Читать книгу The Risk of Returning, Second Edition - Shirley Nelson - Страница 8

We were barely off the ground and on the way when I knew it was a mistake.

It began with Pat Crane. I met him first. No significance to that in itself. Somebody has to be first, and he certainly was. We met in the air, shortly after take-off, 30,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico.

I had noticed him earlier at the departure gate in Miami, a heavy red-bearded man reading a newspaper. I hardly glanced at him then, or he at me, aside from the way adult males do, with an instinctual check of the territory. But in retrospect it’s a wonder he wasn’t watching for me there, holding high my name in magic marker, a certain prescient light in his eye.

The flight was delayed, this second leg of the trip. Announcements were made, repairs to something in the instrument panel. The waiting area was full. A big percentage of the passengers were apparently Central American, loaded down with shopping bags bearing the logos of Miami stores. They chattered cheerfully, their voices reaching my ears in a familiar orchestrated sound, the Hispanic lilt. I don’t mean I understood it. The language was no longer mine, other than a phrase here and there, an old song I recognized but couldn’t sing.

I wasn’t taking it well, this delay. It seemed ominous to me, though I knew it was only the state of my mind, that like a lost child was seeing things in every tree and post. Not that I felt lost exactly, more like mislaid, as if someone had set me down and forgotten where I was, a notion that might have struck me funny at another time. I tried to read, paced the corridor, and stared out the windows at our stalled behemoth.

My seat when we boarded the plane was on the aisle next to the portside wing. At the last minute a dozen teen-aged kids swooped on board like a flock of noisy birds, filling spaces in front and on either side of me, chattering across the aisle and singing snatches of songs. All wore the same white T-shirt with the same logo, “Gringos For Jesus.” Gringos they were, in a fair-skinned, orthodontal sort of way. Two of them filled the empty seats in my row, a boy in the middle and a girl by the window.

When we were airborne, I removed the headset from the seat pocket, hoping to pick up some decent jazz in the aircraft offerings. As I plugged it into the arm rest, the boy turned toward me confidentially and mumbled something. I unwired myself and asked him to repeat it. He did. Would I like something, I thought he said. Kids had only just begun saying “like” and it still caught me off-guard. “Like what?” I asked. He tried again, still mumbling, his words run together, rapid fire. I leaned closer. “Where would I like to go?” No, wrong. “Where will you go,” he said. “Where will you go if we all go—like down?” His hand took a dive.

“I go like down, too?” I said. I put on a dead face, eyes rolled back. When in doubt, play the clown.

Not funny. The boy looked frustrated. He mumbled a correction and I had to ask him to repeat it. He raised his voice then, a lot.

“Heaven or hell! I mean like heaven or hell! Where are you going?”

That got attention, everybody’s, that is. Suddenly the chatter around us stopped. An audience of young faces peered at us over the seats. I might have been confronting a room full of students on the first day of classes. I felt the same first-day wash of tenderness and panic. The boy was waiting for an answer, his face ruddy with responsibility. I wanted to set him at ease, get him off the hook. Nothing came to my lips. It was not my day for that kind of finesse, but it was his for persistence. His fingers reached for what looked like a tract in his shirt pocket.

Walking away was clearly best for all. I glanced about for a different seat. Nothing empty in front of us. I turned to look behind and found my face mere inches away from another. In a slapstick, it might have been God’s own, a fairly young God with a bushy red beard, like the Norse god Thor, but it was only the reader in the waiting room, seated in back of me now and leaning forward to speak.

“There’s an entire unclaimed row in the rear,” he said. “Shall we go for it?”

Why not? I took up my pack with a wave to the kid. He looked relieved. “Have a good trip,” he said.

The man ahead of me in the aisle was big. He wore the rumpled look of a guy who carries an extra hundred pounds and is tired of tucking in his shirt. The bowl of a briarwood curved out of his suitcoat pocket and a faint smell of pipe ashes trailed behind him. When we reached the empty row, he motioned to me to enter first. “Do you mind?” he asked, wheezing a little. “It’s easier for me on the aisle.” He was in every way wide, his eyes widely spaced, hair abundant over the ears. I felt oddly narrow and colorless beside him, eyes too close set, beard too cropped.

We introduced ourselves, shaking hands over the empty middle seat between us.

“Ted Peterson,” I said.

