Land of Careful Shadows

by Suzanne Chazin

  “It’s hangman, güey. Haven’t you seen them play hangman here before?”

  Rodrigo shook his head. Enrique explained the game while Rodrigo pulled out his purchase from the hardware store. A package of glue. The glue had cost $2.32—more, he was sure, than it would have cost in a big store on the highway. But he had no way to get to the highway. He didn’t even own a bicycle. And his right work boot needed fixing. The leather had separated from the rubber sole. When he walked, it flopped about like a dying fish. He suspected the glue wouldn’t fix the boot but he saw no alternative. Without the boot, he couldn’t work. Without work, he couldn’t buy new boots.

  He was pressing the leather upper hard against the glue on the rubber sole when Enrique’s cousin Anibal walked up to them. Anibal stared at the shoe a moment, then pulled a piece of string from one of his pockets and handed it to Rodrigo.

  “Here. Tie this around your boot. Maybe this will hold it together until the glue dries.”

  “Many thanks.” Rodrigo was glad of Anibal’s and Enrique’s company today. Both men were from his hometown in Guatemala and he knew them well. Anibal was a year older than Rodrigo, dark and quiet with a broad mustache that hid his mouth and eyes that turned into slits when he smiled.

  Enrique was five years younger than Rodrigo and the opposite of his cousin in every way. As a boy, he could never sit still. He used to tape mirrors to the tops of his feet so he could look up girls’ dresses. He put chili powder in the priest’s wine during communion. People used to say he moved like he had crickets in his underwear. He had a little sister, Sucely, who once fell into the river when Enrique was supposed to be watching her. Rodrigo swam out and rescued her in the swift-moving current. It was one of many bonds that tied them together and made them look out for one another.

  Anibal smoothed his thumb and forefinger down each side of his mustache, something he always did before he delivered bad news.

  “The heat won’t be fixed for a while, unfortunately. The repairman won’t be here for at least another hour.”

  “Ay, chimado!” Enrique cursed. Anibal gave his younger cousin a disapproving look. He was a deeply religious man who didn’t use bad language when there were women present—whether they understood or not. Rodrigo respected him for it—wished he could retain so much of his honor. He’d vowed many things before he left Esperanza seven months ago and he’d already broken the most important one.

  “I put our names in the job lottery at least,” said Anibal.

  Rodrigo looked over at the front entrance. On a wobbly card table sat a canister full of numbered Ping-Pong balls. Above the canister, a dry-erase board noted the numbers and corresponding first names of the men hoping their number might get pulled if someone came in looking for day laborers.

  “Have any employers come in today?” asked Rodrigo.

  Anibal shook his head. “Not yesterday, either. The economy is still not good.” Rodrigo finished knotting the string firmly around his work boot. It pained him that he’d had to borrow from Anibal to buy the glue. On his first journey to the United States, he’d been able to earn enough to build his family a house in Guatemala with concrete walls, a sturdy tile roof, and an indoor toilet. He’d done nothing he was proud of on this journey—and a whole lot he wasn’t.

  Anibal read the worry in Rodrigo’s eyes. He patted his friend on the shoulder.

  “Things will get better once the weather warms up. It’s still only early April.” The top joints of the last three fingers on Anibal’s left hand were missing, the result of a printing factory accident in Guatemala. When potential employers came around, Anibal always kept his hands in gloves lest they cost him a job.

  The men were quietly talking among themselves when they suddenly noticed a palpable buzzing in the room, a nervous rush of energy Rodrigo hadn’t felt so strongly since Arizona where every cholero in a uniform made him go cold inside, made his knees shake and his throat turn to sand. And then he understood: there was a police officer in the community center. He wasn’t dressed in a police uniform and he was Spanish-looking. But the consensus seemed to be that he was one just the same, mainly because he carried himself with the sort of stiff authority they all seemed to have, from Central America, to Mexico, to the United States. Plus, there was a bulge underneath his jacket. A gun.

