Thai Horse

CENTRAL AMERICA

1985

LOS BOXES

The river had been broad and energetic at the beginning of the journey, but the jungle had gradually encroached on it until now, after four days, the tortured umbilicus between Madrango, the capital, and the forlorn outpost 160 miles away was a mere trickle. The ancient riverboat, scarred by years of heat and rain and piloted by a captain who could barely stay awake, chugged feebly up the last few cramped miles. Trees and ferns snapped at its gunwales and rattled its portholes. The old tub groaned as it fought the brush. The only passenger was an obese grotesque, his delicate face squinched by layers of fat, his faded blue eyes, tiny mouth and pointy nose lost in folds of flesh. He sat on a decrepit old lawn chair near the bow, knees and ankles tucked together, his chin pulled down, a white hat hugging his brow, his soft, dimpled hands clutching a white umbrella to shield him from the broiling sun. His white suit was skimpy, ill fitting and sweat-stained, and his unbuttoned shirt cuffs hung loose, for they no longer fit around his massive wrists.

His name was Randall Wilfred Pratt III, and he was with the U.S. State Department in Madrango, much to the chagrin of the embassy staff. On paper, Pratt had looked good, an honor graduate of Harvard whose father was a major contributor and leverage broker for the party in power, and a confidant of the president.

In person, Pratt III was an embarrassment to all, a closet case who came in the package, along with the donations and endorsements. Banished to the minute, unstable Central American country, he was kept discreetly out of sight and used only when some undesirable occasion arose. This job was perfect; it required no diplomacy at all.

For two days he had sat thus, all tacked in, waiting and watching for his first glimpse of a place so foul, so unforgiving, so terrifying by reputation, that even the judges who condemned men to its depths whispered its name. With each passing hour Pratt’s anxiety grew until it was a scream waiting to happen, a scream that could not be suppressed.

The old scow burst through the trees and the place rose like a specter before them, a towering stone bastion tortured by vines, smothered with damp green moss, and choked by the forest that entrapped it. Pratt was so undone, so utterly terrified by the sight that he -yelled out loud, a piercing cry that jarred the master of the boat awake and brought him immediately to his feet. Pratt quickly recovered. Turning with embarrassment, he dismissed the outburst with a wave of his chubby hand. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and furiously mopped his face.

My God, he thought, was Hatcher still alive? And if so, was he sane enough to be worth this trip?

HATCHER

Christian Hatcher had been there for three years, two months and twenty-seven days — 1,183 days, to be exact. Nobody in Los Boxes knew his real name, which was not uncommon; nobody in Los Boxes knew anybody’s real name. To be sentenced here was to be sentenced to oblivion.

There was no escape from Los Boxes. It loomed like an apparition from the jungle floor, encircled by two hundred miles of steamy jungle as deadly as it was verdant, an emerald paradise whose green canopy concealed a floor crawling with venomous snakes, jaguars and wild hogs, pocked with quicksand bogs, and teeming with vines that grew so fast in the hot, fertile forest that a man could be strangled by them as he slept. There were no paths here; the jungle devoured them in hours.

Centuries-old vines entwined the crumbling citadel and seemed to hold it together. Inside, there were 212 rooms carved from dirt and stone, each ten feet square and eight feet high, and each lit by a single bulb, the electricity supplied by an aged and unreliable generator. The barred windows were hardly more than slivers in the wall, barely wide enough for a man to get through. The only adversary here was nature. Nobody could remember why this fortress had been built, but it had served as a political prison for more than a century, surviving one feeble government after another. In Madrango its name was whispered in fear.

There were no records of names or arrival dates. A new inmate was simply assigned a box and its number became his identity.

Three years, two months and twenty-seven days ago, Hatcher had become no. 127.

The rules of Los Boxes were simple: You did your work, you never spoke to another prisoner. That was it.

Nobody refused to work, it was the only way to get outside, where there was fresh air and exercise. Those who did refuse, out of obstinacy or rebellion, were locked away in their box and forgotten.

If one prisoner spoke to another, the guards simply cut out his tongue.

There were no second chances here; Los Boxes was ferociously expedient.

The guards — there were only six — had once been inmates themselves. When the federales quit or went mad or died from belly worms, they were replaced with inmates. The inmate guards were no better or worse than the regulars. And although they were armed, they used weapons only to protect themselves or to shoot occasional predators.

Escape? To escape was to die. Those who tried to were never pursued. The guards chuckled and waited, and when the fugitives realized the futility of escape and returned, they were put back in their box, fed twice a day, and forgotten.

In the beginning there had been incredible frustration. Like a poet without paper or an orator without a voice, Hatcher had no way to express his rage. Only that ruthless, sleepless inquisitor called conscience kept him company. Unable to escape from a constant evaluation of his deeds, his anger turned inward, and as the months turned to years the specifics of his arrest and the politics behind it merged into philosophical abstractions.

Had he betrayed a trust? Had cynicism robbed him of all sense of value? Was this the price for intolerance, for the arrogance of pride? The cross-examination was endless. He went to sleep with the questions on his lips and awoke with no answers, for even his memories had convoluted into fiction.

His calendar scratched out on earthen walls, Hatcher’s clock was a shadow flitting across the floor. Only a dream of freedom kept him alive, and after three years that had dwindled to a mere flicker of hope, hardly enough to inspire escape.

