Hard Red Spring (56 page)

Jean shrugged. “I don't know.”

“I want a room for the week,” he insisted again to the proprietor, whose own knuckles bled from the stucco. “Everyplace else says they're full, too. I'm not fucking leaving.” He dropped his bag on the ground and put his
hands where his waist should be. He had the body of someone on the verge of going to fat, probably from all the drinking the NGOs did here. Jean had run by the vegetarian restaurant and had seen a few of them starting already. They worked and drank in shifts, these young devotees of truth.

“It's not good for business,” the proprietor admitted with a shrug. The paint began to come up. She thrust her hand into the pink water, renewed by her progress. “We have a tourist,” she said.

“I don't mind,” Jean said, but no one paid attention. “I just need to get inside. Please.” She thought from the depths of the hallway she heard Maya laugh. Her desperation began to seem ridiculous, even to herself.

“Fine,” the man huffed. “You know there won't be any more tourists, so I'll make you a deal that's good for business, okay? I take a room here and I don't talk to the tourist.” He pointed at Jean. “I'm out of here in the mornings and back in the evenings. No one will see me. One week.”

He slammed a handful of colorful paper bills down on the sill and the proprietor pursed her lips at them. “My sons won't like this.”

“I won't talk to your sons, either. They won't even see me.”

“Okay.” She thrust her wet hand into her apron for the key. She pointed a wrinkled pink finger at them both. “But no talking.”

Jean opened her mouth, but the woman squared her eyes at her.

—

Maya was in the meditation garden, lying very still in the sun. She had not moved since Jean had left, save for the slow, rotisserie turn to make sure she tanned evenly. She bubbled with sweat, blackened and laid out on her side.

The man in the suit sat at his table, reading the newspaper with another frozen banana drink. Jean did not enter, but stood at the screen door, watching, knowing she couldn't run in and hug Maya. She could not endure her daughter's rejection again, so she just watched, calming herself. After a few minutes, Maya sauntered over to the pool. She sauntered, Jean was sure, for the man's benefit, and he glanced up from his newspaper with practiced aloofness. Maya dipped a toe into the water, but did not get into the pool. She walked the circumference, testing at different locations, swinging her narrow hips.

