Grave of Hummingbirds

by Jennifer Skutelsky

  Finn flinched.

  “Believe me, Finn, if there was some parallel universe, I would have discovered it. Many times I wanted to follow her.” He smoothed his fingers along the wooden grain, seeking to erase his sharpness.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Why didn’t I what? Commit suicide? You’re not a Catholic, are you?”

  Finn shook his head.

  “No? Well, I don’t consider myself one, either,” Gregory said. “I don’t believe in anything anymore. I believe in the things we see, not the things we wish were there. What about you? What do you believe in?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. That’s very personal. I shouldn’t ask.”

  “I believe in the things we can’t see.” Finn quickly changed the subject. “Do you have photographs of her?”

  “Of Nita? Of course.” Gregory busied himself with their empty plates. “And one day, when you come back for a ride and to visit your new friend in the barn, I’ll show you. Will you come back?”

  “I don’t know,” Finn said. “I’m not sure how long we’re staying.”

  “Ah. Well, you’ll always be welcome. But now we should head back, before your mother starts to worry.”

  Shades of sunset rippled over the lake as they left the cobbled driveway and turned onto the logging road.

  “We must hurry,” Gregory said, grimacing at the pain that flared suddenly in his ribs as he stumbled on the track. He had checked—he hadn’t broken anything in his fight with Rufo, but it was uncomfortable for him to straighten up, and he winced with every breath as he began to exert himself. “It gets dark very quickly at this time of year.”

  “I saw a condor flying over the canyon before I went into the barn,” Finn said as their steps quickened along the path. “It felt like . . .”

  Gregory stopped short and Finn almost ran into him. “It felt like what?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Like he was looking for the one in the barn.”

  “It may be that she has a mate. If he spotted Esmeralda, he might have flown into the canyon to feed on her.” Gregory turned his face up to the purpling sky, where the colors of early dusk were swiftly deepening, and strode on.

  Finn had to jog to keep up with him.

  The dark closed in on them as they neared the stone bridge. A single guard sat outside the shed that served as a sentry post, and Gregory stopped to talk to him. There should have been two of them, but the man, gesticulating with excitement, explained that a condor had been captured, and the other guard had joined the entourage that had followed the bird through the village.

  “I’d better find my mother,” Finn said. “She’ll be worried, especially if she saw Alberto come back alone.”

  Gregory suggested he call her, and Finn switched on his phone.

  “It just goes to voice mail,” he said. “I hope she’s okay.”

  Gregory recommended they split up. He would look in on the condor, make sure no harm came to him, inadvertent or otherwise, and risk incurring Rufo’s wrath yet again. But this time he’d be ready for him. He left Finn and made his way toward the square. To avoid the crowd, he took the back way across the alley and down the rugged steps behind Rufo’s café.

  On the chill breeze, a rank smell wafted his way. Alarmed and suspicious, Gregory slowed his pace long enough to identify the stench of recently loosened bowels. He discerned the metallic smell of pooling blood and the unmistakable reek of death. In shock, he backed away and probed the dark street with wide, straining eyes.

  A beer bottle tinkled down the steps and rolled against the curb. Gregory turned toward the sound in time to see a figure dart across the alley and disappear amid the Dumpsters at the back of the café.

  Torn between following the figure and tracing the source of a stench so strong it hijacked every other sense, Gregory chose to stay. He slowly walked toward a figure seated on the curb, legs spread, back propped up against the wall of the Gómez house. The man studied something in his lap, his head hanging onto a chest that slumped forward. He seemed to be moving from a solid into a liquid state, melting into dark pools that collected at the base of his torso and around his thighs.

  Gregory’s flashlight shone on the short rope that dangled from the man’s neck and froze on the hafts of more than two blades lodged in the muscles at the top of his back and shoulders. The blood had flowed down the front of his Windbreaker, along the rope, and into the open palm of his hand.