At first, Hatcher seriously considered escape. He had survived five months in the steamy backwaters of Laos and Cambodia and walked out to tell about it, had led two crewmen out of the southern jungles of Madrango when his planeload of arms had crashed, although one had died of snakebite just before they got out.

So memories helped to stave off madness — memories and the dream of escape. There was no rush. He would take his time. He studied his prison carefully until he knew the layout. He memorized every niche and crack in the walls, studied the jungle paths and made elaborate escape plans, which he drew on the dirt walls and floors of his box so he could revise them. The cell window was easy. Time and erosion had crumbled the wall around the bars.

A little work with sticks he could smuggle back to his box could work it loose. From outside he carefully studied the face of the prison. It was old and rotten. Climbing the sheer wall to the top of the citadel would be a breeze. He had learned that lesson well from Cirillo.

It was a day he would never forget and he played and replayed it in his mind.

Hatcher had clung to the rock as if it were a magnet while the wind tore at his clothes and pulled at his bleeding fingers. If he could have, he would have dug a hole in that rock and crawled in. He was seventeen years old and petrified.

It was not a mountain — no way you could have called it a mountain. It was a spear, a slender spear a hundred feet high with a flat top and sheer sides, snuggled against the foothills of the Green Mountains, three hours from Boston. And what had started out as a warm clear-skied September day had suddenly turned ugly.

Cirillo was ten feet above him, inching like a spider up the face of the cliff. Cirillo had no equipment. No rope. No axe. Just a canteen and a small bag of resin, which he had attached to the back of his belt. Free climbing, he called it, and the only way to start vas to do it.

Before starting, Cirillo had stood looking up the rock face.

‘This looks good,’ he said. ‘Not too high for a beginner.’

‘You talkin’ about me goin’ up that?’ Hatcher had said with an edge of panic in his voice.

‘Gotta start somewhere.’

I don’t gotta start anywhere,’ he answered.

‘That’s right,’ answered Cirillo, ‘it takes a little guts.’

He had laid another resin bag at the base of the cliff.

Then Cirillo ran his fingers across the perpendicular face of it until he found a small fissure. He dipped his fingers in the resin bag, blew the excess resin off them, and started feeling his way up, clambering hand over hand, foot over foot, looking like a giant crab as he went up the cliff by his fingertips and toe tips, using cracks and ridges to haul himself up. The kid watched in awe.

‘You’re nuts,’ the kid said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘What happens if you run out of cracks?’

‘You fall.’

‘Great, just great!’ Hatcher said.

Cirillo kept going, his muscular arms bulging as he worked his way laboriously up the cliff.. Hatcher watched, began to feel embarrassed. He walked close to the cliff and ran his hands tentatively over its surface, feeling its ridges, cracks and tiny ledges. Finally he picked up the bag of resin, attached it to his belt and, copying Cirillo, started painfully up the wall.

‘Don’t be in a hurry and don’t look down,’ Cirillo said quietly. ‘The ground ain’t goin’ anyplace.’

Hatcher had started up, his fingertips aching, his toes aching, his stomach aching. An hour later he was forty feet up the side, hugging the spear like a found child hugging its mother.

Cirillo was near the dead end, the ledge at the top of the cliff that projected out over his head.

‘I can’t go any farther,’ Hatcher’s wobbly voice yelled. ‘Can’t find anything to get hold of.’

‘To your left, kid,’ Cirillo yelled back. ‘A little farther . . up a coupla inches . . . there!’

Hatcher’s bleeding fingers found a split in the rocks barely deep enough to get a fingernail in.

‘Not enough,’ he yelled back, still hugging, his eyes closed.

‘It was good enough for me,’ yelled Cirillo, ‘and my fingers’re twice the size of yours.’

Hatcher dug his fingers in, scraped dirt out of the tiny ledge, made a crevice deep enough to slowly pull himself up another six inches. Fear was bile in his throat.

That’s when it had started getting darker. The clouds blew in on a cold, biting wind that carried with it the dampness of rain.

The wind picked up, battering him. He could feel his fingers trembling.

‘It’s turning bad, kid,’ Cirillo yelled. ‘Pick it up, keep movin’.’

‘Can’t . .

‘Bullshit. Get your ass in gear or you’re gonna be nuthin’ but a puddle.’

‘Shit,’ was all Hatcher could manage. His fingertips were raw and bleeding and his toes ached as they had never ached before. His arms trembled with exertion. Sweat stung his eyes and tickled the corners of his mouth.

He was hanging on for dear life. The first drops of rain had begun to pelt Cirillo’s face and panic began to gnaw at him, too. But he couldn’t let the kid know that.

Cirillo was at the overhang, he reached up and slowly crawled the fingers of one hand toward the edge, stretching out as far as he could until he very cautiously reached around the edge and felt for a finger hold. His aching fingertips found a small trench. He dug at it, making sure it would hold him, then pushed himself up and out and swung free of the face of the wall. He hung there by one arm, staring down at the kid, who clung to the wall, pressing against it like a piece of moss.

Cirillo switched hands. Hanging with his right arm, he extended his left toward the kid.

‘C’mon, another six feet, I gotcha.’

Hatcher inched his way up, snatching a peek at Cirillo and then closing his eyes and feeling for another finger hold. Finally his head bumped the overhang. No place else to go.

