The Juliet Stories

by Carrie Snyder

  Bram calls for song, and Gloria lifts her guitar and plays, joined by the pluck of banjo strings, the rattle of tambourines, and by Charlotte’s open throat: Oh, woman, would you weep for me?

  Voices swept together by darkness, satiation. Apart, they come together, in a faraway land, far away from home.

  “Let’s dance!” Charlotte moves, she moves, she moves with the spirit, but Juliet hesitates. “Never hesitate. Start with your parts. Hold out your hand. Start with this one.”

  A girl in parts.

  One hand. One wrist. One elbow. One shoulder, two, and down the other arm and on, until piece by piece her entire body is in motion. Hips and knees and head and feet and guts, and who is watching? No one. Juliet is entwined, enmeshed with her own body. She is whole, she’s forgotten that her spirit is separate, because it isn’t, when she’s dancing.

  Everyone is moving.

  Charlotte, neck exposed, holding hands with Juliet’s father, swings him into a circular dance, pulling him towards Juliet so that she can join too. Juliet, right hand in her dad’s left, feeling his strong, thick fingers wrap and squeeze her own, thinks she will cry.

  “Do you have to go to the campo, Dad? Do you have to?”

  He can’t hear what Juliet’s asking over the music and the laughter. He smiles down at her, though he is breathing heavily. “Isn’t this something else?” he puffs, but he is ready to stop. He is a man of bulk and solidity, not made for whirling.

  They are still holding hands, the three of them. Juliet is the first to let go, stranding them together, her father and Charlotte, but only for a blink. Their hands swing back and forth once and then they drop each other.

  Bram says, “If you want, you can come along to the campo. Why not?”

  Juliet thinks he is talking to her, and something leaps like a small furry animal inside her chest.

  “Oh,” breathes Charlotte. “How can I thank you?”

  Not Juliet. Charlotte. Charlotte can come with Bram to the campo. The small furry animal in Juliet’s chest curls around itself, a weight heavier than before.

  Bram shrugs, smiles warmly. “We’ll keep you safe.”

  “I’m going somewhere,” cries Charlotte. “We’re going somewhere!”

  Charlotte grabs for Juliet’s hand and kisses it. Her cheeks shine wet in the firelight. She twirls Juliet like a ballerina. “Come. Let’s go!”

  And now the two of them, Charlotte and Juliet, are on their way, together. Together, they are dancing away from Bram, who mops his brow with a handkerchief,

  and from Gloria, whose fingers find rhythm no matter how asymmetrical. They are living, really living. They step lightly, delicately, weave invisibly over blankets and past backpacks, out beyond the forest of bodies lit by sparks, through deep and heavy grasses where the shadow of a tethered horse flickers in the dark, stamps its feet, and whickers soft and low.

  “Oh!” breathes Charlotte, like they have passed into another world, like they may never find home again.

  Maybe, thinks Juliet, we never will.

  Her mother’s music drifts from the other side of the field, sending them off, and the sky is dusty with stars — the blackness of a sky unlit by electricity, a long-ago sky in which no planes could ever fly, from which no bombs could ever fall. Charlotte pulls Juliet by the hand, dreamily, two train cars rolling silently down a track.

  Rolling, rolling, rolling, and we ain’t never coming back.

  SHE WILL LEAVE A MARK

  Across Managua, election posters flutter, graffiti is sprayed, car windows are plastered with slogans, and beautiful murals are painted on walls in honour of the ruling Frente. For five years the country has waited to vote, and in two months — on November 4, 1984 — the people will go to the polls, observed by a legion of foreigners, including those from the Roots of Justice.

  With a handful of volunteers, the Friesen family attends a massive rally held before the Palacio Nacional. The building is decrepit and magnificent, its huge white pillars faded grey and spotlit under a humid, porous sky. Daniel Ortega, the slender leader of the ruling party, appears onstage in his olive-green uniform, to a collective thrill.

  Juliet and Keith raise their voices deliriously in the party’s official song: “¡Luchamos, contra el yanqui, enemigo del humanidad!” We will be victorious over the Yankee, enemy of humanity!

