Grave of Hummingbirds

by Jennifer Skutelsky

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Jennifer Skutelsky

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503952713

  ISBN-10: 1503952711

  Cover design by Adil Dara

  Illustration by Samantha Neukirch

  For Amber-Mae.

  It all spins around you.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  Deep in the Andean highlands, Gregory Vásquez Moreno prepared himself for the bloody days to come. He met each day with growing reluctance, rising in the morning, weary from long, wide-awake hours in the dark. As Pájaro’s Independence Day approached, dread took hold like a strangler fig, choking its host, the weeks leading up to the fiesta chipping away at a heart that still belonged to Nita.

  Gregory had wanted to escape for good and almost succeeded, when his father sent him to Cuba to study veterinary science. Halfway through his degree he opted for medicine instead and, after his residency, tried to put down roots. He started a practice in Havana, but in the end, Nita wouldn’t let him run from Pájaro. The small, mountainous country, sodden where valleys clung to its rain and glacial sweat that streamed down from the peaks in the dry season, seeped into his bones as relentlessly as he tried to wring it out. So after years of struggle between his need to stay away and Nita’s longing to return, he surrendered, bought some land in the highlands, and took her back.

  Aromatic red cedar and mahogany trees stood at the shores of Lake Ulloa, and they built their house in a natural clearing overlooking the water. Uneven stone and rough-sawn, densely aged oak, recycled from an abandoned warehouse in a crumbling part of the city, supported a terra-cotta roof, and bay windows let in patterned light. The house had the hospitable look of an artist’s recumbent model, laid out in careful dishevelment on a worn velvet sofa.

  In recent years, Pájaro’s government, determined to service the national debt, had begun to subsidize timber and meat exports. Increasing areas of forest were logged. Military and law enforcement, in an attempt to redeem the country’s international image, burned swathes of farmland to curtail the growth of drug crops. On a once uniformly verdant landscape, gray-brown stumps replaced evergreens.

  Nita herself reflected Pájaro’s bitter transformation. Toward the end, the drugs that fought her cancer gave up and turned on her instead. Her scalp began to show through her hair. Gregory cut it shorter and shorter until one evening, after he’d read to her from Pablo Neruda’s Cien sonetos de amor, she’d asked him to shave it off. He complied, then lifted the clippers to his scalp.

  She flailed at his hand before his black curls could join hers on the floor. “No,” she said, dull eyes flaring. “I love your hair. Don’t cut it off.”

  “It’s done, my love.” He quickly mowed a strip across his head. “See? Too late.”

  When clumps of hair lay at their feet, she slouched on the lid of the toilet and stared at the heap of straight, wispy strands overpowered by his curls. He sat on his haunches and butted her gently with his smooth head until she smiled and pretended to take a bite out of it.

  “We’re still here,” he whispered. “Both of us, we’re still here.”

  Now she lay, cradled between two slopes, the first leading down from the side of the house and the second up toward the logging road. Three yew trees, knobbed with age, stooped over her grave. When Gregory visited her, he crushed thyme underfoot and brushed against the silver-gray foliage of absinthe. At the crest of the far slope, he let the grass grow wild because she would have wanted it that way. Some things tame and tended, some free to do as they pleased. When it became too unruly, he brought the horses out to graze.

  Gregory scooped his keys off the kitchen counter, stepped out the back door, and crossed the cobbled courtyard to his clinic. He hadn’t seen a patient in a week, just enough time to brace for the injured and the near dead who would soon stumble across his threshold. Birds called to him from the aviaries that flanked the barn and clinic—some were almost ready to return to the rain forest canopy.

  He slowed when he saw the clinic door standing half-open. A breeze zipped past his ear, and he stilled as the door’s hinges creaked. Someone had broken one of the glass panes near the doorknob.

  Alarmed, Gregory pushed the door and peered inside, then crossed the room to the drug cupboard where he kept barbiturates, benzodiazepines, opiates, and cortisone locked away. The cabinet doors had been forced. As he pulled them toward him they fell forward, hanging off broken struts. His stocks of propofol and morphine were virtually gone. As he searched, he discovered other losses: needles and sutures, syringes and blades.

  Any one of the visitors converging on the nearby village of Colibrí to witness the fiesta might have trespassed on his property. Puzzled, Gregory stooped to pick up the glass from a shelf that had fallen. He knew of no one who’d want to cross him. It had to be a stranger.

  TWO

  Not far from Gregory’s house, a boy and his llama stopped beside the body of an angel. She lay on her back, arms folded across her chest, too tidy to have fallen. Nicotine-yellow ribbons, tied into measured, frayed bows, trimmed the cuffs and neckline of her white cotton dress.

  The boy wore a hooded black jacket and faded jeans streaked with blood. Hands shaking, he lowered his father’s rifle and sat down. Tears ran down his gaunt face as he withdrew the copy of El principito he’d tucked into his pants, where the tattered book nestled in the small of his back. He opened it and traced the words scrawled across the title page: Alberto, you will always be mine.

