Grave of Hummingbirds

by Jennifer Skutelsky

  The governor was silent.

  “Did you collect any evidence before you brought her here?” Gregory asked. “Did you do that?”

  “She’ll stay here with you, Gregory,” Rufo said. “If you want, we can show you the place where we found her, and you can have a look around. Later. Right now she’s yours. So get to work, write up a report, and we’ll come back to fetch the body.” He turned to go.

  “Wait!” Gregory cried. “Please, Rufo, have a heart. I’m not the man to do this.”

  “You’re the only man to do this,” Rufo said. “Let go of the past. We all see the resemblance to Nita, but I’m sorry. We need you. There is no one else.”

  “I can’t store her for more than a few days. She must be identified, her family notified.”

  Rufo didn’t respond.

  Gregory knew she’d be heavy. “I can’t lift her on my own. Unless you wish me to conduct a postmortem out here.”

  And so together the men lifted and carried the stretcher into his clinic. They heaved the body onto a steel table and almost clambered over one another in their haste to be out and away.

  FOUR

  The smell of death and eerie silence compressed the walls of the clinic and shrank the space. Standing immobile at the door, Gregory had to force himself into action.

  All he could undertake was gross anatomy, cutting through skin, muscle, and bone in search of the body’s more accessible secrets. Even a microscope would reveal little without the specialized slicing and staining of tissue samples. He was not a pathologist. His technology was basic, run by generators not intended to support a sophisticated mortuary. He lacked immediate access to a laboratory that could analyze microscopic organisms and DNA samples.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured to the draped figure. “You deserve better. But I’ll do what I can.”

  The small room seemed to listen to him, its hushed attention respectful, waiting. The body lay half-revealed, wings jutting, shedding feathers to the floor. A few lifted as though an impossible breeze had stirred them from behind the closed door.

  She lay awkwardly on her side, limbs bent. When Gregory stretched out a hand to touch her, an image flashed across his mind as he uncurled her fingers. Someone standing watch, hunched and howling, lashed by the cold. Gregory drew back, and the impression turned into the wind, to slip away.

  The wings prevented him from turning her onto her back, so he eased her onto her stomach. Concerned that his would be the only evidence to later emerge, he photographed her from a dozen angles. Then he removed her dress, prying it from beneath the wings. Once white, it was now soiled where rough handling had marked and torn it. He draped the shredded back section over her shoulder and stared down at the intricate arrangement of feathers that were unmistakably those of a condor.

  They were not just quills and fluff, pasted together with wire and glue. There was no fiberglass, no welded-steel frame. As he lifted one four-foot wing away from her back, symmetrical rows of silk sutures kept it in place.

  You would need a curved needle for this type of work. Specialized equipment. Where would you find it? A doctor’s office, an operating theater, a mortuary. Gregory’s horror deepened as he raised his eyes to the broken cabinet at the far end of the room.

  Forcing his attention back to the body, he pushed away the likelihood that thief and killer were the same man. He unpicked continuous seams that were knotted at each end, afraid the woman’s skin would tear as the weight of the wing stretched it taut. He murmured, “Be still, be still,” but the task became impossible without assistance and the wing fell, sending a small table clattering on spinning wheels across the floor. Gregory lurched forward too late to catch one or stop the other, and for a moment, he sagged, resting his head on the back of his hand, waiting for the pounding in his chest to slow. The macabre stillness returned, and he set to work on the other wing.

  There was no evidence of blood or inflammation around the deep wounds. He suspected they had been inflicted postmortem, but it was impossible to detect bruising beneath the colors of fresh tattoos that adorned the body’s back. Haphazard patterns cluttered the skin with jittery outlines, as if the artist lacked a steady hand.

  The tattoos appeared random and clumsy, but somehow Gregory knew they were a message. He tried to make sense of them, studying the swelling that needles had left in their wake. He found a hummingbird on one shoulder blade, a pyramid of skulls and odd-shaped bones on the other, and a scarlet river at her hip, in which stick figures floated. A yellow climbing rose linked the images together.

