“Don’t say that again. Okay? Don’t tell me you’re sorry, bitch, because we both know what that’s worth.”
The bank manager rushed to see what the problem was. “Can I help you?” he said, shielding the girl. Harry still glowered at her when she backed away, even as he struggled to catch his breath, as his body deflated to its diseased state.
Aaron had forgotten what it was like to stand there helpless when his dad went off. He was associated with the man. He was the one person in the world who was inexorably tied to Harry Kleinhardt.
“Why do you do that?” he asked later, alone with him in the car.
“What are you talking about?”
“Treating people like that. That’s what I mean. Like you treated the girl.”
Harry wheezed out a laugh, hunched into the bench seat of his Lumina. “Those people don’t care about you. They certainly don’t give a shit about me.”
“What’s accomplished though? What can you gain by—?”
“Nothing,” Harry said. “It’s not supposed to do nothing. There isn’t one damn thing I’d trade for what they got. People like that don’t understand and it pisses me off.”
There was tapping on the roof of the mudroom, the first sleet of the season, Thanksgiving week.
Harry had been in the mudroom a long time and Limbaugh was over. The station was playing country-western music. Behind him, in the window, the atmospheric dust settled in the western sky, burning red and orange in the last sunlight. Aaron knocked on the doorframe to let Harry know dinner was about ready, fried bologna this time, but Harry didn’t move. He’d been smoking in the mudroom with his waders on. The cold ash of a cigarette hung from his lips. His face had gone slack and stiff, his eyes rest shut. His hands were in half fists on the bulge of his coat.
Aaron stopped in the doorway. When he touched his dad’s cheek the cigarette ash collapsed onto Harry’s chin.
“Is it—?” Aaron said. He kneeled into the cushion and whispered within the sleet on the rooftop.
Suddenly there was beeping from the kitchen. The smoke alarm going off. Aaron jumped at the noise but didn’t move away from Harry. “Are you here?” he asked. He put his ear next to his dad’s nose.
“What’s the racket?” Harry shouted. He jerked back from Aaron, arms raised, and knocked his head against the drywall. “What are you doing to me?”
The pan handle scalded Aaron’s hand when he grabbed it, but there wasn’t a fire. It was just the bologna that set off the alarm, the bottom burned black. Aaron tossed the mess in the trash then cooled his fingers under the faucet. He offered to make something else but Harry told him not to. “It wouldn’t be any use if you did.”
Aaron didn’t know what to do with himself. He made a sandwich and ate it. He paced inside the house, in the two rooms, and packed his suitcase. He decided to go into town, to the Congress, and that’s what he told Harry as he walked out through the mudroom to the car.
The Congress was busy, ninety minutes into happy hour. Groups of men talked loudly, a few couples danced, lines formed outside the bathrooms. The top pages of a hot-rod magazine curled off from a stack at the end of the bar.
She was alone. He recognized her. “You’re the teller from the bank, aren’t you?”
“My name’s Emily,” the girl said. She didn’t seem to mind when Aaron hung his messenger bag over the stool back next to her.
“I’m sorry about what happened. He shouldn’t talk to you like that.”
“It’s okay.” She spun a straw in her drink. “We know all about Harry Kleinhardt.”
“Do you?” Aaron said.
He fixed his eyes on different parts of her face until laughter bubbled up out of her nerves. He laughed too and turned away to take a breath. The air was hotter here than it had been earlier that week, the music louder. The neon lights bled brighter. The walls were lined with old men waiting out their liquor, but there were handfuls of young men too. At the other end of the bar were a few women in tight Wranglers, braless under plaid button-downs. Eager men surrounded these few women.
“Let me buy you a drink,” Aaron said. “It’s the least I can do. Consider it compensation for the aggravation my father causes.”
The girl leaned down when she talked to Aaron, showed some cleavage from inside her bank-issued polo, unbuttoned as far as it would go to flash the freckles of her chest. She wore a padded pink bra, her bitties loose inside it.
“Are you really his kid?” she asked.
Aaron nodded.
