fruits, bananas. Half of them are poison. Crouch down on one knee and vomit them up, vomit them and drink off a leaf and get up and go on.

You’re walking through the submerged and almost disappeared crater, two hundred miles wide, from a cometary impact sixty-five million years ago, a comet that struck the Yucatán with many times the force of every nuclear weapon currently on the planet, a comet that threw millions of tons of dirt and rock into the atmosphere and blackened the sun for months and changed the climate forever. That wiped out the dinosaurs and two thirds of all other living things on the planet. That made space for a little lemurlike creature that evolved through sixty-five million years into you.

You walk through the crater and you are weak and your wounds are not healing and animals inhabit spaces beneath your pale skin. You limp and the nails have fallen off your toes. You walk and you hallucinate and it occurs to you that perhaps you are already dead. That you are dead and this is hell. That this and all that follows is a rite of passage and a fantasy and you are dead on the wire or mad and in your cell.

You try and penetrate the veil to a higher form of existence, but at present you cannot. This reality appears to be the only one given to you. So it will have to serve.

Your skin is hanging from you and your hair is falling out, you are in rags caked with blood and filth. But you are a holy fool. Enthused. The Lord is in you. You are St. Anthony in the demon-filled desert. You are Diogenes mired in grime. You are the Buddha at Bodhgaya. You are a Jain priest, naked, with a broom before you to sweep away any living being that you might inadvertently step upon. You are holy because you are possessed by a vision of a future time. It is a bright vision and a tight one, compact. Simple. The truth of it has made you pure. It is you. You are healed and strong and patient. You have bided your time and you have slept alone in the city. No one knows you are there, you have been waiting. Watching. And now you are ready. You have acquired a firearm and you are taking the subway train. You are in a house and you have silenced bodyguards and opposition. You are in a study with a man explaining, pleading, he didn’t know there would be deaths. You don’t want explanations, you just want to pull the trigger and turn and leave. Which you do. You leave and that is all. What happens next, if anything, is irrelevant. The circle is complete, the future event comes back to the now. It is the clarity of this vision that makes your legs move and your lungs breathe. That drives every tendon and nerve within you. Yes, you are beyond pain and beyond hunger. Your mind is cast and your will is subservient to this pact with tomorrow.

What kind of an emotion is revenge? Oh, it is much derided. And observers to an execution will often say that they feel repulsed and unsatiated. That it made no difference. The Hebrew God knows this and reserves the right to vengeance for Himself. It’s an eejit’s game. The cycle of violence that spreads itself out from West Belfast and the Bogside and South Armagh. Tit for tat and eye for eye; didn’t someone say that these rules leave us all blind? And yet what if it’s all you have? There are other motivations for a narrative of your life. Love, ambition, greed. But you have erased them all and there is only one thing left. It’s either that or absorb yourself further into the wraith’s world, disappear completely. No. It isn’t noble, but it’ll do. It is good, good enough.

Not that your thoughts have coalesced into a plan, or even that they make sense at all. It’s rather more that in the cold and the unfeeling extremities of your mind there is one glowing coal that helps you to move, put one foot in front of another.

The vines trip you and the trees talk, but they let you pass. The jaguar sleeps and does not stir. The snake rests. You are a fellow being. You cannot see any of them, but they are there and they recognize you. You are part of this now. The forest. Deep into the bush. The swamp comes up to your knees and the hurricane pauses while the eye crosses. It is only a respite, but in fact, as you’ll see, the worst is done. The peninsula has broken it. The wind and the rain come again, but they are halfhearted. They have exhausted themselves. It’s a harsh autumn in Rathlin for a day and you sleep in a forest clearing that in County Antrim they would say had been enchanted by the wee people. And when you wake, the sky is gray and the rain is less and the dream within you is fast and clear.

The hurricane had moved northeast and died to a warm drizzle. I slept under a highway bridge, and as the river rose, tiny crabs came out of the water and sidled up the bank. I killed one with a rock and tried to eat the flesh, but it was rancid and not fit for human consumption. The river continued to flood, and it became dangerous under there. I saw that I could be swept away or trapped under the overhang and drowned; but even so, I needed a break from the downpour. The crabs were coming out of the little holes in the mud and soon the concrete slopes were full of them. They crawled over one another and came up to investigate if I was still alive or not. I wondered where we were and tasted the river water and saw that it was fresh. I hadn’t known then that there were such things as freshwater crabs, and for a while I’d assumed I was near the sea. I’d been walking directionless for a long time and, for all I knew, I might have circled back and been close to where I’d started, wherever that was.

I scooted the wee shites away, but they kept coming back and eventually the crabs were too much and I climbed up out of the overhang and went along the road. A road that in good times must be an impressive two-lane affair, cutting through the jungle and the plains, but now, quite frankly, was a fucking mess. Mud and branches and landslides had made it impassable. There was no hitching here, and it was actually easier to walk at a steadier pace going through the jungle.

