The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

She was arrested. The other story began.

  Victor fought and bribed and lied indefatigably to secure his jilted lover’s release. He pounded on doors, he pushed his way past secretaries. He got away with it and that became his motive, just to fuck them just to fuck them feverish in his head. He discovered his forte, the role of loose cannon. Greasing palms, he made powerful friends.

  By the time he was called to collect Fernanda from prison, Victor was manic with pride. Greeting him, the duty officer was shifty-eyed, monosyllabic – afraid of him! Asked to wait, Victor put his feet up on a chair and smoked. He blustered at the long delay, laughing inside.

  He was still blustering when she came into the room, supported by a nurse. Although he didn’t recognize her, he fell silent. Then the duty officer had his revenge. “There’s your girlfriend,” he said, and cackled.

  She had been beaten so she was fat with swelling, beaten out of human shape. Her eyes were crusted with blood, she had no teeth. Her arms were broken and some of her ribs were broken: her painful gait came from burns on her genitals. He would later come to know well the strange, starfish scars where her nipples had been sliced away: through two pregnancies the milk trapped there would make her sweat and clench with pain.

  She moved her head, ungainly, to acknowledge him. But she couldn’t speak; he didn’t know if she knew who he was. So he cursed with helpless rage, alone with his rage, as he drove her, speeding, to her father, the doctor.

  The people in that house met him with shifty eyes and monosyllables. The mother spoke to him as if she were not weeping. They were cravenly grateful, but they wouldn’t let Victor Caceres in their house, thank you, and the door shut in his face, the sound of locks, a bolt drawn and checked.

  The other story came into its own. Victor Caceres had decided he was a good man. He devoted his life to the cause of rescuing Fernanda.

  When his son was born, Victor sent Fernanda every article a new mother might want. It was then, too, that the queer clapboard house was built, in an area reassuringly far from power. He begged and borrowed. He sold his car for her, he sold his clothes. His parents refused to give him money, flattered him with their anger. His friends called him crazy, admiringly, and Victor Caceres grew into the part.

  Fernanda refused to see him, but he was gratified to learn the boy had been christened Victor. And when the child was eight months old, and she at last was healed from one thing and the other, Fernanda consented to be taken to her new home.

  Victor stayed with her there for a year. They were lovers again, after the fashion of harmed people, bonded by distrust of others. For that brief span, the house became a mystery to its humble neighbors; children whispered ghost stories, passing that house.

  Slowly, in exhausting stages, the baby son turned into a thing; a staring, awful reminder; the personification of blight. Fernanda cosseted him still with the impervious love of mothers. He was just her stupid child, her silly child, her child.

  Victor suffered agonies of detestation at the sight of the dazed, incurious face, the asymmetrical mouth ever open.

  When Victor left finally for Guatemala City, I had already been conceived. He never acknowledged me: for him, the canceled son had canceled the possibility of children. He even regarded me as something done to spite him, a gratuitous salt in his wound. I was born nevertheless, and grew to be a normal child. Without him, we became a contented family.

  Without him, Fernanda resumed, too, her own life; the life of forbidden books and meetings, the life of real work to be done. She came to know the local people: through them and through her old contacts, she came to know the guerrillas of that district. Her odd house became a haven. Arms could be hidden there; the wounded could die or be healed in peace. Through her father, Fernanda obtained basic medicines; through Victor Caceres, she had a generous flow of cash.

  The money this time was not begged or borrowed: Caceres had at last begun his glorious career. He fought and bribed and lied his way into his chosen sinecure: a commission in the Army was secured by a helpful cousin.

  He embraced the diversions of his class. He drank away his monstrous son, he whored away his monstrous son. The political killings he used to relate to my father with such relish were a part and parcel of that life: another communal shame of whose excess young men boasted. But also, for Victor: he disappeared and disappeared thoroughly his monstrous son.

  When he drank alone, he drank too much. It was then that he would drive out to Momostenago.

