She nodded toward the short, tough-looking woman in the immaculate uniform, who watched over the chaos with sharp eyes. “My mother doesn’t want me to go to the session Sergeant Mendez is giving. She thinks I’ve had quite enough of the police in my life for the time being.”
“I can understand your mother’s concerns.”
“I guess. Anyway, I can always talk to Sergeant Mendez on my own.” With a grin that made her look her age, just for an instant, Mina turned away to join her duckling friends.
7:18
Chaco
Chaco was on the side of the bus near the school when they came down the road, so he saw Tío at the flagpole, talking with Mina Santos, who must’ve just got here ’cause she still looked like a kid and not a wannabe rock singer. Why’d a girl as hot as her dress like that, anyway? Or hang around with old guys like Tío and the principal’s husband? Pretty much every boy made a play for Mina at one time or another. But only once. Girl had a tongue on her. Things she said could leave scorch marks. They’d excoriate, which meant taking the skin off something.
Mina wasn’t bad for an eighth-grader. Nowhere near as hot as her best friend, Sofia, of course, but she was okay. Before Sofia’s sister mouthed off at Cousin Taco last year and dumped them all into la mierda, the girls would sometimes talk to him. That was then. Now, Mina was not only friends with Sofia, she was sticking up for that little punk Danny Escobedo, who was gonna testify for sure against Taco. Which made Mina The Enemy, a person to be dissed every chance Chaco got.
So he did—but she didn’t even seem to notice! Which pissed him off, partly because, hey, he should be the one who got to do the ignoring here, but also because she should be scared of Taco and didn’t seem to be. So how was that smart?
Maybe Mina wasn’t all that bright. Like, she had a thing for Mr. Basketball Star, Brendan Atcheson, who, yeah, was good-looking, but he was also trouble with a capital T. And like her, Brendan seemed to be both smart and stupid, ’cause he didn’t even see Mina flirting with him. Or maybe he was just ignoring her.
Well, there wasn’t anything Chaco could do about any of it, and anyway she’d find out how things worked soon enough. Serve her right, the little puta.
But man, life could be so…perplexing.
The bus doors hissed open. Normally, Chaco was one of the first to shove down the aisle. But Mina and Tío were crossing over in front of the bus, so he sat at the window and watched them.
If Tío’d been any younger, Chaco would’ve made trouble for him by spreading rumors he was a pervert—like that hashtag thing going around—but honest, who’d believe it? The old guy didn’t even eye the girls like Sofia who already had tits. Tío had pets, that was all, boys and girls. Like Esme, after that gum thing back in January.
Everybody knew who was dropping the wads of gum in front of the cashier’s window—everyone but the teachers. Esmerelda Gustafson hated the cashier, who’d spotted her chewing one day and given her a hard time about kids leaving it on trays and the mess it made in the dishwashers, and when Esme told the woman it wasn’t her, the cashier just got pissed and pretty soon the two of them were shouting and the cashier reported Esme and got her in trouble with her mother. So Esme (who really wasn’t one of those leaving gum on the trays) starting saving her gum up just so she could let it fall in front of the cashier’s window.
Until Tío caught her.
Chaco happened to see the whole thing, though nobody else did. He came through the cafeteria door and there was Tío standing straight as a soldier next to his mop-cart, staring across the tables at Esme, who was looking like that nature program in science class about the mouse frozen in front of a snake. Hypnotized was the word. And Chaco didn’t see Tío make any move, but after a minute Esme left the line and walked over to stand in front of him. Tío said something, she answered back—polite, not smart-ass—and the old guy said something else. Esmerelda nodded, and got back in line. Tío pulled out his scraper and went to work on the gum. But after the final bell, instead of getting on the bus, Esme headed toward the school yard, where Chaco saw her sitting at a picnic table, across from Tío. Talking. She never said what had happened, but she didn’t spit gum on the floor anymore.
