Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

A half hour later, he stole in quietly and found Strock sprawled on the mattress in the living room with his limbs awry, a faint wheezy snore hissing through his teeth. Four empty beer bottles lay on the floor beside a Packers tumbler and the fifth of Jack, now half-gone.

  How in God’s name, he thought, are you going to get this drunken sack of tricks all the way to El Salvador? Punch line: one cocktail at a time.

  He wondered what Eileen might make of him—or make of me, he thought, if I turned out like this. Was that possible? Only death had spared the old man, he supposed. How bad does it have to get before that’s your choice—stay drunk or die?

  In Strock’s defense, Jude could see why Peg still found him attractive. Remembering the picture Malvasio had shown him, he saw the same strong lines in the face, the heavy-lidded eyes. His black hair remained full with just a brush of gray at the temples. A man with a fierce heart, Peg had called him, a good lover despite the drink. But he was haunted, too, got chased around by his demons and couldn’t be trusted to hear a word you said. Worse, when he got mad, which was all too often, it was scorched earth—which brought Jude’s parents to mind.

  He’d stopped by the old house yesterday morning. Opening the door, his mother had greeted him with stunned dismay. Her graying hair clung to the side of her skull, fixed by bobby pins. Her blouse was old—Jude remembered it from his grade-school days—and she smelled of closed rooms and talcum powder. She was forty-six years old.

  “Why didn’t you call?” She sounded afraid. Then: “I was on my way to church.”

  She’d mentioned during his last visit she was attending services more. It didn’t surprise him. She’d always been unforgiving; he could see her devout.

  “This won’t take long.” He reached into his pocket for the cashier’s check he’d bought, two thousand dollars, knowing better than to hand her cash, given the history. “I’ve had a little windfall. I know things aren’t as good as they might be for you. Hope this helps.”

  She looked at the check like it might crawl out of his hand and bite. “What did you do to get this?”

  Of course. He remained, after all, his father’s son. The worst part was, she was right.

  He considered asking her if it was true, what Malvasio had said, the old man’s two-year thing with a call girl. He checked the impulse, sensing the question might seem needlessly cruel. It was possible his mother knew nothing about it. But two years—how could she not know?

  “I’ll get going.” He turned to walk back down the steps, then something stopped him. He half pivoted, said over his shoulder, “Coll been in touch?”

  While conducting his record searches for Strock, Jude had snuck in Colleen’s name as well, wondering if by some off chance she’d migrated back to Chicago after college. At the main library, he’d even plugged her name into a website search engine—the only hit was five years out-of-date, Madison, no address or phone number. He found himself wanting to catch up, thank her for that lifesaving box of books, maybe even get some sisterly advice on how best to patch things up with Dr. Browning, who was or wasn’t the love of his life.

  His mother studied the cashier’s check, flipping it over, front and back. “Like your sister would bother to call me,” she said.

  Jude gently kicked Strock’s leg. The man’s eyelids fluttered and he sat up jerkily, shaking the grog from his mind.

  “Back from the black lagoon,” Jude said in greeting.

  “You’ve got no idea.” The words came out snarled and bleary. Strock tried to situate himself. “What time—”

  “It’s early. But we’ve got someplace to be.” Don’t tell him too much, Jude thought. Just enough to get him moving. “I’ve got a job for you. One that pays well. You can shower up in the bathroom down the hall. I’ll make us some breakfast.”

  He went into the kitchen and gathered some eggs and bacon from the fridge.

  From the living room, Strock called out, “What kind of job?”

  13

  “I’m going to need something cold soon,” Eileen said in Spanish. “Just to rinse the dust off my teeth.”

  They’d started that morning in the cooler highlands to the north, but for at least an hour now they’d been driving along the scorched eastern plain. The volcano known as Chaparrastique loomed in the distance with its girdle of coffee and cotton plantations, a sky of blistering white for background.