‘Grab my hand, kid,’ Cirillo said.

Hatcher looked at him through terror-stricken eyes, stared at the fingertips wiggling an invitation to him.

‘Trust me,’ Cirillo said.

The kid had never trusted anyone before. He started to look back toward the ground.

‘Don’t — look down,’ Cirillo said quietly but sternly, and the kid closed his eyes and clung on for dear life.

‘Gimme your hand, kid,’ Cirillo ordered. Hatcher reached out very slowly, stretching toward the cop’s bulging arm. He felt Cirillo’s callused fingertips, felt his hand slide across his palm, felt the powerful fingers enclose his wrist.

‘Okay,’ said Cirillo, ‘swing free.’

‘What!’

‘Do it now, I can’t hang on here forever.’

The kid closed his eyes, swallowed, and freed his other hand. He was hanging in midair with nothing below him but space. Cirillo gritted his teeth and slowly lifted the kid’s dead weight.

‘Okay,’ Cirillo whispered, ‘hang around my neck.’

Hatcher reached up and wrapped his arms around Cirillo’s thick, bulging neck as the cop chinned himself on the ledge.

‘God Almighty,’ he whispered as Cirillo hauled himself over the lip of the ledge and rolled to safety. Hatcher lay on his face, his breath blowing little billows of dirt away from his mouth. His heart was beating so hard his teeth hurt. Then suddenly he started laughing hysterically.

‘Damn,’ he said, ‘we’re alive! We’re a-fuckin’ live!’

He had confronted and cheated death, a new and seductive experience for him.

‘I did it!’ the kid yelled at the forest and it echoed back:

I did it!’

‘Just remember, kid,’ Cirillo said. ‘Ya can’t quit in this life. Quit and yer dead. Ya take a job, ya do it. Ya don’t hold back nothin’, ya put it all on the line. Ya don’t leave yourself any outs.’

Hatcher turned to Cirillo. ‘Let’s do another one,’ he said eagerly.

And Cirillo had smiled.

‘We still gotta go back down,’ he answered quietly.

Yes, Hatcher thought, these old walls would be a piece of cake. Getting through the jungle, that was the tough part.

Then the rains came. The face of the prison became a slimy river of muck. The rainy days became rainy weeks and then months. With each passing day, climbing the wall became more treacherous. he drew rough maps on the floor, trying to remember directions and distances from the trip upriver. And finally he accepted the reality that without weapons or even a compass, without maps or any knowledge of the area, escape was suicidal. As the rains continued, the challenge slowly faded.

And so he imposed upon himself a daily regimen:

calisthenics to keep his muscles from atrophying; mental exercises to keep from going mad, although gradually madness and sanity became one.

To postpone insanity, he thought about the women he had known. Sometimes names eluded him and he associated them with events in his life. He tried to reconstruct his first high school romance — what was her name, Haley? He remembered touching her the first time, in the backseat darkness of Cirillo’s Chevy, groping, feeling her soft down and feeling her rise to his touch, moving his hand to her breasts, those soft buds just beginning to bloom. He was terrified, she was impassioned. But after the first time, their fervor approached insanity. They did it everywhere, in the darkness of the balcony of the town’s only movie house, rolled in blankets in the green Massachusetts forest, and once, late in the afternoon, in the girls’ locker room at the high school, abandoned for the day, the tin rattle of the locker door providing rhythmic cadence as they stood against it, thrashing in the agony of youthful passion.

Then he had gone off to the academy and she had fallen madly in love with the high school wrestling champ.

The loss of his innocence haunted his fevered memory as his mind wandered freely in time, back to the alleys of Boston, where Cirillo had nabbed him. Hatcher was a tough, crafty street orphan, and Cirillo a just-as-tough cop who had taken him in hand and changed his life forever. It had been Cirillo who had forced him to go to high school, challenged him not only to climb walls but to show his best, and finally arranged the appointment to Annapolis, where Harry Sloan had discovered him. Sloan. Hatcher’s torment was that he could no longer imagine life without that treacherous intrusion, could not remember the precise moment when he had traded truth for expediency, had traded light and beauty for the shadows of the shadow warrior, and in his desolation, Hatcher, like many men and women in less desperate conditions, futilely cried out to relive that moment and change his destiny.

At first, hate was all Hatcher had. Sitting in his box at night, he would imagine every conceivable kind of torture he could inflict on Harry Sloan. But as time passed he began to look elsewhere, to shift the blame to someone else. But in the end it always came back to the same thing. Sloan had betrayed him, had set him up and condemned him to a living death.

Cirillo had been Hatcher’s salvation, Sloan his destruction.

And yet the cord was difficult to break. Sloan had been more than a friend, he had been Hatcher’s mentor, had exposed Hatcher to experts in every conceivable field of lawful and unlawful endeavor, from lock-picking to murder, had taught him how to survive under the worst conditions. In a strange irony, Sloan had prepared him to survive Los Boxes.

Yes, Sloan had delivered his promises. His silver tongue promised adventure and romance, spiced with words like ‘patriot’ and ‘duty’ and ‘country’. Well, there had been plenty of both. There had been a lot of good times. Tokyo, Singapore, Manila.

Hong Kong and Bangkok.

