The Visiting Privilege (42 page)

Then she and Caroline talked about how they wished they had a car they could share. Then they began talking about how James claimed to have stolen a car in Texas and driven it through Mexico into Guatemala, where he'd sold it for a great deal of money in the capital. This was a difficult, virtually impossible feat and the story had always elicited considerable admiration. James also claimed that once, prior to stealing the car, he had been arrested in California for underage drinking, and that as part of his sentencing he was forced to attend the autopsy of a drunk driver. He described how they had sawed off the top of the dead man's head.

“I think he made up that stuff about the cadaver,” Abby said.

“I didn't believe that for one minute,” Caroline said.

“I don't know about that car from Texas either,” Abby said. “He's so enthusiastic about that experience, he probably didn't have it.”

“What are you thinking, June,” Abby asked.

“I was thinking I have no sense of direction,” June said. “I can't remember the names of flowers or ruins or saints. And I can't keep a journal. Any journal I keep sucks.” She was thinking of Edith Holden's precious Edwardian journal with all the lovely drawings. The one she had in prep school. Edith Holden had died tragically young, drowning in the Thames while collecting horse chestnut buds, the twit.

The bill arrived and June began to go over it painstakingly. “Excuse me, pardon me.
Perdóneme?
” she called to the waitress. “But no one here ordered the
huevos revueltos
.”

“Oh, just pay for it,” Abby said. “All that stuff is fifty cents or something, isn't it? I'll pay for it.”

“No, it's my turn,” June said, counting out some coins. They then got up with a great scraping of chairs on the ugly tiles.

On the street, the dog strained toward a mound of burned plastic in the gutter and managed to acquire something repellent before Caroline hauled him away.

“He is so dim,” she said. “I thought fixing him would make him smarter.”

“That is so funny,” Abby said.

They reached the heavy scarred wooden doors of their compound. They pushed them open and Caroline unknotted the rope from the dog's collar. He leapt into the air and ran around the courtyard three times at remarkable speed before a bougainvillea stump snagged the basket and sent him sprawling. The parrot dropped the piece of mango he'd been toying with and crouched against the gnawed slats of his bench. The parrot's name was Nevertheless as far as anyone could translate it. The dog didn't have a name.

The fortune birds were not up yet. Customarily they rested until noon in their cage, beneath a clean dish towel. For them Easter Week was one of the biggest weeks of the year. They had told a thousand fortunes. Their director, the man with the staggeringly large vein, was sitting at a card table in a corner of the courtyard writing new fortunes in an elegant script on blue pieces of paper. He wrote swiftly, without reflection or emotion. James and Howard were playing Hacky Sack on the grass with a tiny stitched ball that said
I
♥
JESUS
on it. They had bought it from some evangelicals who did massage. The boys had been so dumped the night before, clutching their glasses of
aguardiente,
that they could hardly find their mouths. Now here they were, sleek and quick.

June blushed when she saw James, for she had drunk a great deal of
aguardiente
last night as well and recalled asking him, “Do you think I have a personality?”

“No,” he had said.

“A personality,” she persisted.

“Why would you want one? You're fine.”

“But I should,” June said.

“Look at my wallet,” he said. It was a long leather wallet clipped by a chain to his belt. “There was a whole bin of these on sale at the airport and the merchant said that each wallet had its own personality because it was natural material and the lines and colors and imperfections made each one unique.”

“That's sick,” June had said.

“Personality is secondary to predicament,” James had said.

She was attracted to James, to his deep-set eyes and perfect skin, but none of them were lovers. That would have spoiled everything. Love was a compromise, they felt. They were not like their parents, who were always in love and who just went on and on with life, changing partners, acquiring new children, abandoning past interests and assuming new ones, always in love with someone or something.

It was almost noon. The boys continued to play Hacky Sack, thrusting out their long feet.

