Blood of My Brother

by James Lepore

  “Not just Mexico?”

  “No.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, it will be a comfort.”

  “Okay, here goes. Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

  Isabel maneuvered the plane over the riverbed. She could see a trickle of water in some parts of it, with small boulders on either side. She looked at the altimeter: one thousand feet. Ahead was a stretch where the trickle was wider but with no boulders, unless of course they were concealed by the water. Beyond this, the bed narrowed and then made a series of turns around and through some low hills. She made a 360-degree turn, giving herself plenty of altitude to gradually descend to the boulderless stretch, lining up the nose with the small and relatively straight stream of blackish-looking water. Jay had finished his prayer.

  “Here goes,” Isabel said. “Keep praying.” Reduce airspeed. Keep it in the green. She could hear Patricio’s voice—calm, professional, filled with confidence in her—as if he were behind her, not Jay. Nose down. The plane began its descent. Trim. She found the trim wheel and rotated it until the plane, pitching as it descended, steadied. Now came the hard part, slowing the plane down without losing lift. Reduce power, use the throttle. Small adjustments. Deploy flaps. Before she knew it, the altimeter read one hundred feet. The airspeed indicator read ninety knots. Too fast. Throttle all the way back to idle. They would hit hard. Flare the plane, nose up smoothly, bleed off airspeed, said Patricio, which she did. A half second later they were jarred by the whump and thud of the rear wheels hitting the ground. Nose down—she did it—feeling the front wheel touch down. Gentle braking. Gentle braking.

  “Fuck,” she heard Jay say.

  They were heading too fast—much too fast—into the side of a hill, where the river bent to the right. Isabel, out of instructions, hit the brakes as hard as she could, which caused the plane to skid and veer sharply to the right before coming to a stop and flipping onto its right wing, cracking it in half, spilling her against her window and piling the inert Jake Decker on top of her. Shoving the door open, she fell out, first landing on the broken wing, and then tumbling to the ground with Decker still on top of her. Shoving him away, she got to her feet and saw Jay, blood running down his face, jump to the ground, holding his knapsack and her bag in one hand and both pistols in the other.

  Isabel took the bags and guns from Jay and led him as quickly as she could along the riverbed to a small pool of water about a hundred feet away.

  “Can you wash yourself?” she asked. “You’re bleeding badly.”

  “I’m fine,” Jay answered. Then he knelt at the pool and splashed water on his face and head. Isabel knelt next to him. When he turned toward her, she saw that the laceration on his scalp was superficial. She pulled one of her blouses out of her bag and pressed it against the wound.

  “Hold it there,” she said. “We need to get on a bus. You can’t be bleeding.”

  “What bus?”

  “I saw a couple go by on the highway. It is market day somewhere nearby. We will join the locals.”

  “Isabel,” Jay said. “You’re Superman.”

  “No,” she replied. “The plane is a Cessna 150, the only plane I could possibly have landed.”

  “Do you think the prayer helped?”

  “Yes. The brake is also the rudder. When I slammed it down it forced the plane to turn sharply. I forgot the brake pedal was the rudder as well. You’re supposed to apply pressure just to the top. I panicked. It wasn’t me who turned the plane.”

  Isabel watched Jay absorb this. They were both still kneeling. Both now had head wounds, and Jay’s hands, she could see, were still raw from moving boulders last night, which seemed like a distant memory now.

  “What now?” Jay asked.

  “I know only one person who would consider helping us.”

  “Who?”

  “Sister Josefina. She lives in Santiago, in the Mountains.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Not far, I don’t think. A few hours by bus or car.”

  “What about him?” Jay gestured toward Decker, lying where Isabel had pushed him away.

  “We will tie him to the plane, and leave him water.”

  “He might be dead.”

  “That was not my intention.”

  “Yes, but even if he is, I think we’re in a just war here. Don’t you agree?”

  Jay smiled as he said this, and Isabel smiled back.

  “I agree,” she said.