“I never thought about Harry Kleinhardt having any family.” She glanced at Aaron like she still might not believe it.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Just back for Thanksgiving?”
“I don’t think you want to know that.” Aaron guided his bangs to the side of his forehead and smiled at her.
“Come on,” she said. “I’m game. You can tell me and I won’t repeat it.”
“You wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“Tell me the truth. Why are you here?”
Aaron didn’t answer for a long time. Emily tried turning away, but she couldn’t stop looking at him while he was looking at her, while he was smiling. His hand found its way to her thigh and she let it stay.
“Do I need an excuse to visit Jackson County?” he asked. “Isn’t the Congress enough?”
She shook her head.
“This place is the worst. Don’t you know that? This is where the lowlifes come when they’re up to no good. Where airheads come to get laid.”
“We wouldn’t want to be like them, would we?”
“No, we wouldn’t. This place stinks.”
Emily pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit it, puckering her lips as she exhaled. Her hair was pulled back. Black curls snuck around her neck. She had a small chin and her face appeared to flare out as it approached the hairline.
“You know,” Aaron said, “you’re really a pretty girl.”
“I doubt that.”
“I mean it. Would it be too much to take a photograph?”
“What do you mean? You and me take a picture together?”
“Of course,” Aaron said. He fingered the strap of his bag, ready to pull out his camera and snap a shot of her.
“You can’t take it here,” she objected. “Who in the world would want to be remembered like this?”
“Come on. Just one. Indulge me.”
“No,” she said, loud enough for Aaron to concede.
“Okay,” he said, his feelings hurt. “But we’ll snap one later. Promise me that.”
“Sure,” the girl said. “We’ll drink a few Long Islands and then take a nice portrait for the Christmas card.”
Aaron heard Emily laughing after he excused himself to the bathroom. A few of the other men at the bar joined her too. “Christmas card!”
“You’re too much, Em. You know that?”
Mangy green carpet covered the floor of the Congress, except in the men’s room, where someone had torn it out. The floor was sticky and wet. At the urinal, Aaron noticed a shirt button in the filter. The bathroom was tiny, a small cinderblock cell, a dripping sink on the wall between the urinal and toilet. There were no dividers, no stalls, just two kinds of toilets, three in a pinch, on the other side of a punched-through black door.
Later in the night, Emily would apologize for making fun of Aaron wanting to take that picture of her. All the other people in the bar laughed long and hard at how she’d put him down. She was sorry for that, even though Aaron kept smiling the whole time. He never let on what he was thinking. The way anger seethed inside his heart. How all he could want then was to make her regret laughing at him.
They were driving the brick roads around town when she apologized. They circled the town square and the courthouse, its moss-covered spires. There was the slumping old lumberyard, the ghostly Co-Op silo gray in the darkness. She suggested they stop. “I live around here. You can take that picture if you want.”
She had a s
mall white house close to the school. Aaron parked in the driveway and they went inside.
Harry was still in the mudroom, his eyes closed.
It was almost morning. Mist gathered on the windshield as Aaron pulled off the road. He left the car door open when he stopped. It dinged to tell him this, the dome light spreading over the yard.
Aaron stood outside the storm door to watch his dad sleep, the lit-up car behind him. The flap of his messenger bag was open, resting on the small of his back.
Harry’s favorite memory was watching Aaron sleep when he was a baby. Aaron thought of this, a story Harry told all the time when Aaron was growing up. “It made me realize my luck,” Harry would say. “You breathing in fits. My hand on your chest just to make sure. You really did look like me. The ears. The cowlick. Your eyes.”
Harry’s eyes twitched open at the noise when it happened. Then his jaw dropped, the blanket fell from his knees. One of his eyes wouldn’t close and stared past Aaron.
The storm door latched, Aaron’s hand on the handle as he looked back at his dad in the mudroom one last time. He told himself that he should leave, and again, that he needed to go. There was a cold whispering mist, so fine in its composition, that unless you were standing in it with him, you wouldn’t even know it was there.
