"Well, for one thing, my clothes are starting to stink. I want my things."
"And don"t you think they"ll be waiting?"
"Of course!" My voice was shrill and I clamped my mouth shut and concentrated on my breathing again. I wondered if I was getting asthma or something. After a bit I said, "I"m not going straight there. I"ll jump to the neighborhood first and check it out."
"Clothes can be bought, kid."
I dug out my h.o.a.rd and spread it out on the coffee table. There were sixtythree dollars and some change, fifteen francs, and seven pounds, eight shillings, four p. "Not really gonna last that long, is it?
"Besidesit"s my birthday. I"m ten. I should be able to get my own stuff."
"I really don"t think you shou"
Didn"t hear the rest but as I walked toward the flat from my jump site behind the school hedge, I felt guilty. I hope I hadn"t messed up the living room too much. Sam had done nothing but help me and what had I done for him, besides the bag of beans?
The flat used to be just storage over the detached garage of a small house on Texas Street , but now the house itself was a separate rental property with a front driveway and the yard had been split with fencing. There was a narrow path back along the fence to the flat but there was a police car on the street, pretty much where one had been previously. The cop inside was reading by the dome light.
I backtracked and took to the alley, sticking to the shadows as I got closer to the house and avoiding the backyards with dogs. Fortunately, most of the dogs were inside and the one that wasn"t, a big Labrador named Lucky, lived in the rental house in front and knew me. There was a gap in the fence at the corner of his backyard and I crouched and snaked my hand in to scratch Lucky"s head. He panted and shifted, putting more of his body in reach. I was working on his upper neck when I felt his ears go up and his head shifted to the right, down the alley. He gave a halfhearted, "Woof!" but then shoved his head back into my hand. After a few more seconds of scratching, I heard the distant scuffing of feet on gravel.
Lucky"s fence put me in deep shadow and I was also screened from that direction by an overdeveloped hibiscus growing into the alley from the corner of our yard. Peeking around the hibiscus at knee level I saw the outline of three men walking down the alleyway, backlit by the distant streetlight. One of them carried a shoulderslung bag and they all walked oddlylifting each foot from the ground and then putting it down heel first before rolling the foot forward to the toes.
I pulled my head back quickly, afraid they"d seen me, and, in fact, I heard someone say, "What"s that?"
Then Lucky began barking up a storm, right by my head. I nearly recoiled out into the alley but realized it was the voice he was barking at.
Lucky"s owner, Mr. Mayhew, came to the back door. "Lucky! Get your noisy a.s.s in here!" Lucky went bounding to the back door. "What did you hear?" he said quietly. He put the dog in but stood there on the back porch for a moment, listening. I wondered if Lucky had been barking the night they killed Mum and Dad.
After a moment I heard the door creak again and light silhouetted Mr. Mayhew as he stepped back into his kitchen.
I leaned forward a tad, looking through the branches of the hibiscus. The three men had flattened themselves against the garage door in response to Lucky"s barking, but when Mr. Mayhew went back inside they moved again, working quickly. The stairway from the flat descended toward the street, and at ground level it was visible from the patrol car parked in front. Instead of going that way, the one with the bag set it to the side, then stepped between the other two. They both dropped to one knee and grabbed his ankles, then stood abruptly, throwing him straight up.
He grabbed the railing above and got one foot on the landing with only the slightest noise, then swung over the railing and dropped to a crouch before the door. I presumed the door was locked but he had it open almost immediately. He stood up again and leaned over the railing. The men below heaved up the hanging bag, but he almost missed it, snagging it by the strap at the last minute. One of the men below said, "Careful, you blad!"
"Shhh!" the other hissed.
"Shhh yourself. The detonators would"ve made a lot more noise than me." I recognized the voice. It was the man with the Bristol accent.
On the landing above, the man disappeared into the flat.
The two men below stepped back into the shadow of the garage door. "What keeps it from blowing up someone else insteadthe police, or the landlord?"
