This gringo, Mirabelle thought, did not look good at all. His face hung slack and pale, unshaven. His eyes were bright, sober maybe, but bloodshot and tired. Tear tracks stained his skin and his fingers trembled as he withdrew them from her brow.
“Really,” he said. “You have to be careful. Your teeth can crack. I’ve seen it happen.”
Where, she thought, does someone see that? Outside, a pelican screeched as it flushed from the shore. Thankfully, the sound of the demented grackles that haunted the room was gone and the scent of bougainvillea drifted on the moving breeze. There was no smell, anywhere, of the Mother.
“How long have I been like this?” she asked.
“Three days.”
He reached out and dabbed her brow again with the rag. An instinctual motion, she thought—he didn’t even realize he was doing it. She had become like that with Rosa by the end. He handed her a plain tortilla.
“Eat this,” he said. “And drink another thermos.”
“Did Soto come?”
Ethan nodded and withdrew his hand from her brow. She followed his gaze out the window, where the palms were black against the purple sky. It was a strange color for the sky and she wondered for a moment if she were still dreaming.
“And he left?” she said. “He did not hurt you?”
“It was fine. He took one look at you and your cholera and bolted. I think you grossed him out.”
“Really?”
“He’s a slave trader. You were damaged goods. Best bit of cholera you’ve ever had.”
It hurt to laugh. Her abdominal muscles were still spasming. Under the sheet, she touched her stomach and the skin felt dry and thin, like parchment.
“I’m better now, I think.”
“You will be. We’ll have to get you packed up in a day or so.”
“Where are we going?”
“Tlax,” he said. “The capital. You’ll love it.”
In the car, on the mainland, Ethan imagined that he had not made the phone call. He had dialed the number he found in the drawer and at first there had been nothing but electric sound. Doors opening and closing and then a man’s voice over the static.
“Halo?” the man said. “Si?”
“I have a message for Yolanda,” Ethan said. “Is this the right number?”
“What is the message? Speak very quickly, please.”
Ethan said Mirabelle was sick, he said she had a package for Yolanda, he said they needed to meet before he could cross the border. He gave a date, a time, he named one of the few places where he might seem innocuous. “The T.G.I. Friday’s on Calle Jimenez,” he said.
Then the man was gone and there was nothing but static, a dial tone, a valve clicking on the empty line.
“It’s fine if she can’t make it,” Ethan said.
Now, as he drove the shore road away from the marina where he’d bought the car, he thought maybe she did not get the message. There had been a confusion. An error in translation. Perhaps she wouldn’t come.
He drove and the girl, sleeping in the seat beside him, looked almost like an old woman. Her flesh clung to her bones like date skin. He drove too fast, he wanted to make it to Tlax by night and the chances didn’t look good—the streets thronged with wanderers. In the towns, women hawking bags of sweet water, bottles of Coke, and roasted peanuts ran behind the car, banged on the windows with their hawking poles, and in the country lines of families wandered the open road. People with their possessions on their backs, with donkeys and carriages, old men on bicycles. Everyone, it seemed fled on some exodus or pilgrimage.
“Mirabelle,” he said, “what is this? Is there some kind of festival? Another Holy Week? A saint’s day?”
The girl stirred and opened her eyes. He thought she’d want to see her country, a land she’d never known, but she turned from the window and closed her eyes again.
“No,” she said. “There is nothing.”
He drove on. Swerved to avoid a dead horse lying in the middle of the road. People sang as they walked, and once he thought he saw a retinue of penitents crawling on their knees, but as they passed he saw that it was simply a traveling troop of the legless. They swung themselves forward along the highway on their arms, and their flabby hanging torso flesh left winding trails in the dust. There were no children.
Smoke rose in the distance. Maybe there were roadblocks. Certainly, fires burned on the road to the capital.
AN HOUR LATER they passed heapings of flaming tires and truck cabins, but the barricade had been abandoned and left unfinished, never strewn fully across the road, as if its makers had taken sudden flight. Two white goats scavenged the street edge under the seep and billow of black rubber smoke.
