Hard Red Spring (25 page)

Dorie stifled a simultaneous sob and laugh with her fist.

“Bananas ripen fast and they bruise easily, when you have to ship your cargo by train, then boat, then train again halfway across the world. Brown bananas were our biggest problem at the time, but I solved it. Do you know how?”

He bent down and found her eyes.

“I don't know, Jim.”

“I rebranded them. Brown spots aren't bad, they're good! I renamed them sugar spots. Where the sweetness is. I wrote a whole ad campaign and people began buying brown bananas over the yellow ones!
Creative thinking
was all it took.”

Dorie herself still bought brown bananas because of that commercial, with no idea of Jim's connection to it. She smiled despite herself, wiped her eyes clear. “You wrote that commercial? I remember watching it as a girl. The dancing, spotted banana—”

“You see!” He encouraged her, bouncing the bed. “You feel better already!”

“But what about Communists? Land reform? Can they be done away with creative thinking, Jim?”

“Of course!” he said, kissing her forehead. “That's why Washington hired me.”

Tomás,

I'm writing you because I know that if I try to do this in person, I will fail. I would be cruel and would only be able to halfway succeed, prolonging both our despair. So I am writing now and I hope you forgive me for it.

I cannot be with you anymore, Tomás. I cannot make a life with someone who has made a life of deceit. I have lived this way for a year now and know that I do not have the strength or the cunning for it. I recall you telling me at the Gringo that everything you have
gotten in life was by deception. I thought you were exaggerating, but only now do I understand the truth of it. In short, I know about your heritage. It doesn't matter how I know, but I do and you cannot deny that this must change everything for me. You know as well as I do that there is not a single country in this world where we could comfortably make a home. If there wasn't a child, maybe it would work, but how can we be together, Tomás, and be fruitless? Your religion prohibits both birth control and divorce and I have no desire to force you to compromise your most fundamental beliefs.

And what of this baby? Beyond my own fears of exile, you must know that a simple gamble of heredity could ruin you, too. All you have worked for in your life, wagered with frightening odds. I know your success is too important to you to risk. So what was your plan? Did you plan on breaking the baby's nose repeatedly, too? Of continuing this charade for generations until your bloodline is washed clean? For even if our baby came out looking normal enough, what, then, of his children?

There are just too many unknowns here, too much pain to pass on to the generations. So I am stopping this before it can go any further. I am not going to Brazil with you. I am not having your baby. I'll take care of the arrangements myself, and you need not know any more details. It will not be your sin, it will be mine. A sin, as was my own deception in this entire affair: I was only using you to get out of Guatemala. I do not love you, Tomás. If it was possible to undo our entire history, to start again as friends, I would, but I do not think either of us would learn from these mistakes if we treated them as simple folly. A child's game to be restarted when we do not like the results. But maybe you can. If so, I envy you and give this advice: Go back to Marcella. She loves you, in her way, and you've the luck there of a fruitless marriage. It seems the path of least resistance for you and I do not know why you strayed from it in the first place.

—

She awoke that night with a raging headache from her day of whiskey baths. A dream had startled her awake, a horrible dream she could not shake. In it, she'd been plowing a field and did not realize she'd run over Jim until she felt his bones crunching in the blades. She jumped off and found nothing left of him but a bloody black suit.

She blinked at the walls, trying to calm herself, to get back to sleep. Then she turned and found Jim lying next to her, awake also, still wearing his suit. Rumpled, but clean. She could smell the smoke, the coffee of some recent meeting on him. The bedside clock placed him there at an impossible hour, before midnight.

“I've been thinking, Dorie. Jenks is right. There's always going to be a reason not to, there's always going to be work and travel. I think we should go for it and try again for a baby. What do you think? It will be our patriotic duty.”

What did Dorie think, lying in bed, hearing this from Jim? She thought very carefully about her words. And about the brutal irony of Tomás's plan falling into her lap the moment she abandoned it. Of Jim's astounding self-deception. Was he capable of even considering the possibility that he was sterile?