"The door sensor. People who come in normally, well, they"re not gonna set it off. But if "e pops in, the motion sensor trips when the door sensor hasn"tsee? That"ll do "im a treat."
Like you did for my parents? I groped for a rocka big rock I could throw or strike with. There was a line of bricks under the edge of the fence, to keep Lucky from digging out. I was able to pull one from the corner, a jagged half brick tucked in to complete the row. I wanted to heave it at them and jump away. Or maybe jump right next to them and hit them in the face with it?
My hands were shaking and I didn"t know if it was fear or rage but I didn"t trust myself to throw the brick and hit anything.
The guy from upstairs came out and dropped the empty shoulder bag over the railing, then swung over, lowered himself until he hung at arm"s length and dropped.
Dammit!
I jumped to the middle of the street and stepped up to the police car. "Hey," I whispered.
The cop recoiled, surprised, his book dropping and one hand going down to his gun belt. "Aren"t you?"
"Yes! But the men who killed my parents are right there!" I stabbed my finger back down the brick path to the stairway. "Behind the garage."
Only they weren"t behind the garage.
Projectiles shattered the pa.s.senger windows and slashed sideways and then the cop was bent over, his head halfway out the window, clawing at the thing sticking out of his neck, a thing with a cable attached to it, and I was in the Empty Quarter in a whirlwind of dirt and brush.
Oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d, ohmiG.o.d. Had they seen me jump? When I appeared at the cop car? But I was on the other side, away from them. I"m shortthe car should"ve blocked me.
I still had the brick in my hand. There was blood on my shirt. The cop"s blood.
I jumped back to the alley and peered up the path. The three were out by the car, weapons leveled, each looking in a different direction, but they all turned back toward me the instant I appeared.
They know when I jump.
They ran back toward the flat and I jumped again, but only down the alley, below my bedroom window. I heard their footsteps by the stairs and I heaved the rock up, hard as I could, through my window.
Fire, light, sound, and flying gla.s.s. I couldn"t have stayed there if I tried, but I returned to the end of the block almost as soon as I"d flinched away to the Empty Quarter.
Debris was still raining down and the roof was gone from the flat and every car alarm in the city seemed to be going off. I walked carefully up the sidewalk as dozens of people came out of their homes to look wideeyed down the street.
I backtracked and looked down at the mouth of the alley, where the men had come from when I first saw them. After a minute, two of them appeared, dragging the third with his arms across their shoulders. As they pa.s.sed under the streetlight I saw blood on their facesflying gla.s.s, I decided and one of them smoked, literally, puffs of smoke rising from his hair and shoulder.
A car came up the street and stopped abruptly. They pushed the man who couldn"t walk into the back and climbed in on both sides, then the car was moving toward me.
I stepped behind a tree and watched it go by. At the next block it turned right. In the distance, the blare of car alarms was replaced by the rising sound of emergency service sirens.
For a moment I thought about walking back to the fiat, to see if there was anything left, anything I could take away, but the neighborhood was well and truly roused and too many of them knew my face.
I jumped.
Chapter Four.
Gra.s.shoppers and Charcoal When the bus stopped in La Crucecita, I thought it was just another stop in the journey. We"d been five days on secondcla.s.s buses and rutera.s.shared minivans in which the other pa.s.sengers might include chickens and where I"d ended up with a baby or toddler in my lap more than once. We"d stayed one night in a hotel in Mexico City but otherwise it was nap as you could on the crowded, bouncing buses.
Consuelo said, "Hemos llegado," and after five days of hearing nothing but Spanish, I actually understood her.
We"d arrived. I couldn"t smell the sea. I couldn"t see it. I smelled diesel smoke from the bus. I smelled something involving cattle. I smelled someone cooking onions.
My stomach rumbled. Except for some crisps on the bus, we"d last eaten in Oaxaca, half a day before.
