Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Father Dixie Ryan got off the bus on a wide boulevard in
Zone 2, Guatemala City, carrying a soft-sided suitcase patched with
duct tape. Sunlight slashed here and there into the shady street where
traffic stood nearly still in black waves of exhaust. He imagined the
oily mix coating his lungs. The orphanage, a gas station fenced on
three sides with tall blue planks: these were familiar landmarks.
A Cherokee, its windows glossy black, crept out from an alley
clotted with houseware vendors. The priest turned--his neck hair
bristling--and maneuvered in an oxbow through the people on the
street. At the gas station he asked the attendant if he could use the
restroom. "Sí, sí, padre," the man said, wiping his hands on a rag.
"The night watchman lives back there." The priest slipped
through the blue gate and into a dirt yard where there stood a
brand-new cement-block toilet stall with grainy newspaper photos
of Michael Jordan plastered above a basin. Inside he relieved himself.
Then he leaned his head against the cement wall. His vision
swam. He took out the scrap of paper with Sunny's address. El
Pacífico Sueño.
He waited as long as he could manage without arousing suspicion
before slipping back into the street and the neighborhood,
through the park where trash drifted, where street kids congregated,
sucking on brown paper bags of cobbler's glue, past bakeries,
past market stalls with radios on and mothers combing out the hair
of little ones or men waiting for customers to make the smallest affordable
purchase, a cigarette or two, a box of Black Cat matches,
a cup of white rice. The Cherokee did not reappear. At El Pacífico
Sueño--the peaceful sleep, the peaceful dream--he knocked on the
red front door. A wooden sign creaked above him; a star the size of
a butter cookie had been carved after the word Sueño.
Sunny answered his knock.
"Dix." She took his hand, drew him inside.
A blinking fluorescent tube lit the foyer. Child-sized coffins
stacked against two stucco walls were dusty, though he could still
detect their piney smell. A three-year-old picture calendar of
churches--turned to November 1985--hung over a desk in whose
many open cubbyholes lay the yellowing invoices of funerals past.
He said, "I might have been followed."
Sunny turned to the desk and plucked a tiny manila envelope
from a drawer.
"Here it is," she said. She took his arm, kissed his cheek. "Make
yourself at home."
He pocketed the key and left at once.
He found a café in the same block and settled into its dim cool
interior, his Roman collar and Panama hat on the table. The last
bus would leave a little after seven. He could be at Sunny and Ben's
Antigua house by eight o'clock. He'd do as the Canadian doctor advised:
rest until the breakbone fever gave up its hold on him.
Waiting for dusk, he drank limonada and read Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair. Out on the street a vendor hawked toy
skeletons for Day of the Dead and an old woman scattered flowers
on the sidewalk: golden flores del muerto. So that the dead may
find their way home
"Go on now. I can't keep you anymore."
The man on the motor scooter lifted Marta by her wrist and
Eduardo caught his little sister. They stood in sunshine at the edge
of a park scruffy with trash and tree limbs blown down by wind.
Flocks of children loitered, squatting, poking each other, hunching
head to head.
"Es Guate, Marta," Eduardo said, taking her hand in his. "El
capital!" He fingered the wrinkled dollar bill the gringo had given
him. He kept it in a secret pocket inside his shirt, a patch pocket his
mother had sewn for him so that he could run errands for her without
being robbed.
Marta said nothing. Her hair tangled in permanent greasy
knots. She was eight years old, Eduardo twelve. The sun was
bleached like straw where an animal slept.
In the park they watched the beggar who shared their bench.
With his white beard, his gray hair thatchy, his trousers rolled to
the knees, his legs streaked with dirt, his feet--Eduardo had never
seen such feet. Big, thick-skinned, with toenails as black as tortilla
blisters. His dusty bolsa had been crocheted in a design familiar to
Eduardo: purple and green stripes with the plumed quetzal worked
in. It was a design from the village nearest the village where
Eduardo and Marta had been born in the highlands above the
Chixoy River. A similar bolsa hung in front of the statue of the
Virgin in the village church; his mother had sometimes filled it with
corn as an offering.
Tall trees shaded their park bench. The smell of rotting fruit
nearby. Marta perched primly beside Eduardo, her eyes wide, her
red corte tattered along its folds. She had to be vigilant about adjusting
the folds and retying her sash; the fabric was soft and worn
and if she did not watch, her corte would slip down. It was her one
last piece of clothing. Her grandmother had made this corte. Her
grandmother had woven her sash on a backstrap loom; the sash was
gray and red and black: sturdy stripes. When the sash and the corte
had been brand new, she had worn a red glass-bead necklace tied in
a knot against her chest. The necklace had been long lost. Trucks
and cars and bicycles dodged and swerved, bright and ramshackle,
horns blurting. She had never before seen the capital, the traffic
and the big advertisements and the capitalistas in glistening bloody
lipstick, their spiky leather shoes. The gringo with the motor
scooter was a man so tall that Marta had to tilt her head back to see
his long horsey face. He had peanut butter in his backpack and he
had bought them hot-from-the-griddle tortillas in Los Encuentros.
Early in the morning, before daylight.
Go on now. I can't keep you anymore.
They had ridden, clinging to him, clinging to each other, in the
dust, in the oily exhaust, in the itchy vibration of the worn-out tires
against the washboard roads, all the way from Chichi.
The beggar reached into his bolsa. He glanced around guardedly
and pulled out part of a loaf of brown sugar. He took a bite.
