“How much do they want?” he asked.
“No, you don’t understand,” Yolanda said. “I need a lot more than your money.”
APPARENTLY, SHE HAD already bought her way out of slavery.
“I saved my money,” she said. “I made some deals. I treated certain people very well. I have paid more than they can ask, but it’s not supposed to work that way and they don’t want to let me go. It would—what’s the expression—it would set a very bad precedent. On the other hand, they like to pretend that it is a business, that they are simply trying to recover their debts. It’s important for morale. So they have threatened me. They have sent a man, a very bad man, a slave trafficker of the worst kind, after my sister. He will find her in Copal and tell her he is bringing her to me in America, and she will go with him because she is young and does not know much about the world, and they will hold her as my collateral.”
Ethan did not know what to say. The situation was bloated with damage. He had stood at the window as the noodle vendor assembled his cart in the street. He had watched Samantha twitch through sleep and tried to staunch her dreams with a wet rag. In the end it hadn’t mattered, and he could not imagine what Yolanda might want from him.
“Wait,” he said. “You met these men in Guatemala. How can they know where your sister lives?”
He didn’t know why he asked the question, or why the answer mattered to him. Her situation was not that unusual and he believed her. But as with everything, he thought one more piece might somehow provide a new perspective, the one sure road to action.
He wasn’t really listening. It was something about letters, how when they first brought her there, to Boystown, they offered to mail her letters home for her, to fake American postal codes to help the women protect their honor with their families.
He held up his hand. Something was wrong here, the whole thing was losing dimension, falling into static, useless detail, white noise.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“This man they’ve sent after my sister is very dangerous,” she said. “He is called Soto, and he is a child trafficker and a killer. I can do nothing to warn her. I cannot leave here. I cannot send word. You must go to Copal and find my sister before he does. It will not be hard. He has other charges and responsibilities. Then you must bring her to my mother’s island, to Santa Maria. There is an abandoned house there, and in that house there is a U.S. passport. After that it will be simple. You must escort her to the United States.”
“And then what?”
“And then nothing. Debt repaid.”
She held her hands out, palms up, empty. A woman displaying the sudden lightness of an unshouldered burden.
“You want me to go to Copal?” he said.
She nodded and he tried to imagine it: the nightmare cities, the jungles, the seething panic. A perfect row of fire ants marched along the far wall. From somewhere distant or near, he couldn’t tell, came the incessant electric hum of a refrigerator knelling the empty hours of a summer night.
“Someone has made a pretty serious mistake,” Ethan said.
The fever hit that afternoon, after Yolanda finished telling her story. Ethan had felt its first febrile pulsings earlier but in his paranoia he had taken them, the trembling and sudden sweat, as a new chemical thirst. He remembered Samantha’s aborted attempts to dry out in their final months together. He remembered holding her as she shuddered into sleep and waking later to the slick of her sweat on his skin and the sound of her in the bathroom, rooting through the medicine cabinet. So he had thought it would only be fitting that now he should be going through the same thing—fitting that his compassion, as it always did, should take its own turn toward ruin.
But it wasn’t that. He poured and poured the rum as Yolanda spoke and the trembling did not subside. The heat in his face thickened to a clammy sweat. He touched his skin, he wiped his brow. He sweat as he shivered and the Virgin Mary on the wall doubled itself and hung then at intersecting forty-five-degree angles that seemed to blur and squirm where they converged with a pulsing cloud of swarming ants. Hard as he tried, he could not tell the real picture from the imagined one.
“I’m sick,” he said to Yolanda, but Yolanda was not there. The chair across from him was empty and her glass was gone. He thought for a moment that it was night, that he had fallen asleep and was waking to an empty house. But it was not night. The pale light of the Mexican afternoon still lit the room. Slowly, he recognized a discomfort that had been spreading in him as Yolanda spoke. His bones ached, his fingers throbbed, and where his hair stood on his arms his pores burned.
“I’m sick,” he said again.
