The Center of the World (16 page)

Kate faced the back of the café, where an arched doorway led to the back room. The blood in her head whooshed. She pictured people standing sentinel over Manuela's body and her son, and the body of Jorge in the makeshift jail. Her eyes stung and she looked down, fussing with her hands. She pressed her lips together to gain control.

“Did anyone survive the massacre? I mean the ones who were shot, were there survivors?” What was left of her voice came out in a whisper.

“I don't know. Do you want to know the thing that tipped the balance, other than the balls-up courage of the people? There was a reporter from the
San Francisco Chronicle
in the village who witnessed the massacre and the demonstration. She wired in the story and it's all over the world. Her name is VJ Kirkland.”

Kate heard the tinkling sound of a spoon against dishware and she looked up. Fernando held a tray with a
café con leche;
he shook his head slightly before he came into Will's sight.

“Hello, Kate. This is your favorite drink. For my special customers, I don't wait for them to order,” he said. Fernando set the cup and saucer in front of Kate.

He'd been listening, she was sure of it. Why shouldn't she tell Will about Kirkland?

“I might have read her stuff in the States. I'm not sure.” She thanked Fernando and sipped the hot drink. She pushed up from the table. “I have to get back. I don't want to leave Sofia with Marta for too long.”

“How about a do-over? I mean it. I feel terrible about the last time I was there.”

Something tingled in her solar plexus, all of its own volition.

Kate watched Fernando's back as he walked away, his thin torso pulsing. The cold from the adobe walls pulled out the warmth from her skin. She wouldn't say anything about Kirkland, but her desire to be with Will muffled any caution.

“Sure, let's try again. Tonight?”

Suddenly there was a light in her chest, something other than terror. Will's smile was sad and soft and the combination was unsettling.

CHAPTER 23

K
ate kept her trips outdoors with Sofia to a minimum. When she did go out, she tried to take both children. With little Felix along, she was a white woman with two children, one Mayan and one white, not a gringo with a Mayan child.

The reality of taking two small children through the streets of Antigua was much harder than she could have imagined. While Sofia clung to her, Felix exploded from one spot to the next. When she ventured into the market to buy another handwoven cloth, she went alone to the stalls on the outskirts of the city.

Kate could not use Manuela's cloth to carry Sofia; it would immediately identify the child's origins. And there were the bullet holes from the machine gun, a surprising few given the torrent. She had washed it and dried it in their room. If she were smart, she would throw it away, take it out to the base of the volcano and bury it. Any number of options had come to mind: Shred it with scissors, burn it, dye it indigo blue. But the cloth stuck to her like a spiderweb. Manuela's hands had touched every thread in the cloth. If she discarded the cloth, there would be nothing left of Manuela. She rolled it tightly and tucked it under the foot of her mattress.

Kate had on jeans and a thick sweater. She had pulled her hair back into a braid and pulled a wool cap over that. Casa Candelaria never truly got warm, but having now slept outside under the worst possible conditions, Kate was grateful for far lesser accommodations than she would have accepted only weeks ago. No rain soaked her and the child, no mudslides threatened, and they were out of the wind. Marta's place already earned four stars.

Kate walked along the network of vendors and looked casually at each one. She squatted in front of a woman and admired her fabric.

“Where do you live? What region do you come from?” Kate asked in Spanish.

“By the ocean,” she answered. The woman had broad cheekbones, with fine features and skin that seemed to pull across her face and not down.

The ocean would be far enough away. Kate selected a yellow cloth to carry Sofia. She had never seen a yellow weaving around Santiago. Handwoven cloth lends itself to geometric designs, but what attracted Kate were the animals and birds that appeared along the weave. Children like animals and birds. She pictured Sofia pointing to each one, learning the word for bird, horse, jaguar, and some of the other as yet indecipherable animals.

She bought fresh cheese, eggs, and Spam. She wasn't sure what Marta intended to cook with the ingredients, but this had been the request.

 

That evening Marta, Will, and Kate warmed themselves by the fire after a dinner of Spam omelets and potatoes. They ate in Marta's living room, amid a collection of laundered sheets. A group of German travelers had checked in and Marta struggled to keep up with the wash. Sofia and Felix made a wonderful mess of the mashed potatoes. Both children refused the Spam.

