Yolanda stirred again. She was staring out at the children running around the settlements.
“Yolanda,”I said.
“Yes.”
“I want you to forgive me.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Do you think you could do that?” I clenched my molars so hard my jaw popped. “For not being there for you. For not writing to you.”
She stayed quiet for a few more seconds.
“Yolanda?”
“Yes, I heard you.” She continued gazing at the children outside, and the black trees and the flood and the poor huts. “You know why I was so angry?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t know if you do. Because I certainly never told you. It’s because you were the”—she hesitated here—”best friend I ever had. That’s why I felt so much about it. Even though we hated each other sometimes. But that’s how it was for me, too. I haven’t had too many people I could count on, you see. It meant a lot to me. And when you wouldn’t write back to me, and then I got that note of yours, last month—‘All condolences’!—I didn’t think that I could ever not be angry at you. And now it’s just … gone. All of a sudden, like I just cut it out of me.” She looked at me sideways. “It surprises me. But I like it.”
“You just forgive me,” I repeated, and gripped onto her hand. “I made a mistake.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t care about that anymore,” she went on. “I’m even glad I’m here. With you, that is, not with the army”—that she whispered in a lower voice, glancing at the colonel. “You don’t think he’ll give us any trouble?”
“I don’t think so. Not here.”
“He recognizes me.”
“I know.”
“Just keep an eye on him. But … as I was saying, I’m glad. That I’m here.”
“Me too.”
“I’m feeling so generous, in fact, that I may even be warming up to your—your—you had some sort of unbelievable explanation for who this fellow Erik was, exactly. What was it again?”
“My friend,” I said.
“Yes, fine. … But anyway, this will be good. The two—three—of us. We’re going to go find your mom, and that thing my father wanted.”
“We’d better,”I said.
We both watched the tents and the mercury blur of the water flash at us from the window.
“When you wrote me that note after he died,” she said, “I ripped your letter up. All in pieces. Then, after, I dug each piece out of the trash and pasted it back together.”
“That sounds like you,” I said.
“Then I set it on fire.”
“Even more like you.”
She squeezed my arm, and then she pressed her head back onto my shoulder. Erik mumbled something into my hair, woke up with a start, and attempted to arrange himself in a more gentlemanly posture, but then fell asleep again with his hand once more under my arm. His head tilted back, and he began to snore.
The river swept by, gold and brown and green and blue, with a fine smattering of rain and the splashing and calls of birds. And then the river ceased moving. Or rather, the truck did.
A soldier was saying that there was a problem with one of the vehicles, and another answered that the truck directly behind us had a flat tire (there were only three trucks left in our company, as the remainder had continued shearing off to their own destinations as we neared Flores). Though the colonel persisted in his dozing, several of the others had been roused by the truck’s stop, and a number of these decamped to see what was going on.
I craned my neck to get a better look outside, but I didn’t really care where we were at that moment. I was still dazed by my mother’s journal.
When I glanced over at Yolanda again, I saw that she was peering over my shoulder. I’d let the diary fall back from my chest, and she was reading the exposed pages.
CHAPTER 34
So, why don’t you tell me what’s in there now?” she asked.
“Oh—well—no,” I said. I snapped the book shut. I was ready to hug and kiss Yolanda and ask her for forgiveness, but I found that I was really not at all prepared for her to read my mother’s bitter secrets about disgracing my father.
“Like it or not, I did read something there,” she said. “Something about—was it me? Did I see my name? Come on, let me look at it. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Let’s keep talking about old times. I’ll just put this away.”
Erik woke up when my elbow stuck him in the ribs. “What’s going on?”
I stood up and looked over the side of the truck. There was firm enough ground, covered by about eight inches of water. The trees bristled before us, just off the road, extending into a soggy and grassy long grove. A ways down from us stood the stalled truck, with one of its wheels removed. A small crowd of soldiers milled about, discussing what to do. Some kicked at the water because they were bored.
“I need to be alone for a second,” I said. I grasped hold of my mother’s duffel and jumped off the truck.
Yolanda slammed her hat back onto her head and followed me out, and Erik came bungling down, too.
The colonel followed.
“You’re being stupid,” she said outside, frowning a little. “You’re not still trying to hide something from me, are you? Because”—her voice hardened—”please just tell me that you’re not.”
She continued peering down at me, and then, with a nimble and shocking flick of the wrist, she gave me a push and snatched the diary from my hands.
“Just to put you in your place,” she said. “I just told you about my feelings, all right? And I never do that. So don’t make me regret it.”
“Give that back to me, Yolanda,” I said, as calmly as possible. “I can’t let you read that—I shouldn’t have read it.”
“Why? What’s in here?”
“That’s just—Mom’s—private—agh.” I raised my voice and struggled with her for the diary, though she was able to keep it from me by holding it over her head. One or two soldiers told me to quiet down.
