Saving the World (42 page)

“Put that thing down, Bolo,” a voice from behind urges him. It's one of the older boys at the windows. “We've got enough problems with guardia all around us.”

Bolo, Alma is thinking. She doesn't remember seeing that name on Camacho's list. One of the bad elements. She tells herself to remember that name, in case of what? Will she even be able to continue carrying off her role as journalist? She looks around and spots her notebook lying across the room. The pen is nowhere in sight.

The red bandanna seems to spend an eternity reconsidering whether to put his gun away. “Okay,” he finally says, again using the word as if it were a Spanish word. He not only puts his gun down, but like a teenager whose dignity has been wounded by being shown up in front of strangers, he stomps out of the room. Her defender now comes to kneel by Alma's side. He looks even younger with his nose and mouth uncovered. A mobile, sensitive face. “Let's see the leg,” he says, and over his shoulder he tells one of the young men to go get la doctora from the back patio.

This is how Alma, who is not a journalist, but goes by the name of Isabel, ends up being a patient of la doctora Heidi Castillo, assisted by el doctor Cheché Pellerano, in the small examining room off the hall where she caught sight of the leader eating her PowerBar. Alma is not sure of the diagnosis, as it takes her a while to figure out that the two doctors are telling the young men one thing and her another. “It is a bad cut,” they pronounce, then later in a whisper, assure her that all the wound needs is a cleaning and bandaging. “We need to take her to a hospital for some stitches,” la doctora asserts, seconded by el doctor. Understandably, the two doctors are devising a way to get out from
under the cross fire that is sure to come between the armed guardia and these stupid kids. Why shouldn't each one try to save his or her individual, valuable life? They have been stuck here for three days already. They want to go home to their families, for whom no doubt they were making this sacrificio of working at a remote clinic for what is probably a pretty good salary.

“I'm not leaving without Richard,” Alma tells the two doctors. “El americano from the green center,” she adds, because they don't seem to know what Richard she is talking about.

They both look perplexed, especially la doctora Heidi, who seems to be about Alma's age, a long-faced woman with beautiful, liquid eyes that moisten up readily—a good professional feature, Alma can't help thinking. La doctora has been told there is a wounded journalist in the front room. But Alma seems somehow connected to el americano, whose casual approach to everything is what has caused all this trouble in the first place. Before Richard, there used to be round-the-clock armed guards patrolling the Centro. But he, and la americanita, who must be Starr, changed all that. That's what left them wide open to these local gangsters who have grown desperate and killed the hen that would have laid enough golden eggs for everyone.

La doctora asks the young guard and el doctor Pellerano if they would step just outside the examining room while she dresses la señora's wound. The boy guard hesitates a moment, but he is still a boy, just starting to feel enough confidence to slip his hand under his girlfriend's blouse and touch her breasts. His modesty is still stronger than his cunning. Out he goes, with Dr. Pellerano, keeping the door slightly ajar por si acaso.

As soon as they are alone, la doctora tells Alma point-blank, “We have to get you out of here.”

“But I don't want to go without my husband.” Alma confesses all. The doctora's face softens. She has been in love herself, knows how a woman might cleave to a good man. “Is Richard doing all right?” Alma
has seen him only briefly this morning but has heard his voice in the hallway all day long.

“He is feeling well,” la doctora answers briskly, back to business. “Only a disturbance in his stomach,” she adds, dismissively. So that's it. He has been going to the john. And here Alma thought he'd been unsuccessfully trying to talk his way to the front room so he could beam her an eyeful of scolding and a smile of tender concern.

“There is something muy urgente to discuss,” the doctora whispers, looking over her shoulder at the slightly opened door. As she cleans up Alma's leg, dabbing at it, la doctora explains that a plan is in place. Last night, she sent word with one of the women who cook, a person of total confianza. The hostages are all on the back porch—seven in all, now eight with Alma. Once it is dark, the guardia can slip in the back entrance to the Centro. Under the cover of darkness, the guardia can easily approach from the rear, overpower the two or three backporch guards, rescue the hostages, and then storm the front waiting room where the captors tend to congregate at night with their leader, listening to the radio and watching the small cable television.

