Cut Off

by Jamie Bastedo

  I gave Luiz a blank face. I never knew if he was kidding or just a little crazy, but I crunched some numbers that seemed to satisfy him.

  More whiteboard scribbles, this time on the ups and downs of Guatemala’s economy, which, Luiz explained, was basically controlled by five rico families. “How do the rich get richer?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I dunno, by—”

  “Jumping into bed with multinational companies! Exactly, Indio. Very good.”

  “You mean companies like … CanaMine.”

  Luiz glanced at the closed door of the practice room. He quickly wiped the evidence off the whiteboard. “Sorry, Indio, math class is over. Time for Shakespeare.”

  “No, wait, Luiz, tell me, what happened out at the mine yesterday? Some kind of disaster?”

  From Luiz I learned that the earthquake’s epicenter was located “not far from the mine’s soft underbelly.” About the time Juan Carlos was running from a downpour of razor wire and Christmas lights, an earth dam at the Eldorado mine popped open and vomited a million swimming pools of toxic tailings into Río Madre Noble, the Noble Mother river that, Luiz explained, is “super sagrado”—super sacred—for the local Mayan villagers. “Not to mention it’s their only source of drinking water,” he said, “their source of life.”

  Luiz glanced at the door again, then leaned toward me. “They won’t take this lying down,” he said. “You don’t have to be a political scientist like me to know there’s going to be big trouble.”

  “You think so, Luiz?”

  He tugged hard on his beard. “Indio, I know so.”

  PROTEST

  The trouble arrived the next day, just like Luiz said. I was in the practice room, slogging through a new Villa-Lobos étude, when something made me freeze.

  It started with a low growl. I looked up from my guitar to see Loba with her front paws on the windowsill. The fur on her back formed a ridge of tension. I tucked my guitar in its case and locked it. I joined Loba at the window, smelling chaos in the wind. I felt another tremor, this time in my stomach.

  The quake had torn a V-shaped crack in the outside wall. Andres had tried to plug the gap with chicken wire.

  A kid on a tricycle could’ve crashed through it.

  The ladder still lay where it fell two nights ago, like a corpse half-hidden in the grass.

  Loba’s growl swelled into a deep bark. I scratched her ears, tried to smooth out her back. “It’s okay, girl,” I said, knowing it wasn’t. Together we strained our ears, sniffed the dusty air.

  Distant shouting. Chanting.

  After a year of fragile peace, they were back.

  A lot more of them.

  Getting closer. Fast.

  I heard a door slam and someone crunching across the chips of broken cement that littered our driveway. Juan Carlos, wearing his camo flak jacket and handgun already drawn.

  Two of Dad’s outer guards, now dressed up like soldiers, paced back and forth. Their shotguns were pointed at the ground.

  For the moment, at least.

  The villagers arrived like a swarm of angry bees.

  Women and children raised cardboard crosses above their heads with the words Madre Noble painted in dripping red letters.

  The men raised fists.

  Loba whimpered and I realized I had been gripping her neck too tight.

  Something green and shiny sailed over the wall.

  Splintering glass.

  I stared at a wet splotch on the driveway, waiting for flames.

  Molotov cocktail, the homemade bomb of choice for riots like this. Luiz once told me how to make one. Pretty simple. A bottle full of gasoline. A rag wick. Just add a lit match and toss at your enemy.

  Another bottle sailed over the wall. And another.

  Smash! Smash!

  No flames.

  One crashed on the edge of the swimming pool and squirted brown guck into the turquoise water.

  More smashing bottles. More muddy stains.

  Then I got it. The blood of Madre Noble.

  Contaminated water from the villagers’ source of life.

  Two worlds merged in our swimming pool. Rico and pobreza.

  Angry bees.

  Juan Carlos shouted something into his walkie-talkie.

  Two shotgun blasts. I didn’t know where. Into the sky?

  Angrier bees.

  I ran across the room for my binoculars.

