Savior (9 page)

That's okay. We just need to be at the airport in two days.

It was pitch black. Evelio wandered out with some meat in a bag to take care of the dog. Noah had turned on the gas range and had taken a skillet out from underneath a shelf, and was cracking eggs into a plastic bowl. Ricky and Al sat at the table. There was a basket with some crusts of hard bread. The meat was frying with some onions on the skillet. The mixed smells rose and wafted through the cabin, and the sound of the sizzling meat, along with the smell, made it seem almost like a positive experience despite the sudden claustrophobia Al was feeling. Evelio came inside and closed the door.

They ate together at the table, and Ricky and Al stared at each other in the silence. Al tried to gauge his son's mind in order to know himself what to think.
The meat was hard to chew. It was beef, but a particularly hard and tough cut. Al guessed it might even have been an ox grown too old to haul a cart. There were no bugs, but there were bats that flew in and out the open window. He hoped Evelio would make another batch of coffee. Noah had unlocked a cabinet and was taking down some rifles. They were automatics, short, ugly Uzis, three of them lined up like sticks on the floor and boxes of nine-millimeter bullets next to them. Then he started loading clips with bullets, pushing them in one by one, until he had twenty or so in each clip. Then he went outside. Ricky and he were alone at the table.

Dad, Ricky whispered. Let's go.

Where?

Out of here. Let's get back to the hotel tonight. It's stopped raining. I don't want to stay.

Ricky wanted to go. That was his wake up call. There was something irrevocably right about Ricky's sense of danger. They needed to get away,
to get back to the hotel. This was some kind of hell of another's making. He had needed that, Ricky funneling down and making the call, in order to wake up.

Al stood up, scraping his chair against the concrete floor. Noah came back in and walked over.

You want something to drink?

Yeah, maybe some water.

Sure. Just use the sink. The tap water's fine. There's a dug well. We had some of our staff come in and dig it. Some contractors from Mobile up here moonlighting.

Okay.

Al filled up a plastic glass with water.

Ricky had his daypack in hand and was by the door, looking at Al anxiously in the
dim light of the bulb. There was a moment's glance between them, and Al recognized a depth of understanding he'd never seen before, a darkness behind the pupil that indicated some perception alien to him.

Yes. Ricky knows, he thought.

He put the glass down on the table and walked to the door. A bat flew in between the cracked door and the frame, flitting past Ricky's head. They both ducked. Al fought the impulse to look back. They were outside in the darkness. A smudge of stars to the south marked the infinity they'd stumbled upon. Evelio and the dog were around the corner of the house by the shed. The dog growled and then whimpered as Evelio scolded it.

Callate, Lobo.

Ricky led the way across the yard. Al heard the aircraft at the same time as the lights went on above and all around them. Ricky started to run and Al followed, but there was no way to see in the blinding light. He stumbled and fell and heard the staccato blast of machine gun fire and then the explosion of rocket fire directed at the house. The blast singed his skin, and he huddled in a fetal position.

Dad, come on.

Ricky was dragging him to his feet. Behind Ricky he could see silhouetted figures approaching in the lights, the strange planes hovering about ten feet above them.

Ricky, run! He pushed his son out of the way and kicked at the running body coming at them. His instep made contact with the bone of the man's skull, and the man's body crumpled to the ground, inert.

Dad! Ricky was calling him from the trail.
He turned to follow the voice. About to run, he felt a crack on his head and his knees giving way. That was the last thing he felt.

Eight
—La Aurora

Ricky had run through the dark down the mountain like a bat guided by an instinct for flight that was more like love than sonar. He thought of his mother as the pack bounced on his back and explosions rocked the night behind him. Fear flooded his mind, and a black cave opened in his chest that was his heart exploding. He tripped and fell headlong down a chasm, landing in a stream. There he crawled between the rocks and nursed his chin where he'd landed and had opened a bleeding gash on it. He didn't want to think. He didn't want to know. Up there, back at the mountain hut, he'd left his childhood behind.

In a semi-conscious
dream state, he saw his mother. She was dressed in a gown and smiled at him from behind a kitchen counter in the house in Florida. There were no more explosions. Nobody was coming after him.

A hazy, dim light first broke above him, changing
the black to grey, and then rays of sunlight shone through the branches of oak and encenillo and the vines of the lianas draped throughout the canopy. He felt his chin. The bleeding had stopped and a scab of crusted blood lay beneath his fingertips. He could move his legs, and he propped himself up on his arms and shifted his weight. The pack was there beside him. He opened it and felt for the tablet. The lines of the hieroglyphs, the smooth, cold stone grounded him with calm resolve. He took it out and held it up. In the sunlight it seemed to change its color. He could almost see the reclining king with the headdress turn to face him in recognition. By mid-morning he could sit up unsupported, and a few minutes later he'd sipped some water from the stream that ran between the large boulders.