  He was standing near the front door, just outside the glassed-in front office where the director of the center and two other employees were. There was no room for a fourth person in the tiny office so he stood in the doorway with an air of impatience, rattling a big envelope in his hands.

  “What do you think he wants?” Rodrigo asked Enrique softly.

  “What does every police officer want? To arrest somebody. Relax, güey. It has nothing to do with us.”

  “It’s about a woman,” said Anibal, who had managed to overhear a little of the conversation.

  “It’s always about a woman,” said Enrique. “All of life is—when you come right down to it.” He tapped his foot restlessly and slid his eyes in the direction of the center’s director, Adele Figueroa. Cajeta, the men at the center called her, after a type of Mexican caramel sauce. Enrique had a crush on her. They all did. But Enrique especially. Sometimes he came to the center just to watch the soft swing of her hips, the roundness of her buttocks, the way her blouses cleaved like question marks to the contours of her body. Rodrigo could never understand why Anglos seemed to prefer women whose bodies were all sinew and gristle and sharp edges. Maybe deep down, they were afraid of sex. Maybe that’s why women dressed like men here.

  The officer slapped a stack of flyers on the wobbly card table by the front entrance and followed Adele Figueroa to her office at the back of the building. Rodrigo wanted to watch the graceful slide of her hips, but his gaze was transfixed on the table, at the flyer with a photograph of a mother and child. The mother wore a silver crucifix around her neck. It was partially obscured by the baby’s red bow but Rodrigo knew it well. He had brushed his hand against it many times. On each side of Christ’s outstretched arms, small bird wings dangled. Milagros. Catholics in his homeland put milagros next to statues of patron saints or crosses to plead for divine intervention. He had seen symbols of body parts—hands and legs. He had seen animals and wings and likenesses of saints. All pleas for God to mend an ailment, alter a fate, answer a prayer. The words across the flyer were written in Spanish and English: DO YOU KNOW THIS WOMAN OR CHILD? At the bottom was a phone number to contact with information.

  Rodrigo’s heart compressed against his ribs. He knew what the flyer meant. He didn’t have to be told. So much for her prayers and milagros. Why was it that God seemed to favor least the ones who counted on him most?

  They would come after him. He was sure of it. He was trapped as surely as he had been at the Arizona border when the helicopters hovered overhead and he’d had to throw himself under cactuses and mesquites to escape. Run and hide. Run and hide. That’s all he knew anymore.

  “Are you okay?” asked Anibal. “You don’t look well.”

  “I need to leave.”

  “But the glue on your boot hasn’t dried.”

  “It’s good enough. I have to go.” Maybe they didn’t know yet, but at some point they would. There weren’t enough milagros in the world that could save him from that. He was going to have to pay for his mistakes. In the end, God makes everyone pay for his mistakes.

  Chapter 4

  Adele Figueroa traced a finger across the face of the woman on the missing person’s flyer. A sweet face, absent of guile, with something pleasing and expectant in the pucker of flesh beneath her eyes, the way her full lips revealed her gums when she smiled. Adele wished she could have identified the woman or the baby for the detective, but she didn’t recognize them. Neither did her two volunteers who were also sitting in this cramped, freezing office, trying to hold down the fort until the heating repairman arrived.

  “I’ll be sure to put up the flyer and let you know if anyone comes forward,” Adele told the
detective.

  “Thanks.” James Vega was his name. His business card said he was with the county police. His dark good looks gave him away as Latino but he seemed nervously out of place standing in the doorway of the front office. His large moody eyes scanned the room like he was half-expecting to find someone from the FBI’s Most Wanted list playing a game of hangman. He was about as far removed from Adele’s sense of Latino as a Taco Bell burrito. She was anxious for him to leave so her clients could calm down. His presence was like a yellow jacket in a bus full of preschoolers.

  He stayed in the doorway, rattling his manila envelope of flyers. “How about José Ortiz? Have you seen him recently? He’s got a wife, Vilma, and a two-year-old daughter.”