  Juliet and Keith relish the shared joke: that they themselves are Yankees, enemies of humanity. Ha! They haven’t considered taking the words seriously. They haven’t considered that it might change them to straddle borders this way, that they might be forever altered, forever unable to choose a side, unable to respond to even the most obvious warning, so utterly confident, so utterly believing themselves to be who they are: multiplicities containing worlds, unpinned by definition, free.

  Gloria’s sweet soprano caresses the notes like she’s attending a gospel tent meeting from her childhood, eyes half-closed, body swaying. But they aren’t here as supporters of a political party, says Bram. They come as observers, to experience, to soak it all in.

  Fireworks explode in the black sky over the crumbling Palacio, a symbol no longer of exclusion but of a revolutionary nation struggling to define itself. Daniel Ortega wears military fatigues. Beside him is his brother Humberto, the Minister of Defence. The country is at war, and the military and the ruling party are as one.

  Within the gathered throngs, smaller, fiercer firecrackers explode, cheap paper soaked in gunpowder and set alight by boys and men, whirling and popping and rising.

  The crowds push and heave. Juliet begs to buy gum from one of the girls who duck and dart and shout with boxes displaying their goods tied around necks like little shelves — bare feet and tattered dresses, thin arms and legs and faces.

  “No,” her mother says, and in the next instant she is parted from Juliet. The crowds are suddenly tightly packed, swelling, pushing against Juliet with a pressure as shocking and ruthless as a tidal wave. Juliet feels herself lifted off her feet and carried, breathless, in the wrong direction. She can’t see anyone she knows. The smell of body heat is oppressive. No one is watching out for her; no one is holding on.

  She feels herself falling. She is slipping under, under the feet, under the weight, knocked to the dirt on her hands and knees. They will crush her without knowing what they’ve done.

  Instinctively, Juliet protects her head with her forearms; she will be trampled in this position. But instead she is grabbed from behind, lifted by strong hands, wrenched free. Her armpit aches, and her shoulder, where he’s caught hold. Her father, Bram, bellying bodies aside, pins Juliet against his damp cotton shirt with one arm and with the other clears the way, forcing a path, relentless as a tank.

  Together they ride out of the crush. The edge of the crowd, the thin layer beyond which it disperses altogether, is as sudden as its invention. Juliet feels cool night air on her hot face.

  “Thought we’d lost you,” is all Bram says. Instead of setting Juliet down, he swings her onto his shoulders. She feels younger than she is. Shyly, she lets her fingers brush his crinkly hair.

  “What can you see from up there?” If he’s worried, his calm tone does not betray it.

  Juliet points. There is her mother, pushing towards to the stage, her arms raised. Music blares over the loudspeakers. And here is Charlotte, quite near Juliet and Bram, looking for them, Emmanuel in her arms. Juliet waves and shouts, and relief washes Charlotte’s face clean as she comes towards them.

  “What about Keith? Can you see Keith?” Bram asks.

  Juliet can’t. They turn in a circle so that she can scan every direction, but she can’t see Keith.

  “He’s with somebody,” says Bram. Their small group picks through the impromptu parking lot towards the white minibus, guarded by their driver, Israel Junior.

  Juliet slides off her fath
er’s shoulders. The crowds are thinning; the people are going home. One by one the other Roots of Justice volunteers find them, each with some small adventure to report, but Keith is with none of them.

  Still Bram says, “He’s somewhere nearby,” and pats Juliet on the head, absently, a touch that chafes. She ducks and he glances at her in perplexity, his eyes distant, unfocused. Worried.

  Gloria is the last to know. She’s running to meet them, her face shining: she touched the sleeve of Daniel Ortega, revolutionary hero! He leaned down from the stage to greet the people — no barriers, no bodyguards, no bulletproof vest.

  “We can’t find Keith,” Charlotte interrupts.

  “What? Where is he?”

  “He can’t be far away,” says Bram.

  Juliet feels the weight of her father’s palm pressing the top of her head as he says again: “He can’t be far.”