“I'm going to wash the dog,” Caroline announced. “After which we shall remove the basket.” She produced some special soap she had bought at the market. It came in a small box that had the drawing of an insect on it.

“It doesn't really look like a flea, though,” Abby noted.

“They intended it to look like a flea,” Caroline said confidently.

They captured the dog and poured a bucket of water over his wiry coat. The soap made a quick brown lather and almost instantly, motionless black fleas appeared.

“Look at those fleas,” Abby said. “They're enormous.”

“This soap must be lethal,” June said.

The guardian and his family came out to watch the dog being bathed. The parrot watched, too, swaying excitedly. The dog stood passively, his head bent, the basket touching the ground.

They rinsed and scrubbed, then rinsed again. There were fewer fleas at the end but there were never no fleas at all.

“Shouldn't we have gloves?” June asked.

“The fortune dog,” Caroline said. “Divination by fleas.” She picked them off. “This is not good,” she said. “This is not good. This is not good either.”

Then there was the ceremony of removing the basket, which was attached to the dog's collar with thick, dirty tape. Finally the basket was wrenched off. The dog's head looked somewhat smaller than anyone remembered.

“He really is unsatisfactory, isn't he?” Caroline said. “He needs something. What do you think, June?”

“Maybe a bandanna,” June said.

“Oh, I hate bandannas on dogs,” Caroline said. “The vet said he had too many teeth in his mouth. A couple of them should be pulled. And see all those warts on his head? They keep growing back.”

The dog squatted on his haunches and stared at them. He had probably never been meant for this life. He was just not consubstantial with this life.

One of the reasons Caroline had acquired the dog was to practice concern. They all felt that sometimes it was necessary to practice the more subtle emotions.

The dog suddenly widened his eyes as though in delighted recall, shot up and sideways and danced away to his favorite spot in the compound, the smoldering refuse pile in one of the stalls that once stabled horses, rooting about for only an instant before finding something ragged and foul that he settled down to eat. At the same time, the owner of the fortune birds capped his pen, rose from his chair, rolled his shoulders, crouched slightly to fart and removed the cloth from the little birds' cage. Immediately the birds began to sing.

It was a lovely day. White clouds streamed past Agua, but so low that its dark cone was visible against the bright blue sky.

“I want to do something today,” Abby said. “Don't you?”

From a distance Agua was magnificent, but they had all climbed it once and found it disappointing.

Abby looked at her watch. She said, “If I got this wet, I'd die.”

“Let's climb Fuego,” Howard said, giving the Hacky Sack a final, unraveling kick.

“It's too late,” Abby said. “We'd have to start earlier than this.” Fuego, the live volcano, was no higher than Agua but the ascent was more difficult. The third volcano, Acatenango, commanded little interest though surely it had its dignity, dangers and charms.

“Never too late to climb Fuego,” James said. “The hot one, the mean one.”

“Oh, that damn Fuego,” Caroline said.

They had never climbed it, although they had set out to do so more than once. They would stay up all night and dawn would bring with it the desire to climb Fuego. They would take a taxi to Alotenango, a poor town surrounded by dark coffee trees, from which the ascent began. They would climb for a while, floundering through the greasy ash. Rocky furrows ran alongside the trail like empty rivers and sometimes became the trail. The furrow would sometimes vanish and a faint path through the ash would begin again above them. Some paths were marked by rocks painted
NO
! for though they looked like a reasonable choice they were not. The rocks bore the name of a hiking club, the members of which they had never seen. They'd never seen anyone climbing, although once they saw a dead colt with a braided mane.

They had always turned back after a few hours, because what was the point, really, of climbing Fuego?

“I think nature's kind of senseless, actually,” Caroline said. “I mean real nature. I don't get it.”

The hours passed. It was midafternoon when the cage holding the fortune birds was strapped to the motorbike for the trip to the plaza.

“We should do those birds sometime,” Abby said. “I can't believe they're right here with us and we've never had them tell our fortune.”

