People crowded into Lloyd’s Bank. The soldier guarding the bank wore black wraparound sunglasses, a gold chain, a beret. A Sacred Heart tattoo on his arm. Fuzz on his upper lip. Kate guessed he was seventeen or eighteen. What did he think about with his weapon slung there at his hip? What adolescent cravings swept along like little boats behind those eyes?
She had been frugal but money was beginning to matter. She stood in line and the woman in the teller’s cage said, No. No money for Katherine Banner. That did not mean he hadn’t sent it. The system was a mystery to her; she had heard stories of money being sent bank to bank—Athens to Tegucigalpa or Chicago to San Miguel—and finally arriving weeks later.
On a bench among the roses she opened the denim pouch in which she kept her passport and her money. She wore the pouch’s strap across her chest and it fit snugly under her left breast. She took out a red change purse stuffed with bills. Twenty U.S. dollars and one hundred quetzales. That was still plenty of money. She could flick through it without taking it out of the change purse. Looking at the money, counting the money, and putting the money safely away made her feel less strapped.
GUATEL was closed again. She had wanted to call her mother. How accustomed she had grown to doors being locked, inaccessibility. On the way to the market she checked the post office, where the strike was still on, the heavy wooden doors shut.
At the market some vendors had covered up their produce, their grains and beans. It was not a big market day. They were away from their stalls, running their own errands. The concrete aisles were slick in spots and an almost rotting odor hung over everything. She bought beans and rice, a half kilo each. Garlic and onions. Candles. She bought a shriveled orange to flavor the black beans.
On the walk home sunlight cut into the narrow street. She passed an optometrist’s shop where a pregnant clerk in a wide pink dress helped a customer. Tourists lingered at a restaurant doorway, struggling to read the handwritten menu in a glass display case. Deaver was on her mind; he came and went. Something about the day, the way the weather had changed at last, some cue she couldn’t even clearly see had tossed her into memories of Deaver, his voice when he pounded out his unshakable belief in armed struggle or the way he stood over the cardboard stage when he made his puppets speak or his charm—he could be charming. In the beginning he had been playful, flattering, validating glance for glance her own lust for herself. What she thought about, what obsessed her walking home, was a pastiche of memory. A kind of totalitarianism reigned when she remembered Deaver. She had been ruled by him for eight years, ignorant and craving. The fragile realization shamed her, humbled her.
She arrived at El Petén #3 without knowing the streets she had taken.
“Hola,” Lino called. He sat in the shade of the courtyard, a book open on his lap.
“Hola,” Kate said.
“Qué tal?”
“I’m okay,” she said, willing that to be so. She set her purchases down on a table. Sweat dripped into her eyes. She wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her shirt. “Where’s Dix?”
“Father Dixie—he’s at the doctor’s.”
“Is he all right?”
Lino closed his book and kept one finger at his place. “I think he’s all right. But the doctor wants to see him.” In English he said, “To check him up.”
“To check him out.”
“To check him out.” He cleared his throat. “Catarina.”
“Yes?”
“I am so sorry about your friend. I wanted to say that I was sorry, but you were in your room when I left.”
She did not want to talk about Maggie. She did not want to go over it one more time. Talk of what had happened cut into her privacy, an erosion that left her depleted. In four more days it would be a month since Maggie had died. She was anxious about facing that day. “Thank you,” she said stiffly. Then, “It’s hot today.” She moved a lawn chair to the shade and sat down, not far from him.
“We have lemon-grass tea. Would you like?”
“Yes, I would. Thank you.”
Lino laid his book face down on his chair and went into the kitchen. There was a balance about him, a physical symmetry, as though he had not been scarred too much, Kate thought. She picked up his book. Where There Is No Doctor. It was open to a chart of skin problems—diaper rash, eczema, pellegra, bedsores.
“Real ice for the iced tea,” Lino said.
“For joy,” Kate said. “Thanks.”
“What is joy?”
“Alegría. Regocijo.”
“Joy. Por joy.” He lifted his glass in a toast.
They drank their tea and sat together quietly for a few moments. It was the first time they had been in the house with only each other. Posh wandered aimlessly around the courtyard, his green feathers dusty, pecking at a dead fly or a seed or a crumb here and there.
“Did you see the helicopters?”
“I heard them,” Lino said.
“GUATEL is closed,” Kate said.
“This happens.”
“And the postal workers are still on strike.”
Lino got up again and started for the kitchen. “Do you want to hear the news?” He brought the yellow radio to the courtyard and plugged it in just outside the kitchen door. Rose petals had fallen on the floor beside a bookcase from a day-old bouquet Dixie had made. Lino fiddled with the dials.
Rock and roll in Spanish blurted from every station. “No news,” Lino said.
“Let’s turn it off,” Kate said. “Please. It makes my head hurt.”
Lino came and sat down with her again. “We will hear about it. Whatever it is.”
“So. Why’re you reading this?” Kate said.
