Fourteeners

by Sarah Latchaw

  “Sam—”

  He held up a hand. “Let me finish. It’s put a lot of strain on us, so this next trip is going to be my last and then I’ll let the Federales and Uncle Carlos handle it. If they can’t find her, then she’s so well hidden the Zacatóns will never find her, or…or dead.

  “But it’s time to fix us, before we do something that’s hard to come back from. So here’s what’s going to happen.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, all business. “First, you are not to be alone with Hector. Period. No climbs, no lunches, no conversations unless I’m along. Do you think this is unreasonable?”

  “Not at all.” I wrapped my arms around my middle, fearful and hopeful.

  “Second, we’re getting a new marriage counselor. The one we have sucks.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Finally, you have got to talk to me. No more kid gloves, even if I’m as batty as an underground cave, or as dark as one. I’m not going to leave you, Kaye Cabral. Get it?”

  I tugged a stray curl, thoughtful. “You’ve been a guarded person since the moment I met you. I suppose it’s hard to drop that privacy screen.”

  “And you’ve walked eggshells with me since the moment I met you.”

  “True.”

  He took my hand and studied my fingernails, smoothed my veins. “This distance between us is killing me,” he murmured.

  I stepped closer. “Not gonna lie, it’s been a rough summer.”

  “Hmmm.” He eyed me up and down—pale gray tank top, flannel sleep shorts, tussled blue hair. I tucked it behind my ear, self-conscious.

  “You have any plans?” His voice was suddenly husky.

  “It’s Sunday. We’re supposed to meet your family for church.”

  His sensitive mouth curled, so soft, so alluring. My heart lurched. This expression was an old friend to me. “I think we need to tend to our own today.” He stepped closer, traced a finger along the edge of my tank top, slipped it beneath the left strap.

  “What did you have in mind?” I whispered.

  “Let’s go swimming.”

  I blinked. Surely I’d misunderstood. “Now? Where?”

  “The pond on the back of your mom’s property, where we used to swim when we were kids.”

  “That algae-infested thing?”

  “It’s her competition week, remember?”

  I thought about it. Never failed, Mom’s heirloom tomato competition in Pueblo was always the weekend of Rocky Mountain Folks, and Sam and I had a long-standing tradition of doing naughty things in an empty house while she was away. A grin broke over my face.

  “Lemme brush my teeth first.”

  Algae was alive and well in the pond. I threw a rock and broke the lime green carpet, and wondered at the sagaciousness of putting my body in the middle of that nasty thing. How had this not bothered us when we were children?

  I grimaced. “You first.”

  Without a beat, he pulled his tee shirt over his head, stripped away his jeans and boxers. My stomach bottomed out when he gave me a sideways glance. The man was still beautiful, more so than ever. Long limbs, sinews tightening and hardening as he aged. His neck, face, arms, were browned from hard summer labor, but beneath his clothing his torso was pale, smattered with whirls of dark brown hair—a secret for my eyes only. I watched him unabashedly as he waded into chest-high cattails and vanished, only to surface with a resounding splash. He shook pond scum from his hair and looked to me.

  “Your turn.”

  Straightening my spine, I dragged my sundress over my body and reveled in my husband’s slackened jaw. When one plans to skinny-dip, one doesn’t bother with underwear. Pinching my nose, I dove through the cattails and cannonballed into the water, keeping my mouth closed so I wouldn’t contract some obscure disease. I kicked to the surface and gasped for air, only to be yanked backwards by Samuel. We played in the water like kids, splashed and gasped, dove for each other’s’ feet, raced from one muddied bank to the other. Sunlight refracted across the water, glittering paths that widened as algae recoiled from our kicking limbs. Sam grabbed my hand and dragged me to him, up against his body, and suddenly those two children were gone. Brown water trickled down his skin. I pushed a strand of wet hair from his forehead.

  Blue eyes watched me.

  “You are more breathtaking than anything I could ever hope to write.”

  I leaned into his body slick with muck. He groaned and pulled my mouth to his. Punishing. Needy. He wrapped his arms around my hips and lifted me out of the water. Cattails brushed my breasts and legs as we pushed through reeds and up the bank. He tossed my sundress aside and laid me down on his dry clothing, and this moved me more than his pretty words.

