Hard Red Spring (49 page)

“Who?”

“Cruzita! Why didn't you tell me about this new prize? They took her to the base and she hasn't been back!”

Lenore felt her heart drop three inches into her empty, stretched stomach. “Are you sure?”

“She hasn't been back to the shed!” She kicked the pews, her foot bleeding. “I should have told her more. If she knew about me, she would not have done your pageant. Selfish! Selfish!”

“Maybe she took her travel pass and left already for her village. Maybe she went to see her family.”

“They were all dead in the massacre! Her village no longer exists! Our family no longer exists! She has nowhere to go. She's afraid to go to the bathroom at night.” Emelda spoke frantically, trying to sort the languages in her head. “I should have told her more. She'd hate me, but she'd be here still. You have to go now,” she cried, jerking Lenore's arm. “You have to go save her!”

Overwhelmed, Lenore let herself be pulled out of the church. “Save her from what?”

“What do you think they did with her all night?”

Outside, the low sun blinded her. Lenore resisted for a moment, unable to see her next step. She shielded her eyes, seeing everything backlit: the stark shapes of soldiers and their guns; what remained of the pageant stage, dismantled with the help of ropes, looked like a gallows. “Oh God.” Lenore breathed hard, but could not catch her breath. Emelda dragged her to the village entrance, where Mincho stood, regarding the Civil Patrol's formation. The Indian men with their wooden machetes and Dan, too, with a real machete in hand. Still shirtless, gleaming with sweat. His skin was the color of baked clay. Of bricks.

“What's going on?” Dan asked Lenore, frowning at her arrival in the middle of their exercise.

Emelda remained silent, not knowing Dan knew about her English. Lenore, forced to say it herself, crossed her arms over herself for modesty. “Cruzita hasn't been back from the base yet.” She gulped in shallow breaths, but they went down like water, only making speech harder. “She's been there all night.”

“Oh.” He lowered his head, thinking. “Did she get her travel pass and leave?”

Lenore suddenly realized how stupid that sounded, how stupid she must have sounded to Emelda a minute before. Cruzita could not have gone anywhere last night because of the nationwide curfew. She tightened her hold on herself and managed to say, “No, Dan. We have to do something.”

He nodded, looked over at the other men, their dissolving formation. Mincho anchored the center, his hands balled in fists, furious at the intrusion.

“Where's Cruzita?” Lenore asked him.

His face maintained composure, though his knuckles went white with tension. “She went back home with her pass, to San Marcos. She'll be back in a week.”

Behind Lenore, Emelda yelled in English, “She's not from San Marcos, she's from Valle Lejos! Where is she?”

“Okay.” Mincho shrugged, with his preacher's smile. “She went back to Valle Lejos. She'll be back in a week.”

At this, Emelda lunged and the men of the Civil Patrol fell on her, bringing her to the ground. Lenore noticed Dan switch his grip on his machete, readying himself for something. For killing her? Mincho remained where he stood, watching the struggle, pleased.

“What's her name?” he asked Dan.

Before Lenore could stop him, he said, “Emelda. She's the one I told you about. I think she's the one who wrote those letters.”

At that moment, Lenore broke down, thinking of all she had told him the night before. Emelda, too, wailed, with her fingertips clawing at the dirt. Just as she had done her first morning in the village.

“Dan,” Lenore sobbed, “this isn't right. I'm going up there.”

“Just calm down, Lenore. You know you can't just go walking up there. We'll write a note and make an appointment.”

An enormous pressure rose up from her gut. “Fuck the notes!” she cried.

Again, Lenore saw him switch his grip on his machete. “Watch your language, Lenore.”

“What is wrong with you? They're holding her captive in there and you want to make an appointment?” He stared at her blankly, like a soldier. “Fuck you,” she said. “I'm going myself.”

Lenore pushed past him and the Civil Patrol men. They all looked at Mincho for instructions, but he just watched with an amused smile on his face. Dan grabbed her arm, with his machete slightly raised in his other hand.

“What are you going to do, slice me up? With your new toy?” She laughed at the absurd way he had always held that machete. Fidgety and unsure of the proper grip. “Go ahead,” she said, and shook free of him. “Prove you're a man.”

Lenore cleared the gate, started up the dirt road, and got about thirty paces before Dan rushed up behind her, grabbed her by her hair, and dragged her back toward the borders of the village. “Don't you defy me in front of these men. What kind of example are you?”

