by Otto Penzler
“Not the government,” I said. “Independent companies.”
“What kind of companies?”
“A mining company. I’m auditing their operations here.” I said this in a rush as though I was flustered, which I guess I was. That’s how I got any time my daughters started in on universal health care, or how awful American foreign policy was. Susan, our oldest, the teacher, was home helping Joyce while I was away, and for her I’d pounded a sign into the front lawn: THANK YOU, GEORGE BUSH.
Allie just stared, as though waiting for horns to sprout from my forehead. Billy was still muttering about this building and that building and the civil war.
“Aqui, El Palacio,” the driver said, easing to a stop.
I left the American kids frowning at the glimmering facade of the hotel and hurried into the revolving door. The lobby, with its slick stone floors and dribbling fountain, was empty except for a cluster of boys in bright red jackets and black pants who looked desperate to snatch my bag away.
In my reserved room I went to the drawer of the bedside table and found the promised handgun and shoulder holster. I splashed cold water on my face, dried it on a plush towel, lay down on the slightly lumpy mattress, and watched the jerking ceiling fan.
I woke to the knocking at the door and groped for the gun, nearly falling out of bed, shouting, “Hold on. Just hold on.”
Through the peephole I saw a bellboy. He was barely five feet tall and so thin his arms and hands looked withered, his fingers long and spindly. He rattled away in Spanish, spraying spit.
“What?” I said. “English. Speak English.”
“Guests, down.” He pointed at the floor. “Wait. You. Guests.”
“Who? Who is it?”
He shook his misshapen head and pulled his lips up into what he must’ve imagined was a smile.
“Why didn’t you call?”
“No phone work,” he said, pointing into my room. “Guests. Down. Bar.” Then, probably sensing I wasn’t going to tip, he shuffled away.
I checked the phone. There was no dial tone, just a blank space. I checked my cell, hoping to call Joyce and make sure Susan had arrived. The phone said, Looking for Service. Before leaving the room I grabbed my briefcase. You could never be sure with these companies. They were often frantic and might want to see something to comfort them right away.
The bar was off the lobby, through a frosted glass door. I let my eyes adjust to the darkness, taking in the sour smell of bleach, half-full ashtrays, and rum. An oily sunset was smeared across the one window.
From a booth near the window a woman waved. It was Allie, and beside her was Billy. They were drinking tall, fruit-adorned cocktails.
“We were waiting,” she said, pointing at their drinks, in which quivered flecks of poisonous ice. “Someone’s got to pay for these drinks, after all.”
Still in something of a daze, I joined them, settling the briefcase on my lap. The waiter appeared and soon we were sipping a round of beers.
“Are you staying here?” I asked, not quite able to pull myself fully into the waking world.
“Dude, are you crazy?” Billy said. “This place costs a fortune.”
“We found a hostel,” Allie said. “Not too far away.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said, tipping my bottle at them, then taking a sip and trying not to gag.
“But we thought we’d come and meet you for dinner.” She reached across the table to pat my hand, as though they felt sorry for me. At that moment her smile reminded me of Susan, with that smug twist to her mouth. I’d assumed these kids were in their early twenties, but now I thought they might be the same age as my daughters, late twenties, on the cusp of realizing that life wasn’t a game, that it was hard and ruthless and that the main thing was to keep from getting completely and totally screwed over by others.
“Sure,” I said. “We can get some dinner. I bet the food’s okay here.”
“Don’t be silly,” Allie said, leaning forward to slap my shoulder. “Not here. We know a great place nearby.”
“Is that a good idea? The food can be pretty dodgy down here.” I touched the gun under my arm.
“Come on,” Billy said, biffing me on the shoulder. “We’ll be fine, man. It’ll be an adventure.” He stared at the briefcase on my lap, seemed about to say something, then just grinned dopily.
I should’ve gone to my room and back to sleep. Maybe it was exhaustion, or maybe, like that idiot Billy said, I just wanted to do something different, something that might help me slip for a moment out of my life.
“Just don’t order salad. You’ll be fine,” Allie said. “And you better get the check, big guy,” she said, then threw back her head and chugged the rest of her beer, clinking the bottle down on the table. Gasping for breath, she said, “Ready?”
They refused my offer of a taxi and so we walked, gathering attention on every street—three gringos ripe for a mugging or, if the locals were feeling more industrious, a kidnapping. The chances of this increased the farther we walked, out of the governmental area, through what counted here as a “middle-class” neighborhood, and past a hostel with a few gringos hanging around out front. I asked if that’s where they were staying and they smiled dimly.
We walked on, into a slum. The narrow passageways between crumbling concrete walls were littered with garbage and an open sewer trickled down the middle. All the children were barefoot and ravenous, dark eyes glittering as they displayed their stumpy teeth. A clutch of them gathered around us, tugging at our pockets and sleeves and smearing swarms of bacteria over my fingers and the brass lock on my briefcase, so eventually I cradled it against my chest. What the hell am I doing here? I kept thinking, but I didn’t turn back. I began to wonder if I’d picked up some tropical bug and was in the early stages of delirium. Sweat soaked my back. I touched the handle of the gun again and again for comfort.
