Hard Red Spring (20 page)

—

When Jim came home, earlier than Dorie expected, he did not linger with a hello, but walked immediately to the telephone. His legs so skinny it looked as if his suit were walking itself. Jim walked across the apartment, flipped the phone over, and began tearing at it with his hands.

“Jim, what are you doing?”

He fumbled the phone. “I need a screwdriver,” he said, a cigarette wagging between his lips. “Bring me a screwdriver, Dorie.”

She brought him one from under the kitchen sink and he began unscrewing the phone, taking the bottom plate out to reveal its complicated machinery.

“You're going to electrocute yourself.” Dorie did not rush to unplug the phone from the wall. “What's going on? You're going to break our phone.”

“We found a bug in my office,” he said, without looking up. Ash fell from his words, into the plastic shell. “In my phone,” he clarified. “They found a fucking tap on my phone!” He began pulling at the wires more forcefully and something came loose.

“That should do it,” Dorie announced. “No one should be able to listen in now.” She tried to remain calm, though she ran through her own phone calls in her head. The brief ones to Tomás, her rash, ridiculous proclamations of love.

Jim gave up on the phone, sat on the couch, and Dorie poured him a whiskey. “So you found a bug,” she said. “No doubt you have them bugged.”

Jim glared, ignoring this attempt at a question. The paranoia on both sides was astounding to Dorie. The Communists paranoid that Jim was masterminding some kind of plan to overthrow them, and Jim paranoid that they were listening in and realizing that he was not.

“Who have you talked to on the phone in the past month?” he asked. He emptied his whiskey glass, drinking back the ice melt.

“I don't know, Marcella, my mother, Tomás.” This was how she lied now, by telling the truth as closely as possible.

Would the Communists now know about her and Tomás? Were they all standing around, chuckling at their pathetic dramas?

“I'm going to fire all Guatemalan staff.” He tried for another sip, but he hadn't given the ice long enough to melt. It slid in a single, frozen mass, and clinked against his teeth. “Even though it's probably someone closer.”

Dorie crossed the room to refill his glass. He watched her closely as her
hand betrayed an unsteady pour. She was sweating, elated, pregnant, in love, and terrified. Whenever Tomás left her, she felt like she had a low-grade fever for the rest of the day.

Jim studied her, then let his gaze drift, settling on the table, on
The Role of the West
, with its feather bookmark. For a moment, he focused all his frustration there.

“This is ridiculous, Jim. Are you going to start spying on me now?” She cleared the table in a wifely way, swaying innocently about the room, though fear began to catch up with her.

If anything, Arbenz's reasonableness disturbed Dorie the most. A conservative revolutionary. The top of a reasonable, slippery slope into Marxist hell. That would be the downfall of Guatemala, the world, at a much later date. She could hardly admit it to herself, but even his land reform seemed quite modest to her. With 85 percent of Fruit land lying fallow, with half the population starving, she couldn't blame him for addressing the problem. And Fruit should pay taxes like everyone else. But, as Jim explained to her, it would all be very reasonable, until it wasn't. Until they were all standing in line for moldy bread. Guatemala was no different from Russia, which was no different from China. She'd seen the pictures in
Time
.

Jim, however, believed the disaster would come much sooner than later. He'd become so obsessed with Communists that he did not see the real enemy, in real time, that threatened his way of life.

She continued to tidy up, sweeping away Jim's ashes with her hand. When she looked up, she saw he held a small black handgun.

“Jim!” She dropped the ashtray, instinctively raising her hands. “You're not going to start carrying a gun!”

“I am, and I don't want you leaving the embassy without Gilberto.”

“Gilberto! But he's a child! An illiterate child!”

“He's a trained soldier, Dorie.” As he spoke, he held the gun out, aiming at the glassed-in bookshelf across the room.

“Yes, you trusted Emelda with him, too, and her hair was absolutely butchered! How could you do that to her? Any woman would kill for that hair.” It was too far gone for her to fix, so she'd made a salon appointment for later that week. The loss of Emelda's hair, for some reason, made her almost cry for something she had lost herself.

