Estrada put his hands, slowly, on either side of her face.
A moment passed. I had no idea what was happening.
He stroked his thumb across her cheek. He touched her lips with his fingers. A terrible expression scorched his features. He bent his face close to hers.
And then he kissed her on her mouth.
Erik and I went totally silent at this, in shock.
“Don’t lose your temper, my boy, and do anything disgusting to her,” Moreno said. “You know—I just can’t control him sometimes when he gets angry—”
Estrada turned from Yolanda and raised his left hand. He brought his fist down onto the head of Colonel Moreno.
“That’s enough of that,” he said, hitting him. “That’s enough of that.”
The soldier with the bilevel haircut leapt to his feet and went scrambling in a random direction, into the farther reaches of the jungle. Moreno lay on the ground below Estrada.
Estrada hit him a second time. “That’s—enough.”
The beating went on for several seconds until Estrada looked up at us. A filament of blood ran from his jaw to his neck.
“I’m returning a favor,” he said to us, in a soft voice. “I’m going to kill him like he killed me. He killed me. Do you understand?”
“No,” Yolanda said. “You’re crazy. You’re a butcher.”
“Maybe. But do you know why?”
“Shut up!”
“Because of your father. Because I let de la Rosa get past me and blow up that house. This is what your name means to me.” Estrada pointed to his scar, and his cheeks were wet. “And look at you. I’ve been wanting to kill you since I first heard your name. But now that I see you … I want—” His face was thrashed with emotion. “Women are harder.”
He turned away from us and looked back down at Moreno, who was moving.
“Come on, let’s go,” Erik said, tugging at the two of us. “Jesus, let’s get out of here.”
“You’d better,” Estrada said. “I don’t know what I’ll do if you’re still here when I’m done.”
Moreno lifted up a hand in the air and dropped it back down again.
I saw that he had a severe cut on his face, and he did not appear to be breathing normally. He tried to say something, but he could not enunciate any words. He sighed deeply, as if he were sleeping and dreaming.
I grabbed my mother’s duffel bag from the bank and began pushing Yolanda into the pool. She had a horrified expression and violently wiped her mouth.
Then the three of us bolted away through the trees.
CHAPTER 36
For an hour, Erik, Yolanda, and I pushed through the layers of the wood until we reached another stretch of the Carretera al Atlántico. We had wandered so far from the resting point of the army trucks that we could no longer see them, and we thought we were probably safe from the reaches of Estrada.
We found ourselves alone on a section of road, and began wading through the water while monkeys capered above in the bush. The moonlight fell very pale and thin over the long highway, turning it into a skein of moving silver. The Peten, with its black and ragged forest, mounted all around us.
I hiked my mother’s heavy duffel bag up onto my shoulder.
For hours, we walked upon this road; sometimes our teeth chattered, or our voices caught in our throats. But mostly we kept our thoughts to ourselves.
Around midnight, we reached the section of the Carretera al Atlántico that forks off into a sand spit and extends to a pair of islands. The sand made rustling noises beneath our shoes, and a breeze swirled over our heads. We were encouraged by the sight of the streetlamps. Walking closer down the spit, we saw the village that emerges as a small, knobbed, bungalow-covered patch of land in the center of the lake known as Lago de Peten Itzae.
“There’s Flores,” Yolanda said.
I nodded.”Thank God.”
“It’s also known as Tayasal,” Erik said. “That’s its fifteenth-century name.”
Neither Yolanda nor I said anything to that for a second, but we looked at each other.
Then Yolanda said, “Oh, Tayasal?”
“Yes.”
She raised her eyebrows at me; she was being nice to him. “I think I might remember that name—was that it, exactly?”
