I climbed over the top of a boulder and there stood Loyd, naked, smiling, an apparition bathed in steam. He slid into the blue pool at the base of the boulder. I touched the steaming water and it blessedly scalded my fingertips. I undressed more quickly than I probably have in my life, before or since, and immersed myself up to my eyes.
The sun set. Venus opened her eye on the horizon. From where we sat we could see the Jemez range and the valley floor fifty miles to the south, its buttes and mesas still lit by a distant sun. When our bodies turned red we stood up briefly among the snow-covered boulders, shouting, and the steam rose off our uplifted arms like smokestacks.
Loyd asked, “So, am I nuts?”
I stretched my legs along the sandy bottom of the pool until my toes found his. The heat relaxed every muscle and sinew and reflex in my body, and most of the ones in my head. This kind of happiness was sure to attract the attention of the Evil Eye. “Have you got any more surprises?” I asked. “Or is this the last one?”
“I’ve got some more.”
He scooted over and lifted me off the sand, supporting my floating body with both hands under the small of my back. “I don’t give them away all at once, though,” he said. “Only a half dozen a year.”
I counted on my fingers: Kinishba. Spider Rock, the Cliff house, and Maxine Shorty’s farm. And this, volcanic hot springs. I didn’t know whether to count the cockfights or not. That he could give up cockfights, I’d have to count that. “So I’ve used up my half-dozen already,” I said.
He lifted me slightly out of the water and kissed my ribs, one at a time. “If you’re only staying around for a year. That’s the rules.”
“That’s bribery.”
“Whatever it takes.” He kissed my navel and the damp hill over my pubic bone.
The front of my body was very cold and the back was very hot. Somewhere in the middle, near my heart, I was just right. I opened my eyes and saw constellations whose names were their own business. “Were you ever in love with my sister?” I asked.
He looked at me oddly.
“It’s just a joke. Every man I’ve ever been with, it seems like, was really in love with Hallie.”
“I can’t picture your sister. She’s shorter than you, right?”
I ducked my chin a little, immersing my smile. Right then I could have signed on for life.
The day we left Grace, there had been four airmail letters in the P.O. box. Lately Hallie’s letters sometimes came in bunches, owing to the accumulated pauses in postal service between Chinandega and Grace. But I saved them and read only one per day. It supported the pleasant, false notion that she was available to me all the time and would always be there tomorrow.
The fourth day of our trip was Christmas Eve. In the morning as we drove down from Jemez, before we arrived in Santa Rosalia, I laid out all four letters on the dash in order of postmark and spent one last hour with my sister.
I reread the old ones before opening the fourth one. Hallie’s week had gone wildly up and down. On Tuesday she was nigh unto manic because the government had had a successful national meeting on the pesticide problem. Central America was becoming a toilet bowl of agricultural chemicals, she said, because of war-strained farming economies and dumping from the First World. In the seventies, when Nicaragua was run by the U.S. Marines and Somoza, it was the world’s number-one consumer of DDT. But it seemed the new Nicaragua (our government, she called it) planned to take responsibility for its poisons. She also mentioned that her friend Julio was back in Chinandega after a stint of literacy work near the Atlantic coast. I couldn’t read anything between the lines.
On Wednesday, a child was rushed in from the village of San Manuel to the Chinandega clinic in critical condition because someone had stored paraquat in a Coke bottle.
On Thursday she was grimly happy. Five contras were making a secret sabotage raid on a hydroelectric plant, somewhere to the east, and were surprised by some armed farmers who took them captive. The culprits had passed through town in the back of an open Jeep, slit-eyed with dishonor, on their way to trial in Managua. Wouldn’t it be something, she mused, if that Jeep hit one of the contra road mines? But there was the driver to consider, and even if there hadn’t been, it wasn’t something she could wish for. She said, “You can’t let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There’s always the chance you’ll want to use it later.”
I wondered at what point I’d given up on later and let mine go sour. I didn’t know, although Hallie might. I reread each of the three letters with fascination but also the same dissatisfaction I’d had on the morning I’d opened it. It was all just things happening, and selfishly, I wanted Hallie. Even if she didn’t speak to me directly, I wanted her to speak.
I tore open the last envelope and was hit full in the face with what I wanted. It was four pages long, in a cursive enlarged by rage. When God wants to punish you, as Isak Dinesen declared, He answers your prayers.
I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I’ve got things to do.
You say you’re not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn’t looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you’re no good, so you can’t do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It’s the other way around, it’s what you do that makes you who you are.
I’m sorry to be blunt. I’ve had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I’m not here to save anybody or any thing. It’s not some perfect ideal we’re working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don’t expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, “What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?” I didn’t look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me.
The contras that were through here yesterday got sent to a prison farm where they’ll plant vegetables, learn to read and write if they don’t know how, learn to repair CB radios, and get a week-long vacation with their families every year. They’ll probably get amnesty in five. There’s hardly ever a repeat offender.
That kid from San Manuel died.
Your sister, Hallie
“What’s new with Hallie?” Loyd asked.
“Nothing.”
I folded the pages back into the envelope as neatly as I could, trying to leave its creases undisturbed, but my fingers had gone numb and blind. With tears in my eyes I watched whatever lay to the south of us, the land we were driving down into, but I have no memory of it. I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It wasn’t a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I’d spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.