Hard Red Spring (62 page)

They stared at each other in the dark, by the light of the open fridge. Jean sipped from the bottle and he chewed his meat, neither caring what the other thought.

~~~~~

When Jean asked Maya what she wanted to do for the rest of the day, she said she'd like to read her magazine at the hotel and meet the proprietor's sons. Jean allowed it, no longer fearing the man in the suit. It must be difficult, Jean realized, to be a man alone. Everyone skeptical of your intentions with the children. Why was it that everyone, even Jean, always thought the worst? Anyway, there were other things to worry about now. The suit faded into irrelevance. Telema had landed in Xela, and Jean had to keep her away from Maya. The hotel now became the best place for her daughter.

Jean took the opportunity to tour Xela alone, without the pauses, the stares that she received when walking with Maya, which made her feel as if she had committed some great wrong. Alone, in her khaki shorts and YWCA T-shirt—the outfit she'd packed in her carry-on—she could be one of the NGO workers. She walked among the Maya in sacrificial deference, her head low and her eyes averted in guilt. Almost wanting someone to steal her purse, she held it loose and low—reparation no one would take.

During their various shopping sprees, none of the Mayan crafts had
appealed to Maya, and for that Jean was thankful, for she didn't have the heart to bargain with these women wearing shoes made out of tires. The guidebook said to offer half of what they asked, but Jean could not deny these people their price. She watched the man in the suit, just yards away, bargaining hard for a cornhusk doll dressed in tiny Mayan clothes. For a daughter? A wife? He looked lonely to Jean now, instead of depraved. He looked familiar.

The woman held out ten fingers, but he held out five. She shook her head and held up seven fingers, he answered with three.

The proprietor had confirmed his business with the Truth Commission: A lawyer? A desk NGO? He was able to get his doll for one quetzal.

Jean hadn't the heart for bargaining, but it didn't matter. She toured the market and the women shouted numbers at her anyway. When Jean shook her head, they began the bargaining themselves, yelling ever-decreasing prices at her back. A few of the women became angry, their prices increasing as Jean walked away.

Navigating through the first raindrops of the afternoon storm, Jean felt herself drawn to the knives—small, fixed blades with orange-stained leather hilts in the shapes of animals. She picked up one that was cut into a bird, with a green stone glued on for an eye and a long, curved tail signified by the blade. A quetzal. It did not have a red breast. Instead, a groove ran from the tip of the blade to the hilt, where the breast connected with the blade.

“How much?” she asked the woman, who was packing up to flee the rain.

“Seventy quetzales.”

“Okay.”

“No. Two hundred quetzales.”

Jean smiled, as if she didn't understand. “Okay.”

The suit had moved on and Jean caught him a small distance away, snapping a photo in her direction. He snapped a few photos, taking his time, like a tourist. She spun around, befuddled. No, she told herself, he was taking a picture of the beautiful church behind her.

—

Jean found the alley where she thought she'd seen the professor. If Telema was here, it had to be for her volcano research. Or the sexual savage. Were they separate books? Either way, she could think of no reason Telema would be following her. No reason at all.

Telema had come out of the government offices, a back exit. Jean entered the same door to escape the rain and eventually found herself in the front lobby. Remembering the letter to Kofi Annan in her purse, she pushed it in
the slotted mouth, then considered the scene around her. The front desk, manned by an NGO, serviced a long line of NGOs and Guatemalans. Jean joined the line and waited, listening to the storm batter the roof.

“Records request?” the polo shirt asked her when her turn came.

“Uh,” Jean stammered, “not exactly.”

“This is the records request line,” he informed her impatiently.

