Don't Look Back (16 page)

She laughed harder than she’d expected, releasing the tightness in her chest.

Raindrops arrived fully formed, filling the air, splattering her hair, instantly soaking her. The water came as a relief, cutting the stifling heat. She wondered where Jay was and if this same rain was falling on him. Or his corpse.

If she hadn’t borrowed that Seattle Mariners hat—

If she hadn’t had to go to the bathroom just then—

If she hadn’t let her curiosity get the better of her—

—then she’d be back at the lodge right now, pouring lavender soap into turtle molds and not huddled in a cemetery in the dark of night, doing her best not to acknowledge just how fucking terrified she was.

As quickly as it had arrived, the rain vanished.

“Let’s go,” Eve said, forgetting to use Spanish.

They kept on through sparser forest, requiring less and less of the machete, until at last they broke through onto a stretch of elephant grass, acres wide, the top of the mountain. Taller rises still loomed in the background, but as they waded across the field toward the distant outline of a ranch house, the sudden sense of openness was disorienting. How quickly she’d acclimated to the surround-sound inundation of the jungle. By comparison the purr of wind through the elephant grass was soothing.

They skirted the edge of a muddy wallow the size of an Olympic pool, and Fortunato paused.
“Do not be scared. He will leave us alone if we do not invade his territory.”

“Who?”

His eyes clicked over a few degrees. She whirled.

About ten yards away, a black bulge in the wallow rotated lethargically, orienting itself toward them. Eve took an unsure step back. And another.

The bulge coasted forward on stunted legs. Twenty feet and change.

She remembered reading somewhere that they never stop growing, that they can live up to seventy years. Two facts that, when put together, yielded something monstrous.

Another flash lit the scene, Eve giving a soft cry, though the reveal only confirmed the nightmare tableau she’d painted in her mind. Armored scales jutted up along the crocodile’s spine, torn from age or battle. The pointy snout ratcheted open, snaggleteeth bared, the creature venting heat through its mouth.

Thunder shook her.

Fortunato’s voice stayed steady.
“His name is El Puro—
The Cigar.
Don Silverio’s grandfather brought him here from the coast as a baby. He has an easy life picking off stray calves, dogs, chickens. He does not want to eat us.”

Eve kept one foot pointed toward the house. Ready to sprint.
“Let’s not find out.”

El Puro’s obsidian eyes watched them back away from the wallow. Unblinking.

They shoved through the elephant grass toward the house. Two burros watched them approach, staring balefully out from a wobbly structure that was more shed than stable. As Eve and Fortunato passed them, a guttural wheezing emanated from around a thicket of yucca plants. Hoarse, moist, pained exhalations.

The sound of something dying.

Fortunato held up his hand, slowing as they neared, and raised the machete.

A backlit form swung out from behind the brush, pivoting with a raised shotgun to aim at Fortunato’s forehead.

Eve’s knees sagged, the bottom dropping away, her courage going to pieces, falling like pebbles into the void.

“What do you want?”
The voice held more panic than menace.

Fortunato dropped the machete, held out his arms.
“Don Silverio. Por favor.”

The man lowered the shotgun, his shoulders bowing with relief.
“Gracias a Dios.”

Finally Eve drew a breath.

“We need to speak with you,”
Fortunato said.
“As the
alcalde.
We have business.”

The man staggered back a step, seemingly weakened from the shock, then nodded once and beckoned. They stepped around the thicket. A cow lay on her side, her bulging eyeball protruding from the socket, her snout frothed with white cords of saliva. Her frozen legs were shoved stiffly through the flattened grass. She did not toss her head or make any movement at all. Even as each wheeze forced its way up her throat, her ribbed hide barely rose and fell.

A cud of half-chewed flowers lay near her head, clearly excavated from her mouth. They looked like purple irises. Eve crouched, poked a finger at them, casting her mind back to sophomore-year botany.
Delphinium scopulorum,
better known as Rocky Mountain larkspur, wasn’t just cardiotoxic; it had neuromuscular blocking effects, shutting down a body limb by limb until paralysis set in. Then death.