  That became a routine. He arrived in a fury, cursing and raving. The children would be sent next door. She learned how to answer him, the path of least resistance. Sometimes he waved his pistol and threatened to shoot her, but he never struck Fernanda, he never touched her. He treated her in all ways as if she were a ghost of his own imagination, an incarnate doubt he fought to conquer.

  He would pass out suddenly and wake with no recollection of having driven there. He would be sick, horrified, he would drive back to the city in a blind panic. That afternoon, after no conscious thought on the matter, he would arrange to send Fernanda a sum of cash.

  He came to regard her superstitiously. She spirited him back to her, against his will. In his mind, she took on the toxic powers of a nemesis.

  When he suggested Momostenago as the target for Pretty Boy, Victor did not have any clear plan. And through the following months of negotiation, when he fostered the idea of it as a hotbed of revolutionary activity, when he even lied and fabricated to secure his aim, he did it with no firm intention. There were images only, which came and went: stories in which he conquered her by saving her at the last moment; stories in which he let her know he had decreed her death.

  He fought bitterly for a lethal plague, no mere fever but incurable death. He liked to think of Fernanda dying prettily, judiciously, among hushed American nurses. He imagined himself with flowers at her bedside; placing flowers on her grave. Her father the doctor would shake Victor’s hand. The children too, the children too, and a final stone would be placed on his old shame.

  The agreement which enshrined psittacosis as the agent employed in Operation Pretty Boy included the provision that, after medical tests were complete, surviving prisoners should be yielded into the custody of the Guatemalan police. Then the Yankees would pack their bags and depart, seeing no evil. The standard process of interrogation would begin.

  Fernanda would be tortured again, to death.

  Perhaps she would not betray him, but someone would. His donations would be revealed, his lies about the village. Victor would be tortured, too, and killed.

  For three months Victor played poker with my adopted father, Jonathan Moffat. He didn’t dare take a drink, he feared waking in Momostenago as he feared hell. He had no plans because his life had already ended.

  He told himself the story of the woman and the man who must be tortured to death, as if it had already occurred many times. He loved Fernanda. He hated Fernanda. There were many stories in his mind, but they ended all the same.

  Then, at the last moment, the loose cannon jerked from its rut and wheeled:

  1. Momostenago, Guatemala (continued)

  9:20

  and howled at my father to leave, and Fernanda said to leave, to leave.

  They became one person suddenly to my father. One vile, crazy person who had been threatening his life for so long, for hours, for months. And he was sick and tired.

  He nodded, curt, and did just as they said.

  He shut the door behind him. In the clean spaciousness of outdoors, he balked and almost went down on his knees. Behind him, he heard Fernanda’s voice again, raised in mockery. He took a few steps around the corner of the house, where he’d see Caceres coming before Caceres could see him. Then he leaned against the clapboard siding and gave himself a short breather.

  Some yards away, by a slanting thatched hut, he saw the children. They were pulling up grass to feed to a skinny tethered donkey. The donkey curled his lip daintily, craned his neck to nip at their o
fferings. The girl coached her brother, pointing out rich tufts of weed.

  Then she peeked over her shoulder at my father. He grinned by force of habit, that was what he did with children. She beamed, flattered, and stretched her handful of grass out toward him. He mimed putting something to his mouth and munching it down. He rubbed his belly to show how tasty.

  The little girl waved her arm and laughed, delighted. She stretched the grass out, insistently, again.

  My father thought suddenly, miserably, of psittacosis. Only young children and the elderly at risk of death.

  He had half a mind to grab her, spirit her away and put her in some boarding school. He who saves one life, saves the whole world. Who said that?

  As he slumped against the house, staring at the child who had now gone shy and turned her neat back, he delved into the fantasy. How he would get her back to the city; the reaction of his superiors; the reaction of his wife. And untying the girl from that brother, his loving-kindness didn’t stretch to the weird boy.

