Hard Red Spring (24 page)

Dorie did her best to sort through this calmly in her chair. Marcella knew about Tomás's investigation. Maybe he'd slipped in conversation or she discovered a document. Small lies and half-truths, she remembered him saying, to cover their tracks.

When she tried to make love to him during his last visit, she only succeeded in taking off his shirt. Usually the last to come off, she went for it right away. But he said he was too scared of harming the baby. Then he scolded her for not telling him before the last time they'd made love. They would take no risks, he made clear. Then he made her promise to boil all her water twice.

“It's important you know,” Marcella told her, “that investigation means nothing. It's a decoy.”

“A decoy,” Dorie repeated, as if she understood. His rejection, no matter how thoughtful, had caused her to resort to desperate maneuvers, which he evaded, claiming a meeting with Jim. “Jesus Christ!” she had cried. An unforgivable offense. He fled, turning his naked back on her for the first time. Showing the whip marks she had only before felt. Long pink ridges, bubbled with old scar tissue.

“I just keep going back to that afternoon in my mind,” Marcella said into her mug. “Just two minutes could have made the difference. None of this . . .” She leveled Dorie with a look. “None of this would be happening.”

“None of what, Marcella?” But it came out too high and false, as she fought tears, remembering those scars.

“I never told anyone, not even the doctor or Tomás, but I know what caused my miscarriage. If I had been delayed a minute, it could have all been avoided, none of this would be happening.”

Dorie did not ask again what she meant by “none of this.” Her sadness, her transformation over the past year?

“I'm glad you could give Gilberto the slip. I've never told anyone this. I was walking home by way of the Presidential Palace. You remember the day Jacobo Arbenz signed the land expropriation law. But I didn't know this—I'd been out all day. Suddenly a mob of Indians rushed the palace and I got caught up.”

“Did you fall? Did they trample you?” Dorie felt, much like the story, herself being pushed where she did not want to go.

“Nothing like that. The Indians were singing and chanting and pushing forward. The smell was terrible. The next thing I knew, this old Indian man pressed right up against me. He brought his filthy hands up and just started caressing my face. I was so shocked, I couldn't even scream. And then he slipped his fingers into my mouth. It was awful. I tasted them; they tasted like metal. I finally came to my senses and screamed. I ducked and found an opening in the crowd and escaped. That night, I lost the baby.”

“So it was all the pushing, you think?”

“No, no, the pushing wasn't so bad. I've had worse at Fruit parties around an open bar. It was that Indian. He did something to me.”

“You mean, like a curse, or like a disease?”

“I don't know!” She stifled a sob into her palm. “All I know is that an old Indian man would never think of laying a hand on me a day before. But Jacobo Arbenz did it. Signing that law, making them think they deserved everything. Making that filthy old Indian think he could put his half-dead fingers in a white woman's mouth.”

The miscarriage happened while she was home alone. She said she felt it coming, and fled to the bathroom, where she would not ruin anything.

“I know he did something to me. Women have miscarriages all the time, but he did something to make it impossible for me to ever have children again.”

“Marcella—”

“But now,” Marcella sniffed, “I'm thinking maybe it's all for the best.”

Dorie tried to muster pity for Marcella. How did she become the type of woman to steal anyone's husband, let alone her troubled best friend's? But Dorie did not have the luxury to give up an ounce of the meager happiness
she could hold on to in her life. And she suspected Marcella would do just the same to her.

“There's something else,” Marcella said, more composed. “Something Tomás told me. Something he's never told anyone. Not even Jim knows, I'm not kidding. When I was three months along, he confessed something to me. He said because he didn't want me to be surprised when the baby came.”

A knock rattled the front door, but neither of the women paid any attention. They both knew who it was.

“What did he tell you, Marcella?” Dorie leaned forward, her hair dipped into her coffee. She did not care now how suspicious her interest, her dread, looked. The knocks on the door grew louder, trying to save her. She sat there, frozen between two enemies, unable to gauge her chances with either.

“He's an Indian, Dorie. Half Indian, at least. He was an orphan adopted by wealthy coffee planters named Fasbinder. He wasn't a migrant worker. He was a slave.”