  For two days he had watched over the angel, reading aloud. He wanted her to wake and fly off, but now he knew that would never happen.

  She was dead, and he was tired of reading.

  The llama, her fleece spattered red, stood trembling on two-toed feet.

  Without warning, a lament welled up in the boy, loud as a moaning wind. He fell over onto his side and cradled himself in his arms, still clutching his book.

  At last, impatient, the animal nudged him.

  High above, two condors flew in tightening circles. The boy had managed to keep them away from the body, but soon they’d descend.

  He would have to let her go.

  He wiped his tears, picked up the rifle, and set off for the village.

  When rock gave way to clumps of wild grasses, he left the llama and hurried to fetch the governor.

  The village of Colibrí clung to the edge of a c
liff like a well-trimmed mustache. Rufo Merida Salazar drove his truck with two men farther up into the mountains. Curiosity spurred him on; the boy was too afraid of him to make up tales of winged corpses in the highlands. The blood on his clothes was enough to convince the governor to take him seriously, although the simpleton swore it belonged to a puma that had stolen a lamb.

  When the paths narrowed and cliffs became treacherous, Rufo parked the truck and led the way to where slabs of jutting rock leveled out. His wheezing men followed, lugging a canvas stretcher.

  The governor spotted her first and stared down at the mass of black feathers that framed her back and bald head. Swallowing a rush of nausea, he stooped and felt for a pulse in her neck. Lifting one shoulder, then the other, he discovered a heavy black-and-white wingspan that rustled and whispered. He could swear he heard a creak and groan, but that had to be the wind.

  Squeamish, the men stood back.

  Felipe, the guard on duty at the village when the boy had descended from the higher slopes, removed his hat. He blotted the top of his head with his sleeve, dislodging several strands of dark hair that he combed across his scalp each morning. “The boy was telling the truth,” he said, clasping the hat to his chest with both hands. “He found an angel. This is a bad sign. Huh, Rufo, what do you think?”

  The governor spat the wad of leaves he’d been chewing. A mix of coca and alcohol had kept a sporadic, gnawing pain in his gut at bay and had given him a sensation of dizzy warmth. Now the cold returned, and with it came a dull headache. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and grunted.

  Keeping his distance, Felipe bent at the waist to get a better look at her. “She’s familiar, no? Can you see? Could it be . . . ?” He retreated from her name.

  They had buried her a year ago. Some of the men who’d stood at her grave on Gregory’s land grieved more than others. At least two of them had openly wept. Maybe others, too, into their beer.

  Rufo cursed and squatted to study the face. He wasn’t a man to believe in ghosts or angels, but now his skepticism teetered. In some untamed, hopeful place in his thwarted heart, she could be Nita.

  “Shot?” Felipe said. “Strangled, maybe?”

  Rufo ignored him.

  This was no angel. The body came from the earth, not the heavens, although someone had done his best to merge the two. There was nothing here but the same gristle, pulp, and sinew the governor could sense beneath his boots. History, growing under his feet.

  As respectful of ritual as the next man, Rufo never allowed it to blind him. Faith and superstition were useful because they suppressed chaos. He knew better than most how to maintain a fine balance between placating the gods of his ancestors and appeasing Father Alfonso’s religious zeal. But truth be told, he was up to his ears in rituals.

  Folds of cloth fell away from ankles too thick to be Nita’s and feet far bigger. The governor noted the body’s wide hips, broad waist, and flat chest.

  Nita had been slender. He used to tease her, called her Bird Bones, even after she filled out. When he and his friends were young and wild as the bulls that grazed in the mountains, she played football with them, the only girl in the village brave enough to take them on. Nimble and fit and unafraid, she was perfect for the game.

  Rufo stood. “This is no one we know.” Could he return to the village as though he’d never been summoned? Leave her to the birds? The governor reached for the dismal prospects he could scarcely perceive with any clarity.

  Call in the heavy-duty police from the city of Búho. Their jurisdiction allowed them to take charge when local law enforcement was out of its depth, and the village police were always drunk this time of year. Joaquin, the officer on duty, had tripped when they found the body. The policeman staggered toward the edge of a steep drop and now braced himself on wide-apart feet and stiff legs to avoid plunging headfirst into the ravine.

  Hysteria rumbled in Rufo’s stocky, knotted frame and burst out of him in a fit of coughing. He recovered to find both men staring at him. His lungs hurt. His brain ached. He wanted to knock their heads together.

  This was as good a time as any to pray. He closed his eyes, but a cackle gurgled in his gut and interfered with his connection to God. Which god, exactly, he couldn’t be sure. He reined in his unruly thoughts, adjusted his belt against the underside of his softening belly, and reassessed his options.

