Hard Red Spring (54 page)

“That's incredible. Did it work?”

“Desperate measures. A lot has to go according to plan over a very long period for it all to come about, but I'm sure some were successful.”

“You actually found evidence of this?”

“Circumstantial evidence. Records from that era are hard to come by, plus I couldn't get down to Guatemala to research because of the war. The deeds I could get copied and mailed were so poorly preserved they were nearly illegible. But yes, overwhelming circumstantial evidence.”

“Little bombs,” Jean repeated, thinking of Maya standing in their terra-cotta kitchen with a lit fuse at her feet.

“I just love bars and restaurants like this. Every war this past century, I bet you, was orchestrated from bars and restaurants. Fat cats stuffing themselves with booze, steak, and power. That is your history lesson for today, Ms. Roseneath. Every world event begins in a restaurant.”

The scene before them, Jean thought, did not look so ambitious.

“Who do you think is plotting a war here right now?”

Telema swirled the last sip in her glass. “I am.”

Jean laughed. “And who is the enemy?”

The professor's black eyes glittered with sincerity and mischief. “You are.” Finishing her drink, she crushed the last bits of ice between her teeth. Her hand went up to signal the waitress.

“Please,” she told the disheveled girl when she arrived, “another for me. And bring my friend over there a drink, a martini, on me.” She pointed to a young man sitting alone at the bar, self-consciously filling a suit. “A gin martini,” Telema clarified. “If he's going to dress the part, he's got to play it. You tell him that.”

“Who's that?” Jean asked. “You know him?”

“He's my best student.”

“Which class of yours is he in?”

“All of them. But he won't come to office hours. I'm dying to see what his paper will be about.”

“Your best student.” Jean studied the young man, not recognizing him from class. But all guys in suits looked the same to her. He appeared overserious, but in the wrong way. An obedient student, not a curious one. When he received his gigantic, potent martini, the waitress explained, pointing at Telema, but he refused to look at her.

“Is he going to get a C, too?”

“Oh yes. Definitely a C.”

Feeling a pang of jealousy, Jean kept an eye on the boy, long after Telema forgot about him. Jean watched him test the murky liquid placed before him. He brought his head down to it, sipped from the side, and winced.

—

And then, miraculously, they were at her place. Telema probably shouldn't have driven and Jean probably shouldn't have, either. When they pulled up in front of a disappointingly ordinary one-story ranch house, Jean looked across the street, then down. Mailboxes, carports, sprinklers hissing in the dark. They had arrived, and Jean would have been less surprised if Telema had brought her home to a dark cave half submerged in ocean.

Everything the woman wore was a wrap—her shirt, her skirt. Jean found an end and pulled and everything fell away at once. Underneath, another layer presented itself: blacks, greens, blues, and purples. Smoke and flames, birds, trains, trees, and mountains, strange pictorial writing. The professor did not wear underwear, but she was covered in tattoos. Jean ran a hand up her sternum, on the hard bone where antlers curved out over her high-set breasts, just big enough to hold.

She watched Jean's hand trace over her. The professor's skin felt damp and smelled faintly musty, as if she'd been left out in the rain.

To undress Jean proved less dramatic, with buttons and zippers and a stubborn, hooked bra. Telema struggled with it a moment, then gave up, as if the contraption were completely foreign to her. It took too much time, there would be no more play, and so all that came off was her pants. Jean let her knees go loose as they stood, kissing, and Telema breached there with a powerful thigh that bore the image of a train flying off its tracks. She took Jean's weight with her arms and took two stumbling steps to get the wall's support. Jean slid up and down on Telema's thigh, moving over her own trail of moisture, while Telema studied her. The journey along Telema's thigh became easier and easier, until she was gliding to her climax.

They stood that way a moment, Jean limp and pressed to the wall, like an enemy impaled on Telema's knee. From this position, Jean examined the house for the first time. It was as surprisingly ordinary on the inside as on the outside. Beige carpet, eggshell walls, white trim, and a picture window dull and listless in the dark.

