Yolanda looked down at her own hands, rough and larger than seemed proportional, hands chapped and callused by jungle living and nothing like his mother’s, which were skeletal and grotesque, an interweaving of bone and blue veins, fingertips spackled by blood blisters.
He told her the rest of it, then, raising and setting his revolting drink as he spoke, looking past her, over her left shoulder into the darkening city. His mother saw an ad in the paper. Some woman in Revere was selling a knitting machine. At first he could not imagine why his mother would want it—she didn’t have hobbies, and who had ever heard of a knitting machine anyway? Then he saw the sketch in the paper, hand-drawn, of a smiling woman sitting at the contraption which looked, of course, just like a giant keyboard. His mother became excited and hugged him, and said let’s go get it, let’s just go buy it, eh? He remembers this specifically, her hand on his shoulder, her sudden energy that he took for pleasure.
They bought the machine and brought it home in its enormous cardboard box and spent all day assembling it, putting in screws and tightening bolts—his mother was good with her hands, far better than he was—and when they were done it stood on a tripod and was about the length of a keyboard but instead of keys it was fitted with a wild metal needle bed.
The next day they drove to Amherst to buy wool where his mother dragged him through the store and let him pick whatever colors he wanted. She handed him skeins of cobalt and copper and green, all the while telling him what she was going to make for him when they got home—a sweater, linked mittens, a striped scarf. And it was beautiful, because although he didn’t really want those things, he was too old for linked mittens or Christmas sweaters, it was lovely to see the way his mother loved him when she was happy.
That afternoon, at home, she spread all the yarn about her on the floor and arranged her packages of patterns on a music stand that she set beside the machine. Ethan watched her as she went through them one by one, lifting each pattern, not even opening it but running her fingers over the faces of the women and children on the covers, brushing across them over and over, her smile giving way to something else as she began to realize that there was no way she could key her obsession into the world and make it look like love. So the yarn lay there unused about her, until finally she picked a pattern and threaded the machine and then sat there, uncertain of what to do next, with her hands poised above the needles. That night when he heard the piano from the living room, he covered his ears with a pillow and knew that it wouldn’t help.
Yolanda clearly did not know what to say. She looked at Ethan the way Doyle had at the bullfight. He could see that she wanted to say and?—she wanted to tell him about dead children and poisoned wells and El Lobo’s death squads unleashed again onto the cities of the poor. He did not want to hear it.
“Ethan,” she said finally, “we are running out of time.”
He raised his hands in something like apology
“I didn’t think you’d make it. I didn’t think you could get here so quickly.”
Yolanda cocked her head as she did.
“You said it was an emergency.”
“Well, yeah, it was. Your sister had cholera. She was very sick. We couldn’t travel and I wasn’t sure she’d live.”
Yolanda reached up and fingered her scar. She traced from her ear to her collarbone. She watched him.
“Anyway, people are dying from less every day,” he said.
She said nothing. She signaled the waiter for a drink.
“Also she has a package for you,” he said. “She said it was Jose’s. It’s important and I can’t travel with it. We can’t talk about it here.”
The waiter did not come. Ethan looked over her shoulder. The PCVs in the bar were gone and the waiter would not look up from the television. Ethan raised his hand and waved. He felt her staring at him.
“I can trust you, can’t I?” she said.
Ethan finished the margarita. He wanted to be out of here, out of here and driving toward the Statue of the Poor and then on a plane and away from Copal and the mad girl and everything else he knew would strip whatever he had left from him. No, he thought. Not by a long shot, baby.
“I never told you that you could,” he said.
“But I have,” she said. “And now I’m sitting here in Copal. I could get up and leave. I think that maybe I should. What do you want me to do?”
The moment, he told himself, does not present a choice. The choice has been made already. And not by me.
“If you thought you should leave, you wouldn’t have come,” he said.
She opened her eyes wide and ran her hand through her shorter hair. She was not as he remembered her, she did not seem confident or cold or certain. She bit her lower lip and brought her fingers again to her scar. When she spoke it was almost in a whisper.
“I want to know that my sister will be safe.”
“Come on then,” he said and stood. “I’m repaying a debt. It has nothing to do with trust.”
THEY WAITED IN THE STREET for a taxi. Yolanda stood behind Ethan, away from the road, against the concrete of an abandoned storefront. She was wearing a black tank top, and the silhouettes of barbed wire tattooed her bare right shoulder under the glow of the store’s perimeter lights.
“I thought you bought a car?” she said.
“I don’t know how to drive in this city and I figured it would make me too easy to follow.”
It was pretty much the truth, and Yolanda didn’t seem to be listening to his answer anyway. He did not know what he’d do if she questioned him.
“Let’s walk,” she said. “Well find a cab as we go.”
They turned and walked the deserted streets. Normally, he would never wander unarmed through the city at night. It was the first lesson you learned in Copal, the first thing Doyle ever told him about the country. Central America 101: Avoid the boulevards by dark. But they were heading, he knew, toward a greater danger, and the idea of being accosted by gangs felt almost welcoming, an escape beyond his control. Besides, it seemed fitting that he was walking again with Yolanda under empty palisades and columned colonial buildings tendriled with mold and shadows. He heard distant sirens, the repeated thump and hiss of the ocean on some seawall. Besides those things, though, they were alone together, moving into a new night ill lit by a freak sun and flickering hurricane lamps.