“George Patton Crane,” he offered. “But do call me Pat.” Not a trace of whimsy. “First time to Wah-day-mallah?” That’s how he pronounced it, as I hadn’t heard it in years. I mumbled something about “long ago,” but he was on another track already, the book he had seen in my hands back there in Miami, that old novel, The Red Badge of Courage, which he had noticed especially because his grandfather had been a distant kin to the author, but a copy he suspected could be owned only by an English professor, considering its tattered condition, and who else would be reading it anyway? “Am I right in that decoding process?”

I nodded, smiling carefully.

“And what prestigious institution do you represent?” Crane asked.

“Shawmut Junior College,” I told him. “Boston.” I was sure he had never heard of it, because neither had I until this second.

He was in sociology himself, he said, before I could ask. In fact, in the course of the next hour I was careful to ask nothing that might be taken as a lead, and couldn’t have found an opening if I had tried. He had been working on his doctoral dissertation at NYU for eight years now, he said, and “one might ask—might well ask—” why he had not thrown in the towel long ago, considering the roadblocks presented by the needless requirements of a soft and self-conscious science. But at least he had a publisher in waiting, he said, and Deo volente, would soon have a book.

He used his hands as he talked, sometimes close to his chest as if conducting a small choral group, sometimes punctuating his sentences with a flourish: quotes, periods, even a semicolon. His advisors kept insisting on a wider statistical base, he said, but lordamercy, his topic was embedded in the unstatistical, the un-pie-chartable spaces of human life. And one might wonder, mightn’t one, what all that had to do with the destination of this plane? He answered that with a “drastically stripped down version” of his life story, which took the better part of the next half hour. He was an AB, he said, an army brat. His father had been a military advisor, so as a kid he was dragged around, ad infinitum, nauseum and absurdo, to various parts of the world.

We were interrupted twice by flight attendants, first with drinks, then with food, a late lunch of sorts. I had no appetite, but Crane apparently did. He stopped talking long enough to feed himself with zest, the little plastic fork in his left hand and the knife in his right, looking like a bear at tea in a British fairy tale. When he began talking again it was to “let me in” on the heart of his thesis, U.S. expats. He was on the way to “Wah-day-mallah” right now to find fresh material among ABs and MKs—missionary kids, “the lost children of Peter Pan”—and he was already on the lookout for a good interview.

“Really,” I said, with what courtesy I could muster. If he had tied me to the seat and sat on me, I couldn’t have felt more like a hostage. He had been back repeatedly in the last eight years, he said, “in spite of dire travel advisories.” Times were when he’d come across dead bodies himself on the street, early morning before they got scooped up.

“Really,” I said again.

“Did you happen to be there during those days?”

“What? Oh. No.”

“Of course nothing has actually changed. It’s just a little sneakier.”

“Right. Of course.”

“What’s yours?” he asked.

“Mine?” I’d lost a thread somewhere.

“Reason,” he said. “There are only so many right now. Research, religion, or reconnaissance.” He even looked roguish, or tried to. Why was I on this plane, that’s what he wanted to know. I considered the “reasons” I could give him, and knew I would not, even “I don’t know,” which was closest to the truth. He was leaning toward me, his body overflowing into the seat between us. All the old warning lights began to flash. I resisted an urge to adjust my jacket over the money belt, where I’d put my father’s letter. Instead, I pulled out my glasses and began to unwrap the slice of carrot cake that came with the lunch.

He was watching me, waiting for an answer, the nosy bugger. I considered telling him, in some configuration of courtesy, that it was none of his business. Or I could just maintain the silence, which is what I did, tearing open the stubborn package with my teeth and biting into the terrible cake. That worked. He excused himself and settled back in his seat for a nap.

I turned to the window and the diminishing light beyond it. By now the plane had dropped through cloud cover and I could see mountains below, an extension of the Sierra Madres, draped in green quilts of vegetation, white mist rising between them so deliberately you’d swear the whole range was on fire. Dusk deepened with the long descent and soon the lights of the capital city spread across what seemed to be a plateau, its edges dropping off sharply here and there into oblivion. I was straining to make that out when we touched down, and the pilot’s voice welcomed us in both Spanish and English to La Aurora International Airport. I reset my watch. It was a few minutes before 6:00, Central American time. Pat Crane opened his eyes.

I managed to maneuver away from him as he probed for his luggage in the overhead. But standing in the stalled line waiting to deplane, I felt warm breath in my hair, and when I entered the terminal he was beside me, moving with the crowd. At least he was not talking, both of us wordless as we walked between life-sized blow-ups of black-haired Mayan women lining the walls with Eight Million Smiles. A gigantic quetzal bird, made of turquoise and scarlet paper, hung from the ceiling, its preposterous tail feathers waving in the air.

