Blood of Paradise (14 page)

She screwed up her mouth. It made her cheek look more swollen. “I don't know what to believe. I mean, okay, you seem legit and you've treated me nice enough, I admit, but I'm like way in the dark here and I just …” Her voice trailed away.

Jude studied her face more closely. The bruising had a deep scratch in it, most likely the swing had been a backhand and the guy had worn a ring. “Tell me who did that,” he said.

“Just get Phil to where he can't fuck up, okay? I can't afford to lose me another job.”

“I'm serious. Tell me who it was.”

“I'm serious too. Drop it. They're assholes. So?”

Jude pulled out his money clip and counted out ten hundreds, from the money Malvasio had given him. “I realize this doesn't fix anything,” he said, handing it out for her to take. “Maybe it'll help tide you over, though.”

She eyed the cash, but before she could take it her daughter appeared. Rubbing a sleepy eye with the knuckles of her left hand, the little girl had the thumb of her right planted deep between her lips. She wore Pooh pajamas and mismatched socks, one blue, one white.

“Hey, Babyshines.” Like that, Peggy Check's voice transformed. It was warm now, gentle. As though her bruised face, this strange visitor offering money, were all just part of the same bad dream. “It's late.”

The little girl staggered up and attached herself to her mother's leg, thumping her head softly against the muscular thigh. Peg ran her fingers through the little girl's hair.

“Other day,” Peg said, proud now, “we were out walking along the lake, you know? And this tree stands maybe fifty yards off the path. She looks up and points. ‘See the birdy, Mommy?' I look and look, right? Can't see squat, and I'm twenty-twenty. I'm thinking, she's making this up, then sure enough, thing takes off, flies away. That's half a football field. Bird smaller than my hand, okay?”

Jude smiled but the little girl turned her head away, clutching her mother's leg still tighter. Kid's got sniper eyes, he thought. What's to wonder at? She's Phil Strock's kid.

A half hour later, he stole in quietly and found Strock sprawled on the mattress in the living room with his limbs awry, a faint wheezy snore hissing through his teeth. Four empty beer bottles lay on the floor beside a Packers tumbler and the fifth of Jack, now half-gone.

How in God's name, he thought, are you going to get this drunken sack of tricks all the way to El Salvador? Punch line: one cocktail at a time.

He wondered what Eileen might make of him—or make of me, he thought, if I turned out like this. Was that possible? Only death had spared the old man, he supposed. How bad does it have to get before that's your choice—stay drunk or die?

In Strock's defense, Jude could see why Peg still found him attractive. Remembering the picture Malvasio had shown him, he saw the same strong lines in the face, the heavy-lidded eyes. His black hair remained full with just a brush of gray at the temples. A man with a fierce heart, Peg had called him, a good lover despite the drink. But he was haunted, too, got chased around by his demons and couldn't be trusted to hear a word you said. Worse, when he got mad, which was all too often, it was scorched earth—which brought Jude's parents to mind.

He'd stopped by the old house yesterday morning. Opening the door, his mother had greeted him with stunned dismay. Her graying hair clung to the side of her skull, fixed by bobby pins. Her blouse was old—Jude remembered it from his grade-school days—and she smelled of closed rooms and talcum powder. She was forty-six years old.

“Why didn't you call?” She sounded afraid. Then: “I was on my way to church.”

She'd mentioned during his last visit she was attending services more. It didn't surprise him. She'd always been unforgiving; he could see her devout.

“This won't take long.” He reached into his pocket for the cashier's check he'd bought, two thousand dollars, knowing better than to hand her cash, given the history. “I've had a little windfall. I know things aren't as good as they might be for you. Hope this helps.”

She looked at the check like it might crawl out of his hand and bite. “What did you do to get this?”

Of course. He remained, after all, his father's son. The worst part was, she was right.

He considered asking her if it was true, what Malvasio had said, the old man's two-year thing with a call girl. He checked the impulse, sensing the question might seem needlessly cruel. It was possible his mother knew nothing about it. But two years—how could she not know?

