by Steven Gould
Alejandra reached out and touched my arm. “I’m sure you will be a big help to me. You already speak French and English. Learn Spanish and I can put you to work in my agency. Or I’ll find you work as a guide. Not to worry. But school will be your main job, comprende? Guillermo Losada?”
“¡Claro que sí!”
“¡Excelente!” She smiled again. “I have an appointment this afternoon. We should return.”
And so it went.
Alejandra, who was afraid of spiders (las arañas), had me do the initial clearing of my new room. Once all the webbing was down and the screens were covering all the windows, she pitched in with hot water and lemon-scented cleanser. By the end of the week I had a cot, a dresser, and a small table (with bookshelves above) for a desk. A metal folding chair completed the suite. It wasn’t air conditioned but the sea breezes made it quite comfortable.
I had very little to put in the dresser but that changed over time and, really, in the warm climate of Las Bahías de Huatulco, I didn’t need much.
Alejandra not only began as she meant to go on, calling me Guillermo and never referring to me by my real name, but she also stopped talking to me in anything but Spanish, miming verbs, pointing to objects and naming them. Very rarely she would illustrate a complicated verb conjugation by comparing it with French usage. She towed me along for the immersion classes she ran at the resorts, too.
It took me three months to learn enough español that she began talking to me in French and English again. Three months later, she considered me fluent and it was another three months before I stopped sounding like a foreigner. By the end of my second year, most locals thought I’d been born in Oaxaca. I still looked European but so do many Mexicans without indio ancestors.
I worked for her agency half days, for which she paid me off the books. Three hours a day I worked on schoolwork, in English and French and Spanish. Spanish word problems for math. European history in French. Sciences in all of them. And I sketched, everywhere.
I was “that boy who draws” to everyone—in the park before the church, at the marinas, on the beach. Most of it stayed in my sketchbooks but the wall of my room slowly accumulated the drawings that worked.
The nightmares were bad at first, but they slowly lessened in frequency. Twice, in that first month, I woke up, my heart pounding, staring around in the sandy wash of the Empty Quarter, that spot in the Sonoran Desert where Sam had found me, bloody and unconscious.
The Spanish study helped. At least there was something to do when I woke up. I’d finished Don Quixote and was working my way through Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s books about Capitán Diego Alatriste. Or, I’d do a unit of math. Math was always good.
But it was probably a year before I slept all the way through the night.
In my second year there, I bought a boat, a little fiberglass dinghy with oars, a daggerboard well, and a small, removable mast with a lateen sail. When I got it, there was a hole in the bow as big as my head and the sail was in tatters and there were no oars, no rudder, no daggerboard, and no life jackets. I spent a week running errands at the Santa Cruz Marina, translating, running to the store, and acting as a local guide. At the end of that I had the oars, two life jackets, a stained but intact Sunfish sail, and enough fiberglass and resin to fix the stove-in bow. I made a daggerboard and rudder out of cheap lumber, scavenged from construction sites, and fiberglassed it.
Alejandra had doubts. “You could drown!”
I raised my eyebrows. “I suppose, if I were knocked completely unconscious, I could. But not from a cramp or being tired, no matter how far out from shore I was. Think about it.” After a bit I added, “My dad and I used to sail, in the Bay of Siam. It was a bigger boat.”
She registered it in her name but it was really mine.
There are nine bays and thirty-six beaches in the Bahías de Huatulco, many of them unreachable by road. I explored all of them—swimming, fishing, snorkeling—as well as the edges of the jungle.
More than once I got caught in the surf, which can be very rough, and I was rolled, though luckily, I’d unstepped the mast and lashed it, and I was able to recover the oars and the life jackets and the daggerboard. Later, I learned how to time things, to ride the breakers in and to row out without taking on too much water.
Rodrigo, one of Alejandra’s many cousins, teased me about the sail and oars. He wanted me to buy an outboard, but I hated the stink and the noise. Every time he brought it up, I rubbed my fingers against my thumb. “¿Tu tienes dinero para la gasolina?”
