T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Ultimately, she knew these boys better than they knew themselves, boys playing soldier in the mornings, beisbol and fútbol in the afternoons, gathering to drink and boast and lie as the sun fell into the trees. They were the spawn of prostitutes and addicts, uneducated, unwanted, unloved, raised by grandmothers, raised by no one. They knew nothing but cruelty. Their teeth were bad. They’d be dead by thirty. As the days accumulated she began to gather herbs at the edge of the jungle and sort through the store of cans and rice and dried meat and beans, sweetening the clearing on the hilltop with the ambrosial smell of her cooking. She found a garden hose and ran it from the creek that gave them their water to the lip of the empty swimming pool and soon the boys were cannon-balling into the water, their shrieks of joy echoing through the trees even as the cool clear water cleansed and firmed their flesh and took the rankness out of their hair. Even El Ojo began to come round to hold out his tin plate or have his shirt washed and before long he took to sitting in the shade beside her just to pass the time of day. “These kids,” he would say, and shake his head in a slow portentous way, and she could only cluck her tongue in agreement. “You’re a good mother,” he told her one night in his cat’s tongue of a voice, “and I’m sorry we had to take you.” He paused to lick the ends of the cigarette he’d rolled and then he passed it to her. “But this is life.”

And then one morning as she was pressing out the corn cakes to bake on a tin sheet over the fire for the arepas she planned to serve for breakfast and dinner too, there was a stir among the boys — a knot of them gathered round the table and El Ojo there, brandishing a pair of metal shears. “You,” he was saying, pointing the shears at Eduardo, “you’re the tough guy. Make the sacrifice.”

She was thirty feet from them, crouched over a stump, both hands thick with corn meal. Eduardo fastened his eyes on her. “She’s the hostage,” he spat. “Not me.”

“She’s a good person,” El Ojo said, “a saint, better than you’ll ever be. I won’t touch her — no one will. Now hold out your hand.”

The boy never flinched. Even when the shears bit, even when metal contacted metal and the blood drained from his face. And all the while he never took his eyes from her.

—

By the time the call came, the one Aquiles had been awaiting breathlessly through five and a half months of sleepless nights and paralyzed days, spring training was well under way. Twice the kidnappers had called to name their price — the first time it was five million, just as the Chief had predicted, and the next, inexplicably, it had dropped to two — but the voice on the other end of the phone, as hoarse and buzzing as the rattle of an inflamed serpent, never gave directions as to where to deliver it. Aquiles fell into despair, his children turned on one another like demons so that their disputations rang through the courtyard in a continual clangor, his abuela ’s face was an open sore and Suspira Salvatoros cleaned and cooked with a vengeance even as she waded in among the children like the referee of an eternal wrestling match. And then the call came. From the Chief. Aquiles pressed the cell to his ear and murmured, “Bueno?” and the Chief’s voice roared back at him: “We’ve found her!”

“Where?”

“My informants tell me they have her at an abandoned tourist camp in Estado Bolívar.”

“But that’s hundreds of miles from here.”

“Yes,” the Chief said. “The amateurs.”

“I’m coming with you,” Aquiles said.

“No. Absolutely no. Too dangerous. You’ll just be in the way.”

“I’m coming.”

“No,” the Chief said.

“I give you my solemn pledge that I will sign one truckload of baseballs for the sons and daughters of every man in the federal police district of Caracas and I will give to your son, Aldo, my complete 2003, 2004 and 2005 sets of Topps baseball cards direct from the U.S.A.”

There was a pause, then the Chief’s voice came back at him: “We leave in one hour. Bring a pair of boots.”

—

They flew south in a commercial airliner, the Chief and ten of his men in camouflage fatigues with the patch of the Federal Police on the right shoulder and Aquiles in gum boots, blue jeans and an old baseball jersey from his days with the Caracas Lions, and then they took a commandeered produce truck to the end of the last stretch of the last road on the map and got down to hike through the jungle. The terrain was difficult. Insects thickened the air. No sooner did they cross one foaming yellow cataract than they had to cross another, the ground underfoot as slippery as if it had been oiled, the trees alive with the continuous screech of birds and monkeys. And they were going uphill, always uphill, gaining altitude with each uncertain step.

Though the Chief had insisted that Aquiles stay to the rear—“That’s all we need,” he said, “you getting shot, and I can see the headlines already: ‘Venezuelan Baseball Star Killed in Attempt to Save His Sainted Mother’”—Aquiles’ training regimen had made him a man of iron and time and again he found himself well out in front of the squad. Repeatedly the Chief had to call him back in a terse whisper and he slowed to let the others catch up. It was vital that they stay together, the Chief maintained, because there were no trails here and they didn’t know what they were looking for except that it was up ahead somewhere, high up through the mass of vegetation that barely gave up the light, and that it would reveal itself when they came close enough.

Then, some four hours later, when the men had gone gray in the face and they were all of them as soaked through as if they’d been standing fully clothed under the barracks shower, the strangest thing happened. The Chief had called a halt to check his compass reading and allow the men to collapse in the vegetation and squeeze the blood, pus and excess water from their boots, and Aquiles, though he could barely brook the delay, paused to slap mosquitoes on the back of his neck and raise the canteen of Gatorade to his mouth. That was when the scent came to him, a faint odor of cooking that insinuated itself along the narrow olfactory avenue between the reeking perfume of jungle blooms and the fecal stench of the mud. But this was no ordinary smell, no generic scent you might encounter in the alley out back of a restaurant or drifting from a barrio window — this was his mother’s cooking! His mother’s! He could even name the dish: tripe stew! “Jefe,” he said, taking hold of the Chief’s arm and pulling him to his feet, “do you smell that?”

They approached the camp warily, the Chief’s men fanning out with their weapons held rigidly before them. Surprise was of the essence, the Chief had insisted, adding, chillingly, that the guerrillas were known to slit the throats of their captives rather than give them up, and so they must be eliminated before they knew what hit them. Aquiles felt the moment acutely. He’d never been so tense, so unnerved, in all his life. But he was a closer and a closer lived on the naked edge of catastrophe every time he touched the ball, and as he moved forward with the rest of them, he felt the strength infuse him and knew he would be ready when the moment came.

There were sounds now — shouts and curses and cries of rapture amidst a great splash and heave of water in motion — and then Aquiles parted the fronds of a palm and the whole scene was made visible. He saw rough huts under a diamond sky, a swimming pool exploding with slashing limbs and ecstatic faces, and there, not thirty feet away, the cookfire and the stooping form of a woman, white-haired, thin as bone. It took him a moment to understand that this was his mother, work-hardened and deprived of her makeup and the Clairol Nice ’n Easy he sent her by the cardboard case from the north. His first emotion, and he hated himself for it, was shame, shame for her and for himself too. And then, as the voices caromed round the pool— Oaf! Fool! Get off me, Humberto, you ass! — he felt nothing but anger.