“You never finish a painting, you abandon it,” Pamela said to Lisette and Father Tim. “And I’m abandoning this one.”
She looked at them, silently appealing for favorable opinions, which she got. His were the more learned—sounded it, anyway. Lisette could manage only a pathetic “It’s really interesting.”
The painting was one of Pamela’s larger works, three feet square. It stood on an easel in the courtyard, allowing the natural light to show it to best effect, and it was interesting but in the wrong way: “disturbing” described it better. Not a word Lisette would use, wary of upsetting Pamela. The lithium had restored her equilibrium since the episode in Álamos, but the drug wasn’t always up to the task. And she sometimes skipped a dose to give herself a lift. Working furiously to complete the painting, she had become both fragile and explosive, like a hand grenade made of fine bone china. One afternoon, Lisette criticized the placement of a triptych mirror Pamela had hung in their bedroom, above a tall chest of drawers. “I’d have to be six feet six to look into it,” she had said, perhaps too sharply. “Why not here”—she crossed the room—“right here next to the door.” Pamela shattered in an instant. “If that’s where you want it, hang the damn thing there yourself!” she yelled, and she flung the hammer like a tomahawk—not directly at Lisette but close enough to scare her and hard enough to gouge the adobe wall. Remorse followed the outburst almost immediately. “Oh my God!” Pamela cried, flying to Lisette and embracing her. “I didn’t mean to.… I’ve been working too hard.… I am so sorry.… Forgive me.… Please say you’ll forgive me.” Lisette said, “Patch that hole and I will,” but with forgiveness already in her voice. Pamela gave her a devouring kiss. “I will, promise. You’re a darling.” Within ten minutes they were naked and in bed. Like the hillbillies back home, Lisette thought when the lovemaking was over. Fight and fuck.
Now, addressing Father Tim, Pamela said, “Don’t tell me you like it if you don’t. I am open to constructive criticism. You may fire when ready.”
Her hands as she wiped them with turpentine trembled slightly—a lithium side effect.
“I’m saying I like it because I do,” he responded, pitch-perfect. He seemed to sense that she was on edge and not open to any sort of criticism. On the other hand, maybe he had nothing critical to say. “It’s striking, original. The blend of styles—Vincent van Gogh meets Jackson Pollock.”
“Thank you,” she said, giving his arm a light, flirtatious brush, empty of promise. “But I don’t see the van Gogh influence.”
Father Tim riveted her with a gaze as admiring as the one he’d cast on the painting. Even in her work clothes—a faded flannel shirt worn tails out, paint-spattered jeans, a kerchief wound around her head—she looked beautiful. Any blind fool could see he had a crush on her. A platonic crush, Lisette assumed.
“That … that effect in the clouds, that roiled effect,” he said, tracing wavy lines in the air with a finger.
Lisette examined the canvas again, and wondered if he was telling Pamela, diplomatically, that he also found it disturbing. The clouds had the chaotic look of ocean waves crashing into a rocky shore; the random smears and points of color bore no resemblance to what they were supposed to be—desert flowers in bloom; and the greenish thing in the middle, representing a saguaro, looked like a tree in a Gothic fairy tale, its arms bent and twisted. There was a derangement in the scene, a distortion of reality, as if it had been painted through a thick pane of leaded glass.
Pamela lit one of her carefully rationed cigarettes and, with her right arm crooked, its elbow cupped by the palm of her left hand, studied her creation for a moment. “I can’t see what else I can do for it,” she said, then put the cigarette in a coffee saucer and picked up one end of the canvas. Father Tim took the other end, and they carried it into the guest room to dry.
Lisette went to her office, doubting her own perceptions, asking herself, Am I getting a little wacky? Seeing signs of lunacy where there are none? Life with a bipolar person, she’d learned, could upset your own mental balance. After they’d returned from Álamos, she had told herself, “We’ve made a mistake,” and considered ending their affair. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it, dreading the loneliness that would follow. Besides, she was responsible for bringing Pamela to San Patricio. It had been her idea that they try living together. She couldn’t tell her to pack her bags because of one spell of ugly behavior that hadn’t been entirely Pamela’s fault. To an extent, Lisette retained the lessons of her hard-shell Baptist upbringing. What her family’s minister had preached about faith—it was refined in adversity, as gold is in the fire—was also true of love. If her love for this talented, troubled woman was genuine, it would survive the trial of Pamela’s inner demons.
Father Tim appeared in the office doorway and tapped on the door frame. Looking up from her cluttered desk, Lisette waved him in.
“Thanks for stopping by to play art critic,” she said, shuffling through a sheaf of documents.
“Glad to. The work she’s doing in the church is top-notch. I can’t thank her enough. Catching you at a bad time, am I? You look busy.”