“Well, I'm looking for someone.”

“The missing persons line is over there,” he said, pointing.

“No, no. I mean, someone who was just here this afternoon. I was wondering if you saw her. A woman in black, with her hair up in a scarf?”

The NGO straightened. “You know her?” He called over to the woman manning the missing persons line. “She says she knows that woman with the black scarf.”

“I don't know her, really,” Jean lied. She sensed Telema tugging at her again, after all these months, involving her in something. “I just saw her running out of here an hour or so ago. I thought I recognized her from somewhere, but I don't think so.”

“Where was she running? Did you see where she went?” The woman stopped her line and stepped out from behind her counter.

“Out the back, in the alley. She ran out the alley door.”

“We really have to start making sure that door is locked.” The records request man sighed. “This is the third theft this week.”

“Theft? She stole something?”

“And we should start locking the reading room. Just lock them in there with their records requests.”

“Yeah,” the missing persons woman agreed as her line twitched and fidgeted. “How's there to be truth and reconciliation if people keep stealing the records? I'm sure they have fine motives, but a single record can be tied to thousands of cases! And now, gone. One case solved, three thousand tied up forever.”

“Listen, if you run into this woman, you tell her that. You tell her she's obstructing justice, which is a crime,” the records request man expounded from behind his counter. “You tell her to bring that folder back! She has to sit in the room and read it like everyone else. Who does she think she is?”

“I don't know,” Jean said. “What did she steal?”

“You know, you're the third person today to come asking that.”

“I guess it's not that important,” the missing persons woman said, stepping back to her line. “It was records from before the war. Way before the
war. No one asks for that far back. I think the folder was still sealed. No one had looked at it ever before.”

“But still,” the man argued, “it's the principle! You never know how things are connected, you just never know! That file could have been everything!”

The woman beckoned her missing persons line into motion again. An old Mayan woman stepped up, holding a photo, ripped in half. “It could have also been nothing, though.” She turned, startled at the picture being pushed into her face. Two halves coming together. “Now, who do we have here?”

“So she came in to read some records and she ran out with them?” Jean asked. “What records?”

“Oh, I have no idea,” the man said. “Like we said, they were still sealed. It was from 1902. Police records.” Jean exhaled in relief. Telema was here, doing her own research. About 1902, the volcano, Evie Crowder. She had really expected the man to say she'd stolen records from 1983.

“Do you have records on people?” Jean asked the man, realizing what line she was in. She eyed the impatient people behind her, but didn't care.

“Yeah. Police records, military, government, tax, and criminal records. Death records, missing persons reports. Who are you looking for?”

“A woman named Cruzita Sola Durante.”

The man typed the name into his computer. It was incredible, these NGOs. The chaos, the displacement of millions of people over forty years, and now an indigenous woman could be found by typing her name into a computer.
Here's her address
, the man would say. Or,
She was exhumed from this mass grave three years ago.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm not getting anything.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Well, I'd say it's hopeful. She hasn't been reported missing, or identified in any of the graves yet.”

Jean showed the man the door Telema had escaped from, wondering if she should have given him Maya's name to search instead of Cruzita's. María Tierra López. She stepped through the threshold and turned to ask, but he'd already closed the door, leaving her in the bruised, post-storm air, in the alley from which she had come. She heard the sound of the key turning on the other side.

