Captives

by Tom Pow

  “Qué día más lindo,” said Pablo.

  “Isn’t it?” replied Raul, as if the beauty of the day were exclusive to themselves. Gabriel’s father’s eyes drilled into the stranger. He would have nothing to do with the puppets, only their master.

  ‘This is Señor Mason from America,” said Pablo, lifting his sunglasses to rest on his head. “He has come all this way to speak to you.”

  “Buenos días,” said the American. He’d picked up the lingo in Guatemala, dealing with the same kind of shit, the same incompetent policemen. Up close Gabriel could read TEXAS COWBOYS on his baseball cap.

  “Qué quiere conmigo?” said Gabriel’s father, in a whisper.

  “First,” said the American, “I’d like you to invite us all inside out of this heat.” He spoke Spanish as if it were brittle—a language so weak boned it never got out of bed, never knew how to work or how to party or how to dance.

  After the strengthening sun, it was dark at first in the wooden house. Mason dabbed his head and squinted around till he caught the looming shape of an armchair.

  “Ah.” He sank into it and said to no one in particular, “You never heard of air con here?”

  Gabriel helped his father back onto his bed. His father’s eyes were closed and he was breathing heavily. Only Pablo had come inside. Raul sat on the rocker on the veranda, his arms along the rests, his hands hanging loosely. He tipped his head back and rocked.

  “These are bad times,” Mason said. “Bad times around here.”

  “You,” spat Gabriel’s mother. “Why do you come around here, telling us of bad times? We do not need you to tell us of bad times.”

  “Hey, tranquilo, señora,” said Mason, pretending offense. “Only trying to be friendly.”

  “Friendly? We don’t need your kind of ‘friendly’ around here.”

  “And what kind of friend do you think I am, señora?”

  “I know. I know you. I know you, United Nickel man.”

  “Well, good for you, señora. But from where I’m looking, I think your husband there needs all the friends he can get.”’

  “How dare you come into my house and tell me this? You, who took his land—”

  “Gave him a good price, señora.”

  “A good price? You take his land and you tell him if he wants to eat he must work for United Nickel. A job that gives him the disease that will kill him. You think this is a good price?”

  “Now, you know there’s no proof of a link between nickel mining and cancer as well as I do.”

  “Do I? Do I? Let me tell you the proof I see. I see a healthy man come home coughing every night. A man who used to work the land all day—sunrise to sunset—a strong man, reduced to an invalid in five years. Do not come into my home to tell me of what I know.”

  “I admire a man who can work, señora, and I should remind you of the pension that United Nickel is paying your husband—and his family—though it accepts no responsibility for his illness.”

  “Four dollars. Four dollars a month. For the loss of his health; the loss of the sacred land he loved; the loss of his dignity.”

  At that last comment, Gabriel’s father pushed himself up and held his shaking head as still as he could. He fixed Mason with watery eyes in which, deep down, there was still something polished and sharp.

  “Forgive me.” His wife breathed the words with such quietness, only her husband could hear.

  Pablo was bending down to look out of the small window at the back of the shack. He could see over the bay to the small isthmus where the tiny airport was, its runway improbably laid over the rise where the land was closest to the sea. That was where he’d picked up Señor Mason. Even as a trouble-shooter for United Nickel, Mason could not quite disguise from Pablo how beautiful he found this place—how blue the sea, the sky, and how fierce the slabs of light on the old colonial battlements. And that dense green mystery that so effectively hid those who had caused his trip.

  “Come on then, let’s keep moving,” he had said to Pablo. “Do you love your job? I just love my job.”

  The usual gaggle of tourists had deplaned with him. Oohing and aahing. How Pablo hated them, their love of color, of picturesque poverty. If it weren’t for his uniform, he thought, he wouldn’t be able to bear living here—a nobody like everyone in his family. But one day that magical strip would launch him far away from this place; one day he’d be a taxi driver in Nueva York. He had another cousin there.

