Captives (10 page)

They're just like any other young couple on the beach. They strip down to their underwear and take to the water. We're all close behind. We turn in the water, weightless after so much physical effort. As we swim, El Taino collects firewood, and soon a small fire is burning and the old man's fish is cooking. Rafael himself dishes it out to us with some plantain on broad shiny leaves.

As the sun begins its rapid sinking, Rafael removes his shabby uniform and walks down to the water.

“Maria,” he calls, “a swim.”

“You go,” she says, and to El Taino, “And you too, El Taino.”

El Taino lifts his shirt over his head and turns slowly to Gabriel—the first time he has looked at him since Miguel's death. But Gabriel shakes his head, like someone with a fear of water.

Louise gets up. “Well, I'm for a last evening dip. Anyone else?”

“I'll go,” says Eduardo.

“What about you, Martin?” Carol asks.

“No, I'm fine.” I feel irritation, wondering how Martin can let Eduardo get away with it.

Maria never takes her eyes from Rafael as he wades into the water. Above him, I note, a lone cloud touches the edge of the moon like blotting paper. It's the last thing I can be clear about. The rest I must piece together as well as I can.

*   *   *

Martin had always known this was where he was heading, but when he arrived, the words started to swim before his eyes. Their letters meshed into barbed, impenetrable bushes. His memory supplied flashes of gunfire; shouts. An occasional phrase, sometimes a whole sentence, surfaced from the darkness—

“Hit the sand!”—

And Martin knew that hiding there somewhere in the undergrowth of words was the famous description of how Eduardo, in an act of desperation, made a grab for Louise to protect his own precious skin. How they threshed in the water, one against the other.

And how, after the shooting, there was silence. Boots. Sobbing. The curtness of an order.

He wiped his eyes and read his father's last words:

*   *   *

When the shooting stops, Carol crawls over the sand towards Martin and pulls him back into her lap. He lies in her arms, his body limp, his eyes wide with shock. We stay like that—the three of us—till two soldiers come to us over bands of broken shells, their weapons still held in readiness. An American voice asks, “You OK, buddy? This your family? It's all
over,
folks. You'll be home real soon.”

*   *   *

Outside, the street was glazed with ice.
Too cold for snow.
Long ago he had heard the hall lights click off. The length of the long dark avenue, his was the only lit window. He turned Test Drive up as loudly as he could. Kurlansky snarled—

“What will it take to make you whole?

What will it take to give you a soul?

We're twisted, twisted in isolation…”

The last word was drawn out, jarring as a train crash. But the music could not quell the final images conjured from the words of his father's diary. Tears of grief and injustice tracked down the magazine's last page. So many details left hanging, so much unexplained. At the first gunfire, Gabriel had run towards the National Defensce Force troops and their American advisers, waving his arms.

“I wasn't to know he didn't carry a gun,” said the soldier who reportedly brought him down. But there was a death more innocent than his.

Martin couldn't remember when he'd started pencilling notes in the margins of the articles. Certainly it had been after everyone had gone to bed. But once he had started, he found he couldn't stop. He'd pulled his desk light closer to the paper and found that, with a tiny spidery handwriting, he could write between the lines.

The first flakes began to fall sometime in the early hours of the day, like blossoms from the dark, laden sky. By the time the first light came through the curtains, and he heard the cars revving through the thick snow, he knew he had the bones of a story he would write one day. He could almost feel it now, fleshing out inside his head.

[PART TWO]

A SECRET RIVER

[CHAPTER 1]

don't you like water?

It was as if someone had pushed the vegetation back to reveal clear water cupped in the heart of the forest. To Louise the pool had the intimacy of a secret.

Miguel and El Taino sat on the rim above it with their guns resting on their knees. Eduardo stripped down to his underpants and dived like a knife into the water. He surfaced and called up to them.

“Come on in. Cool down.”

The hostages all looked at one another uneasily and Miguel gestured that, Martin apart, they must go in the water.

“Come on. You see, you must,” Eduardo shouted again.

Louise noted how the light that filtered through the trees above made his hair shine like wet coal.

“What?” said Carol. “They expect us just to…?”

“Well,” said Jacques, rolling his broad shoulders, “that water does look inviting and—”

“Easy for you to say,” said Carol. “You're not the one with three men staring at you.”

“Three?” said Jacques.

“Eduardo, Miguel, and El Taino.”

“Don't we count?” said Tony.

“You know what?” said Melanie. “I don't care any more. I need a wash and this looks like the best bet yet.”

“Right on!” said Louise and lifted her T-shirt over her head.

She felt a sudden excitement, the kind of excitement that makes you clumsy taking off your clothes when you're in a race to be first in the pool or the ocean—all fingers and thumbs. But this wasn't the pool or the beach. This was a waterhole in the middle of the jungle, God knew where. In phys. ed. changing rooms, when there were only girls present, Louise turned her back on everyone and curled her shoulders around breasts she feared might be too large—already becoming her mother's daughter. Yet here she was, in front of a bunch of people who'd kidnapped her and threatened her life, just lifting her T-shirt off and stepping out of her shorts. She noted that Carol, at least, was still in her mental changing room, but the others were taking off their clothes less carefully and folding them roughly into small piles.

Then the awkwardness came.