  The driver, a woman from the Casa de la Cultura named Lili Recinos, remarked that there would be a place to pull over for drinks when the road split near San Miguel. She was part Ulua, part Lenca, with a broad dark face, arched cheekbones, obsidian eyes. “It’s a shame you have to come all this way again so soon. But it was fortunate you could make the celebration, no?”

  Originally, Eileen had come east from La Perla to help Waxman and Aleris monitor the national balloting for president. They’d made arrangements through the Election Observer Mission and the Junta Electoral Municipal in San Miguel, and she’d figured on a weekend trip, no more, needing to get back home to pack up her artifacts for storage and plan for a more extensive junket to Morazán in the coming week. Once she’d arrived in San Miguel, however, she’d connected with the Casa de la Cultura to finalize arrangements for the days ahead, and Lili, in a rush of excitement, had informed her that the villagers of Cacaopera intended to reenact the traditional selection of the village alcalde to coincide with the presidential vote.

  Eileen had heard of the ceremony but never seen it, the kind of native ritual all but forgotten in the country except in the remotest villages—exactly the sort of thing she was here to study. She explained the situation to Waxman and he insisted she go, and so Lili had driven down to pick her up and take her into the henequencovered hills to the same tiny village where, in another ritual two months before, she’d witnessed the villagers sacramentally washing the clothes of the Blessed Virgin at the junction of the Torola and Chiquito rivers.

  This trip, she watched as a handful of men, candidates for the position of village mayor, or alcalde, lined up in the town square wearing white pants and shirts and broad palm-leaf hats. An equal number of men with bows and arrows stood before them. The candidates removed their shirts, hanging them on wood-framed yokes, then submitted their bare chests to a pinprick blow from an arrow, just hard enough to break the skin, after which the judges decided the winner on the basis of the purity of his tribal blood, assessed by taste.

  All in all, Eileen found the procedure, not to mention the result, far more gratifying than that of the presidential election. Although the count had yet to be finalized, it was already clear that Tony Bullshit, former sportscaster, Washington’s darling, and the right wing’s new champion, had ridden a landslide to victory, earning nearly 60 percent of the vote.

  She tried to be philosophical about it, put her own wishes aside. ARENA probably would have won regardless, given the country’s often conservative peasantry, its reliance on America, its increasingly evangelical lean, its cynicism when it came to elections in general and its indifference in particular to Schafik Handal, the aging former guerrilla and FMLN candidate. Handal had hardly done himself any favors, kicking reporters from the largely right-leaning press out of his office when they tried to bait him into impossible positions—handing them a perfect opportunity to paint him as a Marxist hothead, an intractable tyrant, an old fool. And the efemelenistas were rumored to be going at each other pretty hard, the pragmatic progressives hammering at the hard-line ortodoxos, because it was the consensus that, had the party put up less of a throwback for a candidate, they might be in power now.

  But there had been a considerable amount of shenanigans as well, beyond the usual fried-chicken handouts at local ARENA offices: busloads of Nicaraguans paid to cross the border and cast ballots in provincial towns; drunken vagabundos handed cash outside polling places; a sudden uptick in brutal murders the preceding week, blamed on gangs by the right, though just as likely the work of death squads hoping to toss a little raw meat to the law-and-order crow
d; all that, plus the usual extortionate fear-mongering from Washington.

  And so now she was returning to San Miguel to reconnect with Waxman and Aleris, who were understandably dispirited. They’d drive her back to La Perla where she’d pack up as quickly as possible, just so she could get right back here in her own car. For the next few weeks she’d wander the highlands, checking her notes and maps and dutifully recording the braiding of plazón hats in Chilanga, the weaving of ropes from escobilla in the village of Chirilagua, the manufacture of palm-leaf mats in Lolotiquillo.

  How trivial all that seemed now. She was a chronicler of the quaint and all-but-forgotten in a country with a skyrocketing murder rate, institutionalized poverty, an environment in crisis, and a polarized political climate, where the rich plundered the economy and anyone with an eye to the future wanted nothing more than to get out. She’d have no more effect in changing things for the better here than she’d had trying to get her brother to rethink a second tour in the marines—or, more recently, getting Jude to ponder a bit more deeply who it was he was really protecting down here.

