Burridge Unbound (25 page)

“Helicopters aren’t much fun in the rain either,” Parker says finally. “I lost three crew in Guatemala in a helicopter crash. Went right into the side of a mountain. This way at least we can walk in if it comes to that.”

Joanne asks him about Guatemala and he shakes his head. “I’ve never felt more frightened for my staff. These were medical people, and I trained them in forensics myself. One of them had spent much of his career falsifying reports for the army – covering up torture, helping to keep political prisoners alive for more punishment. More than anybody else he knew what to look for. That was his problem – the army didn’t want him working for me. Velasquez. They hanged him in the village square, threw his arms and feet to the dogs down the road.”

This little smile on his professorial face, as if he isn’t saying the words he’s saying.

The soldiers attach three different winches, strain like horses. One loses his footing and falls face-first into the slop; another pushes from behind and is sprayed by the spinning tires. Sin Vello sits in the back apparently unaware, a briefcase on his knees, files open.

“Did you ever fear for your own life?” Joanne asks.

“Not as much as I should’ve, probably,” Parker says. “I had my American passport. I thought, stupidly, they’d never dare do anything to me. It was supposed to be part of the reconciliation anyway. Then when they got Velasquez … Some men go home, you know, and some lash out. But I got very calm, and tried as hard as I could to keep it on a scientific level. They’re not used to it – it’s one of the things missing in so many of these countries. They’ve no investigatory skills. Instead the police just seize and terrorize people till they talk. They never think they’ll be held accountable.”

Lower, lower in the mud until I’m sure the Jeep will never move again, and then improbably the winches take effect and Justice Sin’s Jeep is pulled free. Now there’s a rush of activity getting us all back in our vehicles before they bog down again. Our driver slams the gears, swears, bounces us off trees, but somehow we keep going despite the rain and mud.

We arrive at Hoyaitnut much later in the day, after the rains have stopped but still with the humidity so thick we seem to be living in a cloud. There’s not much anyone would call a village here now, although Dr. Parker’s advance crew has erected several tents, and in some areas of intense green foliage there’s still evidence of charred remains. It’s only a few minutes to six and sundown happens in an eyeblink, but Parker takes us anyway to the old church ground. The area is so small I have a hard time imagining what sort of building might have stood here – perhaps a one-room shack, hardly space enough
for ten people, not the sixty or seventy who supposedly crowded in for refuge.

“Nobody was buried here,” Parker says soberly. Luki, the young woman who translates for the aides – Justice Sin didn’t walk up the steep slope – is hardly higher than Parker’s elbow. It’s her voice behind the earphones in the hearing room. In Kuantij she is velvety smooth. Parker points back to a clearing barely the size of a couple of driveways. “That’s where the helicopters landed,” he says. “The soldiers ran up the hill to get here. We scoured the area but all the spent casings were here. They seemed to know where to go and what they’d find.”

Rubble, collapsed walls, charred wood. The jungle already growing over a good part of it, well on the way to wiping it clean.

In increasing darkness we head back down the hill to where the soldiers have been erecting our tents. I’m wet and dirty and bone-tired just from sitting all day as a piece of baggage. But it feels good to get out of the hearing room and away from the silent expectation of the
sorialos
. I hadn’t realized how relentless the pressure was becoming, as if somehow our little commission is going to relieve the pain of thousands.

The tents are grey canvas, ripped in some spots with no floors and therefore no real refuge from mosquitoes. Fortunately we’re high enough to be out of malaria danger, but Joanne has us on anti-malarials anyway. What’s another pill among the crowd? I hang my kerosene lamp from the centre pole and try to weigh down the bottom tent fringes with rocks and bits of luggage. It’s pointless, I know – Santa Irenian mosquitoes drill you, then move off quick as houseflies, so you rarely get the satisfaction of killing them.

Fortunately Joanne brings a mosquito coil and lights it for me. Then a soldier arrives with a pan of hot water and some
towels and I wash myself, retrieve some clean clothes from my luggage. Such a simple act, and yet I feel renewed, like Joanne’s Hindu woman on the train. I extinguish my light, then grope for the tent flap and step into the night. Joanne’s tent is next to mine; I find her outside it in a yellow rain jacket, seated on a wet log with her knees pulled up, eyes closed, face covered in mist and turned skyward. The whole encampment has a ghostly look to it: the white tents disappearing in black shadows, the lamps glowing eerily in the mist, the press of the jungle, sky and mountains all around us, swallowed in black.