  “No.”

  “ ‘No,’ you haven’t seen him? Or ‘no’ you don’t know him?” He spoke like a man who was used to getting his questions answered. She refused to be cowed.

  “I know who he is. I haven’t seen him in awhile. And I’ve never met his wife or daughter.” She stood up, hoping he would take the cue to leave. But cops were like bad houseguests. Once you invited them in, they never left of their own accord.

  “He have friends or family in town? Someone who’d know where he’s disappeared to? He skipped out on his last known address.”

  “Can I ask what this is concerning?”

  “I’m following up on a domestic violence complaint.”

  She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Come now, Detective. You’re not here for that.”

  He looked taken aback. “So you think domestic violence is no big deal?”

  “I think it’s a very big deal,” said Adele evenly. “My center runs a support group for victims and a hotline in Spanish. But the Lake Holly Police Department doesn’t seem to share my sentiment—at least not when it comes to my clients. So let’s not pretend that’s why you want to speak to José Ortiz.”

  “Huh.” He rubbed the back of his hand along his chin, weighing the situation, weighing her.

  “I’m not being coy, Detective. I honestly don’t know where he is. But I will ask around.”

  “Okay then.”

  Adele moved toward the doorway, hoping to encourage him to leave. But instead, he turned away from her and scanned the big room beyond the glass cubicle as if he were sizing it up for a stakeout.

  “You’ve got a lot of security cameras on this building. Front and back exits and the parking lot as well. Had a problem?”

  “An incident last month. Someone set a fire in our Dumpster and spray-painted some disparaging language across our parking lot.”

  A muscle twitched in the folds of those moody eyes. “Did the Lake Holly PD do an investigation?”

  “We didn’t have the cameras up at the time. We got them as a result of the incident so there was no video footage. No witnesses have come forward. No arrests have been made.”

  “You said, ‘disparaging language.’ What did they spray-paint?”

  Adele glanced at the two dozen or so men in the room beyond the cubicle. “Is this necessary?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  Not here. Not within spitting distance of all these terrified immigrants. “My office. In back.” She turned to one of her volunteers sitting at the computer. “Kay, do me a favor? When the repairman comes, get me?”

  “Sure thing, Adele.”

  She tied a wool shawl around her that a client from Peru had given her and led Vega through a back room with bright yellow cinder-block walls and a scattering of pool tables. There were men everywhere—playing pool, talking in groups. All of them had their jackets and hoodies on. Adele hoped the repairman would hurry up and get here so she could go home and warm up. She was supposed to be off on Sundays. She had to help Sophia with her diorama. Her third-grade class was studying Native Americans and Sophia’s teacher insisted the children make their Indian longhouses using only natural materials. Sophia ended up in tears last night because Adele had constructed the frame out of cardboard instead of twigs from the garden. Where her clients were concerned, Adele could do no wrong. Where her daughter was concerned, she could do no right.

  “Your heating system’s broken?” asked Vega.

  “Thermostat’s acting up.”

  He scanned the room. “You’d think they’d all go home. It’s cold enough.”

  “Home is a corner of a crowded attic or basement. No matter how cold it gets here, this is better.”

  She opened the door of her office, another glassed-in fishbowl, this one containing just one battered gunmetal gray desk. Behind it was a colorful display of Latin American folk art. There was a weaving of women balancing baskets of corn on their heads beside an acid-green mountain and a painting of a sunny marketplace overflowing with tropical fruit. Vega nodded to the artwork.

  “I’ll bet it doesn’t look like that or they wouldn’t all be here.”

  “In their dreams it does. Doesn’t Puerto Rico look like that to you?”

  She caught something defensive in the set of his jaw. He didn’t like being sized up, even if he did it all the time to others.

  “How do you know I’m Puerto Rican?”

  Actually, Nuyorican if she had to guess. The Bronx accent in English, probably in Spanish as well. That streak of arrogance. There was something about the way he carried himself that told her he didn’t really comprehend her clients’ fear or desperation. There was no history there—at least not in the same way.