The fact that he was alive must mean something to someone. His father had fallen saving him from the men
with the hovering choppers. But it was all like a dream. He’d go back. Al was sure to be there having coffee with Evelio and Noah. It had all been an illusion of his own distorted, teenaged imaginings, a product of too many video games in his younger days. He wanted it to be that, but he knew. Al was gone. He knew it. Where would he go, how could he get home, where was home now?

Without his Dad, a secret called to him from the stone tablet and the figure carved on it, a knowledge that there was a bigger destiny in store
for him than he had ever imagined or accepted. As if in confirmation, he found a spotted newt on the top of a rock, nestled in moss. He looked at its dead black eyes as it stared at him.

Okay. I'm
communicating with newts now.

He spoke aloud to himself, stepping away from the stream and picking his way through the boulders, swinging the daypack with the tablet in it onto his back again. As he hiked back up the mountain, the blackness that had emptied his heart slowly lifted, and he felt a new strength surge through his
body. He wasn't sure what it was, but he knew that nothing could hurt him on this day. Then he remembered. It was his mother's birthday. Al and he had planned on celebrating it with a rainforest hike up to the Continental Divide where they would have dropped gifts for her towards the Atlantic and Pacific, mingling the sounds of their voices with the mists swirling towards the four corners of the planet. It was his idea. Now it would never happen. In a way he was glad. He would keep the tablet instead of letting it go into the jungle forever in her name.

The hut was gone, just a blackened lump of something which might have been a tank of propane gas. The ground around it was black, and there was no sign of life, human or otherwise, in the surrounding fields. A stench
of something burnt filled the air, incongruous with the blue sky that heralded a beautiful day. Ricky walked around, kicking at the ground for clues of his father's whereabouts, a cigarette pack, a piece of cardboard packaging. Puddles of water mixed with reddish gore. Death and destruction filled his nostrils until he had to get away.

Mom! He yelled at the top of his lungs. Dad!

He waited for an answer back. There was nothing except the rasping noise of tree beetles scratching in the bark of the trees. He hiked down the mountain to the main road and caught a ride with a man on a motorcycle, who said he was headed for Juchintla. The wind stung his eyes as he sat behind the cyclist with an unlikely pompadour of greased black hair and a too small leather jacket.

They passed buses full of tourists and
slow moving trucks bearing brand names of cheeses and toilet paper. Life proceeded as if nothing had happened on the mountain. The man parked the motorcycle in the town center by the taxi rank. Ricky slipped off the back. He walked up the hill to the hotel and sat on the concrete embankment beside the entrance and waited. He couldn't go to the police, couldn't tell anyone what had happened to him for fear of tripping some guide wires of intelligence leading back to the men who had come in the night in those air ships. They had appeared so suddenly. Like ghosts slipping around invisibly. Didn't Noah say they had super stealth airplanes? That entailed a level of sophistication that meant Ricky ought to lay as low as possible. On the other hand, he needed help. The trick was getting through to the right people, people like Evelio and Noah.

An o
ld scrap of a flyer went sailing by out of a car window. Reflexively, he ran after it and caught it. It was an advertisement for a zip line adventure tour.
The Super Tarzan Jungle Canopy Ride
. Not so long ago he would have begged for the chance to go on something like that. But he didn't feel sorry for himself. The sun was out and it felt good to be warming up in it. Cars were going by. School age kids hiked up and down the hill. It must have been the time for lunch. He felt like he should be hungry, but he wasn't. The absence of his father was such a drain on his heart he could barely move, but if he didn't keep moving he didn't stand a chance of finding out what had happened to him. He didn't even have time to be scared. He was too busy trying not to think at all. It was like his brain was rebooting after the
Santos Muertos
ambush.

A mini-bus pulled up to the
hotel's courtyard, a smallish concrete pad about the size of a basketball court with a tiled fountain at one end, whose brackish water spilled out and over a series of steps meant to mimic a rainforest grove with moss covered rocks. A couple and two small children exited the glass doors of the hotel. They looked European, well groomed, with identical pairs of sandals on all their feet. They were not speaking English. He couldn't make out the language. His head was buzzing with fatigue and a dull sense of panic. But underneath it he felt calm and collected. He shouldered the pack and walked over to where the man was negotiating with the driver of the minibus.

Excuse me, he said.

The two men stopped talking and looked over at him. They were both exasperated, but he had an opening and he couldn't stop now.

I missed the bus. My parents are waiting for me but I have no money. I can pay you when we get to the airport. Is there any way I could get a ride?

What is zee name? asked the head of the family, a burly man who could have been a builder or a factory foreman in his native Belgium, guessed Ricky.

Richard Lyons. I would be extremely grateful for a ride.

Yes, yes. Of course. How did you miss zee bus?