  But then the child wouldn’t want to leave. He could picture her carrying on, shrieking, breathless with tears, arms stretched out to her ogling brother. That would bring Victor and all the demons of hell down on his head. And Mama none too pleased. What that writer didn’t take into account, whoever he was. Most times, you couldn’t save just one life. They all stuck together in impossible bundles.

  Then he heard low voices and the unmistakable sound of bedsprings, and realized he was leaning right beside the bedroom window. He glanced back in a kind of real Baptist boy’s disgust, and almost laughed when he saw a tidy red shutter. That must be his cue to go. If Victor had time for that, John Moffat sure as heck did not.

  With a last look back at the little girl he wasn’t going to save, he started walking briskly, back the way he had come.

  Soon mosquitoes covered his face and arms. He began to jog, dashing them with his palms, reckoning how far away he’d get in forty minutes. More Victor he was fleeing than the damn disease, a big guy like him would hardly –

  the shots began. By force of Vietnam habit, he dashed for cover, running and clinging to a tree. Then he knew his foolishness. When the next shot came, he heard shattering glass, and pictured in a flash the little girl flung into the dirt, her blood.

  And he cringed in frantic unhappiness, knowing what he was going to do.

  And he was going to save one life, and he was going to be too late, and there was something anomalous in the way he ran, easily as if there was no emergency. There was the village again, the huts that now seemed familiar: the weird clapboard house. The donkey alone, rolling wild eyes and fighting his tether.

  He spotted the little girl right off, crouched beneath that bedroom window. Her brother was lying beside her, in the loose, expressive posture of a fainting woman. Both glittered with broken glass.

  John stopped running and came up stealthily.

  Just as he came back to where he’d slumped before, watching that bedroom window like a hawk:

  The lights came on in the house, blindingly. All the lights in the house. My father staggered, reaching out.

  In the window, Victor Caceres was neatly framed. He was stripped to the waist, and he had his trousers down to his knees, fucking Fernanda.

  Dead, the woman was again calm. My father was standing so close, he could see the vermilion stain on her temple, and the dark puncture in her shirt where the bullet had gone in. Against the jolly orange walls, the dribbles of blood looked drab. My father crouched down and untied the rope from my wrist.

  I bore it patiently, staring at my dead brother. When my father picked a shard of glass from my cheek, I kept still, solemnly watching his big hand. He whispered, although he knew I wouldn’t understand, but he couldn’t think of any Spanish, and he just thought a quiet voice would calm me:

  “You wanna come along with me?”

  I put my arms up to be lifted. He carried me away.

  Mosquitoes covered his face and arms. Carrying me, he couldn’t brush them away and he couldn’t run. When he heard the jeeps, he was still within sight of that awful electric light.

  He staggered out of the road. Of course there wasn’t a bush any higher than his knee here, he finally just slid to the ground and lay flat. He mashed me down flat beside him, crooning no tengo miedo, hija, no tengo miedo because he couldn’t remember the right words.

  The nightmare got worse. He had a long time to reflect, and all he could think was, how awful this night was. He kept stroking my head, more to comfort himself.

  There was rifle fire. There were screams that just went on. After a while, he could swear it was just repeating itself, it was a broken record playing the same horror noises over and over. They’re killing them all, he thought. He knew he should wonder why, but he didn’t, he just had to go and stop them, stop it, and he couldn’t do a damn thing. Too many guns.

  Finally there were only men’s voices, distant and inconsequential. An engine started up, then another. He tried to count the jeeps as they passed. The last was the different, genteel drone of the Mercedes. That made John raise his head, incredulous that any man could survive what Victor Caceres had done.

  Then he lay with his ear against his watch for a long time, listening to it tick.

  “Well, kid,” he said at last. “Let’s just try our best to get out of here.”

  And he’d just got to his feet, and got me to my feet, when he heard the planes.

  He stood there yelling, “That tears it! Goddamn it! Goddamn it!”

