Open Pit

by Marguerite Pigeon

Everyone is running. The strangers’ guns fire. Their shots receive replies from terrified, inexperienced hands alongside more experienced ones. It’s difficult to determine whose shots are connecting with those who are hit. Danielle definitely sees Carlos running towards Pepe and passing him the handgun he received from her earlier. She sees Pepe fall to the ground to begin shooting. Sworn enemies, yet they’re working together against whomever has found them. She cannot understand this and doesn’t try.

  At some point, one of the strangers — they don’t look at all like police, but then who? — collapses within sight of her and is bleeding from the head.

  Danielle watches Rita go down too, though it’s unclear whether she has been hit by a bullet or has merely tripped. Probably the latter, because Rita gets up again and runs screaming, very much alive, a section of her forehead still exposed, moving uphill and past a rocky outcrop until she’s clear out of sight.

  Martin takes a bullet in his thigh, which leaves him bloodied and screaming for help and for his lord Jesus Christ in a high-pitched voice about thirty feet from where the second stranger is still firing. But Cristóbal crawls over and drags the young man over a sheltered dip in the land, ensuring that all of Martin’s limbs are hidden. Then Cristóbal takes a gun from him and rushes back out, still shooting.

  Tina sees Cristóbal get shot in the stomach. After the first of the intruders took a bullet in the head, she rose from where she had dropped to the ground when they first appeared and ran as fast as she could away from everyone, her gun bouncing painfully against her back. She ended up slightly uphill, which is where she is when Cristóbal goes down. Tina has to swallow a cry of concern, an uncomfortably strong feeling that adds to the overall confusion of the situation. Not long later, Delmi passes very nearby, moving with a swiftness and silence that Tina could not have foreseen into the tall trees.

  Danielle sees Carlos on the ground, firing his own weapon. He seems confident to her, young in his movements, the way he was when she knew him. Invincible. But not so heroic now. More like resolved. She’s aware of a feeling of pride on Aida’s behalf. And then something makes Carlos jerk twice. He slumps over himself awkwardly, landing on his stomach, and Danielle knows he’s gone without even having to go over and check, which she can’t do anyway because she’s hiding, her lips coming into contact with the dirt, her palms burning from having skidded over pebbles. There, she cries silently for her daughter as she waits for whatever will happen next.

  Nothing does. What Danielle has hoped for since that long-ago first morning is suddenly real: their capture is over. The thrashing and screaming and shooting have abated, and the sounds of the day fill the void. Insects. The breeze steadily brushing over pine branches. A distant, indifferent airliner arcing far overhead. Danielle rises slowly and goes over to the body of the man she knew as Adrian. She looks at him in the face, closes his eyes. He’s done something good after all, hasn’t he? She pulls the satellite phone gently from his pocket. Then she removes her own backpack and withdraws a piece of paper where she knows she wrote down a phone number before leaving San Salvador. With trembling fingers, she dials.

  12:30 PM. Mil Sueños mine

  “You’re not going to believe this,” says Neela.

  Marta puts a finger to her ear to hear better. One of the foreign reporters standing beside her is speaking loudly and self-importantly in English into his own phone. “Is it over?” she hears him ask, as if he too is speaking to Neela. Then the reporter drops the following line in Marta’s general direction, nonchalantly, as if it were equal — no less valuable but no more — to all news updates he’s ever passed along: “Three dead. Lots injured. Being flown in to the hospital in Gotera now.” He turns to his photographer. “Let’s go!” They rush down the road towards their vehicle.

  The scope of what Marta can think shrinks momentarily to those two English words: “three dead.”

  “Marta? Are you there?” Neela sounds frantic.

  “Sí,” says Marta, but she can’t focus on her friend’s voice. At the mine’s main gate, everyone halfway important among MaxSeguro’s army of guards is speaking on their phones too. The police, who did eventually join them before yesterday’s demonstration, are also abuzz. Something is happening.

  A lens is shoved up close to Marta’ face. She pushes it back. “Un momento,” she says to the reporter and to Neela too, because beyond the cameraperson she has caught sight of a familiar car on the main road. Pedro. “Intercept them!” Marta calls out to anyone who might help. “Tell them to go back!” But before those within earshot can figure out what she means, Pedro drives straight up and all the reporters who’ve begun approaching Marta turn to swarm the car.

