Some Rise by Sin

by Philip Caputo

  “Right,” the Professor said. “He’d be warned before they got there. There’s an escape tunnel, starts under the main house. Levya’s seen the entrance, but he doesn’t know where it ends up.”

  Valencia rose, went to the computer, and clicked back to the image of the airstrip.

  “We are left with that,” he said. “Fixed-wing aircraft…” His glance turned from the screen and fell on the painting that enlivened the dull, functional wall: a depiction of the Battle of Camarón, when the Mexican army defeated the French Foreign Legion. “But that has its problems, too. Our people would have to cover five hundred meters from the landing field to the ranch house. Salazar would have time to crawl into the tunnel.”

  “But it’s not an insurmountable problem.”

  “Are you suggesting we parachute in?” the captain said, smirking at the absurdity of such a notion.

  “No. But I’ve been thinking: the guests, the cooks, the musicians, everybody is flying in—”

  Interrupting himself, the Professor went to the window, raised the shade, and, craning his neck, directed his gaze toward a cloud of turkey vultures soaring above the hill just beyond the base’s walls.

  “Come over here a minute,” he said. Valencia joined him. “Do you see those birds?

  “Buitres,” the captain said, with a baffled look.

  “Not all of them. Zone-tailed hawks are mixed in with the vultures.”

  “I see no difference.”

  “Neither would a field mouse or a lizard. Those hawks fly with turkey vultures because they look like them—the same two-toned wings. Deceptive camouflage. So if you were a little lizard or a field mouse, you would think, ‘Those are vultures up there, they only eat dead things, I’m safe.’ You come out into the open, but you’ve been tricked. A hawk swoops down and kills you.”

  Watching the birds—rising, dipping, but always circling, as if caught in a vortex—Valencia reflected on this natural history lesson. His lips stretched into a thin smile. He was stubborn and inflexible, but he wasn’t stupid. He got the idea. With a little more nudging, he would be made to believe it was his.

  “That pendejo of a priest should be here,” he said. “He would enjoy hearing you speak in parables.”

  “We owe the pendejo a vote of thanks.”

  “That’s a ballot you cast alone. How much time do we have?”

  “Ten days,” the Professor said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “You never finish a painting, you abandon it,” Pamela said to Lisette and Father Tim. “And I’m abandoning this one.”

  She looked at them, silently appealing for favorable opinions, which she got. His were the more learned—sounded it, anyway. Lisette could manage only a pathetic “It’s really interesting.”

  The painting was one of Pamela’s larger works, three feet square. It stood on an easel in the courtyard, allowing the natural light to show it to best effect, and it was interesting but in the wrong way: “disturbing” described it better. Not a word Lisette would use, wary of upsetting Pamela. The lithium had restored her equilibrium since the episode in Álamos, but the drug wasn’t always up to the task. And she sometimes skipped a dose to give herself a lift. Working furiously to complete the painting, she had become both fragile and explosive, like a hand grenade made of fine bone china. One afternoon, Lisette criticized the placement of a triptych mirror Pamela had hung in their bedroom, above a tall chest of drawers. “I’d have to be six feet six to look into it,” she had said, perhaps too sharply. “Why not here”—she crossed the room—“right here next to the door.” Pamela shattered in an instant. “If that’s where you want it, hang the damn thing there yourself!” she yelled, and she flung the hammer like a tomahawk—not directly at Lisette but close enough to scare her and hard enough to gouge the adobe wall. Remorse followed the outburst almost immediately. “Oh my God!” Pamela cried, flying to Lisette and embracing her. “I didn’t mean to.… I’ve been working too hard.… I am so sorry.… Forgive me.… Please say you’ll forgive me.” Lisette said, “Patch that hole and I will,” but with forgiveness already in her voice. Pamela gave her a devouring kiss. “I will, promise. You’re a darling.” Within ten minutes they were naked and in bed. Like the hillbillies back home, Lisette thought when the lovemaking was over. Fight and fuck.

  Now, addressing Father Tim, Pamela said, “Don’t tell me you like it if you don’t. I am open to constructive criticism. You may fire when ready.”