I slipped ahead of him in the line to the caged window where passports and tourist cards were processed, then headed off to the baggage carousel on the lower level. A packed crowd filled a balcony there, shouting and waving at the people they had come to meet. One man at the railing circled a huge bottle of pink Pepto-Bismol over his head. “For the galloping shitskies,” said Crane helpfully, over my shoulder. As I picked my bag off the conveyor belt, he grabbed his, too, riding right behind mine. And so together we joined the line for customs inspection.

Crane’s suitcase was given a perfunctory exam by two men, and he stepped several feet aside. My inspector was younger than the others, very young, I thought. He said something to me in Spanish.

“I don’t understand,” I answered.

He proceeded to explain in English, so muddled I could only shrug in return. “Okay,” he said, and as the two older men stood by watching, began to transfer to the counter every single item, first from my suitcase, which contained only clothes, and then from my pack—tapes, books, an apple, granola bars, Walkman, toiletries case. This he unzipped and emptied— toothbrush, deodorant, nail clipper, beard trimmer—all of it looking remarkably mundane. I think that bothered me the most. Nothing interesting here, let alone drugs or contraband. He asked me to empty my pockets. I did. Change, comb, mints. I would be patted down next, I supposed, money belt removed, letter extracted.

But now the kid turned his attention to my books. He placed the four paperbacks side by side on the table, a Spanish-English dictionary (new), The Red Badge of Courage, a copy of Walden and the Final Harvest edition of Emily Dickinson (all old). After flipping through each, he picked up the novel and brought it over to the other men.

“But why?” I protested. They ignored me. Cover half off, the book was passed from hand to hand among the three of them.

Now Crane, the empty pipe hanging from his mouth, stirred his bulk and walked forward. “Dispense uds, señores,” he said. There was a moment of exchange, a question and an answer. The book along with every other item was replaced methodically in the bag and I was signaled to go.

“What the heck was that all about?” I asked, as we passed into the lobby.

“Just an aberration,” he said. “They don’t usually do it to U.S. tourists.”

“Oh, that’s comforting.”

“The kid’s a trainee, I think. Just showing off.”

I glanced about for a men’s room, saw a sign and headed there. He was waiting when I came out. We walked together toward the exit.

“What did you say to them, anyway?” I asked. “That you’re related to the author?”

He guffawed, unoffended. “Lordy, no! I had a hunch the fellow got hung up on the word red, and indeed, that was the case.”

It took a couple of seconds for that knot to untangle. Subversive literature? “What bloody nonsense!” I said.

“Oh, indeedy-dee. Ludicrous. But ludicry, if I may coin a word, is often the name of the game around here.”

The doors to the exterior, just yards away now, beckoned with wafts of cool air as they opened and closed. Out on the sidewalk the breeze mixed with the exhaust of a fleet of taxis double-parked at the curb. Cabbies whistled and yelled. I turned to Crane to say goodbye. He looked rumpled and tired, his shirt half out. “I appreciate whatever you did,” I told him.

“Don’t mention it, old chap,” he said. Thunder sounded faintly. “Rainy season,” he announced.

A taxi pulled into a space in front of us, the rusted hulk of an old Ford Crown Vic. “Zona Uno?” called the driver, getting out of the car and opening the trunk. He wore a Mets cap.

“Are you going downtown?” Crane asked me.

I opened the back door without answering. Four people instantly pushed past me into the cab, two in front and two in back. With a squeeze there was room for one more.

“Take it,” I said to Crane. “Are you going that way?”

“Yes, to the Centenario.” He surveyed the seat skeptically. The cabbie barked something, slamming down the trunk. “It’s yours,” said Crane.

I got in, both bags on my lap, and reached my hand through the window. He shook it, palming a business card. “Centenario,” he repeated. “I’ll be there most of the month. Call me if you need another salvamento.”

What?

“Deus ex machina.”

Oh. A joke? “Sure,” I said. I had no intention of ever seeing him again. Then the vehicle was off with a roar, plowing a path through the wet evening haze. In a few minutes we were on a main artery. All the way to the hotel, I watched for landmarks that might have meaning for me, but nothing did—an enormous statue of somebody, a viaduct, wave after wave of plump graffiti. No leaps of sensory memory. On the dark horizon ahead an urban glow edged the sky. Soon buildings closed in on either side, neon lights flashed, and we were locked in a preposterous horn-blaring traffic jam. By the time we reached the hotel, it was raining hard.