The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  Joseph lowered his board to the snow and dropped to one knee, saying he needed to take one run to settle his blood before the lesson. He snapped the clasps on his boot and the sound of shackles spiked through Álvaro, a sound repeated around him as skiers bent to their boots and bindings. Snap. Snap. Snap. He hunkered down into a squat and covered his ears with the big mitts Joseph had given him, waiting for Vinicio’s orders. People swirled around, laughing and calling. But it was Thomas’s hand on his shoulder, Thomas’s voice that spoke.

  “If you need to leave, say the word.”

  Álvaro looked up. The glasses were fogged around the rims, but Thomas’s eyes were visible. It was those eyes that Margaret must love. The wise child’s unblinking attention. Álvaro scooped up snow to rub on his face, hoping the cold would bring him back. Thomas stood, one hand still on his shoulder, talking about when he used to come up here with his own father. The rope tow and wooden skis. Girls in those tight wool pants. The old French priest who claimed it was the closest he expected to get to heaven. The body wanting nothing more than to fly, he’d said, and what could be wrong with that?

  Álvaro unbent his knees and followed Thomas over to rent a snowboard. By the time they’d been outfitted, the snow had slowed and Joseph was waiting for them. He led them to a gentle open slope out of the way of the crowds, the snow lightly packed.

  Now, come, he said, and Álvaro held his breath and strapped himself in. Joseph took his hands and raised his arms to shoulder height. Facing him the whole time, his grip firm and reassuring, Joseph talked him through his first attempts. Try this, he said. No, this. Keep your weight centred. Lift your toes. Now your heels. His hands knew when to grab hold, knew when to loosen up. When to let go.

  Half a painful hour later, Álvaro and Thomas could sideslip down the hill frontward and backward. Álvaro was getting used to the feel of the ground dropping away beneath him, but his knees and thighs ached and he shivered in the wind that spun little twisters in the snow. He looked longingly at the lodge beyond the trees.

  “No way,” Joseph said. “No breaks until you carve at least a couple of turns.” He showed Álvaro how to shift his weight. How not to overcompensate when he picked up speed.

  “Remember, it’s counterintuitive. When you speed up, you want to throw yourself back to slow it down. Don’t. You’ll catch an edge and smash your head. Lean into the speed and you’ll come right around and slow down again.”

  “Counterintuitive!” Thomas roared from the snowdrift he’d fallen in. “It’s insane. Why didn’t I bring my skis, dammit!”

  Joseph spoke to Álvaro. “Don’t be afraid of the speed. Let your body do the thinking.” He gave him a little push.

  Caught off guard, Álvaro went and, just for a minute, his body did figure it out. He felt his weight shift on the board, put pressure down on the back leg, and pivoted to the right, the speed, pure feeling. He stayed with it, completed the turn, caught his breath, and dug into a turn to the left. And there he was, riding down the slope toward Thomas who was scrambling to get out of his way.

  “Yahoo!” Joseph hollered. “The father flies.”

  The snowboard slowed as the hill flattened and Álvaro miraculously remained upright until he stopped. Again, he thought, like a two-year-old wanting to be thrown into the air. Again.

  On the drive home, Joseph slept in the back seat, the car steaming with the warm stink of sweat and wet wool. By the time they got down into the city, the snow had mostly melted, and the cars sent wet spray into the pedestrians cramming the sidewalks. Exhilaration slumped into exhaustion as they unpacked the car, shuddering in the wind coming off the inlet.

  Joseph jumped into the shower stall in the basement; Thomas and Álvaro crept upstairs, groaning.

  “Father Al!” A girl called to him from the bright kitchen. Her hair was vampire black and the fingers tearing salad into a bowl were tipped with green nails. Metal glinted from her nose and one eyebrow. She wiped her hands on Margaret’s quetzal apron and came toward him, arms outstretched. “Como esta?” The voice was gravelly, familiar. She stopped when she saw he didn’t recognize her.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, this wonderful English phrase that covered so many awkward moments.

  She drooped, her hair a little black shoe rag, her lips pouting. The mouth did it, a fat little mouth that had chattered in terrible Spanish.