“That’s what the Peten Indians used to call it. This is the place where Cortés left a white horse, and they wound up worshipping it as a god for the next hundred years or so. Well, not the actual horse, obviously, but after it died they made a stone idol of it. And then around 1618, missionaries arrived—white men hadn’t been seen here again since old Hernán Cortés. But they were not very nice white men. Apparently, they weren’t much intimidated by the fact that the Indians could have chopped them up into stew or whatever, because as soon as they saw the horse god, they just crushed it to bits. The Indians, for their part, were apparently far too gentlemanly to register their dissent with a hasty bit of decapitation or disembowelment, which was too bad, because they were promptly pacified and enslaved, and … can you tell that I’m wholly traumatized and talking like a deranged pedant just to keep myself sane and awake?”
“Actually, yes.”
“But don’t stop now,” I said. We continued lugging our way toward the blue-and-gold lit houses and the little winding stone streets, which were not flooded on account of the incline of the island.”Come on, tell us the story about the white horse—it was Cortés’s, and it was lame when he left it here, and when it died the Itzae took its bones and buried them in sacred ground, and erected a stone in its place—”
“Over which the unintentionally ironic Spaniards later built a church, and this town,” Yolanda said.
“Yes, but before that the Franciscans smashed the idol, and it looked like the Indians were not going to make much trouble about it,” Erik went on, “until the very bad day in 1623 when the Itzae started to feel upset at the priests, and so belatedly rose against them and killed them all in a massacre, after which they were forced to run up into the hills beyond the lake and were never seen again.”
“And here we are,” I said, hiking my mother’s bag up.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Here we are.”
We stood at the edge of the village of Flores and looked up at the gold lamps shining through the blue air, and the stars that sparkled down, casting reflections in the surrounding lake, which dazzled back up again.
And even though I was so sad, the sight suddenly pierced my heart. It was a shock to me. Despite everything that had happened, and that I had read, the world was still beautiful.
I took a breath and tried to see that, as hard as I could.
“I can’t wait to go to bed,” Yolanda said.
CHAPTER 37
In the gloom of the night, we could barely make out Flores’s street signs and numbers. We wound our way through the stone-covered lanes and past the mysterious moon-glimmering views of the lake, until we stumbled across the hotel that my father had mentioned to me when I last spoke to him on the phone. The Hotel Peten Itzae proved to be a tiny, slightly ramshackle bed-and-breakfast, hung with pots of gardenias and ivy. The owners decorated the place with plain upholstered furniture and an old-fashioned stereo with pine-wood veneer. A broad wood common table dominated the kitchen, crowding an old wood-burning stove that was about the size of a sofa. The host was a lanky dark man; he and his pocket-sized wife, as well as his four nightgown-clad teenage daughters, had all climbed out of their beds to greet us in the hall. They spoke to us quietly, as five other boarders were sleeping in the house. Erik, Yolanda, and I, dirty, exhausted, and still very scared from our brush with the soldiers, gawked back at our hosts as a terrible hunger hit us—we had not eaten for hours. But the landlord, behind whom stood his girls, all of them waking up at the sight of Erik, only shook his head and said, “We don’t have anything ready for you, sir. Our stores are poor. There isn’t much coming into Flores, because of the hurricane.”
“Was there much damage here?” Erik
asked. “The streets aren’t flooded.”
“Not so bad as in other places,” the host said; “only one person has died.”
“One person?” I asked.
“We got lucky,” his wife said. “People are starving in the east, and so most of the supplies are going there, not here.”
“We don’t even have chocolate,” one of the daughters said.
“We don’t have Zucaraias,” another of the daughters said, meaning the Spanish version of Frosted Flakes.
“We don’t have any Pepsi, either.”
“Or orange soda.”
When we looked at the woebegone girls and their haggard parents, the terrible feelings we’d been trying to fend off with crayfish risotto in Guatemala City, Armagnac in Antigua, reconciliations in Rio Hondo, and stories about holy horses just a few minutes ago threatened to come down on us with more force than we could manage. Even Yolanda looked as if she were ready to simply lie down on the oak floor and weep. The girls also appeared close to tears, from the look in their gigantic eyes, and the husband and wife, glancing at their daughters, began to press their lips together very hard, as if they were trying to keep their composure.
“We’ve had a rough week here, see,” the landlord said. “My girls here, they don’t understand.”
“Somebody died,” the smallest daughter said, from behind her father.
