The Sky Below (29 page)

Leaning against the wall of the pit, she pulled her pants off and dirt tumbled over us as I hoisted her up with a grunt. She was heavy, braced against the dirt. She tightened her legs around me; dirt fell into my eyes, my mouth, but once I got into her I was all blood and reckless forward motion. Her skin was hot. “Go,” she said. Hunched over, I buried my face in her neck and pushed like I was trying to push through the dirt wall. We dug together. Was it still art if you fucked in it? Our dirt house was crumbling over our shoulders, into our hair. I thought maybe it would bury us, but I kept pushing anyway. She wouldn't let me pull out, wrapping me with her short, strong legs, as I got close to coming. The weight of her was almost too much, but it also made me want to fuck her more, deeper, harder, faster. Even in my lust, I noticed that the nodule inside my left thigh didn't hurt at all. The vein on Malcolm X's neck pulsated against my closed eyes; her tears mixed with the sweat and dirt and I tasted mud and salt.

I came. I set her down. We leaned against the walls of the latrine pit as the wind above roared past us. We were both streaked with dirt, panting, sweating. Leaning forward, she took my face in her hands and kissed me deeply, pulling my tongue into her mouth. She held on to my forearm for balance as she stepped back into her pants. A ray of sun shone into the pit, illuminating the side of her face, and I studied the lines there, her skin, as if it were a map that might show me where I was. You Are Here. Where? I felt like I had vertigo. I was a stranger to myself; Julia was right. For a second I wondered if I had dreamed it, but there she was, Malcolm X or whatever her name was, buttoning her shirt over her big breasts, pulling the damp hair off her forehead, starting up the ladder. She had a big ass, too. I held my palm to the soft dirt wall in the place where she had lain against it. The spot was still warm.

Later that afternoon, we began mixing the concrete. She
showed me how much water to add to the cement, how to stir the mixture, how to pour it. The dusty bags of cement were even heavier than she had been. I felt like Atlas, and rather pleased with myself, as I struggled to hoist each one onto my shoulder, stagger a few feet with it, and drop it at the base of the big rusty tin drum where we mixed it. We had been coated in dark dirt before; now we were coated in the gray-white dust of the powdered cement. We looked like survivors of Vesuvius, pouring the concrete slabs that would anchor the latrine. I was unaccountably content and, to my great surprise, got half hard for her off and on all afternoon.

At the end of the day, we went back to the edge of the latrine pit to admire our handiwork. “You're a good digger,” Malcolm X said, pinching my ass. “We could use a digger like you around here.” At dinner she fetched me my dessert—a flan like a cloud of cream—with a wink.

That night—and for this I have no more explanation than for what happened in the latrine pit—Janos came to me in my nun's cell. I woke to find him sitting upright on the bed, his feet on the floor, gazing down at me. The Tweeties perched on his right knee, sleeping, their yellow heads tucked into their yellow chests. He was in the middle of telling me something, a very long story in Hungarian, and somehow I knew Hungarian, and I was torn between a ferocious desire to know what happened next and an equally ferocious desire for the story, which had every kind of thing in it, not to be over. He talked on and on into the dark, and I held my breath for fear that he would stop. I didn't want to be a stranger forever.

 

Where are you? I miss you.—G

I walked outside the Internet place. The sun was bright on the zócalo. A group of kids, big boys and little boys, were scrambling on the basketball court, all of them in the baggy shorts and enormous shirts of American ghetto style. Michael
Jordan looked on, inscrutable as Mona Lisa. The burnt-orange ball pounded on the concrete. The boys shouted to one another. In marked contrast to my dream, the virtual Janos in real life had nothing to say to me. I'd checked the Sent queue—no problems there. Caroline had sent me back a long, articulate, pleading, worried missive that I didn't finish reading. Sydnee had written curtly that I was fired. Where Janos should have been, however, there was a blank space. I watched the boys run up and down the court, chasing the basketball. Who did they love? Did any of them love another boy? Could a boy do that in Ixtlan? The tallest one, soaked in sweat, tumbled theatrically down onto the concrete as he was fouled. The other boys gathered around to help him up and jostle one another in their baggy ghetto clothes.