“Sort of.” Lisette scanned the papers, then stuffed them into a manila envelope. “We’re off to the States this coming weekend.”
He raised his eyebrows. “The States? Holiday?”
“Hardly. There’s a Mayo girl, Evangelina Morales, going blind in both eyes. We’re flying her to a hospital in Philadelphia for a procedure—a vitrectomy, it’s called. Pam got her father to set it up. He’s on the board of trustees for the Wills Eye Hospital. It’s one of the best on the planet.”
A kind smile broke across Father Tim’s face. “Well, good for both of you. This procedure, it’s for what?”
“Diabetic retinopathy. Hemorrhaging in the eye caused by diabetes, in plain English. Pam and I have to go with her. The kid is only twelve, never been outside her village, much less to Philadelphia, never been in a car, much less an airplane.” She held up the manila envelope. “Admission papers, travel documents, airline tickets, papers for her family to sign authorizing us to take her out of the country. All set up and paid for by Daddy Childress and his fellow board members.”
“Generous of them.”
“Rich people making themselves feel good about themselves. But I’ll take it.”
The statement caused him to flinch. “Y’know, Lisette, you might try to be a little less abrasive.”
“Well, pardon me. This operation isn’t going to do Evangelina Morales any good in the long run if she keeps eating crap. But crap is all her mother can afford.” She rifled through the clutter and picked up a report from the Mexico’s National Foundation for Public Health. “Diabetes: number one cause of death,” she said, rattling the pages. “Every state except next door in Chihuahua.”
He gave her a quizzical look. “They have better diets in Chihuahua?”
“Nope. Over there, murder has replaced diabetes as the number one cause of death. Anyway, Pam and I are going tomorrow to get Evangelina’s family to sign off on the permission papers.”
“So it’s all right with them?” Father Tim asked, a somewhat dubious undertone in his voice. “I’d be surprised if they have any idea where Philadelphia is.”
“Well…” Lisette hesitated, the soft ring of doubt in Father Tim’s voice giving her pause. “I’ve got her mother’s okay. She wants me to do whatever I can. Evangelina’s father is dead, and her mom is illiterate, so her grandfather will have to read and sign the consent forms. I’ve never met him.”
“You said you’re heading there tomorrow. Where is there?”
“San Tomás,” she answered.
“That’s a coincidence,” Father Tim said. “We’re headed to San Tomás day after tomorrow.” He adopted a diffident posture, shoving his hands into his pockets and hunching his shoulders. “But I think we could move it up a day. Would you mind if we caravanned with you?”
“We who?”
“Me, Moises Ortega, César Díaz.”
“César? Risky for him to be going up there. That’s narco country. What for?”
“A civic-improvement project,” Father Tim replied. “Rebuilding a decrepit rope-and-plank bridge that spans the Santa Teresa.”
The municipality had promised to fix it but, as usual, had done nothing; so he had taken up two special collections at Mass to buy materials and tools. César had volunteered to do the repairs.
“Turns out he knows something about bridges. He was in the engineers when he was in the army. I never knew that about him.”
She looked at him skeptically. “What do you know about bridge building?”
“Zero minus nothing. He wants me to come along.”
“Because, with the beloved padre there, there’ll be less likelihood of trouble from the bad guys? From what I know, the bad guys aren’t crazy about you, either.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“And you asked if it’ll be okay to follow me, because the beloved Dr. Moreno would provide a little extra insurance against trouble. Shame, shame,” she scolded in a joking way. “Hiding behind a woman’s skirts.”
“I’m confident there won’t be any trouble.”
“Better not be. Pam will be with me. To meet Evangelina and her mother. If anything happens … Well, I won’t say it.”
* * *
That afternoon, Lisette and Pamela shopped at the supermercado on the Calle Juárez, which was super only in comparison with the shabby tiendas on the edge of town. Lisette was assembling a food parcel for Evangelina and her mother. She filled the cart, which Pamela pushed, with dried beans, bananas, oranges, nixtamal, and whatever else she could find that wasn’t loaded with sugar and trans fats.
“Mother Moreno, Mother Moreno,” Pamela said in a singsong. “Mother Moreno will make her kiddies eat right if it kills her.” She laughed her light and trilling Pamela A laugh, the one Lisette loved to hear; the brittle Pamela B laugh made her grind her teeth.
“I’m looking forward to tomorrow,” Pamela went on as they carried the groceries to Lisette’s Dodge. “We’ll be doing something together, a team. Instead of you doing your thing and me, mine. And I’m eager to see what the Sierra Madre looks like from the inside. There’s a kind of mystery to it.”
