Crimson Footprints lll: The Finale (18 page)

Chapter Forty-Three

The first flight out of Aruba was a nonstop to Buenos Aires. Mike settled immigration’s entry fee with a phone call and credit card authorization, presented his passport, and purchased a ticket for onward travel at the airport.

He expected a large plane, not the rickety 40 seater he’d been required to venture outdoors to board. Nor had he anticipated the single narrow aisle with two seats on the left and the right, stopping short after a meager ten rows. Mike dropped down in his window chair with a swift intake of air, held it, and exhaled as he stared out at the island.

No one waited for him in Argentina. He knew neither good neighborhoods nor good people. His college Spanish meant he could conjugate an arsenal of verbs, but forget what they meant and how to use them. Yet, calm settled over him just the same. He’d spent the night packing, allowing the tears to come under a blanket of solitude. Maybe time and distance could wash away his urge to swallow a pharmacy’s worth of pills.

A bronzed and petite woman with a plump, heart shaped face and rivers of black hair dropped into the seat next him. She had the look of a woman eager to read his fortune.

“Buenos Dias,” she said and inclined her head.

Mike tilted a nod in her direction.

“Good morning.” It was best to get the mistaken assumption that he spoke Spanish out of the way. That way, they could get to ignoring each other in peace.

“No Spanish?” she said, with a trace of humor in her voice. “And you go to Argentina?”

Mike lifted a shoulder and wished her elsewhere. “I’ll learn.”

She smiled.

“What else do you come to learn, Michael Tanaka?”

He froze. “How do you know my name?”

“Here.” She pressed a finger in his lap, where his boarding pass sat face up. “Is where I read it.”

Mike snorted something close to disgust and turned back to the window, but most of his reaction was for show, he supposed. She was attractive, with a pixie face and ample bosom. But women were the last thing he needed. Detox. That was the prescription.

“Did you vacation in Aruba, Michael Tanaka?”

Orange vested figures fiddled with a cart full of luggage on the ground. The woman next to Mike touched him at the wrist with a single finger, then dragged it up his arm.

He looked back at her, eyes wide in disbelief.

“I asked you a question, Michael Tanaka.”

He plucked her hand from his body and dumped it in her lap.

“Mike. Not Michael.”

“Then Mike.”

He rubbed his head tiredly in response. Were he back in Seattle, wanking off to the tune of his own loneliness, no woman would have spat in his direction let alone drag her fingers up his body. But as it was that he’d sworn them off completely, he supposed they would fling themselves at him nonstop.

He had half a mind to move.

“Yes,” he said, remembering her question. “I vacationed in Aruba.”

She raised one brow.

“My name’s Carmen,” she said. “It is impolite to speak so long without asking my name.”

Mike rolled his eyes and turned to the window. He would feign sleep all the way to Argentina.

“You’re better off,” she said, after some time. “Without the thing you left behind.”

He turned, faced her, studied.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But even he heard the strain in his voice.

The stewardess who stood close enough to touch greeted them in the P.A. system. First in English, then Spanish. Mike wondered why she bothered. Given the attendance on this flight, she could have gone up and down the aisles and shook each person’s hand for awhile.

“Did you hear what I said?” Carmen said. “You’re better off.”

Mike’s gaze narrowed. “Do I already know you or something? Because the dark haired mysterious woman thing is kind of a tired trope. Give me whatever premonition you’ve got and move on. I’m missing my nap.”

Carmen smiled.

“No premonition,” she said. “Only, you coming to Argentina, alone, without so much as bothering to learn a few phrases, speaks of a man on impulse. Also, your eyes are so burdened, your shoulders slumped. Maybe it would help to talk about what troubles you. I’ve no…skin in the tournament.”

“It’s ‘game’ not ‘tournament,’” Mike said. “And no, I don’t want to talk.”

“No, I don’t want to talk,” Carmen echoed. “Not, no, I’m not running.”

Mike closed his eyes and rested his head against the window.

“I think this is the last flight out of Aruba,” Carmen said. “Before the airport is shut down.”

That opened his eyes.

“Why would they shut—”

“The storm, silly. Mandatory evacuation for all tourists. They are expecting brutal conditions, you know. Good thing you made it out, Michael Tanaka.”

“But my family,” he said. He shook his head and began again. She had to be mistaken.

“They don’t know any storm. They’re beachfront. What can I do?”

Her dark eyes glimmered with mischief.

“Pray,” she said and slipped her hand in his.

“Oh, Señor, hazme un instrumento de Tu Paz.

Donde hay odio, que lleve yo el Amor.

Donde haya ofensa, que lleve yo el Perdón.

Donde haya discordia, que lleve yo la Unión...”

Mike’s mind drifted in the lull of her recitation. When she finished, she released his hand and exhaled, smiling as if rising from a nap.

“Better?” she said.

Oddly enough, it was.

“I have no idea what you said. But I did make out Amen.”

He smiled at her and she returned it, broad as the ocean on horizon.

“It is the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi. I have prayed with you, so that the Lord may make you an instrument of peace. So that you may bring love instead of hatred, harmony instead of discord, truth and faith instead of error and doubt, light and joy, instead of shadows and sadness.”

Mike swallowed. The engines of the plane revved just behind him, but it was a distant sound, unimportant.

“How did you know?” Mike whispered.

Carmen pulled a small flannel blanket from a bag just under the seat in front of her. She draped in her lap, making him wish he’d brought one for himself. As if reading his thoughts, she unfolded it until it covered both their laps.

“Your regrets are plain, for anyone paying attention,” Carmen said. “And I, it seems, am paying attention.”

The flight attendant went through safety regulation while being ignored. The man on the left of Carmen flipped through an in-flight magazine. The child next to him had headphones in her ears.

