When we came upon two men dripping wet and drying themselves off with a rag of material they scattered like rabbits.
‘They must have just got here.’
Then she pulled me along, smashing through the dry and brittle reed stems towards the river.
She was the woman in the wood from my dream, running.
IV
THE BULB GLOWED FAINTLY, protected by a steel grille. A cockroach worked its way across the concrete, pausing in the strips of light that beamed through the wire. I was curled on the bloodstained floor of a prison cell.
Again, I heard a key in the lock, and stood up, presuming another questioning. The metal door swung a brighter light into the room. Silhouetted, the comandante stepped past the young guard who that morning had slipped me a cigarette through the bars.
‘I have no reason to keep you here.’
I stared at him, blinking.
‘Do you have a reason to stay?’
‘This room?’ I gestured at the stone walls, the slop pail. ‘Or Mexico?’
The comandante tipped his hat to study me. He’d been doing this for three days, again and again asking me about ‘the woman’.
‘I recommend you go home,’ he said. ‘And not through the US. They hang men in Texas.’
He shouted back to the corridor. Another guard walked in with my clothes, washed and folded, held out before him as if he were my footman.
‘The blood didn’t come out in the laundry.’
He watched as I set the clothes on the wooden bunk, and then stripped off the soiled and rank cotton shirt and prison issue trousers I’d been wearing since the second morning.
‘Come,’ he said once I’d changed back into my own outfit. I felt as much of a stranger in it as I did in the prison garb. ‘You must sign for your money and credit cards, your watch and phone.’
I followed him through the corridor. In other cells I saw the Mexican men who’d been calling out to me since I was brought into the station, handcuffed on the banks of the Rio Grande.
DAY AND NIGHT, IN the dark of that cell, I’d seen nothing else. Kay had been running ahead of me towards the river, slashing at the reedy grass with her hands. She fell at speed, sprawled and crumpled in the dirt. I dragged her up and pushed her on, desperate, every thudding second expecting the bullet in my back.
When we got to the bank I shouted, ‘Swim.’ She threw off her shoes and dived. I looked down at my laces, then looked back along the path.
‘Jump, Sam.’
I did. Shoes on. Because he came thrashing through the grass, pistol in hand.
It was the way he calmly took aim that was so terrifying. Like a man at a shooting range.
THE COMANDANTE WALKED AHEAD. A guard held my elbow, firm and guiding, as if I might fall if he let go. ‘I apologize for your lack of exercise,’ said the comandante over his shoulder. ‘Now you can see why you were kept separate from the others.’
In an open cell where men were caged like exhibits at a zoo, one man with spider web tattoos wrapped round his upper body mimed slitting my throat by drawing a finger across his own.
‘And he would,’ said the comandante, leading us from the dim corridor of cells into an office behind the front desk where relatives of the interned waited with bundles of food. He gestured for me to sit, and the guard set me down and stepped back. Then the comandante took a Ziploc bag from his bureau and asked me to check my wallet.
‘It’s okay,’ I said.
‘Please. Check.’
I opened it up. The bills were still damp from the river crossing.
‘All there?’
I nodded and picked up my mobile.
‘It doesn’t work,’ said the comandante. ‘The river got inside it.’
I slipped it into my pocket.
‘Your signature.’
The form was typed in Spanish, and I tried to read it to make sure I wasn’t signing a confession.
‘Sabes leer Español?’ asked the comandante.
I shook my head.
‘It’s simply an inventory.’
I scored my name across the dotted line shakily, a moniker with no meaning to me whatsoever. Then I slid back the wooden chair and stood. ‘I can go?’
He nodded. ‘But sit for a moment.’
I hesitated, then again took the wooden chair before his desk.
‘I assured them you’d be released by noon.’
I was puzzled. ‘Assured whom?’
‘Your benefactor, of course. They will be waiting.’
I felt my palms sweating on the arm of the chair. ‘I tell you now,’ I snapped. ‘If he’s waiting with a gun you’ll have a murder on your hands. Either his or mine.’