“A lady died,” said her sister.
“What lady?”I asked.
“Ssssh, honey, we don’t talk about that,” said the mother.
“We’re looking for a woman named Juana Sanchez,” I said. “We’re here to find her—maybe she took a room here, in your hotel?” I described my mother, down to her hairdo and her grumpiness and her job as a professor.
But the landlord said: “Not here, ma’am, and I never heard of her, sorry.”
“Let’s just go to bed and forget that today ever happened,” Yolanda said.
None of us moved, though, and everyone grew quiet again. We all just stared at each other in the hallway under the glare of the ceiling light, until Erik—who until that point had been looking very bad, with his hair standing up straight on his head and mud still on his bruised cheek—glanced over at me and grinned in that way that I remembered when he’d been flirting with the hussy librarians at the Huntington Library a thousand years ago.
“Okay, I think I’m going to have to take charge here,” he said. “We’ll have to postpone that bedtime, Yolanda. It appears clear enough to me that a little sticky debauchery is in order. Otherwise we’re going to go out absolutely, clinically—nuts.”
“You’re the boss,” I said.
“Really?”
“No, but go on.”
“Fine,” he said. “You know what we need?”
“Yes, a long, cold, nasty, chewy, stiff drink,” I said. “Stiff as a board,” he said.
“All right,” Yolanda said. She wouldn’t let Erik look tougher than her. “But don’t forget the hors d’oeuvres.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” the landlord said.
“All we’ve got is pancake mix,” his wife said.
“And we’ve got a little rum,” the landlord said.
“What do you mean, we’ve got a little rum?” his wife asked.
“Rum will do,” Erik said.
So we all went into the kitchen with the huge stove and started to mix up some booze, and the wife of the landlord sat down at the long oak table and put up her bare feet while Erik wrapped an apron around his mud-splattered pants and whipped up Bisquick pancakes. Yolanda went out into the living room and found, among the landlords’ extensive collection, some old vinyl Liliana Felipe records. Soon the maracas and horns and thumping drums and Felipe’s dangerous and sly voice began to bang through the house like a wonderful calamity, causing these little Hummel figurines on the top of the stereo to shake and shudder. It also caused the other up-to-then-sleeping lodgers to slump out of their rooms, though they perked up quickly enough when they smelled the pancakes and the six bottles of Bacardi that Erik discovered in the very back of a cupboard, at the sight of which the wife registered shock and indignation until she had consumed four glasses of the stuff at the urging of her new Guatemalan-American bartender.
“Drink up, you glorious beauty queen,” Erik said. “You have the eyes of a starlet and the legs of a fawn, and your daughters are going to break the hearts of a million men.”
“Okay,”she said.
Until dawn, Erik displayed the talents that had melted the chastity of the postdocs at UCLA, driven my mother to distraction, and ecstatically corrupted the university deans until they slid under the tables in the faculty lounge. For one night, his mastery of the saturnalia allowed everyone a respite—and in my case, I could forget what I had just read in my mother’s journal. By two in the morning I saw the daughters of the landlords whooping and swinging from his elbows, and the wife tangoed with her husband and bawled out Felipe lyrics in his ear. The drunker Yolanda became, the more stiff and proper she looked, as she sat at the table very rigidly, with the increasingly perfect posture of a Russian ambassador or a corseted duchess and the haughty expression of faux soberness. But when I came over to hug her, she was not so formidable after all; she pressed the knuckles of my hand very hard to her face and kissed them.
“I love you and I hate you,” she said. “But I actually don’t hate you at all.”
“You’re my best friend, Yolanda,” I bawled. “I was a horse’s ass.”
“That’s right,” she sobbed back, in complete inebriated agreement. “You have the ass of a horse.”