  He washed the body with a sponge and warm water and began to sweat, fighting a growing dizziness that eventually forced him to stop.

  He recorded staccato observations into a digital voice recorder. “There are no ligature marks. Scabs forming antemortem, likely from tattoo work done prior to death on the back and shoulders.”

  Free now of the crushing, dragging weight of the wings, the body became manageable, and after a dozen more photographs, Gregory at last rolled the woman onto her back. He was afraid to look into her eyes, in case he’d find a trace in them of the last thing she’d seen, the last sensation of fright she’d felt. But he found them dark and blank. Nita’s pain had lodged in her gray eyes, which were more the color of ash toward the end than a building storm. As he studied the face of the strange woman on his table, her resemblance to Nita receded.

  The dread he’d managed to submerge returned as he removed the rest of the crudely stitched garment. Beneath the bland fabric, he discovered the work of a butcher.

  Her breasts had been removed, leaving jagged, haphazardly sutured tears that would have bled and bled. Memories of Nita’s surgery swooped in to reclaim the similarities, and Gregory’s eyes stung as he noted where bacterial fasciitis had run its course. If not comatose, she’d have been confused, dehydrated. She might have lived for a few more days before succumbing to loss of blood, systemic inflammatory response syndrome, and multiple-organ failure.

  Sweat wet Gregory’s face. Choking on the inaudible anguish of this woman’s last days, he coughed and stared at her mutilated flesh, her shaved head, and the ruined heap of feathers on the floor. Someone had loved—or hated—his wife and reconstructed her likeness in a stranger.

  He covered the body and bent to gather the wings, crushing them in his arms before he set them down on the examination bed a few feet away.

  FIVE

  The morning after Gregory completed the autopsy, he defied Rufo’s orders and reported both the homicide and the robbery to the Búho police, relinquishing the body to the chief medical examiner.

  Police in gray uniforms swarmed through the village and dusted Gregory’s medicine cabinet for fingerprints. Rumors spread fast that the boy, Alberto Pacheco Chavez, had discovered a winged corpse in the highlands.

  The police took Alberto away with them to Búho and dragged him through the charge office to a room at the back of the police station. Few shadows and secrets survived the fluorescent lights that buzzed from the ceiling. Today they flickered incessantly.

  Two aluminum chairs faced each other across a distance of about five feet. To one side, a table stood against the wall. Papers lay scattered across an open green folder.

  One of the men locked the door while another hit the boy in the face. He fell to the linoleum and gave them his name, although he knew they had no need to ask it.

  They kicked him in the small of his back, and his kidneys screamed as he gave them the llama’s name. Sweet Caroline. For Neil Diamond. The animal had found the body, not he, and what could they do to her?

  The heel of just one boot cracked something in his chest. They picked him up and sat him in a chair, then handcuffed his wrists behind his back.

  Eyes on the floor, lungs cowering, he told them the truth. “She guards the sheep . . . nnnggg . . . because my father thinks she’s cleverer than a . . . uhhhhh . . . dog. People laugh at him because of this, but he’s right. She cares like a mother.” He straightened in
his chair, arching against the pain in his lower back, then snapped forward like a whip, to protect his ribs.

  The lights flickered, and one of the guards moved to the door to jiggle the switch before returning to stand behind the chair.

  The man facing Alberto smoked a cigarette. He had one lazy eyelid and slick, careful hair, straight and low-slung, like a crow’s tail. This man wore a suit, not a uniform. He draped his jacket over the back of the chair and unbuttoned the top of his shirt. He loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves before he sat down. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. “Never mind. Why would you?” He spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable as though communicating with a child. “A-le-jan-dro Her-nan-dez. You will remember it.”

  Alberto spoke to the lazy eye because it seemed kinder. “Alejandro Hernandez. Yes, I think I will remember. They took my mother. Did you know that? They took her.”

  Again the lights flickered. “I know they took your mother. She was a troublemaker. A rabble-rouser. You have any idea what we do to troublemakers and rabble-rousers?”

  Alberto tried to focus but coughed around the words he tried to form.