  “El banano sano,” he said, and she laughed.

  The kids had hidden him behind a broken-down bus to watch her street theatre in the centre of Guatemala City, giggling as she taught them about safe sex with an erotic display consisting of bananas, ketchup, condoms, and the kids’ own mouths. She waggled her tongue, wiggled her hips, and wielded bananas with clear intent. Pointing to the cracks around the kids’ mouths, she told them death enters here. She pointed to their groins, and their bums. Death enters here too.

  When Juan Tzul opened his mouth to suck heartily on a ketchup-smeared, condom-covered banana, Álvaro had moved to stop it. Armand pulled him back into the shadows. It’s just pretend, he whispered. But see. His mouth is clean.

  “Amy,” he said, forcing himself to smile back as she clasped his hands, saying something about how much she missed Guatemala. How much she missed the kids. Especially the ones who had been lost. She nodded toward the small shrine just off the kitchen, the one Margaret had made with the photos he’d sent her. Juan Tzul. Moises. Armand. Emilia. Marta.

  “What the fuck madness is this?” she’d screamed after Marta had been killed. Gone all tight and hard when she’d seen the body. The nipples cut off. The genitals shredded. The mouth, a gash. “Just plain dead isn’t good enough,” she’d cried out in the morgue. “They want you still breathing while they fuck you, but they want their fucking to kill you and their own dicks are too limp to do the job.”

  She’d been out of control, in danger herself, when they got word her mother had died. Álvaro had struggled to break through her shrug of indifference and get her safely home. All the people in Guatemala, he told her, who risk their lives to find out if their relatives are dead or alive, to find out where their bodies were thrown — she owed it to them to treat her own mother’s death with respect. He’d driven her to the airport, put her on the plane, and gone back to fooling himself that Vinicio had made him strong. He would go to the bottom of los barrancas to get a kid back. To the police station. To the morgue. A certain kind of suicidal longing.

  “I hear you’re still rescuing kids,” he said.

  Amy nodded, pointing to the ceiling. “She’s been taken in hand. And you? Margaret says you’re in some kind of recovery.”

  He shrugged. Recovery? Able to survive a day on Grouse Mountain. Just barely. He’d be as crazy as she’d been if he ever set foot on a Guatemala City street again. As soon as he saw the mounds of orange rinds beside the juice vendors and smelled the leather of the policemen’s boots. As soon as he saw one desperate child ducking into the shadows with a Norte Americano in a white shirt and jeans. He shivered and Amy shooed him upstairs to change. He longed for a bath, but the door was closed on a murmur of female voices.

  In his room, he pulled off his clothes. He opened the window and scooped up the remnant snow, gasping as the cold electrified his body. His scrubbing raised his scars to bright red welts and he apologized, not for the first time, to the little girl in the painting at the foot of his bed. She looked blue and cold herself as she teetered on the edge of a bathtub, peering out at him as if to decipher the strange calligraphy of his body. He’d liked it, he told her. The snowboarding. For at least an hour he’d liked it very much and hadn’t thought about his body except to send it urgent pleas to stay upright. Now he was tired and wanted to sleep.

  When Joseph called, he forced himself downstairs to a thrown-together meal, the mood dismal. Thomas’s age showed in the bright light, the red marks where his skin cracked from the day out in the cold. Joseph ate without looking up. Amy pouted and Margaret was angry.

  She put down her fo
rk and sat back. “This is ridiculous. Amy, you’ve got to contact this girl’s parents. I don’t mind taking her in, but her family needs to know she’s not well.”

  Amy’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. “You’re speaking to the converted. Her mother would be here in a flash if she knew she’d been sick. But Janna refuses to tell her. Or to let me tell her.”

  “What’s the problem at home?” Margaret paused, suddenly delicate. “Abuse?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Her mom’s great.”

  “Her dad?”

  Amy shrugged. “Don’t know. Isabel never talks about him, that’s for sure.”

  “Isabel’s the mother?”

  “Yeah. I roomed with her when I went home to Smithers this past summer.”

