The Juliet Stories (14 page)

The grown-ups squeeze into the cab, and all the children, except for Emmanuel, ride crouched and bouncing on the flat metal bed behind.

“I kissed him,” Isobel breathes into Juliet’s ear. “And that’s not all.”

The wind carries everything away.

Bram greets them at the gate. He lifts his children over the side of the truck, knowing nothing of this day. Their house waits silently behind the fence.

“Goodbye,” everyone sings. Juliet would cry, but the grown-ups are laughing, and laughter is easy, laughter lifts and snares, lifts and lies. All these grown-ups, talking over each other, drowning each other out.

“Our paths will cross again.” Heinrich slides his frame behind the wheel of the truck. He says it twice. “We’ll meet again.”

Juliet believes him. He is certain. He seems to know for sure.

Grown-ups. They think they can change change itself.

Because this story collapses, crushed from beginning to end. Juliet has to steal everything she learns about what happens next. The grown-ups speak of it with a low solemnity that masks horror, shock; but they cannot pour it out.

Because these two families will not meet again. Their paths will never cross.

Here it remains — this story that goes on until Juliet is a middle-aged woman standing in her wintry kitchen holding in her hands a diminished collection of possibilities. Here it is — an indestructible essence that dangles like the blown glass ornament in Juliet’s kitchen window: a story from another country, from a time long ago. Inside the glass is a frozen figure. He’s hanging by the neck. Who will find him? Who will cut his big blond body down and lay him to rest?

Juliet’s questions might wake for eternity, never to find peace. Is this story hers to hold, or even to behold?

No matter: she holds; she beholds; and the mystery is sealed. She cannot alter its insistence that it will be the thing that it is, no matter how horrifying, how unwanted, how inscrutable, how grievous, how — if she catches herself looking at a certain time of day, when the light lowers and shines through it — shockingly beautiful.

Seven of them are travelling towards the Honduran border over mined roads in a white Jeep . Every spare inch is crammed with supplies: notebooks and pens, a new tape recorder, batteries, water canteens, butane lighters, chloroquine and Bactrim and iodine tablets. Juliet and Keith perch atop luggage behind the back seat, trying not to kick each other. Juliet asks Yuri, who is turned around so he can entertain them, why there is enough room for their bodies but not for their legs.

Yuri says it is because they are upright creatures with lengthy appendages.

Bram sits peacefully beside Josiah, a new volunteer, who is driving and has been since Estelí, where they stopped for lunch at the home of an American nun, Sister Mary Grace. Juliet scooped beans and rice with cold, black-spotted tortillas before running outside to play alone in the shaded dirt.

Sister Mary Grace held Juliet’s brother’s clammy head, her blue-veined hands stroking his hair. Keith did not resist. Juliet saw him through the open doorway, resting for this moment against Sister Mary Grace’s white blouse, his head a dark shadow. The mouldering backyard was surrounded by concrete walls embedded on top with broken beer bottles. From the yard next door erupted the clucking of invisible chickens, a noise Juliet will associate with the hurtling of time, with there not being enough.

“God be with you,” said Sister Mary Grace, waving as they pulled away.

The answer to that is
And with you
.

They are in the mountains now, past Ocotál’s hallucinogenic pine forests, and climbing. It is the dry season and the surrounding hills are pale, chalky. The road twists and snakes, and when a Russian-made truck speeds past from the opposite direction, the Jeep’s tires leave the gravel. In the back, with the luggage, Juliet shrieks with glee as she is flung into the air.

“I feel sick,” says Keith.

“Bram, he’s going to be sick!”

A shortlist of things to fear: the hills opening up, automatic weaponry, macho posturing, stepping on a mine, thrown into the air, engulfed in flame, ambush. What Juliet fears: snakes. She huddles in the truck with Emmanuel, who is sprawled in sweaty sleep on the middle bench seat. Gloria supports Keith beside the rear tire, the sound of his struggle, his fight against his body, wrenching in the absence of the bruising wind. The others urinate into a field of bleached grass. The air is heavy, inert. Insects rasp.

Juliet does not see the men with guns, sees instead her dad and Josiah and Yuri raise their hands above their heads. A skinny dog circles, sniffs at whatever came out of Keith, and Gloria almost screams, rises, dragging Keith with her, her shoulder blades bashing the truck’s dusty frame.

Juliet sees them now, one older and one younger. They carry machine guns, AK-47s, which everyone here calls
ah-kahs
. They might be a father and his son, the boy wearing ragged fatigues, ammunition across his shoulder like a pageant sash; he is not much older than Juliet herself. His father’s incongruous dress shirt is almost transparent, yellow under the armpits, hanging over a pair of black belted pants. He peers through the back window, into Juliet’s eyes, and she sees a deep brown poke of blood mottling the white of his left one, the hair above his lip silver spikes trapped in folds of skin. He ignores her, so calm that no line in his face changes shape.

