He stood there, gazing at her.
He went to turn up the music, drew her to her feet. She let her head rest on his shoulder, arms draped around his waist. He could feel her heart beating against his chest, the weight of her tired arms on his hips, a slight breath on his neck. And soon he felt her head weigh heavier as sleep began to draw into her. The turn of their dance narrowed till they were turning in one place, her eyes closed.
8
At the end of the school day, on the bus back to El Tablon, they got off in the aldea of Santa Ana. On the western slope, close to this village, they could see pine stumps, the trunks stacked by the roadside.
“I’ve something to show you,” Bernabe said.
They went into a hall with a white painted cross above the door.
“What are these?” Lacey asked. Across the hall floor there were twenty or more stacks of cinder blocks and stovepipe.
“Stoves,” he said.
“Fuel efficient stoves. But nobody knows how to put them together. Some American church brought them here. And then they left at the start of the troubles over the mine. Let’s take one,” he said, “to see if we can make it work.”
While he went to hire a truck, Lacey sat outside on the hall steps. Below she could see clothing spread to dry on boulders by a muddy river. A security patrol was passing on the far bank.
The men were walking single file, two carrying rifles. She could see they were looking for someone. She watched them vanish into a pine grove.
She felt that Michael was somewhere in these highlands.
How would the message she had for him enter his heart?
She had written the letter on paper her father had made.
That folded piece of washi paper she carried in a buttoned shirt pocket, touched now and then to make sure it was still there, was made to last hundreds of years: paper that could survive immersion in water, mudslides, blood stains, almost anything.
“Let the words dwell in you.” She had read that somewhere: Let the words dwell in you. And how will he be changed, if at all?
When she used to work in a fire tower, the dispatcher on the radio phone would ask her, What’s your news? What do you have for me?
At first, when she called in a fire, her heart would beat out an emergency rhythm and she’d speak too quickly, jumbling her words. Later, when she got into the habit, she calmed down.
Still, there was always an edge of clairvoyant tension, of sharp seeing, when she walked from the fire finder to the radio desk.
She was remembering helicopters in the air, the smell of burning pine and fir. Words over the radio phone and then action.
She would stand on the fire tower catwalk and watch as the helicopters she’d called in brought firefighters. Whole days and weeks would go by, nothing. Watching, waiting, reading Ryokan or Spinoza. Then a lighting storm would blow up over the Palliser Ridge, and she would watch trees explode into flames.
Those were moments when she felt really alive and even now she remembered some of the fires she’d called in as if it were yesterday.
So often there are signs in this world.
Once, on a secondhand clothing rack at the back of the Grizzly Bookstore, she’d found a paper raincoat from Japan that had been left on a transcontinental train.
When she touched the sleeve that had the luminescence of corn snow she imagined that it was a warning for Mr. Giacomo, a rich man in the village. He had moved there when she was three. Soon he was buying land for orchards and vineyards. He bought Jonny’s taxi and the Mallone café and he’d floated a great house across the lake from Burnham for his wife.
There were rumours that he hadn’t made his money logging in the Nachako country as he had said, but from the sale of gems and pottery stolen in Japan at the end of the war. His mother was Japanese-Canadian, and he’d worked for the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section in Tokyo.
Once Mr. Giacomo had told her that he’d served as a translator for General Douglas MacArthur. He was there when the gemologist Edward Henderson was brought to Tokyo to appraise the gems that MacArthur had recovered from the ashes of burnt-out buildings. “We got buckets full of sand and gravel with lots of diamonds in it,” he told her. “Then we worked down in the vaults of the Bank of Japan where they kept all their gold. 800,000 karets of diamonds stored there shrunk to only 160,000 karets,” he’d nodded, looking at her. And now he wanted her best friend’s child, Michael’s child. She hoped that if and when she found him, Michael would act, but she didn’t know what he was capable of, whether he’d even care.
She didn’t know him that well. They’d met a few times in the Grizzly Bookstore and he’d asked her to look after a carton of books before he left.
Once Rose invited her to go swimming with them off Olebar beach. They’d rode down on bicycles, towels rolled and strapped to the carrier over Rose’s rear tire. That was in the middle of the summer and a wind storm came up when they were out in the water. The dry wind raised swells on the lake and soon it was frothing with whitecaps. Lacey had gone ashore and was sitting shivering on a towel, watching the two who were still out there. They were laughing and shouting, treading side by side in the swells that hefted and dropped them. He dove and then, through some trick of the wind and a shift in the current, when he came up she was fifty, sixty feet away, drifting downshore. He was laughing at the sudden wildness of the waves, but Rose, frightened, turned to swim in.
Something in his laughter had disturbed Lacey then, a testing recklessness that had no feeling for his girlfriend’s fear. Yet she shared a love of books with him, and for that she felt close to him.
Now she could smell the pine smoke of the village kitchen fires. Below in the evening light she could see that women had come to collect dried clothing from the river boulders. She could hear the slap of the current at the boulders in the river, the answering burl of a gravel bed downstream.