“Look,” Yolanda said. “Here comes a cab.”
IN THE TAXI HEADING WEST toward the Statue of the Poor, Yolanda said, “Why did you not stay at a hotel?”
“The hotels aren’t safe. Soto might check them.”
As he said it, he thought it was probably true.
“That’s smart,” she said, and touched his knee. “See, Ethan, you’re better at this than you thought you’d be.”
He could hold her hand and move toward her touch. He wanted to confess the truth to her and let her grant some forgiveness, to cradle him through the world’s betrayals—the two of them confounded together on this, her final trip to the end. Outside, people cheered and held signs that he couldn’t read. The sun still cast a sliver of light, a ray of annunciation or spectacle, over the mountains.
“Was any of this ever real?” he asked. “Were you ever really a prostitute?”
She turned away, toward the window and the sun.
“Such a silly question. We all sell ourselves a hundred times a day.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s not even an ideology.”
She looked back at him, and for a moment she was as he wanted her to be: she forked her hair out of her face with two splayed fingers, she cocked her head. She winced and he didn’t know if it was in pain or anger.
“What do you want, Ethan? I found you lurking in a brothel and feeling very bad for yourself. I gave you a chance to do something significant. To see the world in action. To be something other than another wandering gringo. You wanted to save a woman? I gave you a woman to save. You wanted to die? I gave you something to die for.”
> “So that guy in the bar, Javier, was just a setup? How many other losers did you run that on?”
For the first time, Yolanda laughed.
“Well, it’s hard to find the right balance of despair and nobility. You weren’t supposed to hit him with that bottle. That wasn’t the plan.”
No, thought Ethan. I could have told you, Yolanda, that things don’t play out as you’d expect. Even the best plans fail. And this was far from the best plan.
“But when you did hit him,” Yolanda said, “when you got back up on your feet and fought a man with a knife, I knew that you were the one I was looking for. I knew that you were a man a woman could trust.”
Ethan looked away from her, out the window. He did not recognize the person she described. Before he left New York he’d watched and then erased a video that he and Samantha had made together in bed. Give it to me, baby, she crooned. Give it to me. Divorced from the moment, her voice sounded desperate. Like she knew that whatever she begged for he would not be able to provide. Watching it was like watching a stranger’s porn. Their voices sounded hollow and only faintly familiar, like running into an old friend in a dream whom you never knew in life. Even now, he had to believe that he was being played.
Beggars chased the car as they passed through the shanty villages leading to the Statue of the Poor. Chickens hustled from the dirt road before them in noisy disarray, a woman wailed from the shadowed lee of a tin shack. Someone fired a pistol in the air. You have to remember, thought Ethan, that it will get worse than this.
They exited the shantytown, attended for a while by a pack of snapping dogs, and turned up the rocky road toward the illuminated statue. The road rose over the bare hills, houses fell away, the dogs disappeared, yowling into the distance, and the taxi continued on, quietly now, up the hill and into the green neon light.
They stopped thirty yards before the statue of whitewashed cement—Jesus weeping and holding his huge arms open in flickering neon benediction. Behind it, a grove of low scrub tangled over the remains of Coca-Cola and United Fruit billboards. The hills beyond crested toward the base of the volcano where the sun refused to set. A road led away from the statue and down a worn path past an abandoned car and on toward a series of squatters’ cabins.
“Look at this,” Yolanda said as they stepped out of the cab. “I bet my sister loves it here. It’s as crazy as she is.”
Ethan paid the driver and the driver spat through the open window into the dirt.
“You are wrong. This is the best country in the world,” he called to Yolanda as he drove off, bumping and rocking over the cratered road.
Yolanda turned to inspect the statue, and in its light her face appeared young and smooth, untouched by time or the heat of roads or jungles.
“Well, what now?” she said.
Ethan scanned the hill for any sign of Soto: the barren rock, the thin line of scrub. He shrugged and she frowned and started to paw wildly with her hands like a cat falling out of a tree. She reached for him and then, as she turned and staggered, she clawed at the air and fell moaning like a dreamer tormented in sleep.
He saw it then: the black dart sticking from her thigh and Soto rising from the tree scrub with the crossbow already slung across his back and his Panama hat pulled low over his eyes. He lit a cigar as he walked, and under the light his long shadow fell toward them like a pool of spreading ink.
“Help me carry her,” he said, and hooked her feet under his arm. Ethan lifted her arms and began to walk. Her pulse throbbed weakly in her wrist.
“I should have let you take her feet,” Soto said as they walked. “Her boots are making me dirty.”
They stopped, as Ethan realized they would, at the car. Soto dropped her feet.
“Put her in,” he said.
Ethan wrapped one of her arms around his neck and lifted her into the passenger seat. Why are there so many stairs? Samantha had asked as he carried her in Key West. Yolanda’s head rocked against his face as he straightened her in the seat. He could smell vanilla in her hair. He fastened the safety belt, closed the door, and turned to face Soto.