He always thought of them together, remembering Cohen and the weekends when he would fly to Hong Kong from Bangkok just to get away from the hell of the river wars for a little while.

And the special suite he had at the Peninsula in Kowloon, shared only with Daphne.

God, Daphne. What a memory - Was she still alive? Was she still as beautiful as ever? Daffy, he had called her and it fit.

There was also Sam-Sam Sam and Joe Cockroach and the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the secret lair of the Chinese river pirates. And there was Tollie Fong, the triad assassin who had sworn a blood oath against Hatcher for killing his father, his uncle and four of his most trusted gangsters.

He could never go back to Hong Kong and Bangkok. Too many ghosts. Too many enemies. Too many unsaid good-byes.

And so Hatcher always thought of Sloan with mixed feelings. The bond between mentor and student was almost as primal as that between father and son. In his misery, his feelings toward Sloan wavered. One day he thought of Sloan with affection, the next he damned him to hell.

What he eventually learned was that there was no precise moment when his values changed. When he met Sloan he was young and impressionable, easily charmed by Sloan’s omnipresent smile, and seduced by his soft-spoken promises. It was what Sloan did best, spinning images of mysterious worlds with that silver tongue of his. In the end, Hatcher had to accept the responsibility for what he was and where he was, a house of his own making.

Life in Los Boxes became Hatcher’s penance.

Then one night he heard a scratching on the wall. He thought it was a roach or perhaps a rat until a small stick punched through the wall, augured for a moment, and was withdrawn.

‘Psst.’

Hatcher leaned over and put his ear close to the tiny hole. And heard a voice, an ancient voice, hoarse with disuse. ‘One twenty-seven?’ the voice said.

126

Hatcher would not answer, could not answer. Paranoia and fear prevented any response. Suppose it was a guard, testing him? He would not risk having his tongue ripped out. He leaned against the wall, his ear against the pinpoint, listening.

Again the hoarse whisper: ‘One twenty-seven?’

His mouth was dry with suspicion. He sat for a moment, then he coughed.

‘Ah, very good, very clever,’ the voice whispered in Spanish. ‘I am one twenty-six. I knew your predecessor for many years. He was a journalist in my country. A famous journalist. Green berries and belly worms got him.’

My God, to hear a voice, a friendly voice, was like a postponement of his madness, and finally Hatcher asked himself, What good is a tongue, anyhow, if you don’t use it?

‘I am here,’ he whispered back, and immediately, reflexively, stuffed his fist in his mouth.

‘Ah, ’whispered 126. ‘Salvation.’

‘I am Hatcher, what is your name?’

‘Immaterial, immaterial,’ 126 said in flawless English. ‘There is no parole from here, no pardon, no escape. I am one twenty-six. I will be one twenty—six for eternity. You are one twenty-seven.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Since God created cockroaches.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘A lie for the convenience of the state.’

‘And I, too,’ said Hatcher.

‘To give such a lie relevance is to perpetuate it. Why I am here, why you are here, that is no longer material. By now even the courts have forgotten us. And if nobody else cares, what matter is it to ourselves? It is, quite simply, a lie.’

‘It helps me to think about it. It gives me a sticking place.’

‘There is no vindication in hatred. Besides, we are all products of our own devils.’

‘I’m not sure I agree with that. My devil had a silver tongue.’

‘Ah yes,’ answered 126. ‘Show me a devil who doesn’t. Forget hatred, it will drive you mad.’

‘If something else doesn’t first.’

And so in the ensuing months and years, Hatcher had decided that if he ever saw Sloan again, perhaps he could forgive him. Forgive but never trust him again. He knew Sloan very well, well enough to know that Sloan would betray him again if he thought it was expedient.

‘Did you kill?’ 126 asked one day -

‘Yes, but it was my duty.’

‘Many crimes are committed in the name of duty.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ Hatcher said.

‘Listen, when one shares the secret of murder, then one is guilty of murder.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Sometimes we can excuse anything in the name of patriotism and so an outcast can only find redemption by claiming to be a patriot. Are you a patriot, one twenty- seven?’

‘I don’t remember. Yes. I think I was.’

‘Well, you are certainly an outcast.’

‘Yes, that’s a fact.’

‘Then it stands to reason that you are probably not a patriot. But it’s all relative. I am here because I thought I was a patriot. Then I discovered one man’s patriot is another man’s traitor. . . . What I thought was an act of patriotism turned out to be an act of murder.’

‘I can understand that,’ Hatcher replied.

‘Then you have had the experience.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, of course. You see what I mean. Righteous indignation comes much easier to the patriot than it does to the felon.’

Hatcher’s lessons came hard. He forgot that in the hell of Los Boxes the rules never changed. One day, he had been working at the edge of the jungle, preparing one of the endless vegetable gardens that surrounded the citadel, when a wild boar had suddenly lunged from the underbrush and charged him. It was enormous, a hulking, stinking beast with curved tusks and insane eyes, snorting and hooking as it ran toward Hatcher.

Hatcher took its first charge with the hoe, smacking it on the snout, but the beast merely backed off a few yards and charged again. Hatcher screamed for the guards as he parried tusk with hoe. The large tusks could easily have torn out his stomach, opened up a leg, ripped away his throat.

A guard appeared nearby but made no attempt to shoot the beast. He stood fifty feet away, laughing.