“What can we do for you?” calls Bram.

“
Americanos
.”

“We’re going to Jalapa,” says Bram.

“So go.” The man waves the hand that holds a cigarette.

Slowly Bram returns his arms to his sides. “What’s happening? Do you have information?”

“Ah, you are Americans. You’ll be fine.”

“Is it the Contra?”

The man shrugs.

“The Frente?”

But there is no telling what the man knows.

Doors slam. No one bothers with seatbelts. Josiah pulls on the steering wheel and the Jeep’s tires spin, spitting gravel. Juliet looks back at the father and son standing in the road, watching them go.

“Easy,” Bram says to Josiah. “If you need a break, take a break.”

Josiah does not want a break; he wants a cigarette. Yuri lights one for him, and one for Gloria too. With the windows open, smoke and dirt stream through the vehicle like a river that tastes in a fine grit on Juliet’s tongue, inside her cheeks.

“Have you ever seen a sky so white?” Gloria’s hand quivers as she lifts the cigarette to her mouth.

“Uh-oh,” says Bram.

A pickup truck blocks the road. The Jeep fishtails to a stop on stones. Stillness. Dust choking, drifting slowly downhill.

“Which side are they on?” Gloria holds the cigarette, unfinished, but does not draw.

“Not ours.”

“Everybody out!” The leader stands in the truck bed. His men are lean, dressed in jungle fatigues in varying stages of decay; boys, really.

The teenager who guards them cannot stop talking, words crashing against words like kite string unravelling into the sky, laughter, flashing teeth, excitement, hysteria. The others eviscerate the Jeep, packages and packs ripped open, Juliet’s own bag dumped. One of the boys steps onto her baby blanket.

“No!”

Time blinks, stalls. But the leader bends, flicks the blanket to the teenager, who offers it to Juliet. He grins. “For you.”

Gloria uses the blanket to wipe Emmanuel’s howling face; woken prematurely from his nap, he is not happy.

“Trouble’s come looking for you.” The leader sweeps his gun at them, addresses Bram, who stands in reply: “We’re going to Jalapa.”

“You should go home instead.”

Bram is silent.

“She’s a nice truck. How does she run?”

“We are going to Jalapa.”

“Ah, my friends, it’s going to be a long walk.”

“Give him the keys,” says Gloria in English, rising. Reflexively, one of the boys trains his gun on her.

Bram steps between them. “Take what you want.”

“Ah, thank you, thank you.” The leader reaches for Bram’s hand and shakes it as if he is concluding a pleasant business deal, slaps his shoulder.

Their guard marches the family and Yuri and Josiah away from the road into leafless brush, pushing deeper and deeper into the lush mountain desert. Small plants can be seen growing everywhere, tough, pale scraps of life clinging, rooted beneath the dust, waiting for sustenance. Hanging on.

Is this it? It does not occur to Juliet that it might be. She is thirsty, her mother has given Emmanuel her special blanket, and every winking shadow is snake-shaped.

The teenager stops. “Wait here.” He pats Juliet’s head roughly, like an older brother might, before backing away, gun pointed at them, then turning and running.

They hear the Jeep’s engine turning over. Dust from its exit, and the pickup’s, floats down to them.

“I can’t believe it,” says Josiah. He’s excited. “I can’t fucking believe it. Contras. Right here.”

“They’re operating pretty deep for the Contra,” says Bram.

“Holy shit,” says Josiah.

“Watch the language.”

“I’m sorry. Fuck.”

Bram wraps his arm around Gloria’s shoulder, the palm of his hand cradling her cheek, pulling her head gently against his body. She resists.

“We quit,” she is crying. “We quit this job. We quit this country. We are going home. Do you hear me, Bram? We are done.”

And Bram says: “Have faith, Gloria.”

In the middle of the road are tire tracks, boot prints.

“They took my baseball glove,” says Keith.

Bram lifts him, protesting, to kiss the top of his head. They begin walking, slowly, following the road north and east.

“Wait.”

They all hear it: the rumble of a struggling engine in pursuit. Juliet instinctively scrambles away, but Bram calls her back. If the advancing vehicle is populated with enemies, so are the hills surrounding, and if Juliet’s dad believed only in that, he would never have come to this country in the first place, would never have put his family into a Jeep and driven these roads. The fact that Juliet and Keith and Emmanuel are here, in this landscape, in this moment, is proof that the worst can be changed into something else.

They all hear what Gloria is muttering under her breath, as if it were being said by someone else:
I give them back to you, Lord, I give them back to you, I release them, Lord, they’re yours, take them
.

A colourless Lada brakes on loose gravel — peeled-off roof, doughnut tires, and holes where once belonged headlights and windows.

“Get in.” His white dress shirt flows loosely around thin arms; his gun, and his son, nowhere in sight. “
Americanos
.”

Yuri balances Keith and Juliet, one on each knee, beside Gloria and Emmanuel in the back seat.