Most of the pa.s.sengers who"d gotten off at La Crucecita took the street toward downtown but Consuelo led me behind the station and up a forested hill on a trail half overgrown by banana trees and brush. It was humid but not too hotnot like some of the places on our journey where it had taken all my willpower not to jump back to some airconditioned mall.
We crested the hill in less than ten minutes and walked into a breeze that did smell of the sea. Looking between the trees I saw flashes of sapphire blue. Consuelo turned up the ridge, away from the water, but thankfully, still in the breeze. After another five minutes she pointed downslope at a red claytiled rooftop visible between the trees. "Finalmente hemos llegado!"
I shifted until I could see more of it around the trees. It was narrow rows of building around three sides of a brick patio. A low wall stood at the open end but there was also constructionadditions to both wings were in progress, extending the rectangle.
Consuelo crossed herself and then turned to me. "WalMart. Okay, Greeefin?"
We"d been working on my Spanish the whole trip. "No, acuerdate me llamo Guillermo."
"Okay. Lo recordare. WalMart, okay, Guillermo?"
"Claw que si," I said. "Un momento."
The first time I"d jumped in front of Consuelo, she"d gone back to the altar in her room and returned with a vial of clear liquid. She"d splashed it across my face and chest and began a long Latin speech that began "Exorcizo te" but that"s all I caught, really.
There followed an extremely long argument and discussion between Sam and Consuelo in which she kept using the words el Diablo and demonio, and he used the word milagro multiple times. Finally, to settle it, I had to go into El Centro with her and kneel in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe, cross myself with holy water and take communion at Ma.s.s, which was probably a sin, since I wasn"t Catholic, but she wasn"t concerned about sin per se, but poderes del infierno.
She decided I wasn"t a demon or possessed but she was never completely comfortable about it.
Sam wasn"t home but the stuff was waiting where we"d left it, in the old stabletwo garden carts (bigger than wheelbarrows) and a large pile of clothes, shoes, toys, diapers (for her grown daughter"s newest baby), and tools. I started with the carts, a jump apiece, then began ferrying the rest. Consuelo took what I brought and stacked it in the carts, lashing the resulting headhigh stacks in place. It wasn"t all bought from WalMart. Just mostly.
It was b.u.mpy but downhill to the house so the issue was keeping the carts from running away from us rather than pushing them. Consuelo"s mother, the matriarch of the family, was the first to see her. There were tears and hugs. Consuelo hadn"t been home since her husband and son"s funeral three years before.
Children and a few adults followed quickly, but most of the adults were at work and the older children were en la escuela. I was introduced as Guillermo, the orphan. La Crucecita is a village on the south coast of Oaxaca, part of a larger resort area called Bahfas de Huatulco, about five hundred kilometers southeast of Mexico City, a couple of hundred west of the Guatemala border. The blue Pacific water reminded me of the Bay of Siam, like sapphires shining in the sun. It wasn"t that crowded, compared with Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta, but being a gringo, I wouldn"t stand out that much, because of the tourists. That was the theory, explained by Consuelo through Sam.
Her extended family worked for the resort hotels as maids, gardeners, busboys, and cooks. Those who didn"t work for the resorts were in the U.S., sending money back, but this was changing as the resorts grew and entering the states became harder.
There was a welcomehome fiesta that evening and Consuelo handed out presents for one and all. I would"ve been lost except for Alejandra, one of Consuelo"s many nieces. Besides Spanish, she spoke English, French, and German, was twentyfive and beautiful. She"d been working in the tourist industry since she was sixteen and had attended the Inst.i.tuto de Idiomas in Mexico City. She ran a translation services agency and taught weeklong immersion cla.s.ses in Spanish, working with the resorts. "Visit beautiful Huatulco, lie on the beach, and learn espanol," she said. She smiled often with her eyes but when her wide mouth opened into a grin, it was staggering.