“You said that already,” Yolanda answered as she placed a glass of water on the table. She was behind him then. She touched his forehead. “You have a fever.”
She stood before him now and the room rocked away toward the bead curtain and the hall. He held the arms of the chair and raised himself slowly to avoid falling through the room’s listing shadows. She must have drugged him. Kidnappings were rampant in Mexico. They were all over the news. He staggered back against the wall and again started to scratch at his neck. A radio went on somewhere and people began to laugh.
“Samantha, you have a fever,” he said.
“Who is Samantha?” Yolanda asked him from the radio.
He turned toward the sink. What he needed was to wash his face. He knew that fever was not a symptom of being drugged. The room, for a moment, ceased its tilting. He stood shivering against the sink in the prostitute’s kitchen. There was no way he could go to Copal.
“You see, I can’t do anything,” he said.
HE SPENT THE AFTERNOON in bed and Yolanda sat by him. He twisted through the fever’s haptic thrashings—he sweat and then shivered, he dreamt that he was a sailor lashed to his ship’s mast. He passed through green waters bordered by dry red rock. In the far distance a volcano puffed smoke over a glinting white city. The high sun scorched his chafed flesh, his bare shoulders and upturned eyes, and he found himself awake and tearing the sheet from his skin. Yolanda lay a cold rag on his brow and held him as the tide turned, and he was again a sailor, mast-bound and freezing, while the night came on over the ocean. When he did not sleep, when he woke to Yolanda in the bed beside him, he was frightened by how good it felt, her skin against his, how something in his body, broken now and released in the fever’s delirium of fleshlessness, rose and craved her touch. She held him as he shook, she held him as he had held Samantha into their final nights.
In the cool of the morning, with the fever broken, Ethan woke alone in the bed to the sound of Yolanda chasing chickens in the walled courtyard. The room did not spin when he stood and dressed. He walked to the doorless threshold, stood there where the chamber opened to the rest of the house, and waited. Somewhere in the back pavilion, beyond the hall and the bead curtain, he could hear Yolanda swearing at the chickens. He wiped his face and looked down at his wrist where his watch should have been.
He had not brought his cell phone with him from New York. In the days after Samantha was committed, in the days he had decided to flee the city, his apartment and his life there, everything that resonated with failure, he had not packed much. He tossed two duffel bags full of clothes into his car, brought one camera, but left his computer and phone and address books in the apartment. He would come back for them, or he wouldn’t. In the moment it didn’t seem to matter, and he was struck as he drove away from it, his home and his marriage, how few items of sentimental value he owned. It didn’t seem possible, it should be harder to abandon one’s life—there should be more to lose.
The money helped, of course. Without her money the escape would be impossible, but it wasn’t just that. He had lost Samantha already, lost her in one moment at the kitchen table, or a long time before that even. He felt as he drove, as nothing appeared in his rearview mirror, that he was not fleeing a life at all—he was simply fleeing Samantha. Nothing rose from the road behind him.
There were no roiling clouds or white birds flying in strange formation. By then he knew how it was, what Samantha had always known: you need no signs beyond your scars. Your loss serves as portent to your future.
Now, as the world slowly solidified in the fever’s aftermath, the airy confusion gave way to aching joints and a fleshy, almost alien heaviness in his hands, as if his whole body had lost, and was now regaining, circulation. He grabbed his camera, he tapped his ring on the wall, he tried to cough. Yolanda, somewhere just beyond him, fussed with chickens and whispered motherfucker in the yard.
When he found Yolanda she was on all fours with a chicken pinned between her knees. Ethan raised his camera and framed her there: Yolanda wearing jeans and a faded black Voltron t-shirt with her hair tied back under a blue bandana, a chicken braced between her legs and a butcher knife slung pirate-style through her belt.
She looked up and put her hand over her face and turned her head as far from him as she could without releasing the chicken.
“It’s not on,” Ethan said.
Yolanda dropped her hand and pulled the knife from her belt and said, “Come here, Ethan.”