“Your lap or mine?” says Josiah to Bram after a pause, and laughter pours like medicine down their throats. Juliet can feel herself breathing again. She tugs the blanket from Emmanuel and sinks her hands into its softness, wrapping her wrists like a fur muff. Emmanuel hits her and grabs.

“I don’t want to leave,” she tells her mother. “I don’t want to go home.”

“Give the blanket to Emmanuel, Juliet. Now.”

Afternoon shrinks to twilight as the ancient engine broaches corners and guts its way into a valley and out again, where await them plots of
jocote
trees and orange groves and cool pines barely visible in the raw blackness of night. The driver refuses their invitation to stay the night, but not a few of the American dollars Bram has kept hidden in the lining of his boot. Yuri’s pocket flashlight illuminates the rutted main street of downtown Jalapa.

Juliet steps over a narrow, garbage-strewn concrete channel that separates the road from a line of attached houses. Charlotte waits in the doorway, electricity off, the cramped room alight with candles. A pot of beans bubbles on her little gas stove over licking tongues of flame, blue and orange.

Charlotte has a hug for each of them, but Bram holds her at arm’s length. “This has been a day and a half,” he says.

“And Gloria,” says Charlotte. Their hair lingers together as their heads touch and part.

“I couldn’t let Bram come all by himself,” says Gloria. “Could I.”

“Pineapple?” offers Charlotte.

Keith and Juliet eat and eat. They gorge themselves until their tongues prickle and burn with the fruit’s sweet acid, and then they rinse sticky elbows and chins in the
pila
standing in the tiny courtyard.

Stunted banana trees are growing all around them, right out of the dirt floor, and the shadows of bats pass in and out of the house through the wide opening in the tin roof. It is just the two of them here, spying on the grownups through jungly leaves. She loves her brother — but is this retrospect? They have the capacity to argue over the most insignificant subjects, over who sits where, over who saw what first; they toss magic phrases at each other like amulets, lists of words that have weight only because they’ve agreed between the two of them that they do:
black ball beats them all, called it, stamped it, red ball, silver ball, no backsies, no cheatsies
, and others she can no longer recall. And there is no one to ask: Do you remember? Can you tell me, do you remember what they meant?

Here they are, still and together in this private interior forest, and she loves him. She loves that it is the two of them, that they have each other for protection, that in the worst of moments she can glance at him and away and know: he knows too. Even if they never talk about it (because they never do). Even so. He knows. He knew.

What it feels like to float unmoored, to be carried on the breeze or blown by hurricane winds, to be given back to God. What it feels like to part suddenly from friends, to live without warning, with terminal uncertainty, to know everything in an instant will change. What it feels like to be called, to let go of the self, a feeling of running amidst an epic rainstorm, drenched and amazed, shot far beyond the boundaries of what is proper and expected.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be a boy with a gun. Maybe.

Think of the things these two could say to each other, here, under green-veined leaves. But it seems they never say the things that could be said, and it seems that is okay too, because what could these two say to each other that would fit more perfectly than a line of words strung together by magic, a spell that binds them, brother and sister, in this house lit by flame, in this town under siege, near the border of a country that is not theirs and never will be, and which they do not claim?

Here they are. Let them be.

Of all the songs sung by the Roots of Justice volunteers, the one Juliet loves most asks, “Where have all the flowers gone?” Each verse follows a repetitive pattern, carrying forward until the song curves around to end at its own beginning, illuminating it so that the meaning changes, she sees differently, she understands where all the flowers are growing in the first place — in a graveyard, beneath which soldiers lie. The delicious shiver as the guitar strums into its final surprise of
Gone to flowers, every one
.

Why does this song so affect her? It is composed of only a few spare lines, but it needs nothing more to build a cumulative picture so vivid, so elemental, of the double forces of creation and destruction. What are flowers, if not for plucking? What is youth, if not for abandon? What are seasons, if not for turning? What are soldiers, if not for war?

But war is never mentioned in the song.

How can the most important part be left out and the song still say everything that needs saying? But it does.

Juliet is going to tell a story. She knows the rules, the five W’s, five sister witches who must be beguiled into gathering and pouring out their tinctures and their powders, lest the story emerge from the pot deformed, unbreathing, lest it bubble until it is burnt away, stillborn. Magic. It’s as good as anything for explaining why one tale comes out for good and another does not. Effort, though a fine starting place, is not the half of it.

This story emerges in a dark barroom; they serve underage, and she thinks she is in love with the boy who listens to it. This is a theme. She will give it to the ones she loves, and she will love the ones who listen. It grows with her. It fills journals: a black hardcover with blank pages meant for sketches; another, a gift, leather-bound; several flimsy drugstore notebooks. It ages. It is stamped into three passports. Years separate it from itself, decades. It is a silent argument, a dream she waits to have again, an album of photographs never taken.