I looked up again at the crowd of soldiers around the truck. In their midst a large and broad-shouldered soldier turned toward us, slowly. When he came into full view I noted the scar across his face and the rigid jaw and the problematic tear ducts.
This was the younger soldier who had given us so much trouble at The Pedro Lopez.
But he wouldn’t do that again. He’d been drunk, right?
Yolanda looked up too, and stopped what she was doing.
I grasped the diary and stuffed it into my mother’s pack.
“You two look bizarre grappling around like that,” Erik said, still sleepy.
Yolanda and I looked over from the soldier to the colonel. He glanced at us from the edge of his eye and then approached the other. The colonel began to talk very gruffly to the scarred one. To the side, the soldier with the bilevel haircut blinked in a hard and nervous way.
The colonel turned from his colleague and started walking steadily toward us. The scarred one followed him. Then came the nervous one with the haircut.
Yolanda and I both moved apart, and took a step back.
“He said he wasn’t going to do anything,” I said. “They’re on a humanitarian mission.”
Erik turned and saw the approaching men.
“No,” he said. “Wait a minute.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“What does he think he’s going to do—he’s going to try to fight me again? He can’t—there are soldiers everywhere. They won’t let him.”
“He said he wasn’t going to do anything,” I repeated.
Yolanda continued staring at the colonel. He made his way slowly over to us, but fingering a small knife that hung from his belt.
“He lied,” Yolanda said.
“No.”
“Yes. He lied. He’s going to hurt us.”
She turned and began to walk quickly across the road, toward the trees.
Erik began to jog in
her direction. “Yolanda, stop.”
“Don’t go that way,” I called after her.
She turned around. Her face had turned the color of birch, and her eyes were a sharp hard green.
“Follow me!” she yelled.
“What?”
“Move, dammit! I know what I’m talking about!”
She turned, and then slipped into the dark covert of the mahoganies.
CHAPTER 35
I saw Yolanda’s black hat like a sharp shadow against the glimmer of the woods as she disappeared into the grove. The three soldiers moved after her, quickening their pace.
I ran into the trees, with Erik fast behind me.
I could hear the smashing rapid footfalls of the men chasing us.
“Yolanda! Yolanda!”
We raced into the dense shifting patch of forest. The sunlight struggled to work its way within the clinging leaves and the clouds of bugs that ate the fragrant air as we slogged through the mire. Ahead of me, Yolanda darted forward and nearly disappeared into the forest’s black and mint-colored shadows. The trees, dripping with moss and rain and choking with flowers, crawled around my head and attached their root fingers to my feet; they snagged on my mother’s heavy duffel bag as I tried to rip through the bush. I was confused, but I still ran for what seemed a long time, far from the trucks on the highway. Erik wheezed behind me, grunting a complaint about women—and behind him, I heard the voices of the soldiers. The man with the bilevel haircut yelled something; he sounded frightened. The colonel barked at him to shut his mouth. The one with the scar kept silent.
We crashed into a dip in the forest. Here, the trees parted onto a small pond surrounded by a muddy bank laced with crabgrass and willow; the thicker hedge of trees curved around the basin. On the far side, the mahoganies looked so tightly knit together that a person could not fit through them.
Yolanda splashed through the water, scratched her way up the bank, and began to jolt up the thicket by hooking her feet and hands into the dents and crotches of the trees. She grappled up to the branches of a mahogany while her breath came out in quick hard contractions. Then she slipped over to another nearby branch, apparently planning to make an escape through the canopy of trees.
“Hurry!” she yelled. She glared down at me, surrounded by leaves.
I slid into the water; Erik half fell into it beside me. We watched, dumb, while Yolanda reached down to give me a hand. But we were too far apart, and she was too high to reach.
“Jump!” She looked up and past me.
We heard the heavy steps of the men behind us. They clambered and smashed through the wood. Then they stopped.
“Can you make it?” Yolanda hissed.
I gripped onto my mother’s duffel bag.
“I do not believe your friends have quite your acrobatic skills,” the colonel said, in an eerie, calm voice.
We all knew he was right.
“Just go, Yolanda,” Erik said. He turned around to face the soldiers.
“They don’t want us,” I said, though I wasn’t really sure of that.
But Yolanda didn’t go. She grimaced and climbed down from her tree, half cracking one branch on her descent.
Her shadow cast a long dark line in the pond where Erik and I stood. The colonel’s reflection reached up into the green water from the opposite direction: the two lines wavered, breaking apart when I moved my leg.
“Who are you?” Yolanda asked.
“I know you who are,” the colonel said.
“Get the hell away from here,” Erik yelled. “You’re scaring these women.”
“You should be scared too, my dear man. Or don’t you remember the conversation you and Estrada had before?”
“I remember it.”
“Once he gets started, there’s really nothing I can do to stop him, you see.”
I looked up from the reflections in the pond, up to the men on the other side of the bank.
