He nodded genially.
“Could you describe for us the strategies you used to circumvent the Costa Rican government’s efforts to have you introduce mustard oil into your glue as an irritant so the street children of San Jose would not inhale it?”
As he pulled the microphone toward him, already speaking angrily, she held up her hand. “Sir,” she said. “On behalf of los resistoleros of Central America, I am here to salute you for maintaining the approximately twenty-five million dollars in annual sales that glue sniffing brings into your coffers. You are providing these poor children with inexpensive peace of mind.”
That was when the back door opened and a group of rough-looking kids fanned out in the audience to distribute little baggies that Janna found out later each contained a tablespoon of glue. Amy’s friend was recording the whole fiasco when Janna slipped out a side door, afraid Amy would acknowledge her in some way. Dumb, dumb, dumb. What had she been thinking when she invited her? She met the security guards coming up the back steps and stepped aside to let them pass.
In the library, Amy sat across from Janna. “Wasn’t Sister Amelia fabulous?”
“Who?”
“La ángel de la guarda des resistoleros.”
“She’s a nun?” Janna had thought she looked like one of the accounting profs.
“Neat, eh? She said it was a wonderful way to celebrate Halloween.”
“Don’t you think glue was taking things a bit far? It grossed quite a few people out. I mean they don’t mind questions about ethical practices — we do talk about that stuff in class. Codes of conduct, fair labour practices. But those kids. The little bags.” Her nose wrinkled. “It was kind of sickening.”
“Gross is the whole point,” Amy said. “It’s bad enough for the street kids here, but it’s nothing like Guatemala City. They carry their little bags of solvent like your girlfriends carry their retro compacts to powder their perfect noses. Or stash their coke. Little sniffs whenever they get nervous.”
“Exactly what girlfriends are you talking about?”
“The kids have cracks and sores around their mouths and noses where the fumes burn their skin. Black eyes and cracked jaws where the cops have kicked them for trying to sleep under their cardboard blankets.”
Students looked their way as Amy’s voice rose. “They stink of glue and dirt and the semen of the rats who fuck them.” Amy was shaking with rage. “It is gross. And every asshole who owns one share in that company needs to know exactly where their dividends come from.”
“I am right here,” Janna whispered. “You don’t have to yell.”
“Fuck ’em,” Amy said. “Researching essays on the romantic context in Yeats’ late poetry or some such shit.”
No wonder Isabel liked Amy, Janna thought as she packed up her computer. After her mother downed a couple of drinks, nothing bugged her more than people’s efforts to calm her down, to keep her from saying or doing something embarrassing. Janna, always torn between wanting to be part of the fun and being afraid where the fun would end up.
“Where are we going?” Amy asked.
Amy’s anger was gone, just like that. Like Isabel. A flash and it was over and the warmth returned. A warmth that had made Isabel’s house a place Janna’s friends wanted to stay, her brothers’ friends, some of the cousins, uncles. There was never any fuss about who might say what, or who might kick over a can of Coke on the carpet. If a girlfriend needed a place to hide from her angry parents for a day or two. And, Janna had to admit, Isabel’s boyfriends and the booze never came past the front door. She slung her pack over her shoulder and walked toward the elevator.
“Gotta catch a bus — meeting my brother downtown.”
“No problem. I’ll pop by later — show you another way to celebrate Halloween,” Amy said and took off down the stairs.
Janna stared at the elevator doors and watched them open. A man looked out at her, one hand holding the door. No, she shook her head.
She wasn’t going to meet Trevor. That had happened a few weeks earlier. He’d called her, said he was waiting outside. She’d run down to where his big diesel pickup idled at the curb, a new tattoo on the arm he reached across to pop open her door. A sports cap on backward, a hemp chain around his neck. Three earrings in one ear, four in the other. The hand on the steering wheel was scarred across the back, the fingers blackened with whatever it was he did on the drilling rigs.
