Captives (6 page)

“Let's eat,” says Rafael, and Julia carves great slabs of pork for us—so sweet and juicy I can't remember tasting anything better. Afterward, Julia brings Rafael, Miguel, and El Taino their cigars.

Rafael tells us that we are privileged to celebrate with them the Día de la Libertad.

“Yes, you know, once it used to mean something,” he says. “Something real to the people.”

“Well, whadda ya friggin know?” says Melanie.

“If you please, ladies,” he says, and one after the other they light their cigars on the embers of the fire.

Day Nine

Whatever news Rafael went down to the village for, it's not news that will free us. We're given some time in the morning to sit in the shade, then we're told to pack our few things and get ready to go.

Julia kisses the guerrillas on each cheek. Very gravely, she takes Eduardo's face between her hands and looks into his eyes.

“
Cuidado, eh?
” she says. She turns to Rafael. “
Cuidado con el niño.
”

Rafael both nods and shrugs his shoulders, and we start climbing once again.

“Did you get what the old woman was saying?” Louise asks me.

“She said, ‘Take care of the boy.'”

“Yeah, sure,” says Melanie. “May he rot in hell with the rest of them.”

And we fall into silence.

*   *   *

Martin heard the front door open and his father stamp the cold from his feet. He knew he would soon be up to see him. He shoved the magazines under the covers and reached for his headphones. He pressed the arrowed start button and his head was filled with the raw opening chords of Test Drive's “Guilty As Sin.” He looked up at the black-and-white poster on his wall of Tony Kurlansky stripped to the waist, his chest glistening and his hair smeared over his face. Martin had found that if he was looking at that image, when the first words of the song were sung in Kurlansky's ravaged voice—

“You can't escape me,

You won't let me go.

If I was an island

I'd be covered in snow.

And if I was a city

I'd rot from within.

I won't play the victim

But you're guilty as sin…”

—he could shut his eyes and the image lived on, the singer twisting and turning to the clear but broken rhythms, as the music welled inside Martin's head, then spread along his nerve endings, till he felt like an instrument of sound himself.

He didn't hear the bedroom door open and wasn't aware of anyone in the room till his father touched his shoulder. He felt his father's hand, still cold, through his T-shirt.

“Martin.” He saw him mouth his name.

Martin took off the headphones and pressed the stop button.

“How'd I do?” his father asked.

“You did OK.”

“Thanks.”

“Some tough questions.”

His father nodded. “To be expected.”

“I suppose so.”

“Oh, good news about Mum, wasn't it?” his father said.

“What?”

“Didn't she say?”

“
What,
Dad?”

“A London gallery wants to have an exhibition of her
Captives
drawings—the originals.”

“Wow,” said Martin. Then, to fill the silence: “I'm happy for her. Really.”

There seemed nothing else to say, yet his father hovered by his bed. Once again Martin wondered what kind of approval his parents wanted from him.

“You're not coming down then?” his father said.

“No, it's late. I'll go to bed soon. Just listening to some music.”

“What?”

Martin knew his father didn't have to ask. The stack of empty CD cases was all Test Drive, ordered over the Net. He could get five of them on his new machine. He'd listened to nothing else since.

“Test Drive,” he said.

“Isn't it time, don't you think, for something else?”

Martin saw Eduardo, stripped to the waist, his body bent into a Test Drive riff—

“I'm a Chicago mobster,

I'm a fairy queen,

I'm each godforsaken place

My guitar's ever been.…”

—Then he saw his body bending again, writhing, as the bullets hit home.

“No, Dad, I don't.”

“Fine,” his father said, and reached out a hand to—to what?—to ruffle his hair? Was he serious? Martin turned his head away before the gesture could be determined, leaving his father's hand to fall awkwardly on his shoulder.

“Night, Dad.”

“Good night, Martin.”

His father turned away in that defeated fashion, his shoulders slumped. But that would have to be the way of it. It wasn't Martin who had stirred it all up again. The memories. They had lived too closely, shared intimacies no teenager should share with his parents. They knew too much about each other—though not the one thing that might have led to an understanding. Let them reach out to Nick. After all, it had been what they'd wanted to do all along.

Martin lifted the covers, brought out the magazines, and began to read again. There were times, he felt, for all the re-workings, when his father simply lost control of the narrative. It became repetitive, dull, as his father's eye had grown jaundiced and tired. This next section was a case in point. For three days they'd climbed back up the foothills again and then higher, till, once more, they were astride the valley. It was three days' walking and the diary dutifully recorded the swollen feet, the sweat rashes, the blisters, and the aching muscles. It noted how little their captors carried; how serviceable was their combat gear for the terrain; how they themselves, with their sun hats, T-shirts, and expensive trekking gear, began to look faintly ridiculous. But the landscape, as described, remained distant, monochrome, nothing but one shade of green. It wasn't how Martin remembered it. And what would Louise have made of these anaemic descriptions? Louise, with her “Jesus, Marty, there's a rainbow with seven colors in it and they're all green!” Yeah, just what, he would never know.

Eventually they had come to a stand of palm trees, which gave good cover, but whose undergrowth appeared to have been cleared.

“Here we stay,” Rafael had said.

Day Twelve

It looks like we're to be here for a while. It's the farthest inland we've come, following trails that were at times so narrow we had to draw in our shoulders to avoid the evil-looking black thorns. But now there's relief that, for however long, we don't have to climb for a while. We can all, I think, feel a little energy returning to our tired bodies.