“What’s going to happen to her?”
Soto puffed some smoke into the green air, tossed the cigar to the ground, and stamped it out like a living thing. He reached into his pocket and removed his handkerchief, wiped his forehead. Ethan could not see his eyes beneath the hat’s brindled shadow but his mouth tumbled in crooked, muddy contortions. A clay man, a golem.
“They will torture her until she gives up her father,” he said. “And then, if she is still alive, they will drop her out of a plane or shoot her or rape her or machete her. She is dead but for time. As are we all, I suppose.”
He lifted his hat a little to gauge, maybe, Ethan’s reaction.
“Did you want a sweeter tale? A colonial fairy story? There are no more children and we should not dishonor them with such stories.”
He moved toward the car and reached for the door.
“I thought you would kill me,” Ethan said.
Soto twisted around toward Ethan. His mouth pitched into a wild sneer.
“I suppose you would have liked that? Well, I considered it. But that would suggest that nothing had changed. That you had no effect. And you did.”
He pulled a dart from his bandolier and held it to the air.
“You realize now, I hope, that you are an arrow. You choose your direction and your direction matters. You do not come down here to play out your little drama and then go home. That girl is your charge now.”
Ethan gestured to the empty hill, the shacks and pine scrub leading down to the shantytown.
“What now? I’ll never make it back to her.”
Soto reached into his coat and tossed Ethan his stiletto.
“You’re an American,” he said. “Go conquer.”
Soto tipped the brim of his hat toward the volcano and closed the door. He turned on the car and drove away and Yolanda’s head rocked and bobbed beneath the green illumination of the Statue of the Poor.
Down the hill away from the statue and into the darkness of the shantytown where the generators failed. The street twined its cluttered way between the shacks of tin and corrugated iron, old signs, and taped cardboard. The road’s trash banked upon the sidewalks in mounds of razor wire and scrapwood, and between the shacks lay the bulldozed rubble of the previous shanties. A lean dog sat and appraised a man lying in his own open doorway. Trash fires burned in the road. Ethan ran through the streets bearing Soto’s knife before him like a lantern.
He rested a moment at the base of the hill where the shantytown ended. Before him was the Zelaya Boulevard, a wide street empty of cars and lined with shabby eateries, junk heaps, and abandoned discos. A windbreak of blighted flamboyana trees separated the boulevard from the city barrios. Through its leaves the lights of the city winked and failed and came on again. Ethan looked up for a moment at the clouds of red ash moving out over the city and the sea. Behind him, in the bare hills above the shantytown, there were a few lights of cars or trucks moving across the darkness. Yolanda was in one of those cars with Soto, drugged or maybe awake now, heading into her last morning. Ethan crossed the empty boulevard and jogged under the trees and back into the city.
Somewhere in his descent into the winding avenues of the old city, two men stepped out of a bodega and into the street before him. He continued toward them, he did not stop walking, he recognized them easily as mareros. They stood in the middle of the road. Their heads were shaved and their faces vined with a webbing of green tattoos. The one to Ethan’s right wore a white work shirt buttoned at the collar and the wrists, and he appeared oddly staid, almost reverential—but the one to his left was shirtless and the inkings spread down his neck, sleeved his arms, and continued across his chest in a design which charted, for a gringo walking alone through the streets at night, a very specific topography of nightmare. In the poor light the tattoos seemed simply dark, a hemorrhage blossoming beneath skin, but as Ethan grew cl
oser he saw what he knew he would: strangely etched imprints of two outstretched hands, a black cross, the unmistakable MS-13 lettered across the chest. Also, he could not miss as he drew closer, that both men carried machetes.
He kept walking; he could not think what else to do. As he neared the curve in the road where they stood, he reached down and picked up a rock and went on that way, walking toward them. He began to laugh. First the broken bottleneck in Boystown, and now a switchblade and a rock. It seemed he spent an undue amount of time brandishing paltry weapons through deserted slums. When he reached them he nodded and said, “Buenas,” and the marero wearing the shirt raised his machete and set it casually over his shoulder. He smiled then at Ethan and the tattooed teardrops under his eyes bunched on his creased skin like freckles. He seemed in that moment jolly and clownlike, not at all threatening.
“Where are you going?” he asked in English.
The English was somehow comforting. Perhaps, if he needed to, Ethan could make himself understood. Still, he did not know what to say. Beyond the mareros, in the farther descents of the capital, the frail red sun burned on the windows of distant buildings. Soon it would recede, as it long should have, into darkness. This was the way the night had arranged itself for him. He was at the point in dream where, without choices or possibilities, he usually woke up.
Ethan pushed passed the mareros and began to walk away into the city.
“Where you going, man?” the marero said again, and Ethan looked back at them. He held his knife and his rock out before him. They appeared confused—certainly no one had responded to them this way before. Their shock, he was certain, would not last long. He began to walk again and they let him go. He turned back once. There were noises behind him. He did not know if he was being followed.
Four blocks from his hotel and moving through the dark, Ethan rounded a corner toward the sea and Cunningham was there, reaching out and touching his arm and saying, “Hey, partner, let’s take a stroll.”
Horse Latitudes Page 33