  They could take her down to the village, where news of a bizarre murder would spread quickly, sending fear and panic into the streets, ruining the fiesta. Rufo had sworn the boy to secrecy, but the idiot would talk.

  This was not the work of Libertad a los Campesinos, a communist guerrilla organization that had recently given up on land reform and embraced drug trafficking. With cocaine attracting high prices in international drug markets, the group’s members forced peasant farmers from neighboring villages to grow coca, lining their pockets and financing their half-cocked war.

  But not here. Not in Colibrí. Rufo made sure of that.

  Violent death was not unusual in Pájaro. Now and then corpses did show up, some of them with splintered bones. Missing hands and feet. The intelligence agency flaunted what it couldn’t be bothered to hide. Rufo himself was no stranger to brutality. He was a man to be reckoned with, self-made and fearless. He resolved domestic and community disputes with a firm hand and had never flinched from inflicting pain when necessary. Thanks to him, Colibrí’s cobbles and curbs and thickset stone houses were a far cry from the dust, adobe, and straw of adjacent villages, and once Gregory Vásquez Moreno secured the grants that made the hydropower plants possible, kerosene and diesel became relics from a poorer past.

  “We’ll take her to Gregory,” he said. “Get her onto the stretcher, and let’s go.” She’d become the doctor’s problem, and he and the men would be free to continue their preparations for the fiesta. An obvious solution, it had eluded Rufo at first, only because of the alcohol. When illness or death prevailed in Colibrí, of course the people called on Gregory to deal with it.

  But the men stood motionless, as if their witless gaping could send this omen back into the mist. Too bad. The obvious solution was usually the best, and eventually Rufo tucked one side of the stretcher underneath the body and rolled her over himself.

  Her wings unfolded, elbows and wrists assuming the odd angles of a discarded string puppet.

  Felipe and Joaquin launched into a babble of prayer at the sight of a full eight-foot Andean condor wingspan. Begging forgiveness for the wanton destruction of a messenger to the mountain gods, they continued their muttering long after they’d made the sign of the cross and wrapped the body tight in a blanket for the unsteady descent to Gregory’s house.

  THREE

  Gregory picked up the satellite phone, planning to sidestep Rufo and report the break-in to the police in Búho, Pájaro’s capital city. He dropped the phone and slammed his hip into the corner of his desk when a pounding on the front door shook the house.

  “Ahhhhh!” he groaned. “God, what do you want from me?”

  He pulled the door open, a rebuke at the ready for the violent hammering. His gaze took in three men, among them the governor, and the words died in his throat.

  “Gregory,” Rufo said. “We have something for you.”

  Slowly Felipe and Joaquin moved aside to show Gregory what lay on the cobblestones.

  He stepped forward. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  No one answered. The men sweated in the cool air, Joaquin pale and Felipe rolling his hat into a fisted mess.

  Gregory hurried down the steps that led to the threshold and knelt, sensing death, stagnant and dense. He leaned forward to draw back an edge of the blanket that covered what looked like a body.

  As though scalded, he dropped the cloth and stared at the form. His heartbeat tore through his chest, bouncing against his ribs and pushing him to his feet. For moments he hovered, then doubled over, supporting himself with arms braced against his thighs before he straightened.


  Rufo watched him closely.

  “What is this?” Gregory whispered.

  “You mean who. We don’t know. We found her, not far from here.”

  Again Gregory knelt next to the body and drew back its covering. He stared down at the woman, who was instantly familiar. Wings were attached to her somehow, and the horrific thought struck him that someone had stolen Nita from her grave and returned her to him, grotesquely altered.

  “Do you know her?” Rufo asked.

  Yes, in a violent skirmish of shock and recognition, hope and outrage, yes, he knew her, and no, of course he didn’t. “She’s so like . . .” He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “She’s dead.”

  “We know she’s dead,” Rufo snapped.

  “Where did you find her?”

  “On one of the slopes. Where have you been, Gregory? All morning.” Rufo narrowed his eyes, lowered his voice, and gestured toward the house. “All alone, here? With no one to see you?”

  The quiet implication shifted Gregory’s mind from Nita and brought his attention to the present with a snap. The governor’s suspicion squashed any lingering intent he might have had to bring up the theft at the clinic.

  “You’re accusing me?” Gregory stood. “Of this?”

  The men shifted uneasily, sensing the combative crackle between the governor and the doctor.

  Rufo, who had locked his eyes on Gregory’s, dropped his glare and nodded as though his question had been answered. “We found her just off the logging road. Your job is to find out how she died. It may not even be our problem. She’s not from the village.”

  “Where, exactly?” Gregory insisted. The icy air and rocks would have lowered her temperature and kept her cold. There was no sign of rigor mortis—the temperatures of the higher slopes could have delayed its onset and dissipation. She might have died several days ago.

  “Less than half a mile up, close to the path.” Rufo crossed his arms over his chest. “She was laid out like so. Carefully. It was respectful.”

  “You have to bring in more police.”