I was feeling better. I hadn’t eaten and I was sick with fever and I was concerned that the gash on my foot from the razor wire was turning gangrenous, but for some reason I was feeling better.

As the rain eased, the jungle soundtrack picked up again and I began to see the creatures. The ants were the first out, clearing up the mess like the global janitors they are. Then there were flies and mosquitoes and lizards and then from nowhere came the birds. Blue ones and a crimson one and a parrot or two. It cheered me. I ate some fruit off the trees. By trial and error I’d found which ones didn’t make me throw up. The green prickly ones were ok and the red ones that looked like oranges weren’t bad either. I chewed bark, too, as I walked, and all this time I wasn’t really ever very hungry, which I took as a bit of a bad sign.

Night came, and I climbed a few feet off the ground onto a wide, splayed-out branch and tried to sleep a little. Songs were a great comfort; I didn’t sing but just played them in my head.

Girls. Bridget. Rachel. Cousin Leslie, whose brother-in-law was big-time in the building trade. A foreman. Yeah, don’t worry, Michael, Mr. White doesn’t need muscle. He’s looking for lads from the Old Country who’ll work hard and come on time and take minimum wage. Yeah. Sure. And that’s why I’m here. The jungle.

Noisy. My mind drifted and would not sleep.

What did you say? Revenge. Is that what you said? Is that enough to get you through, can that drive an engine like you? Shouldn’t it be hot, won’t it dampen? No. It’ll do. It isn’t much, but it’s enough and I promise you, it’ll do.

That’s what I was saying. Foolish maybe, but that was it. Thinking too much. Too much. My heart, a snare drum in my ears. And there was a dullness beneath my left knee.

I managed to get off to sleep and woke in the morning, stiff and shivering.

The rain was gone for now. I attempted to climb a tree and get a perspective, but I wasn’t made for climbing yet; walking was hard enough.

I licked dew off a leaf and ate some of the things that looked like pears. During the night, ants had come and made me part of their fraternity, cleaning bits of scabs and exploring unwholesome aspects of my skin. They hadn’t woken me, so I chose to see them as benign beings.

I walked along the springy forest floor, mulch and dead leaves making it an easy path for the weary. The vines were the enemy, though, getting everywhere and trying to trip you. It wasn’t hot, and this at least was a relief. I walked directionless all day and lay down in the afternoon. My leg was almost numb, and this concerned me more than anything else. I sat down and sniffed it, but I didn’t smell anything. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I tried to get up but sitting had been a mistake and I was too knackered now. I found another likely-looking branch and curled into the fetal position and slept.

The next day I realized I was having hallucinations. I might have been having them all along, but it took me until then to see that my mind wasn’t completely clear. I woke with vultures tearing at my left leg, tearing huge chunks out of it. I sat up and tried to shoo them away, but they were massive, ugly, bold creatures that paused merely to look at me with contempt and continue their abominable activity. I screamed and thrashed wildly and still the birds hung on. I swung at them with my fists, and I overbalanced and fell off the low branch and onto the forest floor. I stared about and, of course, there were no vultures at all. I cracked up then, sobbed, and sat there for a long time. To have got out of the prison, clean away, and then to have made it through a hurricane only to die of fever in the jungle. It hardly seemed fair.

How was I going to get to America, to carry out my plan?

How indeed? I was lost. I was sick. My leg ached. And most important, my mind was not clear. I tried to think, but everything inside my head was sluggish. Christ, was I really going mad?

I drove away the panic and breathed and tried to get some thoughts together. I could either stay here and hope someone came by, or I could go on and try to find help. If it meant giving myself up to the authorities, so be it. Surely that would be better than dying insane out here in the tropical rain forest.

I tried to get up, but it was impossible.

I found a stick. I heaved myself up and started walking, going a third the speed of previous days and looking always at the ground to make my way easier. I went half a day like this and collapsed, exhausted, drenched with sweat and bleeding from scrapes on my arms and feet. It rained that night and woke me, and I lay with my mouth open trying to drink a little.

In the morning, I couldn’t get up and I decided I would have to crawl. Crawling was a bit easier than walking, and I actually made better progress. On my hands and knees I could negotiate better the fallen trees and vines. I went like this that day and into the next. To my surprise, the jungle began to thin a little and I could see huge patches of sky through the canopy.

That night I had terrible hallucinations about snakes biting at my ankles and trying to eat my leg whole. They were wrapped around me and suffocating me. I screamed the whole of the night and begged them to stop, but they only fled with the dawn.

In appalling fear, I crawled away from the place I’d slept. I moved blind now, for my eyes didn’t open. I crawled for hours, and I fell on my face and slept that way. During the night, I crawled again and I thought the end must be coming soon. I’m not overly defeatist, but I am a realist, and I could see that I was in trouble. I could see that I was in mortal shape. I crawled on, expecting, soon, paroxysm and death.