Some soldiers stand around a fire, their weapons leaning teepee-fashion a little ways off. I hesitate, but pass on.

“I used to have visions of a place like this,” I say.

“What’s that?” Joanne asks.

“In captivity. They gave me drugs and I had visions of a mountain encampment like this – the fire, the weapons leaning like that, the blackness. I remember a really light feeling – like flying, hovering. And Josef was there. My keeper. He kept telling me I was dead, to leave him alone. It was just like this. Only there were children quite often. It was a Kartouf camp, not army.”

We find the mess tent – circus-sized, almost, with eight or ten tables surrounded by metal chairs. Justice Sin, changed now into a newly pressed safari suit that looks big enough to clothe a tank, motions for us to join him at his table. We pull up chairs, and Luki, the translator, frees herself from talking with a young, mud-covered soldier and sits between us and the justice. The conversation is light and friendly – “What a day!” we say in various ways, laughing and nodding. Dinner is some sort of spiced stew with a bean sauce and
supira
. I ask for water, but the cook insists I try a type of jelly instead. As soon as I see it my stomach convulses.

“God, Bill, what is it?”

“Take it away. Take it!”

The cook starts to explain what it is so I grab the plate and hurl it off the table.

“I’m sorry! But I can’t have it.
Damn!”

Sudden rage blotting out everything else.

“This is not harmful. This is–” Luki starts to say.

“I know what it is!”
It seems impossible to explain so I rise and leave, fists doubled, face on fire. Jesus! One of the soldiers looks up from his meal and for a moment I imagine my thumbs at his throat. I surge past him, through the flaps of the tent and into the darkness.

“Bill!”

Jesus.

I keep walking, but they won’t let you. They keep after you, so I turn suddenly and knock her down. Joanne scurries back in the mud and I try to breathe, calm myself.

“Bill, it’s me.”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?’

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

A crowd of soldiers around me now. Even Sin Vello has made it to his feet to see what’s happening.

“It’s nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you breathing like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re about to go to war.”

“It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

Slowly, slowly, I loosen my fists. I won’t let them get me. Clearly I won’t. It’s not going to be like last time.

I make it to my tent, sit inside with the poison of the
mosquito coil. This flimsy cot. At least it’s off the ground. I’ve done my share of sleeping on the ground.

They leave me alone for a while and then Joanne comes.

“Bill?”

Breathing. For days and days I’ve forgotten my breathing.

“I’ve got some food. Why are you sitting in the dark?” I don’t answer. She brushes aside the flap. “Can I come in?”

“Have you brought the straitjacket?”

She steps in and puts the tray of food on the ground, then fumbles for a moment and lights my lamp. The suddenness of it strains my eyes, makes everything overwhelmingly white for a time. Another reminder. This wasn’t such a good idea after all. I should’ve stayed in the Merioka where practically nothing would remind me of this country.

She hands me the tray, then sits beside me on the cot and we nearly tip it. When we’re righted she puts her hand on the back of my neck. “You never need to hit me,” she says.

“No.”

“You
never
do. It’s just me. And you know what else?”

“What?”

“If it happens again I’ll sue you for millions.”

“Yes.”

“Not
loros
either.”

“U.S. dollars?”

“Huge ones.”

The smoke from the mosquito coil poisoning the air. The smell of the lamp. Darkness pressing in from outside.

“They served me
linala,”
I say. “That jelly stuff. It’s made somehow from tree bark. Try some. It’s not completely tasteless, but it has so little taste it’s revolting. And there’s no nutrition. Zero. For months it was the only the thing the Kartouf fed me.”

“Did you use your life preserver?” she asks.

I’m looking at it, I think. Of course I used it. If you hadn’t been there – “Yes. It could’ve been worse,” I reply, and I ask her to tell me a story.

“What story?”

“I don’t know. One of your stories. The one about the Hindu lady.”

“I told you that already.”

“If you can’t think of another one then tell me that again. I just want to sit here and breathe poison and listen to your voice while you rub my neck.”

