A man with a round forehead, thinning black hair, and wire-rimmed glasses hosts the evening. I assume it’s evening because it seems appropriate that coups are planned after the clandestine setting of the sun. This I know: the host’s father is the owner of the Bolivian newspaper, Los Tiempos. And another son, the brother of the owner of our house, is also in attendance.
This I envision: these newspaper men and high-ranking military officers sit in the living room, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer from the local brewery.
Fact: Cerveceria Taquiña was built by Nazis who had disappeared to Bolivia after World War II.
The room, usually well lit, has the linen curtains drawn and feels stone-cold without a fire in the fireplace, the fireplace with the alabaster ship sculpture. The men don’t notice the chill in the room. Entranced by their own conversation and heated by the occasional strategizing arguments and decision-making, their blood runs warm.
Fact: at least one man in the room will be exiled from Bolivia and especially this living room. One man is to become president of Bolivia, though only for two days.
The men don’t lean back comfortably in the brown-and-gold velvet-upholstered furniture. Instead, they sit precariously on the edge of the cushions, talking with their hands, waving their cigarettes and planning a revolution of the people.
Fact: just three years earlier almost to the date, the host’s brother was one of the four journalists to travel to Vallegrande in the jungle to identify Che Guevara’s body. “He looked alive in death,” he said.
This leads me to believe the U.S. government was in contact with the men who owned our house. This is my one clue.
Fact: Miranda, the designated leader, the present government’s commander of the army, would lead the military to revolt on October 5, 1970.
Four years later, on August 9, 1974, my family sat in the same living room, as my father laced the room with cap wire. When his task was completed, the wire ran from every corner and upper crevice toward the encyclopedia-sized radio on the coffee table. The wire spanned the room like copper spider webbing.
My dad noticed me standing in the doorway and told me to come in. “We are going to listen to a radio broadcast from the States.” I had noticed the leather-bound shortwave radio we have owned for most of our overseas life.
The United States and what it had to do with me was so far away now; it was not just another hemisphere away, but another world.
My father turned the knobs on the radio; the whirring and buzz of the shortwave reception picked up voices way off in the distance, and then slowly they came in closer and closer.
“What are we listening to?” I asked.
“Shh,” my dad said with his ear to the radio speaker, straining to hear the garbled words that gradually became clearer.
The man on the radio was talking about war and about peace and about future generations. All three of us leaned forward to listen, to hear every word. I thought I heard a wobble in his voice, as though he choked up a bit. Yes, I remember this, a hesitation in his voice, in his speech, in his well wishes to our nation. Their nation. Mine?
When the speech ended, when my father began rolling up the cap wire and chucking the tools into the tool box, and my mother left the room to check on what Lucia had planned for dinner, I sat cross-legged on the alpaca rug under the cross-hatching of dynamite wire. I was only ten, but when I heard Nixon’s quavering voice, the shame and embarrassment in his speech, a grown man like my father, being shamed, it didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t even really know what he had done except that he had lied.
Under my hands I felt the softness of the alpaca fur. The marble of the fireless fireplace made the room cold, as did my mother’s empty little blue velvet chair. My chest heaved, and my body trembled so noisily my dad noticed. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
This man on the radio who I had never heard of before, he talked about his intentions and how this Congress, which I had also never heard of before, would keep him from doing what he needed to do for the nation. He had tried, but was stifled. I heard it. He sounded so sad. So weary. “I’m sad for him.” I pointed to the radio.
“Nixon?” My dad said, sounding satisfied. “He’s a liar and a crook. Just another ousted leader.”
A spiral of smoke twirled from my father’s forgotten cigarette sitting in the ashtray on the coffee table.
I didn’t cry for Nixon, I cried because the voice on the radio, Voice of America, sounded betrayed. America had been betrayed. The people. The country. The coups were so common in Bolivia that we often had to take detours to get home. Who was right and who was wrong? Who were the betrayers? Did grown-ups even know?
