Hard Red Spring (32 page)

By the time the festival began, Lenore couldn't even bring herself to attend, but lay in the church nursery with a wet cloth over her eyes.

Near the end of the day, however, a sudden, intense desire overcame her. She walked straight from the church, across the scorched blacktop, past the stage where Miss Teen Blackberry waved and waved, past the pie table, the exhausted pony, and the greased pole. She walked to the prayer circle, where Dan stood with a slice of blackberry pie in his right hand, while holding someone's hand in his left. They prayed against the rain clouds, amassed on the horizon, threatening the festival. Lenore grabbed his wallet from his back pocket and made for the dunk tank, where Pastor May had good-humoredly offered up his dignity to raise money for the church food bank.

He was smiling above his full gut, eating pie, with his bare feet suspended over a placid skin of water, calling for quarters.

“Who wants to give me a second baptism?”

Lenore handed Bobbie Groenig everything in Dan's wallet—thirty-five dollars—and started throwing.

“Is that all the power you got?” Pastor May laughed, spooning his pie. “Keep trying, old lady! Maybe the Spirit will enter that arm and give you a decent fastball!” But after about fifteen tries, the taunting stopped. He just watched her, a worried look on his face, as she heaved balls pathetically at the target. Some missing wildly and actually hitting the grate that protected his head. A silent crowd formed, watching. Then Dan appeared.

“What,” he hissed in her ear, pulling her away, “has gotten into you?”

“You know,” she said, “as much as I do how absurd all this is. You cannot—” She stopped and twisted under his grip to face him. She raised her voice, hoping others would hear. “You cannot tell me that you feel at all like a man. Sitting there, getting fat on pie and praying for it not to rain on your fun, while there is so much suffering in the world. You even broke the prayer
circle! You broke the circle because you could not fathom letting go of your pie.”

They both looked down at the blackberry pie in his left hand, while he held her arm with his right. Lenore knew she was being unfair. If she hadn't been in this mood, she'd have been in the same prayer circle, eating pie, too.

He listened to her with the blatant show of patience that infuriated her. He said things like,
I think you're tired. I hear you, Lenore. I hear you.
After fifteen years of marriage, she knew he tended to repeat himself when he lied.

He walked her back the same way she had come. Past the smoldering BBQ pit and the colorful wreckage of the pie-eating contest. He walked her through the sly looks of everyone. Even Miss Teen Blackberry could not maintain her general benevolence as they passed. His grip on her upper arm became gentle as they entered the nursery, where he re-wet her cloth and tucked her into a child's cot. He spoke to her in the empty church quietly, as if there were sleeping babies all around them.

—

That, it seems, marked the beginning of her troubles. After that, Lenore resigned as the president of the Ladies of Vision, and stopped going to evening church services. At first she told Dan that she had too much to catch up on around the house.

Dan, concerned at her inactivity, started signing Lenore up for clubs at the church. At first he thought exercise would help, so he enrolled her in the married women's volleyball team. But Lenore couldn't muster any enthusiasm for sports and when they lost a scrimmage match to Sacred Heart, her frustration overwhelmed her.

“How could God let idolaters triumph over us?” she'd asked Dan. “If He'd levitated me for one spike, the entire county would be on its knees, praising God.”

Dan began chewing his lip, showing real worry for the first time. “I think,” he finally said, “your problem might be a bit more fundamental than exercise. I'll sign you up for a Bible study class, Lenore. What do you think of that?”

“But I already know the Bible,” she snapped. “I know it backwards and forwards. I've known it much longer than you have!”

Dan did not like to be reminded of this, of the fact that she had been born-again her entire life, whereas he'd only been so for about ten years. “Well, obviously you've forgotten the temptations of Christ in the desert. If
you remembered, you'd know not to ask such a silly thing as why God doesn't lift you up for a point in volleyball.”

“Just because the Bible mentions it, doesn't mean I'm satisfied with the explanation!”