TWENTY MILES OUTSIDE the city limits, the road turned, as roads did there, totally insane. The coast route and the Pan-American Highway converged into the capital motorway, where the truck traffic out of the south intersected the eastern bus routes and four lanes of speeding, lawless, brakeless traffic joined into a pitted, half-paved highway. Ethan had never driven in the capital before, he had always taken buses, and he held the wheel now with both hands and drove as fast as he could since he knew that to slow down was to allow the truck and bus drivers the chance to run you off the shoulder and into the jagged barrancas that fell away through valleys of scrub pine, cactus, and dust. The yellow roadside signs read PELIGRO LOMO and pointed in a crooked, aimless scribble toward the unrailed shoulder. “No shit,” Ethan said, and Mirabelle stirred and looked up.
“Do you want me to drive?” she asked as she yawned.
Tlaxcultepec was built in a valley and, like most Central American cities, its outer neighborhoods sprawled up the mountainsides, where they hung impossibly in ranging, cluttered barrios. Ahead, in the distance, the tin roofs of the western settlements glinted like a hill of broken glass in the setting sun.
“Is that the city?” Mirabelle said.
“Just the outskirts. The tip of the iceberg.”
“The what?”
Ethan knew Tlax well enough. The western reaches sat beneath a range of logged mountains and one ugly, bare volcano. The locals called the volcano El Hueso—The Bone—and apparently El Lobo mandated a national holiday in its honor in which the local Indians, whose celebratory rites did not concern it, were supposed to dance and sell textiles at a trinket pavilion erected at its base. But El Hueso commanded little appeal. It was taller than the other mountains, and in its complete chalky bareness it seemed a place forlorn and sinister. Peasants passing beneath its shadow did not ever look up.
Though Tlax lay in a valley, the city sloped gradually west to east down the coastal plateau until it ran up against the sea. Whenever it rained, the eastern barrios flooded—a situation that considerably shortened any imagined tourist season, since most of the established luxury hotels, the ones erected when United Fruit and Axel Diamonds still had interests in the city, were constructed as seaside resorts.
By now, Ethan thought, the sun should have set. It hung low and seething over the volcano. In the smog of exhaust that rose from the city, its light wavered and pulsed, something static and molten. It did not seem to be dropping. Ethan shielded his eyes and lowered the visor, but it didn’t help. They were driving west and all around them the traffic slowed and chugged against the sun’s sudden glare, and as they crested the valley wall the whole city lay below them, vast and tinny and sun-twanged, a city of fire. The Spanish stone architecture bled crimson, neighborhoods stretched out in rows of red clay roofs, the tin and iron shantytowns glinted painfully up from the shore where the sea, now that Ethan saw it through the lit smog, seemed a sheet of just-forged steel. Illuminated clouds of starlings jerked and turned and overflew the city like bellowed embers.
“Ay,” Mirabelle said as the road descended. “It is very beautiful.”
“You won’t think that for long,” Ethan said.
IT TOOK ETHAN AN HOUR, after checking Mirabelle into the hotel, to find the T.G.I. Friday’s. The restaurant was s
everal miles west of the docks, near the Hotel Guadelupe, and since Ethan felt sure Cunningham would be there, at the Guadelupe, he had decided to stay at the Cabaña Azul, a hotel on the water. He chose the Azul because it faced the ocean and the large glass doors to its lobby were security locked—you had to give your name and room number to the desk manager before he buzzed you in. The docks were strangely empty, no boats flecked the bay, and the coconut stands, palm cafés, and reggaeton kiosks were all abandoned. It was a welcome change from the glue junkies who lurked outside the Guadelupe.
“We only have a penthouse free,” the manager said. “Top floor, fantastic view. Very beautiful.”
Ethan looked at the green flood-stained carpet, the mold line on the marble desk, and down the hall to the deserted hotel bar. Clearly, the hotel was empty.
“Okay, we’ll take it,” he said.