He was always broke so he had no answer. He’d reached the magic age of fourteen and what little money he had went to las niñas, the girls. While I took him out fishing and lobstering, sometimes Alejandra forbade me to lend the boat to him, to impress the girls.
“You might not drown, mon cher, and I know Rodrigo can swim like a fish, but his girlfriends? Let him get his own boat. I don’t want him sailing off to remote beaches. He’ll get them drowned, or worse!”
I didn’t quite see what was worse than being drowned, but I figured out what she meant, eventually. It seemed odd, since she had boyfriends and there’d been times when they’d spent the night.
She blushed when I pointed this out, but she said, “I am not fourteen or thirteen. That is the difference.”
Rodrigo’s answer to this prohibition was to try to get me to take him and his filles du jour out, but the dingy was too small. I offered to take these girls for rides sin él—without him—but this didn’t go over so well.
Every three months I climbed the hill into the jungle behind the Monjarraz compound and jumped to Sam’s place in California. Usually I would just transport Consuelo and some gifts back, but once Sam came, too, and I took him fishing.
I had my eleventh birthday, and then my twelfth.
Pretty much I kept the rules. I didn’t jump near Alejandra’s house or anywhere near people. If I wanted to practice, I’d take my boat out at sunrise and sail to the Isla la Montosa, a rocky island east, out from Tangolunda Bay. I could usually get in an hour before the dive boats showed up with the tourists.
I was being careful.
So I really resented it when they still found me.
FIVE
Going to Ground
I had ten minutes’ warning—an enormous amount of time, really. Didn’t even have to jump. Not immediately.
I was at the translation agency, Significado Claro, answering phones for Alejandra while she attended a real estate purchase at the lawyer’s office down the block. An American couple were buying property for their retirement. They had a bit of español but wisely wanted to be absolutely clear on everything they were signing.
Our dentist, the elderly Dr. Andrés Ortega, called and asked for Alejandra. I explained she was out and offered to take a message. He asked for me, that is, Guillermo Losada.
“Es yo, Doctor.”
He spoke rapidly in Spanish. “Some foreign men were just here with an agent of the AFI. They had dental records. Your dental records.” The AFI was the Agencia Federal de Investigación—the Mexican equivalent of the United States’ FBI. “They were American records and they had a different name on them … Guillermo.” He paused. “I had to give them your address. They just left here.”
My heart began pounding like waves crashing into the shore after a storm. Ka-thud. Ka-thud.
Traitor teeth. I’d had two fillings eight months before. See what not flossing will do?
“Do they have the address of Alejandra’s agency?”
“No—it wasn’t in your records. I didn’t show them hers.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Thank you very much.”
I hung up. My impulse was to jump away, to Sam’s, but Dr. Ortega’s office was in Santa Cruz, the next village over. It would take them at least ten minutes to get into La Crucecita and then they would be going to the house.
So I jumped to the house first. I kept my money in a Oaxacan black pottery hexagonal box, the lid decorated with cutout t
riangles. I think I liked the box better than the money.
I dropped it in the middle of my bed, on the light spread. Then the contents of my dresser, grabbing the drawers, dumping them on the spread, and sticking them back in the dresser. It took three armloads to strip the books off my two shelves.
I took the comers of the blankets and pulled them together. The bundle was almost as big as me but it still came with me when I jumped it to Sam’s broken-down stable in California. I jumped back and grabbed the sheets and the raincoat hanging behind the door and the corkboard that held a few drawings, some snaps of Alejandra, a picture of Rodrigo with one of his girlfriends, and a picture of me sailing my boat. These, too, went into Sam’s stable. Then I was back, pulling the sketches off the walls, tearing out the corners where they were tacked up. I carefully put these in Sam’s stable, on the pile.
They’d taken all my pictures last time, when they killed Mum and Dad.
When I jumped back, the room looked weird—uninhabited. I wished I could put dust all over it, so they’d think it was abandoned months before, but I didn’t know how to manage that.
I used the house phone to call Alejandra at the lawyer’s office.