  Her hands as she wiped them with turpentine trembled slightly—a lithium side effect.

  “I’m saying I like it because I do,” he responded, pitch-perfect. He seemed to sense that she was on edge and not open to any sort of criticism. On the other hand, maybe he had nothing critical to say. “It’s striking, original. The blend of styles—Vincent van Gogh meets Jackson Pollock.”

  “Thank you,” she said, giving his arm a light, flirtatious brush, empty of promise. “But I don’t see the van Gogh influence.”

  Father Tim riveted her with a gaze as admiring as the one he’d cast on the painting. Even in her work clothes—a faded flannel shirt worn tails out, paint-spattered jeans, a kerchief wound around her head—she looked beautiful. Any blind fool could see he had a crush on her. A platonic crush, Lisette assumed.

  “That … that effect in the clouds, that roiled effect,” he said, tracing wavy lines in the air with a finger.

  Lisette examined the canvas again, and wondered if he was telling Pamela, diplomatically, that he also found it disturbing. The clouds had the chaotic look of ocean waves crashing into a rocky shore; the random smears and points of color bore no resemblance to what they were supposed to be—desert flowers in bloom; and the greenish thing in the middle, representing a saguaro, looked like a tree in a Gothic fairy tale, its arms bent and twisted. There was a derangement in the scene, a distortion of reality, as if it had been painted through a thick pane of leaded glass.

  Pamela lit one of her carefully rationed cigarettes and, with her right arm crooked, its elbow cupped by the palm of her left hand, studied her creation for a moment. “I can’t see what else I can do for it,” she said, then put the cigarette in a coffee saucer and picked up one end of the canvas. Father Tim took the other end, and they carried it into the guest room to dry.

  Lisette went to her office, doubting her own perceptions, asking herself, Am I getting a little wacky? Seeing signs of lunacy where there are none? Life with a bipolar person, she’d learned, could upset your own mental balance. After they’d returned from Álamos, she had told herself, “We’ve made a mistake,” and considered ending their affair. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it, dreading the loneliness that would follow. Besides, she was responsible for bringing Pamela to San Patricio. It had been her idea that they try living together. She couldn’t tell her to pack her bags because of one spell of ugly behavior that hadn’t been entirely Pamela’s fault. To an extent, Lisette retained the lessons of her hard-shell Baptist upbringing. What her family’s minister had preached about faith—it was refined in adversity, as gold is in the fire—was also true of love. If her love for this talented, troubled woman was genuine, it would survive the trial of Pamela’s inner demons.

  Father Tim appeared in the office doorway and tapped on the door frame. Looking up from her cluttered desk, Lisette waved him in.

  “Thanks for stopping by to play art critic,” she said, shuffling through a sheaf of documents.

  “Glad to. The work she’s doing in the church is top-notch. I can’t thank her enough. Catching you at a bad time, am I? You look busy.”

  “Sort of.” Lisette scanned the papers, then stuffed them into a manila envelope. “We’re off to the States this coming weekend.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “The States? Holiday?”

  “Hardly. There’s a Mayo girl, Evangelina Morales, going blind in both eyes. We’re flying her to a hospital in Philadelphia for a procedure—a vitrectomy, it’s called. Pam got her father to set it up. He’s on th
e board of trustees for the Wills Eye Hospital. It’s one of the best on the planet.”

  A kind smile broke across Father Tim’s face. “Well, good for both of you. This procedure, it’s for what?”

  “Diabetic retinopathy. Hemorrhaging in the eye caused by diabetes, in plain English. Pam and I have to go with her. The kid is only twelve, never been outside her village, much less to Philadelphia, never been in a car, much less an airplane.” She held up the manila envelope. “Admission papers, travel documents, airline tickets, papers for her family to sign authorizing us to take her out of the country. All set up and paid for by Daddy Childress and his fellow board members.”

  “Generous of them.”

  “Rich people making themselves feel good about themselves. But I’ll take it.”

  The statement caused him to flinch. “Y’know, Lisette, you might try to be a little less abrasive.”