Kate pointed to the mini-piles of the pink meat product discarded by the children. “I think they know something that we don't,” said Kate.

She was on her third beer. The great salve of alcohol had entered her bloodstream as soon as her mother died and now it found the old pathways of grief once again. With each beer, Manuela's face with the black hole over her eye faded and grew hazy.

“You Americans are too finicky about your food. We ate tinned meat for Sunday supper and were glad to have it,” said Marta. She patted her stomach. “Just like home.”

“It was a magnificent meal of multiple meat sources,” said Will. He nursed the same beer that he had started with. “Let me take care of this fire and see if I can inspire it.” Will put another small stick of wood on the fire and rearranged the embers until the fire wrapped its greedy tongue around the fresh wood and sent flames upward.

“Impressive,” said Marta. “You'd be right at home in the outback.”

“Maybe the outback should be my next stop.”

Kate set her beer down on the floor next to her chair. The idea of Will leaving gripped her throat. “Where is your next stop?”

The sound of the iron knocker clanging on the front door startled Kate.

“You're a jumpy one. That's only the German tourists coming back after their dinner.” Marta scooped up a pile of towels and headed for the door. “Continue on without me, but take notes. I want to know where this fire-tender is off to.”

Will's sweater smelled of fresh air and smoke, and as his body warmed, tendrils of feral spice rose from his skin. Sofia and Felix played on a rug closer to the fire. Kate got up and sat with the children, putting Sofia on her lap. The child fidgeted a bit, wanting to be near the boy. “Oh, Sofia, I know Felix is the main attraction. Be careful of the fire.” Kate pointed with her finger. “Fire. Fire.” She exaggerated the word, dragging it out, placing her top teeth on her bottom lip as she enunciated.

Will squatted down next to them. If sadness could have been drawn on someone's face, it would have been around Will's eyes, which had a dryness to the outer edges and eyelids that had gone heavy.

“I learned a saying about children from the Maya and I've heard it all over, in different dialects, but the meaning is the same.
Ri akkala qi wish kaj qe ri schoy
. It means—”

Sofia turned away from Felix as if the sun had just shone on her. Will stopped in mid-sentence. She stood up and walked to Will and placed a tiny hand on his cheek. Then she rocked from foot to foot and said, “
Akkala wishkaj,
” in a singsong voice. Sofia smiled and a small yelp came from her throat that Kate had not heard before.

Will said, “
Q'uel ya'? Juyu' nim?
” He was casting with a fishing rod of words, testing the water with bait until he got it right. When Sofia repeated a word back to him exactly as he said it, he smiled at her.

“Stop it! What are you doing? Stop it,” said Kate. She scrambled to her knees.

Will looked over Sofia's dark head at Kate. “She's from Santiago Atitlán, isn't she? When were you in Santiago, Kate?”

She wanted to protest, but instead a new sound came out of her, not a word, but some leftover sound from the massacre, as if her ears had popped at high altitude. What came out was only air escaping from her lungs.

The door to the living room opened. “It wasn't the Germans after all. There's someone here to see you, Kate. She said she knows your friend in Oakland. She gave me this. It's for you.” Marta handed her a note.

Kate jumped up and ran out the living room door. She sprinted to the front door, unbolted it, and yanked it open. “Wait.” On the street, she saw the taillights of a truck two blocks away.

Kate placed her hand on the cold adobe wall. Did Kirkland have to be so dramatic, so film noir? Kate went back inside and pulled the door shut, locking out the rest of the world. She stood under one of the ceiling lamps and opened the note.

 

Checking what? Kate squared up her shoulders and went back to Marta's living room. Marta cleared dishes. Sofia had abandoned Felix for Will, curling into his lap and gazing at him with sleepy eyes.

She crumpled the note and tossed it into the fire. “Be careful,” said Kate. “She has a way of growing on you.” She could tell by the look on Will's face, a deadly seriousness, that he was adding up Kirkland, Santiago Atitlán and a small Mayan child. There was no way to stop him.

“Your friend must have been in a hurry. I'll be putting Felix to bed soon. Would you like me to put Sofia in with him? The two of them sleep easier together,” said Marta.