  The man in the chair bared his gums and sucked a sliver of air between two of his top teeth. “Now listen, you little shit. Don’t play with me. What were you doing up there?”

  “I was . . . ,” Alberto said, then paused to think. He focused on the llama. His mother would not save him. “I was bringing Sweet Caroline to Doctor Vásquez Moreno. She was injured. Yes. I was bringing her down from the sheep. She’s . . . clever. You know.” He lowered his voice to share a secret.

  The lights hummed.

  Cigarette man leaned forward.

  “And brave. Clever and brave. In the past two years we lost only one sheep. This year, a lamb. Do you know that about a llama?” Alberto spewed the words as though they were loose teeth. “That she’s better than a dog? To guard? A dog can bite. He must worry . . . about mountain lions and bears, but no”—he even managed a chuckle—“the one bear in the village is the governor.” A mouthful of blood dribbled onto the floor between his knees. “I brought her down to see Dr. Vásquez Moreno because she was in a fight.”

  “What’s he talking about?” spat the man in the chair.

  “His fucking llama,” said a guard. He slapped Alberto across the skull.

  The boy’s head fell forward. “Did you know,” he said quietly, when he could speak again, “some think a llama is a type of camel?”

  The smoking man stubbed his cigarette out on the faded blue cotton shirt that was pulled askew across Alberto’s chest. Two of its buttons lay under the lights a few feet away.

  Cotton and skin hissed. Alberto jerked back. He would have toppled his chair if the men behind him hadn’t kept it still.

  The smoking man lit another cigarette.

  Above their heads, a scratching sound began. At first soft, it grew louder, as if one, then dozens of claws were scraping the ceiling boards.

  Everyone looked up, except Alberto.

  “But a llama isn’t a camel. She’s a . . . ,” he said, coughed, and then shuddered. “Camelid.” He shook his head, as though to free it of water after a swim. “She was bitten by a puma. Sweet Caroline fought for the sheep. Maybe . . .” His voice dropped to a whisper, so that again his interrogator had to lean in close. “Maybe I should have fought like that for her.” He squeezed his eyes shut, and a memory leaked out of the corners, streaking tracks through the sweat and blood.

  As protective as she was, Sweet Caroline was no match for a hungry cat. Alberto had shot the puma with his father’s gun.

  The scratching in the ceiling intensified. It sounded like the purr of a hundred or more small, beating wings against the roof.

  One of the cylindrical blue-white globes shattered.

  Spooked, the guards ducked, and the smoker leaped from his chair. They whirled at a loud knock on the door. With a growl and a curse, Alberto’s interrogator lunged across the room to snatch it open. He stepped out, then came back for his jacket and shrugged it on. Just before he left again, he eyed the ceiling and snarled at the men, “When we’re done, see to those fucking bats. Birds. Whatever.”

  Once he’d left, the room settled. The guards grew nervous, eyeing the ceiling.

  Alberto sank into his aching joints. His pulse gradually steadied as he concentrated on his twitching muscles. The second hand of the clock on the wall clicked again and again against the same minute mark before it stopped.

  On the dark insides of his lids, Alberto saw himself as a child, playing outside with a group of five-year-olds, knees dusty and bare feet crusted with mud. His mother, Penelope, boiled water on the stove for eggs and pulled fresh-baked potato bread from the oven. Onion soup simmered, and steam rose off the red kernels of fresh corn in a bowl on a wooden table. She wore a white cotton smock and had drawn her long, tangled hair into a thick ponytail with one of his father’s broken shoelaces.

  When she called to Alberto, the fragrances of food brought him and his three friends to the door in a stampede while behind them their mothers moved toward the house at a slower pace. One carried a bowl of tomatoes and aji peppers, another a length of calico, and the third a flask of chicha morada, thickened with pineapple chunks and flavored with cinnamon and cloves.

  In the buzzing lights of Búho’s central police station, Alberto imagined the taste of fruit on his tongue, instead of blood—apple pieces and pepino he nibbled while sitting on his mother’s lap during the meetings she’d held at their house.

