Jessica dated the Colegio Anne Hunt’s golden boy, stocky, blond, beachboy-faced Arturo Lange, Vinicio’s younger brother. They were a very public couple, seemingly chaste, frigidly superior when they were together, invited to every party. But what mysterious nuttiness they must have been brewing in private! Because after their graduation they scandalized the universe by forgoing college abroad—Jessica, who’d graduated number one from her Anne Hunt class, had been accepted to Cambridge in England—to get married and move to Quezaltenango, the highland city, to teach in a Montessori school for poor Indian kids that some bohemian couple from Italy had founded. But it was the worst possible year to suddenly start dabbling in having a social conscience, 1980, and two of the Montessori faculty members were disappeared within days of each other, and it was also the year that Jessica’s father was kidnapped—by guerrillas or by profiteers, often off-duty cops posing as guerrillas, you could never be sure—and killed, supposedly after the two-million-dollar ransom had been paid. Scobie Hunt’s body was found tied to the hood of a car that had been dumped in Lake Atitlán. Jessica and Arturo’s marriage dissolved. Arturo joined the Hare Krishnas, who had a handful of members in Guatemala then, though he is said to be the last still practicing—he owns a Hare Krishna vegetarian restaurant in Panajachel, his head shorn but for a shaving brush of golden hair protruding from the back of his skull. Catty still sees him sometimes, when he comes into the capital to do his banking. Jessica went to Italy to become an Opus Dei numerary, and Catty has heard that she never even leaves the grounds of her convent and sleeps on the floor at night without even sheets or a blanket.
All of this, of course, is said to have shaken Anne Hunt badly. But she still has three sons, and loads of money, and, of course, her school.
It really wasn’t always unbearable there: a shimmering rain falling, the breeze bouncing the geraniums hung in pots from the eaves of the covered passageway outside the Colegio Anne Hunt classrooms, which were like fancy horse stalls, each room with a wide, paneless window facing a lushly overgrown courtyard. The passageway walls were hung with framed photographs of Anne Hunt girls who had triumphed in beauty contests: several Miss Lions Clubs, Miss Club Montana, a Coffee Queen, one runner-up Miss Guatemala. It was always the rainy season. You smelled soaked earth, bark and leaves, the morning sweetness of engorged blossoms. Moya and I sat in the back together, I with a comic book or sports magazine hidden in my notebook, Moya muttering and sighing in ever quickening impatience over the idiotic proceedings of each class. You didn’t have to worry about being called on because whenever you were it was the adamantly macho thing to just shrug, flap your hand in a laconic gesture of dismissal, chuckle maybe, and not say anything. If the homework was to memorize a poem, even Moya would pretend he hadn’t, while girl after girl would rise to recite in prettily piping monotones.
Then outside Moya and I would be walking to the bus stop, and suddenly he’d stop and fix me with a significant look, one finger over his lips, and then he’d fling that finger skyward and lower it slowly as the day’s poem flowed dramatically from his lips. His voice had a mannish timbre even back then, his poetry recitals propelled by an unnervingly passionate tone of gypsy lament that was only occasionally apt to the words he was speaking:
Quiero, a la sombra de un ala,
contar este cuento en flor:
La niña de Guatemala,
la que se murió de amor . . .
(But when the poem was something like Darío’s “Y dijo la paloma Yo soy feliz! ...” adolescent girls chanting like kindergartners about the happy pigeon was apter.) When he was finished he’d stiffen, his closed lips twitching a little as the emotion drained. I’d wait in embarrassed silence to move on. He wasn’t the kind of kid I was used to hanging around with.
Our ephemeral friendship was based on encouraging each other’s dislike of nearly everybody and everything at Anne Hunt, assuring each other of our own indistinct superiority while conceding none of our failings, and walking to the bus stop together. Back then the school was in quiet, upscale, mainly residential Zona 9. (Now it’s located atop a walled-in grassy hill near Colonia Miraflores and the golf course, a glassy, modern complex; widowed Anne Hunt had her new house built there too, with an indoor pool and a temperature-controlled greenhouse enclosing an oversized sponge of highland cloud forest where she grows orchids.) I was living with my mother and grandparents in Zona 1, the same house I’m living in now, and Moya lived farther out, at the far end of Zona 6 in a barrio called La Pedrera for the cement factory there. And though for lunch and the siesta hours I usually went to my cousins’ house, walking distance from the school, Moya and I always took the bus together after the evening sessions.
But we’d never even invited each other home. And I don’t think I’d ever mentioned him in front of my mother; I stubbornly wanted her to believe that I had no friends at all at Anne Hunt. We were both fourteen, and I didn’t know it yet, but this would be my final summer at that school. The next three I’d spend in a mandatory Namoset public schools’ program for underachievers, going on all manner of field trips or being taught to cook vegetarian lasagna in the home ec room of our otherwise deserted high school, anything to distract us and catch us off guard while grad student hippie psychologists snuck around conspiring to trick us into soul-baring conversations about parents, drugs, and why we hadn’t tried hard during the school year since “Gee, you’re doing a great job with that lasagna, Roger. Don’t you find it kind of rewarding?”
