Andrew Klavan - If We Survive

So anyway, this whole ancient, sacred ceremony went on, with all of us Americans being honored by being allowed to watch. And there we were, in this mystical cave full of candles and incense and chanting people. And finally, when it was over, the priest blew out the candles one by one, and the cave sank into a blackness that you could never describe, never even imagine, just a complete, lightless nothingness full of the fading echoes of the people’s prayers.

Then silence. Total darkness. Total silence.

And out of that silent darkness came Nicki’s voice—a sort of lazy, complaining whine.

“I am in such a shopping mood today!” she said.

I nearly pitched forward onto my face laughing. That was Nicki all over, it really was. The natives honored us by sharing their most ancient secrets, and all she could think about was scoring a new pink T at A&F!

Sweet girl, just… shallow.

And then there was Jim Nolan. And you know the old expression, “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all”?

Well, I haven’t got much to say about Jim Nolan.

Jim was the smartest person in the universe—if, that is, the universe were his own imagination—which I think he believed it was. Jim was sixteen. Tall, very skinny, stoopshouldered. Had kind of bugged-out eyes and very thin lips that he always seemed to be pressing together in disapproval of something. He really did know a lot—or he thought he did, anyway—about history and books and so forth. And whenever anyone said anything about practically anything, he was only too willing to correct them about it and give them a lecture on what he thought was the truth of the matter.

“We—we Americans, I mean—we destroyed this country, that’s the fact of it,” I heard him say once.

I was coming down the hill after helping Pastor Ron and the others drag tarps over our building materials in preparation for the afternoon storms. I heard Jim talking before I saw him.

“General Benitez was a great reformer,” Jim went on. “There’s just no question he would have redistributed the land more fairly. It’s only because our CIA took it upon themselves to come in here and help the reactionaries overthrow him that you continue to have the poverty and unfairness you have today!”

Typical Jim. All the poverty and misery in the world was America’s fault. Just as it never occurred to Nicki that poverty and misery were the default mode of the planet and we should be grateful for what we had, it never occurred to Jim that we didn’t cause that poverty and misery; it was there long before we got here.

Anyway… I heard him talking like that and I came around a stand of thick-trunked evergreen trees and then I saw him. He was standing in a little clearing with a group of men. The men were sitting on the ground and Jim was standing over them as if he were a professor giving them an open-air lecture. He was pointing a finger at them as he spoke, driving his ideas home as the words tumbled out of him.

The men? They just sat there, gazing up at him with dull eyes. One of them I noticed looked particularly mean. A lean, broad-shouldered guy in his thirties. He had a craggy face, weatherworn and somber. A thin mustache, a cigarette dangling from the full red lips underneath. His eyes looked to me to be almost black. And the way he was looking up at Jim—with a sort of droll, distant, disdainful humor—well, it was the way someone might look at a spider who was just disgusting enough to hold his attention for a few seconds before he stepped on it.

That guy—that guy with the mean eyes? That was Mendoza, it turned out. I would see him again. Hanging out around the edges of the village. Talking to some of the men there. Talking to Pastor Ron once, as if they were having a philosophical debate of some kind.

And of course later, in the cantina, with his gun.

But that time—that time Jim talked to him—that was the first time I ever noticed him.

Enough about Jim. Let’s move on to Meredith Ward. What can I tell you about Meredith? Not much really. She was a hard person to get to know—though she was not hard to admire at all. I sure admired her, at least. I admired her and I liked her—a lot.

Meredith was the oldest of us—except for Pastor Ron, of course. She was twenty or so—maybe twenty-one, I’m not exactly sure. She was not from my hometown, not from Spencer’s Grove, like the rest of us. She went to Westfield College nearby and, like a lot of the kids from Westfield, came into town to attend our church on Sundays. I guess that’s how she became part of this wall-building expedition.

Meredith wasn’t pretty like Nicki. She wasn’t pretty at all, really, not in what you’d consider a glamorous way. But to tell you the truth, after getting to know her for a day or two, I found her looks sort of grew on you. In fact, I started to think she was sort of beautiful. She reminded me of a painting or a statue or something: very tall, taller than I am, almost six feet, her back always straight and her chin always up, her face kind but serious, her pale brown eyes clear and direct. She had a very pale complexion—white with maybe a little rose just beneath the surface. And she stayed that way, even after the rest of us had turned brown from working in the sun. She had short curly hair, a sort of high forehead, a strong, straight nose—like I said, not pretty in any movie star way but really… noble-looking— I guess that’s what you’d call her.

She didn’t talk very much. I noticed that about her right away. Not that she was standoffish or anything. She’d sit with us and listen and laugh at all of our stupid jokes like everyone else. But everyone else always seemed to be talking about something or other: what they liked to do for fun or what music they liked or what video on YouTube cracked them up, their school plans, career plans, philosophy of life, and so on and so forth. Not Meredith. She listened. She asked a question sometimes, made a comment sometimes. But she almost never said anything about herself—what she liked, what she did, who she thought she was. Even when you asked her a direct question, she’d answer in a few words, very simply, and that was the end of it. After a couple of days around our campfire, I knew she came from Colorado originally. And I knew she wanted to be a grade-school teacher after graduation. That was it.

I’ve told a story about everyone else, and I’ve got a story about Meredith too. It’s a sad story, but it does tell you a lot about her.

While we were in the village—just the second day we were there—a baby died. I don’t know what caused it, a fever or something. There wasn’t any doctor in the village, and I guess the sickness just carried the kid off.

Anyway, the first thing I knew about it was just after I woke up. I was coming out of the Guy Tent when I heard the terrible sound of the baby’s mother screaming and crying. She was out in the street, the dead baby in her arms. She was calling out desperately to the other villagers, to us, to God, to anyone who would listen. Like I said, I don’t speak much Spanish, but I understood she was begging us—begging all of us—to make the baby come back to life, to make her nightmare end.

What happened next: the poor woman went sort of crazy with grief. She carried the infant’s body back into her cottage and refused to come out. I caught a couple of glimpses of her in there through the open door. She was cradling the dead child in her arms as if she could somehow comfort it. She refused to let anyone come near it, refused to let anyone take the baby away for burial. Her husband went in and tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t listen. Some of the other women from the village tried as well—same result. The local priest—the Catholic priest—Father Juan, his name was—he went in and reasoned with her for half an hour. Then the old priest too, the guy from the cave ceremony—he tried. But the mother simply would not let the baby go, would not admit that the child’s soul was gone now, that she was cradling nothing but the body that remained.