(Jessica Harding)
He noticed how she watched him circle the plaza fountain. Her head tilted skyward, as if she wanted him to think she didn’t notice. He was aware of her glances. She sipped cola when she looked. She peeked beyond the curve of a plastic bottle.
He circled twice, hesitating when he was on her side of the fountain to bring the stub of a cigarette to his lips, his head raised over chattering students on their way to class. Smoke drifted from his mouth as he peered dumb at the names stamped on distant buildings. He shook his head then circled the fountain again, patted the pockets of his jean jacket like he’d lost something. A green messenger bag hung off his shoulder.
She watched breathlessly the third time he circled toward her, when he was holding it out in front of himself. She leaned forward on her bench to look, forgetting to be inconspicuous because he’d been swallowed in a crowd. He stepped clumsily in front of bicycles and edged between groups of women in conversation. Then he bent to look at it. It was a ring. He lifted it in the sunlight when he knew she was watching, a wedding band that would look familiar to anyone, in the thickness of the metal, in the way the silver glinted in the light.
He made his way to her and grinned pathetically, searching the faces of others before picking her out—her, of course. She looked stunned when he smiled at her. The ring was between his fingers but he slid it into his jeans before speaking. Her eyes followed somewhat desperately as the band disappeared into his fob pocket.
“Excuse me,” he said. He pulled a digital camera from his messenger bag. “Do you mind if I take your picture?”
This is how it started with Jessica Harding.
He told her to call him Aaron.
The Missing
Worthy told Steve to come visit San Sal for a few days. Why San Sal? Because I live in San Sal, Worthy told him.
Worthy told Steve what airline to fly. United. And where to connect. Houston. Worthy told him to forget his Delta miles, forget Atlanta. Take United. Go through Houston.
Worthy told Steve wild stories about El Salvador. Bus rides up chuckholed alleys into ghettos where even police were afraid to go because gangs controlled that territory; that San Salvador was the murder capital of the world, no matter what claims were made by Kabul or Baghdad or Tegucigalpa. Worthy talked about getting drunk on something called coco loco. And girls dancing in clubs where the Salvadoran Geddy Lee played bass with one hand and keys with the other. And girls dancing in clubs who were on the hunt for American men, for the green card, but were often left behind in San Salvador if pregnant, and there was little recourse for a woman of that kind. Over the phone Worthy told him about girls dancing in a nudie bar called Lips that had a taco bar next door that was also called Lips. Worthy was persuasive. Even the plastic bags filled with soft, slimy cheese called queso fresco that Worthy bought on the street, even that sounded attractive when Worthy talked about it. Even when the Mrs. grabbed the phone and told Worthy that if anything bad happened to Steve she’d know who to hold responsible.
Do you understand? the Mrs. told Worthy. If he doesn’t come back, I will come down there and fuck you up.
The Mrs. told Steve about all the reasons why it was stupid to go. He had a family to think about. I’m six months pregnant, the Mrs. told him.
You’ll do what you want anyway, the Mrs. told him, but at least try and be smart about it. What’s it prove going there for a long weekend? Isn’t there enough to worry about here?
You don’t belong in El Salvador, the Mrs. told him.
That’s why Steve had to go.
Worthy told him to look for a Subaru Outback at the airport after he cleared customs. He was supposed to tell customs that he was staying at the apartment complex where Worthy lived with other doctors, where foreign diplomats lived. But the customs agent at the airport had never heard of Dr. Worthy. The customs agent wanted to be told an address. The name of a hotel. Steve had nothing to tell the customs agent. Worthy hadn’t passed on this information. All Steve could do was hand over his passport and shrug. He didn’t speak Spanish and was in the wrong line because the gringo line was backed up with missionaries from Evansville and Dallas–Fort Worth. The customs agent’s supervisor came over. She wore a yellow blazer that was big on her.
My friend Worthy is coming to pick me up, Steve told the supervisor. I’m going to stay at his apartment. In San Sal.
The customs agent and the supervisor discussed between themselves and agreed it was fine for Steve to enter. This is you, they told him, pointing to his passport, to the photo he’d taken nine years before, when his skin was smoother, his hair thicker, his chin more distinctly there. He had ten dollars American to buy a visa. That was good enough.