  He’d been on her mind a lot the past week, and she wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. She liked the dope, there you had it. She knew his type, maybe too well, and for all his knee-jerk male bone-headedness he was basically decent. And it wasn’t just missionary instinct, thinking she could rattle his cage a little, make him see things differently—she saw something in him she couldn’t quite put her finger on, the stuff of tarnished hearts and Steve Earle songs. But then there was all that other baggage—feeling wounded by his attempt to sneak away after making love, ashamed for reading too much into it, guilty for blurting out something entirely inappropriate at the time. See you when I see you, stranger—that’s what she’d wanted to say, something glib and nonchalant. But pride took over her tongue, then her temper stepped in. Old story. She was, after all, the daughter of a man they called Colonel Tripwire.

  Finally they came to where the highway split—south to San Miguel, southeast to San Bartolo Oriente—and Lili pulled off at a roadside chalet, a small thatched hut where an Indian woman sold drinks from a plastic cooler. They parked in the blinding sun beside a pair of dusty, sagging trucks, one loaded high with plátanos. The other was decked in blue and white bunting, the colors of ARENA, and in back the bed was littered with election posters and signs collected from along the road—not just their own, Eileen noticed, but everyone else’s too. How thoughtful.

  The areneros sat at a table in the feathery shade of several giant ceiba trees, sharing jokes with the truck driver, who looked like he could live without the badinage. Eileen and Lili ordered agua cristal and a tamarind fresco from the Indian woman, sauntered over to another spot of shade, and sipped their drinks as an old woman pushing a wheelbarrow full of cocos appeared from down the road, hoping to sell some to the woman who owned the chalet. A young girl trailed after the woman with the wheelbarrow, holding a towel over her head for shade from the sun.

  Nodding to the areneros, Lili murmured, “Look at them. So full of themselves. They won. Like that’s all that matters.”

  Eileen, steeling herself against the heartbreak in Lili’s voice, said, “Admit it, if our side had come out on top, and by a twenty-point margin, we’d be crowing too.”

  “No. We’d be talking about what we intend to do. The things that will change.”

  “And slapping ourselves on the back just a little, no?”

  Lili shook her head and looked away. “You don’t understand.”

  No, Eileen thought, I do understand. But that was what Americans always said. The ones who came down, wrung their hands, pledged solidarity, then ran back home. “I’m still thirsty. Let me get us a couple more drinks.” She excused herself, realizing this was but one more gesture of convenience—walk away from the hard part, spend a little money to smooth it over. It was impossible, knowing what to do.

  Passing through a cloud of flies, she came up to the chalet just as the old woman with the wheelbarrow concluded her transaction—she’d sold five coconuts—and she and the little girl with the towel umbrella trudged off again, heading toward the turn in the road where Lili sat in the shade. Meanwhile, one of the areneros got up from the table, peeling away from his group to buy another round for the crew. Eileen was scouring her jean pocket for money as he came up behind her.

  “You’re an American.” His English was melodic, the kind of accent you heard from Latino movie stars back home. Sensing her surprise: “I studied at San Diego State.” He was fair-skinned, ginger-haired, with a lanky build and spaniel eyes. Smiling, he extended his hand. “My name is Armando.”

  It was one of those excruciating moments, not wanting to be rude but knowing Lili was watching. Manners won out—discretion and valor and all that, she thought, taking his hand. “Eileen.”

  He gestured expansively. “Let me buy the drinks for you and your friend. We’re celebrating, as you can see.”

  “That’s very kind,” Eileen said, “but unnecessary.”

  His smile flagged as he glanced over at Lili, who was negotiating with the old woman and child for a few cocos. “And if I insist?”

  Eileen handed a dollar to the Indian woman and gestured that the change was hers to keep. “You’ll force me to be impolite, and that in itself would be discourteous. Then we’ll both be to blame, won’t we?” She turned to go. “Very nice to meet you, Armando.”

  He let her walk a few steps, then said, “We’re not the devils they make us out to be, you know.”