This was probably just the sort of thing Susan had done during her recent trip across India. She’d come back with a new wardrobe of saris, a streak of red dye in her light brown hair, and stories about the noble poor and our responsibility to them. Like Allie and Billy, Susan had played at destitution, renting rooms from families in remote villages where she could’ve easily been raped or killed. During her recent visit she’d worn me out with her stories and self-righteousness. One night, after listening to awful, jangling music for an hour, I’d helped Joyce to bed, hooked up the tubes, and said, “Well, that was quite a performance.”
“Performance?” she said, in the raspy near-whisper that was all she’d been able to manage for the past year. The brittle strands of her hair clung to the crisp pillowcase.
“Susan,” I said, kissing her papery cheek. “That music.”
Joyce closed her eyes and said softly, “I thought it was beautiful.”
“Beautiful?” I said. She opened her eyes, and at that moment she looked frightened of me. I tried to calm myself. “Don’t be silly, Joyce. It was awful.”
“No,” she said, closing her eyes again. “No, Robert.” And then she was asleep. Music leaked up from below for hours and I ground my teeth until my jaw throbbed.
I told myself that Allie and Billy weren’t much different from my daughters, which is obviously part of the reason I went with them: I wanted to protect them, and in so doing I thought maybe I could teach them something useful. The longer I was around them, the more ragged they looked. Both were severely underweight, especially Allie, whose jaw was drawn so tight it looked painful, and she had the wild look of hunger, the kind of fear that could get her into real trouble. There was something black and feral in her eyes, as though they didn’t quite see you, only what she could get from you. She’d carried her Central American adventure too far and soon, if she wasn’t careful, would end up truly lost.
At the door of the restaurant the urchins fell away. At first my relief they were gone was so great I didn’t notice that the restaurant doubled as a brothel, but by the time we were seated at a rickety plast
ic table, I’d noticed the sickly girls, none older than sixteen, lined up against the far wall, shifting their legs apart so their tiny dresses rode higher. The barstools were full of heavy men wearing cowboy hats which they tipped back on their heads to peer at us through the smoke haze.
“Apparently,” Allie said, scooting up to the table, “the tacos here are killer.”
A tiny Indian woman with wildly unkempt hair took our order. I lied and said I’d eaten but that dinner was on me, of course. A few urchins approached the door warily, eager for us to emerge, drunk, easy targets.
When the food came, the American kids bent over the paper plates and crammed everything into their mouths, even the lettuce, sauce dripping over their dirty hands, which they licked clean like dogs. I signaled to the waitress for another round of tacos, and they tore into them, letting out little groans of pleasure. Wiping their mouths on their sleeves, without a word of thanks, they pushed their plates away and grinned at me.
“Hey,” Allie said, sitting up straighter. She pointed at me. “Do you have any money?”
“What?” I said. “Of course.”
“So, like, do you think we could borrow some?” She cocked her head and grinned, and when she did I noticed she was missing several teeth, as though they’d been pried from her raw red gums.
“For what?”
“To buy stuff,” she said, so brightly, so stupidly, that I pulled out my wallet.
“How much?” I said, peering at the lump of nearly useless local money and the crisp American bills behind.
“I mean, whatever you can spare.” She was still smiling, but it had a harder edge now. This wasn’t the first time she’d asked someone for money.
I pulled out two American twenties and handed them across the table. She squinted at them as though not quite believing I was so cheap, then slipped them beneath the table.
“That’s great. Thanks,” she said.
“Hold on.” I pulled out another two twenties.
“Thank you,” she said softly, folding the bills carefully and tucking them away. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Done with me now, the American kids started yakking about something, music, I thought, though the arcane names of bands, or brands, or TV shows proved impenetrable. I fell into the role of observer, watching men slip in from the street, skirt the far wall until they reached the line of girls, one of whom would peel off and lead the man through a curtained doorway. One of the girls had noticed me watching and kept catching my eye, smiling, maybe thinking I’d be good for a big tip.
“So are you, like, actually going up to the mine?” Allie said, cutting Billy off in the middle of one of his stories.
“Excuse me?”
“The mine, are you going there?” She was squinting, as though I were far away.
“No. There’s plenty of work to do at the headquarters.”
“Yeah, I bet,” she said, propping her knobby elbows on the table.
Like my daughters, this girl clearly had some fantasy about a world made up of good guys and bad guys. This was a liberal dream, one that sensible people eventually realized was a limited and immature way of seeing the world.
“I’ve heard about that mine,” Allie said.
I knew she meant in Harper’s. Susan had mailed me a copy of the issue. The article focused on the displacement of the local population and the tensions this generated within the community and the possibility that it might reignite the civil war. In truth, I’d only skimmed the pages, bloated as they were with nonsense.
“I guess that makes you an expert, doesn’t it?” I said.
“I think it’s pretty fucked up,” she said. “I mean, how can you work for that company? They’re stealing those people’s lands.”
“Those people don’t own the land. That’s the point.”
“That’s such bullshit!” she shouted, slapping the table.