Before Kate could answer, Will said, “I'd like to hold her longer. I think she might even go to sleep right here. This doesn't happen much for me.”

“Then I will put this lump of boy to bed,” said Marta, scooping up the child like a large sack of rice.

“I no lump of boy,” said Felix, laughing with delight. Yet he offered little resistance.

Sofia arranged herself in Will's lap so that she could look up at him. He cradled her head in the crook of his arm. She whispered to him, a question, emphasized with an imploring shrug. He smiled at her and gently shrugged, answering her.

“She wants to know where her mother is. I suspect you know the answer to that,” said Will. The golden smile drained out of him. His eyes held her in a grip.

Kate slid to her knees on the cold tile floor and covered her face with her hands. Her skin stripped off her shoulders, then her torso, and fell to a puddle on the floor. She was only blood and bone.

“You're probably in way more trouble than you can imagine,” he said.

CHAPTER 24

 

W
hen Will was still a language specialist, he vacationed along the Pacific coast. Ten days was enough. It was late October. The beaches were sparsely dotted with tourists. The independence of his new job was intoxicating, but he longed for the familiarity of Hector and his family.

If his neighborhood in Brooklyn was ever transplanted to Guatemala, it wouldn't be all that different from Hector's village with men gossiping about imagined sex and women cooking over a fire while children tugged at them. He could fit in a side trip to Dos Erres before heading back to Guatemala City.

He bought another soccer ball for Hector, tied it to his motorcycle, and drove away from the Pacific coastline, heading north and east. Hector could hold this one in reserve for the day that the other soccer ball was beyond repair.

When he was half a kilometer from the village, he came to the last crossroad and an odd buzz resonated through him, much like walking past a dark alley in Brooklyn late at night. He pulled his motorcycle to the side of the road, flipped the key, and pushed the bike up on its kickstand. There should have been sounds from the village by now. Men and women should have been coming and going, carrying sticks for fires, coming back from the terraced gardens, their all-purpose hoes over one shoulder. What was wrong? Why weren't the dogs barking?

From the ditch on the far side of the road, two men rose up, Maya, their faces fixed and decisive, eyes burning into Will. They had guns and each man had a machete sheathed at his side. Had they been waiting for him? Machete, the agricultural tool that kept the forest at bay, cleared paths, and, at lower elevations, sliced open coconuts as if they were butter. These machetes had been transformed into weapons.

This is what hatred looked like. Will recognized it and it etched deep in the back of his throat. They had nothing to lose; they had already lost too much. They were resistance fighters and they had not bothered to hide their affiliation from Will.

“I'm going to the village,” he said in K'iche'. “I have friends there. I am bringing my young friend Hector a soccer ball.”

Two more men and a woman appeared, all armed. The sun bore through his shirt, peeling away his sweet expectations of Dos Erres. The woman, who, if she had lived in Brooklyn, would have been in high school, lowered her gun. Five guns were pointed at him. When the girl lowered her long, dust-covered weapon something changed; they had been ready to shoot him and now they weren't. Not now, but maybe soon. This was how he would die, not by a punk kid on angel dust in Brooklyn, but here, in the highlands where he would be food to the vultures. Who would tell his parents?

“We know who you are,” said the woman. Every bit of music that was natural to their language was drained from her voice, as if her vocal cords had been torn apart and put back together in a bizarre patchwork.

All he had was his ability to speak in their dialect. Nothing mattered except getting to the village and finding the people who knew him. Was Hector in danger? Only four guns pointed at him now. He decided on formality to show respect.

“I request passage to the village to see my friends. I have no weapons,” he said.

 

When Will had been a bike courier in Manhattan, he learned how to read drivers the way a horse reads a rider, noticing when a rider turns his head, moments before they pull on a rein. The woman driving toward him didn't have her turn signal on but he saw the rise in her right shoulder, ready to ease into the left lane, right in front of him. Or the way a man tilted his head or pressed down a forearm on an open window. The last thing that Will paid attention to were the turn signals or the brake lights. If he wanted to stay alive on his fragile bike, he had to know about a change in direction before the drivers did.