  Blood coursed through my veins, awakened my dormant body and excited my mind. I’d needed my husband’s touch for so long. His mouth sought my skin, nipped, bit with a pain fringed in tenderness. Samuel had always been a good lover. Maybe it was because he knew my quirks and tells, just as I knew his. I dug my hands into his hair and yanked. He winced.

  “It seems I need to remind you of a few things, mi vida. You gave yourself to me, nearly four years ago, at the Boulder County Courthouse. Do you recall the vows you made?” His hand snaked under my back and gooseflesh prickled my skin. I guided his shoulders until he rolled onto his back.

  “You said some vows too, Samuel Cabral.” My lips glided over his skin. Fingers dug into the clay on either side of his rib cage. “You better damned well keep them.”

  “Then we’re in agreement. We belong to each other. There’s no room for anyone else between us, is there?” Suddenly, I was beneath him again. He lowered his heated body to mine and drove home his point.

  Our lovemaking was frantic, aggressive, a battle to reclaim, outdo, prove to each other why no one else could possibly make our bodies sing. The first time left me with an ache in my hips. The second time was slow and affectionate, as Samuel repossessed every inch of me. The summer sun baked mud and algae onto our skin until it crackled and flaked away. Sam tenderly brushed a streak of dirt from my cheek and lowered his mouth to my ear.

  “You are the only one who can break me, Kaye. Not my birth parents, or fame, or those killers in Mexico. Not even this disease in my head.” He cupped my shoulder blades, my bottom, traced my spine. I cried out my sorrow and he held my shuddering body tight. “Symbiosis, remember?”

  “I remember. Sam, forgive me, forgive me,” I sobbed again and again.

  He tilted my chin and I saw his sky eyes, clouded with sadness, and it cracked me in two.

  “I will always forgive you. Forgive me, too.”

  “For what?”

  “For neglecting you.”

  I pressed my palms to his beloved face, kissed the corners of his lips, his chin, his cheeks. They came to rest over his heart.

  “Symbiosis.”

  Chapter 17

  Beta

  Second-hand knowledge a climber receives from another climber who has previously tackled a specific route.

  Hydraulic Level Five [WORKING TITLE]

  Draft 1.117

  © Samuel Caulfield Cabral and Aspen Kaye Cabral

  LEYENDAS de MONTAÑA

  “So you’re in Nuevo Leon.”

  Monterrey, to be exact,” he shouts over the roar of rain.

  “Isn’t that awfully close to Tamaulipas?” Aspen’s voice is thin with worry, so Caulfield treads carefully.

  “It is… I’m on my way to Tamaulipas.”

  “You told me you wouldn’t go back there!”

  “You asked me not to go to Tamaulipas, but I never agreed.”

  “Dammit, Caulfield! Both Mexican coasts are about to get hit by hurricanes, and you’re driving straight into Ingrid instead of away.” He hears the tears. This is a hurricane, obliterating his marriage. Honesty is especially crucial with Aspen because she’s been deceived so much in the past.

  “I’m not going to lie to you, firecracker. I could have told you I was returning to Mexico City, or simply stay
ing in Monterrey.”

  “That makes me feel so much better. Dammit, Caulfield!” she says again.

  “Uncle C says the only way Mexico’s anti-kidnapping unit will investigate my sister’s disappearance is if we have solid proof she’s connected to Rodriguez. And I can’t get proof at home, on our sofa. The answers are in La Vereda.”

  Silence stretches all the way from Boulder to this pock-marked highway, deep in the Sierra Madre Oriental. Rain hammers the car, as if a massive bag of frozen peas has been ripped open and dumped over the entire coastal state of Tamaulipas. He pictures the bags under her eyes, the way her entire body sighs in defeat as she utters her next words.

  “If anything is off, if someone tries to stop your car, you and Alonso drive all the way to the border. Please just come home.”

  “I love you, Aspen. I promised this would be my last trip.”