  Álvaro was in a narrow tunnel, noise and darkness closing in to obliterate what the women were saying. But not before he heard Amy mention the little house down by the railway tracks. The two older brothers. And the town. His food filled his throat. He spit it back onto his fork and deposited it carefully on the plate where blue fish swam around the edges, each one’s mouth biting at the next one’s tail. They were all within a millimetre of becoming someone’s dinner. What kind of mind would paint this in such bright cheerful colours? He looked underneath. Guatemala.

  He heard the name again. Isabel. Amy was talking about how word was she’d had quite a few boyfriends, not always good choices. Maybe Janna’s dad was someone she’d be better off not knowing about. Álvaro had tucked her away deep inside him, safe from any inspection but his own. He hadn’t even mentioned her to Chris. But here she was, present in the room, scrutinized and found wanting.

  After a long silence, Thomas spoke up. “Sometimes children are born out of rape. It’s very hard for the mother. She loves the child but hates what the child represents. Who the child represents.”

  Joseph clattered his cutlery down and blurted out his distress. “How would you like to hear your old man raped your mother? Talk about messing with your head.”

  “I don’t think so,” Amy said. “It just doesn’t feel like that’s what happened.”

  “Maybe that’s why she won’t call her mom,” Margaret said.

  A car honked outside. They looked at each other.

  A quiet voice spoke from the doorway. “I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve put you to, Amy. Mrs. Coleman.”

  The manners were exquisite, the voice perfectly controlled. Everyone at the table knew she’d overheard and even Thomas Coleman blushed.

  “I won’t be imposing my complex family problems on you anymore.”

  She nodded to the shocked faces all turned to look at her, picked up a small plastic bag, and walked out the front door.

  “Janna!” Amy ran after her.

  Álvaro was still struggling to understand what she’d said, so surprised had he been to hear English coming from her mouth. Before she’d spoken, when he’d seen her standing there listening to them, he thought he was hallucinating, so much was it like his dreams on the bus coming to Canada. Clara talking to him, the words a blur. Clara turning away in sorrow. Clara’s face clenched in fury. He pushed back his chair, stumbled to the door, and saw Amy watching a taxi pull away from the curb. The dreamy free falling he’d talked to Chris about was all a joke. He was plummeting down a mine shaft and the air was getting hotter and hotter. His lungs were full of fire.

  Margaret snapped orders to Amy, the two of them driving off into the night to find her. Álvaro left Joseph and Thomas to clean up the kitchen and dragged himself up to the bathroom where he threw up, the food still virtually intact, floating in the toilet. He looked at it as if he could find some kind of explanation there. But he didn’t need anyone to explain, he told himself as he flopped on the bed he’d woken so happily in that morning. He stared at the little girl. She stared back, waiting for him to say something.

  “My name is Álvaro,” he said out loud. “I am your father.”

  It felt as if the fish on the plate had been let loose in his bloodstream. Doors slammed. He was back in the torture room. He could smell Vinicio. Feel the sting as the lemon bit into the cuts on his face. “Hermanito,” Vinicio saying. “Little brother. And your mother, such an accommodating little whore.”

  The vomit came too fast this time and splattered the floor beside his bed. He retched and retched as Vinicio tut-tutted in the background. Clara’s hair in his face as he rode behind her on her horse. Clara pale and sleepy, pushing him out of her bed. Her drowsy insistence. Clara in her debutante dress, her hair piled up on her head. Her anger.

  The mess drove him to action. He cleaned up as best he could with his dirty clothes and opened the window wide to let in the cold wind driving what was now rain through the rustling branches of the trees. Bundling up the mess, he crept downstairs and threw it all in the washing machine. He stuck his head under the kitchen tap, swilling out the taste of vomit. TV sounds came from behind the family room door. The men were battened down. He found a scrap of paper beside the phone. A UBC residence. His heart pounded. He was terrified they’d bring her back and hoped they would. That he would see her again. When Margaret came in, he slid the paper into his pocket.

  He waited, one hand crushing it.

