Bitter Truth (12 page)

“I am just grateful,” I stammer. “I didn’t mean…”

“I work for my money.” He is stern and noble for a moment more and then he smiles. The smile is wide and seems to come from somewhere deep in his chest. When he quickly turns serious again I want to see the smile once more. “Where are you staying?” he asks.

“At a guest house by the sea.”

“I’ll walk you back.”

“You don’t have to,” I say, but I’m glad that he does.

He walks through the alleyway slowly, his back straight, his gait even, and I struggle to slow down enough to stay by his side. As I quiet my step, I find myself calming. “I’m Victor Carl. From the United States.”

“Pleased to meet you, Victor,” he says. “I’m Canek Panti.” He says his name so that the accents are on the second syllable of each word.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Canek. I didn’t mean to insult you. I am extremely grateful. What kind of work is it that you do?”

He shrugs as he walks. “I run errands, paint houses, whatever there is. I have access to a car so I also do some taxi work and guide travelers around Belize.”

“Interesting,” I say. “Do you know a place call San Ignacio?”

“Of course,” says Canek. “It is in the west, near the border.”

“The Guatemalan border?”

“Yes.”

I think on that a moment. I have read enough news reports of the CIA’s activities in Guatemala, and the missing Americans, and the never-ending civil war, to be nervous about that country. “It just so happens, Canek, that I need to go to San Ignacio on business. Can you take me there?”

“Of course.”

“How much would that cost me?” I ask.

He thinks for a moment. “One hundred and twenty dollars American for the day.”

“That will be fine,” I say.

He doesn’t smile at that, he just looks seriously down at the ground as we walk, as if he is somehow disappointed. I figure he figures he should have asked for more and he is right. He could charge whatever he wants and I would pay it gladly in gratitude for what he did for me. At the end of the alleyway the pavement turns and opens up to the sea. Sailing boats are moored by ragged docks, others are moored bow to stern in the middle of the river; boats speed out of the river’s mouth toward the Belizean cayes. We walk together along the water’s edge and stop at a small park next to a red and white lighthouse. A pelican, brown and fat and haughty, floats by, its wings extended against a gentle current of sea air. From the lighthouse there is a view across the sea to the southern part of the city. The white buildings lining the far shore gleam in the sun and suddenly the city doesn’t seem such a pit. I spin around slowly and look. There is something about Belize City I hadn’t noticed before. It is old and rickety and full of poverty, yes, but it is beautiful too, in a non-Disney way, a gateway to true adventure, as if a last haven for swaggering buccaneers remained alive in the Caribbean. Canek, already acting as the guide, waits patiently as I take it all in and then we continue on together, around the ocean’s edge and up Marine Parade.

“You must bargain,” says Canek, finally, as we walk along the unpaved road that fronts the sea. “I say a hundred and twenty, you say seventy, and from there we find a fair price.”

“I thought your price was pretty fair as it was.”

“It is high,” says Canek. “Most taxis will charge eighty-five to San Ignacio. The bus is only two dollars. Let’s agree on a hundred dollars American.”

I walk without saying anything for a bit, pondering everything carefully, and then say, “Ninety.”

He gives me his brilliant smile again. “Ninety-five,” says Canek Panti, “and I will allow that to include a guided visit to Xunantunich, the ancient ruins beyond San Ignacio.”

“Done,” I say. “We have a deal.” By now we are at the end of Marine Parade, standing in front of the tidy white porch of my guest house. “Tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll be here at nine,” he says.

“That will be perfect. I’m suddenly very thirsty,” I say, wiping sweat again from my brow. “Can I buy you a drink, Canek?”

He glances up at the guest house for an instant and then shakes his head. “No, I’m sorry, Victor, I have now to get the car ready for our trip. It needs first some work, but I will be here tomorrow at nine, on the spot.”

We shake hands, solemnly, as if we had just agreed on the next day’s headline in
The Wall Street Journal,
and Canek walks off, hurrying more now. I wonder in just what shape his car is in that it needs so much work but, surprisingly, I am not worried. The Caribbean shines like an emerald in the late sun. The guest house, on its stilts, seems more quaint than I remember it to be, prettier and whiter. I have met an honest and honorable man. Inside, I know, I can get a bottle of cold water and a bottle of cold Belikin and sit at a table on the veranda and rehydrate beneath a spinning fan. All of it is almost enough to make me forget what it was that led me to Belize City, almost but not quite. I think on the man I am hunting and I think on all he has committed and on the secrets he is hiding and think again on last night’s dream of Veritas and even in the midst of the heat I shudder.