“I'd want Planeta to tell mine,” June said. “The one with the black eyes.”

“They all have black eyes,” Caroline said.

“I mean black rings around the eyes,” June said.

“This earth is my home for life,” James said. “Do you ever think that?”

“That is unacceptable,” Howard said.

“I don't think Profeta looks that well,” Caroline said. “She doesn't look as yellow. Her beak looks like it's peeling.”

Caroline's dog had danced over to the motorcycle and was nosing the cage.

“Get that cur away from here or I'll break its goddamn back,” the man with the remarkable vein said in startlingly clear English. The birds chirped on, hopping about in their tiny, airy cage, the bars of which were woven with pale, wilted flowers, the floor of which was covered with the shredded faces of movie stars from shiny magazines.

Caroline hurried over and hauled the dog away. No one remarked on the outburst, recalling that it had happened before.

Shortly after the birds' departure on the black motorbike, Abby's parents arrived at the gate with young Parker and two string bags filled with food.

“Oh, I can't believe it,” Abby murmured to Caroline. “So soon?”

“I'm sorry we're early,” Abby's mother said, “but we went on a ruin run. We managed eight ruins today, which must be some sort of record, and when we got back to the room we discovered that we'd been robbed. Isn't that something!”

The three of them, even Parker, seemed almost enchanted that they'd been robbed, as if this were just another aspect of an exciting life. “They took nothing of real value,” Abby's mother said. And that, too, added to the enjoyment of it all.

There was a little something on Abby's mother's nose that perhaps had been in her nose and somehow gotten out and around onto the side of it. All of them looked at it politely. With a small adjustment in her gaze, June looked at Parker and the large white bandage he wore insouciantly on one knee. She narrowed her eyes and the child receded into some blurry future, permitting the present to be inhabited by herself and her friends, which was proper.

Abby's mother set down the bags. “There's all kinds of stuff in here,” she said. “I thought you could have a picnic supper.”

“That is so sweet!” Caroline said.

“What did they take?” Abby asked.

“It was so stupid of me,” her mother said. “I have so much trouble locking that door. I think it's locked but it's just stuck, so the room wasn't even locked. They took this jade necklace I'd just bought. It was still wrapped in tissue. It wasn't that expensive, but the thing was I'd bought it for you. Then I thought I'd keep it, because I didn't think it was really you, and then it got stolen. It serves me right, doesn't it?”

“That's really ironic, Mom,” Abby said.

June asked Abby's mother which of the ruins had been her favorite.

“I loved the convent Las Capuchinas,” Abby's mother said.

“Oh, I love Las Capuchinas too!” June exclaimed, as though everyone didn't say their favorite ruin was Las Capuchinas.

“What do you think actually went on there, on that subfloor?” Abby's mother wondered. “I have three guidebooks and they all suggest something different. It was either a pantry, or for laundry, or for torture.”

“You have four guidebooks,” Abby's father said.

“I think it's all a matter of wild conjecture.” Abby's mother raised her hand and brushed the inconsequential thing off her face. “There were twenty-five nuns, right? Twenty-four? And they were never allowed to leave except when there was an earthquake.”

“I like those creepy mannequins at prayer in their cells,” Caroline said.

“Don't you just want to know everything?” Abby's mother exclaimed suddenly. “Just think of all the information children Parker's age will have access to, and so quickly!”

“What's your favorite ruin,” June asked Abby's father.

“I don't have one,” he said. “My favorite meal was the steak at Las Antorchas.”

“I can't believe we're going back to Las Antorchas,” Abby's mother said. “Honey,” she said to Abby, “I'm sorry we're so early but we'll be back early. I just want to get this anniversary dinner over with.”

“I don't want to stay here,” Parker announced. “I want to stay with you.” His hair was firmly combed. He wore madras shorts and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, dressed in a manner that small children often are for an event they are not really going to attend.

“Parker, look at that parrot!” Abby's mother said.