Fact: It took two days to plan, but those who started the coup d’etat in October 1970 were defeated in less than forty-eight hours. Another party that wasn’t even planning a coup, but jumped at the opportunity, took over the government instead.
As TIME magazine reported, “Even for Bolivia [this coup] was high comic opera.”
This is where my imagination and my memory have collided. Or maybe my memory has slipped, or my parents’ stories have crashed into my memories.
My parents’ fancy dinner parties. Daiquiris were served by the gallons. Crudités pushed on trays. I wish I could tell you the album The Butcher put on the record player when my dad spoke to him. I surmise from what I do know about my parents and their frequent parties at our house and at other friends’ that the music had to have been Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” or Tom Jones singing “What’s New Pussycat?” Whoa ah whoa ah . . . I can still sing it.
When I think about my whole childhood and where we lived, I can pinpoint a drug enforcement reason we lived there. To me, my suspicions are becoming truth. I tell these stories to my friends, the same ones my dad tells, my own stories as well. I count the reasons, the proof on my fingers. I want it all to be true—for the sake of story.
I don’t know anymore if this next part is a memory or if it has been told to me so many times that it is now my memory. I don’t think I was there because Burt Bacharach is not playing on the record player, and Tom Jones isn’t singing “What’s New Pussycat?” It was not the kind of party where nine-year-olds danced. This time it’s a sit-down dinner party. I’m not sure if we were in Peru or Bolivia. It must have been Bolivia because of the ending, which I know is my own real memory.
Everyone sits seriously at a long dining room table, dinner has moved into dessert. If I had to guess, I would say VSOP cognac had been served in the fat glasses I loved to look at in the cabinet, where all the fancy dishes sat waiting for the next entertaining event. Or maybe it was the thick, dark green crème de menthe in the thin glasses. On their saucers are the tiny black paper slips that hold After Eight dinner mints. This evening’s dinner guests are an interesting mixture of young and old. The helicopter pilots, who work for my dad, have been invited. They wear black leather bomber jackets instead of the sport coats and turtlenecks the older men, like my dad, wear. The helicopter pilots are Vietnam Vets. My dad hires them to transport him and his seismograph equipment around the dense Amazon jungle. Carving a road would take months. The jungle vegetation grows so fast that the task is Sisyphean since when you reach the end, the beginning has already grown over and covered its tracks.
These young American men have one superb skill, and it brings them to South America: flying choppers. The helicopter pilots know their way around the jungle like no one else. They bring young American wives with them to South America. One is my fourth-grade teacher. The wives have not been invited to the dinner party.
The doorbell rings while dinner is still underway. There’s a shuffling, and conversation is silenced in the dining room. Then the loud screech as chairs are scooted out, and everyone is trying to stand. The pilots are escorted out. The men at the door—Americans wearing dark suits. The pilots, so good at their jobs, jungle flight, that they have been moonlighting for the drug cartels. Tonight they have been busted.
> My teacher, Mrs. Estes, is not at school the next day. When my friend Marianne and I go to her house to visit her, as we sometimes did after school, her boxer growls at us through the gate. She tames him and lets us in. Her red-rimmed eyes tell us she’s been crying. She says that she is home alone, her husband is out of town, so she has let the dog off the roof to keep her company. She tells us she has to go back to the States. When we ask why, she looks the other way and says she just does. “No, don’t go,” we say, “you’re our favorite teacher.”
We have a substitute the rest of the school year.
The Chicken-Wire Menagerie
People are not so dreadful once you get to know them.
—Jim O’Connor in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie
Marty had barely walked in the door from the airport when I pulled him by the arm, guiding him outside to show him my menagerie. He already knew Pretty Bird, of course. But he’d never met the other two birds. Dad had brought home two more parrots from the jungle.
“I haven’t come up with their names yet,” I said. “They are kind of mean to Pretty Bird.”