  “Oh God.” Gloria claps her hands against her rib cage, her face drained of colour and suddenly still, frozen. “Kidnapped. Someone saw us, someone saw an opportunity. Oh God. What will they do to him?”

  “Gloria.” Bram’s tone is stern. “We will find him. Yuri and Andrew are going around the perimeter of the crowd right now. No, don’t move, Gloria.” He catches her by the arm, but she yanks free. “Stay here. We can’t lose you too.”

  “We have to tell someone,” she says. “The police, someone.”

  “I’ll do that,” says Charlotte.

  “Sit in the bus,” says Bram.

  “Fuck you,” says Gloria. “You think we’re on the sidelines. But we’re in the middle of a fucking war.”

  Keith has black hair. His skin tans easily, his eyes are nut brown. No one would guess him to be a gringo. He slips into a crowd and becomes any boy in a way that Juliet cannot become any girl. She envies her brother his malleability, his deftness at the art of reflection. Wherever he is right now, she knows he is not lonely: he’s squatting in the dirt lighting firecrackers with matches, or drinking a bag of pop offered for free by an admiring woman, or playing a game of street baseball with a stone and a stick and a rabble of boys.

  He will saunter up, hand in hand with Yuri or Andrew, and shrug: What?

  But if she were to slip away, if Juliet were to creep towards the Palacio to see the brass band playing right up close, to touch the nose of a horse, to hop onto the stage and declaim her favourite poem from The Hobbit — what would happen to her? She knows the question is without validity. Everyone would see her coming; they would whisper and point and stroke her hair to see if it’s real, and she’s not brave enough to go.

  On top of the minibus, Israel Junior, the driver, jumps up and down with excitement.

  “Oh!” Gloria sees them and she runs, her jaw and fists unclenched, her hair unfurling like a flag in her wake: Yuri and Keith.

  What?

  ———

  As they pull out of the parking lot, Gloria turns in her seat and tells all of them, but Juliet especially; “I know I said some things that sounded bad. Did they scare you? I’m sorry if they did. Were you afraid too? I was so upset and worried, it was like I’d lost my mind. Do you understand?”

  Juliet nods yes.

  Her mother does not ask for forgiveness. She sums up what has happened, rolls down the window, and lets it blow away, like that.

  Keith’s leg rests next to Juliet’s on the plastic seat, bumping up and down as Israel Junior negotiates potholes and ruts and stray pigs. It is a just a leg, like her own, and she couldn’t say anything more than that in explanation, looking down on it: so close to hers, so warm, so irritating.

  Juliet pinches Keith.

  He stares at her and she stares back, blank faced, almost as surprised as he is, and he has to — he pinches her thigh in return — so she has to — she pinches again. Hard, her nails digging. She will leave a mark. Hey! Whispered. He punches her arm. She kicks his ankle. He pulls her hair while she digs her nails into his brown thigh.

  Neither will let go. Breathing through their mouths.

  They hold on in silence, hidden in the back of the minibus from all but Israel Junior, who watches them in the rear-view mirror, sees them carrying a rage that can go nowhere but here, caught, pinned together as the dark city spins past and warm air washes like incense through open windows and the grown-ups talk about who will win, and who should, and what their roles as impartial observers might be.

  TIDAL

  Adios, Mrs. Friesen. Say goodbye to your house. Say goodbye to your family. The bomb is ticking. Adios, los Raíces de Justicia.

  The muffled voice on the other end of the line is speaking Spanish, but badly.

  Describing it to the uniformed soldier afterwards, Gloria insists the accent was American. The Friesen family stands in the street across from their house. Two trucks styled in jungle camouflage idle in a diesel fog. The soldier jots notes; his companions amble and smoke. “What were his exact words?”

  Gloria does not know the Spanish word for “ticking,” and when pressed admits that she cannot recreate the message with precision. “Does it matter? His exact words? He knew my name. He knew the office was in our house. He knew all about us.”

  “Ka-boom!” The mysterious voice had made the sound of an explosion, and she dropped the receiver and ran, yelling her children’s names: Everybody out, get out, get out! Run!