The man looked down at his newspaper, turned a page, then glanced up again, watching. Maya hesitated and turned to the side, striking a thin profile in Jean's direction. Her bikini was half wedged into her bottom. Jean watched, with horror, as she giggled and pulled it out with a snap.

~~~~~

Jean had not seen Telema for a week, outside of class. They met up on the campus green, to have lunch, but Telema seemed to have forgotten that. She arrived late and began walking in the opposite direction of the graduate student pub.

“How was your trip?” Jean asked, trying to get a better look at Telema's face. A nasty cut marred her cheekbone. Recent, inflamed.

“What?” Telema glanced back, like someone might be following them.

“Your trip to Boston.”

Telema was in the throes of her investigations, although for professional and funding purposes she had to call it research. She would spend a week at a time on the East Coast, only coming back to teach her class. There had been a few trips already, and Telema was often cool about the results.

“Very productive.” She smiled to herself.

They walked across campus in silence. Where were they going? Telema, lost in her own head, probably didn't know herself. A troubling state, since Jean had set herself a specific goal for this lunch. To tell Telema about Maya's origins. But already they were off to a bad beginning.

“Where are we going?”

“To Daggett Lounge.”

“What's there?”

“The panel discussion. Haven't you seen those offensive flyers tacked all around campus? I can't believe no one asked me to be a panelist.”

Jean remembered, vaguely. “The ones about American happiness?”

But she'd retreated again, her dark eyes alight like stoked coals. Whatever went on in Telema's head was almost always more interesting than whatever happened around her. Telema knew she had a daughter by now. However, Jean did not mention ethnicity or adoption. Jean's family life didn't interest Telema, so she'd asked no questions about Maya. Children, it seemed, were boring. And after a month spending weekends with Maya at the mall and evenings with Telema in varying degrees of inebriation outdoors, Jean was beginning to agree. At least, after learning Jean had a daughter, Telema still agreed to see her. Another miracle of this new era.

My daughter is a Guatemalan war orphan.
She'd been saying this proudly for fourteen years. But she could not see Telema acting overjoyed about it. She'd just assigned an article she'd written herself called “The Economy of Love,” in which affluent white parents paid huge amounts of money for
non-white children to love. Assimilation, conquest by humanitarianism. Jean had thrown the article aside in tears, unable to finish reading it. For weeks Telema had been like an antidote to Maya's rejection. But as the class progressed, Telema and Maya, though they'd never met, seemed to be allied in the goal of making Jean feel guilty.

Would it be better for these children to die of starvation in their home countries, without parents, than to become a part of a white family? Jean wanted to ask. No, Jean wanted to
tell
Telema this. For once, she felt she knew a topic better than Telema. Just look my daughter in the face and tell her she belongs in a cholera-ridden slum. She'd mapped out a whole confrontation, a whole defense, over the course of the week.

In Daggett Lounge, young men in blue uniforms already filled the first row. ROTC. Telema chose their seats in a middle row. Jean found the clock. Five minutes till one.

“Can we talk, Telema?”

“Yes, of course. We've lots to talk about!”

Jean was forced to sit on the same side as Telema's cut. She spied slight swelling around the eye. “We do?” she asked thankfully. Jean dreaded the adoption conversation, even as she knew the longer she put it off, the more difficult it would become.

“Yes! I've fucking found her!” Two ROTC guys turned to register the disturbance. Four minutes until the panel began, and Telema wanted to do all the talking. “I can't believe I finally found her.” In her excitement, she picked at her scabby cheek, beaming.

A few more people walked in, taking seats. A photographer with the campus newspaper, and a few students. Up front, the panelist table remained empty, with five chairs and a pitcher of ice water. “In Boston? Who did you find?”

“The old bat who wrote the letter claiming to be a dead girl.”

“What dead girl?”

“My subject! Evie Crowder. My lost little girl.”

“Who's that?” Already, all hope for this conversation, lost.

“She was supposed to have been murdered in Guatemala in 1902. No one doubted it. But then, out of the blue in 1983, a Guatemalan newspaper called
Prensa La Verdad
got a letter from an old woman claiming to be Evie. The letter was from Boston. Of course, the paper runs with it and rehashes the whole horrible crime, the history, the trials, with these terribly written, sensational installments. But I guess I can't complain too much. It was those
articles that led to me to the story of Evie in the first place. I was researching the volcano and came across the archive.”

“And so you found Evie Crowder?”

“Nope, I found a woman in a mental institution named Dorie Honeycutt.”

It turned one o'clock. The small audience, mostly ROTC, quieted expectantly. Jean shifted to see the door. “Hey, isn't that your best student? Sitting in the back?”

Telema turned. “Of course.”

“He looks like a Young Republican.”

“How's your paper coming?”

“I haven't gotten far. I've been busy with my book.” No, she'd been busy with Telema. Even when the professor was in Boston, Jean was busy with Telema. Upholding small lies, constructing narratives that inevitably produced more lies. Inventing arguments, defenses. The woman inhabited the mind, took it over, like a vine.

“Who said that any book worth writing is like trying to construct scaffolding around a huge beast you don't even know the dimensions of? Who said that?”

“I don't know.”

“The danger, of course, is finding yourself trapped inside. Has that happened to you yet?”

“No,” Jean answered in confusion. She felt, more than anything, Telema constructing some network around her. Just hammering and screwing away, without looking, without seeing Jean at all. How could she still think Jean was writing a book?

Someone arrived in the room and the whole audience turned. A girl, a student with a ponytail. Everyone looked at her expectantly and she clapped a hand over her mouth and ran out, laughing.

“Your book is no excuse,” Telema said. “You're still required to turn in that paper on time. ‘Cold Blood, Cold War,' that was it, right?”

“I've done all the research. And have my new thesis.” The thesis was the easiest part. Everything they learned in class fed into the thesis.

“And what is that?”

“The lengths our government will go to protect powerful American businesses abroad. All the ties between United Fruit and the major players in the coup. How everyone, the Dulles brothers, the American ambassador, the CIA men, and even Castillo Armas—how everyone who planned the coup had an economic stake in Fruit. Well, everyone but Eisenhower.”

“And so you think Guatemala was the victim of one big fraternity prank?”

“Yes, exactly that.”

“Unflagging devotion? A homoerotic hazing around a roasting pig sort of thing? Government jacks off business and business jacks off government?” she said too loudly.

The entire ROTC line turned to give Telema a look, and she waved at them.

“Yes, yes,” Jean agreed.

Disappointment touched Telema's face. She shook her head at Jean. “But what about the lawsuit? All the things you're saying are true in a way, but you've not gotten to the meat of it.”

“What lawsuit?”

“The suit brought against United Fruit five days after Jacobo Arbenz fled the country.”

“There was a lawsuit? What was it? Who brought it?”

“Your State Department. Antitrust, my dear.”

Ten after one. The photographer left. One of the aspiring soldiers stood up and walked back to the door. They heard him stepping down the hall in his uniform shoes.

“Why would they do that?” Jean asked. “That makes no sense at all.”

“Use your fiction skills. Your imagination.”

Jean considered a different, more powerful company, a woman getting in the way. “I don't have much of one,” she admitted.

The ROTC student walked back into the room, walked right up to Telema in their empty row, and said, “Are you in charge of this clown show?”

“No,” Telema replied, straightening. “I thought you were. I thought this was a circle jerk, not a clown show.”

The aspiring soldier blushed beneath his buzzed blond hair. “That's funny.” He grinned. “We were all so sure you'd be Exhibit A.”

“Exhibit A?”

The boy at the moment looked like the happiest boy in the world. All his buddies turned to hear him deliver his line. “Yeah, for the conscience destroying America's happiness. I took your class, Professor. And I think everyone at this university can agree you're the most miserable cunt on campus.”