The soldier named Estrada remained farthest back, still in the thicker part of the wood. The soldier with the bilevel haircut stood to his left. His cheeks shuddered, and he seemed terrified.
The colonel stood above me; his hands were cut by the branches he’d run past. His elegant head, clean triangular cheekbones, and small mustache formed a smooth, almost pleasant facade, until his mouth opened into a wild gape. He let out a strange and short sound, like a cry.
“Your father,” he said to Yolanda, “your father killed my nephew.”
“What are you talking about?” she yelled.
“Moreno,” the soldier with the haircut said. “Calm down.”
The soldier with the scar still said nothing, but his right eye winced and began to tear up.
“My father never killed anybody,” Yolanda said.
“Your father killed my nephew,” the soldier repeated. “With an explosive.”
“Moreno,” the soldier with the haircut said again. He hunched in the mud.
“De la Rosa’s only been accused of one killing,” Erik said. “That accountant.”
“My nephew,” the colonel said. “Nearly my son.”
“Moreno,”Yolanda murmured.
“Then that’s—I’ve heard of this man,” I said, looking at the scarred soldier, and remembered the stories about de la Rosa blowing up an army colonel’s home. His bomb had scarred a young soldier who’d gone on to do terrible things in the war.
“Many have,” the colonel said. “Estrada is my protégé.”
“That’s the lieutenant,” Erik said. “The killer.”
“Help us!” I screamed, toward what I thought might have been the place where the trucks had stopped.
“I wonder if they can hear you through all this?” Moreno said, gesturing at the web of trees around us.
I screamed for help again.
“Oh, God,” Yolanda said, bending down at her waist. I thought she began crying, but when she looked up, a scowl tore over her face. “Your nephew was an accident! He was a mistake!”
“As if that matters to me?”
“And he was—just one person. And you’ve killed—”
“I’m sure that you understand that my little world means more to me than the whole universe, Señorita de la Rosa. As these things always do, to all people. My sweet nephew was more wonderful to me than any village. Certainly much more than your insignificant little head. Though I’m sure your father would disagree, if he were still alive—if he were still alive. Is he? I heard such bizarre things about his funeral.”
And now Yolanda did begin to cry.
Moreno walked toward us, slipping ungracefully down the bank until he half fell into the water at my feet. Erik yanked me away from his path and dragged me to the other side of the basin. I dropped my mother’s duffel on the shallow end of the bank.
“Go away,” Erik said to Moreno.
“Get away from her,” Yolanda commanded. She did not sound afraid.
Moreno stood knee deep in the water, smeared on one side of his flanks by mud. The third soldier remained on the banks, useless and sniffling. Estrada, who had stayed silent and still on the far side of the pond, began to make his way down.
“It was her father who gave you that scar,” Moreno said.
“De la Rosa did hurt me, Colonel Moreno,” Estrada said. “You’re right.”
I slipped out of Erik’s grasp and jolted over to Estrada, though again, when confronted with so much mass, I barely knew what to do. I gripped his shirt and his shoulder and tried to shake him; I was half hanging off his torso and trying to make him fall down, but he didn’t. My nails were scratching at him when Erik began to pull at me from behind.
“We—have—to—go,” he grunted. “He’ll hit you. Or worse.” “Don’t touch her,” Yolanda said. “I won’t let you do anything to them.”
“Is that so?” Moreno asked. “And how would you do that?”
“I don’t know—Lola—leave … But you—yes, you—why don’t you come over here, Lieutenant Estrada? Pay attention�
�that’s right—let me see how ugly you are, hermano. My father did an excellent job on you, didn’t he? You must be the absolute filthiest cuss I ever laid eyes on—I’ll bet you never get any attention from the ladies, you poor thing. Though there are still uses for you, aren’t there? We could put you in the circus? Or you could play monsters in the pictures—”
Moreno had climbed the bank and stood in front of Yolanda. While she spat her insults at Estrada, she also was trying to pull off the branch of the tree that she’d cracked. Estrada continued to make his way up toward her through the water, and Erik and I wrestled him and punched him, so that he walked unsteadily through the pond and up the sliding bank. He was magnificently strong.
“Stop it,” he said, to us, irritated. He hit Erik across the face with the back of his hand. And then a second time. Erik staggered back, coughing, and gripped onto him harder again.
He hit Erik again, this time with such force that we both fell back. Estrada and Moreno stood in front of Yolanda, who had cracked the branch off the tree and began to swing it at them.
The stick hit Estrada hard on the shoulder, but he only grasped onto it with both hands and ripped it from Yolanda. He hurled it to the side. The two men took another step closer.
Yolanda stood on the bank defenseless, but perfectly still and ready for their attack.
The soldier on the other side of the pond remained there, gulping with fear.
“You make me sick, with all your talking,” Estrada said to Yolanda.
“You make me so sick,” she whispered.
The Queen Jade Page 18