  Decker was still unconscious when they got to him. Jay tied him to the landing gear with electrical cable he found in the tool locker in the plane’s belly. While he was doing this, Isabel took Jay’s two thousand dollars from the pilot’s flight bag along with a bottle of Jameson. When she was searching the rear compartment for the flight bag, she saw bullet holes on both sides of the cabin, lower on the right, higher on the left. Jay’s scalp wound was arrow-straight and long, and now she understood why. It’s a good thing he was asleep. Another miracle.

  “How’s your head,” Isabel asked Jay as he finished up with Decker and stepped back. Jay had tied the blood-soaked blouse around his head in order to work on Decker. He removed it and bent forward so that Isabel could see the wound.

  “It’s better,” she said, “the bleeding has almost stopped.”

  Jay found a clean spot on the blouse and pressed it to his head. As he did this, the sound of a large vehicle—a bus or a truck—could be heard on the highway, which was, Isabel realized, very close by, just over the hill to her left.

  “I will look,” she said, taking one of the Glocks, which she had placed on the ground next to the bags. “If it is a bus, I will hail it. If it is troops, we will die here.”

  55.

  6:00 PM, December 26, 2004, Santiago Ixtayutla, Mexico

  Except for special occasions, of which there had been a dozen or so in the last five years, evenly divided between weddings and funerals, Sister Josefina de los Angeles wore street clothes in Santiago. A simple skirt and blouse from the Sears catalogue and a pair of Nikes had become her new habit. In church, where she sat now, she covered her short salt-and-pepper hair with the white headpiece with black piping that was part of her old uniform. She missed her flowing white robe and coif, but they were not practical in Santiago, where she taught school, ran a crude clinic, tended a community garden, and helped maintain the few working motor vehicles, including her own VW Beetle, in the small, impoverished town of eleven hundred souls.

  Early on she formed the habit of putting on her headdress and walking across the village’s tiny square to the primitive and starkly simple Church of the Precious Blood of Christ to say a rosary at fixed hours. She knew she looked a sight with her skinny legs, bulky sneakers, and thick glasses, but it was this public display of religion, of loyalty to Mary, that eventually won her the trust of the villagers, mostly women whose husbands and sons were al otro lado—on the other side—in the US, living and working illegally, sending the dollars back that kept the town, literally, alive.

  Having accomplished little in five years to alleviate Santiago’s misery—only a handful of houses had electricity or indoor plumbing, most had dirt floors and mud roofs, the school stopped at grade six, the weekly market in the square had died a sad death—Sister Josefina had taken recently to saying a special prayer to the Virgin. If anything, however, things had gotten worse. When the boys turned sixteen, they left. Their fathers and brothers and uncles were not coming back because there was no indigenous economy except for one family that made chocolate and another three or four who weaved or made simple furniture. The rest scratched at the earth with mule-drawn ploughs for their living. She had been reading lately about microbanks and their role in Third World economies, but of course the seed money required—several hundred thousand dollars—was beyond even the imaginations of the people of Santiago. Several hundred dollars would have been difficult to raise.

  Sister was, this evening, contemplating this state of affairs, having just fi
nished her rosary and made her special petition, when Juanito, the boy who had become her de facto assistant, tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Sister,” he said.

  Turning, Josefina saw something in Juanito’s face she had never seen before, but that she could not place. Had he seen a ghost, or a space creature?

  “Yes, Juanito,” she replied.

  “You have visitors.”

  “Visitors? Is it padre?”

  Though there was a church in Santiago Ixtayutla, there was no priest. On Sundays, a priest from one of the “rich” towns in the valley came to say mass. Hence all priests were padre because they never knew who would appear on any given Sunday.

  “They are injured, Sister,” was Juanito’s reply.

  Josefina rose without a word and strode out of the church, taking her headpiece off as she entered the patch of dirt that passed for the village’s zocalo. Halfway across she stopped in mid-stride and stared at the two people, a man and a woman, sitting on the whitewashed concrete steps of her tiny house. Starting again, going slowly, she approached them and, for reasons completely unknown to her, a dam in her heart burst when she confirmed that it was Isabel Perez sitting there, a large, ugly bruise on her forehead and a grim look on her still beautiful, still angelic face.