Across the zócalo, I saw Jabalí leave the municipal building. He waved me over. I crossed the square and got into the truck with him. “How did it go?” I said.

He lifted his shoulders, started the rumbling truck. “These things take time. They understand the
ecoturismo,
but this is a very Catholic place.” He pointed to the church on the hill. “They're suspicious of gringos with ideas about the spirit.” He waved his fingers in a mock-spooky gesture.

“Well,” I said, “can you blame them? Consider the history.”

He laughed. “Not to mention looking like this,” he said, tugging at the tinsel and feathers and other items in his hair. He had, however, put on a clean white button-down shirt, long pants, and decent sandals for his meeting. He looked smaller, dressed conventionally. “To them I'm a madman. Harmless, but a madman.”

We left the town and began climbing back into the mountain. I kicked off my shoes. “Did you get the duct tape?” We always needed duct tape at the ex-convento.

Jabalí nodded.

“Can I ask you something?”

He nodded again, shifting. The topmost shimmering pool at La Hacienda came into sight.

“This place, the ex-convento—what is it all about? I don't understand.”

Jabalí squinted. “Yeah. I don't always understand it myself, to tell you the truth. It just got a hold of me. It started because I used to have another name. And then for a while I had a number.” He gave me a knowing glance, but I must have looked blank, because he continued, “Twenty-five years ago, when I finally walked outside those prison gates, I swore that I would make something better. Not just another fucking prison with prettier walls and a big television set.” He slapped at a bug on his wrinkled mahogany neck. “When I go, I want Julia to feel like her crazy old father left her something that matters. Someplace a special person like her can be. Where she can build what needs to be built.”

Not wanting to know, at least not yet, or maybe ever, what he'd been in for, I asked, “So it's like a utopia? Like a commune?”

We shuddered around an upward curve. The shining expanse of La Hacienda's grounds came into full view, glorious and pristine. Malcolm X had told me that they had fresh salmon flown in every day. Half of Ixtlan worked at La Hacienda in some capacity or other, mostly as maids, waiters, and groundskeepers. “It's what's next,” Jabalí said. “I can't explain it to you better than that.”

I stared out the truck window at La Hacienda. It was quite beautiful: someone had dreamed it up, terraced the mountainside, dug the pools to spill water from terrace to terrace. “Twenty-five years? You've been here twenty-five years?”

“Yeah. Never expected to be. I thought I was on my way to Costa Rica. Ixtlan was much less built up then.”

“So you've seen a lot of folks come through here.”

“Who are you looking for?”

I didn't hesitate. “My father. He came this way, maybe, around twenty years ago. It's just a feeling. I don't have any evidence.”

“Hmmm. You should ask Julia. She might be able to pick up a vibration, see something. Do you have anything that belonged to him with you?”

“I do, actually.”

 

That night, after dinner, I brought Julia to my nun's cell. We sat cross-legged on the cold floor. I handed her my father's radio. She closed her eyes, felt the radio all over with her slender brown fingers, turned it on, turned it off, held it against her cheek. She set it in front of her on the stone floor and held her hands over it. My skin prickled; my heart speeded up.

“Who is this?” she said, eyes still closed. “He's a running man.”

“My father.”

She nodded. “Okay.” She tilted her head. “He's a running man. But.” She frowned, pursed her lips. “He is sad.”

“He's sad?”

She touched the knobs on the radio. “Homesick.”

“Was he here?”

She sighed. “If he was here, he wanted to leave again. Homesick.”

“So did he? Did he come here and go back home?”

She shook her head. “I can't say. I don't know. I'm getting tired. Javier ate all the extra cookies.”

“Julia, please. Tell me.”

She opened her eyes, lifted her head. The small radio, silent, sat between us. “They're going. I can't. They say it was a long time ago.”

I did my best to conceal my overwhelming disappointment from her. She was only a little girl, after all. “Yes. It was a long time ago. When I was about your age.” She looked fractious,
exhausted, and as if she might cry. “It's okay, honey. You did great.”