Lisette fished the keys out of her purse and climbed into the pickup. Pulled herself in, actually; with her short legs, she needed the handgrip above the door.
“Don’t expect anything picturesque,” she said. “It’s pretty backward.”
“I think I can handle backward,” Pamela said, then leaned over and placed a hand on Lisette’s wrist just as she was about to switch on the ignition. “Thanks for putting up with me the last few weeks.”
“Honey, I’m not putting up with you.” Lisette threw an arm around her. She felt strong and protective. “It’s not like you’re a run of bad luck.”
“Patient, then. Thanks for being patient. I know I’ve been difficult. All I can say for myself is that when one of those spells starts, it’s like I’ve been injected with a drug and I can’t stop it. Matter of fact, I don’t want to stop it, because then it’s a real rush. I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do and that everything I think or say is incredibly brilliant. It’s only later that it gets bad and the fan belt in my brain breaks.”
“Stay on the meds and you’ll be okay. Dr. Lisette’s orders.”
Pamela gave her an affectionate peck on the cheek. At the same moment, as if by design, Paulina Herrera—the woman Father Tim referred to as “the Very Pious Señora Herrera”—emerged from the market, stopped, and stared at them. Lisette pulled away from Pamela’s lips, switched on the ignition, and drove off toward the house.
“What the hell was that all about?” Pamela said, with an injured look.
“Someone saw us. Happens to be a patient of mine, and a gossip.”
“So? We weren’t doing anything.”
“It might not have looked that way to her. I probably overreacted.”
Pamela let out a breath, flapping her lips. “It does get wearing, all this … what’s the word I’m looking for? Restraint. All this pretending. We can’t show any physical affection for each other in our own house when Anna is there. Or the cleaning lady. Conchita or whatever—”
“Consolata.”
“Right. Right. Consolata. No kissing, no touching on the days Consolata comes to mop up. Mess up the bed in the guest room so she doesn’t suspect we sleep together. And God forbid if we’re walking somewhere and I put my arm around you. It wears me out sometimes.”
They circled the plaza, where vans dispensing iced raspados vied for space with police SUVs and army trucks; then they headed up the steep Calle Insurgentes.
“I did tell you, didn’t I, that we’d have to watch ourselves?” Lisette said. “That this town is more Catholic than the Vatican?”
“It’s one thing to hear about it, another thing to live it. Sometimes I feel like I’m back in the day when coming out was what debutantes did.”
Lisette threw her sidelong look. “Did you? Come out as a deb, I mean.”
“Oh, yeah. The Philadelphia Charity Ball. I was seventeen. My escort looked like he’d stepped out of a Ralph Lauren catalog. And I had to make off that I was entranced, waltzing in his arms, and never ever let on that I’d already experimented with alternatives.”
Lisette felt it like a flash fever—that old class antagonism mixed with class envy—as she pictured the tall, pretty girl and the Ralph Lauren catalog boy, whirling under a chandelier in some grand ballroom. She pulled into the alley behind the house and parked.
“My senior prom in the high school gym is what I remember,” she said. “Kissing my date in the car after the dance. I grabbed him because I knew what I was and I was fighting it and I thought if I kissed him real hard something would happen.”
Pamela looked at her, wide-eyed. “Like what? That the guy would…?”
“Not that. No. That it would change me. It was the reverse of what usually happens. The desire leads to the kiss. I hoped the kiss would lead to the desire. It was the same thing when I got married, when it was more than kissing.”
“Yeah, oh yeah,” said Pamela, bobbing her head. “Do I know that feeling. I’ve been there.” She looked up and down the alley and said mischievously, “No gossips in sight.”
With desire in its rightful place, their kiss was long and avid. It made Lisette feel that she was going to jump out of her skin. “Okay, let’s not push our luck,” she said, her voice slow and thick.
They got out of the car and carried the shopping bags into the kitchen and dropped them on the table. Recovered from the effects of the kiss, Lisette fetched a cardboard box from under the sink and set it down next to the bags.
“How do you feel about going back to Philly?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s different now than it was then,” replied Pamela. “All in all, Philadelphia is looking pretty good—”
“I was referring to your mother. How should we … uh … comport ourselves when we see her?”
Pamela pondered the question while they transferred the groceries to the box.
“‘Comport’—that’s a word I haven’t heard in a while. We shall comport ourselves like the adult women we are, and keep contact with Mamá to the minimum possible. She’s seventy-seven, but she can still bite.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Lisette said, then motioned at the box. “I don’t want to forget this tomorrow.” She folded the flaps and lugged it outside to the pickup.
Following her, Pamela asked, “Has going back to the States ever crossed your mind? You did tell me you could practice there.”
“Sure. And you know what I’d be? Just one more doctor in some medical group or other.”