  “Love you.” He barely hears her whispered words above the storm before she ends the call. This is the last trip. It has to be the last trip, or he’ll lose his wife. He’s felt her departure, a dull butter knife sawing at the ties between them, so slowly, he barely notices until that rope is but a few frayed threads. Another snaps every time he closes the door to go to the airport, to cross the border, to put his life at risk for a woman whom he knows nothing about, except that they share blood.

  That’s not true. He knows his sister is lonely, an addict, a head case. He knows she’s like him.

  Is it possible to love someone you know nothing about? Aspen would say it is. She loved their nephew and niece before she held them in her arms. She loves a child she’s never met, that doesn’t even exist. And she chose to love Caulfield when he was nothing but a broken boy in a ghost costume.

  The gas gauge dangerously flirts with ‘empty.’ Not an envious position, driving a lonely highway in the middle of the night through miles of Zacatón killing fields, just as Hurricane Ingrid flexes her muscles and pours out her fury in the Gulf, one hundred miles east. But bright, sunny days have never stopped the cartel from picking off cash cows from pastures.

  Amazingly, his father sleeps in the passenger seat, head lolling against the glass. He hasn’t noticed how gray he’s gone, more salt than pepper, and Caulfield has caused most of those silver streaks above his temples. Heart disease runs rampant in his family. Caulfield never met his paternal grandfather, who was just fifty-nine when a heart attack stole his golden years. Papá is fifty-nine.

  His father says love is a choice, an action. His father chose to love him all those years ago, when no one else was left to do so.

  Caulfield has chosen to love this woman because she is his sister, because she is lonely, because she is an addict.

  Because he knows where she’s been.

  Because someone was there to love him.

  Aspen gets this. She’ll let him do what he needs to do, that’s her way.

  Two days later, Caulfield downshifts the four-wheel-drive rental all the way up mud-slicked mountains west of his ancestral hacienda. She couldn’t have possibly gone home, could she? Back to where people know her, back to where the Zacatóns most certainly will find her? Could she have gotten out again, in this weather? Now he walks the street of her village, looking lost and suspect in his rain slicker while his papá visits the town’s only grocery store. Thirty years ago, his birth father had been welcomed with red festival ribbons and honeyed lips. But the cartels have fleeced their young and sacrificed them along highways, loaded them like pack mules with kilos of cocaine, sold them to ‘resorts’ who cater to rich perverts from all over the world.

  The air is sickly-sweet with dying orange blossoms.

  The blooms are long gone, but he sees why their ghosts still linger.

  In an old woman’s lap is a pestle and mortar and she crushes dried petals into a powder, presumably to make a fragrance. She sits in a lawn chair outside a cinder-block home, dry beneath a frayed awning. Only the first level is painted bright blue. The second is unfinished with rebar sticking up like flagless turrets. A halo of flowers sits upon her head and she is draped in once-bright colors, now faded to pastels. Does she often sit in drizzles, like one of his nixies?

  She crooks her finger.

  “I remember you.”

  “Buenos dias, Señora. We meet again.”

  She nods, neck stiff with arthritis. “You look like your father.”

  “Excuse me?” He glances through the store window at his papá.

  “The man who would visit the Sanchez girl all those years ago.” She points across a street that is little more than two tire tracks. The home is the same cinder-block as the rest of the village, but without flourishing gardens, the ramshackle home is drab, lifeless save for weeds that glisten with a thousand drops of rain. “She lived there with her daughter.”

  “Marieta?” Caulfield’s heart races.

  “You are the girl’s brother, the son in Boston. Oh yes, you look like your father.”

  “I’ve been told I look like my mother.”

  The woman grins, toothless as a newborn. “Gringo eyes, gringo skin. But the rest of you...” Her eyes travel up and down Caulfield’s body and she leers in a way old women can get away with. “You are an Aztec rain god, sleek as a panther. Your father was just as handsome. I will never forget as he walked up this very street and swept her away. She was ruined by him, but I think it must have been worth it.”

  Caulfield clears his throat. “Do you know where Marieta is now?”

  “I do not.” His spirit falls, but the woman isn’t finished. “As I told her uncle, she was only here for a few days and then she left.”

  “Her uncle? When?”

  “Not six days ago and then she vanished into the night, just as she arrived. La Llorona, that one.” She crosses herself.