  Gregory recognized the hair first: the strands of faded red that fell forward onto a face that could be only Rufo’s. He started forward without thinking, hoping that the governor was still alive, that he could repair him, make up for their morning fight, restore him to the obstinate adversary and occasional ally he had been ever since they were children.

  A few feet away from the body, he stopped.

  Rufo was dead, and this was a crime scene. If Gregory interfered with it in any way, he’d become a suspect. Which he would be anyway, even without directly incriminating evidence. Everyone in the village must have heard about their fight.

  Gregory stood still, aware of circumstances closing over his head in a flood, images pouring in: the body in the highlands, laid out on his table under a scalpel; the tattoos and their scabs; Alberto’s beatings at the hands of the police; the woman at the café, who resembled Nita too closely, who seemed an afterthought of Nita or a memory made whole in flesh and bone. Sophie and her son, Finn.

  He had to get back to Finn and his mother. He’d find them, and they’d return with him to the house, where he could keep her safe.

  EIGHTEEN

  Finn found only traces of Sophie in the room they shared on the second floor. Her bed had been recently slept in, the blanket thrust aside and the imprint of her head left on the thin pillow.

  He tried to call her again, but she didn’t pick up.

  Downstairs, he ran into the German news crew and asked whether they’d seen her. No, they said, she hadn’t been at the café, and they couldn’t recall seeing her in the crowd that had milled about the stables. They’d filmed the crowd, too, as well as the condor. Finn’s mother was not a woman to forget, they teased—they would have gone in for a close-up, for sure. They’d caught the bird on camera, wings outstretched in the hands of two of its captors, who stood on either side of the ten-foot span—ten feet, can you imagine such a sight? A magnificent bird! They were happy, everyone was happy, although they would have liked to record the capture. They had planned to set out early the following morning to climb to the canyon. Sometimes the men stayed up there for days awaiting the descent of the messenger to the gods. It was unusual to catch one so soon, with a horse still fresh.

  Never mind, the best was yet to come.

  They offered no more English to Finn, and as they shed their gear, reverted to German.

  Finn left the school and hurried onto the main road. Once, his mother had told him, he had wandered off in a busy mall when he was a toddler, and for a few minutes, she’d been unable to find him. She’d described her agitation, how it had built to panic very quickly—in seconds—and how she’d felt as though her world had ended, knowing her life could not accommodate something so huge and ghastly as the loss of him.

  He felt that way now.

  Perhaps he would find her at the café, having a glass of wine and waiting for him to join her.

  As he headed for the square, people filtered back into the streets to the sounds of drums and trumpets and, somewhere, the rolling thrum of a vigorously strummed guitar. Tables were filling up at Los Colibríes—Manco was busy and in no mood to be pestered.

  “Have you seen my mother?” Finn asked, following him to the kitchen. “Mi madre?”

  “No,” Manco said over his shoulder. “She isn’t here. Check outside.”

  “I will, but have you seen her? Was she here? She was here this morning. Did she come back in the afternoon?”

  Manco pushed past him, shaking his head, to admonish one of the servers, and Finn stepped outside. He ra
ked every face with frantic eyes.

  A sudden high-pitched scream tore through the evening. It resounded again and again, soaring and dwindling, rising and falling, as though carried through the village on the back of a giant bird.

  Everything stilled. People who were walking stopped. An off-key trumpet moaned and fell silent. The guitar’s strumming cut off abruptly, its strings stopped by the thwack of a shocked hand.

  Then pandemonium broke loose. The sound came from behind the café, and men broke away from their parties to move toward it. They surged around Finn, who spun in their midst like the seeking needle of a compass.

  “Finn!” he heard as he joined the group that had started to run toward the back of the crowded restaurant. Someone grabbed his arm, and he narrowly avoided a collision as he was pulled away.

  The screams faded, then stopped.

  “Come with me, Finn,” Gregory said and headed for the church. When they stood before the dark wooden double doors he asked, “Where’s your mother?”

  “I don’t know! I can’t find her.”

  “She wasn’t at the school?”