  There she was again. Eliza. Her once star-struck face now screwed up in fury.

  Shaking her fist right at me.

  The sun was in her face. She couldn’t possibly have seen me. Or could she?

  Shaking her fist at what could be her distant cousin.

  Me.

  More shotgun blasts.

  The bottles flew.

  Approaching sirens.

  Screech of truck tires.

  The stomp of army boots.

  Juan Carlos jammed a shoulder against one side of the crack and leveled his gun with both hands.

  At what? At who?

  I cringed at the sound of gunfire, this time much closer.

  A cross fell to the street, and with it, the young mother who’d held it a split second ago, the top of her skull blown clean off.

  Part II

  CALGARY, ALBERTA

  Eight months later

  Technology is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

  –C.P. Snow

  “Why can’t you just stop?” non-addicts will often ask. When you ask us to stop gaming or to give up online social networking, you might as well ask that we stop living.

  –Kevin Roberts, Cyber Junkie

  SWAPPING PLANETS

  It was weird moving to a new planet. Very weird.

  Soon after the shooting, Dad ran from Guatemala, figuring he might be next. We rocketed from Planet Xela to Planet Calgary at lightning speed.

  Calgary. Alberta. Canada. Where I heard that real guys wear cowboy boots, have sunburned necks, worship hockey, and bathe in oil sands.

  Calgary. My dad’s town. We were on his turf now.

  I was an alien all over again.

  Dad knew that a lot of Guatemala’s pobreza hated his guts. His enemies grew as news spread about the crappy construction of the tailings dam that popped, wrecking their river. News about how local people had lost their land, their water, and in some cases, their lives. The press pored more gas on the fire when it broke the story that ninety-nine percent of the profits from my father’s gold mine went straight to Canadian banks.

  The Guatemalan government called for a temporary shutdown of the mine while it investigated the disaster.

  The villagers wanted it closed forever.

  Village leaders organized community-wide votes. They kept the question simple: “Mina sí or Mina no.” Villagers came out in hordes, marking their ballots with a thumbprint. Ten out of ten villages voted ¡no! to the Eldorado Mine.

  The protests got bigger, noisier, closer to the source of the villagers’ anger.

  That would be my dad.

  Our house became what Luiz called “the protest epicenter of Guatemala.”

  So, days after that Mayan mother’s brains spilled onto our street—Juan Carlos blamed the army—after more tear gas, police sirens, and shouts for vengeance, my father fled the country. Before somebody sent a bullet into our house instead of rocks.

  Right after landing in Calgary, at a safe distance of, like, 4,000 miles, what did my father do? Turned around and sued the Guatemalan government for, as he put it, “fucking with his mine.”

  So it was goodbye, Guatemala.

  No more need for ten-foot walls, razor-wire, or shotgun-toting guards. No need to live in a padded prison where my father was Chief Warden and could boss me around with a wave of his Scotch glass. And no more bullshit about me being the reincarnated Segovia. The Wonder Boy was dead, thanks to the press smearing my name with Dad’s blood-soaked mine.

  Even Ka
tie tarred me with the same brush. She axed our budding romance with four words. The last words I ever got from her, emailed the day after the shooting.

  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?????

  Like it was me that pulled the trigger.

  Dad might still have fantasized that his boy prodigy would one day be world famous, but you’d never know it. He’d been too busy fighting fires and suing everybody to find me a classical guitar teacher. And I wasn’t about to start.

  Touching my guitar made me physically sick.

  So now it was hello to a hilltop mansion, jumbo shopping malls, and fulltime high school.

  That’s where my new troubles took off.

  That’s where I was a zero. Maybe even a negative number.

  FALLING

  I can’t pinpoint the moment when I started falling. Maybe it was when I first went online in Calgary and discovered all the stinging comments tacked onto my blog.

  How can you sit there in your ivory tower and play your pretty music when your dad is out there raping the land and murdering its people???