I was wrong, though. Old Atropos wasn’t hovering overhead that evening and wouldn’t be for some time to come. But it was night and the daughters of Nyx must have been guiding me, because if I’d turned a slightly different way to the left or right I would never have made it to the pig pen. I would have veered off into the jungle and died sometime in the next few days. But as I say, the Gods or the Fates or involved beings who’d heard about my story, about my narrative, about my plan, realized that to continue the show, they had to preserve me and so, out of the jungle, they made a pig pen with small, black, friendly pigs, and they allowed me to crawl up to it and stop and collapse and wait.

It wasn’t long. The pigs snuffed my face and licked it. There were children’s voices first, distracted, singing, and then silence for a while and whispers and then the sound of running. Not long after that, the voice of an older woman whispering at first too, and then barking instructions. And then arms, a dozen arms lifting me up. I was thinking that if this was another hallucination it was one I liked. Tiny arms lifting me, half-dragging me, not very far into darkness.

Water on my lips and questions in Spanish, many questions.

¿Quién es usted? ¿De dónde ha venido usted? ¿Qué sucedió a su pie?

More water, and then voices raised. A man arguing with two women, clearly about me. He was opposed to my presence, but I could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. Someone began washing me and taking off my clothes and tiny fingers were picking the lice out of my hair. At the same time, a soothing voice fed me water and in the water there was ground maize. They cleaned me and put a blanket over me, and I shivered still and slept.

During the night I cried, and first the man and then the two women sat up with me, holding my hand, dripping water onto my lips.

Estamos consiguiendo a un buen hombre, él es médico, the woman said. The word médico stuck in my head.

I need Bridget, I said, she’ll help me.

The woman talked to me in Spanish and sang to me a little, and I think I slept. In the morning there was another voice, stern and almost angry. He was talking to the women and the man. He asked me questions, but I could say nothing. Then suddenly, violently, he poked at my foot and I cried out. It seemed to confirm everything that he’d been saying, and he sighed and went outside.

Later, they fed me beans and water and milk and they bathed me again, wiping me down with wet rags and then wrapping me in a blanket. The woman spoke to me for hours, soothing me and comforting me, and then the angry man came back. He had brought other men with him. I was falling in and out of consciousness. I couldn’t see. The word médico came up again.

I want Bridget, she’s a good nurse, I want her. She’ll look after me. She looked after Andy. He’s in good shape. Get Bridget, please, please, I really want to see her. I want to see her.

The angry man came over, his voice mellow now, kind.

It is ok, he said in English.

I tried to open my eyes, and I did for a second or two, but everything was out of focus. I felt strong arms hold me down on the cot and then the blanket was removed. I was naked under the blanket and I was self-conscious. I tried to cover myself, but the arms held me by my side. Someone was pouring brandy into my mouth. I recognized it. How in the name of God had they gotten brandy? They forced a stick between my teeth and then I realized what it was they were about. I yelled and thrashed my arms, but they held me fast. I struggled for only about a minute and then I calmed my mind and resigned myself. The man holding my shoulders was the very first man. He kissed me on the forehead and whispered things in my ear in Spanish: it would be ok, it would be ok. I would be brave and it would be ok. The angry man, too, soothed me in broken English.

Please not worry, it is fast.

Then in a soft voice the older woman explained in slow and simple Spanish how everything would go. I got none of it, but her demeanor helped quiet me further.

Sí, sí, I said and nodded to show that I understood now. There were murmurs of approval. I was in a small hut and their breaths were close to mine. I bit down on the stick, and I was ready.

It was a hacksaw, but it had been sharpened. I felt it go in above my ankle and I was relieved, because I thought they might do it below my knee. The whole thing must have taken less than twenty minutes. The actual sawing under two. What he did down there, I don’t know, but he stopped the flow of blood and mended the wounds and halted the screaming of the nerve endings. They gave me a sweet drink and told me to sleep, and after a while I did.

The next day I could open my eyes, and I saw that I was in a hut with a thatched roof and a hard dirt floor. It was swept and clean but hardly hygienic and not the place I would have chosen to recover from major surgery. I had the will to survive but will can’t do everything, will can’t do the job of antibiotics; just ask any of those prematurely dead Christian Scientists.

Still, if kindness counted for anything, I was way ahead.

The old woman was very ugly and the young woman was her daughter and the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. They were so caring that I loved them both and the man too. They told me things about themselves and the place I was in and they asked me questions, so many questions, but I couldn’t understand. I told them my name and they told me theirs, Pedro and María and then the old woman’s name, which was Jacinta.

When the children came to see me, they taught me to count, first to twenty and then to a hundred. We played a game in which I taught them the English word for things and they taught me the Spanish and we argued over which was right. Every day, when the pain started to get bad, the woman knocked me out with a milky white juice that first numbed me and then drifted me off to sleep.