Only a messenger, her heart quiet and still.
Then she could go home.
Bernabe came over the bridge in a dented pickup, standing in the bed with his hands on the cab roof.
He leapt out to untie a rope tied in place of a tailgate. Lacey went inside with the driver to bring out a plancha of brushed concrete. Then they carried out cinder blocks and stove pipe, pushing them onto the truck bed.
“If it works, we’ll come back for another one,” he said.
They rode in the back of the pickup. The driver had a three-year-old child in the seat beside him. Bernabe could tell she liked being outside, the air cool on her forehead and wrists, holding onto the side of the truck and crouching to absorb the shock of the road-stones and ruts.
“I’m not stealing it,” he reassured her. “I have permission from the Mission 2 Serve. If I can figure out how it works, I’ll give away the rest.”
“I think I know where your boy is,” he went on. “There’s a young gringo in Chapel, on the other side of the San Pedro mountains. If you can wait I’ll take you there at the end of the week.”
“He’s not my boy,” she said. “I’m not even sure I’ll like him anymore. I’m waiting to see.”
9
They don’t usually patrol in the afternoon. The men have crops to attend to, a market stall or a job on a bus collecting fares.
But Bernadino Garcia is the leader and he has heard that Jose Cabral is hiding in the village of his birth. This village was also called Los Pinos, The Pines, and he sees that they’ve cut down many trees near the village, the blind adobe walls turned to the receded forest.
They went from door to door, asking.
No, Jose Cabral has not been seen.
Jose Cabral has gone to San Marcos, to pick coffee.
Jose Cabral has gone to the city, to work in a shoe factory with his cousin.
Jose Cabral has gone to Los Estados, to work on the broccoli farms in eastern Washington.
So they combed the forest around the village and along the river, looking for him.
The search was
not authorized. The army had said there was no anti-mining activity in the area. The subversives were elsewhere, in the Huehue lowlands.
Garcia had asked the army commissioner, “Why have you appointed me leader of a security patrol?”
“Because you can write.”
He could table reports. An army must have written reports; they were a necessary ritual that distinguished the military from vigilantes.
The goal of the security patrols was to ensure peace, stability. The men of the villages were asked to join.
Not really asked. If you don’t volunteer, they were told, you will be considered a subversive.
The government had promised a few coins a month for those who agreed to walk around the Department with a rifle or a stick.
Many had signed up because there were no known subversives in the area.
As long as the subversives were far away in some other Department, there was no question of bringing in a neighbour or a friend.
He was a shopkeeper in la calle des Flores. He sold medicine and other medical supplies, including regulators and bottled oxygen. In the democratic Arbenz era, he had served in the special presidential battalion, and because he could write, the army had made him the leader of this patrol of six men. He had heard that many zone commissioners had been appointed throughout the highlands and that each village was to form its own security patrol.
He asked his zone commander why these patrols were being set up, why the army had taken such an interest in civilians.
“Boredom,” the commissioner had replied. “Pure boredom.” The commissioner was an army veteran who did not bear arms, did not get paid and was a resident of Lupine.
He had told his men that Jose Cabral was a suspected activist, maybe the first recruited in the region. Before he recruited others they had to bring him in for interrogation.
The truth was that Cabral had gotten his daughter pregnant and vanished. Furious, he’d thought of going to the police, but the police would only laugh at him.
Then he remembered he was his own authority.
They went over the hill and below was the Rancho Viejo river lined with clothing-strewn boulders. Across the muddy water he could see a cinder-block prayer hall, a young gringa sitting on the steps. She looked like she was waiting for someone.
He was surprised to see her there.
Many foreigners, including the American builders of the prayer hall, had left during the start of the unrest last spring.
Garcia told his men to separate when they came to a pine grove. He knew there was no one in the grove and so did the men. But they must make a show of searching. These villagers were his own people; he knew how they thought, how they lied. Cabral was certainly in the village somewhere, well-hidden and protected.
Perhaps he was watching them right now, laughing.
The gringa was watching them. He could see her young age in the way she sat, legs drawn up, chin resting on knees, arms wrapped around her legs. She was surely the age of his own daughter. Young, vulnerable, hugging her knees and unsure. Cabral had certainly seen that open-hearted lack of confidence in his daughter. It was always in her laughter when she brought her friends home to their house on calle des Flores.
But when his daughter stood alone, you sometimes saw a troubled look, bewildered. He had seen that in her and had turned away, preferring her easy laughter.
Now he understood his fault.
He should have asked why, now and then, she had looked so unhappy.
If she saw him gazing at her, she’d immediately smile — a gift which he accepted with relief. Now he recognized that the relief he’d felt was cowardice. Something was troubling her and he had not wanted to know.
He recognized the truck that pulled up. It belonged to Pablo Valiente. Standing in the pines, he watched Valiente and the gringa carry a concrete slab to the truck bed, the teacher Bernabe Mateas following with an armful of cinder blocks.