Chaco’d even seen her doing homework one afternoon in the cafeteria while Tío mopped away at the other end. He didn’t know why, but it made him think of his mother and Auntie Isabella, working in the rows of tomatoes and chilies in Isa’s garden, separate but somehow together.
Which was weird.
Hell, Tío was weird. He’d only been here a few months, and couldn’t earn as much as even a teacher, but it almost felt like he ran the school instead of Principal McDonald. Maybe it was that quiet thing of his, ominous, like, but Tío reminded him a little of cousin Taco, the way Taco would walk into a room and everybody’d kind of watch him. Which was stupid, ’cause Taco was a big man in San Felipe, with money and guns and scary Angel to back him. Tío was just this indio in a turd-brown uniform, scrubbing out toilets.
Anyway, what with Mina and Esme, there was a lot about the janitor that confused Chaco. The old man was a…an anomaly, meaning something that didn’t fit. Tío didn’t fit.
But he was there, all the time, sneaking around behind his quiet cart. And those black eyes of his, they saw everything—a lot more than Principal McDonald’s blue ones.
When Tío and the second-hottest girl in school had passed by the front of the bus, Chaco stood up at last to join the kids shuffling down the middle. Although he checked to make sure the janitor had gone on into the building before he pushed forward to the steps.
Not that Tío would guess where that can of spray paint came from. Not unless the old guy knew how to do fingerprints.
THIRTY YEARS AGO
Gordon: his story (3)
The news of a strange man who was dead-finished in the salt pond brought a crowd as the bush-telegraph spread the word of this gratifying event. Men with hastily-arranged decoration, women with bilums loaded with kaukau and pikininis, older naked children at their feet—and all of them including Gordon seemed to feel that the dead man was the responsibility of the two waitpelas. All ignored Linda’s protestations that the police should be called.
With a sigh, Gordon began to undo the buttons on his shirt. “There’ll be nothing left of him by the time they get here. And he’s already spoiling the salt.”
“But surely these people—”
“They’ve gone for something to wrap him in. They’ll take him down to the main road for us, but I’ll have to get him out for them.”
He handed his shirt to the man with the spear, slipped out of his shoes, and waded cautiously into the murky water. But Linda scarcely noticed his manipulations of the gruesome object, because as Gordon turned away, her eyes were riveted by the skin on his back. He had been scarred, deeply and thoroughly, in a pattern of great raised welts from shoulder to waist. She had read about this, the crocodile-marks of tribal initiation. Where the hell had he submitted to those? And why?
Gordon wrestled the corpse to the bank, where a threadbare blanket had been stretched out to receive it. When he had it at the water’s edge, hands joined in to help roll the body into the blanket, wrapping the resulting bundle with bits of vine-rope and commercial twine, using a pair of machete-trimmed saplings to turn the muddy corpse into a package with handles. A package with two naked feet emerging from one end, the dead man’s shoes having been claimed by one of the rescuers.
With great good cheer, now that the problematic corpse had been transformed into a ceremonial object, four men seized the ends of the branches and heaved the burden up from the ground. They and a dozen others made off with it, chattering and shouting. Gordon sluiced himself with water from the cleaner end of the pond, then resumed his shirt, squatting down on the grass-covered bank to dry his feet and speak with the spear-carrier about the discovery of the body. Linda walked along the bank to look at the fires, and realized this was what Gordon had been telling Mrs. Wilson about, back
in Holyoke: pond salt was a far cry from the supermarket variety. Logs were weighted down in the mineral-rich raunwara to soak up all they could, then propped up to dry, and set alight. The little heaps of ash were no doubt salty, but Linda couldn’t imagine the tidy Mrs. Wilson spooning that into her peanut biscuit recipe, no matter how authentic. She also wondered, somewhat queasily, how long it would be before minute traces of waitpela ended up in someone’s dinner—although, come to think of it, the body was near the pond’s trickling outlet.
What was the man doing here, she wondered. Had he drowned—in knee-deep water ten feet from the bank? Perhaps he’d had a heart attack.