I had been a week in the hut when out of the blue one morning, Pedro helped me dress and got me out of bed. He was explaining something very important and serious. I nodded and tried to get it, but I couldn’t follow him. María wrapped my stump in cotton bandages and then pinned my trouser leg up over it. Both María and her mother had skillfully repaired my jeans. They had patched them with heavy cotton that they had dyed light blue. When I arrived, they had been cut to shreds and more hole than fabric. I told them that now some hippie chick from NYU would have coughed up a hundred bucks for them. Pedro had made me a beautifully worked crutch that fitted well under my arm. It was carved with leaves and simple patterns and there were three little figures at the top, which were obviously him and his family. I choked up when I saw it. He helped me walk out of the hut into the village square: half a dozen huts, children, women, goats, and little brown dogs with long tails. The jungle on three sides and a clearing and a dirt path on the other.

Pedro had watched me walk and wasn’t happy with his crutch and took it off me to shorten. He ran back inside while I leaned on María and her mother. It was to be a departure, as waiting out there in the clearing for me was a Volkswagen Beetle, a red one in reasonable condition. The driver came and tried to help me over to the car, but I shook my head. I wanted to say something first. I turned to the little assembled crowd and cleared my throat.

I just want to say thank you very much for looking after me. You have been so kind, muchas gracias, muchas gracias.

There was a smattering of quiet, sincere talk and some applause and María kissed me on the cheek. Pedro came back with the crutch and it worked even better now. Before I got in the car, I saw a man jogging through the jungle towards us, a huge, fat man with a beard, blue shirt, white cotton slacks. He didn’t look at all as Indian as the people in the clearing. He was puffing, and his face was red. I knew he was the angry man who had been my surgeon.

He came over to me.

I want to see you before you go, he said.

Yes, I said, I remember you.

My English, I cannot talk.

No, your English is good, I said.

No, very badly, he said, and his eyes met mine.

The children have taught me to count to one hundred in Spanish, I said.

He smiled.

I do not want to miss you, he said.

Look, I want to thank-I began, but he interrupted.

Listen, please. I know who you are. You are American. Not safe anymore for here. We take to you somewhere else. The border. There you are safe. They are good men, but not everyone keeps, uh, keeps quiet when he is. Tell no one about where you are from, say that you are in trouble over girl if you say anything.

It seemed a bit hokey, but he was serious and his face was grave. I looked at him; his eyes were old and very blue.

All of you, and you in particular, you saved my life. I don’t know your name.

He offered his hand and I shook it.

Príncipe, he said. You know that there is no choice, we know we cannot take you to hospital, you are famous gringo escape. Murderer. Famous.

They said I was a murderer?

Rapist, murderer, such things we hear.

It’s lies.

Príncipe shook his head, as if I didn’t even need to say it. The cops wanted me and that was good enough for them. For all of them.

Thank you, Príncipe, I said.

You are welcome. Thank also la Virgen nuestra, nuestra madre, que se echa la culpa de nuestros pecados. Now, my friend, you will go.

Ok.

He helped me into the car. I wound the window down and thanked Pedro, María, and the mother. I got in the VW and we headed off. I turned to wave, and they were all waving back. I was crying. I wiped away the tears and looked out after them for a long time.

The driver of the VW didn’t speak to me but was friendly enough and offered me cigarettes. We smoked and listened to godawful mariachi and Mexican rock music on the radio. The little Beetle was not in as great shape as I had thought and the exhaust seeped into the car from the backseat. The engine was loud and throaty and it seemed impossible that so great a rupture of sound could be coming from so wee a vehicle. The road was good for a long time, but then he turned off it and the new road was immediately terrible, and the car shook and made dreadful crashing noises over every pothole. I was feeling extremely sick from the fumes, and we had to stop every half hour or so for me to get a breath. When we got going again, I tried to focus on the horizon. I stared at the fields and occasional plantations, but my attention always wandered down to my left ankle. The horror of it got me every time. Jesus Christ. María had given me roots to chew on for the pain, and they’d dug up some white pills from somewhere. The root really helped, but whether through placebo or some natural emollient, I don’t know.

When it was getting dark and we had climbed a little and it was colder, we stopped at a village and the driver helped me out. He led me to a hut and told me to use the roll mat on the ground. I lay down and he went back to the car and drove off. I couldn’t sleep at all that night, and it wasn’t from the vermin everywhere. My heart was pounding again in my ears, not from fever this time, but from something else. Nerves, panic. Was this the start of it? My breakdown? I calmed myself very deliberately and lay awake until just before dawn, when men came for me in a jeep. They laughed and slapped my back and said things in Spanish. We drove through a town called Tenosique de Pino Suárez, and then up into mountains. When it got cold, one of the men gave me a parka and I wrapped myself in it.

We came to the camp in the evening. For camp it was. Tents and outdoor fires in a clearing by a river. About twenty men standing about, and at first I assumed they were miners or prospectors or something; but it soon became clear that they were fugitives and absconders and the like. They weren’t bandits, they didn’t raid anyone, they just lived up here, gathered for mutual protection. A tall, thin man with a preposterous Zapata mustache came up to me grinning with a mouth of yellow teeth and said something in Spanish. He shook my hand and gave me tobacco to chew and introduced me to a couple of other men. He was the boss, and I said I was happy to meet him.