The comandante tutted, shook his head. ‘No, señor. You’re mistaken. Not a man. An Englishwoman.’
My skin prickled.
‘I only heard her on the telephone, but what I learned from her voice was that, yes, perhaps she’s angry with you, though I doubt she will kill you.’
The door bumped open and a young officer backed in carrying a pot of tea and two cups on a metal tray.
‘She has made the necessary, how shall we call it, arrangement for your release.’
Jenni? A bribe? ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t even know I’m in Mexico.’
The comandante checked his watch. ‘She will be landing in Monterrey.’ He studied the ticking hands. ‘About now. And I agreed you’d be at the bus station by nightfall.’
The officer set the tray down on the desk, and the comandante lifted the teapot lid and regarded the steaming contents. Then he looked up. ‘First an American man enquiring about your health. Then an official from the British consulate returning my call, and finally a woman from London.’ He put a spoonful of sugar into his empty cup. ‘You lose one woman in a river, and then another comes to your rescue. I wonder if her line of questioning will be more successful than mine?’
Jenni. What did she know? And did she have any idea why her fiancé was suddenly behind bars in Mexico?
‘Señor, when I first asked you about the women, you corrected my English. “Woman”, you said. “Women” is the plural. And then you said nothing else. Now, I believe my grammatical error was actually correct, no?’ The comandante sat back in his leather chair, briefly checked his computer screen and nodded with satisfaction. ‘Muy bien.’ Then he looked at me again. ‘And I doubt this woman waiting for you will take silence for an answer.’
He was right. She wouldn’t.
‘But, well, you have no reason to talk to me now. Perhaps you should save your explanations for her.’ The comandante poured tea from his pot and offered me a cup. ‘You English like milk, yes?’
I declined, asked if I was free to leave. The comandante shrugged and blew on his black tea, sipped, then set down the cup with a clink.
‘I’m not sure you’re listening so well, but try.’
My mind, after days of nothing but four walls and thoughts of Kay, suddenly had to cope with the fact of facing Jenni, explanations.
‘The first arrangement for your release was in US dollars. And considerably more than the English pounds transferred this morning.’
I clenched my fists beneath the table.
‘However, the woman on the phone, seemed, well, the deserving party. Something in the sound of her voice. Her plea.’
Segur had tried to buy my flesh and blood. The comandante explained that a man interested in my welfare had volunteered to pay bail. And while the comandante considered the correct legalities, as he phrased it, Segur sat in a cantina across the road from the police station. When he slept or used the lavatory, men he’d hired from one of the local cartels kept watch for him, and only when the comandante threw his weight around and sent Segur back to the US was it safe for me to be released.
Because Jenni had begged for my life.
‘This job,’ said the comandante. ‘This uniform. This unseemly business of murder, bribes. Funerals. It can stop a heart dead. But y
our Englishwoman, she … what’s the word. Yes, revive. She revived my dead heart.’
He raised his cup, then decided what he had to say was more important than the drink and set it back down on the saucer. ‘But you, señor. You still have murder in your heart.’
He was right. Segur had died a thousand times in my bare hands. His death, his last breath, was all I had left apart from my grief.
After dismissing the officer from the room, the comandante sipped at his tea. I studied his round face and thin lips, perfectly groomed fingernails, the silver Rolex.
‘Listen.’ He put down the cup. ‘A few years ago this town was like Iraq. Not that it’s a resort town now, and certainly no place for your Englishwoman. But then cartels battled in the streets with bazookas and grenades. A police chief was killed. Seven hours after the welcome ceremony for his replacement, he was killed, too. I knew this man most of my life. The evening before he was gunned down I went to a party at his house, played soccer in the yard with his sons. The next day we lay him in the ground. A mother watches her son into the earth. When I pay my respects to her at the wake, I promise vengeance, that the men who murdered her boy would be cut down. She said to me, “And bloody your memory of Raul? So instead of remembering him with the good food his wife cooked and the company of his children, his friendship, you have more dead men?”’