“I'll get going.” He turned to walk back down the steps, then something stopped him. He half pivoted, said over his shoulder, “Coll been in touch?”

While conducting his record searches for Strock, Jude had snuck in Colleen's name as well, wondering if by some off chance she'd migrated back to Chicago after college. At the main library, he'd even plugged her name into a website search engine—the only hit was five years out-of-date, Madison, no address or phone number. He found himself wanting to catch up, thank her for that lifesaving box of books, maybe even get some sisterly advice on how best to patch things up with Dr. Browning, who was or wasn't the love of his life.

His mother studied the cashier's check, flipping it over, front and back. “Like your sister would bother to call me,” she said.

Jude gently kicked Strock's leg. The man's eyelids fluttered and he sat up jerkily, shaking the grog from his mind.

“Back from the black lagoon,” Jude said in greeting.

“You've got no idea.” The words came out snarled and bleary. Strock tried to situate himself. “What time—”

“It's early. But we've got someplace to be.” Don't tell him too much, Jude thought. Just enough to get him moving. “I've got a job for you. One that pays well. You can shower up in the bathroom down the hall. I'll make us some breakfast.”

He went into the kitchen and gathered some eggs and bacon from the fridge.

From the living room, Strock called out, “What kind of job?”

13

“I'm going to need something cold soon,” Eileen said in Spanish. “Just to rinse the dust off my teeth.”

They'd started that morning in the cooler highlands to the north, but for at least an hour now they'd been driving along the scorched eastern plain. The volcano known as Chaparrastique loomed in the distance with its girdle of coffee and cotton plantations, a sky of blistering white for background.

The driver, a woman from the Casa de la Cultura named Lili Recinos, remarked that there would be a place to pull over for drinks when the road split near San Miguel. She was part Ulua, part Lenca, with a broad dark face, arched cheekbones, obsidian eyes. “It's a shame you have to come all this way again so soon. But it was fortunate you could make the celebration, no?”

Originally, Eileen had come east from La Perla to help Waxman and Aleris monitor the national balloting for president. They'd made arrangements through the Election Observer Mission and the Junta Electoral Municipal in San Miguel, and she'd figured on a weekend trip, no more, needing to get back home to pack up her artifacts for storage and plan for a more extensive junket to Morazán in the coming week. Once she'd arrived in San Miguel, however, she'd connected with the Casa de la Cultura to finalize arrangements for the days ahead, and Lili, in a rush of excitement, had informed her that the villagers of Cacaopera intended to reenact the traditional selection of the village
alcalde
to coincide with the presidential vote.

Eileen had heard of the ceremony but never seen it, the kind of native ritual all but forgotten in the country except in the remotest villages—exactly the sort of thing she was here to study. She explained the situation to Waxman and he insisted she go, and so Lili had driven down to pick her up and take her into the henequencovered hills to the same tiny village where, in another ritual two months before, she'd witnessed the villagers sacramentally washing the clothes of the Blessed Virgin at the junction of the Torola and Chiquito rivers.

This trip, she watched as a handful of men, candidates for the position of village mayor, or
alcalde
, lined up in the town square wearing white pants and shirts and broad palm-leaf hats. An equal number of men with bows and arrows stood before them. The candidates removed their shirts, hanging them on wood-framed yokes, then submitted their bare chests to a pinprick blow from an arrow, just hard enough to break the skin, after which the judges decided the winner on the basis of the purity of his tribal blood, assessed by taste.

All in all, Eileen found the procedure, not to mention the result, far more gratifying than that of the presidential election. Although the count had yet to be finalized, it was already clear that Tony Bullshit, former sportscaster, Washington's darling, and the right wing's new champion, had ridden a landslide to victory, earning nearly 60 percent of the vote.