“¿Bueno?” she said when they called her to the phone.
“Te amo.” I’d never said it before, but I did. As if she were Mom, or a sister.
“¿Guillermo, que estas loco?”
“No estoy loco. Veniron y deboir.”
She switched to English. She wasn’t understanding me but it wasn’t the words, it was the situation. “Who has come? Why must you—oh. Oh, no!” She’d got it. “¡Ve rápido!”
“Don’t go home. They’ll be watching.” I hung up the phone and walked out the back door.
Five minutes later I was on the patio of the Hotel Villa Blanca when they pulled up. I had a newspaper covering my face, and I’d ordered a limonada to justify my presence. The paper shook in my hands and I had to brace my elbows against the table to stop the movement.
They drove by in two cars, one after the other, eyeing the house casually. One car parked up the street, the other pulled into the hotel’s drive, not forty feet from where I sat.
It was all I could do not to jump away, but I realized they were there for the same reason I was—you could watch the house from here. The plates were Oaxacan and it was not a rental. The driver, a man in a rumpled white suit, looked Mexican. His passenger wasn’t.
I’d last seen him in San Diego, the night the flat blew up.
My hands, for some bizarre reason, stopped shaking.
I shifted my chair slightly, letting me see through the archway to the registration desk. I couldn’t hear them but Martin, the desk clerk, was shaking his head. The man in the white suit took his wallet out of his jacket and flipped it open, showing the clerk something. I saw Martín’s eyes widen and then he picked up the phone and spoke into it.
Señor Heras, the manager, joined them from the office. After another moment’s discussion, Vidal, the bellman, was summoned. They unloaded the trunk, only three pieces of luggage, but one piece the man from San Diego grabbed out of the trunk as Vidal reached for it.
“I’ll get that,” he said, loud enough that I heard it across the lobby. “Fragile.” He still had that Bristol accent. I wanted to jump, away, mostly, but I remembered the night they killed the police officer in the street by the flat. They’d seemed to know when I jumped without seeing me.
I watched them take the stairs up while Vidal rolled his cart back to the freight lift. When they were out of sight I wandered back to the front of the hotel. Standing just inside the door, I could see the other car down the street, parked on the other side, where they could watch the front of Alejandra’s house.
Vidal came back after a minute. “How did they tip?” I asked him in Spanish, rubbing my fingertips.
He made a face. “Los mezquinos.” Cheapskates.
“What side are they on?”
He jerked his thumb to the left, toward Alejandra’s. “En la planta tercera. Al fondo.” He pointed to west. “¿Por que preguntas?”
“Because they are looking for me.” As I said it, I felt my face twist and I knew I was on the verge of tears. I took a deep breath and steadied myself. “So, you don’t know me, okay? I’m leaving but we don’t want them to hurt Alejandra, right?”
“¡Claro que si!”
Everyone who knew her thought highly of Alejandra.
“I owe you.”
He jerked his chin up and grinned. “Claro que si.”
At the edge of the beach park, vendors had tables selling Oaxacan souvenirs to the tourists—black pottery, Guatemalan clothes, painted wooden carvings made with tropical hardwoods. I found a small hand mirror set in painted copal wood for twenty dollars americano. I paid for it without haggling.
Vidal unlocked the back stairs of the hotel for me, to access the roof. It was a popular place for the employees when the resorts over at Tangolunda Bay did fireworks, so I’d been there before, but I didn’t jump.
I didn’t want to jump around them—not until I left for good.
The roof was gravel over tar and I took my time moving across. I didn’t think they’d be able to hear me through the roof, but all the rooms had balconies and if they were out there, or had the sliding door open, they might.
As I approached the concrete parapet that edged the roof I heard them talking. From the sound, they weren’t on the balcony but they must’ve opened the door.
My Bristol-accented friend spoke: “—’e won’t be the owner—’e’s just a kid. We should find out who owns the house, and all of ’em that lives there.” He groaned, surprising me.