That year Moya’s father had temporarily retired from the sea, or else he wasn’t being hired anymore, I don’t know which. He’d taken a job as a waiter in a seafood restaurant and had dragged Moya into part-time work as a dishwasher there. Also, Moya claimed to have found a girlfriend, Maritza, from his barrio, older, a whole year older than him. Suddenly, at fourteen, Moya had brand-new records to drop the needle of his garrulity down on—a more complicated life was erupting all around him, turning him into a hilariously deadpan raver. The kid was all over the place! He was confused, aghast, furious, over his father’s return after so many years: that diminutive and wiry sea dog had stormed the tranquillity of Moya’s upbringing in a maternally doting seamstress’s house like some raging, impulsive giant. Now Moya was spending some twenty-five gruesome hours a week gagging over a sink full of lukewarm soapy water and fish offal, risking hepatitis, he was sure, every time he plunged his hands in, waiting in chronic anguish for his eyeballs to turn yellow. Now he was head over heels for some pretty patoja who was driving him up a wall mainly because he hardly ever got to see her: she went to a public school, had her own group of friends, she was a coqueta, a flirt—one of those brown and shiny-eyed, notebook-clutching girls in school uniforms, black shoes, and droopy white socks you saw moving in packs with symmetrical steps down La Sexta in the afternoons, crowding into booths at McDonald’s to giggle over the boys and their nervously boastful come-ons. He really was in a torment of disbelief over her liking him, and often she acted as if she didn’t anyway:
“Ay no. Pero qué bárbaro! Qué noche de la gran puta, vos . . . !” raved Moya on our way to the bus stop, his widened eyes aimed straight ahead, his lower lip drooping in monkey-faced stupor over this latest humiliation. It was a Monday, and over the weekend Maritza had invited him to another girl’s quinceañera, her sweet fifteen party. Saturday Moya had washed dishes well into the evening and then, hanging around waiting for his father to show up for his waiter’s shift, had descended into a furious foreboding. When he finally left it was past nine, and the manager had fired his truant father. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Moya and his father now shared many of the same clothes, and in some ludicrous arrangement of fo’c’sle fairness the old man had dreamt up, the pants were kept in one compartment and the shirts were hung in the other of a single, wooden, stand-up wardrobe, and Moya had been entrusted with the key to the pants, his father with the key to the shirts. When he got home his father was still out, vanished, bingeing somew
here, passed out over a bottle-stacked table in any of the sticky, sewage-fumed little cantinas that in this city are as numerous as crab holes on a jungle beach and that constitute the repository of so many gloomily and furiously sought oblivions. Somewhere out there, in a damp pocket of his drunken father’s pants, lay the stolen key to happiness. Moya’s shirt was marshy with the stench of sweat and fish, and there wasn’t another clean, dry one to be had in the house. For a frantic moment he even considered taking a machete to the locked shirt door . . .
“Puchiiiis,” growled, whined Moya, lifting his gaze to the dark, clouded-over sky. “I shouldn’t have gone, vos, should have faked a flu or I don’t know, what an idiot I am, I just didn’t think, vos, I was in such a rush. I change my pants my socks my underwear and I go to the party, where Maritza is waiting, waiting for me, vos, a party in a rented hall, vos, everyone dressed in their best and dancing close, vos, and my shirt stinks worse than low tide in Champerico, vos. Maritza looks at me like I’m the walking dead, vos, and says only one word—cochino! (pig!). And then, there she goes! Right over to Hipólito Mercado, vos, she spends the night dancing with that cerote, that little piece of shit, Hipólito, vos. Pero mierda! Puta! Qué pendejada, vos!”
My notebook had fallen to the sidewalk, and I was slumped against a wall, laughing. Moya watched me with a befuddled expression for a moment, which made me laugh even harder, and then, suddenly, he grinned.
“You could have phoned me, man,” I gasped. “I would have lent you a shirt!”
“We don’t have a phone,” he shouted gleefully.
“What happened when your father came home?”
“He hasn’t yet. Maybe I’ll get fired too!”
“Well, that’d be good. Wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, starving to death will be a good way to forget that . . . ayyy no, Maritza, vos. Would you really have lent me a shirt?”
“Claw.” Of course.
“Qué amigazo! What a great friend!”
That evening in Zona 9, where there are trees, as opposed to Zona 1, where only the sad little parks have them, the cool, blue-green air was full of the jungle chatter of grackles. Tall pines, cypresses, eucalyptuses, and all kinds of other not as ubiquitous trees rose up from behind the long, high walls wealthier people live behind, and others grew along the streets, their roots buckling the sidewalks and their bowering limbs shedding a constant confetti of pine needles, petals, and leaves. The tops of the walls were strung with barbed wire, inlaid with bristling rows of jaggedly broken bottle and window glass that glimmered with furtive light from the houses inside, or even with moonlight when the sky was clear. Sometimes you’d hear a chain dragged along the top of any flat-roofed garage, and, looking up, see a straining watchdog’s glowing eyes through overhanging branches, hear its low, mesmerized growl. Or dogs would erupt into crazed barking and even fling themselves against resounding, sheet-metaled gates as Moya and I hurried past. (Nowadays people are even more security conscious, and sophisticated electronic alarm and surveillance systems have replaced, or complement, watchdogs, who have proven all too vulnerable to intruders armed with silencer-accessoried weapons or even a deftly wielded machete or knife—the late Blacky and Brownie, Uncle Jorge’s two machete-decapitated Dobermans, being a case in point, though all those burglars made off with was a big, ancient Maya urn hoisted from the garden.) So it was always a bit unnerving, walking down those walled streets at night, even when “safety”—not that we were specifically scared of anything but the dogs—was just a few blocks farther on: marked against the sky by the beacon-capped spire of La Torre, the imitation Eiffel Tower spanning the busy commercial avenue where the fume-spewing buses ran.