Like all languages that he decoded, driving in Manhattan was just one more language. He could not afford to be smug or cocky, which would have made him a dead bike courier, but he had known he was good. Knowing that he couldn't afford to miss any of the signs that drivers offered made him even better.

Now he needed to understand the language of resistance fighters if he hoped to stay alive.

 

The guerillas pointed their guns down toward the unpaved road. They had all decided something. Will missed that essential moment because he was too afraid, the scent of his sweat changed to the sharp emulsion of fear, and all he wanted to do was run. Where had they come from so suddenly?

“You want safe passage to the village?” said one man, bone thin, dark eyes. He was older than the rest with deeper lines around his eyes. “Come with us. Your friends are waiting.”

The late afternoon sun was still warm, burning through the thin mountain air. Will didn't want to know their names and prayed that they weren't going to tell him. Everything that he knew before shifted and tilted.

The older armed man walked first, followed by two more, then Will, followed by the woman with her gun slung over her chest. The last man hung back, facing the direction that Will had just come. He was barefoot, his broad feet covered in nicks and white scars, his soles as thick as leather. Will was taller than even the largest man by a foot.

The road to the village narrowed on the edge of the mountain. Two cars could not have passed each other easily. Will knew this last turn, where you could look out over the forest on the right as the road hugged the hillside on the left. Where were the short-haired village dogs with their tails curled upright into a ring? The crunch of rocky soil beneath their feet should have alarmed the dogs long ago.

When he had worked for Outward Bound, they had trained the kids to put out the campfires with water and dirt, to smother all oxygen from the fire. The smell always stayed with him and it meant the end of things; the damp, dark, acrid smell of wet charcoal.

As they turned the corner, the dead campfire smell hit him like a dark rolling cloud of a storm. He stopped walking. A monstrous dread cascaded over him. There had been a fire, then a rainstorm. The woman behind him lifted her gun and prodded the small of his back.

Two adobe houses had served as the centers of commerce; Fanta orange soda, sacks of rice, cornmeal, and tinned meat had been stacked in modest piles. Now, anything that could have burned was gone, including the shelves and the chairs that two old women used to sit on while they talked. The walls were pocked with bullet holes.

Will stopped and spun around, facing the young woman. “When?” he shouted. “What happened?” Without waiting for her to answer, he began to run to the next house. “Hector! Hector!” His muscles were alien to him, his arms heavy in dreamlike uselessness, his leg muscles refusing to go fast enough.

The first body was already swollen, skin giving way to insects and birds. A barefoot man, his striped pants cropped at mid-calf, a belly wound dark with dried blood, and his hand covered with blood from holding his abdomen together. Death made the man unrecognizable. But Will must have known him; he must have seen him before.

The village was held in a cup of land along the mountainside, a stream running down the hill to form their water supply in a large concrete container that served as the heart of the people. Women brought their laundry there and scrubbed their clothes along the concrete, children brought plastic buckets to fill for the household, people gossiped and watched their small children there. Will saw another body draped over the edge of the concrete; a woman, bent at an impossible angle, faceup, her head in the water, her feet not quite touching the ground, doing a graceful backbend in death.

Hector's family lived in a clutch of houses behind the water supply. Will could think of nothing else but to find them. He backed away from the dead woman, as if she could rise up and reach for him. Then he turned and ran for Hector's house.

Every adobe wall was dashed with bullet holes, nearly cutting one wall in half. The door to Hector's house was small for Will; he had to duck low to enter. The roof was corrugated metal and beyond that a drape of fabric, now half torn away, formed another room. This room, the kitchen, was empty. Beyond it was the doorway to the shared courtyard where Hector's mother and grandmother often sat with their back-strap looms. Will ran from room to room, to the enclosure for the chickens, looking for life or, worse yet, bodies.

When he came out, the guerilla fighters stood in a semicircle facing the doorway. He hadn't known that he was crying until he tried to talk. His words came out sloppy and wet. He sank down on the ground, falling as though he was sucker punched, landing on his butt. They waited for him to stop crying with a consideration not yet burned out of them.

The older man knelt down on one knee. He could have been a farmer, examining his crop, or a fisherman looking out over a lake before dawn. “They killed as many of the people as they could and buried them in a mass grave. The ones you see in the village are the ones who were wounded and ran into the jungle to escape. When they came back, they died from their wounds and the cloud of sorrow. But they came home to die where their families and ancestors lived,” he said.