When he saw the identical brothers flapping around the cage, he said, “How about the Flying Karamazov Brothers?” I had no idea he was suggesting the name of a popular juggling comedy troupe. Little did I know that the brothers didn’t have a funny quill between them and would prove to be more like Dostoyevsky’s brothers of the same name.
“How do you say it again?” I asked. I had to practice “Karamazov” a few times until I got it right.
Then I took Marty by the hand and pulled him to the back of the house where the rabbit cage sat. We had to hurry. The sky had metamorphosed into the deep purple that leads to black night. Once the sun set at eight thousand feet above sea level, no matter how warm the sun had been, the air turned icy.
The cage sat on the pathway between Lucia’s quarters and the brick back wall of our house. I lifted the plywood door on top. The glow from Lucia’s porch lamp shed shadowed white light on the cage. I couldn’t see their faces well, but both rabbits lay on their sides dead still. “They must be sleeping,” I said. I scooped up Charlie with my hands, and he dangled limply.
“Nah,” Marty said, his head shaking. “I don’t think they sleep with their eyes open.”
The yellow bulb behind us revealed Charlie’s blue eyes.
“Here, hold Charlie.” I thought he’d wake up when Marty held him. That he’d be as excited to see my brother as I was. I then tried picking up Blanki, and she had the same slinky effect. Her ruby eyes just stared.
“I don’t think they’re sleeping,” Marty said again. He sounded serious, and I knew I couldn’t look at him because I didn’t want to know what his face would tell me. My ribs tightened.
“Maybe they are just sick,” I said. “Why else wouldn’t they move? They love getting out of their cage.” Don’t we all want to stay in bed when we don’t feel well? I reasoned. Besides, it was dark, maybe we couldn’t really see. I wanted them to hop around, back legs tilting them forward into a bounce.
Marty laid Charlie back down gently on the chicken-wire cage bottom. A pile of tiny black pellets had climbed up through one corner of the wire, and I thought about how negligent I was at cleaning their cage. Maybe whatever was making them sick wouldn’t have happened if I’d taken better care.
“I’m sorry, Amy,” Marty said. He put one hand on the top of my head, as he always did, and mussed my hair.
I stared at Charlie and Blanki, lying on their sides, side-by-side. Blanki’s scary red eyes stared back at me. Maybe, I thought, I’ll close the cage lid, go away, then come back in the morning, and they’ll be hopping around, their little toe pads getting caught in the wire bottom of the cage. I was frozen. Time needed to reverse. This couldn’t be true. My rabbits could not be dead.
“Come on, Amy,” Marty said. “Let’s go back inside. It’s getting chilly.”
I just stared. Everything I had ever dreaded—the stillness, the silence, the separation—lay limp across the chicken wire. My heart beat so loud, I knew Marty must be able to hear it.
The next day I was home alone. Marty had gone on an errand, Dad was at work, and I didn’t know where Mom was.
I created the graveyard at the back of the house.
Just past the rabbit cage was Lucia’s maid’s quarters. I usually never went back there, especially since she sometimes left her bathroom door open, and I could see inside to the most frightening showerhead. My father explained to me that the electrical wires spiraling out of it heated the water. An electric showerhead. All I could think of was how water and electricity did not mix. It only made me think that someday Lucia would be electrocuted.
The rabbits had come from la cancha, where we bought everything from firewood to chicken necks. I put Blanki in Mom’s white Thom McAn shoebox, and Charlie’s coffin was Dad’s Hush Puppies box with the gold trim. Charlie, the larger rabbit, didn’t quite fit, and I had to squeeze him into the box. The shoeboxes felt leaden in my hands. I neatly arranged round river rocks I collected from the yard, rows of rocks the size of a baby’s fist across the top of each grave. I had plans to paint their names on bigger flatter rocks as headstones, but I hadn’t found the appropriate stones yet.
I crouched next to their graves and waited. I felt something should happen. Something would rip through my rib cage. Something would crawl out of my ears. Something would move somewhere it shouldn’t. Because nothing felt right, nothing inside or outside. Everything was wrong. I watched the stones, each placed neatly, purposefully. I watched as though they’d rise with a small breath.