While she wandered up and down, trying to push these morbid thoughts away with a close examination of the salt enterprise, she was interrupted by a smothered burst of laughter. She looked up, startled, to see Gordon sitting on the grass beside a boy of about twelve, their heads together as they watched her, their faces holding identical expressions of impish humor.
Her own disapproving-missionary face shamed them instantly into solemnity. Gordon got to his feet, clapping the boy on the back, shaking hands with the remaining menfolk, rubbing the heads of the small children, and taking verbal leave of the women in the background. He tucked his shoes under his arm for the slippery journey back to the jeep. Once there, Linda scraped the muck from her own footwear while Gordon washed his feet off with water from the five-gallon can lashed to the back.
When they were moving again, she hardly noticed the precipitous cliff at her elbow, all but forgot her disapproval at the insensitive laughter. The scarring on her companion’s back seemed to press through the very fabric of his shirt at her, until finally she couldn’t bear not knowing.
“Those cuts, on your back…”
He shot her a rueful grin. “You know how sailors get to port and wake up with a tattoo? Well, I didn’t realize how strong the local hooch was.”
You’d have to be catatonic for a week, for that much cutting. “An initiation?”
“More or less. None of us took it very seriously—once it healed, that is.” She thought he was lying, but to what extent, or why, she did not know. Before she could go any further, he asked, “So, why are you in New Guinea? You don’t seem much of an evangelical.”
“I caught my fiancé in bed with my best friend, and missionary work was the first escape I came across.”
He gave a cough of laughter. “Bit of a shock, that.”
“Galvanizing.” At her dry agreement, he glanced over. She smiled. “What about you? Are you married?”
But that was a step too far. His face shut down, his focus on the road ahead resumed. When they had negotiated their way around an unremarkable gap in the road, he gave her the briefest possible answer.
“I was. She died.”
“Oh, Gordon. I’m so sorry. What was her name?”
This silence was even longer. “Mary. Her name was Mary.”
Linda heard the name as Meri—how odd, to name a girl Woman—before her native tongue reasserted itself to identify it as a proper name. “Was she English?”
“No.” The finality of the word made it clear that the topic was at an end.
When they reached town, Gordon insisted on dropping Linda at Mrs. Carver’s before he went on to the police station. Linda shivered as she watched him drive away, and continued to feel so shivery that Mrs. Carver called the doctor, to check her for malaria.
She was better the next morning, when a kiap came for her statement. She had little to tell him apart from having been with Gordon Hugh-Kendrick when the dead man was taken from the pond, but he wrote it down and had her sign it, then told her that there was no reason she couldn’t get on the plane that afternoon.
“Do you know who he was?” Linda thought the chance of any white man going unidentified for long here was tiny.
“ID in his pocket said John Taylor. But it’ll be a while before we’re sure. Have to send for his dental records in Brisbane. Nothing to worry about, miss. Accidents happen.”
He left.
But as Linda retrieved her things from the laundry, as she packed her bags and went over Father Albion’s shopping list, she could not stop thinking about all she had seen and heard. John Taylor. Dale Lawrence. Their friend Abrams. Gordon Hugh-Kendrick’s initiation scars and his marriage to a woman called Woman. His wife’s death, and his subsequent arrival in the highlands. The gray mud and splash of betel on his shoes the afternoon he appeared out of the bush. His easy camaraderie with men dressed in leaves, whose heads did not reach his chin.
When her suitcase was packed, Linda went to the kitchen and asked Mrs. Carver if there was any way to get a message to Gordon. The landlady said that one of her employees was sure to find him, if he was in town, so Linda wrote a brief note. I need to speak with you before my plane goes at 3:00.
And sure enough, at 2:30 there he was, leaning on the side of the yellow jeep and chatting amiably with one of Mrs. Carver’s houseboys. When Linda came out onto the veranda, his eyes lit on her, and he managed to dismiss the young man without seeming to do so.