“It was too Indian. I wouldn't be able to get her through the airport with the papers we have for her.” He aimed recklessly now, tracking their belongings.

Dorie kept her eye on the wavering barrel, wondering if it was loaded. “This is ridiculous. Marcella's never had a bodyguard thrust upon her.”

“Marcella knows the city, Marcella's aware. She grew up here, nothing gets past her. You've been here for years and you don't even speak Spanish. You stick out.”

“I'll stick out even more with a car and an armed soldier following me around everywhere.” She realized then what this arrangement would mean. “I can't even go out for lunch tomorrow? I have a lunch date.”

“You can go with Gilberto.”

She crossed her arms.

“Dorie, do you know, with all this populist fervor, what can happen to a white woman walking alone in the city? These Indian men think they're entitled to everything, and it's not going to stop at land and health care. They will take what they please!”

Dorie felt her resolve slip, the beginning of the slippery slope. She imagined the Indian man without a hand coming at her in the street, the one who always came at her, thrusting his stub in her face, threatening her for change. She imagined him venturing beyond his usual block, imagined him coming at her and not stopping at all.

“I made all my calls about Emelda on that phone.”

“I'm sure the Communists have bigger concerns than an illegal maid, Jim.”

He glanced up at her darkly. “All the Guatemalan staff must go. But Emelda won't be leaving for a while. I'll send her up every morning. It'll be good training for her. And you should get used to having a maid, anyway.”

“I don't need a maid, Jim. I don't need a bodyguard. Is Gilberto even old enough? Is Emelda? The labor department's cracking down. That's probably who bugged your phone. A child labor sting.”

He stood up, declaring the argument done. “You aren't allowed out of the embassy without Gilberto, Dorie. Do you want to find out if I'm kidding?”

“Fine,” she said. “But don't ask me to get involved in any of your sex trafficking ventures again. It's too depressing, that girl has too many hopes.”

Tottering in the street in her new heels, Emelda had proclaimed, “Now I am no longer an Indian.” It was the saddest moment of the entire afternoon—sadder even than her butchered hair—this girl believing that a simple pair of shoes changed her place in the world.