Parking is hopeless here, he’d said, and taken her to a White Spot out along Broadway. He’d never lived in Vancouver but seemed to know his way around. She’d sat with her hands wrapped around a coffee cup, watching him eat. Cutlery clanked and dishes rattled on the busboy’s trolley. He was tired, she could tell, after driving for three days straight. Dark pouches under his eyes were a sure sign and the rough and red patches across his cheeks and his chin. He’d been gone since June, working long shifts in some dry hot mountains way out in the middle of a Mexican nowhere.
He pulled a flat package out of his pocket and handed it to her, telling her to stop staring at him and open it. She unwrapped a piece of cloth, woven in a copper and green pattern of birds and leaves. It’s a special bird down there, a spirit guide for some of the locals, he’d told her. He showed her the new tattoo, the same green bird with a long tail and a flash of red at its chest. She rubbed the skin, still rough from the ink. His girlfriend could tell you more, he said. A quetzal. Not raven tricky, but more noble.
“We don’t really have any of those kind of stories at home, but this bird, it tried to save some great Maya warrior. People down there think a lot of it.”
“Girlfriend?”
She was visiting some nuns, he’d said. They’re all Catholic down there and nuns raised her.
“Poor kid.”
“Nah.” He shook his head. “She liked them fine. She did okay.”
Trevor would never listen to much in the way of complaints. When he came back from a drilling job and found her living with Jason and Cindy in Prince George, she’d tried to explain. I’m not saying your leaving didn’t make sense, he had said, and I’m glad Jason was here to take care of things. But there’s nothing good going to come of you staying mad. He’d been the one to bring Isabel to her graduation, both of them as prickly as devil’s club. But he’d got them through it.
“I knew you wouldn’t like any of the really bright stuff they make down there,” he said, “but this might give you a laugh.”
He threw a gaudy drawstring bag onto her placemat. She opened it and shook out six tiny figures onto her hand. Each was dressed differently; some were men, some women. Black hair curled on their heads. Worry dolls, he’d said. You tell them your troubles and stick them under your pillow and let them do the worrying for you.
She’d reached up to scramble his hair, stiff with something trying to keep the cowlicks down. He’d be getting Isabel to cut it as soon as he hit Smithers, she’d said. He’d laughed. She seems to be taking care of herself, he’d said.
“It’s her birthday in a few weeks. You want me to take something up for her?”
A birthday present for Isabel. She’d shaken her head and felt so lonesome when he drove off she wanted to call him back, climb into the truck, and drive home with him.
†
All Souls’ Night at her sociology professor’s, Amy told her as they walked through a jungle of untrimmed hedges around to the back door of a big house sprawling down the slope overlooking the ocean. She shuddered as the leaves brushed her face. The night Latinos usually visit the graves of their relatives and bring them food and drink. Skeletons dangled from the trees and skulls lit with little red light bulbs clacked in the wind blowing off the water. But these people’s dead relatives are either buried in faraway places or missing in action. So, the Colemans put on a special party. Salsa music and smoke wafted out the open windows. And Spanish. Animated conversations, exclamations, and cries of appreciation. Oh great, Janna thought. Maybe she could sing La Cucaracha.
Amy le
d her through an entrance hall crowded with coats and shoes into a large living room. People clustered in front of the fireplace, under a huge window festooned with paper skeletons, and in the doorways leading to the rest of the house. Someone touched her arm and she turned to see a short man with thick glasses. He said something to her in Spanish. Janna looked for Amy but she was already across the room enveloped in a group hug. Janna pointed to Amy and shrugged her incomprehension at the man. She turned away, already regretting coming, already looking for an escape.
“Here I thought Amy had brought one of her little Latina refugees.” He was the sociology professor, Thomas Coleman.
“Like Amy, I was actually born and raised right here in BC,” she answered as he guided her toward a table at one end of the room.
“Ah, but you’re the image of a little salsa dancer from Spanish school in Panajachel.”
Janna had no idea what he was talking about.
“Wine, beer, tequila.” He waved at the debris of bottles, glasses, melting bowls of ice, and scattered slivers of lime on a corner table. She poured herself a glass of wine.