Again, in a slightly effeminate gesture, he filled his cup before continuing. ‘In the movies, when the wronged man seeks out the destroyer of his dreams, we call him our hero. In his revenge we have justice. And this is Hollywood, you might think. But in Mexico we know the difference between the real world and the movies. Not that we think the movie is false, just that we know life is a show, too. A wronged man here must act, play the part of the avenger or leave the story. So the crime of passion is a show, yes, but the show is all there is.’
‘You didn’t want me to kill someone in your town.’
The comandante muttered something in Spanish, tutted. ‘Neither did I want someone to kill you in my town.’
‘Who would want to do that?’ I asked, not wanting to tell what I knew, fearful of subterfuge if Segur and the comandante had been talking.
‘Please, señor. A man is seen firing shots across the Rio Grande. Men only fire guns at each other if money …’ he paused to finish his tea, ‘or a woman is involved.’
‘Can I go now?’
‘You can. Not that I’m looking for thank yous, but you should know it’s only safe for you to venture beyond these walls with my permission. Because under this uniform is a beating heart.’
Jenni. All I’d done to her and she’d come to my rescue. I was crushed by the thought of what she must be feeling.
‘My last question. Not that I expect you to answer this one either, but still.’ The comandante leant forward in his seat and looked hard into my eyes. ‘Certainly a man can be destroyed by the love of a woman, of this much I’m sure. But do you really believe a man can be saved by this love?’
The ceiling fan whirred, a lost propeller come free of its wings. On the wall above his desk hung a map of Mexico. Beyond the northern borderline the US was a blank country without names of towns or states.
‘Yes,’ I answered, because it was all that remained of who I was. ‘I have to.’
The comandante sighed. ‘The memory of this love? Or what you hope is waiting?’
I didn’t know, and while wondering if I could survive both without being torn apart I stood to leave without asking for permission.
The comandante nodded to himself, stared into his empty cup and pointed to the young officer who opened the door. He asked if I needed an escort to show me to the bus station, but I said I’d rather find it myself. And with a wave of his hand the comandante gestured for me to go. Before I did he casually remarked, ‘Two dozen witnesses saw her drift under the International Bridge.’
I froze. ‘It was dark. How could they see anything?’
‘She wore a white dress.’
Right then, I saw her. Floating in the room.
‘They say it was glowing.’
Then I turned and walked from the office. Another policeman lifted the counter so I could pass through the crowded reception area and out of the doors, into the Nuevo Laredo sunshine, bewildered.
For a few minutes I waited on the steps, somehow expecting Kay to walk over and collect me from jail, simply pull up in an open-topped sports car and hit the horn.
Or Jenni.
But no one was there to greet my freedom. My shame. I drifted busy streets, with no more idea of what day of the week it was than what year. Children saw me and begged, others hawked necklaces, candy. I asked a man at a news-stand for directions to the bus station. He pointed in a general easterly direction, then saw my bloodstained shirt and focused back on his till.
‘This world,’ I said to him.
He looked up. ‘Qué?’
I opened my empty hands to the road, the busy sidewalk. ‘Unless you have someone.’
He waved me away, spat on the paving stone before my feet.
I tried my phone again. No life. I walked. I couldn’t remember when I stopped walking, but I must have done because I was curled in a doorway and only knew I was when I caught a boy of no more than eleven or twelve trying to steal the watch from my wrist.
On the edge of a plaza, where old men sat and played chess, miniature birds swooped and dipped, snatching insects from the morning air.
Swallows, not hummingbirds.
For three days in a stone room I’d thought of nothing but her. Nothing. The first morning they stripped me, the comandante had looked at my naked body and asked, ‘Who was the man firing the gun at? You, or the woman?’
I had no answer.
‘You were with a woman,’ he would state. ‘Where is she?’