  “No, I looked there.”

  “Where else have you checked?”

  “I was going to see if she’d gone to the stables with everyone else. But even if she did, she should have come back by now. Nobody’s seen her.”

  “Try to calm down,” Gregory said. “We’ll find her together.”

  The door at their backs creaked open, and they turned to see the shadowy figure of Father Alfonso. He wasn’t wearing his robes and appeared to have dressed in a hurry, still adjusting the collar and sleeves of a turtleneck sweater.

  “Gregory?” the priest said. “What’s happened? I heard something . . .”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  “Well, hadn’t we better find out?” Father Alfonso walked out onto the square and observed several groups of women gathered together in frightened silence. “Screams. Did I hear screaming?”

  Gregory nodded but didn’t elaborate. Someone had found Rufo’s body, and it was too late to help him. They had to find Sophie.

  The priest returned to shut the church door. As he stepped back, he said, “What are you waiting for? You may be needed, Gregory. Come, come.”

  “Right behind you, Father.” Gregory made as if to follow the man but broke away instead and headed in the opposite direction. “Stay beside me, Finn,” he said. “We mustn’t get separated.”

  There was no sign of Sophie among the women. No sign of her along the main road that the condor and the crowd had taken to get to the stalls. They stopped short of the livestock corrals. She wouldn’t have lingered there, alone, in the dark.

  “Mom?” Finn called, over and over, until hoarse.

  “Sophie? Sophie!” Gregory took up the cry when tears began to cloud Finn’s voice. His own was tremulous, too, and he had to clear his throat to make a coherent sound.

  “We have to go back,” Finn said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “Maybe that was her, screaming like that.”

  “It wasn’t her. She’s not here.” Gregory pleaded with Finn to listen, to trust him, even as he stopped trusting himself, even as it dawned on him that it was too late, that he was too late, as he always had been. Too late to detect the malignancy that had been growing in Nita, too late to save Alberto from his beatings, to save a doomed horse, a condor, a puma, Finn’s mother, who, unless he could find her in time, would suffer the same fate as the woman who had lain under his scalpel a year ago.

  He faced Finn, took him by the shoulders, and gently shook him. “We’re going back up to the house. We can do nothing at night, and you can’t sleep here alone. At first light, we’ll begin a proper search, but until then, we’ll call the police in from Búho.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Finn said. “There are police here, too. I saw them.”

  “Believe me, they’re not in any condition to do anything tonight. My guess is they’ll be better equipped tomorrow. We need to organize a search party.”

  “No.” Finn backed away from Gregory. “You’re kidding, right? You think I’m going to leave her somewhere out there all night?”

  “No, I’m not suggesting that, but Finn, it’s dangerous. Wait . . .”

  “No. Something bad has happened, I can feel it. I’m not hanging around—she could be anywhere—maybe she went for a walk and fell or . . . something . . . This place is . . . fucked.” His voice broke. “We should never have come here. It’s all my fault.”

  With a last wild look around him, he turned and ran.

  NINETEEN

  Sophie slowly opened her eyes but could see nothing. The pitch black pinioned her. She sank into a long-forgotten place . . . a time she hadn’t visited for years . . . but there it was, clear and vivid and soothing . . . a memory of feeding Finn, and he wasn’t greedy, even as an infant. Then later, look, there she was, chasing him with a teaspoon of mashed carrots as he propelled his black plastic scooter past the blurring bark of evergreen pear trees, leaves twisting, grass catching a loosened sneaker . . .

  Pain filled Sophie’s skull and tears coated her eyes. A drop leaked into her hair.

  She blinked and found she could see in the glow of a faint yellow light.

  Her hand rested close to her head, thumb relaxed on a hard surface. Slowly her eyes traced what they saw: the swell of her knuckles, manicured nails with oval tips, thin wrist with bones . . . bones . . . bones . . .