Lenore heard the men laughing. Her robe was flung open, revealing her nakedness underneath, but she couldn't bring her hands down to close it. They were in her hair, trying to ease the pull on the back of her scalp. With her head forced down, she watched her own pale body struggling gracelessly, retracing her footprints back, back into the village. She then saw Emelda's bare feet floating an inch off the ground, back toward the education building, escorted by boots.

“You think you're special, that the rules here don't apply to you? This is a war! You're lucky I was here. Any one of the soldiers could have gunned you down.” Back inside the fence, Dan released her with a violence that sent her stumbling to the ground. Her hands, unable to decide whether to break her fall or clasp her robe shut, froze, doing neither, and she fell into the dust on her back, her legs spread, her robe almost completely off now, the back sliding down to her elbows. Dan sighed and looked down at her as if she had hurt him immensely.

“Go back to the church,” he said.

It took all of Lenore's energy to gather herself up from the ground without screaming. She could hear Dan talking to Mincho as she tried to walk away with dignity, but her knees were shaking and useless. “The Lord says that a woman's duty is to obey her husband, while the husband's duty is to protect his wife. There's a lesson in this,” he said somberly. He paused, allowed
Mincho to translate to the others. “Even if the woman fails in her duty, even if she insults and mocks you, you still have to fulfill yours. No matter what, you have a duty to protect her. That's love.”

Lenore noticed she was barefoot. At some point during the struggle, she had lost her sandals. But she didn't turn around for them.

—

Lenore spent all day in bed. No one brought her breakfast or lunch. Now she regretted the meal the day before. She regretted so many things. Epiphanies washed over her, one after the other, as she waited for his inevitable arrival.

He came home almost sheepishly, without a word. Instead, he searched his Bible, as if for what he wanted to say to her. But she didn't want to hear it. She knew the Bible better than him. Suddenly she saw everything more clearly than him.

“Do you realize, Dan, that we've set up nothing but a huge Communist experiment? No food, bad water, cramped shacks. Everything is supposed to be for the good of the village, but the men work constantly to build military roads. The women harvest wheat that's driven away in a truck. It's worse than communism, if you ask me. It's a labor camp.”

The open Bible hung heavy and limp in his hand as he stood up. “What's wrong with you, Lenore? This isn't what you thought last night. It's what you thought the day before. You're erratic, you change your mind every day. You used to think the women were idle. You used to think that working for the good of the village was the best thing!”

Yes, she knew she had reached the point that whatever she said would be used against her. Her own words bent into loops and snares to trap her. And his words were like heavy stones, stacked between them. Impassable.

“A woman tells you a story, a girl disappears, and you forget absolutely everything we've seen and learned down here. This is Guatemala. Hundreds of people disappear every day. We can't forget our purpose and get caught up in every small injustice. We have a higher calling. Nothing would get done here if we stopped for every crime.”

“Dan, I spent hours yesterday dressing Cruzita, curling her hair, giving her lipstick. And I just handed her to those soldiers to take away—”

“I think you're imagining the worst scenario, and we don't have any facts. She could have just gone home.”

“Don't give me that! You know exactly what happened to her and you don't care. You care more about your roads than about an innocent girl being passed around—”

He kicked the chair, which clattered on the floor. She flinched.

“You think I'm going to hit you? You think I'm an abusive husband because I had to hurt you to save your life? Should I have let them shoot you?” Blood rushed to his face and he could barely spit his words out for the anger collected there. “I warned you and you brought it on yourself. Don't blame me for your failure. You failed in your duty, but I held up my end.”

“I don't care about us,” Lenore said, pulling the blanket over herself. “I'm talking about Cruzita and Emelda. Where's Emelda? Did they take her away?”

“The General wanted to see her.”

“For what? She didn't do anything, she was just worried about Cruzita.”

“She obviously will never trust the military. Those letters she wrote are full of the most typical Communist lies. Blaming America for the war! And she's trying to convince others. She even had you believing her. I had to tell the General everything you told me. She'd compromise the whole program. Guatemala is too unstable—”

“Now, wait, I never said anything like that. If this is about you and me, if this is about our problems, let's not drag an entire country into it.”

“Yes, Lenore, let's not drag an entire country into it. You don't trust me, you don't think my roads are important. You hear fantastic stories about helicopters and military massacres and American corruption from a stranger and you believe them because you don't trust me. She speaks English! She's a Communist agent put here to sabotage us.”

“My distrust of the program here has nothing to do with you, it has to do with what I see here every day. Where is Emelda?”

“The General and I decided that taking her out of the village was best.”

“Emelda is a good woman. She was just hiding in the mountains, she was defending herself! This isn't right, Dan. Don't let the General decide!”