Clean and easy. No one gets hurt.

“They get TV up here?” Richard never told her that.

Solar panels, a dish. La doctora waves away Alma's question. Time is short. Soon the boy guard's suspicion will overwhelm his modesty. As she bandages up the leg, la doctora goes over the exodus plan. What a mastermind, Alma can't help thinking. La doctora Heidi Castillo should be working for the military. Whatever happened to the Hippocratic oath? But la doctora is trying to save lives, a clean and easy plan, in which no one is going to get hurt if they follow her instructions.

“But we have to get you out of here,” la doctora goes on quickly. Either Alma has to be out of the compound—that's why they've been pushing so hard to have her evacuated—or out of this examining room. “So you can be with us on the back porch when the rescue comes.”

Suddenly, it seems awfully inviting to leave this place. To rest in the mayor's house and await a reunion later tonight with Richard. “Either way,” she tells the doctora, too embarrassed to come out and say that she'd like to leave now but with Richard, who is arguably sick himself. The rest of the hostages can wait for their rescue operation that la doctora has worked out for tonight.

“If we ask for you to be evacuated …” La doctora's voice trails off, as she works out the options in her head. Alma can guess. If their request for her evacuation is refused again, as it was in the beginning, then the captors might not let Alma go hang out on the back porch in her critical condition.

So the plan is set. “We must get you to the back porch. I will say that I have cleaned the wound, and it is much more superficial than I thought, no stitches required. That you are faint because you are closed up in here without air. Okay?” She, too, uses the English word. Alma wonders if
okay
is now a global word, a bit of Esperanto from that bright land of promise where everything is okay, which is why so many people around the world want visas to go to the United States.

“Okay,” Alma agrees. But as the doctora turns to call the two men back in, Alma wants to be sure, “No one's going to get hurt, right?”

La doctora looks sadly over at Alma. Her eyes moisten up. “You think I want to risk anybody's life here?” She has thought up a plan that will not violate the Hippocratic oath, a maneuver in which everyone goes home, or behind bars, unharmed.

W
HILE LA DOCTORA NEGOTIATES
with the leader over letting Alma join the back porch hostages, Alma lies on the examining table, trying to make out what is being discussed in the front room.

She closes her eyes, and her young guard must think that she has fallen asleep because he yanks off his ski mask—it is so hot in this windowless room. But when he notices her eyes flickering closed after she opened them only to realize she shouldn't have, he quickly pulls the mask back over his head. “Don't bother,” Alma tells him. “The women gave out all the names last night.”

This seems to convince him because he pulls off his mask again. A cowlick of black hair stands up at the back of his head. He can't be a day older than sixteen. He might not even have a girlfriend. “One of them is my mother,” he confesses a moment later.

He is in trouble any way he cuts it. “Are they going to give us visas?” he wants to know.

“I don't know,” Alma tells him, although of course she knows: they are not going to get visas; they are not going to get jobs with the green center; they might not even get a meal from the autoridades. The brief window of hope is now closed if it was ever open for these young fellows.

“Maybe if you give up now, you could get a pardon,” she suggests. The young ones especially, maybe Richard and Emerson can plead their case. They're kids; they should be given a second chance to make something of themselves. But Alma knows damn well how their story will end. This is a place without first chances to begin with, which is why these kids got desperate in the first place.

A phone has begun to ring. For a second, Alma thinks she has dreamed up the shooting of Starr's cell phone. But no, it's that old, funky phone in the front office. There is a scurry back and forth in the hallway beyond her door. She thinks she hears Richard talking to someone in English.

“What will they do to us?” the boy persists. His young face is worried. Maybe he isn't even sixteen. Maybe like the Killington ski-mask boy, he wants a visa so he can go to the United States, earn good money, and win back the good graces of his mother and family.