“What’s so terrible about that?”
“I’d be easily replaced. ‘Fungible’ is the word. A fungible cog in the medical machine.” She slammed the tailgate shut, a little harder than necessary. “I love these people, Pam. They need me.”
“Have you ever thought that you love them because they need you?”
“Have you been talking to Nick? That sounds like him.”
“I need you, too,” Pamela said, turning on her heel to go back into the house. “You’re so solid. You’re my rock.”
* * *
The drive to San Tomás, two and a half spine-cracking hours in César’s farm truck, left Riordan feeling as if he’d been inside a clothes dryer, though he ignored the discomfort. Going into the mountains always invigorated him; it made him feel closer in spirit to Father Kino and the early missionaries, striking out into the wilderness, though at the present stage in history the Sierra Madre was more a moral than a physical wilderness.
They rattled through the village, which was nothing more than a few dozen mud-brick shacks, scattered like puzzle pieces across a flat expanse a thousand feet below the crest of the Sierra Madre, the slopes shaggy with pine forests scarred by the clear-cuts made by pirate loggers. Stringy-looking chickens ambled about, pecking at the ground, and goats nibbled on the abundant rubbish. Plastic tarps enclosing a latrine flapped lazily in the wind.
Riordan spotted Lisette’s Dodge parked on a low hill between a house and the rural public health dispensary. Driving at her usual death-wish speed, she’d easily outrun the rattletrap truck. César went down a side road—a burro path, really—turned around, and backed up to within ten yards of the foot of the bridge, flung across a gorge in the Río Santa Teresa, sixty feet wide and as many deep.
“Mierda, look at this thing,” he said after they got out to inspect it. Standing well back from the edge—as close as he dared—Riordan could see that it sagged in the middle, forming a curve like the rocker of a rocking chair. Planks were askew, separated by gaps a foot wide. Two tall pine trees, spaced several feet apart, anchored the bridge on the near side. The suspension cables—thick ropes—had been wound around them and tied off with half hitches. He could not imagine crossing the rickety, jury-rigged structure. That people did testified as much to their fatalism as to their nerve and agility.
He put on his lined denim jacket. Spring weather, if not spring itself, had arrived in San Patricio, but at this altitude, better than seventy-five hundred feet, winter hung on. From the truck, the three men unloaded two-by-six boards sawn to three-foot lengths, coils of synthetic and manila rope, eyebolts and other hardware, plus power tools and a diesel generator to run them.
César studied the bridge again, hands on his hips, chest thrust out, as if he were confronting an adversary. “First thing we gotta do is tension those suspension cables,” he said.
He cranked up the generator, plugged in the power drill, bored pilot holes into each of the pine trees, and screwed eyebolts into the holes.
“Okay, Padre, you and Moises grab the right cable from in front of the tree and you pull on it. Pull hard.”
This brought Riordan much closer to the edge of the gorge than he cared to be—within three feet. The rope bit into his soft, priestly hands as, shutting his eyes, leaning backward against the cable’s resistance, he stood behind Moises and hauled like a tall-ship sailor raising the main.
From behind, César called, “Leggo now.”
Riordan released his grip and stepped back, relieved. César had untied the cable, passed it through the eyebolt, and lashed it to the truck’s tow hitch. He then got behind the wheel and eased the truck forward. The bowed cable began to straighten and tighten, and as it was lifted higher than the one on the left, the old, loose planks tipped into the river below. There wasn’t much water in it; Riordan heard a sickening clatter as the boards struck bare rock.
Now the cable had to be refastened to the pine. César untied it from the tow hitch. With all three men holding it taut, they circled the tree in what looked like a primitive dance and wrapped it around the trunk in neat coils. César secured it to the eyebolt with an elaborate knot. The left side was tensioned in the same manner, as were the thinner handrails above each, and it was satisfying to look at the four lines, now strung ruler-straight over the chasm.
His pitted face flushed from effort, César winced and slapped his breastbone. “Too much salsa on my eggs this morning.”
“I don’t know why you took this on, but these people will be glad you did,” Riordan said.
“I don’t know why either.” He bowed his head thoughtfully. “Maybe I want to do one last thing for them before I go to El Norte.”
“Leave a legacy?” asked Riordan.
César laughed. “Yeah, maybe they’ll name this bridge after me. The César Díaz Stupid Bridge. The municipality should be doing this job. We are looking at what’s wrong with this country—nobody wants to do anything, but everybody wants to be somebody.”
“That’s why you’re leaving. Mexico is screwed up, you said.”
“‘Fucked’ is what I said. Mexico is fucked, and she has fucked herself. If she was only screwed up, I would stay.”
“I would like to talk you out of it,” Riordan said earnestly.