‘Shoot it,’ Hatcher screamed, and the guard instantly reacted.

‘Silencio!’ the guard demanded.

The boar attacked again. This time Hatcher swung the hoe in a wide arc and buried the blade in the boar’s thick neck. The hoe handle splintered and broke. The boar, roaring in pain, backed off, and began to circle.

‘For Christ’s sake, shoot the son of a bitch!’ Hatcher screamed as he backed away.

‘Silencio!’ the guard ordered, running toward him.

The boar wheeled, snorting crazily, pawed the ground and came at him again. Hatcher was defenseless. He scrambled to his feet and started to run. Then he heard a shot and the boar’s scream of pain. Another guard across the field lowered his rifle.

Hatcher turned and saw the boar lying on its side ten feet away, its short legs pawing the air, its head jerking back and forth in the spasms of death.

Hatcher’s sigh of relief was shattered by the first guard’s gun butt as it smashed into his throat. He reeled back, clutching his neck, feeling the mangled veins and muscles as blood surged into his mouth. He fell to his knees gagging.

The guard leaned over him.

‘Silencio,’ he repeated, then turned and walked away.

That night, 126 had told him, ‘You are lucky you still have your tongue.’

‘I hate that bastard,’ Hatcher’s tortured voice answered. ‘I’ll kill him if I ever get the chance.’

‘No, don’t think about that,’ 126 had answered. ‘Hate comes easy here and hate kills the spirit. You must learn to love. Something — a woman, your country, anything. Without love, life is meaningless. To be in love means to laugh, to cry, to feel without touching. Without feelings, one twenty-seven, you are a robot.’

It was true, Hatcher thought, arid yet for a good part of his life, hate had sustained him.

‘Why is talk prohibited, one twenty-six?’ Hatcher whispered feebly.

‘Talk is the seed of revolt.’

‘Ah, that makes sense.’

‘In a very primitive way, everything here makes sense, one twenty-seven.’

‘What did you do on the outside?’ Hatcher’s shattered voice asked.

‘I was a teacher. A mentor. Did you have a mentor?’

Hatcher thought for a moment. ‘I had two,’ he answered.

‘Ah, and what did they teach you?’

‘One taught me the meaning of honor,’ said Hatcher.

‘And the other?’

‘He taught me to ignore it.’

One twenty-six had grown old in Los Boxes and would die there. In a moment of insanity lie had tried to run, but two days in the jungle was all he could bear. Now he was trapped forever in box 126, and to hold on to his sanity he philosophized endlessly.

‘Talk is fertilizer for the brain,’ he told Hatcher. ‘If there is no one else to talk to, talk to yourself.’

There was also practical advice:

‘If it is so important to you, scratch your name and your age in the wall so you don’t lose your identity. Just remember no one else cares. To everyone else, you are one twenty-seven. Forget what’s happening outside the walls, it’s no longer of any consequence. This place is your reality. To survive, all that matters is reality.’

‘Why bother,’ asked Hatcher.

‘Because hope is the key to heaven, 126 answered.

He became Hatcher’s tutor. Every day when Hatcher returned from the fields around Los Boxes, there were new lessons to be learned.

‘When you are outside, don’t eat green berries. The green ones will kill you.’

And: ‘Masturbate every day, it will keep your emotions alive.’

And: ‘Forget the politics of your agony. Politicians are vermin in the soul. They sway with the winds and keep you angry, and anger becomes madness, and madness is the step before death.’

And: ‘Don’t waste your time on thoughts of vengeance. Vengeance is depressing. It requires action, and action is the enemy of thought and the friend of illusion. Here illusion leads to madness.’

‘Ah. . . that is tough to do.’

‘It will get easier. Better to forgive your enemies than to invite madness.’

‘What do you fear most, one twenty-seven?’

Hatcher gave it some thought.

‘Cowardice,’ he said finally.

‘Then as long as you’re alive, you have nothing to fear. Only cowards kill themselves to escape this place.’

And: ‘If you get sick, cure yourself. Otherwise they will kill you to keep whatever you have from spreading. There is no doctor here.’

And: ‘Do not lose your sense of humor. Humor feeds the soul. If the soul starves, so does the conscience, and your conscience is your only true companion.’

And: ‘Do not eat the pork. It is cooked badly. It will put worms in your belly.’

‘Thank you, one twenty-six.’

‘For what?’

‘I’m learning.’

‘I am a teacher. It is a joy for me.

Then there were the Mushroom People.

At first Hatcher thought 126 was merely having one of his mad days. They all had mad days.

‘Look for the blossoms,’ 126 had told him shortly before he died. ‘The big ones that grow in the shade under the tall trees. Chop them and mix them with a meal, never straight. The Mushroom People are friendly, but if you eat the blossoms straight, they get out of hand.’

Hatcher had no idea what 126 was raving about.

‘Time to say good-bye.’

‘No!’

‘I’ve been here twelve years, old friend. It has been two years since I saw the sun or breathed fresh air. Enough is enough. Besides, my heart is worn out. It skips every other beat.’

‘But I need you,’ Hatcher implored.

‘Nevertheless . . .‘ He paused. ‘I will miss you, one twenty-seven.’

‘Not half as much as I’ll miss you.’

One twenty-six laughed. ‘Good. You have not lost your sense of humor.’