“So it doesn’t matter what I say, just how I say it?”

“You know I’d fall apart without you.”

“Would you?”

Breathing the smoke deep into my lungs. No mosquitoes going to get me, hoo boy!

“I’d be dead or in the loony bin. I’ve no doubt.”

I spoon in the food, chew it joylessly. After a few minutes I put the tray on the ground, careful not to spill the glass of water.

“Tell me about one of your boyfriends. The most important one.”

“Oh God,” she says.

“Was it Jeremy? The guy who abandoned you in Lagos?”

“No,” she says, sighing deeply. This might not be the right thing to ask about. But she responds after a moment.

“There was a New Zealander,” she says, “a young doctor, Daniel. Tall and wiry with bright hazel eyes and beautiful hands. A pianist’s hands – long, tapered, strong fingers. He played the piano like he was born to it.”

“I hate him already,” I say, and she laughs. My hands are thin but not graceful, not skilled.

“We were a team. I met him in Mozambique, and we were together in Sudan, and went travelling in Nepal. I visited his family in Auckland, and he came to Ottawa in February, hated the snow. It was very, very intense. Everything gets magnified, you know, when you’re dog-tired and filthy and stretched past what you think you can do. That’s just how he wants his life. He got sick in Nepal, but wouldn’t slow down. It turned into pneumonia and he still wanted to trek in the Himalayas. He couldn’t turn anything down, it was all experience.”

“But he was all right?”

“Oh, he survived. He always does. But he had a hard time turning down other women. He has a very magnetic personality, shall we say. The first couple of times I figured it was the stress of the situation. But he could be relentless. Especially after you break up with him.”

She goes quiet, the hiss of the lamp, her soft breathing.

“So it took some willpower to keep the separation?”

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “But I had to seize responsibility. That’s what I told myself. It sounds like something from a self-help book. But it’s true. If you keep making bad decisions you can’t expect your life to turn out.”

There’s a lot more she could say, I’m sure, but she lapses into silence.

“Where is he now?” I ask.

“Bosnia. I didn’t want to make the trip.”

No. You came here with me instead.

I change tack. “What about your first kiss?” I ask, and she knocks my shoulder sharply.

“I can’t talk about that,” she says. “It’s too painful!” But she does anyway. “Danny McDougall. Oh, he was beautiful. Long wispy blond hair, blue eyes, those high cheekbones. His skin was so smooth. I wanted to have his skin. Grade five.”

“You had your first boyfriend in grade five?”

“He was a choirboy, had this crystal-clear voice. He got to do all the solos. But I desperately wanted to sing ‘Silent Night’ in the Christmas pageant. There was an audition. I remember my mother came and I had on a green velvet dress with white ribbons, my hair was in braids like Anne of Green Gables. And Danny McDougall came up to me a minute before I was supposed to go on. He just put his hand behind my head and kissed me as if he’d been doing it for years. Then I stumbled onto the stage, flustered, and sang dead flat. Mrs. Dorchester at the piano actually stopped halfway through the first verse and had me start again, but I couldn’t get it. He was perfect, of course. And he never spoke to me after that. Years later and I still couldn’t figure out if I wanted to break his teeth or have him kiss me again.”

“Could you sing it now?” I ask.

“Oh no,” she says and looks away, a little flustered.

“Please.” I put my hand on her arm.

“I wouldn’t be any better.”

“Sure you would.” She takes a deep breath, silently pleased, I think, at the invitation. And then she sings, quietly, beautifully, her eyes soft and happy, mouth round and full and tender-looking.

“Thank you,” I say, and applaud, and she turns down all other requests, lays me down on the cot instead and starts to rub my back.

“What about your first kiss?” she asks.

But I tell her a different story. I tell her about the time my brother Graham fell off the roof on a construction job, how he stayed in mid-air all night long, or at least that’s what it felt like. He was in Edmonton, my parents in Ottawa, and I was in Kingston going to school. My mother phoned to say Graham had fallen off a roof but she didn’t know how bad it was, she
and Dad were just getting on the plane, she’d call in the morning. So all night long Graham was floating in my mind. I didn’t think to call the hospital. In a way I wasn’t in a hurry to know. If he was dead he’d be dead a long time. This way at least he was still possibly alive.