This shocked them both and Dan left the room. She cried for a good hour, then drove herself to the evening service to repent. She sat in the full parking lot, in the car, but no matter how terrible she felt, she could not convince herself to go inside. The heaviness, the emptiness—was it possible to feel both at the same time?—only got worse when she was at the church. How could this be, if she still believed in its overall message? Faith had carried her before through moments of uncertainty, but now relying on blind faith seemed lazy. Faith seemed a way of avoiding honesty with herself about her part in God's plan. Was she really just meant to bake, scoop ice cream, and rent dunk tanks for God? She sensed a larger purpose for herself, though she hadn't any clue what it might be, since the world she inhabited suddenly felt so small to her.

“What do you want, Lenore? What would make you happy?” Dan kept asking. For weeks, she had no answer for him. Then one day she told him that having a maid would make her happy.

“For what!” he had yelled. “What do you need a maid for?”

“I'm exhausted, Dan. I just can't keep up with the canning and everything.”

“But you haven't been doing anything else. You don't work, you don't do anything with the church anymore, you walk through the mall and come home to watch television. How could you be exhausted?”

“I don't know. I just am. I think the maid would be a great relief. I think if it works, I may look for a job.”

“A job? Do you think I don't provide enough for you, Lenore?” With this, his pleading had gone from measured and rational to panicked. “Is this about my demotion? Is that it? Are you worried about money? I've applied to other jobs, but no one even wants to interview someone with an arrest record. I'm trying—”

“Of course not,” Lenore reassured him. She hadn't meant to poke that sore spot, but he held it in front of him, always, so everything hit it. “I'd just like to have a job. I think I need to be out in the world.”

“Where? What would you do?”

“Maybe I could go back to Friendly's. I worked there before we got married.”

“I know you did. And I also know you hated it. Why would you want to work a job you hate when you don't have to?” Dan was so perplexed and desperate, his eyes swimming. Ten years ago, in this situation, he would have punched the wall behind her head and shaken her. Now he questioned his own manhood.

“I don't know,” was all she could say.