  “They all drive like you there, Pablo. You’d fit in, no problem.”

  He turned from the window. Things didn’t seem to be going well.

  Mason sighed. The failure of friendliness always disappointed him.

  “Let us then touch on the matter that really brings us here. This one concerns your son, Gabriel.”

  “My son has nothing to do with United Nickel,” said his mother.

  “No, indeed,” said Mason. “But perhaps he has something to do with vanishing tourists.”

  “Cabrón,” said Gabriel’s mother. “Leave my house, leave my house now, son of a whore.”

  It was not the best way, Gabriel’s father knew, but all he could do was shake his head, muttering, “Pilar, Pilar, por favor…”

  “Well,” said Mason, “it’s become obvious we can get nowhere here. Isn’t it time you did something?”

  Pablo stepped forward immediately and as importantly as he could.

  “Gabriel Ferrer, I must invite you to come with us to the police station. We have questions we need to ask concerning the abduction of foreign tourists on the island.”

  “You do not take him alone,” said his mother. “I’m coming with you, Gabriel. This is nonsense!”

  “No, señora. He comes alone. Really, it’s better this way.”

  “It’s all right, Mother. I’ll go. I have nothing to fear.”

  “We hope not,” said Mason, smiling at Gabriel and his mother.

  Gabriel leaned over his father to say good-bye.

  “Say nothing,” his father whispered. Gabriel could feel how light his father’s breath was and how the smell of decay came with it.

  This time Mason walked ahead, his hat off, testing the heat of the sun. Gabriel was flanked by the cousins. It was a complex thing, Pablo mused, power and how it touched you: You could feel it flowing into you from the weak and the powerless as well as from the strong.

  “Primos! Cousins!” Gabriel’s mother shouted. “Where is your shame?”

  Back inside the house, she knelt before her dying husband and wept into his lap.

  [CHAPTER 5]

  like all prodigal sons

  Martin looked at his father, squatting like a toad over his diary. His father’s eyes were narrowed to focus on the tiny writing. His worst fear was the paper running out. Beside him, his mother leaned her small sketch-book on her thighs, her head lifting and lowering as she sketched the shelter and, to its side, Miguel and El Taino leaning against a palm trunk. Every so often she paused to pin her lank hair behind her ears again.

  It appeared to Martin that his parents’ fear had mostly been replaced by a new intensity that the others saw as distraction, selfishness. They seemed intent on finding a shape for what was happening to them as it was happening; too busy to notice what did not fit a narrative they had already imagined. How else were they to survive?

  Any day now, the schools would start. Perhaps Nick would be one of the returning pupils—getting some normality back into his life. Staying with one of his friends perhaps—an endless sleepover—or with his lawyer uncle, Ralph, and his young wife in the big Georgian house that always made his father so uneasy.

  The summer term began with the trees dripping with blossoms, the exotic come to suburban streets. His father held the end of another year in sight and seemed more relaxed, more expansive, as he ambled down the corridors—the ones Martin avoided. Even the feud with the headmaster became something he could make light of. “Yes, Headmaster, I’m sorry the paperwork’s late. But look around you.
Nature’s on the side of the creative—it doesn’t need to fill in a form to advance.” He even thought he saw the man smile. Still, his mood could be tripped. When there was a beige self-addressed envelope on the carpet, Martin could hear his father sigh before he opened it and his eyes skimmed yet another rejection slip.

  “Not for us! Not for us! Christ, how anodyne can you get? I mean, what do they bloody want?”

  “It’s still a good story, Tony. Nothing changes that,” his mother said.

  “Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it really?”

  “No. Come on, try somewhere else,” she said, an edge of tiredness in her voice her husband never noticed. “There are always other magazines.”

  So she would dust him down and buck him up. The rejection slips would pile up, clogging his pen, and more and more Martin became aware of his father’s dissatisfaction with himself and his life.