Horror wrung Dorie's heart, squeezing any hope, any idea of happiness from her. She felt it all leaving her with the force and efficiency of two hands twisting.

“An Indian?” The word she said a hundred times a day struggled now up her throat like bile. “But he doesn't look Indian.”

The door jumped from its frame as Gilberto threw himself against it, trying to break in. “Mrs. Ambassador, I hear you! Are you safe?”

“It's his nose,” Marcella said, waiting a moment for Dorie to understand. “It wasn't broken in fights. He broke it himself, three times. Reset it three times, then ran away from the plantation when he was thirteen.”

—

Dorie ran the bath as hot as she could, poured a tumbler of whiskey, and made herself, despite the pain, crouch so the water touched her backside. Bracing herself with a swig, she sat down completely, feeling the burn in her throat and on her skin.

She sat in the tub until it cooled and she needed the whiskey to stay warm. Then she drained the water, walked naked around the apartment, until the water heater recharged for another round. She would not let herself cry. To cry, to wallow in self-pity, would only waste valuable time.

If she could not rid herself of it in two weeks, she would have to tell Jim. Telling Jim would not mean she'd have to give up the baths. It just meant that when it finally worked, she would have to endure the pity of everyone she knew. And there was only one thing she could think of that would be more humiliating than being pitied.

The unbearable visit with Marcella did not end right away. Gilberto stalked the house with his gun drawn, while Marcella kept insisting, “If it had come out dark, I don't know what I would have done,” over and over, more sure each time, as if she knew exactly what she'd have done but couldn't bring herself to say it. Dorie imagined Marcella climbing Volcán de Fuego, tossing her dark baby into the smoking crater.

Of course, everything about Marcella's behavior over the past year now made sense. Her slow slide into mad drunkenness, her rants about race.

The phone rang. Dorie ignored it, suspecting Tomás.

She had been prepared to run away with a Hispanic man, Hispanics and whites married often enough in Latin America, especially in Fruit circles. Though unacceptable at home, at least they would have the Southern Hemisphere to find peace in. But this relationship would be considered an abomination even in Guatemala. And surely in Brazil. Dorie didn't know any women who'd say hello to an Indian man, let alone have an affair and become pregnant with an Indian baby. There was no one to turn to for help.

She considered Emelda's blue eyes, and the faceless Indian in Xela, claiming land after two generations. She'd seen a handful of gray-eyed Indians just in her limited wanderings around the capital. Then, of course, there was the dark baby born to a respectable Fruit family. Even an act of impropriety committed a hundred years before could, without warning, come back to stamp itself on the face of any child.

He arrived like a specter during her third bath, his black suit moving through the steam-filled apartment.

“It's like a jungle in here, Dorie.” Jim swam with his arms, through the bedroom to reach her. His glasses steamed, rendered his face blank and eyeless.

“I'm just taking a bath.” She slipped down further into the water to hide her body.

He knelt down, dipped a finger in. “It's so hot! Why do you have it so hot, Dorie? You're going to burn yourself!”

Before she could answer, he opened the cold tap, which spewed instant relief. She waited for him to realize, to think for one moment about his own question. Whiskey and a burning hot bath. So obvious to any woman. She stared down at her body, slightly distorted with the baby and the magnification of the water.

“It relaxes me,” she said, sinking down so the water lapped just beneath her chin. “The heat relaxes me.” Her breasts, she was sure, had grown a half cup-size bigger.

Thankfully, he took off his glasses before he could notice. “Why do you need to relax? I'm the one that had the scare today. What were you thinking, sneaking out of the embassy without Gilberto? We thought you'd been kidnapped!” His eyes were wet with steam and emotion. He rubbed them, then squinted to find her through the peachy blur of his farsightedness. “Gilberto is here for your protection, Dorie. Do you know what could have happened—”

“I can't have him following me everywhere, Jim. He's awful. He stresses me out. He perches like a vulture, like he wants someone to try to murder me so he can prove himself. He's an idiot, a savage! He broke down Marcella's front door!”