I’d picked up my notebook, and Moya and I were walking along, flush with amigazo good feeling. What happened next happened spontaneously; I’d certainly never thought of trying it before. On our way to the bus stop we always passed this one odd house that had nothing more than a rusted, vine-braided chicken-wire fence, about eight feet high, running around it, and inside, in the yard, lived Guatemala’s most demented and overwrought German shepherd. Approaching that property, I’d cringe in anticipation, but the sudden explosion of barking so close by always made me jump out of my skin anyway, and we’d find ourselves speeding up our steps as the dog chased the length of its territory, shadowing us, roaring, crashing its head and forepaws through the tangled tropical shrubbery growing along the inside, making the shabby fence jingle and bend. Moya always said he was sure that dog’s brain was being eaten by pig-shit worms.
“Let’s seal it, Moya,” I said suddenly. “Let’s climb the fence, jump down, and climb out as fast as we can and we’ll be best friends forever!”
“Estás loco, vos.”
“No, Moya. We get in and out so fast the dog doesn’t know who to hit. He thinks he’s seeing double.”
The dog was in a state all right. Moya looked slowly from me to the rabid uproar in the greenery as if following and carefully considering the thread of my logic. When he turned back to me, he was wild eyed.
“It’s a test,” I said. I felt surprised that he seemed to be taking my proposition so seriously, but, seized by the power of my dare and my own onrushing adrenaline, I persisted: “That’s how we do it in the States all the time. It’ll make us like brothers.”
He nodded vigorously and looked at me with such ridiculous emotion that I suddenly felt sad.
“But we have to jump down at the exact same time and then get out as fast as we can,” he said.
“Well I’m getting out as fast I can,” I said.
“Bueno, vos . . .”
He threw his notebook down. I did the same. And before I knew it we were scrambling up the fence, both of us giggling as the dog raised its demented howl several decibels. I reached the top first, a second or two ahead of Moya, clamped my elbows over it, hoisted myself up for the vault, and stared into the spacious, shadow-blackened yard, first at the old Swiss chalet—style house glowing like a fairy-tale cottage back in the trees and then, directly beneath me, at the German shepherd as it took two, three delicate steps backwards, its blazing eyes and head lifted as it let out a throbbing roar through distinctly bared fangs.
Moya was beside me, blinded by the glory of our friends-forever infantry charge.
“When I count to three!”
The more or less assenting sound that came from my throat was a high-pitched, two-syllable chipmunk’s chatter.
“Uno Dos Tres Ya!”
Moya plummeted straight down and landed on his feet amidst cracking branches, stunning the dog into a few seconds’ silence. Against the blackgreen dark, frantically treading his arms through the rain-soaked jungle that came up to his chest, he looked clad in sugary white. I had one leg dangling over the fence, and in that position I’d frozen forever.
The rest of it, all that jumping and thrashing around and the dog howling like it was in a fight to the death, happened quickly. Moya got himself turned around, fell forward, and grabbed the fence, his legs tangled up in the growth and kicking furiously while the dog barked barked barked, dodged forward, stopped, ducked under Moya’s feet, and slithered lightning fast into the bush. Moya looked up at me with the expression of a terrified boy overboard. But he’d managed to free one foot and had it drawn under him, and with all his might he hopped against the fence and slid back down, landing right in front of the dog as it recoiled after its own mistimed, snarling lunge, and then Moya jumped again, hitting the fence so hard he jolted me into realizing what I’d done, but this time he stuck to it.
“Ya!” he yelled in triumph, hanging on. And he started to climb just as the dog, peeled-back snout fangs flashing, rose up again.
Moya screamed, “Yaaaa ...”
And the dog landed on its side, writhing as if netted by the branches, while Moya pulled himself up in a few swift steps of the hands and rolled over the fence in one motion. He hit the sidewalk laterally, with a bag of cement’s thudding slap. Then he lay there with his face in t
he leaves, one hand clutching the bottom of the fence like it was a blanket he wanted to tug over himself. His white sock was bloodstained and pulled down around his heel, which was missing a shoe.
I climbed down, stood over him. My chest was pounding as if it were me who’d been in a fight to the death. Moya sat up slowly, not looking at me. He drew up his knee and groped around his ankle and heel, finding the bloody patch where the dog had managed just a small tear in his skin—
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 5