He first spotted them while chopping out a new area for a garden. Large, bright yellow mushrooms, half a foot in diameter, glowing like jewels in the thick, dank shadows. He picked one, chopped it up, and stuffed it in the pockets of his cotton shirt. That night he sprinkled the pieces on the tin plate of vegetables that was shoved through the slot at the bottom of his cell door. Their taste, a musky, cardboard flavor, overpowered other tastes.

He lay on his pallet and stared at the ceiling, wondering why 126 had told him about the blossoms. Perhaps they provided some necessary vitamin or mineral that would keep his bones from turning to sand.

A dervish mist appeared in the corner of his box, brightening the shadows with soft light, and then, what began as a shimmering aura took shape in flesh and blood, standing in the corner as if awaiting orders.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ he whispered fearfully.

But the Mushroom People never answered, never spoke. They simply kept him company, and as he learned to trust them he addressed them as he would visitors, describing his daily monotony.

Sometimes he danced with them, spun and twirled an insane Irish jig in his earthen crypt. He made love to the women and sparred with the men. With 126 gone, the Mushroom People became his only friends.

There were days when Hatcher was lucid; there were days when he spent hours in the company of the Mushroom People, dancing, singing, making love, recounting whatever fragments of history he could remember or make up. He told them jokes to keep his sense of humor alive, sang songs to them because music fed the soul.

When he discovered the Mushroom People, Hatcher no longer needed 126. And if the thin line between sanity and madness be judged by what’s in the mind, Hatcher was indeed mad during his years in Los Boxes. It would be two more years before he recovered enough from the brutal, dehumanizing experience to admit to himself that there was no hole in his cell wall, and no 126 on the other side talking to him. It would be two years before Hatcher admitted that 126 was his own conscience.

MADRANGO

The boat came once a month, bringing supplies as well as whiskey and whores for the guards. Its doleful horn announced its arrival with three bleats as it neared the last crook in the river. There was no outside work when the boat came. When the horn sounded, the prisoners were quickly herded back into the boxes. They were not allowed to see the women, although those on the southern side of the citadel could sometimes catch a glimpse of them through the narrow slits in their cells. The boat always stayed three days and then left. A few of the men always went crazy. Like dogs in heat, they lay in their boxes and bayed in agony.

Hatcher was on the north side of the structure. He had not laid eyes on a female since the day he arrived. But when the wind was right he could smell their perfume, the musk of their sex, even the bitter odor of the alcohol, and he would summon the Mushroom People and stay mad for the whole three days.

This time the boat came just before dusk. The men were already inside and dinner was being doled out when the foghorn moaned upriver. Hatcher was confused. He immediately checked the primitive calendar scratched on the wall. It had been only sixteen days since the last visit. Maybe they were going to come every other week, give the guards an extra ration of sex and booze. Maybe they were bringing someone special in, some big shot.

Hatcher, who was eating, slipped a rock away from one wall and reached behind it, pulling out a small bag of magic mushrooms. He broke one of them into small pieces and sprinkled them on what was left of his meager meal. He chewed the rubbery bits well, knowing that the easier they were to digest, the faster and better he would react.

When he finished, he lit a cigar made of crumbled palm leaves stuffed in bamboo shoots. The acrid smoke burned his nose and lungs. He lay back and waited for the Mushroom People. Outside thunder rumbled across the sky and he could hear the first drops of rain splatting against the wall outside his window slit. A cool breeze seeped through the narrow gash in the wall, soothing him. The drab earth colors of his box began to change, growing brighter, and he closed his eyes as patterns took shape and danced on the back of his eyelids. He began to chuckle softly to himself and his stomach began to tickle deep inside.

They were coming. He could almost hear them sneaking down the narrow corridors toward his cell, and he wondered which of the Mushroom People would be visiting him tonight. Not that it really mattered, he loved them all

— passionately. They had never seemed more real. He could hear them outside his cell, hear the door groan open. One of them kicked the bottom of his foot. He giggled with anticipation.

‘One twenty-seven,’ a thick, guttural voice said in Spanish.

The Mushroom People had never spoken to him before. He opened one eye and peered out cautiously. A guard was standing over him.

‘Come,’ the guard said. He reached down, pulled Hatcher to his feet, and led him out of the door. A cold wind, damp with rain, sighed down the stairwell and moaned through the corridors. Hatcher knew better than to ask where the guard was taking him. But the mushrooms were working on him. Colored light patterns blazed around him like shooting stars. He tried to keep steady, but he kept lurching against the wall as they climbed the stairs. On the top level they stopped, and the guard beat on the door. It swung open. Bright lights scorched his eyes and he reeled back, blinking. He squinted and stared up to the top of the second stairwell. Haloed in shimmering bright lights was an enormous hulk of a man, a mastodon in a white suit clutching a briefcase to his chest with both hands. The garish white light turned red, then yellow, then broke into shards like broken bits of colored glass.

‘Mr. Hatcher,’ the apparition in white said, ‘I’ve come to take you home.’

Hatcher fell against the wall and leaned there for a moment, then slid down into a crouch and began to howl like a hyena.

‘He hasn’t said a single damn word since we took him out of that pigsty hellhole,’ Pratt said to the captain. ‘Just lies down there staring at the ceiling.’