The penthouse was beautiful—about that the manager had not lied. The eastern wall of the main room consisted of enormous glass window-doors that opened out onto a railinged deck. Ethan saw Samantha sitting on the balcony in Key West with the sun going red in her black hair and the dew of shower water still beading on her throat. He turned away from the window. The deck canted dangerously to the left and the impossible light still spread over the sea.
“You should rest,” he said to Mirabelle.
“I’ve been sleeping all day.”
He opened the door to the bedroom. The bed stood huge and canopied. Mirrors paneled two of the walls. An enormous potted palm drooped in the corner. For a moment he imagined Yolanda in a room like this, naked and sweating, her eyes closed as in pain, her face pressed against the headboard, the image refracting and refracting. He needed to remember to get more rum.
“I’m going out to meet your sister,” he said. “Don’t open the door. There’s no reason for anyone to knock. I may be a few hours.”
Mirabelle frowned, and when she did so, her face still parched, drew back against her cheekbones, something grimacing and skeletal.
“Yolanda is coming with you, yes?”
“Yes,” Ethan said. “Of course she is.”
LATER, AS HE WALKED, the city was not as he remembered it. People all seemed to be hurrying, here where people did not hurry. Beggars and junkies did not accost him, no children peddled flowers or cabbages and women did not whistle from the porches. Hand radios played through open windows and there were rumors on the wires. The signal was weak and cut by static and he could not follow all the Spanish, but he heard reports of guerrillas in the hills, an off-season storm moving up the coast. He had to admit, as he wandered the labyrinthine streets that were laid, in their day, to resemble the great curling cities of Spain, that he was lost.
Ethan had always prided himself on his sense of direction, but he could not find his way in the city. The lanes turned in winding routes he did not remember, the sun hung and hung, it would not fall behind the volcano and the horizon, as he walked, trembled in a haze of lit smog. He found himself on strange boulevards, he passed empty clubs and shanty villages, a zoo where animals bellowed from their cages. He came through an abandoned Indian market and found himself running, once, with a group of squawking chickens. Behind them skulked three dogs, and he wondered if the chickens ran from the dogs or if they all, together, fled the same pestilence. It was hard to ignore that the sky, as it did sometimes, had filled with volcanic ash.
And then he came upon it, Friday’s, standing in a former two-story diplomatic mansion on Calle Jimenez. He wiped his face, he checked the empty street and the purple, roiling horizon. He went inside.
The Friday’s in Tlaxcultepec was an institution without American precedent. The restaurant proper lay in the old diplomatic banquet hall. Waiters wore tuxedos but the menu, the same as every other Friday’s, was in English only. Ethan followed the brass-banistered spiral staircase upstairs to the dark bar, where a cluster of gaunt American youths sat and watched football on the satellite feed. It was a comfortable area—a consular lounge with plush leather chairs, mahogany cigar humidors, and green-glass shaded table lamps. But the group of Americans shouted drunkenly at the screen and Ethan didn’t want any expatriate companionship.
He took a table on the empty outdoor patio that overlooked the street several stories below. The waiter approached with a towel over his arm as if he were about to pour a bottle of wine, and Ethan realized that here, where nobody drank wine, he must have mimicked the gesture without knowing its purpose. Pictures of local political candidates—Ethan recognized their names from the graffiti spray-painted in the road—were pinned to his lapel.
Ethan ordered a margarita and waited for Yolanda. Perhaps, he thought again, she would not come. The electric lights had gone on in the city, and they blinked and wavered as generators failed and restarted and failed again. Still the sun hung over the volcano and the rising exhaust merged with the ash and the whole city settled into a murky red glow, like a model viewed under a darkroom safety light.
The margarita came and it was terrible. Here, in the citrus capital of the world, they made margaritas from mix. Still, it was probably better not to eat the blighted fruit. Driving the mountain roads to the city, he had seen grove after grove of brown, bulbous bananas and withered black limes. An old man had slept under a rotting United Fruit billboard.