  “Well, pardon me. This operation isn’t going to do Evangelina Morales any good in the long run if she keeps eating crap. But crap is all her mother can afford.” She rifled through the clutter and picked up a report from the Mexico’s National Foundation for Public Health. “Diabetes: number one cause of death,” she said, rattling the pages. “Every state except next door in Chihuahua.”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “They have better diets in Chihuahua?”

  “Nope. Over there, murder has replaced diabetes as the number one cause of death. Anyway, Pam and I are going tomorrow to get Evangelina’s family to sign off on the permission papers.”

  “So it’s all right with them?” Father Tim asked, a somewhat dubious undertone in his voice. “I’d be surprised if they have any idea where Philadelphia is.”

  “Well…” Lisette hesitated, the soft ring of doubt in Father Tim’s voice giving her pause. “I’ve got her mother’s okay. She wants me to do whatever I can. Evangelina’s father is dead, and her mom is illiterate, so her grandfather will have to read and sign the consent forms. I’ve never met him.”

  “You said you’re heading there tomorrow. Where is there?”

  “San Tomás,” she answered.

  “That’s a coincidence,” Father Tim said. “We’re headed to San Tomás day after tomorrow.” He adopted a diffident posture, shoving his hands into his pockets and hunching his shoulders. “But I think we could move it up a day. Would you mind if we caravanned with you?”

  “We who?”

  “Me, Moises Ortega, César Díaz.”

  “César? Risky for him to be going up there. That’s narco country. What for?”

  “A civic-improvement project,” Father Tim replied. “Rebuilding a decrepit rope-and-plank bridge that spans the Santa Teresa.”

  The municipality had promised to fix it but, as usual, had done nothing; so he had taken up two special collections at Mass to buy materials and tools. César had volunteered to do the repairs.

  “Turns out he knows something about bridges. He was in the engineers when he was in the army. I never knew that about him.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “What do you know about bridge building?”

  “Zero minus nothing. He wants me to come along.”

  “Because, with the beloved padre there, there’ll be less likelihood of trouble from the bad guys? From what I know, the bad guys aren’t crazy about you, either.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “And you asked if it’ll be okay to follow me, because the beloved Dr. Moreno would provide a little extra insurance against trouble. Shame, shame,” she scolded in a joking way. “Hiding behind a woman’s skirts.”

  “I’m confident there won’t be any trouble.”

  “Better not be. Pam will be with me. To meet Evangelina and her mother. If anything happens … Well, I won’t say it.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, Lisette and Pamela shopped at the supermercado on the Calle Juárez, which was super only in comparison with the shabby tiendas on the edge of town. Lisette was assembling a food parcel for Evangelina and her mother. She filled the cart, which Pamela pushed, with dried beans, bananas, oranges, nixtamal, and whatever else she could find that wasn’t loaded with sugar and trans fats.

  “Mother Moreno, Mother Moreno,” Pamela said in a singsong. “Mother Moreno will make her kiddies eat right if it kills her.” She laughed her light and trilling Pamela A laugh, the one Lisette loved to hear; the brittle Pamela B laugh made her grind her teeth.

  “I’m looking forward to tomorrow,” Pamela went on as they carried the groceries to Lisette’s Dodge. “We’ll be doing something together, a team. Instead of you doing your thing and me, mine. And I’m eager to see what the Sierra Madre looks like from the inside. There’s a kind of mystery to it.”

  Lisette fished the keys out of her purse and climbed into the pickup. Pulled herself in, actually; with her short legs, she needed the handgrip above the door.

  “Don’t expect anything picturesque,” she said. “It’s pretty backward.”

  “I think I can handle backward,” Pamela said, then leaned over and placed a hand on Lisette’s wrist just as she was about to switch on the ignition. “Thanks for putting up with me the last few weeks.”

  “Honey, I’m not putting up with you.” Lisette threw an arm around her. She felt strong and protective. “It’s not like you’re a run of bad luck.”

