by Tom Pow
“Pack everything. Fill in latrines,” says Eduardo. “Tomorrow, early, we leave.”
“For the coast?” says Melanie.
“Perhaps,” says Eduardo. Then he gives Louise one of those looks that have aroused all our suspicions. I wonder if he knows that the endgame is in sight and that he has little time to make his move. One more reason we’re happy Louise and Martin have each other.
Day Twenty-Four
For much of the night it has rained. We rise in darkness. We gather up our belongings as Miguel and El Taino take their machetes to the shelters, scattering thatch and supports. There is no cause for speech and the tasks are carried out in silence—a numb silence, for it seems strange to be leaving this spot after the time we’ve spent here. I wonder where we are in this ordeal and what our journey to the coast will bring. By the time we’re ready to go, the black cut-outs of the palms are already dark green.
* * *
We walk till almost midday. We clear the thickest of the forest canopy and the sun is strong on our backs. But Carol in particular is struggling. She falls, twists her ankle, and limps on in pain.
“We can’t go on like this,” I say to Rafael. “We must rest for a bit.”
“After the river. We cross first and then we rest.”
We take the steep slope down into the river valley. I give Carol all the support I can. Rainfall has swollen the river, and it rushes and twists down the hillside. On the river plain you can see where its force has taken great half-moons of red earth from its banking.
Rafael shouts ahead to Gabriel, who nods affirmatively and waves his hand farther on. Finally we come to a part where the river spreads into a broad shallow weir. It still flows strongly here, but close below its plaited surface there’s a line of stepping stones. Just beyond these, the river tumbles into a deep pool, then sweeps on down towards the coast. Gabriel nods: This is it.
Miguel places one boot on the first stone and draws the other foot across. The water washes over the ankles of his boots. He stretches a boot to the next stone. At the same time he reaches out a hand to one of us. To our surprise and dismay, it’s Martin who reacts first. Their eyes lock together. As Martin stands on the first stone, Miguel steps onto the second one. Whether its edge is rounded or whether Miguel simply miscalculates the maneuver, he twists as he attempts to regain his balance and his left leg seems to hang in the air momentarily, before the force of the water tips him over and he falls backwards into the river. His pack hits the water first and his head whips back and strikes one of the stones. There’s a burst of blood in the water, before the strong current carries him away like a log down into the deeper reaches of the river.
“Martin!”’ Carol’s first thought is for Martin, who stands statuesque on the first stone, his arms curled around himself. I reach out to him and, with locked fingertips, pull him to the safety of the bank.
But Carol’s shout is embedded in El Taino’s shout for Miguel. Now Rafael and Eduardo hold him back, talking fiercely to him all the while. The whites of his eyes roll, and he casts Rafael and Eduardo from him as if they were bindings of straw and leaps down the riverbank after Miguel’s body.
We collapse on the grass. Martin allows himself to be held awkwardly in Carol’s arms. She strokes his forehead over and over again.
“Martin. Martin. Martin.”
After a while El Taino returns, shaking his head, his eyes glistening. Rafael is first to rise to greet him. He says a few words and lays his hand on El Taino’s shoulder. Gabriel approaches and seems to shrug an apology. For a moment I think El Taino will take his machete to him. But the energy and the anger have left him. He buckles to the ground, his head between his knees, his broken fingers held like a flag above one shoulder.
We improvise a camp near the river. Rafael wants us to stay here for as long as we can to retrieve Miguel’s body.
Day Twenty-Seven
After two days of searching, Eduardo and El Taino find Miguel’s body, lodged between two rocks, and bring it back up to camp. They’re exhausted. The body is gray as slate and wrinkled. River crabs have been nibbling at the softened flesh—small ragged wounds. His proud face is bruised and swollen, beaten up like an old fighter’s. But even in death we’re slightly nervous about looking at him, face-to-face, for long.