  Six days. Caulfield missed her by six days. “Señora, are you referring to the uncle who is a mule for the cartels?”

  “So they say. He threw his only sister out of his home when she was round with child. Your abuela came to them often, good Catholic woman.”

  Inspiration strikes, and he takes the photo out of his backpack: the only picture he has of his sister, given to him by the migrant farmworker.

  “Yes, that is them. Marieta, her uncle, and...” she squints, then suddenly spits on the ground. “That woman is a bruja. We don’t speak her name.”

  Caulfield runs a desperate hand through his hair. The man who stalked him this summer, who claimed to be her neighbor in Tizilicho…he is her uncle.

  Has her uncle found his niece and saved her? Sold her to the Zacatóns? The woman touches his hand. “Señor, no one in our village told him she returned. We all remember how he sang beautiful songs to our children, weaved illusions and lured them away to the drug lords. We hate him.”

  “How do you know I won’t do the same?”

  Her smile is a black, gaping hole. She gestures to the dirty glass table beside her, where tattered paperbacks hide beneath a bushy, potted Mexican orange blossom. “Because I like your Nixies.”

  Of all things.

  He holds a hand out for the well-read book. He flips to the dedication page, pulls a pen from his zip pocket, signs his name. Only a slight hesitation, knowing he may be sealing his death warrant, then jots down his burner phone number and a message:

  M—Please call me.

  He returns the book. “Señora, you’ll make sure she sees this?”

  She wraps thin, frail arms around her prized possession, her face grief-stricken. “I will, but she will never return. The man she loves is dead. They found my poor boy, God rest his soul.” She crosses herself. “No head, hands…only his feet. A grandmother knows her grandson’s feet…”

  Caulfield pales as he and his papá descend the mountain. Mist enshrouds them, thick and heavy, as if they’ve fallen into the crease of his own dark folktales where creatures like brujas, wicked uncles, and feetless ghosts stalk the slopes. Her uncle. Now what should he do? Should he entrap him before he himself is entrapped,
lure him back to the states and into the arms of the border patrol? Is this uncle good or bad?

  “Look.” His father catches his elbow and points.

  He nearly misses the wild cat in the rain-speckled brush, watching him, waiting. He freezes. No, it can’t be.

  A leoncillo.

  Caulfield crouches, astonished. He’s never seen this creature of myth, surely it’s as fantastical as the ghosts of these mountains. A harbinger? His eyes are unable to leave the clear amber of the animal’s irises.

  “Well, my friend,” he whispers, “you haven’t told us anything we don’t already know.”

  We are drawn to the light. The sun pulls us to our doors and into the waking world after a long sleep. Our ancestors hovered over the crackling glow of fire, mesmerized by dancing flames as sweat trickled down necks and soaked wool. We are hypnotized by the fluid pictures of electronic screens, information and entertainment illuminated within the confines of a magic box. How often had I studied my husband as he wrote behind his laptop late into the night, his face reflecting its pale light like the moon against a canvas of black?

  People are lights. I’d witnessed countless human moths drawn to these light carriers. Samuel hadn’t set out to be a light carrier, yet people drifted to him because they ached for warmth, or illumination, or simply to be seen in the darkness. Samuel had a moment for them all.

  A word of inspiration, his name in their books, or simply an ear as they told their stories.

  He was born to be a light.

  When I was nine and Samuel was on the new side of twelve, I spent a rare summer at home instead of being shipped off to Gran’s in Durango. The neighborhood children played baseball at the Lyons field, next to the St. Vrain (everything in Lyons is next to the St. Vrain Creek). Most of the boys had been in Little League, with a few exceptions. One of these non-Little-Leaguers was a weird kid named Rafael. I now know he had Asperger’s, but back then we didn’t understand. He struggled to get the other kids to use his real name, but everyone had irritatingly called him “Fello” since preschool and continued to do so until the day he graduated and got the heck out of Lyons. Rafael wasn’t a sports kind of guy, but his mom had confiscated his video games and forced him out into the sunshine. So, with great reservation (and a touch of hopefulness), Rafael joined our pick-up game.