Eduardo salivated. Marta squeezed his kneecap. Their mother had
nearly always kept a piece of such sugar in a tin on the shelf. She
had shaved curls of the coarse brown stuff on their hot cereal or
rice. Eduardo did not like to think about his mother but she and his
father were never far from his thoughts. He had last seen his father
at the municipal hall in the center of the village. A rainy night, a
night of fiesta. Eduardo had peeked through the loose fenceboards
and there he had seen his father dancing like a marionette to
marimba in a line of drunken men. The courtyard of the municipal
hall had been slick with mud and the birds-of-paradise had been
coated with mud and the mud had soaked up the striped trousers of
the drunken men who shouted and slurred the monotonous and
mournful songs. They danced and laughed, although they looked
as though they cried, with the whites of their eyes sore and red.
Rain and clouds bled like ink over everything. After the fiesta the
military had come. Soldiers with hard eyes. Shiny bayonets. Steel-toed
boots. Helicopters had chopped like razor wings above the village.
With his dirty thumb the beggar pressed out two hunks of
sugar from the loaf and offered them to Eduardo and Marta. They
hurried down the concrete bench, hovered over his open hand. The
beggar shrugged. Eduardo plucked the sugar--hunks the size of
small bird eggs--from the old man's hand and ate. And Marta ate.
The sugar melted on their tongues, at once rough and velvety; the
palm trees swayed, their palm leaves clacking; the scent and oil of
oranges burst in invisible clouds nearby where a man unloaded oranges
in red net bags from a flatbed; and the capital was for that
moment a place of generosity.
A boy swaggered up to the bench. His knuckles were bony, his
skeleton visible under his ashy dark skin. "Give it to me," he said.
The beggar crammed the sugar into his bolsa, hugged the bolsa
to his chest. Eduardo and Marta scrambled to the end of the long
bench.
"For--my--boys." The intruder called his boys forward with a
chop of his hand. His flat cheeks were chalky, his eyes devoid of
light. Busy people passed by. They swarmed along the sidewalks.
No one took notice.
One of the boys--a little older, perhaps fourteen, in a plaid
shirt that had all its buttons--stared with malevolent eyes at
Eduardo and Marta. "Are you with the old one?"
The first boy hit the beggar's face with a stick.
Eduardo said, "No lo conocemos a él."
He grabbed Marta's trembling hand and slipped away to a palm
tree behind a fruit vendor's stand. They squatted at the base of the
palm tree, stealing glances, watching but not watching the beggar
and the boys, their hearts beating hard within the spark and boom
of the strange city. The fruit vendor's plywood stand had been
painted to resemble a bunch of bananas. Beneath the stand was a
bodega. Eduardo imagined sleeping under there. That was on his
mind, finding a safe place to sleep.
"Piña y mango, piña y mango," called the fruit vendor. "Piña,
piña."
The beggar folded his body over his bolsa. The gang of boys
pounced, kicked the beggar's ribs. Eduardo could see only the back
of the beggar's brown coat puffing out like a bird's feathers.
One boy jerked the bolsa from its strap and sprinted into a
straggly grove, a lean shadow among the white-barked trees. The
others kicked the beggar again and again. They kicked, cursed,
grunted, laughed. Dust as fine as incense rose around them.
"I have it," shouted the boy in the trees.
"Get out of here," the fruit vendor growled at Eduardo. "You
are like animals. Animals! Mierda! Get out of here." He pitched a
mango pit and it landed in dirt at their feet.
A morsel of fruit clung to the pit. Sunlight shone on the fleck
of mango as it flew but it was dusty now, wasted. The molasses taste
of the brown sugar had made Eduardo's stomach growl. He pulled
Marta by the hand and walked across the street, walked away from
trouble, thinking, We are in the capital now and we must never
carry a bolsa.
The Nicaraguan National Cathedral in Managua was not a sacred
place. Kate Banner ventured inside despite that; she wanted to
see the damage for herself. Weeds had taken over the sanctuary;
statues had fallen out of their niches, their porcelain fragments long
since ground into dust. Piss and shit everywhere, broken glass
winking, black streaks from mortar fire staining the columns.
She picked her way to the foot of the altar. Some evenings, on
her way home from the clinic, she glimpsed men playing softball inside
the cathedral. Still, it was not hard to imagine that it had once
given refuge to women, women tired of babies crying and children
pulling and men reaching into their blouses. Christ loved women and
they love Him. She pictured the Nicaraguan women in the cathedral
praying for their men to quit drinking or praying for Somoza's plane
to crash, whatever they had prayed for. She thought of the quiet of
the cathedral, the peace of it, the gratitude of the women.
And then a witchlike voice spoke. "Brigadista!"
Kate's heart sped up. "Qué pasa?" she asked, startled, peering
around.
An old man broke cover from behind a marble column.
Sunshine half hid his face, sunshine pouring through the caved-in
roof. "Brigadista, brigadista, brigadista," sing-songy like a bully, he
said, "You do not belong here." A few steps above her, his hands
clutching weeds. Dancing wickedly in rags. Skin and bones. Kate
thought that she could smell him, smegma, sweat, piss and all.
She ran from the altar, tripped, stumbled to the entry.
"Go home, brigadista. Go home." He fired a bit of gravel and
cackled.
On the street the people waited endlessly for a bus. There
weren't enough buses; because of the embargo, vehicles had been
abandoned all over Nicaragua. Sweat ran down her sides. She
sweated all the way to the apartment.