  “I was under the impression most Spanish-speaking police officers in New York were. Though usually Puerto Ricans are like Texans. They have to tell you they are right away.”

  “Do most Harvard lawyers generalize as much as you do? Or only the Ecuadorian ones?”

  That stopped her. “How—?”

  “—Your degree’s on the wall behind you, and I figured you wouldn’t have the Ecuadorian flag on your desk if you weren’t.”

  “The flag is in memory of my parents,” said Adele. “They were from Ecuador and I feel a strong connection. However, I was born here.”

  “Well I was born in the Bronx.”

  “So you don’t think of yourself as Puerto Rican?”

  He hesitated. “We’re not talking about me, Ms. Figueroa.”

  She’d hit a nerve. Why, she wondered? She thought all Latinos felt a connection to their heritage. A flower cannot survive long when cut from its stem.

  She closed her office door and took a seat behind her desk. Vega settled himself in the only other chair in the room. She steepled her fingers under her chin and willed her voice to stay cool and professional.

  “Go home fucking beaners. You don’t belong here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what was spray-painted on the parking lot.”

  “Oh. Gotcha.” He took a pen and notebook out of a pocket in his dark blue Windbreaker. “Those were the exact words?”

  “You think I’d forget them?”

  “How many people saw it?”

  “Hard to say. Maybe upward of a hundred people including all the sanitation workers and auto body mechanics who work on the street. Not to mention all the contractors and volunteers and clients at the center. It took maybe three or four days before we were able to scrub off most of it. We’ve since repaved because it never came off entirely. May I ask why this interests you so much?”

  “I’m curious, is all.” He smiled and held it a moment too long, like he was posing for a picture with someone he tolerated rather than liked. One of his eyeteeth was crooked. She hadn’t noticed that when his smile was genuine.

  “You had a hate crime at your center,” said Vega. “And yet, far as I know, it never made the news. Seems to me you’d be screaming for blood, if not with the local PD, then with some immigrant rights group. It’s not like you don’t know your way around a courtroom. So what gives, Ms. Figueroa? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Stuff a lot worse than a few spray-painted words in a parking lot, thought Adele. But what was the point of opening up to
a cop? This guy wasn’t her clients’ friend. Both sides knew that. The fastest way to lose the good will—and funding—she’d built up in the community was to turn La Casa into a lightning rod for suburban intolerance. She could kiss off her roving medical and dental clinic after that. And her after-school tutoring program and a host of other needed social services. Besides, this cop wouldn’t even be here if he weren’t fishing for something. And then it hit her.

  “That woman on the flyer—she didn’t just die, did she, Detective? She was murdered. And for some reason you’re not sharing, you think it might be a hate crime that José Ortiz is mixed up in, in some way.”

  Vega’s face lost all expression and his eyes turned dark and flat. “The case is still under investigation.”

  “Right. And you wonder why the Latino community doesn’t trust the police.”

  “Oh, so you’re the Latino community and I’m the police?” He got a bemused expression. “I hate to break this to you, but you’ve probably got about as much in common with these people as I do.”

  “You’re not trying to help them,” said Adele. “I am.”

  “I am trying to help them. I’m trying to find the identity of a dead mother so her family can put her to rest in her own country. I’m trying to find a coward who used his wife as a punching bag. What are you doing? Giving them a place to shoot pool?”

  That did it. Her temper was up. “You spend five minutes at La Casa, you think you understand the Latino community in Lake Holly? You don’t have a clue. Things get reported. Police investigations get done. We just handle it differently. That’s how come we’re still here. After everything that’s happened, we’re still here.”

  Vega sat up a little straighter. “Everything? What everything? ”

  “We’ve had some—incidents. I see no point in stirring the pot right now.”

  “I see.” Vega rose and walked over to her bookshelf. He picked up a trophy, dusty with age, the gold plating chipped in places.

  “You fenced?”

  “When I was a teenager.”