“You're right,” Jean finally said. “Someone with two graduate degrees doesn't pay to take an undergraduate class.” She slipped down the professor's leg, away from the banana trees colored on Telema's flat belly. “Actually,” Jean said, “I don't pay. I'm not even enrolled. I just show up. Have you even once looked at your class roster?”

“I know exactly how your book should start,” Telema said, her eyes closed, her own personal ecstasy coming on.

—

Jean could not believe that she'd just had sex for the first time in a decade. And it had all been so easy. A date, in a regular bar. No curious or angry glances from anyone. In the eighties, nothing had been this easy. Jean, all her friends, everyone closeted. Except, maybe, the freaks in San Francisco. The men who made the news and made her circle of friends groan. Jean dated casually then, for there was no other way to date. Being seen too much with the same girl would provoke suspicion, and they all had careers to protect. Maybe they were all paranoid, but eventually Jean tired of the game, deciding to make a real family for herself. A family the world would acknowledge and could understand.

The choice to become a single mother shocked and dismayed Jean's family. But Jean only begrudgingly acknowledged them, anyway, for answering her mother's calls every month proved easier than ignoring them and enduring their increased, panicked frequency. Only very recently had Jean changed her number and cut them out completely. Anyway, their disapproval of single motherhood did not affect her, for they'd disapproved of her sexuality, her atheism, her education, her friends, for decades. Her mother, once, had told her that in addition to being a sin, homosexuality would deprive her of the joys of motherhood and family. Unsurprisingly, her parents did not believe that adopting a child would provide this missing aspect, it would merely pervert the institution. She could never get it right.

What truly affected Jean during this time were her friends' reactions, which, amazingly, didn't differ too much from her family's. At least they tried to be understanding, but eventually they dropped away. Working, taking care of Maya, Jean no longer had time for them. And they had little patience for a screaming infant. And so Jean's social and sex lives pretty much stalled, outside of a few dates where she'd mentioned Maya too soon. On the flip side, she'd had just enough dates to feel the need to come out to her daughter. Maya, eleven years old, accepted Jean's awkward talk with equanimity, then began to sleep in her own bed.
Big dyke
didn't make it into her vocabulary for another few years.

So yes, Jean sat in Telema's house now, a novice in this new, exhilarating world of semi-acceptance. She watched Telema, like a vision, still naked but for her head wrap and combat boots, walk unself-consciously to her bare picture window. She paused to study the street, then she proceeded to the kitchen. There was no excess on her buttocks. On her back, a small, colorful bird perched on her left shoulder blade, with a spectacularly long tail that curved all down her back and nestled around her right hip. A quetzal.

“Are you hungry? Do you want anything?”

“Do you have any coffee? I've got to drive home soon.”

“No coffee,” Telema declared, standing in the angelic light of the open fridge. “Coffee is against my moral code.”

“How about tea, then?”

Telema frowned. “Are you kidding?” She turned to the bright innards of the refrigerator and began fussing. “I have water, soy milk, bourbon, and red wine.”

From the couch, Jean eyed the house, empty but for the essentials: a couch, a kitchen table with one chair, a rotary telephone on the floor. All the windows bare, like open eyes in the dark. Seeing this, Jean dressed quickly in a corner.

“So you don't drink coffee or tea. You only buy used clothes because of sweatshops. You don't wear underwear because to buy used underwear is gross. You don't buy new furniture because of illegal logging. You don't eat bananas, of course. Or meat, for obvious reasons, or vegetables, because of exploited immigrant labor. What do you survive on, Telema? This is our second dinner together, but I've yet to see you eat.”

“People eat too much anyway.”

“You have to eat something. You can't survive solely on booze. You have to choose your battles, right? As one of my favorite writers said,
If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you
.”

“What?”

“Your conscience.”

“You see? You are a perfect CIA recruit.”

“What does your conscience allow you to eat?”

“I hunt.”

“You hunt? When do you hunt?”

“As distinguished visiting professor, I only teach in the spring. During the fall semester, I hunt.”

“What were you going to offer me, a deer leg to gnaw on?”

“I have cereal.”

Cereal wasn't the most sobering thing to be having. The soy milk and the bourbon mixed in Jean's stomach, making a vile alcoholic soup.