That evening, Dan phoned Pastor May. The three of them met that night, and for two weeks after that, for emergency counseling.

~~~~~

The road from the base to the model village was so new that the survey stakes from its construction still marked its edges. From the hilltop, as they descended into the valley, Lenore studied the village: a grid of sheds spaced exactly, inhabiting only a small area in the center of the valley. Surrounding the fence, and stretching to the jungle in all directions, the earth had been turned in preparation for planting.

Getting closer, Lenore could see tiny solitary forms, wandering slowly and without purpose. Indians. No, Maya.

Huela led the way, running ahead with her too-long tail sailing behind.

“Huela!
Aquí
,” Mincho yelled. “
¡Aquí!
”

Several guards stood at the gate, older soldiers without puppies, with dirt on their uniforms. They laughed, ceremoniously holding the gate open for Huela.

“Why so many guards?” Lenore asked Mincho.

“We are in guerrilla country. The Indians in here are under amnesty now, they give up and tell us where the guerrillas are hiding. We must protect them, or the guerrillas would kill them all for being traitors.”

“Have you gotten a lot of good information already?”

“Oh yes. I think everyone is ready for the war to be over.”

Dan breathed in and out several times, refreshed, as if their downhill walk had brought them to a mountain summit. She waited for him to say something about the larger picture again, but thankfully, he did not. Lenore felt that the world, which was supposed to be expanding for her, had only closed in. She breathed in and out, too, trying to capture Dan's confidence.

Tiny sheds stood like double-wide port-a-potties along the gridded paths. Donated by Operation Open Arms, they looked modern, though without the dignity of doors, and were new and sturdy and big enough for two people to sit comfortably in. For three people to lie down side by side. But Lenore
didn't see any people. The figures she had seen from above, crawling the village grid, were gone.

“Where is everyone?” she asked.

Mincho brought them to the water pump—an efficient-looking contraption that moaned and shuddered when Lenore worked the lever, hinting at a vast underground network.

“The secret to the water pump,” Mincho said, “is that you have to put in just a little first, to get a lot back.” He retrieved a small can of water on the ground, poured it into the curved, humanoid mouth, then worked the lever. Water gushed out, puddling between them. “But,” Mincho warned, with a seriousness that must have been imparted to him, “you must remember to refill the can every time, Beasties.” He placed the can under the stream and set it back on the ground.

“Beasleys,” Lenore corrected him.

They left the pump and followed Mincho into one of the unoccupied sheds. It was dark and smelled like a Tupperware container. Lenore pressed her hand to one of the walls: cool like metal, but when she tapped a nail, she heard the dull thud of plastic.

They stood inside the cramped, dark shed for a moment, with Huela whining outside, distrusting the space. Then suddenly a light revealed Dan's surprised face.

“And there's electricity!” Mincho shouted, pleased at his timing.

Dan put a hand out, palm up in the light, as if feeling rain.

“Every shed has electric light and a hot plate!” Mincho said. “The Indians no longer have to cook over fire. No need for firewood.”

“I bet they've never had electricity,” Dan said. “I bet this is a treat for them.”

“Yes,” Mincho said, his hand still on the switch. “They all lived in darkness, all the time before.”

—

Huela sensed the Indians that Lenore could not see. She barked and barked, betraying their whereabouts everywhere. What would they look like, these refugees? In the pictures at the conference, their skin had been dark, with dirt and race mingling deceptively.

“Are you happy to be translating our sermons?” Dan asked. “Is that something you asked to do?”

“I am.” Mincho lowered his head in humility, then proceeded to admire
his boots. “I asked, but I also knew they would ask me. I am the only one here who speaks Quiché.”

“No one else can speak to the Indians?” Lenore was astonished. “I thought Indians . . . Mayans,” she corrected herself, “made up over half the country's population.”

“He speaks Quiché,” Mincho said, motioning to one of the armed guards slouched at the gate. They had made a complete circle. “But he doesn't speak English.”

Lenore eyed the razor wire, so new that it glinted cheaply all around the camp like a toy crown. Above, a large bird circled and called. The guards were all turned in, watching the village and not the mountains.

“We're glad to have you helping us,” Dan reassured Mincho. “I think you'll have fun, and maybe learn something, too.”

“Fun, yes. But not as fun as shooting Communists. Ha ha.”

This, they would soon learn, was how Mincho laughed. Saying it, rather than actually laughing. He'd draw his lips back, revealing a mouth full of horrible jagged teeth, and lunge forward.
Ha ha.
Like a terrifying fish taking the bait of a joke.

—

The education building marked the exact center of the model village and was, by far, the nicest and sturdiest of all the structures, though Dan squinted skeptically at the foundation. They toured inside and were surprised to find carpeting, a television.

“For educational videos,” Mincho explained, running his hands over the dead screen in wonder. “All Spanish lessons, sermons, and Lessons in Democracy.”

“Sermons? I thought we were going to have a church.”

“Oh, not your sermons. The President's sermons. He gives a sermon to the nation every week over the television. I translate for the Indians. I translate the President!”

They moved on to the last stop on the tour, the church. Constructed entirely of corrugated metal, it bordered a small public square that faced the entrance and guards. In front, a flagpole displayed the Guatemalan flag throwing a fit in the wind. At its base, three struggling shrubs provided the village's only greenery.

“Those plants are nice,” Lenore ventured. The sight of the television had renewed her, made her think they weren't as cut off as she had believed. “Maybe we should do some more planting around the village to cheer it up?”

“The plants,” Mincho said, “are nice because they are in front of the guards. There can be no more, because they will burn the sticks and leaves for their gods.”

“Oh my. Okay.”

Inside the church, wooden benches faced a stage with a microphone. Mincho hopped up and yelled into the microphone, “The church has electricity, too!” But his enthusiasm died a prompt death. The mic wasn't plugged in.

Though small and spare, their first church, with its bolts and seams showing, made Dan and Lenore hold hands and smile.