The Americans in the bar turned every so often to look at him. They did not appear friendly. They pointed and glared and shook their heads. They drank, he saw with relative envy, from a bottle of Cutty Sark. Down in the street, two men passed carrying a carved wooden Jesus over their heads. Beyond that, the road was empty. It was almost impossible to drink the margarita. He sipped and winced and sipped it again. The liquid was thick and warm and unctuous and the glass was rimmed with sugar instead of salt. He did not know how long he should wait for Yolanda.
One of the gangly Americans stood before him at the table. His hair was matted to his head with sweat and his eyes were splayed with veins like a glue-sniffer’s.
“Hey, guy,” he said. “You’re from stateside, right? You’re from the mother country. Tierra madre?”
“Sure,” Ethan said. He wished he hadn’t ordered the margarita with its electric Jell-O color and enormous stemmed glass. It was a ridiculous drink. It made it hard to appear disdainful. He lifted it to his lips.
“A little advice from an old hand,” the kid said. “You don’t sit on outdoor decks. Not if you’re an Anglo. Not in Tlax.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“You better come watch some football with us. You like football, don’t you?” He frowned as if he thought Ethan might answer in the negative. He did not blink his bloodshot eyes. “We’re not your run-of-the-mill creepazoids. We’re not the federales. We’re PCVs. We’re drinking Scotch.”
“I thought Peace Corps pulled out of Copal?”
“Well, sure, officially. But we didn’t want to be reassigned. This is where the groove is. They wanted to send us to the Goose but we did not want to go to the Goose. No way.”
“The Goose?”
“Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The Goose.”
Ethan had been to Tegus with Doyle and Paolo.
“No one calls it that,” he said. “Never.”
“Well, sure,” the kid said, turning to leave, maybe forgetting why he was there in the first place. “Not yet they don’t. Not in the Goose.”
“YOU SHOULDN’T APPEAR on balconies,” Yolanda said as she sat.
How long had it been since he left Mexico? About two weeks. Now her hair was down and shorter than when he last saw her, just past her shoulders. Her skin was darker than he remembered it, darker than Mirabelle’s, suntanned. The skin of someone spending her time in fields or jungles.
Ethan looked down to the boulevard, a twisting cobbled river empty and silent on the night’s current.
“There’s no one here,” he said. “We’re alone.”
“No,” said Yolanda. “The whole world is watching us. They just don’t know it yet.”
More than anything, Ethan wanted to sleep. A bed somewhere beyond all this, someplace empty. He envied Samantha her corridors closed to the maddening world.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me the truth about anything?”
She looked suddenly impatient. She raised her hands from the table like he was a child asking an annoying question. Are we there yet?
“And what difference would it make?” she asked. “Enough truth will force inaction out of anyone, while those who don’t care about it continue to destroy the world. Do you think Los Patrióticos cared about truth when they ravaged San Salvador?”
“You know,” he said, “I think I’m sick of being lectured. Of being told what I need to know and what I don’t. You’re all so righteous? Look at this place. It’s a petting zoo for psychopaths.”
She started to speak and he stopped her. When he held his hand up they both saw that it was trembling.
“And don’t start with the whole fruit and free trade spiel. I’m sick of that shtick as well. I’m sick of death squads.”
Yolanda, he saw, looked frightened. Twice more she started to speak and then stopped. She wanted him to be the crass American, the gringo patsy? Well, here he was. The waiter had not yet come to the table.
A howling, like that of a coyote, rose from some near street. Ethan watched Yolanda raise a hand slowly to her lips. She seemed for a moment like her sister, suddenly divorced from herself, a blind person tracing her own face into form. Ethan did not trust his own anger. It was the sham that masked what everything else masked.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I feel guilty enough. For everything.”
A memory appeared like a shipwreck breaching on the tide.
“When I was about twelve my mother bought a knitting machine,” Ethan said. “Now my mother, it should be noted, did not knit. Or sow, or cook, or buy me books for school. What my mother did was play the piano. Sometimes for days at a time, nonstop. She’d fall asleep at the piano, she’d wake there. You should have seen her fingers. They were really awful.”
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