I suppose that he explained the situation up here and who everyone was.

Ok, mate, but I haven’t understood a fucking word, I said, and smiled, and hobbled to a place near the fire.

The men were kind and saw me under a canvas overhang next to a rocky little patch which was to be my spot. There were blankets, and you could stuff saw grass into sacking if you wanted a pillow. They helped me clear away the stones and, when the ground was flat, I laid a blanket down and slept.

In the morning we ate beans and in the evening we ate rice and beans, sometimes with a tortilla. Where the food came from was a mystery; indeed, how the men supported themselves at all was a mystery, for it seemed that they did nothing at all. A few of them spoke to me in broken English, but it was so bad and their accents so heavy I could understand very little.

Príncipe must have spun them some yarn, because they were good to me. We were all in the shit together and that was what mattered. Someone was bankrolling us, though, and later when I looked at a map and saw that I must have been in Chiapas, I came up with a few ideas. It was 1992 and within a year the American papers were filled with stories about that most southerly, poorest, and heavily Indian of Mexican states.

In the evenings two of the old guys pulled out guitars and sang long, mournful songs about sweethearts. I didn’t recognize them, but I picked them up, and when I tried a few later on Spanish-speaking friends, they knew them. One night one of the guys strummed “There’s Only One Northern Ireland,” the old football anthem from the Kop at Windsor Park, but it turned out that this was a very well-known song called “Guantanamera,” which everyone on earth had heard of except me. Seeing I was excited by it, they sang it over and over and, in what seemed like no time at all, I had learned all seven verses. The days were all the same. The sky was blue, save for a few breaths of cloud. It was cold until noon and then hot for a few hours, then cold again at night. The landscape was high desert, cacti, a few scrubby trees, boulders. Once when I went for a walk, I saw a fox.

I had been there about a week when I started to get itchy feet (itchy foot, if you want to be literal). The guys sang songs and played checkers and eked out their scant tobacco in the evenings and slept most of the day. Like I say, they did bugger-all and there was no one for me to talk to. I ate their supplies and contributed nothing, not even a decent story or two to the conversation. Things had probably cooled down sufficiently, and it was ok to move on. And I wanted to go. I had to get north, I had to get back to New York.

On a Sunday morning (half a dozen of the men had rigged up church), I rolled up my clothes and got my stick and tried to make myself understood about heading north. The headman got the picture and told me to wait till tomorrow, since a car was coming and could take me to a road-this explained in bad English and more helpfully by drawings on the dirt.

I did wait and a car did come, a green Toyota Camry with a door missing. The driver left off a sack of rice and a tiny bag of coffee. The boss explained a few things and the driver nodded. I got in and the driver didn’t ask me anything at all. He drove me down into the plains. At a road junction he stopped the car and gave me some Mexican banknotes, which I refused but he insisted upon, and told me which way to hitch.

Guatemala, he said, pointing in one direction.

United States? I asked.

El norte, he said, and pointed along a line of blue mountains. He started the car and asked with gestures if I was sure I didn’t want to head back east with him. I shook my head. He shook his and off he drove.

I stood for a while, and then I sat. Just before nightfall a dust storm in the distance showed that there was a vehicle, the only one going in any direction that day. I hobbled up on my crutch and stuck my thumb out. It was a truck with an open back and no cargo. The driver saw me from a long way off and slowed down and stopped. He opened the cab door and said something in Spanish.

Can I come up? I asked.

He nodded, and I got up beside him.

¿Habla español? he asked.

I shook my head.

Bueno, he said, and started her up.

He drove the whole of the night and shook me awake in the late morning as we arrived at a small town. I could see it was the end of the line. I asked him where north was and he showed me. I got out and thanked him, and he seemed to say that it was nothing.

The town was so full, it must have been a market day. I bought water, dates, oranges, and tortillas with one of the banknotes and got a lot of change back. I sat in the market square in the shade of a church and ate everything I had. I asked around with sign language and found a standpipe at the back of the church where it was permissible to wash. I stripped down to my boxers and cleaned myself off, much to the amusement of some small children playing nearby with a ball. If the kids hadn’t been around, I would have given my bollocks a good washing too. I air-dried and pulled on my mended jeans and a cotton smock that I’d been given in the village. I had a sandal on my good foot and a now filthy bandage on my stump. I safety-pinned the jeans back over and it was ok. I went back to the village square and found a bus stand and with much confusion explained that I was heading for the United States. This was tricky, I was told. I apparently could not get a bus straight there and should either go to Mexico City or take a bus up the coast, which would get me close but take much longer. In case of the peelers I chose not to go to Mexico City.