  It was also in the blossoming time a year before that two policemen had come to their door with Nick, standing slightly unsteadily, between them. His small, almost shaved head glowed bluishly in the hall light. It wasn’t the first time and no more serious than the others: hanging about the playground at night, being rude to passers-by, getting his hands on cider booze and alco-pops. A typical hoodie. But it was the first time that one of the policemen had recognized his mother as the social worker from a case that had involved them both.

  “Well, let’s hope the young man takes a warning this time,” the policeman had said. “Next time it won’t be so pleasant.”

  “Yes, Constable…”

  “Sergeant.”

  “Yes, of course, Sergeant. Sorry. Very sorry. Thank you. Sergeant.”

  “Can’t even look after her own,” she’d heard the sergeant say to the other policeman as they walked to the front gate.

  When his father returned home, she was ashen. As Martin listened outside the door, she told him how shame and embarrassment had gripped her. She feared for Nick. For the future. She felt they’d lost him to a set of foul-mouthed shadows on BMX bikes. She’d seen a hundred families fractured in just the same way. Martin saw his father take her in his arms. She shook: a small woman becoming lost in his father’s big, shambling body.

  No one mentioned a breakdown. It was just that the washing was never done; the meals she had agreed to cook never appeared. Nick was rarely home. All his energy was spent escaping the enormous tiredness that had enveloped his parents and threatened to engulf him too.

  She agreed to take a leave of absence and began to draw again. “Something for yourself,” the social worker had said. But still, the family couldn’t shift that exhausted feeling of being on a still-bound ship going nowhere. One evening Martin had heard the soft voices of his father and of Christine, the social worker, rising up the well of the hall.

  “Are you concerned at all about Martin?”

  “About Martin? No, not at all. Why do you ask?”

  “He’s very quiet.”

  “Well, that’s his nature. He’s very different from Nick.”

  “I can see that. It’s just that he doesn’t seem to be very happy.”

  “But none of us are with all this business with Nick—and now Carol being unwell.”

  “I understand and I know it’s not easy for any of you. It’s just that, well, maybe Martin’s feeling everything more than he’s showing. He seems a very sensitive boy.”

  “Oh he is, he is—”

  “Look, Tony, all I’m saying is, keep an eye on Martin too.”

  “Oh, we will … I will. But please don’t say anything to Carol. I can’t have her worrying about anything else.

  “Of course, Tony.”

  “Thank you, Christine. Thank you.” His father shuffled to the door to show her out. Suddenly he’d got old.

  Soon after that conversation his father, in an act of desperation, booked the Easter trip of a lifetime. Whether it was in anticipation of that, or whether some confusion he’d been feeling had simply resolved itself on its own, Nick began to calm down, to stay in, to “go straight,” to become, like all prodigal sons, precious.

  “Oh, Martin,” his mother said one day. “It’s a mystery to your father and me, but I think Nick’s turned a corner at last.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Oh, isn’t it? This trip could be the making of him, you know.”

  * * *

  “Hey, Martin,” Louise called from another part of the clearing. She wanted him to cut her hair with a pair of scissors she’d borrowed from Maria.

  “Why not ask her then?” he asked.

  “Come on, Martin, do you think she’s here to do us favors?”

  “Your mum?”

  “Get real. Like, Mom thinks we are our hair. She’d never do it and I need it done. I just can’t bear it up, down, or wherever. I want it off. What’s your problem?”

  “Nothing,” said Martin. “I’ll do it. Here, sit on that trunk.”

  Martin took a handful of her thick, rich hair. He knew the only problem he had was to stop his hands from shaking.

  “How do you want it, madam?” It would be easier, he thought, to be in character.

  “Just short. Be brave.”

  The scissors were small, so it wasn’t possible to cut the hair without lifting up lengths of it between thumb and forefinger.

  Lift. Cut. Lift. Cut.