  Pausing, she replied over her shoulder, “I certainly hope not.”

  She felt his gaze on her back like a scald but continued on, crossing the hard-packed dirt toward Lili, who waited in her oasis of shade, now in possession of three cocos. Attempting humor, Eileen said, “I’d say we have sufficient fluids now to last us to San Miguel.” She handed the fresco to Lili, who plunged the pointed straw into the plastic sack and sipped, watching the old woman point her wheelbarrow toward San Bartolo Oriente. That was where, Eileen remembered, Jude and his hydrologist were doing whatever for whomever in the name of whatever—hard-nosed realism, maybe. Funny, she thought, how in a place like this—how did the World Bank put it: catastrophic but improving—everything began to feel either insidious or naïve, even pragmatism.

  Lili said, “Do you know what that little girl told me?” She nodded down the road, where the youngster with the towel over her head plodded behind the old woman. “They live in a village ten miles or so down that road. A woman who lived in the next village over noticed the water in their well turning bad, so she complained to one of the citizen councils in San Miguel. Now the woman’s gone. No one’s seen her since yesterday.”

  Her voice was dull, her eyes impassive, as though this story wasn’t something she’d just heard, but a tale from long ago, repeated so monotonously it no longer merited feeling.

  Eileen said, “Gone as in how? Has anyone told the authorities?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to ask any of that,” Lili said. “The old woman—the girl’s grandmother, I think—told her to be quiet. Then she asked me to forget what I’d heard. She said the girl was wrong in the head, a liar, she makes things up. She apologized, and promised me the girl will get a beating when they get home.”

  14

  Jude and Strock sat in a sports bar at O’Hare, waiting for their flight to Los Angeles. From there, they’d catch the red-eye to El Salvador.

  All in all, Jude felt relieved—there’d been no need to ply Strock with half as much drink as he’d feared would be necessary. They’d gone to the clinic for his vaccinations and picked up a new cane, then bought a few beers at a package store to down with sliders over an early lunch. After that it was on to collect some clothes and a bag—not because any of it couldn’t be had far cheaper where they were going, but only a jihadist or an imbecile shows up for his flight in this day and age without luggage—then a few more brews before leaving the car at the rental drop, and now a cold one or t
wo before takeoff. On reflection, it did seem like a bucket of suds, but he’d never felt things skidding out of control.

  Strock had been strangely open to the pitch. He found the prospect of work, regardless of where, appealing, and this would be tax-free, an extra bonus. “My little girl, a little money might help out,” he’d said, something in his doghouse tone suggesting it might ease things with Peg, too, if she’d allow it. He’d go down to the tropics, get tan, dry out, come home flush with cash and in the pink. A changed man. His gaze turned inward when he talked about it. Beyond that, Strock stayed relatively mum and he seemed to take Jude’s spiel at face value. At least until now.

  “I haven’t brought this up yet,” Strock said, “but I’ve been wondering—you remember Bill Malvasio?”

  They were watching college hoops on the TV over the bar. Despite himself, Jude flinched at the name.

  “Sure. He worked with you and my dad.”

  “He and your dad were tight.” Strock held up his hand, his fingers crossed.

  “My dad was tight with you, too.”

  “Not like with Malvasio.” Strock got the bartender’s attention and signaled for another round. “Rumor has it Big Bad Bill ran south when the worm turned, down to where we’re headed, actually. You ever hear that?”

  It came out more like a prod than a question.

  Jude said, “That was what, ten years ago?”

  “I wasn’t counting.”

  “You think he’d still be down there?”

  “I didn’t say he was down there. I said that was the rumor.”

  Jude checked the impulse to chew his lip. “Okay.”

  “You seen him?”

  Jude laughed. “Okay, now you said it. Look, like I told you, it’s been ten years. You don’t really think—”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  Jude glanced up at the TV screen as a point guard in dreads nailed one from downtown. Groans and cheers and hand claps rose up among various clusters of men around the bar. Tell him, he thought. The truth, all of it.