16

L
AST NIGHT I dreamt I went to Veritas again. I was at the base of the long grassy hill just inside the great wrought-iron gates with the forged design of vines and cucumbers that barred the entrance to the drive. The moon was bright and cold, the grass devoid of all color in the darkness. Behind, a stream swept past, its black water swirling around heavy, sharp-faced rocks. Two massive sycamores stood side by side, sentries at the base of that hill, and I stood between them, looking up the long sweep of grass to the stone portico that guarded the formal front of the great Reddman house. The wind was fragrant with the soft scent of spring flowers, with lilacs, with the thick grassy smell of a perfectly manicured lawn. Rolling down from the top of the hill, stumbling uneasily down like a drunken messenger, came the sound of music, of violins and trumpets and snappy snare drums. There were lights shining high over my head, there was the sound of gaiety, of laughter, of a world drinking deep drafts of promise. Veritas, on the crest of that hill, was alive once again.

I began to walk up the hill toward the party. The music, the laughter, the light in that dark night, I wanted to see it, to be a part of it all. I was in jeans and a tee shirt and as I got closer and began to hug my bare arms from the cold I wondered where was my tuxedo. I owned one, I knew that, and mother-of-pearl studs and a cummerbund, but why wasn’t I wearing it? I patted my pants. No wallet, no keys, no invitation. Where was my invitation? Where were my pearls? I felt the sense I feel often of being left out of the best in this world. I thought of turning back but then the music swept down for me. I heard a car engine start, coughing and sputtering like something ancient, I heard the neighing of a horse, I heard voices that sounded like guards. I dropped to my knees and began crawling, hand over hand, up the steep hill.

My knees slid over grotesque fingers of roots that jutted from the soil. Pebbles embedded themselves into the flesh of my palms. I heard the faint buzz of beetle swarms infesting the lawn. I thought about stopping, about letting myself go and rolling down the hill, but the music grew louder and swept down once more for me. The violins drowned out the buzzing of the insects and the laughter turned manic. My jeans ripped on a stone, my palms bled black in the moonlight, but I kept moving toward the joy, reaching, finally, the encircling arms of the front portico’s stairwell that would take me to it. On the wide swooping steps that led up to the house I crouched and slowly climbed, steadying myself with a hand on the step above my feet, my blood smearing black on the stone. I could hear distinctions in the voices now, hearty men, laughing women. Snatches of conversation flew over my head as I rose to the top of the stairs. A group, standing outside on the drive that circled the surface of the portico, seemed not to notice me as I slipped across. I was certain the guests would see me but they didn’t; even as they turned to me they looked right through me. They were handsome, pretty, they laughed carelessly, they were sure of their places in the world and I realized that for them, of course, I would not exist. I stood, slapped the dirt off my ripped pants, walked past the group to one of the large bay windows to the right that studded the grand ballroom wing of the house.

It was a party like every party I had never been invited to. Fabulously dressed women, men in white tie and tails, champagne and butlers with tiny foods and dancing. The women wore gloves, they had dance cards, the men waltzed as though they actually knew how to waltz. The celebrants stood straight and showed white teeth when they laughed. I pressed my nose to the glass. I watched their revelries and felt again what I had felt in high school and college and through my career as a lawyer, the sheer desperate pain of wanting to be inside. But where was my tuxedo, where was my invitation? I was no longer in tee shirt and jeans. I was now wearing a navy blue suit, black wing tips, a tie from Woolworth’s, but still it was not enough. A pretty girl in a white dress walked by without noticing me stare at her with great longing through the window. And then I recognized him, standing tall and grand in the middle of his ballroom, recognized him from the pictures and the histories, from the portrait on the billions and billions of pickle jars. Claudius Reddman.