He slung the camera around his neck and stepped out into the walled courtyard. Husks of corn and dried chicken shit littered the ground. He was not wearing shoes. She flipped the knife with the same easy grace as she had folded the shawl and held it out, handle first.
“I think you should cut this chicken’s throat,” she said.
As a child, Ethan had slaughtered chickens on his grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire. He remembered not liking it, the crunch of severing vertebrae, the first splash of blood on the stump, although years later his mother insisted that he did it with glee. Begged to, even. It was one of the many stories of his childhood that his mother had liked to tell that seemed to be about someone else, someone he never knew. Here, there was no stump and no axe.
“Would you like me to slaughter your livestock before or after I go to the worst country in the Americas to save your sister from slave traders?” he asked.
She did not smile or lower the knife.
“Please,” she said. “I do not like to do it.”
LATER, AS THEY ATE the soup she made and he recalled the moment following the slaughter—the way she plucked two feathers from the thrashing chicken’s wings and formed a cross with them on its back, the way she held it as it quieted and bled out onto the ground—he knew that she had lied, that she could have slit the chicken’s throat as easily as she’d handed him the knife. He ate and she stood at the sink and watched him. After all this, he wondered, what did she see? And what would she do if, after she finished appraising him, freezing him in this moment—what would she do if she found him, as she inevitably must, wanting, incapable of her purposes?
“Are you feeling better?” she asked.
“I don’t have a fever. My ribs don’t hurt too much. If that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean.”
He still did not know what time it was, but he knew that soon she would ask him to leave. He worked the spoon through the last of the soup in his bowl but did not raise it. When the bottle broke across Javier’s face Ethan had seen a flash of exposed bone, if that were possible.
“Why did you make me slaughter that chicken?” he asked. “You could have done it.”
Yolanda did not move from the sink. She reached up to touch her hair and found her bandana. She flattened it against her head.
“You spent the night crying,” she said. “The night before that you pissed in my sink and crawled through a sewer. Sometimes, I think it is good to let a man be a man.”
Yolanda pulled off her bandana and put her hair up with a blue elastic. She was strikingly unadorned: wearing jeans and a twenty-year-old t-shirt, hair up, her face unmasked by makeup. It would have been easier to deny the alluring stranger who’d approached him in the brothel, but she had stripped that artifice from herself and stood before him now as a woman of his own age, tired, wracked by misfortunes of fate and class and geography. She wanted him to save an innocent girl from a similar fate. Such opportunities did not come often. The urge for redemption was not usually packaged with a chance to be satisfied. Many would call this a blessing.
“You are married?” she said.
“I was.”
“You still wear the ring. I think when I met you I could tell you were a man of great devotion.”
There was a sound coming from his mouth that might have been laughter. Outside of this house, another day turned toward noon, and he knew that in a moment he would be heading out into it, drawn by whatever gravity governed his journey south. Another decision made by circumstance, without his consent.
Yolanda touched his cheek and he could smell the dander of chicken feathers on her hands. She stood at the bead curtain and watched him.
“I hope your sister is a lot like you,” he said.
“I don’t,” Yolanda said, and stepped into the hallway.
WHEN SHE RETURNED she was arrayed in the vestments of the night. Her hair was down and dark blue eyeliner shadowed her eyes into grottos. In this new garb she appraised him coolly, as a fury might, to see if he would be worthy of her efforts.
“I didn’t intend any offense,” he said. “It’s just that I like you.”
She went to the doorway and opened it, waited there. He realized that he was supposed to stand and follow her into the heat.
“That’s nice,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. You may not always like me, but you will always owe me.”
“My camera is broken,” he said.
“That’s for the best. You will not want it where you are going.”
“I need new clothes.”
“Ethan,” she said, “it’s time to go. Are you coming?”