~~~~~

The short drive to the orphanage was mostly uphill, with jungle piling up all around them. The eyes of the Latino driver flicked constantly in the mirror at
Maya, watching her more than the road. His smell crowded the taxi and Maya was not discreet about rolling her window down. Jean watched the trees, hoping for some birds.

“Quetzals?” she asked the driver.

“Three quetzales.” He replied, holding up three fingers. “Do you want me to wait at the top? Five quetzales.” The driver enjoyed practicing his English.

“No, not money. Birds.” She made a bird with her hands and held it up to the rearview. “Quetzals here?” She pointed up to the trees.

He shook his head. “Quetzals at the Biodiversity Park. I take you there, six quetzales.”

“What's the Biodiversity Park?”

“It's very nice, a nice building with animals and scientists. The quetzals have two babies there, behind the glass.”

“That's not possible,” Jean said. “Quetzals can't live in captivity, and they certainly can't breed in captivity.”

“I saw them,” he said into the mirror, “last week. Two babies.”

“But that's the whole point of the bird, isn't it?” Maya asked. “Don't they kill themselves in captivity?”

“Oh yes, before. But now they figured it out. They fixed that problem.”

They ascended in a fury of potholes and dust, gaining speed on an uphill road called Calle Emelda Lupe Tuq. Hardly any of the roads outside the town center had signs, but this one was new and deliberate, a stone obelisk. This cut monument had not been spared the political graffiti: a stalk of corn, an orange triangle, green letters, and the blue hand. This one, too, spoiled with red paint, bloodier than the effort on the hotel.

Jean blew her nose, and the tissue came away black.

The top of the small mountain was a surprise. A vast, bright lawn surrounding a stucco and glass building. So much less depressing than Jean had expected. Near the parking lot, a field had just been turned as if for planting. The grass scraped away in a large, perfect rectangle, to reveal black, wet volcanic soil.

Maya found a bench outside the front door and sat down. “I think I'll just wait here with my magazine, Mom. If that's okay.”