  You quote some German egghead who says that “music will show you everything you are.” My earnest wish is that you find the music that shows you what a total shit you are. Stop messing with the third world!

  go back home you cannibalizing canucks!

  The Xela me would have carefully trimmed out any nasty comments, which in those days were few and far between. Smacked in the head by pages of hate mail, the Calgary me closed Mom’s laptop, ran for the bathroom, and threw up.

  Or maybe I started falling after my first visit to a mega-mall. I was alone in a clothing store a week before school started, trying to figure out what Canadian guys my age were supposed to wear. I felt flames at my back and looked up at the mirror in front of me. The man at the cashier was sizing me up, a scrawny teenage Latino male, rifling through his carefully folded jeans. When I left the store empty-handed, he followed me out the door. He watched me shuffle down the hall and get on an elevator. He didn’t take his eyes off me until the elevator door closed. A lone woman on the elevator clutched her purse tighter and held her breath until she could get off at the next floor. Then, as I crossed the street outside the mall, I heard locks clicking shut as I passed in front of cars stopped for the light.

  Or maybe it started the Saturday night I was holed up in my basement bedroom, lying in the dark, bored out of my mind. I’d already slept most of the day but was still dead tired.

  Dead tired.

  Dead.

  I felt a sickening urge to cry.

  I forced myself to sit up, to stand, to walk, to look out the window at the night sky. I gazed up at stars I’d never seen before. A dim melody pricked the edge of my brain. My fingers twitched. My back tensed. Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor” limped to life then stole center stage.

  I knocked my head against the wall. I made loud humming noises, grunted, clapped my hands. I did a belly flop onto my bed, crammed a pillow against each ear, and sobbed.

  However my new troubles started, going to high school only made them ten times worse.

  ROLL CALL

  First day of classes. Mom had trouble finding the school and the buzzer was already ringing by the time she dropped me off. I ran through what looked like the main doors. Before I could figure out where I was supposed to go, speakers above me started blaring the national anthem of my latest country.

  O Canada! Our home and native land!

  Random bodies caught in the corridor stopped suddenly as if trapped in a UFO tractor beam. I was standing across from the principal’s office. Our eyes locked and he gave me a dirty look that glued my feet to the floor. Above his desk, an old queen draped in white fur frowned at me.

  God keep our land, glorious and free!

  My shoulders hunched under the weight of all this newness.

  Later, I was sitting at the back of a Grade 11 English class. The teacher, Ms. Mackenzie, was at the front reading names from a computer screen.

  “Jeremy Williams?”

  Jeremy put up his hand. He was a tall guy with long blond hair rolled into a bun.

  “Carol Miller?”

  Carol raised both thumbs without looking up. She wore black lipstick. Tattooed spiders crawled up her arms.

  “Brian Moore?”

  He was a chubby guy with straight brown hair, his back pocket bulging with golf tees.

  “Morris Kritch?”

  Morris propped up his gelled hair and flashed a movie-star smile for all to see. “Yoh.”

  The teacher paused. She leaned closer to the computer screen and her forehead wrinkled.

  I sat up straight. Something shiny dropped onto my desk. A drop of sweat.

  This must be it.

  Seconds, minutes, years passed as Ms. Mackenzie mouthed a name several times before saying it.

  “In-DEE-oh McCracken?”

  I twisted my palm toward the ceiling as if asking a question. The whole class turned around, even spider girl. My black hair turned into feathers, my Mayan nose a beak.

  Ms. Mackenzie took off her reading glasses and studied me. “That’s an interesting name. Where’s that from?”

  My heart was about to burst through my chest. “Actually, it’s … it’s Ian,” I said. The feathers and beak fell away.

  “Oh, really,” Ms. Mackenzie said as she put her glasses back on.

  “Yes. Really. Call me Ian.”

  LUNCH BREAK

  Lunch. My favorite period of the day—not.