“You're not qualified to make that decision. They know her, where she's been, and who she knows. So they decide. You,” he said, “just taught her sewing.”

“She was my friend! I know her! I'm the only one who knows her!”

“Guerrillas don't have friends. They're killers.”

“Emelda's never killed anyone! This is all my fault! Take me up there, take me instead of her. I can explain!”

“I've spoken with the General, I've seen the evidence. You're willing to believe a strange Indian woman over me, your husband, who loves you. You,
Lenore, are the one dragging an entire country down with our personal problems. You're the one who can't see the larger picture.”

—

Dan went back to the Civil Patrol. Lenore watched them conduct some exercises in the square, switching their machetes from the relaxed to ready position. They held a meeting there, then resumed their drills. Lenore sat on her new piano bench in the darkened doorway of the church and watched them for a long time. It wasn't until hours later, after Dan and the patrol had marched out of sight, that she came out of the church. Stepping onto the path, feeling the gravel, she remembered that her feet were bare. At the gate, a soldier stood guard. Lenore walked to the fence, hooked her fingers in the links, and looked out onto the road that rose to the military base, opaque and terrifying in the distance. She could see her sandals in the middle of the road, several yards away. One in front of the other, frozen in step. She glanced at the guard and knew he would not let her retrieve them.

T
wo aging soldiers, used to more exciting things, guarded the gate. One leaned inside the frame of the metal detector, which clearly didn't work. It was nothing more than a freestanding doorway for its tacit acceptance of the AK-47, hand grenades, pistol, ammunition, and bowie knife strapped to his uniform. The first soldier stood in the hall, funneling the wary, weary passengers in the direction of the second.

It was either the most dangerous or the most secure border crossing Jean Roseneath had ever experienced. She was accustomed to the small, tyrannical absurdities of third world countries from her less conventional travels abroad. Maya, however, was not. Jean could feel her sidling close, could feel the musky heat coming off her, like that of a baby stirring after a long sleep.

“It's okay,” she told her daughter. “Just do what I do.”

The two feet of cautious distance that had separated them for the past several months was suddenly, so easily gone. Fifteen-year-old Maya took her mother's hand and made her bare shoulders very small. Jean could not remember the last time Maya had held her hand. She preferred men with guns to her daughter's moods and hoped all of Guatemala was like this. Maybe, under the threat of violence for the next three weeks, their relationship would become more civil.

Jean glanced down on the top of her daughter's hair—angry, matted from failed midflight naps. Her altered part revealed a faint pink scar that disappeared the moment Jean bent to confirm its presence. It was unfair, she knew, to wish this fear upon her daughter. She was fifteen. She was beautiful and furious and popular and, Jean suspected, brighter than she let on.

The first soldier's face twitched from its trance to look from daughter to mother, then back again. He took his time to point them in the direction of the other soldier, who squinted at them as if from a much greater distance. At once these two men became very alive and alert, as if all their training had been in preparation for this moment—a white American woman entering their country with her child. Maya squeezed her mother's hand hard
before she was forced to let go. They were directed to walk separately through the plastic metal detector gate that didn't work. They both went through, then Maya was asked to step back and walk through again.

No alarm sounded, no lights, of course. The soldiers looked satisfied that they had accomplished their goal with these two tourists, which seemed nothing more than to slow them down and force them to walk with reverence into the single and only baggage claim in all of Guatemala.

—

The passengers gathered around the raised mouth of the baggage machine and waited for their possessions.

Jean studied her flight companions, trying to find Telema. She had not noticed the pile of black, knotted hair, the elegant hands coming up to tighten the nest mercilessly, until it was too late to do anything about it. They had already been seated in the plane in Los Angeles and Telema had arrived late, like an omen. The sight of her after four months had felt like an ambush. In order to calm herself, she'd had several Bloody Marys on the flight. From more than ten rows back, after three drinks, Telema could have been anyone.

But she was not anyone. She had followed Jean like a shadow cast by the abstractions that plagued her: love, history, guilt. Jean constantly scanned the baggage area to try to catch her, determined not to be taken by surprise again.

And then they began to arrive. One by one, bags heaved up the throat, clattering down to the circular conveyor belt, where they were either claimed or doomed to make circles for hours with other unclaimed baggage. Jean's and Maya's suitcases appeared. Jean hoisted them both and turned, and that was when she encountered Telema standing directly behind her, her teeth biting her lower lip in an angry smile. She wore combat boots underneath her long black skirt, wore them seriously, tightly laced, not loose and clomping with irony.