“This will be a new life for you?” Carmen said. “In Argentina?”

His nostrils flared. This woman was all questions. All he knew of her was that her name was Carmen. But Carmen what? Diaz? Sandiego? Electra?

“Is Argentina where you live?” he asked. “Where your family lives?”

The aircraft began to move. An easy stroll that belied their eventual summit, they taxied away, picking up speed with the drone of an engine.

“My family immigrated to Argentina.” Her gaze skated the cabin. “From Bolivia.”

Mike looked around, as if to uncover the thing she looked for. “Is that…a problem?” he said.

She smiled weakly. “You are a foreigner, no doubt here for a short time. You will find that Bolivians are not…crowd pleasers in Argentina.”

“That sounds disgusting,” Mike said.

“It is like that in your country, right? With Mexicans?”

She stared at him with wide open eyes. She didn’t appear to be teasing.

“People have issues with illegal immigrants,” he said. “But it’s a divisive issue. There is no unanimous sense of xenophobia. Especially for people like me.”

“Like you?” she said.

“People who can remember when their race was the least favored.”

Mike faced the window again and sucked in a gust of air as they took flight. The running taxi glided up in glorious flight, veering as sparkling waters shimmered endlessly. There was liberation in flying, in defying limitations. It said to him that it mattered not how or where he’d been born. It said to him that innovation, ingenuity, perseverance would prove more reliable than circumstances of birth. It said that the premature child of a barely legal adult and community college dropout could be anyone, live anywhere, and do anything.

Including saving his family from Argentina.

For hours, Mike listened to Carmen, unsure if she paused at the moments he snored. In sleep, he contorted into a seven-headed demon, desperate for a woman to ease his bestial satisfaction. A monstrous phallus was what he wielded, complete with spikes on the tip. Any woman, no matter her appearance, was in danger the moment she grew close. When one did, he impaled her on sight and dropped her, dead, the second he’d been sated.

A monster. Him.

Mike woke gasping. Carmen still talked.

“So where are you staying?” she said, eyes on him expectantly.

“St—staying?”

“Yes. Certainly, you’ve made arrangements.”

He had the sneaking suspicion that she’d laugh at him if he said otherwise, and for someone used to being laughed at, it bothered him immensely.

“Yes. A hotel. I have money for a hotel.”

For a little while.

“And your family? By the time we land, it will be too late for you to send them warning. The storm will be upon them.”

He’d thought of that before falling asleep, but so far had come up with nothing better.

“They could die,” Carmen said, as if he needed reminding.

He snapped at her, something insulting, and an image of the seven-headed demon came to mind. Mike apologized.

“You are frightened,” Carmen said. “It’s understandable.”

But when he looked down at her hands—weathered, beaten, rough hewn, he saw that they shook, too.

“What is it? Why are you shaking?”

She shook her head. “It’s nothing. The work in the textile factory is harsh. I developed this while there.”

The textile mill. He searched his inventory of stories for one that matched. Ah yes. Her brother Mateo came over to Argentina first. Found work for himself and his siblings, including Carmen, then sent for them. The three of them worked in a textile mill that promised room, board, and good pay. What they got was one hundred dollars a month and a work day from 6 a.m. to midnight, six days a week.

He’d been nodding when he heard it and had hardly responded at the time. Now that he gave it the attention it deserved, he felt his fists clench in response.

“Is there nowhere else you can go? Nothing you can do?” It was a stupid and obvious question, one she no doubt asked herself time and again after five years of servitude.

Carmen smiled warmly, as indulgent as an old woman would for a child with questions that had no answer. What is time? Where is God? If I speak to Him, will he answer?

Once, Mike had asked his ojiichan those same questions. The old man sat on his stoop in Denver and pulled him into his lap. Of all the children, he had loved Mike best. He always felt it. But Mike suspected that all the others felt loved best, too.

“Michael,” he’d said. “You think so much and you worry even more. Worry is a stone in your belly that you can’t stop rubbing.” He messed his hair in that way that was all ojiichan’s, broad-handed enough that his finger fell in Mike’s little boy eyes, even as he wrecked every strand of hair. “Be free,” he told him. “Try to be free.”

Mike’s gaze had fallen on Tak then, wrestling in the dirt with Mike’s baby German Shepherd, O’toole. Even O’toole liked his cousin better.

Ojiichan had followed his gaze.

“Not free like Takumi. Free like Michael Tanaka was meant to be.”

Carmen slipped the whisper of fabric from her shoulder to reveal an angry red gash. Eyes wide, Mike’s fingers drifted to it, hovered, then dropped in embarrassment. The factory, he realized belatedly.

This was his weakness. Women. Beautiful women. Bonus points if they had scars of the physical or emotional variety. What man’s primal instinct didn’t swell at the notion of being needed, of being a rescuer?

He stared out the window at open seas, toying with an idea, then buying it. Deciding it was his moment to be free.

“They pay you $100 a month to work at your factory,” he said.

“When they pay.”

“I’ll give you $400 if you help me figure out how to save my family. Agreed?”

He stuck out his hand to shake. Carmen looked at it doubtfully. For all her talk, all her prayer, she knew charlatans more than Jesus, it seemed. Eventually, she slipped her hand into his.

“I will help in any way I can. I will not accept payment in return.”

****

They landed at Ministro Pistarini International Airport early that afternoon. The trip through immigration took two hours. He stood in line behind Carmen, and watched her present a Mexican passport with Elena Salvadore as her name. He tensed, sensing the wrongness of it. The official who examined her passport excused himself momentarily. Carmen kept her gaze down. Mike followed suit. Minutes eked by as if kept by a broken clock. When the official returned, he waved her through with a nod. Mike exhaled, presented his passport without looking, and watched Carmen hurry away.