  I hung outside the cafeteria door. Once enough students had streamed in, I could see the safe spots. After a week at school, I was still eating alone except for Danilo, a twenty-something Filipino dishwasher who liked to practice his Spanish on me. Making friends with kitchen and cleaning staff was one of my specialties, a throwback to my Xela days. I was glad for the few minutes Danilo had for me during his breaks. But honestly, the cafeteria was the last place I wanted to be caught speaking Spanish.

  “Hasta mañana, amigo,” Danilo said, looking at his watch and beating it to the kitchen.

  “Yeah, see you tomorrow.”

  I turned back to my squashed tuna sandwich, addressing it like it was worthy of great attention.

  I caught what snippets of conversation I could, determined to build my bank of Canadianisms.

  “… and like, she’s reaching for a book on the top shelf and I can see half her gonch!”

  “… you mean your mom gives you a jam buster like that every lunch?”

  “… so we ditched our mountain bikes and built this, like, humungous inukshuk at the end of the trail …”

  Then this.

  “Hey, Pedro!”

  Some guy behind me.

  “Pe-dree-to, hey!”

  My tuna sandwich suddenly became even more fascinating.

  I recognized the smooth voice of Morris Kritch. I gulped down the last of my sandwich. The crust stuck halfway down.

  A crumpled paper bag ricocheted off my head.

  “What are ya—deaf?”

  I slowly turned around. Morris and a couple of his hockey buddies sat one table away. He had a questioning look on his face. His buddies eyed me like cats casually studying their prey. One of them was twirling a hockey puck on the table.

  “Uh … it’s actually Ian,” I said, gagging on the bread crust.

  Why the hell did I pick that? My father’s middle name!

  “Oh, right,” Morris said, nodding politely. “Ian … Ian.” He said this like he was exploring a new taste. Something sour, disgusting. He grabbed the puck and started tossing it from hand to hand. “So, Pedro … I mean, Ian … how’s about trading a burrito for this hockey puck.”

  I looked around for any teachers in case he decided to wing the puck at my head, too. Just the principal, Mr. Grimsby. His back was to me as he chatted up a fashion plate running for student president.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t play hockey.”

  “So what do you play?”

  “U
h … football. I mean soccer. What you call soccer. We call it football. Fútbol.”

  It didn’t even occur to me to tell him I played guitar.

  Morris stopped tossing the puck. His eyes narrowed slightly. “Who’s we?”

  Jesus, now I’ve done it.

  That’s when the hiccups started, the violent kind that get your whole chest heaving. My throat closed around the crust.

  Morris’s eyebrows went up a notch. “Sorry … am I making you jumpy?”

  His buddies laughed.

  I hopped to my feet and opened my mouth but nothing came out. I clutched my throat.

  “So, I guess that’s no burritos for my hungry friends?” Morris asked as laughter rippled out to other tables.

  “Sorry,” I managed to gasp, while desperately looking for a water fountain. “We don’t eat burritos.”

  “Then … what are you?”

  But I couldn’t answer Morris. I was already bolting for the kitchen and Danilo’s sink.

  Danilo got it right away and grabbed a sudsy coffee cup. He blasted a shot of water into it which I downed in one life-saving gulp.

  “What happened, amigo?” he asked.

  I just shrugged.

  Even though Danilo was standing right beside me with a comforting hand on my back, I could not have felt more alone if the cafeteria were empty.

  SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY

  “It’s just a small thing,” my mother said.

  I cracked one eye open as she placed a slim white box on my bedside table. I saw the Apple logo on it. I rolled over and closed my eyes.

  “Felis cumpleaños, Indio.”

  “Huh?”

  “Happy birthday, Indio.” Mom leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  I grimaced and pulled the covers over my head.

  “This will help you stay connected.”

  “With who?” I mumbled.

  “With us … when you go out.”

  “Go where?”

  “You know, out.” Mom started ripping off the tinfoil I’d carefully plastered over every window. “Out of this cave, for starters.”