He looked out the door and considered Copal. He had been there several times to visit Doyle and had never liked it. The interior was a jungled basin of old volcanoes; the jungles gave way to dry forests, valleys, and rotten beaches. The cities were vast and sprawling and teeming with a growing presence of Mara Salvatrucha; the police were ridiculously uniformed, psychopathic survivors of the contras or Indian children drafted out of the mountains. It was a hot and weird country. Stripped of industry and infrastructure, its villages were shabby and collapsing, and it seemed a place without history, or a history only of dread. Unlike in Honduras, Guatemala, or Belize, here the Mayan temples in the forest were treated as if they were cursed. They crumbled into ransacked heaps in the jungle. Doyle had chosen it for his own private trip into ruin and Ethan had long decided that he never wanted to go there again.
Yolanda still stood at the door. There were children in the street. A light, opaque and milky as almond syrup, spread between the houses. Yolanda said his name and said it again. He reached out and lifted his broken camera, framed her there in the doorway. It would not focus. She was waiting for his answer.
Later, after the bus trip west out of town, a ferry ride and then another bus through the country and across the border; after the city’s red roads opened to hills and shacks rigged of clapboard pine, cola signs, and leaning sheets of tin that trembled and twanged against the wind’s gusts in some melancholy choir; after the descent through bare mountains where horses grazed on weeds by the side of the road and children from what few towns there were hawked their wares of warm coconut milk and bags of sweet water to the bus’s diminishing silhouette; after the border crossing through ways suddenly lush and wild, with shadow-dappled banana groves, warm wounds of blossoming bougainvillea, and the jagged towers of Mayan pyramids rising in the far distance above the jungle canopy; and then after that all gave way to the mountain city, damp and hot and trembling with music and the shouts of street hawkers and truck engines rumbling between gears and the air thick with diesel fumes and blown dust and insects and the briny smell off the tepid bay; after that and the next bus ride and the next border crossing and the first night in the colonial hotel and his call to Paolo, and everyone
—Paolo, the hotel clerk, the detective who drove him through the dark—asked him the same question: what are you doing here?; after that and many nights more, Ethan remembered Yolanda’s story, played it again and again in his head until it was like a mantra, a legend he could repeat to himself as if it were his own, as he headed out into ways unknown with something, for the first time in months, like purpose.
Ethan moved, those first days, with the pilgrim’s steady somnambulism. His fever rose again during the trip out of Mexico, and his last night in Guatemala unfolded on its wavelength: the strung-out Marine and coyote attack, the coconut woman selling fake and gruesome relics. In the morning the fever broke again and another bus came, and when he boarded it he was surprised to see that it was almost full.
The border crossing into Guatemala had been easy: there was no paperwork even if there should have been and it took less than an hour. The crossing into Copal, though, as always, was an exercise in chaos. For three hours the bus waited in a line no longer than fifty yards. Then, when it reached the border, soldiers poured into the cabin and ordered everybody out. Bags were grabbed and opened, clothes tossed in the road, a chicken escaped from its cage and began running for the border. A soldier chased it down and pounded it into the ground with the butt of his rifle as if he were an Indian woman grinding corn. The rifle went off. People began to shout. The embarrassed soldier continued crushing the dead chicken for some time.
To cross the border, Ethan had to pass through a sort of airplane hangar where, while there were at least twenty officials milling about, listening to the radio or drinking coffee, there were only two active lines. Still, because there was no reason for anybody to go to Copal, the lines were short, and after thirty minutes Ethan reached the customs agent. The agent sat at a card table arrayed with five separate piles of papers, seven different stamps of official character, a pistol, and a bottle of Honduran beer. Sweat stains soiled his khaki uniform, but his brass buttons were polished. Behind him, out through the swinging metal doors, a clamor rose from the Copalan side of the border. Ethan wiped his face with his sleeve. He could not make himself understood. There were forms to fill out and the forms were incomprehensible. The guard peered at Ethan’s handwriting. Dónde? he said again and again. Ethan invented an address for himself in the capital, the guard corrected his spelling and then stamped over the address with a red rubber stamp so that nothing could be read anyway.
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