Randy White: Night Vision

Automatically, Tula used her hands to cover herself. But then she took her hands away.

The man had fog in his eyes-most people did-and Tula decided it was safer to be still, like a mirror, rather than behave like a frightened vessel that could be taken by force, then filled.

The man, whose name was Harris Squires, looked at her strangely for a moment. It was almost as if he recognized her face and was thinking back, trying to remember. Then he tilted his head and sniffed twice, nostrils searching. He was a man so large that he filled the bathroom space, his nose almost touching the low ceiling. Squires’s nose was flat and wide, like a gorilla’s, but he was the palest man Tula had ever seen. A man so white that his skin looked translucent, blue veins snaking out from beneath his muscle T-shirt and tight jeans.

“Know how else I knew you was a girl?” he asked. “I could smell you, darlin’. Man-oh-man”-his grin broadened, showing teeth so even that it was as if they had been filed-“I can wind-scent a virgin from seven counties away. What’s the word for virgin in Spanish?”

Harris Squires didn’t speak Spanish, although he’d learned a few phrases. But his girlfriend, Francisca Manchon-Frankie-spoke bits and pieces of it. She had taught him some things to say. Frankie called male Mexicans chilies, or greasers. Women were chulas. Harris didn’t understand what the last term actually meant, but he guessed it wasn’t very nice, knowing Frankie.

“No entiendo,” Tula said to Squires. But she did understand. English was her third language. Spanish was the second-and even most Mexicans were unaware that her people, the Indigena of Guatemala, grew up speaking Mayan.

Gradually, Tula had acquired Spanish in the marketplaces of Tikal and Guatemala City. English had been learned from nuns at the convent where she and her brother had lived ever since their father was murdered and their mother had been forced north, to the United States, to provide money.

That was four years ago.

Six months earlier, Tula’s brother had come north looking for their mother. Now he had disappeared, too.

El Norte -it was the way they spoke of the States in the mountain villages. El Norte was always said with a mixture of hope and dread because, in the ancient religion of the Maya, north was the direction of death.

The man stepped closer. “What’d you just say?”

“Yo no comprende,” Tula repeated, shrugging her shoulders, feeling the man’s eyes on her like heat. Squires leaned in.

He asked, “What’s on those necklaces you’re wearing? They’d look real nice on Frankie.”

She didn’t respond, hoping he wouldn’t make a grab for the jade amulet and the silver medallion she always wore on leather straps, day and night, no matter what.

Instead, the man reached and began massaging the back of Tula’s neck with his fingers. The girl didn’t flinch. Instead, she found the bar of soap and began to lather her feet, her movements masculine and intentional, her expressions sullen, like a child.

The man stood, his smile gone. “Bullshit! You speak damn good English, you little liar. You and old man Carlson was spying on me last night, weren’t you, goddamn it? You and your special buddy-I snuck back here a few nights ago and heard you two whispering. You was speaking pretty good English, so you can stop your lying right now.”

Harold Carlson was one of the few gringos who lived in the trailer park. Tula trusted him because she trusted her instincts. Carlson, already an old man at sixty, was also a drunk, probably a paint sniffer judging from the half-moon darkness of his eyes.

But, as Tula knew, the depth of a man’s decency could sometimes be judged by the depths of his own despair. People who were kind, after years of being wounded by their own kindness, naturally sought ways to dull the pain.

Carlson was her patron. After their first conversation, she had thought of him that way. He would help her, given the chance, because that is what a God-minded person would do. After only eight days in the States, Tula felt confident because she had already acquired two patrons.

Her second patron was a man as well. He was a strange one, named Tomlinson, who did not have fog in his eyes. Even though he resembled a scarecrow with his straw-bleached hair, Tomlinson was one of the few people Tula had ever met whose kindness glowed through gilded skin.

Tula continued lathering. She had seen what Squires had done last night, but Carlson, the old man, had not. Squires had gone to the bed of a rumbling truck, lights out, and dragged something malleable and heavy across the sand, then down the bank into a little mangrove lake that was surrounded by garbage dumpsters and palm trees.

The sack had sunk in a froth of bubbles, Squires watching, before he returned to the truck.

It was a human body, Tula guessed. Something weighted in a sack. Tula had seen enough corpses being dragged through the streets of her village to know. They were old people who had ended their lives in a gutter usually but sometimes a young man who had died from drinking too much aguardiente.

Also, Tula had been old enough during the last revolution to remember corpses drying among flies in the courtyard.

Her father’s charred body had been among them.

Tula hadn’t intended to spy on Harris Squires last night. She had been sitting in the limbs of a ficus tree, listening to owls speak. There were two big owls, one calling from nearby, the other answering from across the water where the strange boats with metal wings were tied side by side.

The shapes of the boats-their triangular silhouettes-had reminded Tula of the jade amulet she wore around her neck. And also of small pyramids that were covered with vines in the lowlands west of Tikal. These were familiar stone places that the girl often climbed alone in darkness so that she could listen to the great owl voices converse while she stared, unblinking, at a jungle that strobed with fireflies.

The owl voices and the sparking fireflies invited visions into the girl’s head. At the convent, Sister Maria Lionza had taught Tula about this phenomenon, and the nun was seldom wrong about such things. Tula had been living at the convent, under the nuns’ guidance, learning the healing arts, and also studying the Bible along with her other lessons.

Sister Maria was a fierce woman given to fits of epilepsy and kindness, and she was particularly kind to Tula, who was her favorite.

“My brave little Maiden of Lorraine,” Sister Maria was fond of saying. “Our blessed saint spoke of you in one of my visions. And now you are here with us. A messenger from God.”

It was only within the last year that Tula had begun to suspect that Sister Maria was actually preparing her to join the nunnery and, perhaps, the Culta de Shimono. It was a secret group-a mythical cult, some said-that caused the villagers to cross themselves at night while whispering of wicked nuns who were actually brujerias.

The English word for bruja was “witch.”

Thanks to Sister Maria’s secret teachings, Tula had experienced many visions in the last four years. The most disturbing vision had come into Tula’s head three times-all within the last few months-so she knew the vision would come true if she didn’t act.

In the vision, Tula could see large white hands choking her mother to death, fingers white around her soft throat. In the vision, Tula’s mother was naked. She appeared diminished by her submissiveness, a fragile creature clinging to life, while the big hands suffocated the soul from her body.

It was a difficult vision to endure.

Now, because Tula had yet to answer him, Squires leaned a shoulder against the bathroom wall, getting mad, but nervous, too. Tula could read his eyes.