He felt the gringa had appeared at that very moment to give him hope. After their walking through the village under the eyes of others who were perhaps laughing, after hours of misdirection and aimless searching, she was a sign of what could be done.
What if he took her and held her?
Then the laughter would stop. He would be in a position to negotiate. Valiente was from this Department and so was the teacher. Let them care about her, invite her into their homes. With that invitation came an obligation. And when that obligation was strong, he’d use her to find Cabral. At that thought, he felt the single concentration of his hatred.
He watched as they stacked cinder blocks and stove pipe in the truck bed.
She had sat there just like his daughter: vulnerable, alert and shy.
Only his daughter would no longer sit like that.
Cabral had destroyed her capacity for happiness, her life. The gringa’s apparition was a sign that God favoured him. He only had to figure out what to do with her, just when he’d almost given up hope. He only had to wait, be patient.
10
Michael awoke to the blat of a finger tapping a microphone.
He rolled over and looked at his watch. He’d slept in again.
Church service was underway across the street: a plaintive voice flapping over the chords of an electric piano. The clinic was closed for the day. He and Alana had agreed to take a bus trip to El Tablon. He’d heard that cortes were woven there and he wanted to see how it was done. He would also ask about the way into Tikru Lake. He might go on to the lake then or he might return with Alana, depending on how she was doing. In the street he bought cellophane packages of sliced watermelon, cantaloupe and pineapple, a half-dozen buns from la tienda Sophia, soft cheese and bottled water. The sky was clear, the light growing warm in the street that was still wet from last night’s rain and the air over the hills was sharp and clear. It smelled of wood smoke and the cordite of bombas let off in the fields to awaken the morning gods, the day lord.
When he arrived at the clinic the metal door was locked. He reached in through the grate to unlock it from the inside. He climbed to the third floor terrace. The door was shut, the curtains drawn. Laundry that she was going to wash in the morning was soaking in a plastic basin by the sink.
He had to rap on the door twice to get her to open it. She was in her dressing gown, shielding her eyes from the glare.
He got her back into bed, took the dispensary keys from the table and went downstairs for some Cipro. He brought her a glass of water from the jug on the kitchen counter and the pills.
“You work too hard,” he said.
He sat on the bed to place a folded, damp towel on her forehead.
“I don’t have time to get sick,” she complained. “There’s too much to do.”
He went to heat some water on the hot plate then brought her tea sweetened with panela. He washed the evening’s dishes that were stacked on the counter. From outside he could hear the rattle of a metal shutter raised in the tienda next door, the blaring horns and squealing air brakes of livestock trucks and buses coming in from outlying villages. When he brought her more tea he saw that her eyelids were drooping and that her body under the blankets was like a child’s, so small she’d become and curled in herself.
He read to her from Eduardo Galeano till she slept; he changed the sweat-drenched sheets when she got up to pee. He heard her retching into the toilet and went across the terrace to help her back into bed, his hand on her heaving stomach that felt hard and small.
“There is hardly anything of you left!”
“I have to get dressed. I have to make sure Celedonia’s okay.”
“There’s nothing you can do right now.”
“I feel like I haven’t done enough.”
“Back to bed,” he said, directing her by the shoulders.
He agreed to take Celedonia a note asking her to come to the apartment. From a low shelf he took out pyjamas and underwear, glanced at her while she changed with her back to him, arms shivering. He buttoned the pyjama t
op for her, drew a strand of hair off her forehead, helped her into bed, drawing the sheet to her chin and placing a damp cloth on her forehead. She turned on her side, the cloth dropping to the bed, and asked for a pen and a notebook.
She tore the message she’d written out of the notebook, handing it to him. “I’m asking her to come back with you. You could probably say that in Spanish but I want her to know that she’s to come right away. I’m worried about her.”
She settled back and closed her eyes. He left the dispensary keys on the table and pulled the clinic door shut when he went into the street, listening for the click of the lock.
Two women who were sitting on the curb got up and came toward him. Both were wearing traditional corte and huipil, women from an outlying village.
One touched his arm and asked softly if Alana was in, they’d been waiting for hours.
They’d heard that someone was giving away stoves American missionaries had brought into the highlands.
Perhaps Alana could help them get one.
He said he’d heard nothing about these stoves, that Alana knew nothing about them either, that she was ill and could not see them today. He walked away and they stood in the middle of the street, watching him.
He followed the street that skirted the western side of the village to a path down to the river. The late morning light was lying across the hills and he could smell cooking fires. Outside her kitchen, Celedonia was hanging clothes to dry on a rope tied between two ceiba trees. Behind her, a field of tall maize stretched to the river.
She read the note asking her to go to Alana’s, and he followed her back up the path.
Turning as she walked, she was trying to tell him something he couldn’t make out.
He could understand simple things now — buy fruit in the market, talk with vendors about where he was from, but often when the words were new to him, he was lost.
She was like a dream figure speaking urgent gibberish, her face crossed by waves of irritation. He thought it had something to do with her husband. He saw her shrug her shoulders, resigned.
The Orchard Keepers Page 24