  “What’s going on?” says Neela. “Talk to me.”

  In the car, Pedro seems to realize what’s happening. He brakes and puts the vehicle into reverse. The reporters surround him anyway, their cameras making contact with the windows, stopping his progress.

  “The families are here,” Marta says to Neela. “I’ll call you back.” She feels horrible cutting Neela off, but Marta has to get to the Canadians before the reporters bombard them with the news. Three dead. And there’s the demonstrators to think about. MaxSeguro and the police now have no reason to hold back. Marta quickly charges people with the task of disbanding the protesters. Everyone is to calmly gather up their things and be ready to board the buses. She has just started towards Pedro when someone calls her attention to the mine’s gate. Marta turns. The unbroken line of security personnel has shifted. Guards are moving to one side. The human barrier breaks open completely as the gate is withdrawn and two minivans, flanked by more security personnel, are slowly escorted out.

  It’s too soon. Too fast. “No!” Marta yells. But there’s absolutely nothing she can do to stop their expulsion.

  A bewildering mass of reporters scream over one another as Pedro honks and Sylvie, in the back middle seat, screams. Ralph, on the right, is giving an overeager camera the finger. Benoît, in the front seat, reaches back to take his wife’s hand and shush her comfortingly. Pedro’s phone rings and he answers, all the while reversing, inch by inch, in a wide half-circle.

  Aida trusts him to take them to safety. They’ll be fine. No tear gas here. But suddenly, every camera, every palm that’s been banging on their windows, turns away and the area around the car clears. The reporters are all running towards two vehicles — vans. Now that she can see again, Aida scans the area where they held the protest yesterday. Her eyes find Marta Ramos. Short, badly dressed Marta, who nonetheless looks like a general. She’s pointing at the vans, advising someone beside her, talking on the phone, visibly upset — all at once.

  “It’s the exhumation team, isn’t it?” Aida says.

  “Quoi? Non!” says Sylvie, straining past her with her perfumed head to get a better look at the vans, which are disappearing beneath three layers: first guards, then police, and now the reporters. Sylvie makes a horrible animal noise. Aida wants to get away from her panic, but she feels it too. She realizes that the exhumation has started to matter to her, and as more than just a way to get her mother home. She’s wanted them to find something — anything. Now the process has been cut off. She puts her index finger to her teeth and peels away a sliver of nail.

  “Maybe they found what they looked for,” says Benoît.

  “If they did, the mine probably took it,” says Ralph, and Benoît turns to challenge the remark before registering that it’s likely true and letting himself turn back towards the front, his shoulders folding in.

  A moment later, the van is gone. The front door to the car clicks open and Marta gets into the front seat. Benoît shoves over and Marta closes the door, which Pedro immediately locks. His hand on the horn, Pedro finishes his delicate reversing, moves into forward gear and ploughs ahead. Some reporters who have already come back from the vans reluctantly move to spare their own feet.

  Then the car is driving down the access road to the place where it intersects with the m
ain highway. Pedro signals and they turn south, headed right back to where they just came from.

  “What’s going on?” Benoît says, finally, as they join southbound traffic. Aida watches the back of Marta’s head. She seems to be choosing her words.

  “The abduction has ended. We’ll go to San Francisco Gotera. That’s where they’re bringing everyone.” Marta gives Pedro the subtlest nod, acknowledging their destination.

  Aida translates what Marta has just said as exactly and economically as she can. She holds Sylvie’s hand, and Sylvie reaches out and takes Ralph’s. Marta uses her phone to make a series of calls in a low voice, all of them to do with reaching Alejandro Reverte, the head of the exhumation team. But she does not pass on any more details to the families about the hostages and none of them asks. They spend the long, haunting hour on their way south to the provincial capital suspended in a silence each is afraid to breach.

  1:15 PM. Offices, Mil Sueños mine

  Sobero returns to Mitch’s office. He has just overseen the withdrawal of the final bus of demonstrators. His guards used the utmost restraint, he says. No reason to add to the tension now. He sounds invigorated, upbeat.

