Hard Red Spring (66 page)

“How much did you pay for her, Imogene? To whom did you write your check?”

“Money has nothing to do with it. I would have given everything I have. I love my daughter.”

Telema nodded. “Oh yes, you love. You are full of love, Imogene. But have you finally realized, in scaffolding your Great Beast, that it just keeps getting bigger and bigger? Bigger and bigger, until you realize you're part of it, too? That you are its heart?”

Jean closed the door on this, and found herself alone in the hall. For once, there were no admirers awaiting their turn. Emergency exits burned at both ends. She felt disoriented, could not tell the way out.

~~~~~

Jean had lost track of how many beers she'd had in the courtyard. She slept heavily through the night and into midmorning, when a knock woke her.

“Where's my daughter?” she asked, half asleep, confused at the sight of Maya's empty bed.

“She is at the pool. You have a phone call,” the proprietor said, politely refusing to see Jean in her nightie. Or the red handprint stamped there. “Guatemala phone calls are one quetzal per minute. And it's three minutes already.”

The phone call was brief, productive, though Jean still felt drunk. The NGO from Nueva Aldea de la Vida had heard through a chain of two others that Jean wanted to speak with her. No matter the drinking, these Truth workers had set up a highly efficient system of communication. She also claimed to know Cruzita. “I was coming to Xela this afternoon, anyway,” the woman said. “Let's meet at your hotel.”

Jean hung up, reeling from the sudden possibilities of the day, the whole trip. Cruzita was alive. Only one person separated them now, and by the end of the day Jean would know everything. After dressing, she found Maya in the pool and asked, “Honey, what do you want to do this morning?”

“I thought we were leaving. I was getting one last swim in.”

“How about we stay one more day? What do you think? Let's do something together. Anything you want. Shopping?”

“Can we go to the coffee plantation?” She smiled, paddling toward Jean.
“I liked the guidebook description. I think we'd both like it. They have a gift shop.”

—

According to the guidebook, the coffee plantation lay twelve miles outside the city. The taxi, like all the other vehicles in Guatemala, seemed only capable of speeding. The driver swerved and skidded as if they were being chased. But Jean kept an eye out, to make sure no one followed them.

Jean's brain threatened to explode right behind her eyes—the thin wedge of a headache driven deeper with each bump in the road. She pressed her palm into her left eye, feeling that made a difference. Of all the days to feel this shitty. But she could not regret the night before, for the anthropologist had kept his promise. He really did not want Jean to go to Nueva Aldea de la Vida. No matter. When the time came, Cruzita could come to Xela. Jean watched out the window, imagining a reunion. The city petered out and the roads had just turned from cobblestone to dirt when they hit something big, something that made the wheels pop. The driver punched at his gearshift.

“What was that?” Maya spun to look through the back window. “Oh, stop! Stop!” she cried out. “Stop the car!”

Jean tried to see what her daughter saw, but her head screamed with the movement. Nausea rising.

“Mom, tell him to stop!”

“
Pare
,” Jean commanded. Had they hit someone?

The man braked hard, Jean braced herself, and Maya hopped out and sprinted away. Jean, easing herself out of the cab, could see nothing but the empty road materializing from the dust of their journey.

It was a dog. One of the scavengers that slunk around the city, so emaciated they seemed to run on nothing but fear. The head lay obscured, down in the ditch, the back legs knocked out and twisted around. It was still breathing.

“Mom!” Maya crouched near it. “Mom!” Her shriek found its mark behind Jean's eye and she pressed it harder as she trotted after.

“Don't touch it, Maya. It could have a disease or something.”

“So? We got shots, didn't we? For the trip?”

Jean watched her daughter lay her hand on the spasming rib cage.

“Maya!” The name came out like vomit, Jean gagged, and her stomach heaved. “These dogs aren't used to being petted. You're just scaring him more.”

This explanation convinced Maya and she withdrew her hand. The hand that had been on the dog now wiped at her eyes.

“It's horrible,” she cried. “He didn't even care. He just kept going.”