“Take you to the airport?” He was already reaching for her bag. He held the car door for her, and she did not hesitate to get in. As he drove back through the town, she studied his face. Another man would have looked apprehensive, or even curious about why she had asked him to come. Gordon merely looked bone tired. As if he had just finished a long and arduous task, and wanted nothing but to rest.
“I have a question.”
The side of his mouth quirked. “Only one?”
“I think so.”
“Ask.”
“Your wife’s name wasn’t Mary. Was it?”
“No.” He drew a breath, as if his last as a free man. “Her name was Jasmin. We were expecting our first child when they came through—Lawrence, Abrams, and Taylor. They worked for TaylorCorp. Private security contractors that the mines use to keep their workers in line. Mercenaries, really. The founder was convicted in absentia of war crimes in Africa. John was one of his sons. I did some work for them a couple years back, and stepped on a few toes when I quit. When John heard I was in the area, he and his friends came looking for me. They found Jasmin instead. I got home six hours later, just in time to watch her die.”
—
Linda had always found forgiveness the most difficult precept of the Christian faith. Who holds the power to forgive? When is the refusal to punish a sign of forgiveness, and when is it cowardice? And if she said nothing, did that make her an accomplice?
What did God want Linda McDonald to do with this stranger’s confession? Could she possibly condone the cold-blooded murder of three men?
But charming accent and appealing smile aside, she felt to her bones that Gordon Hugh-Kendrick was a good man. She had no doubt that if she told him they needed to speak to the police, he’d merely nod tiredly and head back into town. On the other hand, from what she had heard about those three men—what she had seen of the mines during her months in this country—it was clear that they had turned their backs on God’s repentance.
The jeep came to a halt on the runway tarmac. Gordon sat back with his fingers on the lower edge of the steering wheel, watching the slowly rotating propellers of the tiny plane for a bit before turning his eyes to her. They were golden, she realized, not green. “Is that the end of it, then?” she asked him.
“There is nothing else that needs doing.”
After a moment, Linda held out her right hand. “If anyone puts it together, it won’t be because of me.”
Equally deliberately, his hand clasped hers. He looked puzzled, rather than relieved, then suddenly his fatigue seemed to drop away, the lines beside his eyes crinkling into a smile. When he leaned forward to kiss her cheek, his skin smelled of coffee and hut-smoke.
Gordon helped Linda into the plane, handing up her suitcase and the string bags filled with the mission’s marketing. He stood on the tarmac until she was in her seat by the window, then climbed into the yellow jee
p and drove away. As he went, his arm came up in a two-fingered salute.
The next time Linda came down from her mountain perch, he had left Mt. Hagen. The kiap were looking to talk with him further, Barry told her, but Gordon had gone home, to New Zealand, or England. Or was it Scotland? Privately, Linda thought that Gordon Hugh-Kendrick had indeed gone home, but not to a land where English was primary.
And that was that.
She thought of him often, over the years. Any number of times she took out her memories and turned them over and over in her mind, wondering if she should have spoken aloud her suspicions, wondering if it was too late…
But in the end, she had not. He was gone, back into the wilds, and—the implied promise of that wave notwithstanding—she did not expect to see him again, ever.
Twenty-six years later, and half a world away from Papua New Guinea, she did.
7:20
Brendan
The text came while Brendan was eating his cereal at the kitchen table. The name on the header was Jim Cooper, but it was Jock, one of the burner phones he’d got so Sir wouldn’t catch the forbidden communication.
Hope you pick up some good tips today, wish I was in your sessions.
Brendan replied:
Like anyone would trust you w a job.
Jock texted back:
Yeah and you’ll look adorbs in a nurses uniform.
Brendan snorted, just as Sir came into the kitchen. Naturally, he wanted to know who it was.
Brendan closed the message function but took care to leave the phone, oh so casually, lying next to his glass. “Nobody. Just a friend.”
“I was beginning to think you didn’t have any. Brendan, I had a reminder of your dentist appointment next week. Have you been flossing your teeth?”
“Yes, Sir.” No, Sir. Put your Glock to your head, Sir.
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