Out There: a novel (18 page)

The rest of her group had dissipated, wandering back in the directions from which they had appeared. He thought he could hear the rustle of birds’ wings again, off in some nearby trees. One of the men approached the bergamot woman, exchanged a few words with her, and then motioned for the others to go on with their business. It seemed this sudden turn of events, as unlikely as it felt to Jefferson, was not giving any of the others pause.

The woman continued in her slumped position, reminding Jefferson of himself now, her eyes glazed and the words, begun like an assignment, having turned into a rhythmic incantation. She began to repeat the few phrases, as song, and he felt the ease of participating in a known ritual. As she recited, he began to feel he had known her since childhood.

The air was so full of wetness, the fishes could have danced in the courtyard.  In the courtyard. Could have danced in the court—yard!

She stood then, a tall vision between him and the place in the hard earth where the line of men with semiautomatic weapons had stood moments earlier, and waved her arms southward.

“You’ve got a long way to go,” she said.

She looked so hard at him that her gaze traveled straight through. “And it’s important, what you’re doing. Brave. Imagine—on your way to meet the great García Márquez . . .” The woman’s voice trailed off as she said this, looking now above and beyond him, her eyes lost way out in the sky. She laughed softly, something occurring to her as funny or odd, and Jefferson got back on the Kawasaki and called for the pup to follow. The bergamot woman was waving and saying “Godspeed,
muchacho
”
as he turned the bike toward Torreón, and he felt once again that it could all have been a movie, this woman behaving exactly as he imagined a character from
One Hundred Years of Solitude
might, saying just what would be expected to a young man whose life she has inexplicably spared.

In
the brilliant moments just prior to sunset, it began as nothing, and then the nothing took form and became a shimmer far off in the distance, a reflective concentration of energy. Minutes passed, and a dark form materialized within the mirage, a form both nebulous and certain. It was human—a large human—moving toward Jefferson up the highway, and he thought momentarily of hiding. But Jefferson’s need for human conversation, for someone who might listen to the story of the bergamot woman, outweighed his fear. Look into the eyes of the one who hunts you, Esco had always said, and so he stood still and watched as the dark form approached. It was at least half a mile off and moving laboriously, so there was plenty of time to change his mind.

It was late in the day and many miles down the highway after his brush with death, and he had stationed himself at the base of a grandmother oak several hundred feet off the road, the tree’s serpentine roots both pillow to his whirling frightened head and ottoman to his throbbing frightened feet, Remedios asleep with her head on his chest. The motorbike lay in the tall grass nearby, now that it had done its job, helping him to hightail it down the highway. His hands had been shaking much more violently than he would have expected, given all the times he’d skirted death before. In the war, he had known it was war, and that death might come at any moment, but now he realized that death lurked in this new non-war-zone life as well, like the undertow hidden beneath the gentle swells of the ocean on a calm, sunny day.

Jefferson had tried to distract himself from these thoughts by working on the collage, this idea he’d been developing over the past few days as he rode, something new he could create out of some of his favorite lines from Gabriel’s novel. Ideas had flown into his mind—a viscous bitter substance, someone dead under the ground, a scorpion in the sheets—but though he copied and recopied them onto a piece of paper he’d tucked between the book’s pages,
they hadn’t led him anywhere. He still could not tear his mind away from the bergamot woman’s life. And so he’d just sat there under the tree and thought about luck and fear and being thankful. Someone had once told him that how we feel about things is a choice, and that he could choose to feel grateful for whatever came his way, that this was the best way to live a good life. That was when he’d first decided to watch the shimmer approach, not run away from it. But try as he might, Jefferson could not stop shaking.

The grandmother oak stood steady and firm. Far above him it lifted its branches to the sky, holding up all those hundreds of small, bright leaves, rustling their applause like an uproarious crowd at a concert. All else was quiet as the shimmer wore off, and the single form became two. With his eyes Jefferson traced a periphery around two distinct objects. Husband and wife? Grandfather and grandson? Cousins? He could not tell. He detected the bend and swing of two sets of knees and legs moving in a forward direction, carrying heavy loads, coming closer. Both heads seemed to be wrapped turban-style, or possibly in bandannas, which made sense, given the sun’s intensity. The grandmother oak above offered Jefferson its cool, friendly shade, and he closed his eyes in gratitude and breathed despite the knowledge that strangers were headed his way.

When less than fifty feet separated him from the figures, Jefferson confirmed that they were women, tilted forward against some weight on their backs, steady as snares—step, step, step, step—though he could determine very little else about them. The heavy loads implied an important mission, but their pace was unhurried. Had they noticed his orange T-shirt against the tree? He did a long handstand, watching them all the while, and tried to think of what García Márquez might say, but really, this didn’t seem to be like anything out of the novel.

The distance became grenade-throwing range, slightly more than the distance he used to span in the triple jump in high school, and approximately double the four paces between his old bed and the bathroom. If someone had been with him, if he had felt the need to communicate, it would not have been safe to whisper.

The women were covered in heavy canvas clothing, multiple skirts and overtops, identical except for the fact that the one on the far side had chosen mostly greens and turquoise, and the one nearer to Jefferson wore light reds and oranges. On their backs they carried matching messes of rope and twine, wrapped in a tangle around a few short wooden posts. And now that they were so close, he realized exactly who they would have been if they had been in the story: these were the gypsies.

At a distance of ten feet he saw their beauty, a beauty that proved what good works God and the angels could do when they worked together. They were identical twins, their bronze skin glistening under the heat of the sun and their chocolate eyes bespeaking a frank calm. The women were by now nearly close enough to touch, but looked as if they might walk right past without seeing Jefferson. He knew that they might be unsightly on the inside, but the outer loveliness of these two women was enough to make him forgive all possible insufficiencies, abandon his defensive position among the tree roots, and rise eagerly to meet them.