I got on the local bus, and we waited about three hours until it filled with passengers. It headed off, and a large woman in the seat next to me opened a black bin liner full of all her stuff and offered me a kind of sherbet to drink. She had one herself and then she produced a Madeira cake and a pot of jam. She cut me off a piece of cake and spread the jam for me too. She offered everyone on the bus a piece of her cake, and there was barely enough left for herself at the end. She told me stuff about her life and her kids and didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t follow any of it.

The bus ride was very pleasant (especially since I wasn’t on the sun side), and we went through a scrubby desert and a few towns and, once, a pine forest. I didn’t see any coast at all and wondered if I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick somehow. In any case, we traveled for about seven or eight hours, almost everyone, including my neighbor, getting off at intervening places. We eventually stopped for good at another place similar to the one we’d left. It was a small coastal town called Puerto Arrajo on a large, curved natural harbor.

I must have screwed up, because it was the end of the line as far as the bus routes north were concerned. Exasperated, I explained to the bus station attendant that I was trying to go north and, equally exasperated, he explained that I had to go back south to Veracruz and get off and then go north from there. The bus south didn’t leave until the next day. It was evening, so I got dinner in a filthy little restaurant which served a greasy pork stew with tortillas and which became the greatest meal I had ever tasted in my life. That night I slept on the second floor of a half-built house. I woke early and got scrambled eggs for breakfast at a sort of tavern. The bus station didn’t open till eleven, so I walked around all morning (I was getting pretty handy with the crutch), took a shit in the public squat shithouse, and strolled down to the shore. I tried to take a swim but the salt water was bloody murder on my stump, so I got out and dried off.

At eleven I hit the bus station. More confusion. Apparently I had misunderstood the man yesterday, for the bus back was not coming today but tomorrow.

I began to fly into a rage, and then I stopped myself. It wouldn’t help. I wandered to the outskirts of town and stuck out my thumb again.

A truck came, and the driver picked me up. I didn’t even ask where we were going. He talked all day and into the night, and I was a good listener.

I thought the sun was coming up, but it was the wrong direction, west, and the man explained that we were in the outskirts of Mexico City. When the dawn did come, I wanted the night back. Soot, diesel fumes, a locust-colored sky. We were up high, and through the smog you could make out slums and shanties and housing estates that were conceived in the design institutes of hell.

When you read Bernal Díaz’s book about the conquest, you get the impression that Mexico City is built upon a lake, with little barges plying between temples and wooden houses; it sounds beautiful, like Venice. I don’t know what happened to the lake, but when I was there, it was a nightmare of roads and concrete, insane traffic, poisoned air,

The driver was only passing through, but it took hours. At one point, in a nicer part I saw Americans at a café near a big church.

A man and a woman in shorts reading the International Herald Tribune. Americans, English words in a newspaper. I wanted to wind the window down and say something. Connect. But I did not. The light changed and we went on.

At a place called El Oro, the trucker stopped at a clothing factory. He asked around and we found a driver heading north.

Tall guy, chain-smoker, spoke a little English, wanted company. Said his name was Gabriel.

I told him mine was Michael, and he said that we were two of the archangels and that was good luck.

I shared his food and his little back sleeping cabin for two days. We talked fútbol and women and ate stale bread, and he told me long and complicated jokes that I couldn’t get but cracked him up.

María’s medicine was gone and the pain in my stump had become incredible. To help, Gabriel let me have some of his homemade moonshine, evil stuff that would have put hairs on the chest of the Lancôme girl.

In Chihuahua City, Gabriel said that we were at the parting of the ways. He was delivering shirts to California and had to turn west. I was going to New York City, and from here the Texas border was only about two hundred kilometers. Texas to New York was a much shorter journey than California to New York.

I could see what he was saying, but I wasn’t quite ready to leave him. It was safe here in this cab, with grain whiskey and old bread and my chatty fellow seraph. I wanted to get back, I had to get back. There was a scene to be played out, the handgun flaring, a knee jerking, the pain to be extracted, the terror to be inflicted, but not yet, not yet.

I’ll go with you all the way to the California border, I said.

He didn’t mind at all, and we drove west to Tijuana.

Tijuana, as most everyone knows, is a miserable place, and it was worse back then, but you only have to go to the nearest bar and be a little discreet before you can get hooked up with someone who can help you cross.

I was discreet, but I had no cash and I had to sponge off two American college guys in a VW bus. They’d been exploring Baja and surfing the Pacific side and had a lot of questions, and they bought me a beer, and I invented a story about myself that I’d been hitching around the Americas for the last few years, working and drifting and seeing things. They thought this very cool for a disabled guy and bought the whole shebang. My invention ran away with me a little, and I mentioned Colombia and Ecuador and the heights of Machu Picchu.

I explained to them I was going to have to cross illegally into the U.S. because I’d lost my passport months ago. They thought this was cool too, and offered to hide me in the bus, but I declined and said that that wasn’t the way things were done, and what I really needed was money.

They gave me fifty bucks and I thanked them and watched them drive off towards the massive customs station that led back into the United States.