El Taino and Jacques have scrabbled in the earth and dug a shallow grave. Rafael stands at its head and insists we all join him. Once again Jacques humiliates himself, stubbornly sitting with his back to us all as we gather round the grave. El Taino pushes his muzzle hard into Jacques’s neck.
“Stand, señor, stand. All stand for Miguel.” His voice shakes.
Melanie screams, “Jacques, stand, for God’s sake!”
Rafael places his hand on El Taino’s forearm. He lowers the gun and Jacques slowly rises to his feet.
“I dig the man’s grave. Must I honor him too?” he mutters to me. There’s a minute of silence, till Rafael speaks, first in Spanish, then in English for us all.
“No matter where death surprises us, let it be welcome. And let other hands pick up our weapons where they fall. One day, Miguel, you will hear other men come forward to intone your funeral dirge till the air rings with cries, not of grief, but of victory. For wherever a life is lost, however it is lost, it is a life lost in battle. It is a gift for a cause greater than any of us.…
“‘Miguel, comrade, soldier of freedom, we salute you.”’
So Maria was right. Rafael’s still a poet when he wants to be. We stamp the earth down on the unmarked grave till it’s flat and hard and Rafael’s sure not even the wild pigs could root Miguel out.
Day Twenty-Eight
In the time of our waiting, the river has become more easily passable. We cross by the stepping stones that cost Miguel his life and soon we’re glimpsing the shining blade of the sea through a fringe of coastal palms. We pass only one poor hut on our journey and now must be far from the town. I think of the first shacks we passed at the start of this ordeal. It is with the same casual “‘Hola”’ that we’re greeted now by an old man. Rafael exchanges a few words with him. It seems we’ll have fish to eat tonight.
It’s late afternoon and the sun is just beginning to lay itself across the water—the closer we are to it, the more beautiful a deep blue it becomes.
After the claustrophobia of the forest—always on narrow paths, always with a thick canopy above us—you can see how each of us visibly changes. Our shoulders come down; we lift up our faces and breathe in the air. We walk along the narrow strip of beach, reconnecting with the world at our feet. Everything is like a message—shells, seeds, even the plastic detritus from a world we were once so keen to escape. Our captors are out of place here in their heavy fatigues with their machine guns slung over their shoulders. Only El Taino seems unchanged, his taut face a reminder of his loss and of the threat that still hangs over us.
Rafael stops and removes his bag, throwing it on the ground and arching his back.
“Thank God,” says Melanie. “Well, at least they’ve brought us to the ocean.”
“A day at the seaside,” says Martin glumly.
“Oh, come on, Marty,” says Louise, and Martin brightens a little at that. “Isn’t it great to get out of the forest? Do you think they’ll let us swim?”
“I ask for you,” says Eduardo, in that oily way of his. He has words with Rafael and comes back nodding.
“Great! Come on, Marty, let’s go!”
They’re just like any other young couple on the beach. They strip down to their underwear and take to the water. We’re all close behind. We turn in the water, weightless after so much physical effort. As we swim, El Taino collects firewood, and soon a small fire is burning and the old man’s fish is cooking. Rafael himself dishes it out to us with some plantain on broad shiny leaves.
As the sun begins its rapid sinking, Rafael removes his shabby uniform and walks down to the water.
“Maria,” he calls, “a swim.”
�
��You go,” she says, and to El Taino, “And you too, El Taino.”
El Taino lifts his shirt over his head and turns slowly to Gabriel—the first time he has looked at him since Miguel’s death. But Gabriel shakes his head, like someone with a fear of water.
Louise gets up. “Well, I’m for a last evening dip. Anyone else?”
“I’ll go,” says Eduardo.
“What about you, Martin?” Carol asks.
“No, I’m fine.” I feel irritation, wondering how Martin can let Eduardo get away with it.
Maria never takes her eyes from Rafael as he wades into the water. Above him, I note, a lone cloud touches the edge of the moon like blotting paper. It’s the last thing I can be clear about. The rest I must piece together as well as I can.