“Save your breath. I don’t like sleeping with a loaded pistol next to my bed. I don’t like walking around with a personal bodyguard. Do you know I was scared to come out here? I came anyway, maybe because I was scared. But I’m tired of looking over my shoulder all the time.”
“You organized the autodefensa. You’re fixing this bridge. Mexico needs people like you.”
“Oye, Padre Tim. Save your sermons for Sundays. The decking comes next.”
He took one of the two-by-sixes and, kneeling down, centered it over the suspension cables and drilled a hole into each end, about three inches in. After threading short strands of synthetic rope through the holes, he tied the board to the cables, then pushed it forward and attached a second plank.
“So, that’s how we do this,” he said, and handed a tape measure and carpenter’s pencil to Riordan. “You mark the boards in the exact same place, both ends. Moises, you drill the holes. I do the rest.”
And so they began. Very soon they were operating as efficiently as a production line. Riordan traded off with Moises on the drill, the first manual labor he’d done in years. He gloried in it—the drill’s whine, the smell of new wood, the thudding generator—and thought of his mentor, Father Batista, never reluctant to pick up a hammer, a saw, a shovel.
Within an hour, the deck reached out some ten or twelve feet. Its weight and the friction of rope on rope made it impossible for César to shove it forward and add new planks from behind. He had to do it from the front end, with a sixty-foot drop in front of him, the bridge swaying each time he walked out onto it. Riordan couldn’t watch. He took off his jacket—now, past noon, it felt more like spring up here. Two more planks, another two. The decking reached more than halfway across when César signaled to shut off the generator and called for a break.
He flopped down against one of the pines, the flush gone from his cheeks, his complexion faded from cinnamon to pale sand.
“Jefe, you feelin’ okay? You don’t look so good,” Moises said.
“The generator,” César said. “Those fumes, makin’ me a little sick. Gimme couple minutes.”
“Lunchtime, jefe. You need somethin’ to eat.”
Moises went to the truck and brought back a cooler stuffed with María’s chicken fajitas and cold cans of Coke. His normally ravenous appetite sharpened by the labor and the mountain air, Riordan tucked in. César merely nibbled.
While they ate, a trio of young women wearing long Mayo skirts approached. One held a dirty toddler by the hand; the other two carried infants in shawls slung over their backs. Evidently, news of Riordan’s arrival in San Tomás had spread; the women asked if he would bless them and their children, which he did, crossing each forehead with his thumb.
“Padre, will you say a Mass for us?” begged the woman with the toddler.
“Maybe, when this is finished.”
They thanked him and shambled off in the dust.
“Muy bien. De vuelta del trabajo. Back to work,” César said, and got to his feet, leaving his lunch half-eaten.
* * *
Lisette and Pamela waited to see Javier Morales, the blind girl’s grandfather, in the kitchen of Cornelia Valdez, his eldest daughter. Evangelina and her widowed mother, Alma, lived with Cornelia, a curandera who had attempted to treat her niece’s eyesight with herbal remedies. Alma and Evangelina were not there when Lisette and Pamela arrived. They were with Javier, Cornelia said. She sent one of her children to find him; he was the head of the family, so he made all the decisions.
They sat down at a picnic table that must have been salvaged from a trash dump—initials, names, and dates had been carved into its surface. The kitchen, attached to Cornelia’s house by two rough-hewn beams, was open on three sides, a kind of ramada roofed with sheet metal laid over woven tree branches, its dirt floor partially covered with tattered straw mats. Ashes smoldered in the oven, made of sun-baked mud; bundles of herbs hung from the crooked rafters. They gave off a mixture of pleasant, if unidentifiable, smells that relieved less savory odors, like the stench from a nearby latrine.
Doing her best to ignore the squalor, Pamela sat with her legs crossed, hands clasped over a knee, a bland expression drawn over her face to hide her discomfort. Lisette had warned her that San Tomás was backward, but she hadn’t expected anything quite this backward. The dirt, the stink, the flies, the scrawny dogs foraging in trash piles. She’d gasped when, going to a rain barrel to wash her hands, she’d seen nests of pale brown, long-legged water spiders covering the surface rim to rim. Less than thirty miles away, San Patricio seemed in another world.
Waiting for Javier, Lisette whiled away the time by talking to Cornelia about her powders and potions. Curing Evangelina’s blindness was beyond her powers, Cornelia admitted, but she had restored health to other people, a lot of them, and offered to reveal her secret remedies the next time Lisette visited San Tomás.