With dough in hand and a grilling in a back kitchen that convinced two teenagers that I was not in the employ of the U.S. government, I was told that we were going that night.

A dozen of us met outside a bar off the strip and away from prying eyes. We waited for a long time and I thought I’d been ripped off, but eventually a van pulled up and we drove off into the desert for a while.

I had to climb a barbed-wire fence, which was tricky in my condition, but not impossible, and then there was a solid metal fence, which was a piece of cake and had handy grooves, as if designed for aiding wetbacks with dodgy legs.

I crossed somewhere east and south of San Diego with a score of other guys of all ages. We walked into no-man’s-land for some time and then a flashlight beam appeared which was either the agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service or the boy we were supposed to meet.

Our boy. Young, short, black jeans, black denim jacket, and a black Stetson. He yelled at us as if we didn’t see him and we went over, me muttering that half the bloody state of California must have heard the eejit. A van idled nearby and everyone gave the driver money. I didn’t have any cash left now but they let me come along. They were good guys, and most of them were agricultural laborers who did this thing every year. Fruit-picking season was over, but in Las Vegas, building season was just beginning. We drove all night and into the next day and the final stop was an industrial complex just south of Las Vegas itself. Everyone was there to demolish and build hotels and with my experience I knew I could have been on to a good thing, and but for my leg I might have made a fortune. But as it was, no one was ever going to hire me, save to make the coffee, so I thanked the guys for the ride and started hitching again east.

I was on the road an hour and a half when a sheriff’s officer picked me up and told me that hitching here was against the law. I said I wasn’t aware of that and he recognized the accent and asked me what part of Ireland I was from. I said Belfast and Deputy Flinn said that his grandmother on his father’s side was from Belfast. I’m not the biggest fan of peelers or other agents of the law, but Flinn was a big, gingerbapped, pale-skinned, nice bloke who almost wept over my story, which was that I’d come to Vegas to work as a builder but a hoddropping accident had cost me my foot and since I was an illegal I couldn’t very well go to the authorities to get work comp. I was hitching my way back to New York, where I had an address of a distant relative in Brooklyn who might sport me the cash to carry me back broken and dispirited to the Old Country.

Well, Seamus, Flinn began (for I was called Seamus McBride in this little universe), that’s about the worst thing I ever heard, and I want to lend you some cash to get the Greyhound. No, don’t object. I know you guys are full of pride but I absolutely insist.

I did object and explained that I had got myself into this mess and would get myself out of it without having to rely on the well-meaning charity of strangers.

Flinn was not to be daunted and explained that this money was only to be a loan and I would pay him back. Surely it was foolishness not to accept a loan from a friend and wasn’t that what I was going to do in Brooklyn anyway? Since he put it that way, it was hard for me to refuse, so I took his name and address and I did pay the bugger back about a month or so later, when, incredibly, I was on Ramón’s payroll, wearing a thousand-dollar suit and carrying a bloody Uzi.

He gave me two hundred-dollar bills and left me with handshakes at the bus station in Las Vegas. I bought a ticket to New York and stayed on all the way to Denver, where I had to get out and stretch and get my wits together after a very long and unpleasant over-air-conditioned journey through Utah and the Rockies.

I found a motel, got a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, stripped, and had a shower that lasted about an hour and a half. I watched TV like it was a new invention. A presidential campaign had been taking place all the time I’d been away and it was getting close to its climax. The governor of Arkansas was being tipped to edge out President Bush. It was boring, so instead I watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and flipped between endless daytime soaps.

I stayed in the motel for two nights. I spent all my money and cashed in my Greyhound ticket and ordered pizzas and drank beer. I rebandaged my foot and stood, agape, staring at my stump for a while, though fortunately I was pissed senseless at the time, otherwise I might have had a bit of a header. In any case, like I say, in two days I’d spent all my hard-earned cash. It was an idiotic and silly waste of resources, considering how Nyx’s weans had escaped me from the prison and the jungle and given me dough.

But that was it, of course. I wanted to get back, I wanted to see blood on walls and pooling under the bodies of gray men. I wanted to see widows’ tears. To hear screams and pleas for mercy. But I didn’t want to go back for precisely the same reasons.

I tried finding Hibernians organizations in Denver, but there was only one in the phone book. I called up and explained my case, but the guy practically laughed when I said I’d like to borrow some money. After that, I packed my shit and walked down Broadway and tried hitching at the on-ramp to the I-70. No one gave me a lift and coppers waved me off and had no time to listen to the adventures of Seamus McBride. I slept rough that night under a bridge near Cherry Creek. I drank the creek water and washed in it before I started hitching again. I went back up to the I-70 ramp and this time I again got lucky.

An hour later, a man in a camper van was pulling up to the on-ramp and saw me and our eyes locked for a second and he jerked his thumb back for me to get in.