* * *
Martin had always known this was where he was heading, but when he arrived, the words started to swim before his eyes. Their letters meshed into barbed, impenetrable bushes. His memory supplied flashes of gunfire; shouts. An occasional phrase, sometimes a whole sentence, surfaced from the darkness—
“Hit the sand!”—
And Martin knew that hiding there somewhere in the undergrowth of words was the famous description of how Eduardo, in an act of desperation, made a grab for Louise to protect his own precious skin. How they threshed in the water, one against the other.
And how, after the shooting, there was silence. Boots. Sobbing. The curtness of an order.
He wiped his eyes and read his father’s last words:
* * *
When the shooting stops, Carol crawls over the sand towards Martin and pulls him back into her lap. He lies in her arms, his body limp, his eyes wide with shock. We stay like that—the three of us—till two soldiers come to us over bands of broken shells, their weapons still held in readiness. An American voice asks, “You OK, buddy? This your family? It’s all over, folks. You’ll be home real soon.”
* * *
Outside, the street was glazed with ice. Too cold for snow. Long ago he had heard the hall lights click off. The length of the long dark avenue, his was the only lit window. He turned Test Drive up as loudly as he could. Kurlansky snarled—
“What will it take to make you whole?
What will it take to give you a soul?
We’re twisted, twisted in isolation…”
The last word was drawn out, jarring as a train crash. But the music could not quell the final images conjured from the words of his father’s diary. Tears of grief and injustice tracked down the magazine’s last page. So many details left hanging, so much unexplained. At the first gunfire, Gabriel had run towards the National Defensce Force troops and their American advisers, waving his arms.
“I wasn’t to know he didn’t carry a gun,” said the soldier who reportedly brought him down. But there was a death more innocent than his.
Martin couldn’t remember when he’d started pencilling notes in the margins of the articles. Certainly it had been after everyone had gone to bed. But once he had started, he found he couldn’t stop. He’d pulled his desk light closer to the paper and found that, with a tiny spidery handwriting, he could write between the lines.
The first flakes began to fall sometime in the early hours of the day, like blossoms from the dark, laden sky. By the time the first light came through the curtains, and he heard the cars revving through the thick snow, he knew he had the bones of a story he would write one day. He could almost feel it now, fleshing out inside his head.
[PART TWO]
A SECRET RIVER
[CHAPTER 1]
don’t you like water?
It was as if someone had pushed the vegetation back to reveal clear water cupped in the heart of the forest. To Louise the pool had the intimacy of a secret.
Miguel and El Taino sat on the rim above it with their guns resting on their knees. Eduardo stripped down to his underpants and dived like a knife into the water. He surfaced and called up to them.
“Come on in. Cool down.”
The hostages all looked at one another uneasily and Miguel gestured that, Martin apart, they must go in the water.
“Come on. You see, you must,” Eduardo shouted again.
Louise noted how the light that filtered through the trees above made his hair shine like wet coal.
“What?” said Carol. “They expect us just to…?”
“Well,” said Jacques, rolling his broad shoulders, “that water does look inviting and—”
“Easy for you to say,” said Carol. “You’re not the one with three men staring at you.”
“Three?” said Jacques.
“Eduardo, Miguel, and El Taino.”
“Don’t we count?” said Tony.
“You know what?” said Melanie. “I don’t care any more. I need a wash and this looks like the best bet yet.”
“Right on!” said Louise and lifted her T-shirt over her head.
She felt a sudden excitement, the kind of excitement that makes you clumsy taking off your clothes when you’re in a race to be first in the pool or the ocean—all fingers and thumbs. But this wasn’t the pool or the beach. This was a waterhole in the middle of the jungle, God knew where. In phys. ed. changing rooms, when there were only girls present, Louise turned her back on everyone and curled her shoulders around breasts she feared might be too large—already becoming her mother’s daughter. Yet here she was, in front of a bunch of people who’d kidnapped her and threatened her life, just lifting her T-shirt off and stepping out of her shorts. She noted that Carol, at least, was still in her mental changing room, but the others were taking off their clothes less carefully and folding them roughly into small piles.