That’s how it goes, Worthy told him once he was outside the airport and buckled up in Worthy’s Subaru Outback and the air conditioning was blowing.
Sometimes they don’t ask where you’re going, Worthy told him. They just want the ten.
Once they got to the apartment, Worthy told Steve they’d go to the mountains the next day.
In the morning they drove out into the country.
They burn their garbage, Worthy said to explain the smell, thumbing out the window at smoggy fires shack-dwelling locals tended near the road.
It did smell bad. Steve thought it smelled like the trash can he put dirty diapers in at home. Like the shit of an eight-month-old.
Worthy drove to the mountains. They went to Ataco because there was a shrine there on top of a mountain, a mountain you could hike up, up a shady path where men wielding machetes moved in the leaves, where men worked a coffee plantation with machetes and canteens filled with yerba maté. In the cobblestone alleys of Ataco a nightclub called Portland served Cuban club sandwiches and Suprema beer for lunch. Steve had visited Worthy a few times in Portland, the one in Oregon, where Worthy did a surgical residency years before. They’d gone to Tube and to Shanghai Tunnel, where fresh citrus was squeezed for whiskey cocktails. Maybe there was more to the real Portland than Cuban sandwiches and Salvadoran beer and “Gangnam Style” on the PA, like was played twice during lunch in the nightclub Portland, but Steve didn’t care.
After lunch Worthy scouted for a room that would be needed for the following weekend, to return to with a Peace Corps girl who would put out if meals and a hot shower were involved.
Worthy drove them to Juayúa. They paid respects to the Black Jesus shrine in the white stone cathedral in Juayúa. Worthy told Steve they should get a tuk tuk to take up the side of the mountain to see the falls.
Los Chorros de la Calera, Worthy told him. That’s what it’s called.
The boy next to the tuk tuk didn’t say anything. The boy didn’t know English
. The boy didn’t appear to know Spanish. Worthy talked to the boy’s father. The boy’s father was the driver. The driver said he’d take them to the waterfalls. Upside the mountain. The driver set a low price and Worthy told the driver that would be fine. This was November and not much was going on. Worthy paid half up front, then they all squeezed into the rusty three-wheeled taxi—two big Americans in the back with the boy between them on the metal bench seat. Both Steve and Worthy craned their heads toward the middle, over the boy’s head, so they’d all fit.
The driver scooted them around the square in Juayúa. Women set up card tables to sell pirated DVDs and CDs and salted fruit and packaged marzipan. The tuk tuk rattled and shook. The mountain path was washed out, rutted through. The driver, one hand on the wheel, the other on the throttle to rev and unrev, kept the motor going through its pops and sputters. The boy laughed between Worthy and Steve in the back.
The driver stopped halfway up the mountain, where the path ended at a chain-link fence. They got out. Worthy told the driver to wait.
Waterfalls rumbled somewhere beyond the gate, beyond the wall of leaves and spindly tropical trees that quivered up to sunlight. Steve followed Worthy to the noise, along a footpath that went into the jungle.
Steve thought they’d be alone at the falls for some reason, but there were people, backpackers, a girl in a blue bikini swimming in the basin pool where the smaller of the falls stopped, before a bigger one cascaded to the bottom of the valley.
Worthy told him to not swim in the water.
It’s freezing. That water comes from the top. Jump into icy water like that and your heart might stop. An old guy like you, Worthy joked.
Backpackers swam and splashed and yelled about how cold the water was. One of the backpackers hauled up onto a stone ledge with a hanging vine then leapt back, hollering, into the water. Aside from the girl in the blue bikini, only young men swam in the basin pool. Their packs leaned together, away from the cliff. Their clothes trailed to the water. The girl in the blue bikini was very blond. Maybe she’s German, Steve thought. He saw the girl’s body under the icy-clear mountain water. The girl’s long arms and legs shivered like a mirage under the waves she made with her kicking and paddling and laughter.
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