She tried to be philosophical about it, put her own wishes aside. ARENA probably would have won regardless, given the country's often conservative peasantry, its reliance on America, its increasingly evangelical lean, its cynicism when it came to elections in general and its indifference in particular to Schafik Handal, the aging former guerrilla and FMLN candidate. Handal had hardly done himself any favors, kicking reporters from the largely right-leaning press out of his office when they tried to bait him into impossible positions—handing them a perfect opportunity to paint him as a Marxist hothead, an intractable tyrant, an old fool. And the
efemelenistas
were rumored to be going at each other pretty hard, the pragmatic progressives hammering at the hard-line
ortodoxos
, because it was the consensus that, had the party put up less of a throwback for a candidate, they might be in power now.

But there had been a considerable amount of shenanigans as well, beyond the usual fried-chicken handouts at local ARENA offices: busloads of Nicaraguans paid to cross the border and cast ballots in provincial towns; drunken
vagabundos
handed cash outside polling places; a sudden uptick in brutal murders the preceding week, blamed on gangs by the right, though just as likely the work of death squads hoping to toss a little raw meat to the law-and-order crowd; all that, plus the usual extortionate fear-mongering from Washington.

And so now she was returning to San Miguel to reconnect with Waxman and Aleris, who were understandably dispirited. They'd drive her back to La Perla where she'd pack up as quickly as possible, just so she could get right back here in her own car. For the next few weeks she'd wander the highlands, checking her notes and maps and dutifully recording the braiding of
plazón
hats in Chilanga, the weaving of ropes from
escobilla
in the village of Chirilagua, the manufacture of palm-leaf mats in Lolotiquillo.

How trivial all that seemed now. She was a chronicler of the quaint and all-but-forgotten in a country with a skyrocketing murder rate, institutionalized poverty, an environment in crisis, and a polarized political climate, where the rich plundered the economy and anyone with an eye to the future wanted nothing more than to get out. She'd have no more effect in changing things for the better here than she'd had trying to get her brother to rethink a second tour in the marines—or, more recently, getting Jude to ponder a bit more deeply who it was he was really protecting down here.

He'd been on her mind a lot the past week, and she wasn't quite sure what to make of that. She liked the dope, there you had it. She knew his type, maybe too well, and for all his knee-jerk male bone-headedness he was basically decent. And it wasn't just missionary instinct, thinking she could rattle his cage a little, make him see things differently—she saw something in him she couldn't quite put her finger on, the stuff of tarnished hearts and Steve Earle songs. But then there was all that other baggage—feeling wounded by his attempt to sneak away after making love, ashamed for reading too much into it, guilty for blurting out something entirely inappropriate at the time.
See you when I see you, stranger
—that's what she'd wanted to say, something glib and nonchalant. But pride took over her tongue, then her temper stepped in. Old story. She was, after all, the daughter of a man they called Colonel Tripwire.

Finally they came to where the highway split—south to San Miguel, southeast to San Bartolo Oriente—and Lili pulled off at a roadside
chalet
, a small thatched hut where an Indian woman sold drinks from a plastic cooler. They parked in the blinding sun beside a pair of dusty, sagging trucks, one loaded high with
plátanos
. The other was decked in blue and white bunting, the colors of ARENA, and in back the bed was littered with election posters and signs collected from along the road—not just their own, Eileen noticed, but everyone else's too. How thoughtful.

The
areneros
sat at a table in the feathery shade of several giant
ceiba
trees, sharing jokes with the truck driver, who looked like he could live without the badinage. Eileen and Lili ordered
agua cristal
and a tamarind
fresco
from the Indian woman, sauntered over to another spot of shade, and sipped their drinks as an old woman pushing a wheelbarrow full of
cocos
appeared from down the road, hoping to sell some to the woman who owned the
chalet
. A young girl trailed after the woman with the wheelbarrow, holding a towel over her head for shade from the sun.

Nodding to the
areneros
, Lili murmured, “Look at them. So full of themselves. They won. Like that's all that matters.”

Eileen, steeling herself against the heartbreak in Lili's voice, said, “Admit it, if our side had come out on top, and by a twenty-point margin, we'd be crowing too.”

“No. We'd be talking about what we intend to do. The things that will change.”