The captain, who was standing above him in the thatched wheelhouse, peering intently through the driving rain, shrugged. ‘Hey, what you expect, señor? He doesn’t spoke to another human being for three years. You want him to jump up and down, sing the “Star-Sprinkled Banana” or somping?’

‘You filthy illiterate,’ Pratt snapped, ‘it’s the “Star - Spangled Banner”.’

The captain laughed. ‘Okay, amigo, Star-Spangled Banana, whatever you say. That guy, he’s loco as a jumping bean, at least, watchacall, maybe more so.’

‘Christ, whoever told you you could speak English?’ Pratt shook his head and poured another stiff scotch. He had taken off his jacket and pulled his tie down. Rain seeped through cracks in the bulkhead and dripped on the table. Sweat turned his white shirt and pants gray. A crazy man staring at the ceiling, an illiterate seaman with green teeth and breath like a jackal’s, and a rainstorm that would probably sink the filthy scow before they got to the main river. This was it for him. When he got back he was going to call Father and get the hell out of Madrango. Screw the service, screw the State Department, screw Hatcher and Los Boxes and this rotten, leaky crap of a tub. He knocked off the glass of scotch and poured another.

‘Did Sloan send you?’ a tormented voice growled behind Pratt. He jumped and twisted in his chair. Hatcher, standing shirtless in the doorway leading below, was a living wraith, his green eyes flicking insanely within sunken black circles, his arms as skinny as broomsticks, his matted, filthy hair tumbling down around his shoulders, his thick, gnarled beard covering most of his bone-ribbed chest. Dirt etched the furrows in his forehead.

Pratt stared at him speechlessly.

‘Did Sloan send you?’ Hatcher growled again in his deep, harsh whisper.

‘As I t-t-told you, uh, I’m from the embassy in Madrango,’ Pratt stammered. ‘The ambassador arranged f-f-for . .

‘Did Sloan send you?’

‘Well, I believe perhaps Mr. Sloan. did have something to do with the arrangements. He —‘

‘Shower?’ Hatcher’s frazzled voice demanded.

‘Shower?’ Pratt echoed, raising his eyebrows with the question.

‘The pump she broke, señor,’ the captain answered.

‘The pump she broke, the pump she broke,’ Pratt aped.

Hatcher turned and went out on deck.

‘She’s the wind bad blowing, señor,’ the captain called after him.

‘Jesus,’ Pratt snapped and followed Hatcher. He stood in the hatchway and watched the ex-inmate crawl out on deck and lie on his back with his mouth open as the rain poured down on him.

‘He says to watch the wind,’ Pratt yelled. ‘We wouldn’t want to lose you now, not after all this, would we?’

Hatcher didn’t answer. Spread-eagled on the deck, he fell sound asleep as the wind and rain laced his emaciated body. Finally the captain lashed down the wheel and crawled out after him, put a slack line around his waist and tied the other end to the rail.

‘You keep a look on him,’ he said to Pratt when he returned to the wheelhouse.

The next day was clear and bright with a northeast wind.

‘Stop the boat,’ Hatcher’s tortured voice ordered the captain, who pulled back the throttle and shoved the scow in reverse. In the stern, the engines boiled up the river.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Pratt demanded.

Hatcher didn’t answer. He peeled off his ragged pants and jumped naked into the river.

‘Jesus, there’s alligators all over the place,’ Pratt babbled. He cupped his hands and yelled to Hatcher as he surfaced. ‘There’s alligators in this river, Mr. Hatcher.’

Hatcher rolled over on his back and floated. Pratt sat on the dilapidated lawn chair and held his head in his hands. ‘That’s all I need,’ he muttered to himself. “Where’s Hatcher?” “Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry, sir, an alligator ate him.”

Ten minutes later Hatcher scrambled back on board. Pratt handed him a terrycloth towel. The United States crest was embroidered in one corner. Hatcher stared at it for a moment or two, then began toweling off.

‘I brought some fresh clothes for you. They’re below,’ Pratt said. ‘Although they may be a size or so too large.’

Hatcher finished and, throwing the towel over his shoulder, stood naked in front of Pratt, waiting.

‘Oh, yes,’ Pratt said, jumping up as fast as a man so fat can jump. ‘I’ll just get those clothes. There’s, uh, also a razor and a toothbrush, toothpaste. Some, uh . . . uh cologne . .

The pants were two sizes too large and the shirt sleeves dangled around his knuckles, but they were cotton and they felt cool and clean. Hatcher stared at himself in the mirror. He had not seen his own face for more than three years. Now clean-shaven, with his hair scissored back to the bottom of his neck and combed, he could have looked worse. His cheeks and eyes were hollow and he was thirty pounds underweight, but it could be worse. He could be dead. He could be sharing heavenly mushrooms with 126. He rolled the sleeves up above his elbows and went back on deck.

‘Well, I must say, you look A-one, sir, just A-one,’ Pratt said.

‘Smoke?’ Hatcher rasped.

Pratt fumbled in his briefcase.

‘Yes, sir, yes, sir, right here.’ He handed Hatcher a pack of Dunhills. ‘Your brand, I believe.’

‘It is?’ Hatcher said, staring at the package. He turned it over a couple of times before he figured out how to peel the wrapper off. He lit one up, took a deep drag, and almost coughed to death. His face turned purple and he gasped for breath.