“Is this your place?”
He laughed. “My wife’s, really.” He waved to a group of women, heads bent together over the pages of a small book, one of them moving a finger along a line of type. “Old money. I am merely a tenant.”
Janna didn’t know what to say.
“Let me show you around.”
Janna liked to think of herself as wise to the ways of the world when it came to parties. When she was a kid there were the huge family gatherings out at the lake, gatherings where her mom often ended up drunk and leaving with someone else’s boyfriend. She and her brothers would be tucked into a cousin’s bunk beds for the night and taken home the next day. Her mother mowing the lawn as if nothing had happened.
Then there were the high school gravel pit parties. She’d spent most of those comforting distraught girlfriends and shaking boys out of alcoholic comas. Hiding car keys. At college it had just been more and harder drinking in chaotic dormitory rooms. Beer cans and pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling. Disgusting bathrooms. Her only party at UBC so far had been the wine and cheese reception welcoming the students in the CA stream. Accountants in suits, mostly men, and a couple of women with muscular arms and legs and gold chains around their necks.
None of her experiences prepared her for this Day of the Dead party. Coleman propelled her through the crowded rooms introducing her. In one, two short men who looked Indian were talking quietly in some language that seemed all clicks. In another, a big man, his belly swelling his T-shirt over the belt of his khaki pants, held what looked like an old rug on his knees, pointing at a bright figure woven into the design. He and the two women examining the cloth looked up through a fog of blue cigarette smoke. Smiled. Bent back to the cloth.
The kitchen was filled with people leaning against walls, perched on stools and preparing food around a long wooden table. Tiled counters and deep blue cupboards, some with red birds and yellow flowers painted around the handles, stretched along two walls. Plants lined the wide windowsills, their foliage cascading down to the red and white tiles on the floor. The fridge and gas range were bright red, and beside the back door an old cookstove shone with polished chrome. Old money indeed. Amy detached herself from the table, a plate of food in each hand. She was rattling away in Spanish to a kid who looked about sixteen. He was trying to take something off the plate. She danced sideways, out of his reach, and ploughed her way over to Janna.
“Follow me, mi amiga, and we’ll find something for your undoubtedly starving tummy.”
One platter was covered with little green packets. Cookies dusted with icing sugar and tiny sugary skulls were piled on the other.
“The tamales are pretty hot, but the cookies should be okay.”
The boy’s big hand snaked over Amy’s shoulder and his fingers deftly lifted three skulls and dangled them over his open mouth. As Amy’s elbow caught him in the ribs, he dropped them in and danced away, mouth bulging.
“Where’s he going?”
“Up to his video games, no doubt. Little bugger.”
Janna watched his big feet climb the stairs, the Nike slash on the heels, wishing she could escape the adults at this party. “He’s related to that Coleman character?”
“Son of.”
She was about to ask Amy who the mother was, but she was gone again, along with the food. Janna was alone with an empty wine glass. She refilled it and drank, feeling the warmth radiate through her otherwise empty stomach. The contract law report waiting patiently on her hibernating laptop in her empty room in residence needed, she thought, one more rewrite.
It was an unusually warm evening for November and windows were open. She pushed aside the empty glasses on a windowsill and leaned out into the darkness, feeling the warm air behind her, the cool air on her face. The leaves wreathing the window were hung with little skulls, their red eyes blinking. Beyond that, darkness.
She closed her eyes. Out of the rise and fall of voices, a little bell chimed, and as she listened, it rang again. And again. Every minute or two, the bell. It will ring all night, Professor Coleman had explained, to summon the dead. Maybe her father had died and was waiting out there in the darkness right now, waiting for her to recognize him. She used to open the old school atlas and pick towns from every province. Chicoutimi. Major. Bay Vert. Nanaimo. She’d dance around saying, Nanaimo, Nanaimo, and imagine she had knowledge of him embedded somewhere in her, knowledge just waiting for her recognition. For a while she’d thought he was maybe a trucker, one of those men with bellies falling over their belts and rolled-up sleeves too small to contain the huge forearms, powerful from slinging big chains and hauling freight. Arms that were always open from grasping the broad steering wheel and a big bull neck that rotated on massive shoulders as he turned to back his truck into tight alleys. When she’d started college in Prince George, she’d imagined him as a professor for a while but she had to admit none of her mother’s boyfriends had been remotely professorial. He’d be some cowboy who’d hate this party, this cluttered house full of people from places that seemed like a dream of words and fragments. He’d probably tell her to lighten up, to come have a beer.