Jean searched her purse for a baby wipe. “Don't touch your face yet. Here.” She looked back at the driver, who leaned against the car, smoking, watching them.

“What do we do? We can't just leave him here.” They both looked down to see its blond face, undamaged. Just like a dog resting.

“There's no way this dog is going to survive, Maya. Its entire back end has been crushed. They don't have vets in places like this.”

“There has to be someplace.”

“There isn't. Most people don't even have a doctor.”

“What about the television preacher? The one that cured the blind woman?”

Jean decided on a generous reply. “He's hours away, in the capital.”

Maya stood up. “Then we have to put it out of its misery.”

“Maya, we don't have to do anything. It's terrible, but there's nothing we can do.” She thought of the knife in her purse that she had paid too much for in Xela. No matter how humane, she knew she was not capable of stabbing a suffering dog repeatedly with a small, decorative tourist knife.

“Make him,” Maya said, pointing to the taxi driver. Before Jean could reply, she ran toward the man with her angry girl's legs. “You did this, you shithead!” she yelled at him, loud enough for her voice to carry up the mountains. Jean tried to pursue her, but the road tipped and thwarted her progress. “You put that dog out of its misery. You think you're so tough, let's see if you're tough enough to finish it, you fucker!”

Her fearlessness and her language were astounding and Jean knew she should stop her, but instead she stood admiring her anger, her bravery, her small-picture call for justice. Maya was, if nothing else right then, her daughter.

The man, whose English was better than he let on, threw away his cigarette and walked past Maya, then Jean. Shit, Jean thought to herself, the knife turning in her head. Shit, shit.

“And he's a litterbug,” Maya called to his back. “Can you believe this guy?”

The man continued past them both, right to the ditch, and with his foot lifted the dog's head to get a good look.

“You see?” Maya whimpered. “See what you did?”

The man knelt down, cradled the dog's head, then, with surprising force, snapped it to the side. The noise was horrible, even from afar. Like walnuts cracking.

He walked back, another cigarette in his mouth, and got in the cab, started it.

Jean had to make a choice then, very quickly. She brought both palms to her eyes and pressed hard. They were in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between town and the plantation. They could refuse to get into the cab with this man who could snap their necks, as if he'd been trained to, or they could take their chances on the road. Armed robbers, ten miles outside Xela. Maya, next to her, was crying again.

“He's horrible. I'm not getting in the car with him. Did you see that? He just killed that dog like he enjoyed it.”

Jean made the decision, quickly, to get into the cab. Sensing danger, trusting her mother, Maya followed without question. There was just one of him, whereas on the road they could be accosted by a gang of criminals. Jean found her knife in her purse, unsheathed it with her thumb, and held it there as they drove. In her other hand, she held Maya's shoulder, bringing her close. No one said a word. Maya sat straight and stunned, Jean, straight and ready to stab his brown, hot neck if the car wavered.

—

They arrived in time for a plantation tour, but neither of them felt up for it. Jean and Maya went instead to the adjacent café, where large, woven fans made slow circles overhead and where the windows framed orderly fields of coffee trees. Jean ordered them both coffee.

“It tastes like death,” Maya declared. “With pennies mixed in.”

She pushed the cup away and stared hard out the window.

Jean studied her daughter fearfully. Maya, however, did not seem to be working herself up for anything. The tour group they should have been a part of appeared in the glass. All khakis and polo shirts. One of them lingered behind, standing in a slight depression, looking down at his feet.

“I want to go home,” Maya said. “I don't feel safe here.” Confronted with her daughter's frown—licked, worried free of its glitter lip gloss—Jean felt, more than ever, her failure.

“I'm sorry, Maya. Maybe this was a mistake, maybe it's too early to be coming here like this.”

“I didn't want to come.”

“Yes, well, it's important, you know. This is your homeland.”

“This is the most horrible place on earth. I want to go home and go to school.”

My God, Jean thought, she's turned the tables on me now. “Then I ruined it for you. I should've waited. It's only going to get better.”