“That's a lot of baggage, Jean,” she said, looking not at her, but at Maya, who stared back at this beautiful tan-skinned woman with unmistakable sexual awe. Automatically, Jean stepped between them. Telema, of course, did not have baggage. And she stood proudly with her black purse as if not having a suitcase were a moral decision. What could she fit in that big purse of hers? Several notebooks, one change of clothes—no underwear—a few books, a gun.

“Telema. How are you?” Jean tried her best at sincerity, for her own sake.
To show displeasure, to show anything, would just provoke Maya's interest, her cruelty. She asked how Telema was, but nothing would have pleased Jean more than a thick, phlegmy hack in reply, the news that she was ill, dying.

“I'm fantastic,” Telema proclaimed as she tightened her black hair scarf with a vicious twist of her small hands. “Clean nose, clean conscience. Can't ask for more, but maybe”—she turned to scan the crowd—“to lose the goon who's following me.”

Jean followed Telema's gaze to the exit, where a white man in a dark suit waited. He did not eye the circulating baggage and ignored the taxi drivers swarming around him.

“Tag.” Telema tapped Jean's shoulder. “You're it!”

Indeed, Jean took that as her cue. No more questions. If she left now, the encounter would appear brief, casual. She nudged through the crowd with her luggage, Maya following behind with a skip. They were almost clear, almost free of the drama, free of any association, when a Latina woman grabbed Jean's arm and began speaking in Spanish. She then put her other hand on Jean's suitcase and began pulling. Jean could feel Telema watching the scene, amused. Possibly she had planned it. A diversion. Jean imagined her coming through the commotion, taking Maya's hand, and walking away with her. An abduction. But that was absurd. Telema hated children, a hatred that would trump any idea of revenge.

The woman kept pulling, motioning for Jean to check her baggage claim ticket. Jean had read in her guidebook about local thieves using diversions like this. Read this, look at that—then she'd turn back to find everything she owned gone.

She glanced around for security and saw none. The woman kept pulling and Jean noted her cheap attire, her shoes made of black rubber. Not wealthy enough to fly in a plane, she was sure.

“This isn't your bag!” Jean took her other hand off Maya's suitcase (never let go of your bags, the guidebook said) and yanked back with both hands. The woman fell over like a toddler, in a surprised heap on her backside. Jean collected their luggage and her daughter and ran to customs.

Neither of them mentioned the woman, and by the time they made it outside, they had forgotten her: Jean by the force of will, Maya because further embarrassment had awaited her in customs, where more soldiers with guns had opened her suitcase and seen her underwear. They did not search Jean's suitcase, only her carry-ons.

They walked in the direction of a taxi, away from Telema, away from any
involvement or accusations, away from the beggars stationed at the exit. Their square, mismatched luggage dragged behind them in the gravel, the wheels jammed, leaving four neat trenches where they dug in.

—

Guatemala City was a city of constant motion. Not progress or renewal, merely motion. Trash and plastic shifted and resettled constantly with the weather. The recent hard rain had turned everything to mud. Mud the color of baby shit, Jean thought. Pale, thin, and stinking. And it covered everything. It was the rainy season and it would get no better. The rain here did not wash, but only made more mud. Their taxi rushed through, splashing vendors and pedestrians.

Alone, Jean would be walking this street, taking beautiful pictures of the misery and mud. But Maya was unaccustomed to poverty, and this trip was for her.

Next to her, in the seat-beltless taxi, Maya sucked on a swatch of her black hair, a disgusting habit that accompanied deep thought. Maya stared through the smeared taxi glass, seeing people who looked just like her, in various poses of degradation—some naked, some dressed in too many clothes, like the beggars in Los Angeles. Many went barefoot, many more wore black sandals made from recycled tires. Very few looked like the Maya in California, buttoned up in the maid, nanny, and restaurant outfits that did not belong to them.

Jean watched several weeks of exhausting work—arguments, promises, stories meant to stoke Maya's enthusiasm for this trip—turn meaningless in two minutes.

“It will be better in the highlands,” she said. “These people are displaced.”

Maya removed her hair from her mouth. “Why did they do that with my bra?” she asked. “They were just trying to humiliate me. There was no reason.”

Jean often forgot the minor, daily humiliations of adolescence, especially with Maya. It was easy sometimes to forget her age, as she tried her best to appear much older.

“They didn't do it to humiliate you, Maya. They were looking for drugs.”

“In my bra padding?”

“Yes.”

Maya, unconsoled, said nothing.