  “Isabel?”

  “Yes, Sister, it’s me.”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Sister, this is my friend, Jay.”

  Josefina could see swelling on the man’s head as well, and a long scab starting above the hairline running to the top of his scalp. She turned to Juanito, who was standing in his customary position—slightly behind her and to her right—whenever they were together in public, and said, “Juanito, go, please, to the clinic and bring me bandages and antiseptic, and get your father’s razor.”

  Josefina watched the boy run off, then, turning to Isabel, said, in Spanish, “Is your friend ill?”

  “Yes, Sister,” Isabel replied in English, “he has had dengue fever, and has had no sleep for two days. We need your help.”

  “What has happened?”

  “If I tell you, you will be in danger.”

  “Have you committed a crime?”

  Isabel’s eyes turned inward as she pondered this question. In them Josefina saw great sorrow. The word haunted came to her mind, a mind still very sharp at fifty-two. What has she done? What has been done to her?

  “Crimes, no,” Isabel answered, finally. “But sins, yes.”

  “What about your family?” Sister asked. “Tio Hermano?”

  As quickly as it had appeared, the haunted look vanished from Isabel’s eyes, replaced now by something very dark. Not sadness, Josefina thought, darkness. What could that be? “Never mind,” she said out loud, seeing Juanito jogging toward them. “Let’s get you cleaned up. We will talk later.”

  “Sister,” Jay said; his first word.

  “Yes, senor.”

  “You don’t have to help us. We can get cleaned up and go.”

  “Are you Isabel’s friend?” Josefina asked.

  She watched carefully as Jay and Isabel looked at each other. They were exhausted, that was obvious, but something very strong was holding them up, and together. Perhaps love, perhaps a glimpse of hell, perhaps both.

  “Yes,” Jay answered.

  “You are blessed, then. She is very special.”

  “There are people looking for us,” Jay said. “Trying to kill us.”

  “Do they know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “Here is Juanito,” Sister said. “Let’s go inside.”

  At nine o’clock Isabel and Sister Josefina were sitting at the wooden table in the nun’s small kitchen. Through the beaded curtain behind them, they could see Jay asleep in Josefina’s bed, an army cot, in the house’s only other room, a sitting room/bedroom/office onto which the villagers had tacked a skeletal bathroom which contained Josefina’s one luxury, a shower. Jay had consumed a huge amount of rice and beans and a large glass of Jake Decker’s Irish whiskey. Showered, fed, his head shaved and sutured, he was snoring lightly, but had not changed position for two hours.

  “He will sleep all night,” said Josefina.

  Isabel nodded. She was not tired. She should have been, but she wasn’t. The cup of hot chocolate she had been sipping from, laced with the same whiskey, sat on the table in front of her, half full. A hurricane lantern, fueled by a pale yellow oil, rested between them, shedding light on the women’s hands and partially exposing their faces to each other.

  “I am not used to seeing you without your habit,” Isabel said.

  “Yes, it hid all my faults.”

  “What faults?”

  “I am not beautiful, as you can see, and I am old now.”

  “Shall I tell you something, Sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your face—the memory of your face—kept me many times from committing suicide.”

  “What happened, Isabelita? Please tell me,” Josefina said. There was no shock in her eyes, or even surprise, as if, Isabel thought, she already knew or sensed that something was deeply wrong. “I will suffer more,” Sister said, “if you keep this barrier between us.”

  The evening had been busy. Juanito’s mother, Esperanza, had appeared with her husband’s razor, a sewing kit, and the food. Isabel had listened while Sister Josefina had blandly lied to Esperanza, telling her in Spanish that her visitors were an old student from Mexico City and her friend whose bus had run into a large pothole while taking them from Oaxaca City to the coast. They would be staying a few days while their wounds healed. A small canyon—un pequeño cañón—she had called the pothole, and Esperanza, apparently familiar with the state of the roads in their rural and forgotten part of Mexico, had nodded knowingly. Esperanza had left with Jay and Isabel’s dirty clothes to launder, and Juanito had returned with the thick slab of bittersweet chocolate for their after-dinner drinks.