Jacques continues to amaze me. The journey seems to have taken little out of him. I think he and Melanie are happier being active, doing something that takes their minds off the situation they're in. So they take the lead in constructing new shelters for us and in digging the latrines—a luxury! Carol and I help, of course, but again it's better that Martin and Louise are active too, so we tend to take a back seat and let them all get on with it. I've the diary to work on and Carol's begun the sketches she'd once thought would be of innocent landscapes. Our captors don't concern themselves with what we do. But today Rafael takes the diary from my lap, as I'm writing. A feeling of utter panic passes through me. Since the beginning, there's been a voice saying,
Write this down, write this down,
and now I feel I'm going to lose it all. But all he does is skim a few pages and throw it lightly back to me.

“Tell the truth,” he says.

“I'm trying.”

Carol's hand isn't quite in with the drawing yet, but somehow that doesn't matter—it gives her pictures a quality of rawness and energy that seems to match the experience. She sketches our camp, its shelters, and us—increasingly ragged as we are. She's even tackled our captors, though her work doesn't meet with Miguel's approval. He grinds his thumb into the faces Carol has drawn of El Taino and himself. Unwittingly, the smudged faces only add to the power of the image—enemies unknown and unknowable. El Taino merely shrugs.

“Is not right for Miguel. But I want to know what El Taino looks like,” he says.

Since then, no one's paid much attention to what we do. And I can see no better way to get through this.

Day Thirteen

The strain is showing on Melanie. Today she explodes at what seems a trivial thing. Louise asked Martin to cut her hair. Maria gave them the scissors. Of course, Martin should have known better, but there's so little for them to do and Louise can, I'm sure, be very persuasive. We are always guarded, but often not in sight of one another, so it must have been behind one of the palm tree trunks that Martin took the scissors to Louise's hair.

She appears in the main clearing where the shelters are, her reddish hair cropped and spiked.

“Christ, baby, who did that to you?”

Martin's standing behind her, not knowing whether Melanie's joking or not. She's not.

“Was that you? What in Hell's name did you think you were doing? The mess you've made of my baby's beautiful hair…”

“Mom, I'm not your ‘baby,' and it was me who asked him. If you want to shout at anyone, shout at me.”

“Good idea,” shouts Melanie. “Did you never think of consulting me about whether it was a good idea?”

“Never,” says Louise.

“Martin,” Carol begins, “you'd no right to—”

But Louise doesn't let her finish. “Oh, come on, Mom, get a life. Where are you—still in some mall with the hairdresser's on the corner? I was coming out in sweat rashes. This is so much more sensible for this place. In fact, I should've had it done before all this even started.”

Louise says this in that way teenagers do—like a challenge to her mother, with that forward lean, so she's almost in Melanie's face. I see Melanie's jaw tighten, but she says nothing, and I'm glad Martin's had the sense to keep quiet, for I'm aware of Eduardo, on the sidelines as usual, grinning at the confrontation.

I think Melanie's accepted she went over the top about the hair, and actually the cut, though crudely done, suits Louise. She's got strong cheekbones and bright, greenish eyes. Still, the argument, though one-sided, ruffles our day, and for the rest of it we keep to ourselves. We're living on a knife-edge and at times the best thing to do is withdraw into ourselves, to avoid any possible conflict.

Day Fourteen

We eat in the late afternoon—rice and beans, but today supplemented with the tiny roasted carcasses of birds Miguel has netted. We let the scraps of meat almost melt in our mouths and suck on the tiny bones. Later, when we're about to leave the fireside and retreat to the privacy of our shelters, Rafael waves us back.

“Hey,” he says, “
un regalo,
” and he throws us a pack of cards. “Play,” he says. “Play with El Taino and Miguel. It will make the time pass.”

“Play what?” says Melanie, still prickly from yesterday.

“Pinochle,” says Rafael. “It's easy. Eduardo will explain.”

Eduardo tells us the rules. It's very straightforward—seven cards each and the aim is to get rid of your cards by putting them down, following face value or suit. There are minor sophistications, but that's about it.

“Well,” I say, “we can't all play. Jacques, why don't you and Melanie go first?”

“
Bonne idée!
” says Jacques. “Come on, my little card sharp.”

“Like, snap!” says Melanie.

“Shouldn't parents let their children play first?” says Louise.

“Well, pardon me for being such a terrible parent,” says Melanie, and it's hard to tell how much she means it. “I stand aside, suitably chastised.”

“You sure,
chérie
?” asks Jacques.

“Is there a choice here? Have I not damaged my daughter enough with my poor parenting?”

“Oh, Mom,
please,
” says Louise, and picks up one of the sets of seven cards Miguel has dealt.

It dawns on me that the
regalo
—present—is not really for us, but for El Taino and Miguel. Since they have taken us captive, their concentration has not wavered. While the others have held their private discussions, El Taino and Miguel have kept their watch on us. Even when we get up in the night, if we must, there is always one or the other of them, the darkest shadow, sitting in the clearing.

Carol, Martin, Melanie, and I gather round the players, and although we are only watching, it seems the most exciting spectacle. To see how each card is fated to follow another is almost miraculous. The fall into a predictable universe is so calming that the shock when a penalty card—a two or a king—is played, and then another on top of it, is almost unbearable.

“
Merde,
” says Jacques, and slowly picks up his four extra cards. I note him grimacing across at El Taino, who has two cards left. Jacques sits forward on his haunches, as if ready to spring. El Taino puts down a ten of spades, then an ace of hearts, and holds up his empty palms.