“My cousin—Angelina—she has a problem. Like this, I think—” Lino laid the book on the floor between them. He pointed to the chart in the book: a line drawing of the blisters called shingles. Posh toddled over to the book, pecked at its edges.
“Where are they?”
“Here,” Lino said, raising his arm and rubbing.
Kate flinched. “They hurt, don’t they?”
“She is in terrible pain.”
“Where does she live?”
“In the mountains. Where I was visiting. She does not know what is wrong.”
“Is there a doctor there?”
“Yes. There is a Belgian doctor. But she was away at another village.”
“The doctor will know what to do. There’s a cream you can use for that.”
“Why does this come?”
“Everyone has that, inside—” Here Kate waved both hands from her head to her feet. “It stays dormant, asleep, most of the time. Hard times—you know what stress is? Stress makes it wake up.”
“Temor. Inquietud.”
Lino was silent. He shook his head.
Kate said, “What?”
“Yes. I see.”
“And what do you see?”
“We pray every day about these things.”
“What things?”
“Fear y anxiety.”
“What is Angelina fearful of?”
“Her life has not been easy. If you go there—to the mountains—you will see many women like Angelina. They will run from you. They have no trust.”
“What happened to her?”
“She lost her family, Catarina,” he murmured in Spanish. “One day she went to another village to buy tipica from a weaver in that village. Angelina has a store, you see, in her front room. While she was away the rain washed away the road, and she waited for the rain to stop. While she was away the soldiers came and took away her daughter and her husband. They took twenty-nine people that day. They took them to the bridge and they hung them over the water and they cut them with machetes until they fell part by part into the river. The river was muddy with the rain.” Out on the street firecrackers went off and almost drowned his words. “But people say that after that the river was red with blood.”
“God help us,” Kate said.
“Angelina is sick now. It has been seven years. She has this—” He pointed to the book again. “In the month of her daughter’s birth.”
“What is going on here?” Kate said.
“It is plain to see. If you want to see.”
“How can you just keep going?”
“What choice do we have?”
“Resist,” Kate said.
“Many have resisted.” He drank from his glass. “Many do.”
The tea in his glass was jewel-like and pale, pale green. The shade surrounded them. Sunlight was out there, beyond where they sat, and at one time she would have experienced the sunlight as pleasant and enjoyable and drowsy, watching the sun move across the courtyard. A buffer, a wall, stood between Kate and the sun. They talked of many terrible things. She learned all that he would tell her about his family and la situación in the mountains. She told him all that he wanted to know about Nicaragua. The hummingbirds trembled above the hibiscus. He had seen his brothers stabbed and killed by a soldier. The soldier had made the sign of the cross before he struck the first blow. Clouds too slight to threaten them puffed along the horizon. She had seen the children damaged by Contra mines. She had seen mothers giving birth while guarded by soldiers. Posh fell asleep on Lino’s shoulder, his green head drooping. Lino wanted to know the cost of food in Nicaragua—beans, rice, corn. He wanted to know what made the people joyful. Did the Revolution make the people joyful, as he had heard? She had seen too much suffering to call it that. Still, they had forced a change. At what cost? Then Lino said, “My mother is a weaver, and her weavings tell the story of all that has happened. Blessed corn. Lords of the hills. Saints. The skulls of children floating in the river.”
The courtyard contained a stillness like music, broken only by the music of their secret voices and the fountain water tinkling cleanly. Music over music. A gracile breeze, hummingbirds. While he talked, she forgot her particular pain.
Finally Kate said, “I can give you medicine for Angelina. If the pharmacy has it.” And she went to the pharmacy. She paid for the Zovirax with quetzales from the red change purse. It was all right to trust that the money would come. That would be soon enough to decide whether to buy a one-way ticket to Indianapolis.
Back at home she put her black beans to soak in a red plastic bowl. No one else was about. Lino had left a note for Dixie: he promised to come for his lesson in the morning. He was going to his friend’s house; his friend’s mother would make dinner for them. The little gin she had left she poured down the sink. She knew she would miss it, if not now then later, and she laughed, her first laugh since finding out about Maggie.
The vegetables she washed in a solution of water and chlorine bleach. She laid them out on a clean towel and admired their colors—the pale watery cabbage, the bright carrots. She concocted a salad, covered the salad bowl with a tin plate, and stashed it in the refrigerator. She had made enough for Dix.
He nearly always left his room open and unlocked. The house hung heavy with silence like funeral crepe. She stood before his slightly open door; her heart drummed. She nudged the door; he had left a lamp on, clipped to his headboard. His bed was made up, covered with a wool blanket: yellow stripes and gray birds. Books in disarray slipped down from piles. At the foot of the bed, where she could read the titles without entering, were The Gnostic Gospels and Love in the Time of Cholera.
Hammers pounded next door, across the stucco wall, arythmic banging, irritating, threatening. Whine of a saw, lumber clunking: the noises dispelled her reverie. She had always prided herself on not being a sneak, for any reason. But she could not undo her mistake. The hands on Dixie’s clock clicked as each second unwound, a life undone, undone, in waiting.