“It'll never be as good as California,” she said, “so why ever come back?”

“There are some things that are more important than safety.”

“Like what?”

“Like family.”

Three people now stood in the depression in the ground, bouncing slightly on their knees. A possible grave? Watching them, Jean realized she'd just paraphrased the therapist. After their trip to Iowa, after Maya's fits had started up again, she'd tried to explain how her parents were to blame. “I'm cutting them out, for Maya's sake.” But the therapist only stressed the importance of family. No, she argued back, Maya's outburst about dykes and hell proved that Jean's parents were poisoning Maya's mind against her. They meant well, they meant to save everyone around them. But how could she and Maya live like that? In the end, it was Jean's decision, not the therapist's. By April, she'd changed her phone number.

“When she came to the pool, Telema told me that family is something white people don't think they need. They think they can just buy love, like they buy groceries. She said that after white people take the land and all the money from a place, the only thing left to take is their love. They hire maids and nannies from here to love their children and old people. Then they get their children from here, too, because they're too busy for sex and real relationships.”

“She said that, Maya?”

“She also said that when white little girls go missing, the whole world stops. Even when it's a lie. But when a brown little girl goes missing, for real, no one cares.”

“I suppose that's true.”

Maya's black eyes glittered with sadness. “She called me a lost little girl, Mom. I don't think I'm lost, I didn't like her calling me that. I didn't really tell her anything. I don't want to be in her book. I just said that to make you mad.”

Jean nodded her thanks to Maya. She took her daughter's cup, added cream and sugar, and pushed it back over. Maya tasted it thoughtfully and accepted it. Outside, the tour group had moved on, out of sight.

“Maya, I have one more thing to do here. Just give me the rest of the day, okay? You can stay at the hotel, read your magazine, swim, drink all the banana drinks you want. I won't ask you to do anything more. We'll skip the ruins and fly straight home.”

“I can spend the last week of summer vacation at the beach? With Brett?”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“I promise. Just give me a day, honey.”

“Okay, but I don't want to stay in the hotel with that sad woman. Can I go out with her sons, to the vegetarian restaurant? She said they'd be back today.”

Jean ordered more coffee and began to explain about the proprietor, a less detailed, altered version of the story the NGO had told her. She did not mention that the murders took place in the courtyard, sure that Maya would not want to stay there for another day if she knew.

Nodding, intent, Maya listened, while sipping her coffee. Surprisingly, she did not freak out at being set up with dead boys. “How awful,” she concluded, just as Jean had. “That poor woman.”

“You don't have to see her. You can just stay in the room if you want, or maybe I can tell her you aren't feeling well and you need to rest by yourself at the pool.”

She stirred her cup absently. “No, I'll play cards with her. She likes cards. She must be very lonely in such an awful place.” She sighed at the blue-black mountains in the distance. “I'm starting to understand why she never goes outside.”

Jean hired one of the plantation workers to drive them back to the hotel. Maya insisted on a white driver.

—

The Roots Tour had not gone as Jean had hoped, but she believed it could still be salvaged. She believed that if she could bring Cruzita to Xela, if she could help the woman in some way, it might turn out better than she had ever expected. Maya had already forgiven her; maybe Telema would, too, once the truth came out.

Maya took a nap after the plantation visit, claiming coffee didn't work on her.

Jean's guest arrived an hour later. Seeing her polo shirt, the proprietor shut the gate and would not let her through until Jean heard the commotion
and insisted she be let in for coffee and lunch. “She's just my friend,” she promised her. “We're old friends.”

In a dated pair of jean shorts and an official polo shirt, sunglasses, and an air of purpose, the NGO surveyed the courtyard. The logo on her shirt stated her business with the Truth Commission.

“Hi, I'm Jean.”

The woman raised her sunglasses. She had the sensible expression of all the NGOs, painfully pink despite the smears of sunblock on the edges of her face and neck. She looked Jean's age, mildly unattractive. Not fat, exactly, but not fit, either.