  Mitch nods, stares out his window. On his cluttered desk is the white hardhat he wore to meet Reverte yesterday. “They slept out there. On the road,” he says. “Last night.”

  “A handful. They were probably paid agitators working for the Committee. Or given free food. It’s unimportant now.”

  Mitch meets this comment with a long silence. His fingers tighten on the window’s edge. Free food in exchange for an entire night on a road, under guard. He flashes back to the dig site and the story of that worker walking four times up and down El Pico, up and down, looking for a grave. Mitch hates the feeling that has been dogging him since Sobero showed him how he was duped by Carlos Reyes. A pang that won’t let go. Not sadness or hurt pride — though it’s got those things in it, sure. It’s just that he believed in that future, the one Carlos always seemed to be gesturing towards. One that blended economic and political prosperity. One where Mitch would never meet anyone as morbid as Alejandro Reverte, or cold like Antonio Hernández. That future will never be. Mitch has met them. And they’ve seen him, too, in ways that, when he thinks about those parts of himself, deepen the pang into a sinking throb.

  “We should discuss security for the coming weeks as the expansion begins, Jefe,” says Sobero.

  Mitch isn’t in the mood for one of Sobero’s chipper planning sessions. “Yes. But not today.”

  The intercom buzzes.

  Mitch eases himself down into his leather chair, resigned to a call from the media. But his assistant surprises him: it’s Mitch’s wife, calling from Vancouver. Can he talk? Mitch hasn’t expected her to know yet. The world of his family and the West Coast — his garage, their yoga studio, his view of the Burrard Inlet, the twins — opens suddenly before him, overwhelmingly appealing, palpable. There, he is a successful man. A father. Real things. Light years from the house of cards he was building with Carlos. “Put her through,” he says. “. . . Honey!. . . Yes, I know. We just heard. . . Of course, we’re thrilled.” And Mitch, letting himself feel this thrill over the end of the threat to his mine because his wife feels it for him, sees another future open up in a way that did not seem possible just moments ago. His legacy at Pico. He raises his head and shifts it ever so slightly, indicating that Sobero, who is still waiting, should vacate the room during this personal call, which his Chief of Security does after only a slight hesitation. Sobero probably wants to say more, to receive some tribute. Probably he thinks this is all his doing. But Mitch is aware that he and Sobero are not actually in this together. Sobero has his business to run, which he mostly does just fine, and Mitch has his.

  “How are the girls?” Mitch asks. He picks up a piece of paper his assistant deposited on his desk earlier and glances at it. Another letter from the Committee for the Environment — this one thanking him for the shutdown. Like he closed his mine for them. Mitch shuts the letter into his bottom drawer without a second look.

  2008

  JUNE 14

  10:00 AM. Northern Mexico City

  Danielle and Pedro follow the man named Jorge. Without him, it’s not worth bothering. At least, that’s how Marta put it when she handed Danielle the note.

  They’re on a dead-end street abutted by a three-sided shack piled with old ovens, dirty microwaves, leaning blenders and toasters. A heavily muscled man stands outside the shack with a shotgun. He stares indifferently at Danielle, who clutches the note and keeps close to Pedro, who’s negotiating a small patch of grass that some hopeful soul has planted beside the road and surrounded with barbed wire.

  Jorge approaches the armed man. “We’re looking for Lane 14, lower end — blue rooming house.”

  “Evangelicals?”

  “Barrios Seguros.”

  Danielle knows this is the name of Jorge’s organization, which works with gang youth in this part of Mexico City.

  “Por allá,” says the man, indicating with a turn of his thick neck that they should go left.

  Jorge, who is exceedingly calm, leads Danielle and Pedro down the uneven road. Pedro, meanwhile, is the picture of alertness. He reminds Danielle of the best guerrillas she knew so many years before. Just like Aida said he would.

  “People want to believe he didn’t die,” Marta said when she first produced the note for Danielle. They were sitting together on Danielle’s couch, Neela facing them in an armchair. Neela had arranged for Marta to give a talk in Toronto.

  The note had appeared in Marta’s hand in April during a rally in Los Pampanos to mark the third anniversary of the temporary shutdown at Mil Sueños. Someone shoved it at her and left. No signature.