The rest of the lodgers, as well as a half-dozen other men, sat with Yolanda at the long wooden table, where everyone laughed and wept inconsolably at the horrors of the hurricane and the war and the wide, incomprehensible void left by all the dead. Periodically the landlord’s wife hauled her daughters back to their bedrooms, but within minutes they reappeared in the kitchen, barefoot, munching on pancakes and taking curious sniffs at the rum. Meanwhile, in a gluttonous and life-affirming effort something like an old biblical story involving loaves and fishes, Erik managed to make the bottles last all night long and baked as many as eight different courses of pancakes, which he cooked in an old black frying pan and toasted by flipping them up in the air so that they performed several less-than-perfect aerial loops. Dancing, swigging, sweating, and telling the constantly reappearing girls riddles and jokes at the stove (where the landlord got the wood to fire the behemoth up, I don’t know, but I did think that I saw him drag out a couple of nightstands toward the backyard and return with sufficient kindling), Erik finally at six in the morning tiptoed over the sprawled forms of the daughters, picked the stiff-backed Yolanda straight up from her chair, and began to waltz with her to “San Miguel Arcangel” while they traded more insults and guffawed and bawled in each others’ faces. And then, after that, it was my turn.
“Get up, Cleopatra,” he said, leaning over me. “Come foxtrot with me, my gorgeous blue-stocking, my dolphin, my sweet fury, my mermaid.”
“You must be drunk,” I said.
“Perfectly so,” he replied.
“Oh, do it, for Christ’s sake,” Yolanda said. “It’s so short.”
“What’s so short?”
“Life,” Yolanda cried.
So we did begin dancing within all that somnolent madness. Erik put his arm around my waist, then bounced me about to the mambo of Celia Cruz’s “Burundanga.” I was hurled up in the atmosphere by giant hammy hands and hauled around so that my limbs were flailing and my hair scattered everywhere, and my boots wouldn’t even touch the floor as he swung me and flung me all about the whirling, colored kitchen, and when I held my head back stars sparkled behind my eyelids and I laughed for the first time in eight days, which is when this nightmare had started. After an initial blast of discombobulation, as I’d never danced with anybody like that before, I didn’t have any trouble digging down deep into my crumbling heart to find all the explosive
and hysterical stuff that makes up the best of salsa and rock-and-roll. When he started swinging me up and down the way the bobby-soxers in 1950s movies do, I bellowed out the half-memorized lyrics with a rapturous dyslexia, and Erik laughed so hard he nearly choked. The partiers gave me a few manic Arribas! between cup and lip.
When the music stopped, all I could hear was the rush of blood to my head and the sound of the needle skidding like a runaway car on the vinyl. Erik’s face turned plum-dark while he roared, “You are the absolutely best worst dancer I’ve ever had the pleasure of destroying a kitchen with, my excellent flat-footed beauty.” I opened my eyes and discovered that we hung onto each other as if the ground moved beneath us, while all around the others enjoyed this fantastic alcoholism that for a minute had wiped every bad thing from our minds.
And that’s when I heard it.
“Here’s to the lady who died,” said one of the neighbors, a handsome older man who had consumed most of the rum and so enunciated his words with a laborious accuracy.
I heard the clinking of glasses and smelled the spilling of more rum. Yolanda presided at the table like a queen, her Stetson at a perfect jaunty angle and her hands dancing in the air along to the music, and she nodded, only half comprehending this toast.
“What lady?” I asked, remembering that detail again.
“There was that lady who died, man,” the neighbor said.
“You mean ‘lady,’ “ another neighbor said.
“What do you mean, ‘lady’?”
“What?”
“I said there was that lady who died.”
“You said, ‘There was that lady who died, man,’ when you meant ‘the lady who died, lady,’ because this girl here’s a lady.”
“Yeah, well that’s what I meant. The lady who died.”
“Lady.”
“Lady.”
“What in the hell are you people talking about?” I asked.
“These North American girls got a mouth,” someone said.
This was one of the other neighbors, or perhaps a lodger, who also had his head down and began weeping afresh. And then the rest of the neighbors’ eyes started to fill up with tears, which fell down their faces in streams, and the landlord too, and they started talking once more about everything that had been lost in the hurricane and the meaninglessness of life, and how all of the people who disappeared would never come back ever again.
The Queen Jade Page 19