  In the moments they were alone Isabel had avoided Sister’s searching looks, but there was no sense putting off the inevitable.

  At ten o’clock, Josefina took another lantern from a kitchen shelf, lit it, and stood silently before Isabel.

  “Are you going to bed?” Isabel asked. “Where will you sleep?”

  “I will sleep in the church,” the nun said, “but first I will pray.”

  “Pray for an answer?”

  “No. I will be thanking Our Lady.”

  “Thanking her?”

  “Yes, for sending you to me.”

  “So you will do it?”

  “Yes, I will make the call. But only on one condition—that I will be the one to kill Herman Santaria.”

  Staring at Sister Josefina’s homely face, Isabel now realized why she had remained so beautiful in her memory. The kindness of her heart shone brightly on it, a brightness now dimmed, no doubt by the horror of Isabel’s story, leaving in its place the drawn and haggard face of a woman who had seen too much suffering and was old before her time.

  “I am responsible for what happened to you, Isabel,” Josefina continued when Isabel remained silent. “I was blinded by Herman’s money, by the good it could do for the other children. I was proud of my role in bringing in that money. I should have asked many questions. If I had, I might have saved you. It is a bitter lesson.”

  “Sister . . .”

  “Yes, Isabel.”

  “I am no longer Isabelita?”

  “Not tonight, no . . .”

  Isabel could see the tears welling in Sister’s eyes. “Go,” she said, “and pray for me as well, and for Jay. Tomorrow we will make our plans.” But I will pull the trigger, she said to herself, not you, nor anyone else. Me. I will do it.

  56.

  2:00 PM, December 27, 2004 Oaxaca City, Mexico

  “Hermano? Tio Hermano?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “It is Sister Josefina from the Santa Maria Orphanage in Polanco. Do you remember me? I am calling about Isabel Perez.”


  Josefina was sitting facing the large baroque fountain in the center of Oaxaca City’s beautiful zocalo. She was in her street clothes but had her headpiece on so that she would be recognized as a nun and obtain the minor but often helpful advantages that this status conferred almost everywhere in Mexico. In the pause that followed her last statement, she watched as two schoolgirls, sitting on the fountain’s low perimeter wall, bent to cup water in their hands and splash it onto their faces. The weather was hot for the winter, ninety degrees or more, and she made a note to herself to do the same thing when she was finished with Herman Santaria.

  “Yes, Sister, it is me, Herman. How is Isabel?”

  “She is not good, that’s why I’m calling. I need your help.” Bueno, Josefina thought, so far so good.

  “I will help, of course, Sister. Where is she?” So sincere. Be careful, Josefina.

  “She is in hiding,” the nun answered.

  “In hiding? Has she done something?”

  “I don’t know,” Sister replied. “She seems almost out of her mind. She is talking about murder and drugs and documents and tapes, and . . .”

  “Yes, Sister?”

  “And incest.”

  “Incest, my God”

  “She is raving, senor. I am very worried.”

  “Sister,” Herman said, “I must tell you, Isabel was not well in her mind. We often had to send her for treatment. She hallucinated and had what the doctors called multiple personalities.”

  “I did not know this.”

  “I did not want to burden you. She was my responsibility.”

  “She needs treatment now, senor.”

  “I will take care of her. Where is she?”

  “I think it best if I brought you to her, senor. She told me not to call you. I think she is ashamed. If you and I went to her together, it would be best, I think.”

  “Bueno. I understand. Where shall I meet you?”

  “I am stationed in Santiago Ixtayutla.”

  “Where is that?”

  “About sixty miles south of Oaxaca City.”

  “Bueno, I will come now.”