Finally, Javier, a retired municipal policeman, arrived. He pulled up in a new, chrome-trimmed pickup far beyond the means of a man living on a pension. The rumors Lisette had heard were probably in the bull’s-eye: he oversaw the Brotherhood’s agricultural enterprises in the region around San Tomás. Entering the ramada, he dismissed Cornelia with a twitch of his head but was courtly toward Lisette and Pamela, doffing his hat in greeting. He was about sixty years old, and built like a mailbox. With his steel-gray hair, bushy gray eyebrows, and clipped gray beard, he looked more like an Old Testament patriarch than a kindly grandfather, and he projected such an air of stern, confident authority that he seemed half a foot taller than his five feet six. Regarding Lisette with the steady but indifferent gaze of a cat, he sat down and said in a voice accustomed to command, “Muy bien. Usted hablar, vaya a escuchar. Entonces vaya hablar tú, escuchar.”
“Dónde están Evangelina y Alma? Se vienen?” she asked, unsettled by their absence.
“Ellos están en mi casa. No se preocupe por ellos.”
“What’s he saying? What happened to the girl and her mother?” Pamela whispered.
“He said that I should talk and he’ll listen, then he’ll talk and I’ll listen. They’re at his house, we’re not to worry about them.”
“But they—”
“Quien es esta mujer?”
“Mi amiga. Una americana,” Lisette replied.
“Qué está haciendo aquí?”
He might have been retired, but he retained a cop’s suspiciousness. She explained that Pamela was there to meet his daughter and granddaughter because her father had arranged for Evangelina’s treatment in the United States. She added a kicker to show that she was not easily intimidated: “Disculpe, abuelo. No puedo hablar si sigues haciendo preguntas.”
Pamela leaned toward her. “Now what?”
“He wanted to know who you are and why you’re here, and I told him. I also told him that I can’t talk if he keeps asking questions. You, too, Pam. I’ll fill you in when we’re done.”
Despite her facility in Spanish, she struggled to describe Evangelina’s condition and its treatment to Javier in layman’s language. Vitrectomy and retinopathy wouldn’t do. There was bleeding behind her eyes, she said. A delicate procedure was necessary to stop it. This procedure would take a couple of hours, her recovery about a week. She assured him that she and Pamela would accompany his granddaughter throughout the journey; they would visit her in the hospital as she recovered. Evangelina would be home in less than two weeks. She pulled the airline tickets from the manila envelope and showed him the departure and return dates. He did not give them a second glance; he continued to look at her with his unwavering, neutral stare.
But before his granddaughter could leave Mexico, Lisette went on, these forms had to be read and signed by her parent or a guardian. She explained their purpose and pushed them across the table. Javier did not look at them.
“Abuelo, por favor, lea y firme ellos,” she said.
“No es necesario para leerlos. Ella no va a los Estados Unidos. Ella se quedará aquí,” he responded in a tone that left no opening for argument.
“No entiendo. Por qué? Por qué razón?”
An implacable look washed the indifference from his eyes as he raised his chin and said, “Debido a que la matarán y cosechar sus órganos.”
Utterly unprepared for such an answer, she was stymied for a retort. He could not have shocked her more if he’d struck her.
Javier rose and put on his hat and said he was through listening and talking and had nothing else to say. Lisette grabbed his sleeve, pleading with him to wait, to please wait. He could not possibly believe such a crazy thing, could not possibly believe that she would allow any harm to come to Evangelina.
She was doubtless an honorable woman, he said. But she was being deceived. He had been a policeman for thirty years, and he knew what happened to Mexican children in the United States. Sometimes their bodies were found, missing their hearts, their livers, their kidneys.
She demanded to know where he had heard such nonsense.
“No es una locura, señora, y no tiene sentido,” he said, with a thrust of his stubborn jaw.
“Lo siento, perdón, abuelo,” Lisette apologized, and begged him to reconsider. Evangelina would suffer no harm, except that she would go totally blind without the operation. Shaking with frustration, she tried to punch through his armor of ignorant obstinacy. You are the one harming her by keeping her here, she said, passionately. You, Abuelo Javier—
“Terminando,” he replied through compressed lips. “Buen dia, señora.”
Helpless, Lisette watched him climb into his chrome-gilt truck and drive off. Then, swamped by a sadness that was first cousin to grief, she gathered the papers and stuffed them back into the envelope.
Pamela frowned in confusion. “What the hell? You said you’d fill me in, so fill me in.”
“He won’t give his consent. The girl stays right here.”
“What? Why?”
“You won’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“He thinks—no, he’s certain—that she’ll be killed so her organs can be harvested.”
Blinking rapidly, Pamela looked at her without speaking.
“I told you you wouldn’t believe it.”
“My father … he thinks that my father would … harvest her organs? Dad doesn’t like to step on ants, and this Javier thinks he would…?”