  Her hands are still shaking. She holds them out for the soldier to see.

  “We’ll go through the house.” The soldier turns from Gloria and addresses Bram. “You. Show us where to look.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Bram speaks an effortless Spanish, acquired through the skin as a child, while his mother attended university classes and he spent his days walking hand in hand along snowy sidewalks with an Argentine woman whose papers were not in order; his mother was resourceful and she was unsentimental.

  “Show us where to look,” the soldier repeats.

  “And if there is a bomb?”

  The man shrugs. He is more boy than man, skinny, armed to the teeth. The soldiers with him are boys too, none of them seeming serious enough for the job.

  “You can’t go,” says Gloria.

  Bram shifts his weight to his shoulders; he is his mother’s son. “No one is going anywhere. We’ll let these men do their job.” Casually he removes a roll of curled American dollars from his back pocket and shuffles them with his thumb.

  The soldiers, these boys, tear the place apart.

  Juliet’s books are in there, and her collection of shabby figurines that populate the pretend dollhouse under the bottom bunk, and her hairbrush, her clothes, her underwear, her pillow and blankets, her toothbrush.

  All clear. The Friesens walk through their house as if it is no longer theirs: items strewn across the floor, dumped like trash, stepped upon, boot prints in dust.

  “I will never feel safe in here again,” says Gloria.

  “Maybe you’re right,” says Bram. “Maybe you and the kids should go somewhere else for a while. A little break, a vacation, by the beach.”

  Bombed into paradise. That’s what Gloria calls it.

  Gloria and the children take a bus to San Juan del Sur. There is some confusion about making a connection, and they are stranded in a nearby town, inland, until Gloria decides to accept the offer of a ride in the back of a pickup truck.

  Hitching to paradise. That’s what Gloria calls it.

  If she regrets the choice, or resents that Bram hasn’t taken the time to drive them himself, she does not say so. In fact, little can be said over the gusts of wind, sitting loose in the truck bed, jolted and jounced and jarred down a road that bears only the rough appearance of once having been paved. The smell of the Pacific comes at them at last, and then the sight of it, as they approach from above and it spreads out below, blue and endless and clear.
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  They are a million miles from school.

  When Gloria tries to pay the driver, he refuses.

  Free passage to paradise. That’s what Gloria calls it.

  Andrew laughs appreciatively; but he laughs easily, he laughs at anything, he bubbles with mirth. He’s been waiting all day on the front porch of the Roots of Justice house, here in San Juan del Sur, keeping his eyes peeled — “Like this,” he shows them, fingers stretching eyelids wide — for the arrival of Gloria and the children. He’s only recently been sent to man the outpost, and “By God, I’ve been lonely!”

  Gloria and the children will stay with Andrew at the Roots of Justice house: it has many bedrooms and a sunny courtyard, and is steps from the sand. The house is used both as a place of rest and recovery for weary volunteers and to host delegations of protestors. Although San Juan is a fishing town, its port has been targeted by American planes for surveillance. A military base armed with anti-aircraft artillery guards the town from atop the hill.

  Andrew welcomes Gloria and the children with a monstrous bowl of purplish red fruit called momones.

  “Help yourselves.” He demonstrates the technique. Juliet cracks the shell with her teeth, pops into her mouth the pale, wet, gumball-sized fruit within, and sucks and sucks and sucks until the hairy fibres lose their flavour and the jelly-like remnants come squeakily away from the pit. She is left with a strange emptiness, as if the fruit has parched her mouth instead of moistening it. She will eat until she is sick or until the bowl is empty, whichever comes first.

  But this is paradise. The bowl is never empty. The children are never sick. The days are solidly sun-filled. The nights are languid and studded with stars, and the sound of waves through open windows soothes their sleep. Gloria sits on the porch in the dark and picks at her guitar’s strings, and Juliet lies in bed under one thin sheet and listens; the songs are in a minor key, but for beauty, not for loneliness.

  It is Juliet who sees the other children first, white-blond, walking with their father along the top of the beach. There are three of them; the oldest is a girl, and they are picking their way deliberately towards the Friesens.