“The soldiers said they had proof that the people were supplying us with food. How could the soldiers in Guatemala City know this?” he asked. He drew a line in the dirt with his gun, a circle for the village, a line, and then a circle for the capital. “From here to the city. Tell me, how could they know anything? Who goes from here to the capital?”

The difference between a question and a statement was clear. How could he have missed the warning signs with Hector's village, with the Department guys in Guatemala City? Innuendos, silences instead of responses, the overly solicitous desire to help the Maya, all of the little bits and pieces that he hadn't paid attention to now sliced through him. For the first time in his life, he hadn't understood the signs that had been all around him. The massacre had everything to do with Will. If he hadn't been here, befriending people, learning about their meager commerce, children would still play by the water, women would continue to weave.

“Do you know Hector and his family?” he whispered. He still sat on the ground, unable to get up. “Did they survive?” Hector was a fast runner; he could have dashed through the jungle, dodging left and right as he had with soccer.

“There was no one left alive. This is what the soldiers do to punish the villages who feed us,” said the young woman. “This is what the Horned Toad has done.” The war made her bold and let her speak with the men.

What was she talking about? What Horned Toad? Something scratched at his brain. Will pushed up to his knees, swaying. “I was here studying agriculture, commerce, to help bring in equipment to the village . . .” He struggled to find a phrase. “I learn languages . . .” He covered his face with his hands. This had been the ruse; the seemingly benign information that he had delivered had been worked through the military intelligence and molded into something heinous. Ron Blackburn had said Jenkins oversaw this area. Would Jenkins have permitted this?

Will catapulted deeper into the nightmare. Jenkins and his disfiguring forehead lump. The Horned Toad. He had been here; the resistance fighters knew him. Will had been inches away from the man who was responsible for the carnage around him.

“Stand up,” said the man who pointed his gun at him again. “We will show you where Hector is now.”

This couldn't be happening. This was a nightmare and soon he'd lurch into wakefulness, sweating and crying, tangled in his own sheets. He was a bike courier, an Outward Bound counselor, a Peace Corps volunteer. He loved languages and played soccer and made children laugh.

They walked again and Will stumbled; he couldn't feel his arms or legs. They went past the remains of the houses, past bodies of dogs that had not been buried, past the cooking pots that were overturned. Will's chest clenched—there was the soccer ball, wedged between a tree and a broken back-strap loom.

The dirt was freshly turned, shaped like a trench, thirty feet long, five feet wide.

“The men of the village dug this pit at gunpoint, knowing that they would be killed. The soldiers bring shovels. That is how it is done, again and again.” Birds sang and swooped in on the insects that dusk delivered. A line of ants carried bits of leaves across the freshly turned mound of earth. Beneath the insects lay the people of the village.

Will knelt on the edge of the mass grave and picked up a handful of dirt, cupped it, and brought it to his lips. He heaved with sobs, convulsing beyond his control. This was a new language for him, the elemental language of unspeakable despair. He became canine, jaguar, screech owl, howling into the jungle, eyes closed, pounding his fists into the dirt.

When he was spent, his throat raw, mucus pouring over his lips and into his mouth, eyelids swollen with tears, they lifted him from the dirt, dragging him ten feet away from the horror. This is where they would shoot him, a marker to the mass grave. They dropped him to the ground. Killing him would be better, there was no other solution. If they could read his soul, they would see it sliced by the horror of death. He would be unable to live knowing that he had played a part in the massacre; no one could live with this.

A young man, a boy really, raised his gun. More than anything, Will wanted him to shoot. The boy settled the end of the gun into his shoulder.

“You must kill me. Shoot me. I am not human anymore.” Did he speak in K'iche', English, Spanish, or some other language that he had learned through the death of Hector's village? He no longer knew.

Will stood up, exposing his chest to him, ready to pay the price for being the conduit to the military. If it weren't for Will, Hector would still be alive, tapping the soccer ball from knee to knee. If only Will hadn't stopped at this village, if only he hadn't been blinded by the chance to learn languages, if only he had read all the signs.