“There's nothing wrong with hope,” he said, smiling, mending their
quarrel while checking the full chamber of his gun. “Things may turn out for her, you never know.”

~~~~~

When they arrived at the Gringo for dinner two days later, their friend Christopher Cortez was already there. “Jim, Dorie.” He grimaced, looking crushed by everything around him. “Coffee?” He gestured to the untouched cup on the table. His own blend.

“No, no,” Jim said. “Scotch for us.” He motioned to Eduardo, the owner.

Cortez tried not to frown. A failed coffee planter, his family's vast plantation in the highlands grew much more than he could sell. Hemorrhaging money and unable to beat Brazilian prices, he had resigned himself to a small grove of trees, while the rest lay fallow. Six months ago, the group had rallied in drunken sympathy for Cortez's plight and demanded Eduardo carry Cortez's coffee. And so now Cortez sat staring distastefully down into a cup of his own coffee, which no one ever ordered but him.

“How are things, Cortez?” Jim asked, watching the door.

“Not good, Jim. Not good. I think you may be interested to hear what I've been dealing with in the highlands, with these Communists.”

Eduardo arrived at the table, set down two straight scotches with a flourish. Jim shifted his attention back to the door, leaving Cortez adrift.

“Cortez . . .” Dorie tried, taking pity on him. A good friend of the previous ambassador, Cortez was more of an inheritance than a close friend. Jim kept him in the circle, however, for strategic reasons he would never share. “We missed you last week.”

Cortez sighed, considered speaking.

“Gilberto!” Jim cried, and thrust an arm in the air. The teenage soldier practically marched into the Gringo, wearing his army uniform. “Cortez, this is my new secretary!”

Of course, Gilberto was not a secretary, but Jim enjoyed using that term to tease both Tomás—who had hired a real male secretary—and Gilberto, who was merely a tough.

Gilberto took a lone seat, near no one, and set his eyes placidly on the wall. Jim raised one finger in the air. “He's an observant fellow. A good secretary! Tell us, what would make a man like Cortez give up all he knows?”

After regarding Cortez a moment, Gilberto said with distaste, “One round of water cure and he'd betray us all.”

Jim giggled mercilessly, while Cortez managed a paper-thin smile. Dorie did not laugh, but studied the smooth side of Gilberto's face, appalled. She imagined poor Emelda holding still while this boy wielded scissors around her head.

How could she make her final escape with him following her around? She imagined lowering herself from the apartment window by a tied sheet.

“A good secretary,” Jim repeated, to no one. “I'm going to send him to college. What college do you want to go to?”

“Harvard!” Gilberto nearly shouted, like a command.

“Ah, an intellectual. No West Point?” Jim teased.

“Harvard!”

The hiring of Gilberto baffled the entire embassy, but Dorie understood the choice right away. In an office where everyone tried to prove himself, impress someone, and make a career, Gilberto merely obeyed. And he was only interested in obeying Jim. He treated Jim's word as scripture. After hearing him refer to Harvard as the best college in the world a few weeks ago, Gilberto had become set on attending. For his loyalty to Jim, he thought he'd gain admission, despite the fact that he was illiterate.

“My God!” came a voice from the door. “It's a zoo out there!”

“A tequila,” Jim ordered, as their friend Marco Jenks strode onto the scene, his face pink, exploded from the broken red veins of his nose.

“A damned circus!” Jenks cried. “I almost killed someone on the way here!”

“Glad you could make it, nevertheless,” Jim told him.

Jenks collapsed in the chair on the other side of Dorie, already a good number of drinks into the day. Dorie began plotting some other way to come in contact with Tomás. Maybe a playful nudge of her foot under the table. She had tried it a few weeks ago and had made Cortez choke on his drink.

“What happened?”

“Today's the day of the traffic shift,” Jenks explained. “There are signs everywhere.” Indeed, signs all over the city announced that in order to make the government center more accessible, the one-way streets had to be reversed. According to the Communists, previous dictators had put traffic patterns in place that purposefully disenfranchised the people.

“If the streets were meant to keep Indians out before, reversing everything will just make it impossible to leave,” Jim joked, but Jenks was on a roll.

“But Indians don't have cars! Indians can't read! So I'm driving near Plaza Mayor, and this old woman just goes strolling out in front of me, her
head turned the other way! I had to swerve into a cart and donkey to avoid hitting her!”

Eduardo arrived with the tequila bottle and a shot glass. Jenks immediately downed one shot and motioned for another. “Who's this?” he asked, swallowing, leaning forward to look Gilberto right in the face.

“This is Gilberto, my new secretary! He was booted from the army for being a soldier. They're all aid workers now. They tried to make him confiscate land and pass out food! They took away his gun!”

Jenks accepted this explanation with a nod. “I see,” he said, shifting his eyes to search for the next topic of conversation. Gilberto made no reaction to the attention so violently thrust upon and wrenched away from him in a matter of seconds.

“Dorie,” Jenks resumed. “You're looking well this week.”

“I am?”

“You're glowing!”

She tried not to show her distress. She turned to the door, where Tomás and Marcella should be making their entrance. He would be devastated, but he wouldn't show it. She had skipped their lunch date, since Gilberto was at her side the moment she stepped out of the embassy. When Tomás called to ask why she hadn't shown up, she could hear him through the broken phone, like a voice calling up from a well. But he could not hear her. Then she had hung up, for fear of the Communists listening.

“If you ask me,” Cortez said, “that traffic shift is an excellent idea. Gets rid of everyone who can't read. The most effective literacy program yet!”

Jenks smiled at this, his body convulsed in one big chuckle. Jim cleared his throat. He'd told Dorie last week that Gilberto couldn't read, but Gilberto made no reaction to this insult.

“We all have to do our part and breed these commies out,” Jenks added. “Now that illiterates can vote, traffic accidents aren't enough. I have seven children! But you Americans wait forever to have kids. By the time you start a family, Jim, you won't have the energy for more than one. And by the time he's old enough to vote, you'll be dead! Your vote merely replaced, rather than multiplied. That's no way to build up a decent democracy.”