I had an argument with my father. I slept late. I think they wanted to punish me. Scare me. You know. Nutty thing is I don't think they realize
d that I don't have the credit card. I lost my wallet on the zip line. The Super Tarzan.

You were in zee Super Tarzan?

Yesterday. I think my wallet fell out of my coat pocket.

Of course, of course. The Super Tarzan.
Il a fait le Tarzan savoir!

The two little children looked at Ricky as he climbed in beside them and smiled. They were full of awe and respect and they, along with their mother, allowed him to scoot to the back and sit in the last row alone. The father sat up front near the driver.

I'm so grateful to you for this, said Ricky.

Oh, no. You will see your Maman and Papa again and they will feel bad for their mistake. What time is your flight? asked the young mother, turning around in her seat and smiling.

It's not until tonight. They, uh, have a thing about getting to the airport like crazy early.

Of course. In this country one never knows.

No. One doesn't, of course.

Ricky looked out the window at the canyons and valleys as the minivan slipped towards the lowlands. He put his head against the glass and dozed. They would never know how grateful he was to get away from there. The driver played some Caribbean sounding music with steel drums.
The music, the sunshine, and the greenery combined to produce an almost comic effect of carefree holiday charm with the Belgian or perhaps French family. He tried to keep his head up. He had the feeling the young mother wanted to speak with him, ensure him that he would be all right. But he couldn't keep his eyes open. The fear had sunk so deep into his bones he needed to shut down.

We are here. Zee airport.

Ricky came to his senses, pulling out of a dream of a day in the summer at Franklin Park in Oakwood, next to his town of Plymouth Beach, sitting and cuddling with Lianne, listening to the music of a free concert, and drinking out of a thermos of honey-sweetened lemonade cut with vodka that Lianne had taken from her grandmother's apartment on Sassafras Drive.

What?

La Aurora Aeropuerto Internacional
, said the driver. The man was paying the driver and walking to the back to get out the bags. Ricky sat up and looked out the window and then climbed out. Cars and buses pulled around them and families and lone men and women in smart clothes exited onto the sidewalk and pulled their luggage along behind through the glass doors of the airport entrance. Around the back on the tarmac, airplane engines whined, and the airplanes wheeled slowly into position for takeoff or disembarkation. In the alien sky, above the distant, dark green mountains, were clouds, small puffballs of white cotton in a sea of dark blue that threatened rain.

The two children, dressed in matching khaki pants and buttoned shirts, waited on the sidewalk with the luggage and their mother. She grabbed their hands and pulled them towards the building, away from the road. Ricky smiled at her and wished he could say something in French to thank her.

Thank you for the ride. I will try and find my parents now and get some money.

No, no. Not necessary. She clucked with her tongue. They stared at each other.
I wish you best of luck. Your parents are inside, I'm sure. I hope so. Her voice was soft and appealing. It pained him.

I hope so, too.

Ricky waited for her to go inside the building with her husband and children. Then he wandered around the back, watching the coming and going of taxis and buses, wondering how to get something to eat. He'd made it this far. Maybe he could even get on a plane. From a fence along the main road into the airport, he observed the taxiing patterns of landing airplanes and the way the airport workers marched up and down the runway in their blue uniforms and orange hats. Then he turned around, light-headed from hunger, and walked inside and looked around for the French family. They were just about to pass through the customs line and into the security area. The mother looked around and caught his eye and looked crestfallen, as if disappointed to see him alone in the crowd, before she turned and passed through the checkpoint.

Through that long day, Ricky wandered
in and out of the airport and along the road—thinking he might keep walking until they found him collapsed on a sidewalk in the busy industrial sectors—then turned around and hastened to march back inside the airport with a crowd spit out from the tourist buses. If he did it right he might be able to pass through customs and get on a plane, any plane, and confess to the pilot that he was running from the
Santos Muertos
and needed to get back to Florida where his father would be waiting in the kitchen with a lemonade on the coffee table and sandwiches from the Shrimp R Us. But he usually stalled in the crowd in front of the long Delta counters.

There was a twenty-something girl, with long black hair in a ponytail working the counter who looked at him every time he walked by feigning nonchalance and smiled at him with a haunting look that promised succor if he could just get up the nerve to confess his plight, but he wasn't there yet. The afternoon dragged into the early evening. The number of arriving and departing flights hit a peak and then subsided. Janitors began long sweeps through the halls with brooms, and security guards on the night shift appeared to congregate in strange, cloistered doorways with small cups of coffee in thimble-sized plastic cups.

You miss your flight? It was the Delta girl.

I, yes.

Come with me.

Where?

To the police. You must make a report and they will help. No, don't worry.

She could see the fear in his eyes. He fought back the panic.

No. I don't want the police. I'm waiting for my father. He said to wait here. He's a geologist with the State Department and he knows where I am. It's okay.

He was speaking so fast she couldn't understand.

Okay. Okay. You want some food, no?

Yes.

She tugged at his arm.