He rolled up his sleeves. “Here, let me wash your hair.”

Dorie did not want her hair washed. She lowered her head into the water to escape him, her knees going up. Underwater she discovered surprising sounds—metal banging, voices traveling up the pipes from the lower floors. She heard a voice distinctly say, “
In times of crisis, it's important that the news stays consistent
,” just before she ran out of breath.

“It's been forever since I washed your hair.” He worked the shampoo in tenderly with his fingers. “Do you think I'm enjoying this, Dorie? Do you really think I enjoy having you followed?” It occurred to Dorie then that Jim knew everything, had ordered Gilberto to follow her solely because he suspected her affair. But did he know it was Tomás?

“Jim,” she said. “This is my life. How can I conduct it in the shadow of that horrible boy? I dread even meeting him in the hallway.”

“I know,” Jim reassured her, kneading her neck, his fingers curling completely around her throat, massaging. “Everyone does. That's why I hired him.”

Jenks, unexpectedly, was her salvation. He burst through their apartment door, Jim's receptionist trailing behind with an apology. Jim left her to attend to him, closing the door, though she could hear every word in their small apartment.

“The newspaper yesterday reported twelve dead from traffic accidents from the road reversals thus far,” Jenks panted in the other room. “Have you heard?”

“No.”

“There will be more, of course. In response, Jacobo Arbenz released a radio announcement about the changed traffic patterns, in Quiché, Ixil, Kaqchikel, Achí, Q'eqchi', and Mam, and decreed that all stations must play it every hour for the next week.”

“So . . .” Jim ventured.

“All our broadcasts are in Spanish!” Jenks cried. “No Indians listen to Guatemala Radio. There's no point! Except, of course, the control. Fucking commie control! It takes fifteen minutes to run it in all those languages! Fifteen minutes, every hour. You wanted me to tell you when they start to interfere with the media.”

“What happens if you don't play it?”

“A fine. Another fine! They're sinking us with these fines, which is the whole idea. Tomás says they fined Fruit for a press release stating Arbenz's grandfather owned slaves. Libel. But Tomás says they had an eyewitness source. Freedom of the press, it seems, only applies to the left!”

Dorie, dried and hidden in a robe, recalled her last conversation with Tomás. Before she'd spoiled the visit, she had teased him about his reluctance to make love, called him a prude, believing she could still change his mind. She asked him why he didn't become a priest.

“Development will bring the Indians to Christ,” he'd said. “Will eradicate poverty more quickly than preaching at them will. More quickly than voting reforms and child labor laws. Forcing these things is counterproductive. And so I answered my calling in an unconventional way. I'm still converting souls, Dorie.”

“You say now that money is the answer, but you worked as a child. I know it was awful. I know they whipped you.”

“Yes. But without plantation experience, Fruit would never have hired me. If the government then had been like the one today, if they plucked me from my job and placed me in one of their free schools, where would I be right now? On a plantation.”

Jim finally succeeded in pushing Jenks out of the apartment.

“Dorie, I'm sorry. I came up here to talk to you. And now I've called downstairs to make sure there are no more interruptions.”

She clutched the robe at her neck.

“Dorie, is there anything you want to tell me? You seem . . .” He paused, searching for the precise word. “Distracted.”

“No.” She knew her face betrayed her. She turned to the bedroom window.

“You know you can tell me anything, Dorie. Anything at all.” Which was true. Jim had the ability to neutralize seemingly impossible problems. When she finally confessed to him that her real name was Pandora—knowing he'd see the name typed out on their marriage license—he merely chuckled and brought her paperwork the next day to have her name legally changed to Dolores. An option she did not know existed.

I'm pregnant with your best friend's Indian baby, she thought to herself. There'd be no way to neutralize that. The problem stretched beyond even Jim's powers.

“Okay, you don't have to tell me, Dorie. But I'm going to give you advice, anyway. Universal advice.” He sat on the bed and patted a place for her to join him. “When I was running the Education Department of Fruit, we had a big problem with bruised and overripe bananas.”