“Imogene Roseneath. Your name is Imogene?” Telema held Jean's wallet, splayed up to the light. “That's wonderful.” She flipped through the contents with the nonchalance of a cop.

“Do you usually card your lovers after the fact?”

“Yes. The investigation's the fun part. The sex is just foreplay.” Telema returned with a glass of water for Jean. “Water shouldn't be this easy in the desert, but I'll make an exception for you tonight. I'm writing a book, too, you know. It's not as fun as fiction, but it's a book. An alternate history. Maybe you could edit it. What house do you work for?”

“We don't do academic stuff,” Jean lied. In fact, Looking Glass Press would publish just about anything, for a large fee. The pricing created the much-desired illusion of prestige for her writers. She made plenty of money publishing self-help books and romance novels by retired moguls and anyone else who could afford to be added to their list. But Jean would never admit to anyone that she worked at a vanity press. And beyond that, Jean sensed that Telema would be a nightmare to work with. “What's your book about?”

“It's about lots of things.” Telema tightened her hair scarf with a reflexive yank.

“Name one thing, then.”

“Volcán Santa María,” Telema said, with an extravagant accent.

“What about this volcano?”

Telema moved a boot between Jean's legs, teasing. “It exploded in 1902, at a very unfortunate time.”

“Is it ever a good time for a volcano to erupt?”

“No, but 1902 was a big year for Guatemala. It's the coffee bust. The country was getting a reputation of being unstable—socially and geologically. Investors were pulling out for Brazil, where there were no earthquakes, volcanoes, or Indian unrest.” She stretched her leg up and rested it on the back of the sofa, exposing herself completely. By now Jean realized that sex and politics, to Telema, were indistinguishable. She slipped from lover to teacher with eager ease.

“I bet your neighbors wish you'd get curtains,” Jean said.

“Why do I need curtains? Everyone else has them, so it doesn't matter.”

“What about people in the street?” Jean stared out the picture window to the line of parked cars. Inside one, a dark silhouette sat at the wheel. A neighbor.

“I've forgotten what we were talking about,” Telema said.

“The volcano. The coffee bust. The economy running through Guatemala's fingers?”

Telema bounced her knees open and closed, flashing the entire neighborhood. “Yes, yes. So Estrada Cabrera panics, invites all kinds of foreign
investors to visit, to show them the promise of Guatemala. The Land of Eternal Spring. There are parties and galas, he decrees new schools to show how civilized the country is. He was especially desperate to convince a railroad company to stick with their contract to complete the line connecting the two coasts. The project wasn't going well, but the whole economy, everything, depended on it. It was all done but a tiny sixty-mile section, dismal with swamp and disease. But that same week the investors arrive, Santa María blows. The highlands are a mess for it. Now the President decrees that all is well in the mountains, Santa María is fine. And if there is any disturbance, it's blowing over from Mexico. The papers all publish it, but that's not enough. The President knows he must convince everyone in Xela to keep their mouths shut while he tours the Americans around the country. So he sends the military band to play over the noise and announce there is no volcano erupting.”

“Why didn't he just threaten them? Why the band? He was a dictator, right?”

“The band is more subtle when you have foreign guests. But more importantly, to the Maya, the military band says, ‘See how many of us there are? How scary we are with instruments? If we can play over and deny a volcano erupting, do you think anyone will hear your screams?'”

“Did the Maya take the hint?”

“Of course they did.”

“Was the railroad ever finished?”

“Oh yes. With a complete clampdown on outgoing mail and telegraphs, news of the volcano never reached the railroad company, which was owned by United Fruit's founder and vice president. Estrada Cabrera completely sold Guatemala to get the track done. The real power of the United Fruit empire didn't come from bananas, but shipping. They just completed the railroad, set the prices, and were given a complete monopoly on shipping. They operated the railroads in Guatemala under the name of CAICO then. They owned the telegraph lines, the only Caribbean port, and the railroad. And their contract guaranteed they didn't have to pay taxes. Estrada Cabrera gave them control of the Caribbean coast, then thirty years later Ubico gave them a similar contract for the Pacific coast. By 1931, they owned virtually everything. Complete control of the infrastructure. Two dictators is all it took.”