EPILOGUE

A YEAR LATER

 

 

THE MESSAGE LIGHT flickered on the phone in the gloom of the back office room. It glowed dull orange, off and on, off and on, like a little lighthouse. Mike felt tired as he flopped down in the chair with his face covered in the grime of Guatemala City, the product of an uncountable number of cooking fires that left a brown smoke hovering over the city like a frown. His brow was covered with sweat and he wiped it off with a sleeve.

He sighed exhaustedly. It was a happy sound though. Tired was good on days like this. Days spent out in the community around San Gabriel. Days of labor and toil, of battering away at corruption and vice and all that plagued the slums. But days that seemed to matter even if the few victories were small. He spent the morning at a local clinic run by nuns that fed and treated the orphans and the homeless. He used the opportunity as a kind of outreach to gang members. There was a vicious turf war going on and he needed to know the details so he could try and calm down things. He did not have much influence. But after nine months here in Guatemala, he had some. He did what he could.

He pressed play.

He recognized the familiar lilting accent immediately.

“Miiike,” the voice crooned. “You are a hard man to find these days. I guess I should have known you would be down there. But somehow it never occurred to me until now.”

Mike froze like a statue and his finger hovered over the button. He did not move a muscle. Suddenly he felt a cold chill on his skin, the frost of a thousand miles driven on frozen Iowa roads or among New Hampshire’s snowy forests. He thought, just for a second, that he heard the roar of a crowd; the magical moment when a candidate made that elusive connection; when, for a fleeting time, a room filled with such electricity that you believed it might set the whole world on fire.

“You’re wasted down there,” Dee’s message went on. “I’d like you to come back and help me out with something. Somehow working out of President Stanton’s office ain’t all it’s cooked up to be. Turns out I hate being behind a desk even if it is in the West Wing. Who would have believed it? I actually just love the fight, not the reward.”

He laughed at the image of Dee in an office. She would be like a caged tiger, pacing up and down in a zoo, longing for freedom, not wanting to be safe and well-fed. She could not fight her instinctual desire to hunt and catch her own food.

“I got my eye on a nice little governor’s race down in Arkansas,” she went on. “This time the candidate’s a real special one. Reminds me a lot of Hodges when he was at his peak. I could do with someone who…”

Mike jabbed a finger down and pressed erase. The spell was broken. It was not real to him anymore. That world of the campaign. It was a ghost world. He got up and walked out of the office. He passed through the church where the glowering black Christ looked down from his high cross and then Mike paused in the open doorway that led outside.

In the courtyard vegetable garden a figure crouched and planted an upturned furrow of earth with seeds. She moved slowly and deliberately down the rows seeming to take exaggerated care as she placed each seed in a carefully dug hole. It was Mayan corn. In a few months, nourished by the frequent rains, even in this slum earth, it would grow tall and strong. The young woman looked up, her face shielded by the flat hat she wore to help shade skin that was paler than that of her countrymen.

Gabriela smiled at Mike. He waved back. She was doing well, he thought. It had been a long struggle to help, but she was clean of drugs for three months now and off the streets for twice that. Perhaps she would yet fall back into the gangs. But perhaps she would not. It was impossible to tell. You just did what you could to help. To try and fulfill a promise made far away.

This world was the real one, he said to himself. Right here. Right now. He watched Gabriela from the shadows of the church doorway. He was suddenly full of hope that she would make it. He stepped forward out of the darkness and the thought warmed him even more than the sudden light of the bright, shining sun.