“Your stomach, still? It happens sometimes, to foreigners. Different bacteria, they say.” Mexican-accented English. Probably the man from the Agencia Federal de Investigación.
“Bugger the bacteria.”
“I will ask downstairs who owns the house.”
“No! They’re neighbors. You ask questions, they might answer, but they also might pick up the phone, comprende? There must be records you can check more discreetly.”
The agent of the AFI said, “Yes, there are records. Over the phone is not so good, though. With my badge in their face, the results are better. You will not need me directly?”
“No. It’s a waiting game now. Call me.” I heard the door open, but before it closed I heard him add, “And please get me some Pepto-Bismol.” It was a strain. This man clearly wasn’t accustomed to saying please.
“Of course, Senor Kemp. And some more bottled water?”
“Good of ya.”
The door closed.
“Shite!” I heard him—Kemp?—groan again and then move. His footsteps changed, echoed.
He’s in the bathroom.
I heard his belted pants dropping to the floor and the unmistakable sounds of gastric distress.
Impulsively I shoved the mirror into my back pocket and swung over the parapet. It wasn’t a hard climb at all. The divisions between the balconies were honeycombed bricks providing good foot and hand holds. Heights didn’t bother me, since I could always “jump” to safety. I was on the balcony before he flushed the toilet. I knelt in the corner and silently edged one of the chairs back to partially hide me.
There were footsteps and he came to the edge of the doorway, binoculars held to his face. He was scanning the house, Alejandra’s house, my house.
No. Not my house, not my home. Not anymore.
Maybe I could push him off the balcony.
He checked the street; he checked the windows of the house. He took something from his pocket and, still looking through the binoculars, he spoke into it.
“Anything?”
There was an answering voice, crackling with static, low volume. “No. Not since earlier, when we were driving over here from the dentist. Felt maybe seven jumps in a minute.”
“You’ve got better range than me—I only felt two of those, at the edge of town. I sent Ortiz out to find out who
owns the house. Keep your eyes open, right? I can’t watch continuously.”
The response was too low for me to hear, but this side of the conversation was loud and clear: “’Cause the bloody toilet is not line of sight with the target, okay?” He put the radio back in his pocket and, groaning, turned back to the bathroom.
I’d been right to climb down.
Range. Varying range. One of them could sense me from, say, Dr. Ortega’s office, five kilometers away, but Kemp couldn’t. But, say he felt my last two jumps right before I called Alejandra; they could’ve been in La Crucecita, within one or two kilometers, but still taking five minutes to find their way.
He’d certainly feel it if I jumped while on the balcony.
Then the realization came. Range. They could sense jumps but they couldn’t have been practicing on me alone. They had experience sensing jumps. Other jumps. Not mine.
Mon Dieu, there are other jumpers!
Kemp groaned again, the sound echoing off the bathroom tiles. I remembered that time I was sick shortly after arriving in Oaxaca and wished I could just die and get it over with. I hoped he suffered for weeks.
I used the mirror then, when it was clear he was still on the toilet, scooting to the edge of the doorway and tilting it, low, to peer into the room. Their suitcases were in the closet, just sticking out, but that briefcase he hadn’t let Vidal carry was on the bed. Wonder what it contained.
Well, why not find out?
It was just a step inside, on the carpet, silent, but I think the light was dimmed very slightly as I went through the door. Even sick as he was, Kemp noticed. I heard him scramble for his pants but I had my hand on the case before he cleared the bathroom door. He was trying to point something at me, something bigger than a gun, bringing it up, but I jumped.
Dad’s voice—Don’t let anyone even point a weapon at you.
No, Dad. Do my best.
Didn’t go far.
Couldn’t. If they weren’t chasing me, they’d turn their attention on Alejandra. So I wanted them to chase me.
I went to the island in the next bay over, the Isla la Montosa, a rocky bit slightly less than three hundred meters across, only a few hundred meters off the east headland of Tangolunda Bay. It had a tiny spit of land extending toward the mainland that sheltered a bit of beach less than fifty meters long. The rest of the island was big waves on rock shore with a raised brushy interior.