Then the awkwardness came.
If she’d been able to strip and dive straight into the clear water, it would have been fine; but she found herself instead poised on the lip of the bank, her arms instinctively crossed over her bra, seized by a fresh panic.
Around her, she heard the forest titter.
Eduardo grinned and beckoned her in. His skin was light brown—like caramels. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like water?”
“It’s not that…” said Louise.
“Don’t worry,” Eduardo called. “There’s nothing in the water that could harm you. We have no water snakes.”
“How disappointing,” said Jacques, as Louise hit the water and felt its coolness envelop her. She was soon aware of other, larger bodies beside her. Occasionally an arm or a leg would brush against her; a spray of water momentarily blinded her. But mostly she turned in the water, curled in on herself, and felt the water support her and grant her a temporary freedom.
“Aren’t you coming in then?” she called to Martin, who had edged himself down the banking, past the point where Eduardo had said they could wash their clothes.
“They won’t allow me,” said Martin. “Because of my leg.”
“Poor you,” Louise called, and ducked under the surface again.
* * *
Louise had not been alone in finding some escape in the water that day. The other hostages too had returned refreshed, more able to confront their situation. There was an openness about their conversation that night that suggested bonds would be formed to get them through this. It was Martin, who’d been unable to lose himself in the water but had remained on the bank feeling ungainly and excluded, who was most burdened by what he had seen there.
The least of his discomforts was seeing the dark coins of Melanie’s nipples through the wet gauze of her bra; the greatest seeing Miguel’s back, crossed with grooves of white hot ash. But it was neither of these images—nor of the otherworldly beauty of a blue bird hovering over the water—that haunted him in nights to come. Rather it was a line of fine gold hairs in the small of Louise’s back. The sun had picked it out as he’d crouched behind her on the edge of the bank, and it pricked all his waking dreams.
[CHAPTER 2]
a flower in her hair
From the start of their captivity there had been a rule: no t
alking on the trail. At times this intensified their discomfort. Louise could see the nervousness in Carol rise whenever anything brushed against her. The green trail was to her a gauntlet; one she must run with few words of comfort to allay her suspicions about what might threaten her. Once a fierce hollow knocking caused her to jump.
“Carpintera,” said Miguel, turning his fingers into a beak.
“It’s a woodpecker, Carol,” said Tony. “Only a woodpecker.”
“Ah, of course.” Carol nodded tiredly. “Silly of me.”
Louise played it a different way in those first days. She simply lowered her eyes to the track, to the roots that crossed it, the grit pressed into it, and saw it as little different to the trails she had followed through the Rockies with her parents. It was one of the things weekends were for. To get in the pick-up and leave the sprawling suburbs behind. For lately the city was claiming more and more of the gentle hills around it. The communities appeared almost instantly, with their schools, their malls, and their long, gently undulating streets, named after every variation involving Glen, Valley, and View. But still it was possible, on a clear day with a high blue sky, to escape them.
Mostly it was the front range of the Rockies they reached. Her father, when he was there, flicked on the four-wheel drive, and they climbed the twisting logging track to the head of the trail. Like now, she thought, it’s just like now. She almost convinced herself that if she were to lift her eyes from the trail, to either side of her would be firs, silvery aspens, junipers, above a floor of pine needles. And ahead, through the trees, she would see not more of the same, but the clear line where the trees had surrendered their advance, and above that line only rocks and the blue-edged distance. Blue. Blue tingeing the tips of the firs; star-shaped blue alpine flowers; blue mountains. And yes, exactly as now, her father striding confidently ahead, making light of the climb; then herself, then her mother obstinately pegging them both back, the explosion of her hair like anger itself.