“If I were you, I'd surrender
now
,” Alma says, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice so as not to give the plan away. “You might get a better deal. Use your time of punishment to study, go to school when you get out.” She wishes he could read. She'd give him the autobiography of Malcolm X, explain how this black guy at the bottom of the American heap memorized the dictionary in prison, became a great leader. She brings up Abraham Lincoln, who was born in a log casita, no bigger than where this boy probably lives with his mother and half
dozen siblings. Alma makes Lincoln sound like a poor Midwestern campesino, president only recently. The point is not to trick the boy but to give him some narrative of hope, a piece of string he can take hold of to make his way out of this hellhole labyrinth.

“Are you in pain, señora?” the young boy asks because suddenly Alma's eyes are moist, like la doctora's eyes, with tears.

Yes, she could tell him, but not from the cut on my thigh. But from this blind alley history keeps taking you to. And here you are again, and there is not a thing I can do for you. She thinks of Walter or Frank, the collusive look he gave her. Fat chance these kids are going to get off as easy as she wants them to.

“You can become a lawyer, a doctor. There are all kinds of organizations that give money. My husband and I will help you. Once you know how to read and write, many doors will open,” Alma goes on; she can't stop herself from imagining a way out for him because this is the way it has to begin, the story that is not a story, that might just happen if she gets him believing it can really happen to him.

T
HE RED-BANDANNA LEADER
is reluctant at first to let Alma join the other hostages—after all, the two doctors originally made it sound like Alma's leg was so bad, it might even require amputation. He doesn't want her life on his head. Alma is relieved to hear this. The bully with the bad temper might have a workable heart after all.

Alma gives a convincing show of miraculous recovery, swinging her leg over the side of the table and taking a hop down, trying not to wince when her foot hits the floor.

“My leg is fine. But I do feel faint. I need air,” she complains, clutching her chest. If this were an audition, she would lose the part for overacting. But the young man seems convinced. Women's ailments. He, too, can be hoodwinked by them.

“Okay,” he tells her. She can go have her dinner with the others. “Dinner?”

He laughs, a little throaty sound under his kerchief. It turns out that he has worked out a deal with the guardia, and food and cigarettes
are on the way. In exchange, he has agreed to release all the women prisoners
after
—he is getting more savvy—their side of the bargain is in their hands. Alma is somewhat surprised that he has agreed to this compromise, but she can tell by the way he swaggers as he tells her that he considers this a victory, the beginning of negotiations that will ultimately get them amnesty, if not their visas. Even he is beginning to scale down his golden dream for the future.

A
S ALMA LIMPS ONTO
the back patio, she is surprised to see that it has grown dark. A dim light has been turned on. Bugs and moths beat their wings against it. Everyone looks milky, spectral, but there is a feeling of palpable hope among the hostages.

Richard cannot contain himself. He rushes forward to find out how her leg is doing. He had gotten a curt report from la doctora. His wife, who calls herself Isabel and pretends to be a journalist, has a superficial cut on her right thigh and a bruise on her forearm. Nothing serious. Of course, she is okay.

“I am okay,” Alma tells him. In fact, she's probably doing a lot better than he is. His unshaven face is drawn, his thin hair uncombed. There's such a forlorn, orphaned look about him. He is wearing his windbreaker, zippered up against the cooler night air, a present she bought him out of a catalog that turned out to be on the pinkish side of maroon, but still he stoically wore it in Vermont. Here, who cares? Seeing him, Alma's eyes fill up. Their vulnerable, valuable lives seem all the more valuable, vulnerable. “I hear from la doctora your stomach's acting up.”

“No big deal.” He waves away her concern. Of course, it's never a big deal with Richard. Probably not a big deal to be held hostage for three days by a bunch of desperate guys with guns.
It's okay
, he had said,
just a little ice
, as they skidded over the side of the mountain.

She touches his hand.
Rescue is on the way
, her eyes tell him.
We will soon be out of here
.