“It’s not personal, Pam. He doesn’t know your father from a hill of beans. He’s just got this idea that Mexican kids who cross the border end up with their hearts and livers on the black market.”
“That poor kid … his own granddaughter … You couldn’t talk any sense into him?”
“I tried. He wasn’t listening.”
Pamela brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead, then swatted at a fly. “All that trouble my father went through, that you’ve gone through.”
A goat so thin its bones could be counted hobbled up to the ramada and stuck its nose in the ground, as if eating dirt. The sadness welled up in Lisette, her eyes filling as an image of Evangelina formed in her mind, the girl aged and infantilized at the same time, shuffling with the uncertain steps of a woman of ninety, or clinging to her mother’s hand like a toddler.
“I should have checked with him before…” Her voice quavered. “I should have seen this coming.”
Reaching across the table, Pamela clasped her hands. “None of that, okay? It’s not your fault that the guy is an ignorant jerk.”
Lisette wasn’t feeling very rocklike at the moment, only wrung out, defeated. She grabbed the envelope and stood. “Let’s go home.”
“How do I explain this to my father?” asked Pamela as they went to the pickup. “I can’t tell him that the girl isn’t coming because her grandpa thinks he’s going to kill her for her organs.”
“No. But some version of the truth will have to do. I’ll e-mail him.”
Taking the envelope gently but firmly from Lisette’s hands, Pamela pulled out the airline reservations. “It would be better if we told him in person, the both of us,” she said, pausing at the car to gaze out over San Tomás’s shabby sprawl, the scarred mountains beyond. “I could use a break from Mexico, and I think you could, too.”
Lisette swung back into the truck and coaxed the engine to life. “You go ahead. I’ve got work to do here.”
“It can’t wait?” asked Pamela, climbing in beside her. “You wouldn’t have been doing whatever it is if this had worked out the way we thought it would. I don’t see the difference.”
“I think you do.”
They bumped down the village’s single street. Black water flecked with garbage trickled in the culverts alongside it. Pamela tilted her head against the window and let out a long sigh. “Maybe I do. I admire you, Lisette. You know that. But what I really don’t see, when I think about that old bastard, is why you love these people so much. I’m sorry to have to say that.”
You didn’t have to, Lisette said to herself.
They drove on in the bright afternoon without talking, each enclosed in a bubble of her own thoughts, Lisette now more conscious than ever of the distance between them. It had been there from the beginning, albeit concealed, not by love but the longing for it.
* * *
As fast as Riordan could drill the boards, Moises carried them to César, down on his knees as he extended the deck plank by plank until he reached the far side of the gorge. Riordan, who came from a family where “good with his hands” described a man who could throw a decent punch rather than one adept at fixing or building things, admired César’s skill. After the final plank was laid, he uncoiled two long ropes to make support lines between the handrails and the suspension cables on each side. Bending low to loop them around the cables, straightening up to do the same around the handrails, he formed two series of triangles the span of the bridge.
From the far end, he called across the chasm, “Eso lo hace! Hemos terminado con esta maldita puente!”
Moises shut off the generator. It was done—a tough job completed in the depths of the wild Sierra Madre. Riordan took a gulp of air, savoring its piney tang, and gazed with satisfaction at the clean, smooth, yellowish decking, the cables and ropes as taut as telephone wires. Sweating from his labors, César tested their work, crossing toward Riordan and Moises at a normal walking pace. When he reached them, he grinned through his sweat, turned, and began to stomp back toward the opposite side. Under his pounding, the bridge undulated and swayed.
Riordan, standing with Moises in front of the two support trees, shut his eyes. Two seconds later, Moises yelled, “César!” His eyes snapping open, Riordan saw his friend flat on his back about two-thirds of the way across, clutching his chest while rolling from shoulder to shoulder. The bridge canted to one side, and he began to slide off, saving himself from a fatal plunge by hooking an arm around a support rope. Now he lay at a sideways angle, his legs from the knee down dangling over the gorge. He let out a loud groan. Moises threw a shoulder into Riordan, intending to shove him out of the way so he could go to the aid of his stricken boss, but inadvertently pushed Riordan onto the bridge.
Without hesitation or a conscious thought, amazing himself, Riordan grasped the handrails and moved forward as quickly as he dared. The bridge swung from side to side, bounced up and down; he felt as if he were walking on a waterbed suspended in midair. He reached César in ten seconds and stood behind him, taking a moment to make sure he had his balance. Then, letting the handrails go, he knelt down and, with cautious, deliberate movements, reached across César’s body, grabbed his legs, and swung them back onto the deck.
“What happened?” he asked, out of breath even though the physical effort had not been strenuous.