  I started crying for the first time, staring at the angry man. He had to calm himself and crouch down to me, mumbling some kind of comforting nonsense. He had to get me to come into his lap, and hold me still while he opened his shirt and pulled it over my face as if that would protect me.

  Of course they flew with no lights. There was nothing to see. Still he looked up, and for a moment mistook the Milky Way, powdery and bright, unencumbered by the lights of cities, for a luminous spray of germs.

  He smelled germs, he tasted them salty in the back of his throat. That shirt was no use. No use. You just had to try. No use. His mind gave up and he began to sing, under his breath:

  one little, two little, three little Indians,

  four little, five little, six little Indians,

  seven little, eight little, nine little Indians,

  ten little Indian boys.

  one little two little three

  He couldn’t remember the verses, he just sang the refrain over and over as the planes groaned and banked and finally vanished like everything else. I was squirming and he had to use his strength on me. Getting to his feet like that, with the kid fighting him all the way, it would have been funny any other time. That night it was the unfunniest thing that ever probably happened.

  Then the walk ahead of him.

  He walked and walked. I struggled and butted my head at the constraining shirt. The mosquitoes came and went, his face grew stiff. He let one leg kick at the bushes as he walked, making noise to ward off the jungle predators.

  After a while I had fallen asleep.

  A while after that he tugged the shirt away from my face, cautious as if taking off a bandage. He rested then, and stared at my sleeping baby features in the moonlight. When the mosquitoes settled on my cheeks, he flapped at them carefully, his mouth forming the word shoo. I turned in my sleep, reaching out, my hand clutching in the air, and he gave me his fingers to grasp. I pulled them to my chin, greedily, and eased.

  He was near to tears as he’d ever been, then. He tried to think, what if it was his own son, but he hardly knew his son. That moment, the little girl in his arms was the only person in the world. The one life.

  Why you can’t go home again

  1My father and I never developed any symptoms of psittacosis.

  1.1Eddie nearly died of it two weeks after Dad’s return from Guatemala.

  1.2In the course of his high fevers, he suffered his first epileptic episode.

 
; 2So I, the

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  Vvulnerable

  Wwaif

  XX-ed out my father,

  he gave his place up

  to me/for the wild

  superior yondersY

  on

  Zbeyond

  33. Pullau Pangkor, Malaysia: Deus Ex Machina

  – Denise concluded, and got to her feet. A ghost of sand slipped from her hand but vanished before it hit the beach. Her affectation seemed to have failed; she looked simply weary.

  I said, “Thank you.”

  “Well, that’s finished,” she said, with a quick ferocity. She looked at Ralph and changed again, became sad and ashamed. “Don’t look at me that way, would you? I don’t know what . . .”

  He said, “Are you all right?”

  It was such a sensible question. In the midst of all the high drama, it seemed actually rude. I frowned at him, but Denise answered straightforwardly, “I’m all right. But I’m sad from all this. It’s strange being here on the beach. I do feel very strange.” She looked up at the sky, and then back at us, and then up at the sky. She said, abstracted, “Does anyone else feel strange?”

  I felt really fucking strange but I didn’t say. Ralph just came to me and took my hand. He was looking at the sky, too. It was shot through with cloud, the moon a russet blot. It seemed to tremble under its load of light.

  And Denise walked down to the sea where my brother had walked down to the sea, she moved fluidly as if singing. At the labile hem of water, she stopped and tensed. She whispered something, then said aloud, “Oh, my God.”

  The brilliant lozenge appeared, superimposed on an ashen cloud.

  It slipped to and fro as if frisking.

  The insects’ tweeting switched off. The sea alone moved.

  Then the beam grew explosively: into our faces. Boomed.

  It filled the world and it was gone.

  Denise Cadwallader was gone.

  She really just wasn’t there. The sea came and went as before, the sand made the same fuzzy drawings in the dark. The sky was shot through with the same clouds, and the inanimate moon stood where it had been, as if feigning innocence.