The flash of a camera from the darkness below the window startled her.
“You look vaguely familiar,” a voice said, “but out of context.”
Janna looked at the winking skulls. “I’d have to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer, maybe, to be in context?”
His laughter was way out of proportion for her joke, but she enjoyed it and was curious to see what he looked like. A boy, really, that twenty-something indeterminate age, walked blinking into the bright light of the living room, a brown paper bag in one hand and a small case in the other. He wore baggy boarder pants, a hooded sweatshirt, and a toque. With his goatee and the narrow black glass frames accentuating the slant of his eyes, he looked Asian. When he set down his bottle and case and pulled his hoodie off, his T-shirt rode up revealing his boxers waistband a couple of inches above his buckle and his lean stomach.
She was suddenly shy and turned away. An older woman had come up beside her. “Boys never looked that good when I was your age,” she said. “Or if they did, we were warned to stay away from them.”
The boy offered his bag to Coleman, who had materialized out of the crowd and was already taking the hoodie. He was, Janna realized, a very attentive host.
“Professor Coleman,” the boy said, offering his bag to the little man. “I tracked down some mescal if you can believe it.”
Coleman was unscrewing the lid when the woman stepped up and relieved him of the bottle, one arm around his shoulder. “Muchas gracias, David, is it? My husband’s been talking about you all day. Glad you could make it. Now, Thomas,” she said the name with a Spanish inflection, “let the poor boy have a drink before you put him to work.”
David looked over at Janna and shrugged helplessly as Coleman poured two tumblers full
of amber liquid and took his arm. They disappeared upstairs. Janna was still trying to put it all together — this regal grey-haired woman dressed in a maroon dress flecked with deep blue, silver birds dangling from her ears, looked way too elegant to be married to the sticky Professor Coleman and way too old to be anything but that skull-eating kid’s grandmother. And what work did, what was his name, David, have to do upstairs?
Amy reappeared, refilled Janna’s glass, and introduced her to more people. There was a young woman who spent a year working on a coffee plantation in El Salvador, another woman who had accompanied refugees returning to Guatemala from Mexico. Two were doing research on the textile industry in Central America. Saying Liz Claiborne with disdain. Tommy Hilfiger. Janna dragged Amy out of that room when one girl started lifting people’s hair and reading their shirt labels.
They stood for a moment looking out through the window at the smokers gathered on the big deck. Amy pointed out a woman who returned from university to find her family had disappeared.
Disappeared? thought Janna. Like the girls on the posters in the gas stations? The ones gone missing on Highway 16? Isabel and Trevor always on to her, not to hitchhike.
“And Ruben, there,” Amy continued, “he watched them rape and kill his wife. Pregnant with their first kid. He was maybe nineteen. They threw him in the pile of bodies, covered him with dirt, but it was shallow. He got out.”
He was laughing at some joke, his face unmarked by the horror he’d lived through. He looked like her brother. Broad cheeks, dark eyes, lips puffed out a little around his big white teeth. Scruffy hair standing up like Trevor’s did.
Everything seemed to blur, the voices and music around her jumbled into a noise that overwhelmed her. She wanted nothing more than to be alone in her tidy little room. Her clear words organized on the computer screen in front of her. Music in her earphones. She slipped away from Amy and found herself in a line-up for the bathroom. She stared at a photograph of boys diving off a big stump into a lake, praying that whoever was in the bathroom would please hurry up, praying that no one would talk to her.
The Taste of Ashes Page 8