  “She wouldn’t let us in at first, but we contacted the floor supervisor and she took Amy up.” Margaret’s face was the colour of ash. “I am too old for this. I am too old to be rescuing college students from their own stupidity. I am too old to have a fifteen-year-old son. I can’t remember being that young anymore. I can’t remember it being fun. It seems such a waste of energy.”

  Álvaro’s skin fluttered like a freshly killed goat hung up for gutting, the surface of its body twitching with electric currents. He stepped aside to let her pass.

  “And what you need is peace and quiet, not histrionics. We should never have brought her here.”

  Did he wish he didn’t know? He couldn’t think that clearly. He plugged in the kettle, but forgot to fill it with water. Margaret took it from him.

  “Is she going to be okay?” he finally croaked.

  “If she doesn’t slit her wrists.”

  Álvaro’s heart lurched in sudden fury as she slammed around the kitchen, putting away pots left in the dish drainer. Opening the dishwasher, rearranging the dishes, adding soap. He wanted to strike her.

  “If she doesn’t want help, what do we do? Leave her alone in her little room to waste away to a skeleton? It’s hopeless. Her mother needs to know. Someone needs to have a talk with her.”

  Those words. Álvaro’s anger surged. I’ll have a talk with her, son, Walter had said. Leave it to me. He would have watched Isabel get big, heard the news of the birth. Walter had known all along.

  He wanted to tear the night apart, rip the noise out of the air. Margaret’s voice. Vinicio laughing in his ear. The breath, entering. Spermatozoa, he’d said. Whipping their tails out through the world, trailing their slime behind them. And he’d drawn a line of the viscous liquid under Álvaro’s nose, smeared it on his mouth. The smell, the taste so strong in the kitchen, he wiped at his face with his sleeve. It was as if Vinicio, too, had known everything after all.

  “I’m not bound by any privacy rules,” Margaret said, handing him a cup of tea. “What’s the last name again? She must have a phone.” She rummaged for a pen, a scrap of paper. “Isabel.”

  “Lee,” Álvaro spoke without thinking. He listed the number he had called maybe ten times, more than twenty years ago.

  Margaret looked up, startled.

  Álvaro decided he wasn’t going to lie about this. “Isabel Lee on Railway Avenue. A little house right across from the rail yard. The whole ground would shake every time a train went by.”

  He could feel Margaret’s gaze upon his face. He felt the scar, as if it conducted electricity up from his pulsing throat into his mouth. More words. “And, if I’m not mistaken, that girl is my daughter.” His teacup shattered in his hand, the scalding liquid spilling over his hands.

&
nbsp; He heard Clara’s voice calling his name as his captors held him in the shadows, a hand over his mouth. “Get inside,” he wanted to scream, “Don’t open the gate.” His teeth shredding his lips as they moved against the crushing pressure of the hand. She’d been expecting him. She’d wanted to see him. The earth filled his mouth, Juan Tzul’s small bones rattled in his pocket. He wanted to do divination, to throw the bones to read their prophecies. He knew he could do this now. The power flowed through him and he could look on the bones and see the future and not flinch. There were no surprises left in the world, Clara. There’s nothing you can do to surprise me. I can see you as a whore on the street, a nun smiling from a website, a Zona 7 matron shopping for a new dress, bored, smoking, drugged with some tranquilizer. The crone in the morgue laying him open, raising the blade and bringing it down to whisper across his throat, his nipples, his terrified testicles. Nothing, Clara, will ever surprise me again. Here you are come back to me. Here you are to prove all of Vinicio’s lies, truth.

  Thomas Coleman appeared in the doorway, rumpled in pajamas, skin flaky, hair awry. He held out one arm toward Margaret, supporting the wrist with his other hand. He hadn’t wanted to bother her earlier, he said, but he thinks he’s maybe broken something. The whole hand was blue and swollen, streaks of red going up the arm.

  Álvaro’s rage flamed. He bent to pick up the curved shards still rocking on the tiles. He wanted to lay Thomas’s arm down on the table and slice it into rags. To slit Margaret’s throat and still her tired laugh.

  “Thomas Coleman, don’t you just take the cake.”