by Lamar Herrin
With the knife point pore-deep in his flesh, the man managed a grin. “This Michelle,” he asked, “what was she to you?”
“A sister,” Annie declared.
Ben heaved, then steeled himself and edged the knife forward.
“Don’t,” Annie said. “Please don’t.”
It was a test of nerves, Ben understood. The man could have broken and tried to run. The moment, which was as potent and rich with possibility as a dream, might have faded into the light of common day. Paula Ortiz said, “He’s not worth it, Ben. It doesn’t make any difference who he is, he’s not worth it.” His daughter slipped behind him and placed a hand on his arm, so that the tremors that ran from his shoulder to his knife point passed through her too. He flexed his arm; together he and his daughter fixed the point. He looked the man in the eye. He might have been looking out a window into the night. The man’s eye was full of whatever Ben wanted to people the night with. It was up to him. He didn’t really believe his daughter and Paula were standing on the bridge with him. They were night creatures too, phantoms he’d called to his side.
Family.
Armando Ordoki? With a phantom hand riding his arm, Ben suddenly advanced the knife so that the man who stood before him opened his mouth on a single soundless howl. Then, in a deliberate act of disengagement, Ben withdrew the knife. The blood on the blade shone blacker than red in the moonlight.
They all gathered around, inspecting the blood, as though admiring a rare jewel.
Then his daughter, the young woman at his side, handed him a large, floppy beret, with which he cleaned the knife. Ben offered the bloody beret to its rightful owner, whose pallor was even more pronounced and whose expression had formed around a scowling knot of disbelief. For a moment it seemed as though in a dizziness of disbelief he might fall.
There was only a trace of blood on the windbreaker, located around a small, blade-sized rip. Annie said, “If you didn’t know where to look, you’d never know it was there.”
What was the punishment for spilling Basque blood? From time immemorial, had a price been fixed? The man made an abrupt movement, as though he meant to lunge at them. Ben raised the knife, and the man fell back, brandishing his right index finger in that show of defiance Armando Ordoki was known for, a finger that ETA could always convert to the barrel of a gun. The man jabbed at them; one by one, he attempted to commit to memory the features of a face. But his concentration deserted him. He became distracted. His cheeks sagged, his bulging eyes clouded over and turned inward. Something had happened here, which he appeared to be puzzling out. There was a moment of quiet, of suspended animation, during which the river ran in a muted chorusing effect and a cow moaned from the hillside. When the moment had ended, the man seemed none the wiser. He looked as confounded as a dull-witted boy. His arm fell, and more to himself than to them, he muttered, “Gora Euskal Herria!” as though he were retaking an oath.
Ensimismado.
Ben lowered the knife.
In a poor imitation of a bear-like sway, Armando Ordoki—or just such a man—turned and walked off the bridge.
Ben Williamson threw the knife and beret over the rail.
Then he turned and walking in the opposite direction might have passed right by his daughter and lover if Annie had not reached out and hooked on to his arm. Paula took the other. Paula’s whisper to him was urgent but curiously distanced, and very quiet: “Don’t stop, Ben. I have my car. It’s just up the street. We’ve got to get out of this town.”
Annie said, “He really doesn’t believe we’re here. You don’t, do you, Dad?”
He no longer smelled like her father. They walked him off the bridge and into that narrow passageway beside the market, and his sweat rose to her nose in a whiff of animal wildness that had Annie thinking of her mother, and then, of all things, of a field of popping goats. She bristled. Her mother was half a world away, which was where she belonged, and they were in Eskuibar, a name that sounded to her ear as willfully foreign as that poor misbred figure climbing onto their bridge.
The man at her side possessed a huge, slumberous fund of strength. At any moment he might swing his arms free and dash both Paula and her to the ground.
Annie coached him along, down Kalea San Agustin to the pension, to Paula’s car, and the way out of town. “Dad, it was just a prick, a little flesh wound. You let the air out of him—that’s what you did! The next time he gets up to make a spectacle of himself, he’ll remember it and sit back down.” And because men making spectacles of themselves could drive her sister into a cold fury, Annie added, “Michelle would approve.”
Something passed through her father’s body, a sort of questioning surge, and with all his weight he seemed to go on alert. Annie said, “I’m Annie, your other daughter, and that’s Paula Ortiz, our dear, dear friend.”
On her side, Paula murmured encouragement of her own.
They passed late-evening strollers on the street, and a couple of them bore a certain resemblance to Armando Ordoki themselves. Paula and Annie were two women out with their man, and these Ordoki-ites were such diminished little creatures that suddenly Annie’s throat tightened and she discovered she wanted to cry.
But she was not a crier, she was a laugher. Laughing, not crying, was what she did.
Her father came around at the sound of it. “Annie, I didn’t mean for you to come here,” he said.
“Yes, you did, Dad. Yes, you did.” Quietly she pleaded in his ear.
Reaching into her hip pocket, she brought out the Madonna-blue scarf, which she unwadded and tied to her father’s arm. She would not have held it against Paula if she’d left the gold scarf back at the hotel, but she hadn’t. Paula tied it to her father’s other arm and said, “I don’t think you realize how serious this is. If that was Ordoki, we may never get out of this town.”
Annie shook her head. “He won’t tell. This is a private matter. We’re all sworn to secrecy here.”
Up ahead, the pension curved into view, and in the streetlight Annie saw the plum-colored Renault, so tiny she couldn’t imagine the three of them fitting inside. Not with her father the size he was now.
“Not too crazy, Annie,” Paula cautioned. Then she spoke to Ben in a tone that caused Annie to feel both excluded and curiously privileged. She was being given a glimpse into the life Paula and her father shared, the memories they could appeal to, the veiled way they might grant and withhold their favors, really, in such a short time, a code of togetherness they’d created that Annie couldn’t crack in a hundred years. Paula said, “We’re almost there, cariño. If we were back on Castellana, it’d be like a short paseo from Cibeles to Gijon, really, no more than that. We’ll be sitting there the next time Leslie and Garret come to town. We won’t tell them about this, not this, but something, we’ll make up something nearly as good. . . .”
Her father strode down the center of the main street of this benighted Basque town, flying scarves of blue and gold, a woman on each arm and blood on his hands.
Had Annie been eager to see the blood flow? She didn’t believe so. But the thing about blood was that once it began flowing it held your attention like nothing else, so that a drop could become a gallon while you stood there marveling that such dark beauty existed in the world. She’d placed her hand on her father’s arm. Intending to hold him back, had she actually nudged him forward? And when her father withdrew the knife, as though severing a bond, had she resisted so quick an uncoupling? All she could say for sure was that it wasn’t until his precious Basque blood had appeared on the knife blade that she’d come close to feeling anything for the man.
For Armando Ordoki.
Annie squeezed her father’s arm. To her friend Paula Ortiz she made a silent vow: We’ll both have him for a while, Paula. Then I’ll leave you in peace. I’ll take my scarf and get on an airplane and fly home. I promise. One day you’ll look for me and I’ll be gone.
I owe debts of gratitude to my editor, Fred Ramey, and
m
y agent, Dan Mandel, for their belief in this book and
their uncommon acts of editing and agenting.