  Danielle took the piece of paper and read through its directions. On the one hand, she was relieved. When the police had failed to turn up any sign of Pepe after their release, she’d decided he had been shot by those strangers and gone off to die somewhere. The note meant that maybe her kidnapper had met a less cruel end. On the other hand, the directions felt like they could lead her backwards. Life has gone on. Over the past three years, it has become easier and easier for Danielle to accept that everyone involved in the kidnapping is either dead or has moved on too. She has crossed a threshold. On the surface, things look the same. She’s still editing, hanging out with Neela. But she’s sold the house. She’s back in therapy, reads the news.

  “I want to go,” Aida said that day, grabbing the note from Danielle’s hand and moving towards the windows that look out from Danielle’s condo building onto a green space. “We have to know.”

  Marta shook her head. “You? No, no, no.”

  “Send Pedro with me,” Aida said. She smiled knowingly at Marta, a woman Danielle had met many years ago through Neela when Marta lived for a time in Toronto. Danielle feels she owes a huge debt to her for having hosted Aida during the abduction. Marta and Aida have since remained close, talking on the phone occasionally. Aida even stayed with her again when she decided to meet with Carlos’s other adult children. Danielle doesn’t quite understand why Marta and Aida get along. Aida is basically the same conservative businesswoman-in-training that she ever was, married now, though thankfully not to the man she was with when she met Marta. But somehow the two women click.

  That afternoon, Marta was feeling protective. “It’s too dangerous,” she said, like the subject was closed.

  “What can happen?” Aida insisted. She slapped Danielle’s arm lightly. “You think he’ll kidnaPMe this time?”

  Now shanties close in around her as Danielle makes her way forward, dogs and small children staring nervously. They are crouched in doorways or leaning against the wooden walls of their homes, tin roofs above, hand-strung power lines dipping low enough nearly for the tallest among the children to touch. One woman operating a tiny pulpería and framed in her windowless window between silver bags of corn and yucca chips shakes her head disapprovingly as Jorge walks pas
t.

  “Many here have been converted by American Evangélicos,” he explains to Danielle, shrugging off this rude behaviour. “They know we’re a secular organization.”

  Danielle can see that though the slum is very poor, it’s not the poorest. It has the density, but its low, overlapping structures make a strange kind of sense. Jorge told her earlier that lots of money passes through this place because there are so many illegals in transit here, running drugs, doing sex work, or acting as enforcers until they pay off their “debts” to the gangs who got them this far north. A volatile hub even the police are afraid to enter.

  Danielle reminds herself that the risk to her own safety here is small. Marta has checked everything out. And there’s the group to think about.

  Tina said it was the last, crucial step to healing. She’s back at her yoga practice and into what she calls “completion.” Martin, in Vancouver, started out cool to the idea. “If that’s your path,” he said, noncommittally. But by the time they’d talked it out, he admitted, “Yeah, I’d like to know. I would.” He’s given up his short-lived career as a smoker and become something of a fitness buff. He’s recently quit his job, too — though not his church. Danielle even sent Pierre an email, letting him know. After their individual interviews with the police and Foreign Affairs, he stopped talking to the rest of them. Danielle knows he’s doing a Ph.D. at Laval, but nothing more. He never replied. Still, she infers from his silence that he isn’t opposed to the idea, and probably that means he’s curious too.

  In those first days after the abduction ended, the four of them were able to agree on a few crucial points. When they were grilled over and over about the sequence of events, none wavered on the fact that the shooting began only after they ran into the two strangers, not when Carlos Reyes had intervened. Pierre and Tina admitted to firing the weapons they’d been handed, in self-defense, but said they didn’t know if they’d managed to hit anyone. Martin explained that Cristóbal is the one who protected him after he was shot. They all said they believed that it was Cristóbal, or Pepe, or Carlos, and maybe even Delmi (who was caught the next day when she was spotted, badly scratched up and sunburned, trying to steal eggs from a chicken coop several hours’ walk away) who likely struck and killed the two men. No one knew who’d shot Carlos. Everyone put the blame on the strangers. They insisted it wasn’t Pepe — even Pierre did. In short, the ex-hostages formed a kind of bond over the way they kept to their version of things. It’s a bond Danielle still feels. But in the end, that wasn’t what convinced her to do something about Marta’s note.