  He was aware how his forefinger traced the slight undulation in Louise’s scalp above her ears, the soft give of the ears when his fingers brushed against them. He cut where her hair grew from its crown and marvelled at the spring of it, the strength of it. He angled her head slightly and she responded to the slightest pressure. As the hair fell around her, neither spoke. Miguel, from across the clearing, watched.

  Perhaps, Martin thought, he’d have his own story to tell once this was all over. He imagined the groups standing around him, on the fallen blossoms, as he told them about his girlfriend.

  “Yeah,” he’d go, “half French, half American.”

  “Cool.”

  Martin tipped Louise’s head down and lifted up the first hank of hair from the back of her neck. He cut it. He ran his hands through the hair that still fell over her shoulders and lifted another hank. He uncovered a mole the size of a pinhead. He cut till it was all gone. Down the back of her neck, briefly still lowered, trailed a line of golden hairs, so light only such a moment could show them.

  “All done?” she asked.

  “Almost,” he said, and circled her, evening up the roughest of his cuts.

  Louise had sensed his concentration throughout. The silence was part of it, but so too was the way his fingers had lingered—oh, the tiniest length of time—on her scalp or on her shoulder; and how, when he had first gathered up her hair to reveal her neck, she’d noticed a discernible intake of breath. She had sensed him behind her at the swimming hole too; sensed the excitement he’d felt as their thighs touched when the photograph was being taken. She felt from him something she could accept or deflect, something constant that, in this place at least, she could trust.

  “Qué linda!” It was Eduardo, behind them. For the first time Louise felt exposed and ran her hands over the thick pelt of her hair.

  “What? Have you been spying on us?” said Martin.

  “On what? On you and me?” said Louise lightly, and the intimacy Martin had felt evaporated in the warm air.

  * * *

  Martin felt exposed again when Melanie exploded at Louise, then turned on him for the “mess” he’d made of her “baby’s beautiful hair.”

  “Did you never think of consulting me about whether it was a good idea?”

  “Never,” said Louise, and she stood in the clearing, with her cropped hair and her shoulders pulled back. Like a warrior princess, thought Martin. A warrior princess who had commanded him to act and he had willingly obeyed.

  “Am I the sole parent in all this?” Melanie spat at Jacques as she turned from them all.

  Every time he saw Louise over the next couple of
days he felt the web of intimacy grow again, threatening to ensnare him, so that he had to fight his way out of it—though if he could remember the exact tone in which she’d said “You and me?” as if the idea were ridiculous, the threads broke at once. Because his powerlessness felt to him like shame, he avoided both Louise and Eduardo as far as was possible in the confines of the camp. It was the card game that brought Martin back to Louise and then brought the three of them together.

  It had begun as the closest any of them had had to fun for many days. An even playing field at last. Only Rafael could have sanctioned it. But Louise had watched with a gathering horror as her father became a stranger to her. The pride she’d thought he carried for them all was revealed as mere aggression that until this moment had lacked the opportunity to express itself. The competition of the card game had stripped from Jacques an awareness of where they were and quite who they were dealing with. When he began pushing Miguel, Martin knew there could only be one possible outcome. Yet it had shocked Louise to see her strong father so humbled, retching on the ground like a sick dog.

  Melanie had wanted more from her and called her disloyal; but her own displays of loyalty didn’t appear to make Jacques feel any more warmly towards her. His shame was so deep, an arm of comfort was like salt in his wounds. He stayed in his shelter, nursed his pain, passed blood, and sulked.

  Violence had entered the encampment. It was a time to lie low, to expiate. Martin’s parents huddled over their notebooks. He and Louise drifted as far as they dared to the corner of the clearing, where Eduardo stood sole guard.

  “Asshole. My father’s an asshole.” Louise bared her teeth as she said it.

  Martin shrugged. He wanted to tell her that there was something brave if foolhardy about her father’s challenge, but he couldn’t find the will to contradict her.

  “And when he called Miguel a ‘big ape’—I couldn’t believe my ears. Call him a thug, murderer—anything—but an ape. Jesus, that man’s my father.”