Harbor Lights by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

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The huts in the village had been made from thatch and scrap lumber and corrugated tin the Indians stole from construction sites. The satchel charges had blown them apart and set fire to most everything inside. I counted nine dead in the ashes, their eyes starting to sink in the sockets like they were drifting off to sleep. I took some alcohol out of the first aid kit and poured it on my bandanna and tied it across my nose and mouth, and tried not to breathe too deeply.

There was not a living creature in the village, not even a bird or insect. The only sound was the cry of a small child, the kind that says the child is helpless, unfed, and thirsty, its diaper soaked and dirty and raw on the skin.

I followed a path along a stream that had overflowed its banks. The ground was carpeted with leaves and broken twigs. Then I started to see more bodies. There were nails embedded in some of the trees, blood drags where people had tried to reach the water, pieces of hair and human pulp on the rocks by the stream. The child was lying on its back next to a woman who looked made out of sticks. One of her breasts was exposed. She wore old tennis shoes without socks and a wooden cross on a cord around her neck. A tear was sealed in one eye.

I could see branches that were broken farther down the path. The air was sweet from the spray on the rocks in the stream, the rain pattering on huge tropical plants that had heart-shaped leaves. I cleaned the child and pulled the shirt off a dead man and wrapped the child’s thighs and genitals and bottom inside it, and tied the first aid kit on my belt and picked up the child and started walking. My passenger was a little boy. I had never married and had always wanted to have a little boy, or a little girl, it didn’t matter, and it felt funny walking with him curled inside my arms, like I was back in the infantry, except this time I wasn’t humping a BAR.

I walked until high noon, when I saw the edge of the jungle thin into full sunlight. Farther down the dirt road I could see a stucco farmhouse, with a deuce-and-a-half army truck parked in front and a canvas tarp on poles where people were lying on blankets in the shade. I looked down at my little passenger. His eyes were closed, the redness gone from his face, his nostrils so tiny I wanted to touch them to make sure he was all right.

“¿Qué quieres?” a soldier said.

“What does it look like?” I said.

“No entiendo. ¿Qué haces aquí?”

He wore a dirty khaki uniform and a Sam Browne belt and a stiff cap with a lacquered bill, a bandolier full of M1 clips strapped around his waist. His armpits were looped with sweat, his shirt unbuttoned, his chest shiny.

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