It was a huge white-and-yellow Winnebago of the very latest fashion. I climbed up. The man was in his fifties, white hair, the sunken gray face of an actuary or undertaker. He told me his name was Peter Jenning, though not like the anchor, he said, because of the s (but I had never heard of the anchor and immediately, from all this nautical terminology, assumed that he was ex-navy).

I spun him Seamus’s sad story and he swallowed it, and I asked him about life on the ocean wave.

Well, Seamus, I was never in the armed services. Ear problems. But my son was in the Gulf War, not in the actual fighting, but he was a radar operator behind the lines. Reservist, got his medal, and don’t think it wasn’t dangerous, because it was.

I believe it. They kept firing those things. Those missiles, I said.

Scuds, he said, seething with the memory of it.

Yeah, very risky. I was in the British Army myself then, actually, but I wasn’t sent to the Gulf. Pity, really, I told him. Not mentioning, as I’ve already said, that at that time I was finishing out a minor prison sentence on Saint Helena, and that in itself was a class-A double fuckup too, because after I got back, my regiment was merged with another regiment and a lot of the new recruits were offered semigenerous packages to get out of the army, though not, of course, the fucking dishonorable dischargees.

You seem upset about it, he said.

I nodded absently.

But, son, that war screwed up. Listen to me. The ground war. Gulf War was all based on the Battle of Cannae, you know, flanking maneuver. Cannae was a big victory and so was the ground war, but did Hannibal win the war? Did we beat Saddam? No, we did not. Let me tell you: Vinse Hannibal, et non seppe, um, usar uh, poi. Ben la vittoriosa sua ventura. Read that, memorized it.

I nodded sagely and said, Ah yes, good point, excellent point. He smiled at me, clearly well pleased with himself.

You must have learned Latin in school in Ireland, huh, Seamus? Jesuits, right, thumped it into you, he suggested in a leer that seemed to convey his distaste for popery but approval of the beating.

We did, but, you know, I was never very g-

Hannibal was victorious and knew not how to use victory given him. That’s what that means. See my point? Bush and Powell, none of them used the victory to boot Saddam out of the country. Hannibal didn’t march on Rome, see what I’m saying?

I had no idea what he was saying, actually, but there are certain very strict duties imposed on a hitchhiker and one of those is to agree with whatever the driver says. I agreed and he proceeded to break down other errors in the president’s strategy.

They’re going to have to go in again, you mark my words, son. You remember Cato?

Yeah, he was always attacking Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther mov-

Carthago delenda est, that’s what Cato proclaimed, Cathage must be destroyed. You’ll see, we’ll go after Iraq again, Mr. Jenning said, and he outlined how we would win the war and further explained how every engagement in every war since 1860 could have been prosecuted more successfully. It didn’t come as much of a surprise when Mr. Jenning told me that he was a bit of a history buff. He had been in sales for forty years and that wasn’t a shock either, considering that he could talk the arse off an octopus. He had ended up, before retirement, as a regional marketing VP with the Kentucky Fried people. I had assumed that all the restaurants were franchises and wondered what they needed a regional marketing VP for, but Mr. Jenning had laughed at my naive appreciation of the ways of the world and further explained his role in the great corporate machine with endless and excruciating detail.

It was, however, my luck that Mr. Jenning was driving all the way to Vermont to see the fall colors, and he said he would swing by New York City and leave me off if I wanted. I did so want, and a few days listening to his yammering seemed a small price to pay. He explained Livy, Clausewitz, and Bismarck and, given encouragement, expanded further upon his theories of the universe. He was a widower but didn’t seem to miss his wife that much, and once in his sleep in the big bunk of the Winnebago he said, Serves you right, you old hag, which elicited a few theories of my own.

He asked a couple of times if I could pay for the gas but I emptied out my pockets and I suppose it convinced him. He didn’t let me do any of the driving, but I entertained him with made-up stories of Ireland. He especially enjoyed salty tales that involved women of loose virtue, and I had a few of those that weren’t so far from the truth.

When we arrived at the George Washington Bridge, it was raining and cold and night. I thanked him much and he let me off and headed up the Palisades to cross the Hudson at some other point.

I walked over the GWB in the drizzly dark. There’s no toll for pedestrians, thank Christ, for I had only a dollar and fifty-seven cents that I had husbanded carefully, and with that I took the A train to 125th Street. I came out in familiar old Harlem again. It was two A.M. and sleeting and such people as there were around gave me the cold shoulder. I walked with my crutch along 125th and turned up the hill on Amsterdam.

I found our building. The front door had been conveniently jemmied again. I walked down into the basement and rang Ratko’s bell. I rang for a long time and eventually there was much swearing in Serbo-Croat and he opened the door holding a lead pipe.

I need a place for a couple of days, I said. Ratko looked at me in astonishment for a second and then helped me through the door.

The basement stair was steep.

Each step down was agonizing but I enjoyed the pain. I had made it, I had fucking made it, and every torture now I engraved in memory, another torment notarized and ultimately to be paid for soon in the currency of fear.