1. Momostenago, Guatemala (continued)

9:20

and howled at my father to leave, and Fernanda said to leave, to leave.

They became one person suddenly to my father. One vile, crazy person who had been threatening his life for so long, for hours, for months. And he was sick and tired.

He nodded, curt, and did just as they said.

He shut the door behind him. In the clean spaciousness of outdoors, he balked and almost went down on his knees. Behind him, he heard Fernanda’s voice again, raised in mockery. He took a few steps around the corner of the house, where he’d see Caceres coming before Caceres could see him. Then he leaned against the clapboard siding and gave himself a short breather.

Some yards away, by a slanting thatched hut, he saw the children. They were pulling up grass to feed to a skinny tethered donkey. The donkey curled his lip daintily, craned his neck to nip at their offerings. The girl coached her brother, pointing out rich tufts of weed.

Then she peeked over her shoulder at my father. He grinned by force of habit, that was what he did with children. She beamed, flattered, and stretched her handful of grass out toward him. He mimed putting something to his mouth and munching it down. He rubbed his belly to show how tasty.

The little girl waved her arm and laughed, delighted. She stretched the grass out, insistently, again.

My father thought suddenly, miserably, of psittacosis. Only young children and the elderly at risk of death.

He had half a mind to grab her, spirit her away and put her in some boarding school. He who saves one life, saves the whole world. Who said that?

As he slumped against the house, staring at the child who had now gone shy and turned her neat back, he delved into the fantasy. How he would get her back to the city; the reaction of his superiors; the reaction of his wife. And untying the girl from that brother, his loving-kindness didn’t stretch to the weird boy.

But then the child wouldn’t want to leave. He could picture her carrying on, shrieking, breathless with tears, arms stretched out to her ogling brother. That would bring Victor and all the demons of hell down on his head. And Mama none too pleased. What that writer didn’t take into account, whoever he was. Most times, you couldn’t save just one life. They all stuck together in impossible bundles.

Then he heard low voices and the unmistakable sound of bedsprings, and realized he was leaning right beside the bedroom window. He glanced back in a kind of real Baptist boy’s disgust, and almost laughed when he saw a tidy red shutter. That must be his cue to go. If Victor had time for that, John Moffat sure as heck did not.

With a last look back at the little girl he wasn’t going to save, he started walking briskly, back the way he had come.

Soon mosquitoes covered his face and arms. He began to jog, dashing them with his palms, reckoning how far away he’d get in forty minutes. More Victor he was fleeing than the damn disease, a big guy like him would hardly –

the shots began. By force of Vietnam habit, he dashed for cover, running and clinging to a tree. Then he knew his foolishness. When the next shot came, he heard shattering glass, and pictured in a flash the little girl flung into the dirt, her blood.

And he cringed in frantic unhappiness, knowing what he was going to do.

And he was going to save one life, and he was going to be too late, and there was something anomalous in the way he ran, easily as if there was no emergency. There was the village again, the huts that now seemed familiar: the weird clapboard house. The donkey alone, rolling wild eyes and fighting his tether.

He spotted the little girl right off, crouched beneath that bedroom window. Her brother was lying beside her, in the loose, expressive posture of a fainting woman. Both glittered with broken glass.

John stopped running and came up stealthily.

Just as he came back to where he’d slumped before, watching that bedroom window like a hawk:

The lights came on in the house, blindingly. All the lights in the house. My father staggered, reaching out.

In the window, Victor Caceres was neatly framed. He was stripped to the waist, and he had his trousers down to his knees, fucking Fernanda.

Dead, the woman was again calm. My father was standing so close, he could see the vermilion stain on her temple, and the dark puncture in her shirt where the bullet had gone in. Against the jolly orange walls, the dribbles of blood looked drab. My father crouched down and untied the rope from my wrist.

I bore it patiently, staring at my dead brother. When my father picked a shard of glass from my cheek, I kept still, solemnly watching his big hand. He whispered, although he knew I wouldn’t understand, but he couldn’t think of any Spanish, and he just thought a quiet voice would calm me:

“You wanna come along with me?”

I put my arms up to be lifted. He carried me away.

Mosquitoes covered his face and arms. Carrying me, he couldn’t brush them away and he couldn’t run. When he heard the jeeps, he was still within sight of that awful electric light.

He staggered out of the road. Of course there wasn’t a bush any higher than his knee here, he finally just slid to the ground and lay flat. He mashed me down flat beside him, crooning no tengo miedo, hija, no tengo miedo because he couldn’t remember the right words.

The nightmare got worse. He had a long time to reflect, and all he could think was, how awful this night was. He kept stroking my head, more to comfort himself.

There was rifle fire. There were screams that just went on. After a while, he could swear it was just repeating itself, it was a broken record playing the same horror noises over and over. They’re killing them all, he thought. He knew he should wonder why, but he didn’t, he just had to go and stop them, stop it, and he couldn’t do a damn thing. Too many guns.

Finally there were only men’s voices, distant and inconsequential. An engine started up, then another. He tried to count the jeeps as they passed. The last was the different, genteel drone of the Mercedes. That made John raise his head, incredulous that any man could survive what Victor Caceres had done.

Then he lay with his ear against his watch for a long time, listening to it tick.

“Well, kid,” he said at last. “Let’s just try our best to get out of here.”

And he’d just got to his feet, and got me to my feet, when he heard the planes.

He stood there yelling, “That tears it! Goddamn it! Goddamn it!”

I started crying for the first time, staring at the angry man. He had to calm himself and crouch down to me, mumbling some kind of comforting nonsense. He had to get me to come into his lap, and hold me still while he opened his shirt and pulled it over my face as if that would protect me.

Of course they flew with no lights. There was nothing to see. Still he looked up, and for a moment mistook the Milky Way, powdery and bright, unencumbered by the lights of cities, for a luminous spray of germs.

He smelled germs, he tasted them salty in the back of his throat. That shirt was no use. No use. You just had to try. No use. His mind gave up and he began to sing, under his breath:

one little, two little, three little Indians,

four little, five little, six little Indians,

seven little, eight little, nine little Indians,

ten little Indian boys.

one little two little three

He couldn’t remember the verses, he just sang the refrain over and over as the planes groaned and banked and finally vanished like everything else. I was squirming and he had to use his strength on me. Getting to his feet like that, with the kid fighting him all the way, it would have been funny any other time. That night it was the unfunniest thing that ever probably happened.

Then the walk ahead of him.

He walked and walked. I struggled and butted my head at the constraining shirt. The mosquitoes came and went, his face grew stiff. He let one leg kick at the bushes as he walked, making noise to ward off the jungle predators.

After a while I had fallen asleep.

A while after that he tugged the shirt away from my face, cautious as if taking off a bandage. He rested then, and stared at my sleeping baby features in the moonlight. When the mosquitoes settled on my cheeks, he flapped at them carefully, his mouth forming the word shoo. I turned in my sleep, reaching out, my hand clutching in the air, and he gave me his fingers to grasp. I pulled them to my chin, greedily, and eased.

He was near to tears as he’d ever been, then. He tried to think, what if it was his own son, but he hardly knew his son. That moment, the little girl in his arms was the only person in the world. The one life.