Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard

some exotic script, she seemed a good sign herself. ‘I don’t know what to talk to you about,’ she said. ‘The things I feel I have to tell you make you mad, and I can’t muster any small talk.’
    ‘I don’t want to be pushed,’ he said. ‘But believe me, I’m thinking about what you’ve told me.’
    ‘I won’t push. But I still don’t know what to talk about.’ She plucked a grass blade, chewed on the tip. He watched her lips purse, wondered how she’d taste. Mouth sweet in the way of a jar that had once held spices. And down below, she’d taste sweet there, too: honey gone a little sour in the comb. She tossed hergrass blade aside. ‘I know,’ she said brightly. ‘Would you like to see where I live?’
    ‘I’d just as soon not go back to Frisco yet.’
Where you live, he
thought;
I want to touch where you live
.
    ‘It’s not in town,’ she said. ‘It’s a village downriver.’
    ‘Sounds good.’ He came to his feet, took her arm, and helped her up. For an instant they were close together, her breasts grazing his shirt. Her heat coursed around him, and he thought if anyone were to see them, they would see two figures wavering as in a mirage. He had an urge to tell her he loved her. Though most of what he felt was for the salvation she might provide, part of his feelings seemed real, and that puzzled him, because all she had been to him was a few hours out of the war, dinner in a cheap restaurant, and a walk along the river. There was no basis for consequential emotion. Before he could say anything, do anything, she turned and picked up her basket.
    ‘It’s not far,’ she said, walking away. Her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell.
    They followed a track of brown clay overgrown by ferns, overspread by saplings with pale translucent leaves, and soon came to a grouping of thatched huts at the mouth of a stream that flowed into the river. Naked children were wading in the stream, laughing and splashing each other. Their skins were the color of amber, and their eyes were as wet-looking and purplish dark as plums. Palms and acacias loomed above the huts, which were constructed of sapling trunks lashed together by nylon cord; their thatch had been trimmed to resemble bowl-cut hair. Flies crawled over strips of meat hung on a clothesline stretched between two of the huts. Fish heads and chicken droppings littered the ocher ground. But Mingolla scarcely noticed these signs of poverty, seeing instead a sign of the peace that might await him in Panama. And another sign was soon forthcoming. Debora bought a bottle of rum at a tiny store, then led him to the hut nearest the mouth of the stream and introduced him to a lean, white-haired old man who was sitting on a bench outside it. Tio Moíses After three drinks Tio Moíses began to tell stories.
    The first story concerned the personal pilot of an ex-president of Panama. The president had made billions from smugglingcocaine into the States with the help of the CIA, whom he had assisted on numerous occasions, and was himself an addict in the last stages of mental deterioration. It had become his sole pleasure to be flown from city to city in his country, to sit on the landing strips, gaze out the window, and do cocaine. At any hour of night or day, he was likely to call the pilot and order him to prepare a flight plan to Colón or Bocas del Toro or Penonomé. As the president’s condition worsened, the pilot realized that soon the CIA would see the man was no longer useful and would kill him. And the most obvious manner of killing him would be by means of an airplane crash. The pilot did not want to die alongside him. He tried to resign, but the president would not permit it. He gave thought to mutilating himself, but being a good Catholic, he could not flout God’s law. If he were to flee, his family would suffer. His life became a nightmare. Prior to each flight, he would spend hours searching the plane for evidence of sabotage, and upon each landing he