He was an imposing figure, with a deep chest and arrogant stance and perfectly trimmed white beard. His eyes bulged with power, his pinprick nostrils flared, his mouth stretched lipless and wide, and he was alive and in his certain glory in that room. His three young daughters, on the threshold of their womanhood, stood with him for a moment before breaking away as if on cue to their separate fates. The eldest was small and frail, her pale hair tight to her skull. She coughed delicately into a handkerchief and sat on a chair by her father’s side and watched the party with a wrenching sadness. The youngest, tall and buxom, slipped from the room with a man far older than she and stood with him on the portico, talking intimately, smoking. She was the only woman in the whole of that party who was free enough to smoke. The middle child, with flowers twined in her hair, was now dancing with a strong young man, dancing beautifully, gracefully, her head lying back, pointing her raised toe. There was a drama to her movements as she swooped around the dance floor, greedily carving space for herself and her partner among the other dancers until the floor was cleared of all revelers but the two. As she spun in his arms she turned her head and stared at me and for the first time in the whole of that night I was noticed. Her mouth twisted into an arrogant smile. Her pale blue eyes glinted. Her head whipped back from the force of her ever more ferocious spins; her mouth opened with abandon; the lights of that great room bounced off the whites of her teeth with a maniac’s glee.

“My grandmother was one of three children, all girls,” said Caroline as we drove slowly through a crashing rain toward Veritas. “The fabulous Reddman girls.” Caroline laughed out loud at the thought of it. “The
Saturday Evening Post
did a spread about them when my great-grandfather’s pickles were becoming all the rage. Three debutantes and their fabulously wealthy father. Men came from all over the East Coast to court them. My great-grandfather threw lavish balls, sent invitations to every young man in Ivy at Princeton, in Fly at Harvard, in Scroll and Key at Yale. They should have had the most wonderful of lives. Hope, Faith, and Charity. I suppose my grandfather named them after the virtues to guard them from tragedy but, if so, he failed miserably.”

A bolt of lightning ripped open the black of the sky; the lashing rain raised welts on its own puddles. My Mazda hit a pool of black water, slowing as the undercarriage was assaulted by a malicious spray. I had picked up Caroline outside her Market Street building with the rain just as thick. She had been a dark smudge waving at me before she opened the door and ducked inside the car. She dripped as she sat next to me, but there was something ruddy and scrubbed about her. Even her lipstick was red. She seemed almost as nervous at seeing her family as I was.

“The first daughter, Hope, died just before my father was born,” continued Caroline. “Consumption we think, it was the glamorous way to expire then. Grammy always told us how wonderfully talented she was on the piano. She would play for hours, beautiful torrents of music, for as long as she had the strength. But as she grew older she grew more sickly and then, before she turned thirty, she faded completely away. Grammy cared for her until the end. Apparently, my great-grandfather was devastated.”

“The death of Hope.”

“Faith, the middle girl, was my grandmother. She married, of course, to a Shaw, with much charm and fading fortunes. He was of the Shaw Brothers Department Store, the old cast-iron building at Eighth and Market, but the store was doing badly and he married my grandmother for her money, so they say, in an attempt to save the business. From everything I’ve heard he was a scoundrel until the war, when his heroism came as a shock to everyone. Through it all, my grandmother loved him dearly. She was widowed young and spent the rest of her life caring for her son and grandchildren, mourning her husband.”

“How did your grandfather die?”

“It was an accident.”

“A car accident?”

“No,” said Caroline. “My grandmother never remarried, never even dated. She stayed at the house and tended the gardens with Nat and took care of the house and the estate.”

“Nat?”

“Old Nat, the gardener. He’s been with the house forever. He’s really the family caretaker, he supervises everything. My mother’s interests lay outside the house and my father cares even less, so it is all left to Nat. He’s probably busy tonight.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes, when it rains, the lower portion of the property floods. There’s a stream that flows all around the house, leading to the pond.”

“Like a moat?”

“Just a stream, but during heavy rains it overflows the road into the gate.”

“What happened to Charity?”

“Aunt Charity. She ran away.”

“It’s hard to imagine running away from all that money.”

“No it isn’t,” she said. “That’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

She pressed my car’s lighter and reached into her purse for a cigarette. As she lit it, I glanced sideways at her, her face glowing in the dim red light of the lighter. What was it like to grow up weighed down by such wealth? How did the sheer pressure of it all misshape the soul? I would have loved to have found out firsthand, yes I would have, but looking at Caroline, as she inhaled deeply and mused wistfully about the grandaunt who escaped it all, for the first time I wondered if all I had wished to have been born to might not have been such a blessing after all.