 

I remember the cave. On the day that the concrete was drying in the latrine pit, Julia led the way to what she had said was a special place with treasure inside. She was purposeful in shorts, an Outkast T-shirt that was three sizes too big for her and belted with a white rebozo, and good sandals with a buckle and a thick tread. I walked behind her carrying a knapsack with water and lunch. I was already hungry.

Julia turned around. “Are you tired yet?”

“No.”

“Good. We have a ways to go.”

The path was wide and well worn. Not far away, the river burbled, creatures scrabbled in the undergrowth, birds called. There was a single sock in the dirt, a bottle cap. We reached the edge of the winding river and Julia grasped my hand as if I was blind and she was going to spell something on my palm.

“That's them,” she said. “The Burros.”

Five rocks, rising in a dark curve above the water; when I squinted, they looked like a shoulder, a back, a donkey head.

Julia was stern. “They got stuck swimming across. Spit.”

“What?”

“Spit right now!” She kicked me.

“Ouch.” I spat in the general direction of the river. The current was strong here, rushing over the Burros. It wasn't hard to imagine that they had gotten caught, confused, enchanted. The sound alone would have been bewildering to an animal balancing on hooves.

She sighed. “Okay, good. Come on.”

We turned and walked along a path by the edge of the river that lifted us above it, grew thinner, more tangled. The air changed, turning sweeter and damper. The greenery lightened in color and became more delicate. There were fewer
tall trees, though it didn't feel as if we were emerging into a clearing or a sparser part of the forest. The path behind us disappeared. The stray clangs and shouts from the ex-convento grew faint, washed away. We entered a long field of ferns. Julia let her hands drift over the big, mitten-like leaves that were nearly as tall as she was. They eddied around my waist, brushed my arms. The green of the ferns was supersonic. When Julia turned her head, I saw that her eyes were closed.

“Julia,” I said in my best adult voice, “do you know where we are?”

“Quiet, Stranger. Just come on.”

Since I didn't know the way back any better than I knew the way forward, I complied. If we didn't turn up for dinner, I thought, someone would come looking for us eventually. I wanted to sit down and eat lunch, but Julia was forging ahead, bending back ferns, her white rebozo flickering through the green. The air continued to thicken and dampen around us, the supersonic greens grew even greener, and what I really wanted right then was an iced double espresso from the smiling twin at Starbucks, loaded with sugar. Would the Tweeties be happy by this river? I wasn't sure where they were from—it might have been India, or was it Cape Verde? Someone had flown them in from somewhere. They'd landed in the middle of the night at JFK in a special climate-controlled cage. I didn't think they would like this humid, wild zone, though they were the ones who had sent me here, hadn't they? Maybe if I had spit in the atrium, none of this would have happened. I wouldn't be a stranger.

Julia hummed, did her hopping dance, turned us this way and that. The river remained on our right, though sometimes our increasingly impassable route tilted down closer to it, at other times rose up and away from it. Julia cut over abruptly. She seemed to be listening hard, eyes still closed. In profile, she looked older than she was, her future self. Her top
teeth stuck out above her lower lip. I could take care of her, I thought. I could get her teeth fixed, tutor her, make sure she left here for school in the States (had she ever been to school?). She could live with Janos and me in the winters, return to Ixtlan in the summers, grow up and be complicated. Jabalí loved her enormously, but he was a total crackpot, and an ex-con to boot. She would outgrow him. She would outgrow this place, and then what would she become? A guide, taking gringos on burro rides into the mountains, telling tourists three times a day to spit in the river? A maid at La Hacienda? Or, worse, she'd stay here doing not much of anything, as fascinating and wayward as the rest of them, growing taller, more odd. Decide on a name gleaned from one of the moldy books holding up the walls in the chicken coop: Heloise, Don Quixote, Bath-sheba. I stopped, bent over, breathing hard. It was unbearable to me. Was this why I was here? To get her out?

When I straightened up, I didn't see her. “Julia?” Green everywhere, a thick curtain of ferns. The river was almost inaudible, so we were high up now, far above it. “Julia?”

“Stranger!” Her small, clear voice, like the ringing of a hand-held bell, somewhere to my left. I walked left, forward, wading through the green. “Over here! Close your eyes!”