“I don't know, Jim,” she managed. “I still don't think Guatemala is any place to raise a child.”

“Oh.” He waved a hand. “There are worse places.”

“Are there? I don't even know the situation down here. I don't even know what you do all day, so I can only imagine the worst. Especially with the fragments I do get.” A viable argument that could sustain her for a while, if needed. “Tell me what's going on downstairs, Jim. You never tell me anything. You keep apologizing for the craziness, but I've no idea what it is. Maybe if I knew the situation better—”

“It's only fair,” he agreed for the first time in a decade. All these concessions, all this tenderness, suddenly, as if he knew Dorie had planned to leave him. “Confidentially, my most important project went haywire, which is why I've been so stressed this week. We screwed up one of our newspaper stories. This one's about a girl in the highlands. Her father got free land and began farming it. But he can't run the equipment, it's too big, and he's just an Indian. He's used to mules. So he's on this motorized plow and the mother is on there with him, but her Indian skirt gets caught. And he can't turn off the plow. He ends up dragging her along, her body torn up and plowed into his field.”

“Jesus Christ, Jim.” Dorie sat up. The light from the guard station outlined the dark room in a simple sketch. “What are you talking about? You made that up?”

“Freedom of the press, Dorie. The Communists asked for it.”

The phone rang and Jim walked into the next room to answer.

“Tomás!” he called into the receiver, now fixed. Dorie scooped up the sheets to cover herself at the sound of his name. “Yes, tell me all about your trip. What time tomorrow works for you? I've got some things awaiting your approval.”

He hung up. “Where was I?”

“The man plowing over the woman.” The version from the newspaper, she remembered, being the other way around. Jim abandoned her, spent all his days making up newspaper stories?

“Yes.” He returned to bed. “I'm talking about how this is a very powerful story. It needs to be covered by the press. Hernando understands this, he runs it in
Prensa La Verdad
. But then one of the editors changes it so the woman runs over the man, which is absurd. He argues that it will have more resonance with Indians if the woman runs over the man. So now we have two different versions running in the papers. And Arbenz is using it to prove opposition papers aren't reporting real stories, but repeating what they hear from us. And Washington knows, and we all look bad. Papers we rely on look bad and we're set back months in our work.”

Dorie lay on top of the blankets for hours, shivering, unwilling to crawl under to join Jim in his warm, dreamless sleep. Jim slept easily, but claimed not to dream. So sure of himself at the end of each day, not a scrap of doubt remained to trouble his rest.

“We can do this, Dorie,” he'd said, before falling asleep. “You can even get another maid to help with the baby. A Hispanic, or maybe even a girl from the States. Will you promise to just think about it?”

“I'll think about it.”