~~~~~

After Jean's father finally went to bed, Jean and her mother sat alone. This was how it always went on these visits. This was when her mother kneaded
the loose skin beneath her eyes and talked about what was bothering her. Usually something she'd heard from a preacher about how the Antichrist would be a half-human, half-dolphin hybrid made by “scientists,” or how a fallen building from a California earthquake looked just like a fetus in an aerial photo. She inhabited a world of paranoid nonsense, instilled by the blue flicker of late-night religious television. The Christian Broadcasting Network saved the hard stuff for these vulnerable hours, sparing insomniacs from the threat of self-reflection.

While flipping channels, her mother finally said, “Jean, I'm worried.”

What would it be this time? Surely not any of the real atrocities going on in the world. Kosovo, the Rwandan trials, the lingering devastation of Hurricane Mitch. Maybe the year 2000 worried her. Jean had seen bottled water stockpiled in the basement.

“What is it, Mom?”

“I'm worried about this trip to Guatemala. I don't think you should take Maya.”

The simplicity of this worry, its relation to an actual event, struck Jean, even as she disregarded it. She'd made a mistake telling her parents about the trip so soon, before she'd even told Maya. “I know you're worried, Mom. But you were also worried when I went to college, when I went to Mexico, when I went to Africa, even Europe. You were worried when I moved to California, because of sharks in the ocean. You are worried about bears when I go hiking on an island where there are no bears.”

“Oh, Jean.” Her mother sighed with the tedium of these visits already. Jean knew how she sounded when she came here. Paragraphs rolling off her tongue, increasing in speed and volume. But what they didn't notice were the passes she gave them. Her mother had no idea what she'd held back with the vegetarian dinner, the derogatory “Indian princess” reference, or the ridiculous talk about high school boys with Maya, the prom comment. To her, Jean fought everything, when in fact she fought less than half the time.

“What is it, Mom? What's worrying you about this trip? Other than flying, the fact that it's a foreign country, that the people there are poor and brown?”

“Oh, Jean.” Her mother shook her head. “I know it's easy for you, but you have to think of Maya now.”

“I am thinking of Maya,” Jean insisted. “I'm doing it all for her!” On the television, the late-night rerun of
The 700 Club
began. Music, lasers, pictures of saved brown people abroad, waving. Jean took the remote and muted it. “What it is, Mom? Can you even name what you're worried about?”

“I have a feeling, Jean. I just do. God spoke to me and said you shouldn't go.”

“Why not? Did God give a reason?”

“He didn't speak, exactly. He gave me a vision.”

“A vision. A vision of what?”

“It doesn't matter, Jean. What matters is the message that you shouldn't go!”

“What are you afraid of, Mother? What did you see? The oceans boiling, the sky rolling up?”

“What I saw wasn't like that, it was just you. But you were different.”

“Tell me! Name it! What are you afraid of?”

“The guerrillas!” her mother cried, pounding the couch with a weak fist. “I'm worried about the guerrillas!”

The word, the clarity and brevity, shocked Jean. Her mother cried, and the television light reflected off the tear trails, making it look like the blue lasers were on her face.

“The guerrillas,” Jean repeated skeptically.

“Don't act like this isn't a real worry, Jean! A few years ago, they were all over the television. All the news stations covered it.”

“Mom, did you even read the report I sent to you a few days ago? The report about Guatemala's war?”

“I looked at it. I don't know. I don't know why you send things you know we can't read.”

“I highlighted the section for you. Did you even look? Where is it now?”

Lost, thrown away. Her mother shrugged.

“The report says that the guerrillas were fighting a genocidal government. The guerrillas were right. Reagan was funding and arming genocide.”

Jean watched the furious blush of patriotism take hold of her mother. “Reagan was the most honorable man to ever lead this country! He defeated communism!” She placed her hand on her heart. Jean wanted to laugh, but then realized this was not a patriotic gesture.

Jean spoke carefully, in a calm voice. “Mother, Reagan did not defeat communism. Communism defeated itself. Reagan defeated hundreds of thousands of shoeless Central American peasants with helicopters. Armed American helicopters.”

“This report. Who wrote it? You, Jean, have the bad habit of believing everything you read.”

“And you believe everything you see on television!”

“You're always telling me about people being biased. Pat Robertson is biased, Pastor Wayne is biased, the Bible is biased. But you never seem to
consider that the things you read are. Ever since you went to that liberal college—”

“It wasn't a liberal college, Mom. It was liberal arts. That has nothing to do with politics. It means you're supposed to come out well-rounded. Not political.”

“But everyone who goes there comes out a liberal. How can you say that's not political?”

They'd had this conversation, too, a few times. The difference between education and indoctrination. Education, reeducation. On the screen, Pat Robertson prayed with raised fists.