“It's a tasteful amount of padding,” Jean lied. “It's nothing to be embarrassed about. All bras have it now.”

“Then why were you laughing?”

“I was laughing?”

“Yes, you were laughing as the soldiers went through my bag. You looked crazy.”

“I was not.” But had she? She had thought nothing funny about customs. She had been standing there, paranoid she may have overlooked something, the way they were going through their bags. Shaking her purse upside down, fingering the lining. She had stood there reminding herself she had nothing to hide.

Commotions seemed to be staged in the street with the purpose of slowing the taxi every few blocks. When this happened, the driver leaned on his horn and vendors approached, said to the closed windows, “Chiclets, Chiclets,” “Twinkie,” or “Coca-Cola.”

The inside of the cab began to sour with heat and body odor, so Maya lowered the window to allow a cautious, experimental crack. “I wonder where Brett is right now.” She sighed in despair. “Probably at football practice.”

Yes, Jean thought, probably. Whenever Maya mentioned that boy, all she could see was a strutting heap of football padding. Maya had first pointed him out to Jean on the field, after flag line practice. An older boy. A sophomore.

On every block, evangelical churches had taken up storefronts, looking identical, with their recycled names. Victory in Christ, Christ the Redeemer, Victory Redemption Center. Each competing for the most hopeful combination from a very small vocabulary. The Victory Redemption Center was guarded by a man with an AK-47.

Yes, Jean preferred an armed military presence and the glue-sniffing child zombies—swaying now in the streets, as the taxi avoided them like potholes—to watching her daughter tanning at the beach with her alarmingly boy-crazy friends. It was not a proper Roots Tour, with a professional guide and tickets and people expecting you, ready and with information on hand. But it was something.

The taxi stopped again and a girl, no older than Maya, stood close to the car, holding a bundle to her chest. Maya watched the baby nurse beneath the flowered native tunic, while her own mouth worked again at her hair.

“There's no education for young girls down here,” Jean explained. “Girls marry and become mothers at your age.”

Maya watched the girl through the pane of taxi glass. The baby's head lolled back so its face became visible. It fixed its eyes on Maya, calmly
revealing a section of pink-gummed skull. Its lip drawn up in a heart-shaped snarl.

Maya made a startled noise in her throat.

“A cleft palate,” Jean managed. “It's just a cleft palate.”

The girl stared back at Maya, her tunic still raised, her brown nipple slicked with saliva, obscene.

Maya rolled up the window. “What a horrible, beautiful culture.”

Yes, Jean told herself, even this was a vacation from Los Angeles, where her daughter preferred insipid flag drills to reading, where summer break turned her slice of tactful, private beach into a meat market of savage nymphets. Los Angeles, where she thought she had left the unresolved problem of Telema behind. But, it seemed, Telema would not be left behind. She'd follow you across the world in order to make a point.

Political signs for the upcoming presidential election—the first since the signing of the Peace Accords—threw large, cool shadows in which people congregated. Other political endorsements were less formal, graffiti scrawled on buildings or over traffic signs: orange triangles, an ear of corn, initials, the most abundant of these being the stencil of a raised blue hand painted on rocks and trees, at times showing up on a proper billboard. The blue hand made a peculiar signal, with three fingers raised, the pinkie and ring fingers curled down. A greeting, a warning, almost always on a white background. Jean, however, could identify no one who seemed to have the energy or passion for politics. People stood dazed in the sun and wind and trash, as if they had no idea how they'd gotten to the city.

They had to get out of the capital, Jean decided, as soon as possible. Already her itinerary was useless. What was Telema doing? She had to have known she had boarded the same flight as Jean. She had to have done it on purpose, but what was the purpose? If they left the city now, they wouldn't have to see her again.

“Not the hotel,” she said to the driver. “The bus station. Are there any buses to Xela?
¿El ómnibus a Xela?
”

The driver nodded, and turned a sudden corner. Maya raised a hand to brace herself and Jean noticed a diamond-looking ring on her left ring finger. Groaning inwardly, Jean considered two possibilities; neither pleased her. Turning away, she looked through the windshield. Ahead, a child no more than six and disfigured by mud, sexless, crouched in their path. A lighter in hand, it waited, then struggled to light a firework stuck upright in the middle of the road. Then it was gone, scrambling barefoot out of their way, just in
time. The driver did not brake for the child or for the fuse that they cleared a few seconds before it exploded.
Crackcrackcrackcrack!
Children rushed the street, waving their stick arms and laughing. “
¡Es golpe!
” they cried. “
¡Golpe de Estado!
”