‘Hands over your head!’ Pratt shrieked and held Hatcher’s arms up. He stopped coughing finally and sat down on the gunwale. He looked at the cigarette for a moment and threw it overboard.

‘We have some fresh fruit, excellent cheese, wine, uh, sliced chicken and roast beef. Also there’s some beer and Coca-Cola down in the fridge,’ Pratt said and, laughing nervously, added, ‘It’s a regular old cruise ship.’

Hatcher stared almost quizzically at Pratt and kept staring until the fat man began to feel uncomfortable, then he said, ‘Coca-Cola. Yeah.’

‘How did Sloan arrange my pardon?’ Hatcher’s ruined voice asked.

‘Well, uh, it’s not exactly a pardon —‘

‘What do you mean?’ he whispered menacingly.

‘You see, Mr. Hatcher, Madrango is going through a rather traumatic upheaval right now. There was a military coup and the new president, his name is Garazzo —‘

‘Garazzo! He sent me up there.’

‘Oh, that’s right. You see, there was a democratic election just after you, uh, went away, and Garazzo and his people were, uh, displaced by Venzio. But then, four weeks ago, Garazzo, uh, pulled off this, uh, coup and he’s president again. Anyway, he arranged for your escape.’

‘Escape?’ Hatcher’s green eyes glittered dangerously.

‘It’s just a formality,’ Pratt said hurriedly. ‘They won’t try to extradite you or anything like that. I mean, nobody’s even going to know you’re out, know what I mean?’

‘Where’s Sloan?’

‘You’ll see him when you get to Washington.’

‘Washington?’

‘Right. We’re going to hustle you right on out of the country, yes siree. . . . He’s, uh, dying to see you.’

Hatcher stared at him again. He was intrigued by the man’s face, by the layers of fat that seemed to reduce his features to miniatures. A little face peering out of a big, fat head.

‘How’d you get mixed up in this?’ he growled to Pratt.

‘I’m a career diplomat,’ Pratt said, trying to sound proud of it.

‘Some things never change,’ Hatcher whispered.

They could see pillars of black smoke rising from the city when they were still twenty miles away.

‘It’s got a fires!’ the captain said, pointing upriver.

‘It’s got a fires,’ Pratt mimicked, shaking his head. He stood up and looked over the bow, toward the capital city. ‘My God, there must have been a counterattack on the city,’ Pratt wailed. ‘The whole place is burning up.’

‘What do we do now?’ Hatcher snarled anxiously.

‘I’ll try to radio the embassy,’ Pratt said and disappeared below. Hatcher kept watching the towers of black smoke as they got closer to the city. He could hear explosions and gunfire. When Pratt returned, he was smiling.

‘They’re going to send a chopper to the pier. It’s in friendly hands,’ he said excitedly. ‘They’ll fly us straight into the embassy.’

‘Why’re you doing all this for me?’ Hatcher demanded.

‘I, uh, I really don’t know, sir. They didn’t tell me that. They just said to go down with the papers, bribe the warden, and bring you back. If you want to know the truth, Mr. Hatcher, they don’t ever tell me anything.’

‘I drop you off and scramming,’ the captain yelled to them.

‘Yeah, right,’ Pratt said. ‘You scramming. Know what they told me? The captain speaks perfect English, that’s what they told me. See what I mean?’

As they neared the pier they saw the chopper, a four-passenger job, sweep over the warehouses along the edge of the river and hover over the bank, churning up the water below it. Pratt stood up and waved to them. The captain guided the scow along the pier and bumped it gently. So he couldn’t speak English, Hatcher thought. He sure knows how to run a boat.

‘You go now, good luck, señors,’ he yelled.

Pratt scrambled to get up on the railing, and as he did, a shell exploded a hundred yards away, tearing out the corner of a building. A naked woman ran down the street with her hair burning. A jeep squatted on flat tires, burning furiously, the charred body of the driver still sitting behind the wheel. Pratt stopped, his face bulging with horror.

‘Let’s go,’ Hatcher yelled, and pushed him onto the dock. The boat roared back into the middle of the river.

‘My God, look at this, it’s horrible, horrible. . . .‘ Pratt whined as the chopper swept over and settled down twenty feet away. Hatcher ran to open the hatchway. A young marine, who looked scared to death, helped him scramble aboard. Behind him, Pratt waddled across the dock towards the chopper. The pilot, a captain, looked at him in horror. ‘Christ, we can’t take him, we’re overloaded already,’ the pilot yelled. ‘Close the hatch, Corporal.’

‘Sir,’ the corporal yelled back and slid the door shut.

Stranded on the dock, Pratt screamed as he saw the hatch slide shut. ‘No, no, you can’t leave me here,’ he screamed, beating on the side of the helicopter. It shuddered and lifted off as he slammed his fist over and over against the side. Then the wind began to buffet him, he was showered with dust, stinging his eyes, and the chopper lifted off. Pratt fell to his knees, his hands covering his head, and began to sob uncontrollably.

Hatcher and the young marine stared down at the huge man and watched as he grew smaller and smaller. Another explosion erupted behind him and part of the dock disintegrated, but Pratt did not move. He knelt like a Buddha, cowering with fear, unable to move.

‘It’s madness,’ the young marine cried out and Hatcher began to laugh for the first time. He had been a companion to madness for so long it all seemed perfectly normal to him.