The men at the bar turned on their stools.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, just above a whisper. “The opportunities that mine presents for this country outweigh the concerns of a few subsistence farmers.” I hated myself for getting sucked in, but I’d never been able to stop myself. Thanksgiving dinners always ended in acrimony in our house.
“Of course it does!” Allie was shouting now. Everyone was watching us. “Opportunities for the rich who’ve raped this country for hundreds of years, and for North American corporations. Which I guess is what your job is, right? Grease the fucking gears.”
There was something in her tone that made me think she wasn’t just someone who’d stumbled across an article, which had mentioned, now that I thought about it, the presence of international human rights organizations, serving as observers and even human shields for the local communities when the mining company sent in men to burn the villages. Seeing her indignation, I began to wonder if maybe she was one of these. Even brainless Billy could’ve been an activist.
“I think you’re simplifying things. The world isn’t that easy,” I said.
“It’s not?” she shouted. “What’s so complicated? Thieves come down and steal land, property, goods, and call themselves a company. That’s how it’s always been.” Her face was red and the cords of her neck stood out. A little vein pulsed along her forehead. Billy watched all this with a bemused smile, as though we were speaking a foreign language.
“That’s how a child thinks,” I said. “Just because you read something in a magazine doesn’t mean you understand anything.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? What fucking magazine? I guess you”—she lunged forward, trying to poke me in the chest, but the table caught her in the stomach—“are just naturally full of fucking wisdom, aren’t you?”
Before I could say anything she stood and stomped to the bar, squeezing in between two men. Billy fussed with the label on his bottle, then followed. They whispered together furiously while I finished my beer and gestured for another. Little peaks of their bitching rose into audibility every now and then. When I’d nearly finished my new beer, they went and sat at another table, back near the prostitutes.
Maybe at that point I should’ve left. But I’d seen the way the men in the bar were looking at the American kids, and though they were strangers, I felt responsible for them. I ordered another beer, told the waitress I was paying for everything the Americans had, and sneaked a look at my cell phone, which was still getting no service. Though the lopsided clock on the wall said it was only six o’clock, dark had fallen. Back home, Joyce would be exhausted, barely able to shuffle to the bathroom, where she’d strain to urinate and then brush her gray teeth. Susan would have to help lift her mother into bed, hook up the tubes, and set the level of the oxygen. These are things I’d done every day for the past year when I was home, and I’d come to think of them as rites no one but me knew how to enact. I hated when reality imposed on this feeling, as it continually did when we had to hire nurses to help while I was abroad. This time Joyce said she didn’t want a stranger. She couldn’t stand another bored, tired nurse changing her bedpan, lifting her frail shoulders from the sheets to slip her nightgown off before sponging her down, massaging her legs, and slipping a clean gown over her head. I’d written out how to do all this in explicit detail for Susan, but I was worried something would go wrong. Joyce might die, and even though I knew this was inevitable, knew that soon enough she’d be gone, I wasn’t ready for it and couldn’t accept it. And now I was here, thousands of miles away and out of touch. I wanted to be there, to take care of her, to sit up in bed when I heard her sighing in pain, or just shifting her hips. I was alert in a way I haven’t been since Susan was born and for the first few weeks had been able to sleep only nestled between us. All that time I slept thinly, always aware of her delicate body on the mattress. Instead of thrashing around in the sheets as I usually did, I was suddenly calm and careful, and it was how I felt taking care of Joyce, the slight weight of her body as I cradled her in my arms, l
ifted her up easily, and set her down in the soft seat of her wheelchair. But what was I supposed to do when the man who might’ve been Steve called? If I’d refused to come down here, they’d have fired me, had nearly already done so because of my “personal conflicts” that were “hindering my accountability,” and if that happened we’d be left without health insurance.
Distracted by these thoughts, I didn’t notice the two men join Billy and Allie. The men looked about the same age as the Americans but were of a whole other world. Both men had cowboy hats tipped down over their narrow faces. I’d seen men like this all over the world, charming enough on the surface, but an inch down they were criminals. I could tell from the way they sat in their chairs that beneath their shirts were knives, or guns. The two men laughed, stood up, and gestured to the Americans. Allie and Billy complied. They knocked at a door on the back wall, which opened a crack, then let them in.
By the time I fumbled up out of my seat and across the room, the door was closed. The nearest prostitute grinned at me, tugging down the neck of her blouse.
I knocked and waited. While I did, I reached into my jacket and lifted the gun half an inch out of the holster, let it fall back. In my other hand I gripped my briefcase, full of financial papers and spreadsheets and my laptop computer. When no one answered my knocks, I turned to the bartender, who avoided looking at me. “Abierto la puerta,” I said. The bartender smiled at me, then nodded and stepped around the bar and unlocked the door.
“Dancing,” he said, speaking Spanish slowly, as if I were a child. “Good dancing.”
A steep flight of stairs led down into a room that pulsed with blue light and a dense, throbbing music. The stairwell was smothered with water-sodden posters—political ads, deodorant advertisements, and what looked like rock bands, men and women studded with piercings, sticking their tongues out and flicking off the camera as they danced atop blood-red letters that had blistered and burst apart. The door above was slammed, a lock thrown.