But nothing moved. This, I thought, this was death. Just as I had imagined it so many times before. Complete stillness. Complete quiet. Completely alone. I thought of my bunnies, how limp their bodies had been, how they looked so sad, so helpless. That’s what death was—being alone forever.
I was done by lunchtime, and Marty had returned.
Every day at lunch Lucia served homemade soup. It was a Bolivian tradition to have soup for the midday meal. Sometimes we had chicken and vegetable, sometimes she’d used the leftover meat from dinner, and sometimes she’d make pumpkin soup, Mom’s favorite. Dad would come home from the office, and we’d all sit at the table together.
Today it was just Marty and me.
“How do you say, where can I find a duck that’s not dead?” he asked me.
He was always asking me to say crazy things in Spanish.
When I told him, he said, “That’s what I thought. I took the bus to the market,” he said. He’d gone stall to stall asking, Donde esta un pato que no es muerto? “I wanted to bring you a new pet.”
I pictured the stone-covered graves I’d made. I thought of Blanki and Charlie alone forever. But Marty and the ducks took some of that away. He was trying to make me laugh, as he always did.
I am sure the only ducks he came across in his search were plucked, their orange feet strung up on clotheslines next to a side of beef, pig’s head, and slab of bacon. All covered in flies at la cancha.
“You still have the parrots,” Marty consoled me.
“The Kama-ra. The Brothers are not very nice though,” I said.
When my dad had brought home two more parrots from the jungle, Pretty Bird was not pleased. Suddenly he had to share his cage the size of a washing machine with two brothers with brilliant underwater green foliage and orange down around their beaks. The new brothers acted entitled and rather ferocious.
“They are from the same nest,” my dad said, as though this would explain everything about them—their cliquishness, their matching outfits, their angry dispositions.
I thought the tension would die down, that eventually they would all get along. I could tell Pretty Bird’s feelings were hurt. Hadn’t he been mine first? I took him out of the cage as often as I could. I reached in the cage, forefinger outstretched. He loved having his chest rubbed. He nodded his head up and down and opened his beak wide like a yawn, wiggling his
round tongue, as I stroked the feathers under his chin. He picked up one foot and shook it. Nudged me with his beak. Then he climbed onto my finger. Crawling up my arm to my shoulder, he nudged me with the rounded top of his hooked beak, a kiss. It was our dance.
When I reached inside the chicken-wire enclosure to take out the two brothers, they scooted up close to one another, squawking at me. I put my hand close, and they pecked and batted me with their wings. So I left the cage door open and let them wander out on their own. They ganged up together, so Pretty Bird and I learned to ignore them.
At the end of every day like this, I reluctantly put Pretty Bird back in the cage because he’d have to cower in a corner until I came to check on him. We never should have made them share a cage.
“They’re from the same nest,” my dad kept saying.
Lucia set a bowl of steaming soup in front of Marty.
“Karamazov Brothers,” he said, “Maybe they’ll come around. Pretty Bird was shy at first.”
She set a bowl in front of me, along with a basket of marraquetas, the hard crusty bread I loved.
“But these birds are different,” I told Marty. “Daddy says they are from the same nest.” I didn’t know what that meant, but as my dad used it as an excuse, I did too.
“Pretty Bird is a good guy,” he said. “You gotta stick by the ones that stick by you.”
I stirred the thin broth and tried to decipher the flavor. A few carrot pieces floated to the top. Some spinach wrapped itself around my spoon, and then a gray stringy lump bumped against the ladle of my spoon. Though reminiscent of my soup at school, this bowl did not contain any chicken feet.
Marty lifted his head from his bowl of soup. His spoon had hit against something odd as well. “What kind of soup is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, pushing the gray blob against the side of the bowl and on to my spoon’s ladle. “It looks like a thumb tip.”
When We Were Ghouls Page 24