  “Patient, then. Thanks for being patient. I know I’ve been difficult. All I can say for myself is that when one of those spells starts, it’s like I’ve been injected with a drug and I can’t stop it. Matter of fact, I don’t want to stop it, because then it’s a real rush. I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do and that everything I think or say is incredibly brilliant. It’s only later that it gets bad and the fan belt in my brain breaks.”

  “Stay on the meds and you’ll be okay. Dr. Lisette’s orders.”

  Pamela gave her an affectionate peck on the cheek. At the same moment, as if by design, Paulina Herrera—the woman Father Tim referred to as “the Very Pious Señora Herrera”—emerged from the market, stopped, and stared at them. Lisette pulled away from Pamela’s lips, switched on the ignition, and drove off toward the house.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Pamela said, with an injured look.

  “Someone saw us. Happens to be a patient of mine, and a gossip.”

  “So? We weren’t doing anything.”

  “It might not have looked that way to her. I probably overreacted.”

  Pamela let out a breath, flapping her lips. “It does get wearing, all this … what’s the word I’m looking for? Restraint. All this pretending. We can’t show any physical affection for each other in our own house when Anna is there. Or the cleaning lady. Conchita or whatever—”

  “Consolata.”

  “Right. Right. Consolata. No kissing, no touching on the days Consolata comes to mop up. Mess up the bed in the guest room so she doesn’t suspect we sleep together. And God forbid if we’re walking somewhere and I put my arm around you. It wears me out sometimes.”

  They circled the plaza, where vans dispensing iced raspados vied for space with police SUVs and army trucks; then they headed up the steep Calle Insurgentes.

  “I did tell you, didn’t I, that we’d have to watch ourselves?” Lisette said. “That this town is more Catholic than the Vatican?”

  “It’s one thing to hear about it, another thing to live it. Sometimes I feel like I’m back in the day when coming out was what debutantes did.”

  Lisette threw her sidelong look. “Did you? Come out as a deb, I mean.”

  “Oh, yeah. The Philadelphia Charity Ball. I was seventeen. My escort looked like he’d stepped out of a Ralph Lauren catalog. And I had to make off that I was entranced, waltzing in his arms, and never ever let on that I’d already experimented with alternatives.”

  Lisette felt it like a flash fever—that old class antagonism mixed with class envy—as she pictured the tall, pretty girl and the Ralph Lauren catalog boy, whirling under a chandelier in so
me grand ballroom. She pulled into the alley behind the house and parked.

  “My senior prom in the high school gym is what I remember,” she said. “Kissing my date in the car after the dance. I grabbed him because I knew what I was and I was fighting it and I thought if I kissed him real hard something would happen.”

  Pamela looked at her, wide-eyed. “Like what? That the guy would…?”

  “Not that. No. That it would change me. It was the reverse of what usually happens. The desire leads to the kiss. I hoped the kiss would lead to the desire. It was the same thing when I got married, when it was more than kissing.”

  “Yeah, oh yeah,” said Pamela, bobbing her head. “Do I know that feeling. I’ve been there.” She looked up and down the alley and said mischievously, “No gossips in sight.”

  With desire in its rightful place, their kiss was long and avid. It made Lisette feel that she was going to jump out of her skin. “Okay, let’s not push our luck,” she said, her voice slow and thick.

  They got out of the car and carried the shopping bags into the kitchen and dropped them on the table. Recovered from the effects of the kiss, Lisette fetched a cardboard box from under the sink and set it down next to the bags.

  “How do you feel about going back to Philly?” she asked.

  “Oh, it’s different now than it was then,” replied Pamela. “All in all, Philadelphia is looking pretty good—”

  “I was referring to your mother. How should we … uh … comport ourselves when we see her?”

  Pamela pondered the question while they transferred the groceries to the box.

  “‘Comport’—that’s a word I haven’t heard in a while. We shall comport ourselves like the adult women we are, and keep contact with Mamá to the minimum possible. She’s seventy-seven, but she can still bite.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Lisette said, then motioned at the box. “I don’t want to forget this tomorrow.” She folded the flaps and lugged it outside to the pickup.

  Following her, Pamela asked, “Has going back to the States ever crossed your mind? You did tell me you could practice there.”