“I thought I cleared it all from the fields,”
Don Silverio said.
“But she ate it with the grass.”
He crouched over the suffering animal, stroked her cheek affectionately. That distended eye stared up at him, helpless. The lips vibrated with each chuff.
“There is nothing to do.”
He rose and gestured for them to give him a moment of privacy.

They nodded solemnly and stepped around the side of the house, waiting in a tangle of pumpkin vines near a chugging generator. Eve tensed, bracing herself.

Gunshot.

Don Silverio appeared a moment later, wiping his mouth. He opened the crooked screen door. “Welcome,” he said, in near-perfect English.

Chapter 23

On the battle-scarred farm table lay Theresa Hamilton’s class ring and Jay’s bloody kerchief, a universe of dark possibilities contained between the two. When Eve mentioned the threatening man with the scarred face, recognition flickered across Don Silverio’s features, but he volunteered nothing, listening intently, the leathered skin beneath his left eye twitching as she spelled out the specifics. The rain had made a fervent return, hammering the roof. Wind moaned beneath the eaves.

At the sink, a matriarch—Don Silverio’s mother—washed cobalt-rimmed enamel dishes in a farmhouse sink, and a boy a few years younger than Nicolas eavesdropped from the hall, his face half hidden by the doorjamb, one chocolate eye taking in the alien proceedings. No mother was present, but when Doña Bartola snapped her fingers, the boy withdrew quickly, heeding his grandmother with haste.

Eve concluded her account, arriving at the million-dollar question: “Do you have a phone that can get reception up here?”

Don Silverio bobbed his head deliberately—the man seemed to do everything in slow motion—and excused himself to the other room. Eve blew out a breath, taking stock of the spare, dignified house. An Old World heirloom sideboard. Two framed photographs, yellowed with age and positioned artlessly on a bare, cracked wall, each showing a white ancestor posed formally beside a seated native wife. A humble altar in the corner, votive candles and pictures of saints arrayed on a floor mat. Directly above the shrine with no apparent irony, the rack onto which Don Silverio had nestled his well-maintained shotgun as they’d first entered.

The kitchen, clearly Doña Bartola’s domain, occupied a stretch of wall and featured an adobe stove, a tortilla griddle, and a volcanic
metate
slab, worn from use, on which she crushed corn beneath a grinding stone, the sound continuous and grating. The window above the sink looked out to a square of moon-limned blackness, and the warped shelf to the side held packaged pasta, jars of lard, a clump of tomatoes still on the vine.

Don Silverio returned bearing a pottery jug, which proved to house a hand-stitched leather pouch. With great ceremony he unzipped the pouch and removed an antique satellite phone the size of a brick, which, Eve construed, had been handed from
alcalde
to
alcalde
over the years for precisely this purpose. He pushed a button unsurely, frowned at the unit. Rooting in the pouch, he came up with a charger. He plugged in the phone by the sideboard and tried again, waiting, his lips twitching. The entire technological interlude seemed anachronistic.

Eve’s hands played nervously with her paperback, now warped from the rain, the pages collectively rippled. On the inside cover, she had jotted key numbers from her phone: her mother in Palm Springs, Rick in Amsterdam, the across-the-street neighbor. Contingency plans in case this troubled situation grew more troubled. And of course she’d call Nicolas, let him know that she was coming home early.

Hear his voice.

Eight o’clock right now at home. He’d have finished his music lesson with the unimprovably named Mr. Doolittle. Bath time would have just ended. He’d be curled on the couch in the fall of light from that ugly chandelier they’d never bothered to replace, entranced with Super Mario Kart, wheedling Lanie into letting him play “just one more game.”

Her eyes moistened.

Don Silverio set down the phone on the sideboard and returned to the table. “It will not work.”

Her ears heard, but her brain didn’t process. “What?”

“The storm, it is electric. I will try again when it has run its course.”

“Won’t that be a long time?” Eve said.

His steady gaze shifted to the window. Lightning illuminated roiling clouds, an endless canopy of gray-purple cotton. “Perhaps two days.”

“We can’t wait that long. Our friend is in danger. He’s either injured, or … or—” She heard herself winding up and stopped. “The man with the scarred face—you know him.” Her intonation somewhere between a question and a statement.

The gaze grew less steady now, Don Silverio’s eyes giving a telltale tic to the right. “No.”