She watched him sleep, thinking instead of the letter she wrote to Tomás between baths, already sent. She gave it to Emelda that evening to deliver to his house, since new security measures at Fruit wouldn't allow an Indian maid near his office. Had he read it already? She felt the heavy machinery of her plan beginning to grind. If she changed her mind now, she'd be crushed.

~~~~~

She awoke in the early morning to a cool light splintered by the partially open blinds. Next to her, she saw his naked back and felt so grateful that she cried out to touch Tomás. But the skin was smooth beneath her hand. She'd woken him up and Jim turned over to kiss her, thinking she had made up her mind to try again for a baby.

As he made love to her, Dorie stopped worrying that he would even notice
her changed body. She found him unbearable, clumsy. She missed Tomás, his almost weightless presence above her. Jim moved too eagerly, twisting the sheets into a rope around her waist. His face too close to hers, breathing too much of her air. She missed wanting more. By the time Jim finished, she had wanted less. About ten minutes less of him than she had to endure.

Jim was pathetic, she realized, an actor sent by Washington to create an illusion of power in a situation they had no control over. An adman, a storyteller. She saw him clearly, in the brightening dark, for this first time.

By midmorning, she sat alone in the apartment, both longing for and fearing the moment she would see Tomás again. Soon he'd make his way up the third-floor stairs, after his meeting with Jim. At any moment, he'd knock on her door and she would have no choice but to open it. Because he had a key.

What part of him would she see? She knew the moment he appeared, her heart would choose a side. Only, she could not predict which. Could she find happiness in exile? In abandoning the respectable position she'd wanted her whole life?

And if this baby was born, a likelihood that grew stronger each day that she failed to get rid of it—as it grew teeth and fingers that clung to her—she would need Tomás. Having an Indian baby with someone she loved would be preferable to having one with Jim. She considered again Tomás's rule: to lie and bide your time. And thought how cruel, to use his own advice against him.

Dorie needed to get the letter back right away. She could not close her options off so finally. Running out the embassy door, she waved to the guards and cleared the gate at a trot, while they looked on helplessly. “I'm going to the salon. I couldn't find Gilberto and I'm late for my appointment already!” They knew they could not stop her, and Jim would never order anyone to physically subdue her. They'd send Gilberto to the salon first, giving her a bit of time. She set off in that direction, but changed course once out of sight. She felt the rain beginning before she'd traveled a block.

When Dorie arrived, soaked and shivering, Marcella announced, while turning off Guatemala Radio, “Thousands of people are protesting across the city—Indians and peasants, demanding that Jacobo Arbenz resign.”

“That's funny,” Dorie replied, feeling this greeting even funnier, “I just walked across the city and didn't see anything.”

“Gilberto's already been here, looking for you. To what do I owe this surprise visit? You never just stop by anymore.”

Dorie glanced casually around the room, looking for the letter. She saw Emelda's fruit hat on a peg, heard her working in the bathroom.

“Fearless Dorie,” Marcella cackled, “you're going to get in trouble one of these times. But you'll keep having your fun until it happens. And I'll keep losing front doors.”

The new front door, paid for by the embassy, looked just like the old one.

“You're soaked. Do you want something dry to wear?”

Dorie shook her head, seeing the letter on the foyer table. Unopened.

“The natives are restless,” Marcella said. “It seems they don't like to be saved. How much time do you think you have?”

“Time?” Dorie asked.

“Until Gilberto comes back. You must at least have enough time to change.”

When Dorie emerged from the bedroom, wearing a dress of Marcella's that she once coveted, the letter was still on the table.
Tomás
, it read, in her disguised hand that looked like that of a criminal.

“You know, he searched the house for you.” Marcella pointed to the white couch, pulled from the wall. “Yet another little girl who doesn't want to be saved.” She extracted herself from her chair, made her way across the room to a round gilt mirror, and brought out a tube of lipstick.

“What about that case in the highlands?” Dorie asked. “Did they ever find that little girl?” She hated that little girl now, wanted her to stay dead. That distant court date could buy her time to figure out what she wanted.

Marcella traced a lopsided heart over the pale flesh of her mouth. The clattering down the hall continued. “A fucking hair clog,” Marcella said. “How hard can it be?”

“Is Tomás still working on that case?”

“No,” she said, finding Dorie's eyes in the mirror. “There's no case anymore. Fruit dropped it.”

“Why?”

She shrugged, began powdering her neck. “Because it was too much trouble,” she said, patting. “Because they discovered something they didn't like. Because the land is cursed by Indians. Because none of this is going to matter in a month, anyway. Who the hell knows why, Dorie? Fruit is not an open book.”

“But Tomás must know.”

“Must know what?”

“What happened with the land, if the little girl came back to claim it.”

“Oh yes, the girl's getting the land.”

Yes, he had done it himself. He had found the little girl and convinced her to claim the land to expedite the Brazil plan. Dorie felt dizzy. “So she wasn't murdered?”

Marcella blinked at herself in the mirror and brought out her eyeliner. “Oh,
that
little girl? A respectable woman like yourself shouldn't be concerned with such ugly stories, Dorie,” she said with mocking distaste, sharpening the tip with two efficient twists. “I can tell you what happened to her. She was gang-raped by Indians and killed, didn't you hear? It's what everyone wants to believe anyway.”