‘Why the fuck do you keep asking? I screamed. ‘What does it matter now?’
I sat handcuffed to his chair and thought they might torture me. I couldn’t imagine what they could do that would be any more painful than being alive.
And what could I have told him that would make sense? That a man from England had left his loving fiancée to come to the US to see another woman. A woman he took from another man. A woman he talked into running from her life. Though she’d say I’d run from my life to hers. That wasn’t a lie. I had.
‘Why would two people swim from the US to Mexico?’
I shook my head again. For the first two days I was catatonic, unable to produce a sound. And if I could, would I have told him how we ran through the reeds like the figures from my dream, how we dived into the Rio Grande?
‘I love you,’ is what Segur had shouted from the riverbank. ‘I love you.’ Then I heard the shots, the flat reports. I screamed at Kay to swim, then goaded Segur to shoot at me.
He didn’t. He stood very still and aimed at Kay, the white muzzle flashing. I tried to swim between him and her but the current had pushed her ahead. Fountained water from the bullets that missed sprayed about her, until the flesh and bone thud of lead striking her body, the last shot he fired.
She was struggling to stay afloat when I grabbed hold of her.
‘Nearly there,’ I kept saying to her. ‘Nearly there.’
I kicked hard and didn’t look back, my arm hooked under her shoulders. ‘It’s okay,’ I told her, ‘it’s okay.’
Carrying Kay, swimming in a pair of shoes, I fought the river to keep us afloat. After finding my feet on a sandbank, I pulled her through a stand of reeds on to the shore. Her legs loose. Her head heavy in my arms. She coughed, and blood seeped from the corner of her mouth. I laid her on the ground, and when she asked if we were in Mexico I told her not to speak.
‘We made it,’ she said. ‘We’re here.’
She lifted her head to kiss me. I tasted the blood on her lips. ‘I have to see how bad it is,’ I told her. ‘I need to turn you over.’
I rolled her on to her side. There was a small rip in her dress beneath her left shoulder bl
ade. She coughed again. The sound of something awry in her lungs. I tore the dress open and inspected the puncture, a neat, dark hole. I was sure she’d be okay, that the wound was too small to kill. Then I eased her on to her side and saw the blood. A red flow spreading. I could hear traffic on the road above the tree line. ‘I’m going to run and get help,’ I told her, cupping her head.
‘Stay,’ she said. ‘You stay here now. With me.’
WHEN I LOOKED BACK to the plaza, saw the men still playing chess, the birds in the trees, I noticed that I’d been holding a stone so hard I’d opened up the cut in my palm. I let it fall, bloodied, into the gutter.
Then I stood again and walked. If Jenni had arranged with the comandante that I get on the bus to Monterrey, then that was what I must do. All I could do. I thought of going down to the river, as if Kay would be sitting on the bank, waiting.
I could see her flashing smile, that bright flaw in the dark of her iris.
As I walked I passed people who looked at my face in such a way that I wondered what they must see for such a crease of sorrow to suddenly appear on theirs.
Finally I found the terminal and bought a ticket. I wandered the concourse with the stub in my hand until a gaudy red and green contraption pulled into the bay. The young guard from the police station, who must have been following me from the moment I stepped on to the street, gave me his pack of cigarettes and gestured for me to board. He spoke softly and gravely to me in Spanish, then walked away. I let the women on first then stepped up. I took a bench seat, my only thought apart from Kay’s face that I was about to ride a converted US school bus.
From the suburbs of Nuevo Laredo and on to highways skimming farmland and mountain ranges and villages I didn’t know the name of and never would. Villages where women swept dust from their steps and boys kicked footballs across dirt pitches.
I sat and stared at the space beside me. It seemed an impossible illusion that Kay wasn’t with me.
Then, as if my brain forced me to sleep to protect itself from my thoughts, I dozed, fluttering in and out of consciousness. Woken by jarring potholes and blaring near misses with oncoming rigs, I once reached over to check that she wasn’t there.
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 20