  Finn. Where was Finn? He never cried when hungry. Somehow he willed her over to his crib, and she found him on his back, gazing past, through, into, at her, waiting for her reaching arms. His eyes were dark, and they lightened as he grew older. Some of the black stayed, flecks that floated in sepia pools.

  She uncurled her hand and touched her face. She could feel bone under skin, brows, and eyelashes. Her nose. Cheekbones.

  Bones reassured her. She used to study them.

  Sophie lifted her head, which felt separate from the rest of her. Her brain pulsed against her skull, and a scream built inside her but couldn’t find its way past her throat.

  She grabbed her hair, clawed her neck, and moved her hands down over her breasts and hips. Sensation returned to her legs. She pulled her knees up. Curling up on her side, she lay and waited for her body to remember.

  She recalled standing outside the doctor’s house.

  Sophie pushed herself up.

  “There’s a blanket, to your left.”

  Sophie started, stared, squinted into the dark. “Who’s there?” she whispered.

  “You’ll get sick. Take the blanket.”

  A low-burning kerosene lamp, close to where she lay, provided some light. She could see a folded blanket on the floor, and just beyond it, a bucket.

  A mattress.

  A cup on a tray.

  Within arm’s reach of the tray, almost beyond the lamp’s range, she could make out steel bars chaotically welded together into strange motifs.

  The voice came from beyond the bars.

  Sophie felt her way forward with her hands along the walls. Inch by inch they stumbled over grooves, concrete stumps, stony warts, and deeply indented folds until they grabbed the bars and she could probe the gloom.

  “You must keep still.” The words were gentle and solicitous. Weightless. Even tender.

  Sophie crouched and whimpered.

  The putrid, cloying smell of blood conjured images of slaughterhouses and deathbeds, the involuntary sloughing away of entrails or the last rancid breath of life leaving a body long sick.

  The thick smell of diesel coated her lungs.

  A clanging sound backed her up against the wall, as far away from the bars as she could get.

  Another sound drew her attention, inside her cell. In the far corner, a shape shuffled and jerked, struggling, it seemed, with a heavy cover.

  Only then did Sophie scream, and as her throat opened up, she vomited. The shape shrieked with her, small head rearing up against the wall,
screech soaring, slicing into the ceiling, cutting the walls, slashing the bars, echoing, echoing.

  Sophie coughed and gasped and sobbed.

  Metal clanked, cutting her off. The voice was muffled, speaking to her from the inside of something, as though it, too, were trapped. “Be quiet! Please be quiet. You frighten her.”

  Beneath the distortion, a familiar, polite concern teased her memory.

  “Who are you?” she croaked. “What is this place? You’ve no right. This is a mistake. Please . . .”

  Sophie cowered away from the noise and stared into the corner where something struggled to stand. She could see a neck and head.

  It was a bird. What had seemed to be a cover was a wing, a black-and-white cape that swept and shuddered and flapped.

  “Listen now. Listen to me. Stay by the wall. Sit.”

  Sophie recalled the sculpture of a bird tied to the back of a plunging bull that she and Finn had seen at the market.

  “She is messenger to the gods, but she can’t fly anymore. It’s very sad.” A key turned in a lock. “Don’t move.”

  The gate was drawn open along a rail, and a figure stepped through. A man’s shape. He wore the mask of a mummy or a burn victim, made of something hard, stucco perhaps or plaster. The mask’s uneven clumps caught the light at the crest of the cheeks, brow, and lips. One side was taut and sculpted; the other drooped as though it had been molded on melting muscles. It left a thatch of dark curls free. A seemingly disembodied head moved above a black turtleneck sweater and pants.

  If not for the mask’s intense black-hole stare, the innocuous voice might have lulled Sophie into a plea for mercy.

  The bird cowered, the same way she did, calling and crying and backing away from the man who advanced toward her.

  One arm was gloved to protect him from the bird’s beak and talons. After a brief scuffle during which two creatures merged, one of them stepped away. Sophie saw the other lying slack along the floor. The man withdrew his arm from the glove.