It took me five minutes to fall in love with her.
We spoke in French, not because her English wasn"t excellent, but because she had less opportunity to practice French. That was a little difficult for meMum and I would speak in French.
She introduced me to everybody from Sefiora Monjarraz y Romera, Alejandra"s grandmother and Consuelo"s mother, to her many cousins" children. I was given name after name, but only held on to a few. The food was both familiar and strange. I ate a tortilla filled with guacamole and some delicious, spicy crunchy thing.
"What is it? Uh, qu"estce que c"est?"
Alejandra"s eyes were alight. "Chapulines. . . los saltamontes."
I looked confused and she tried French. "Les sauterelles."
It took me a minute. "Les sutereGRa.s.sHOPPERS? I"m eating gra.s.shoppers?" I unrolled the tortilla and it became all too clear she was telling the truth: legs and all, fried, from the looks of them.
She laughed. "If you don"t want them, I"ll eat them." She reached out.
Stubbornly, I rolled them back up and ate the rest of it. Crunch, crunch, crunch. It was still delicious but knowing ... I didn"t go back for seconds.
The next day I had la turista, really bad, with a fever and cramps and the groaning, stumbling run to the toilet over and over. I wanted to blame the gra.s.shoppers, but no matter what else I thought, they"d certainly been cooked well. Consuelo brought me a bitter tea to drink. When I asked what it was, she said something in Spanish and added, "Para la diarrea."
Gra.s.shopper tea, no doubt.
Later, she brought a small wooden box and burned it by the window in a metal pan. When the charcoal had cooled down she mimed eating it. "Comete el carbon de la leha."
"Yuck! Absolutely not."
Alejandra came and coaxed me into taking it. "It absorbs toxins and is the quickest way to stop the diarrhea. You only take it this once. No more after. That would be bad for you."
"I don"t want to. You also eat gra.s.shoppers!" I set my teeth and curled in on myself, prepared to resist to the death. But she didn"t play fair.
"Faites ceci pour moi, mon cher."
French, dammit.
"For her." I managed half of the charcoal washed down with some salty boiled water. "For electrolytes." And they stopped bothering me.
The runs did stop after that and I was able to eat rice with chicken broth that evening. Two days later, after my first fully solid meal, Alejandra and Consuelo took me out to the patio and we sat in the shade of the banana trees growing near the wall.
"My aunt tells me that you are not just an orphan, but that those who killed your mother and father are still after you."
Reluctantly, I nodded. I knew we had to tell her. It wasn"t right to ask her to help without knowing. But I liked her. I didn"t want her to push me away, to not want anything to do with me.
"And she brought you here to avoid them. They would still kill you if they could find you."
"Yes."
"She won"t tell me why they want to kill you. She says only you can tell me."
"Ah." I licked my lips and nodded to Consuelo. "Gracias." To Alejandra I said, "Thatthat was good of her." Consuelo was keeping my secret.
Consuelo said something then, and there was a brief backandforth between her and Alejandra that was too fast for me to follow.
Alejandra looked back at me, a little confused. "She says she is willing to try that thing. The thing she said she didn"t want to do before."
I raised my eyebrows at Consuelo. I knew what she was talking about. I"d suggested it back in Sam"s living room, where he could translate, but she"d been afraid. I guess the thought of five more days on buses and ruteras was more daunting.
And it would certainly answer Alejandra"s unspoken question.
"When does she want to leave?"
Compared with the stuff we arrived with, Consuelo"s little suitcase was tiny, but she was taking back a box of regional foods she couldn"t buy in California.
"Any gra.s.shoppers? iChapulines?" I asked.
Alejandra laughed and Consuela said, "No. Sam no like."
Still, walking uphill into the jungle, the box was heavy and I was sweating by the time we reached the level spot where I"d transported Consuelo"s gifts. I could"ve jumped here from the patio but I was cautious. I"d decided that the rules had some merit.