“Charity was sort of a fast girl,” said Caroline.

“I haven’t heard that expression in a while.”

“These are all my Grammy’s stories. Grammy said that after her sister disappeared she had guessed that Charity had gotten pregnant and would return in half a year or so, saying she had been abroad, or something like that. That’s the way it was done. But there was apparently a bitter fight between Charity and my great-grandfather, that’s what Grammy remembered, and then Charity was gone. Grammy used to sit on our beds at night and tell us strange and fascinating tales of a traveler in foreign lands, overcoming hardships and obstacles in search of adventure. Grammy was a natural raconteur. She would weave these beautiful, brilliantly exciting stories, and the heroic traveler was always named Charity. It was her way, I think, of praying that her sister was well and living the life she had hoped for when she left. Of all of us, really, only Charity has been able to rid herself of the burden of being a Reddman.”

“And, unfortunately for her, the Reddman money. Any word ever about the child?”

“None. I’ve wondered about that myself.”

“Anyone ever make a claim to her share of the estate?”

“No, the only known heir is my father. Turn here.”

I braked and turned off the road into a paved lane so narrow two cars could pass each other only with scratches. Foliage grew wild on the sides of the road and the trees, boughs heavy with rain, bent low into my headlights as if in reverence to Caroline as we passed. The rain thickened on the windshield so that I could barely see, even with the wipers, and there was a steady splash of water on the undercarriage of the car. I slowed to a crawl. I hoped there were no hills to go down because I figured the brakes were too soaked to stop much of anything.

“Tell me about your childhood,” I said.

“What’s to tell? I was a kid. I ran around and fell a lot and skinned my knees.”

“Was it happy?”

“Sure. Why not? I mean, adolescence was hell, but that’s true even in the best-adjusted families, though no one ever accused us of being one of those. We’re all in tonight, which is a rare and oh-so-delicious treat, so you can judge for yourself. My brother Bobby, my brother Eddie and his wife, Kendall, and my mother. There may be others, too. My mother has a need to entertain and though most refuse her invitations now, there are always a few parasites who can be counted on to grab a free meal.”

“We should figure out what to tell everyone about me.”

“We should. I’ll say you were a friend of Jacqueline’s and that she introduced me to you. But you shouldn’t be a lawyer — too obvious.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a painter,” I said.

I was waiting for Caroline to dub me a painter when instead she screamed.

A huge figure, shiny and black, lumbered out of the woods and stood in the rain before my oncoming car.

I slammed on the brakes. The car shuddered and slid sideways to the left as it kept humming toward the figure. It looked like a tall thin demon waving its arms slowly as my car slipped and skidded right for it.

“Stop!” said Caroline.

“I’m trying,” I shouted back. I had the thought that I never really knew what it meant to turn into the skid, as I had been forever advised in driver’s ed, and that if a clearer instruction had been implanted in my brain I wouldn’t be at a loss at that very instant. As a row of thick trees swelled in the headlights, I twisted the wheel in what I hoped was the proper direction. The car popped back to straight on the road and then veered too far to the left. I fought the wheel again and locked my knee as I stood on the pedal. With a lurch the brakes finally took hold. The car jerked to a sudden stop and stalled.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” said Caroline.

I said nothing, just sat and felt my sweat bloom. With the wipers now dead, the rain totally obscured the view through the windshield.

When I started the car again and the wipers revived I could see that my front bumper was less than a foot from the shiny black figure. It was a man, clothed in a black rubber rain slicker and cowl.

“Oh my God, it’s Nat,” said Caroline. “You almost hit Nat.”

The man in black stepped around the car to the driver’s side. I unrolled the window and he bent his body so that his dripping cowl and face loomed shadowy through the frame until Caroline reached up and turned on the roof light. Nat’s face was long and gaunt, creased with deep weather lines. His eyelids sagged to cover half his bright blue eyes. Circling his left eye was a crimson stigma, swollen and irregularly shaped. There was no fear on his face and I realized there was no fear in the way he had held his body as my car headed right for him, just a curious interest, as if he had been waving his arms not to ward me off but to increase the visibility of my target.