“You know who he is.” Eve turned her attention to Fortunato. “Don’t you?”

The grinding of stone against
metate
kept on, steady as a dog working a bone.

Fortunato wet his lips. “He treat badly the girls
locales
sometime.”

“Well, he’s probably responsible for what happened to Jay. And he’s out there. So I don’t think we want to sit around and wait for a storm to end.”

The grinding sound had stopped. Doña Bartola still faced the wall, her bony shoulder blades tenting the fabric of her blouse. Her hands gripped the inert stone.

A windblown owl perched on the outside sill of the kitchen window, moonlight lending him an otherworldly glow. One wing stuck out, bent.

“Tecolote,”
she said.
“Trae mala suerte.”

He brings bad luck.

The cigar-butt head rotated, the wise eyes blinked, and then the owl flailed from the sill and was swept off as if by a current.

Don Silverio had remained motionless. “You’re right,” he said to Eve. And then, to his mother: “
Ama,
load your burro. You will take the trail to the
milpas
tonight. Uncle Quique is waiting.” He raised his voice, but not by much.
“
Magdaleno?”

The boy popped out from the hall immediately, removing any doubt that he’d been lurking right around the corner.

“You will pack now
.”

The boy nodded and scampered off. Doña Bartola dried her hands and drifted back to a different bedroom.

“Why are you sending them away?” Eve said.

Don Silverio returned his attention to Eve, and there was no denying the fear his eyes held.
“La tormenta.”

The storm.

She looked in his face and knew him to be lying.

“I will take a report to San Bellarmino at first light. It is my duty.”

“How far is that?”

“Fifteen hours by burro. The
presidente municipal
is there. He will call Policía Federal in Oaxaca City.”

“How far is Oaxaca City?”

“Thirteen hours.”

“So it’s
closer
? Can’t you go directly there?”

“No. Policía Federal have to be asked into an incident by a
presidente municipal.
”

“That makes no sense.”

“It is how things are done.” Don Silverio maintained the same quiet tone. “When things are done differently, Americans say, ‘That makes no sense.’”

“Fifteen hours,” Eve said.
“Fifteen hours.”
She smoothed her palms against the rough grain of the table. “Okay,” she said to herself. She wrapped Theresa’s ring in the kerchief and handed it to Don Silverio. Then she removed the passport from where she’d tucked it inside
Moby-Dick
and jotted down Jay’s name, his date of birth, and the passport number on a pad Don Silverio provided. She stared at the writing.
Jason Rudwick.
Gay Jay. Before all this she hadn’t even known his full name.

She handed the pad across, but Don Silverio didn’t take it.

“The report,” he said, “it must be written.”

Eve looked at him, not getting it. Fortunato leaned toward her and said, “We do not know how to write.”

She nodded and got to work.

*   *   *

In the basin of Don Silverio’s bathroom, Eve scrubbed ink from her fingertips. She’d written out the report as best she could, employing stiff, official-sounding phrasing, trying not to exaggerate the situation while also conveying alarm and urgency. She hated to think that Jay’s life hung in the balance of three scrawled notepaper sheets.

Exiting, she came down the hall, pausing at Magdaleno’s room. The boy had thrown a few items into a canvas bag—toothbrush, stuffed animal, pair of tighty-whiteys—then gotten distracted from packing. He sat cross-legged, drawing with crayons.

She surveyed the room, affection warming her chest. The floor, strewn with dirty clothes, stuffed animals, and a few secondhand-looking plastic action figures. A chair on its side, the hollow beneath the prefab desk converted to a mini-fort replete with books, blankets, and carved wooden masks. Drawings taped to the walls, soldiers and monsters and stick figures holding hands. A world apart, and yet how familiar the diorama was.

She thought about all those times she’d shushed Nicolas when he’d crowded her elbow with a new finger painting of Optimus Prime, a macaroni-pasted Buzz Lightyear, a tender spot where his finger
really, really
hurt. His timing impeccably bad, an interruption whenever she picked up a phone or collapsed into a chair. She’d do anything now to be there with him, to have him within reach, self-centered and irritating and disrupting her every third thought. How she’d taken his presence for granted.