“Hello there, ladies,” he said, waggling the fingers on his right hand in what he had always thought to be a reflection of his good humor and kindness. “I do believe you are the first humans I have seen on this road in half a day. How do you do?”

The women stopped to look at him from under their velvety camel’s eyelashes. Dark wisps of close-cropped, wavy black hair escaped their headscarves, and beads of sweat sparkled at their temples and behind their ears and at the napes of their long necks. Though the mirage-like shimmer around them had long disappeared, the richness of their lovely brown skin glistened all the more at close range. They were of medium height, and though they appeared to be identical in the genetic sense, Jefferson quickly began to notice differences between them. The one in greens and turquoise, who had been walking half a pace ahead, was slightly more wiry and athletic, with a taut quickness in her gestures and a sharper face, with keen, expressive features and a thinner nose.

The woman dressed in light reds and oranges was more rounded, with grace in her slower, more methodical movements. Her mouth quirked to one side in a near-query. She struck Jefferson as having a better sense of humor than her sister, though he knew that he might be projecting his personal history onto her; the quick, skinny girls he’d observed in high school had never appealed to him, while the one girl he thought he’d ever love, Josephina, was round. Jefferson, a skin-and-bones guy who’d always had to work at keeping the weight on, thought it was basic algebra. You had to keep the two sides of the equation equal, like balancing a seesaw: skinny guys and round girls on one side, big guys and skinny girls on the other.

He had a theory about the difference between round girls and skinny girls that he now applied to these two. The rounded one in reds and oranges would run late for her appointments. Rounded women were like that—they enjoyed themselves too much to be prompt. He loved that. Skinny girls, on the other hand, were skinny in large part because they rushed everywhere they went, their whole lives through. Skinny girls were always worried about being late or getting into trouble. He did not want to be judgmental, and he was sure that some skinny girl out there existed to prove him wrong, but so far in his life, Jefferson had found that skinny girls made him nervous and round girls made him breathe deeply and smile.

He broke off this train of thought, noticing that they were still striding forward, and soon would have passed him.

He smiled and waved again. Remedios had woken up now, and she yipped in their direction too. “Hey, don’t you two wanna rest a bit?”

They exchanged glances of near comprehension, followed by a few quick Spanish responses, too fast for his brain, before stepping from the road toward him. They swung their bundles down from their backs, whispering and giggling as they approached. The rounded one asked a question, but Jefferson didn’t understand her, and shrugged. “No sé, no sé.”

He had begun to feel a sense of ownership over the space under the oak, as if it were his living room. As the women made their way toward him, he shifted his arms off his hips and into an outspread and beckoning posture, like the host at a party, coming to the door.
Come in, come in, you must be tired
,
he said in his mind.

The tangled bundles of rope and wood on their backs, he could now see, were hammocks, and the women laid them on the ground only long enough to scope out good hanging spots in the branches. They greeted him with preliminary smiles, but hurried right to work, as if it were understood that the visiting, the getting to know each other, would come after the hammocks were in place.

“Can I help you?” Jefferson asked from behind. “Would you like some water?”

Both turned and smiled knowing smiles at him and then at each other, and then resumed their hoisting of ropes and their tying of knots. Jefferson did not understand why they might be putting up their hammocks but he didn’t think it could be dangerous. He’d recovered from his shock at his near-execution, and now was feeling somewhat entertained. He’d even begun thinking how he might relay this story to Nigel and Esco. Both of these, he felt, were good indications that he was not afraid.

By then it was clear that the twins spoke no English. As they worked, Jefferson performed a panicked review of Spanish III from senior year—he had learned much more about writing Spanish than he had about speaking it, and even that was three years stale.

“So
 . . . cómo está?” he blurted out, wanting to continue his impression that he was a harmless young guy who knew
un poquito de español
. “Muy bien?” he prompted, after almost a minute had passed with no response. “Sí, muy bien!” he said again, another thirty seconds later, laughing a bit to himself. Ever since he had left Santa Fe, with the brief exception of those few minutes on the ground with the bergamot woman and her bandits, his hands had been shaking less, and something told him that he would continue to fail to die, and that this plan to visit GGM had been, in fact, a good one.

He was not afraid. He was certain of that now.

The hammocks hung securely, the twins turned to look at him, standing still for the first time at close range. They were not as old as he’d first thought, probably in their late twenties, and their bodies reminded him of those of high school dancers. He saw skin for the first time as the one in greens and turquoise sat on the ground and began disrobing. She unwrapped what looked to be a long scarf from around her neck and shoulders—several complete circumnavigations of herself—and continued with what appeared to be a practiced shirring off of three layers of blouse and four layers of skirt until finally all that remained was a cotton lace camisole and loose cotton pants, both wild-egg blue. Her sister stripped down to her underlayers as well and began digging in a large duffel bag until she’d found a stainless steel cookset and several plastic bags of vegetables and grains.

They smelled of cinnamon and almond extract, a scent Jefferson could taste many years later if he concentrated, and it caused him to question their existence  Could they be angels? The one in greens and turquoise, the quick one, took a snake of gauzy fabric from yet another bag—ten or fifteen yards, it must have been—and began creating a breezy tent around her hammock. The action recalled in him a distant memory of a woman he could not remember, possibly a dream, and he found himself groping for a reference point for how to behave. A sexual beast was stirring in him, though he was shy about making this assumption. These were beautiful women. They were twins! And so he told himself he was mistaken about what that quick woman in greens and turquoise was preparing for in the hammock under the gauzy tent beneath the giant oak’s branches. Still, he felt a distinct tightening in his chest that he’d come to know as his heart, telling him,
You are still alive
. And so he smiled and reminded himself that he was not afraid.