  It was late evening when they came for her. His father was playing chess with Rufo at the café. Alberto lay in bed as Penelope read to him from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s El principito.

  His grandmother, arthritic and given to bouts of uncontrollable weeping, was visiting and planned to spend the night. Although she lived nearby, a late walk home up a steep hill was out of the question. The old woman sat alone at the table, listening to the melody of Penelope’s voice, when sadness took hold again.

  Alberto watched the tears slide silently down her face. They appeared silver in the light.

  He had just begun to nod off when they heard the stutter of gunfire across the bridge. Penelope jumped up and his grandmother stood, leaning heavily on the table. Alberto had a hiding place: a depression in the wall behind an ancient closet, and his mother wedged him in before dragging the furniture back into place. She didn’t have time to close the cupboard, and he could see through a hole in the wood.

  Three men broke down the door and burst into the house. Alberto’s grandmother stepped in front of Penelope, pushing her into the corner and screaming for help.

  No one came.

  They broke her fingers against the wall with the butt of a rifle as she raised her arms, shaking with effort, to protect her daughter. In the end, they had to go through her to get to Penelope. She took two bullets to the chest and one to the head.

  The men dragged his mother away, and Alberto crept out of his dark, tight hiding place to huddle beside his grandmother until his father, dazed with shock and fury, lifted him away.

  They never saw Penelope again.

  “Can I have the buttons from my shirt?” Alberto said, bracing himself as a hand grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled his head back.

  “What did you say?” The other guard stepped forward, crushing glass beneath his boots.

  Just then, the door opened, and the man in his sloppy suit returned. “Let him go,” he said.

  Incredulous, the guards balked.

  “You heard me. Let him go. He’s simple, can’t you see that? He’s nineteen and acts like a ten-year-old. There’s nothing in his thick skull.”

  One of them unlocked the handcuffs.

  “Go. Get out of here. Stay out of trouble.”

  Alberto limped into the charge office to find Dr. Vásquez Moreno waiting for him.

  Gregory had secured Alberto’s release with a wad of dollars and tended to his injuries at the clinic. He hadn’t meant
to incriminate him.

  That night, he couldn’t sleep. Disturbed by the lack of light in Alberto’s eyes, he wallowed in remorse and pity for the boy, who never really stood a chance after his mother was abducted. He also felt responsible for him and inexplicably answerable to Nita, as though he and Alberto were somehow connected through her.

  Alberto’s mother was older than Nita, but the two had been friends. When Gregory and Nita lived in Cuba, they’d learned of the work Penelope did with the women employed in factories and on farms near Búho. Many faced the dangers of getting to and from work safely each day. Members of Libertad a los Campesinos, restless and bored and far removed from the ideology that originally inspired the organization, randomly used and discarded women who traveled long distances on decrepit buses at night or early in the morning. Drug money kept them in weapons, and terrified bus drivers complied with their demands to pull over and look the other way.

  Penelope sought to unite women and organize them into groups who traveled together, armed if necessary. She told Nita that she intended to put pressure on employers and bus drivers to protect workers. Until women were more independent, the men they were forced to work for had to take better care of them. At best, give them higher wages, but at the very least, keep them safe.

  She might have made a difference. People were beginning to follow her; journalists had started to quote her.

  When Gregory and Nita had learned of Penelope’s disappearance, Gregory could barely restrain his wife from leaving him to return to Colibrí. For weeks Nita lay awake sobbing, afraid of what the kidnappers would do to her friend, knowing that at the end of the horror they’d inflict, they’d kill her. Night after night Gregory held Nita as she pleaded with him to let her go, but he resisted, and at last, when he thought she’d never stop, she gave in.

  She settled again into the life they’d built in Cuba, yet turned inward at odd moments, often gazing wild-eyed and wordless at him.

  He felt it, too—the rage and despair—but with nothing close to her ferocity. At times, Nita’s passion frightened him. He loved her for it, but when she ventured alone into some dark, inner place he couldn’t access, he watched her slip away and feared she’d never return.