César looked up. His face had a grayish pallor. “Got dizzy … fell.… Pain here…” He poked his left shoulder. “Damn diesel fumes…”
Oh, God, not a heart attack, Riordan thought. He placed his arms under César’s, intending to drag him. But it would be impossible to walk backward on the unstable platform while dragging a man as heavy as himself. César would have to make it back on his own two legs. Riordan raised him into a sitting position, then—he didn’t know how he accomplished it—got him to his feet and turned him so that they stood facing each other.
Doing an about-face, Riordan said: “Hold on to me, hold tight.”
César clasped him around the waist and shuffled behind as Riordan half-walked, half-hauled himself forward by the handrails. They looked like a curious circus act. Riordan gave no thought to the bridge’s lurching, to the grinning chasm, to the rocks shining through the thin, clear water below. He was aware only of the necessity to deliver his friend to safety.
When they reached the other side, César released him. He staggered forward, bent over, and dry-heaved. Riordan had him lie down under the trees, telling him to take deep breaths. He did, complaining that it felt like he was inhaling ground glass.
Aspirin. You were supposed to give aspirin to someone having a heart attack. But he didn’t have any aspirin.
“Moises, go find Dr. Moreno,” Riordan said. “Bring her here quick.”
He sat down in the warm loam and rubbed César’s chest. “How is it now?”
“A little better. Oye, Padre. Muchas gracias. I thought I was going to—”
“Don’t think about it,” Riordan said, panting. “Take it easy. Rest.”
“I fainted,” César said, as if embarrassed.
“We’ll find out what’s wrong and get you fixed up.” He smiled reassuringly.
While they waited for Moises to return with Lisette, Riordan alternated looks at the bridge, swung out over the deep rift in the land, and at César’s face, now regaining some color.
“Not so much pain now,” César said. “I’m okay now.”
“No, you’re not. Dr. Moreno will have a look at you.”
But that wasn’t going to happen, not here. Dr. Moreno had left the village some time ago, Moises reported when he returned.
“All right, let’s get him in the truck,” Riordan told Moises. “You drive.”
He extended his hand to César, who grasped it and pulled himself upright.
“No kidding, I’m okay.”
“The hell you are,” Riordan said. “We’re going to bring you to Hermosillo. To a hospital.”
He and Moises got César situated in the passenger seat, quickly loaded the generator and the tools, and started off. The road spun down out of the pines into the oaks and junipers, matching the Santa Teresa bend for bend, some turns so sharp Moises had to take them almost at walking speed. On that long, jarring drive, Riordan had a chance to reflect on his actions. In retrospect, they seemed as automatic as reflex; yet there had been nothing automatic about them. They had not lacked intention. He’d seen what needed to be done and he’d done it. He wondered how he’d managed to conquer his abject terror not once but twice, the second time towing a man who weighed at least 180.
These musings did not produce pride in himself. Quite the opposite. He felt humbled, touched by grace; his rescue of César had been an act of love, for one human life and so for God, and grace is bestowed in proportion to the love in the soul that receives it. That, not reflex, not his own will, was what had overcome his dread and impelled him forward. He wasn’t worthy of it, but his faith taught that it was the unworthy to whom grace was granted.
At last, from a straight stretch girdling a hillside, he saw the river a few hundred feet below—a ribbon of water that vanished into the sand and reappeared downstream. The roofs of San Patricio peered through the mesquite and palm trees, the twin domes of his church towering over all, crucifixes against a barren blue sky. Westward, the highway to Hermosillo drew a winding black stripe across the Sierra foothills. The familiar landscape brought him to the recognition that in having been touched by grace, he’d been restored to himself and his rightful place in the world. He was skeptical about emotional religion, the ecstatic moment of conversion evangelicals spoke of; yet he felt that he was undergoing something like that now—a reconversion, as it were. After the shock on Christmas morning, he’d played a mental trick on himself to dodge the conundrum theologians and philosophers had wrestled with for two thousand years: how to reconcile an all-loving God with the existence of evil. If they hadn’t resolved it yet, he certainly could not. He would have to live with the doubts it awakened. No faith without doubt, he reminded himself. The trick had been the idea that he’d been thrust into an alternate universe, some spiritual black hole in whose depths the laws of moral physics no longer applied. But he was in Mexico, bleeding, suffering Mexico, a Franciscan priest empowered to preach the Gospels, to perform baptisms, to witness marriages, to anoint the sick, to celebrate the Eucharist, and to hear confessions, whose secrecy he was sworn to preserve. To violate that oath was to betray a sacred trust. He’d betrayed it three times; he would no longer. He resolved to end his unholy pact with Inspector Bonham and Captain Valencia, regardless of the cost to himself. Grace is given to the undeserving, he thought. But once it is, your actions have to show that you’ve received it.