If she'd been able to strip and dive straight into the clear water, it would have been fine; but she found herself instead poised on the lip of the bank, her arms instinctively crossed over her bra, seized by a fresh panic.

Around her, she heard the forest titter.

Eduardo grinned and beckoned her in. His skin was light brown—like caramels. “What's wrong? Don't you like water?”

“It's not that…” said Louise.

“Don't worry,” Eduardo called. “There's nothing in the water that could harm you. We have no water snakes.”

“How disappointing,” said Jacques, as Louise hit the water and felt its coolness envelop her. She was soon aware of other, larger bodies beside her. Occasionally an arm or a leg would brush against her; a spray of water momentarily blinded her. But mostly she turned in the water, curled in on herself, and felt the water support her and grant her a temporary freedom.

“Aren't you coming in then?” she called to Martin, who had edged himself down the banking, past the point where Eduardo had said they could wash their clothes.

“They won't allow me,” said Martin. “Because of my leg.”

“Poor you,” Louise called, and ducked under the surface again.

*   *   *

Louise had not been alone in finding some escape in the water that day. The other hostages too had returned refreshed, more able to confront their situation. There was an openness about their conversation that night that suggested bonds would be formed to get them through this. It was Martin, who'd been unable to lose himself in the water but had remained on the bank feeling ungainly and excluded, who was most burdened by what he had seen there.

The least of his discomforts was seeing the dark coins of Melanie's nipples through the wet gauze of her bra; the greatest seeing Miguel's back, crossed with grooves of white hot ash. But it was neither of these images—nor of the otherworldly beauty of a blue bird hovering over the water—that haunted him in nights to come. Rather it was a line of fine gold hairs in the small of Louise's back. The sun had picked it out as he'd crouched behind her on the edge of the bank, and it pricked all his waking dreams.

[CHAPTER 2]

a flower in her hair

From the start of their captivity there had been a rule: no talking on the trail. At times this intensified their discomfort. Louise could see the nervousness in Carol rise whenever anything brushed against her. The green trail was to her a gauntlet; one she must run with few words of comfort to allay her suspicions about what might threaten her. Once a fierce hollow knocking caused her to jump.

“
Carpintera,
” said Miguel, turning his fingers into a beak.

“It's a woodpecker, Carol,” said Tony. “Only a woodpecker.”

“Ah, of course.” Carol nodded tiredly. “Silly of me.”

Louise played it a different way in those first days. She simply lowered her eyes to the track, to the roots that crossed it, the grit pressed into it, and saw it as little different to the trails she had followed through the Rockies with her parents. It was one of the things weekends were for. To get in the pick-up and leave the sprawling suburbs behind. For lately the city was claiming more and more of the gentle hills around it. The communities appeared almost instantly, with their schools, their malls, and their long, gently undulating streets, named after every variation involving Glen, Valley, and View. But still it was possible, on a clear day with a high blue sky, to escape them.

Mostly it was the front range of the Rockies they reached. Her father, when he was there, flicked on the four-wheel drive, and they climbed the twisting logging track to the head of the trail. Like now, she thought, it's just like now. She almost convinced herself that if she were to lift her eyes from the trail, to either side of her would be firs, silvery aspens, junipers, above a floor of pine needles. And ahead, through the trees, she would see not more of the same, but the clear line where the trees had surrendered their advance, and above that line only rocks and the blue-edged distance. Blue. Blue tingeing the tips of the firs; star-shaped blue alpine flowers; blue mountains. And yes, exactly as now, her father striding confidently ahead, making light of the climb; then herself, then her mother obstinately pegging them both back, the explosion of her hair like anger itself.

“Hey, Jacques,” her mother would shout, “you're away for weeks, then you come back and won't even walk with me.”

Her voice, rasping in the altitude, never reached her father. But it would always strike home with Louise. When she was younger, it seemed that her father's job concerned geography as much as time.
Daddy is going far away.
They looked at a map together, traced a finger round a lit globe.
But Daddy will be thinking of you always, no matter where he is, for you are his precious.
Lately though, until this trip, geography was never mentioned: time was the sole issue.

“How long this time?” her mother would say, and Louise became aware that her mother was as often looking at her when she said it as she was at her father. It was as if it were a question they were asking together.

“A few weeks. Look, we're going away together soon. All right?” There was no talk of “precious” any more.

Louise kept her eyes down on the trail as long as she could, sometimes counting out the time—one to five hundred, doubling it, trebling it. But when she looked back up, it wasn't the airy, freeing vistas of the snow-capped Rockies she saw, but the enclosing world of the rain forest. At first she'd felt each green pulse pressing in upon her, as insistent as the guerrillas with their orders and their guns.

“It's all the bloody same, wherever you go,” she heard Tony say up ahead, and Miguel drew the flat of his hand across his own throat as a warning not to speak. But Louise was discovering it was not so. She remembered at school being told that the Inuit had no word for snow. Instead, where others would only see snow, they had two hundred words for every kind of snow you could imagine—hard-packed snow, newly fallen snow, melting snow, and so on. It was the same, Louise felt, to say that the forest was “green.” For there must surely be as many different shades of green as there are kinds of snow. There was the green of a fresh shoot that was so pale it almost seemed to emit light, and there was a green that, before the eclipse of the sun each night, was almost black. And there was every kind of green in between—a green that was almost purple and one that burned as gas does with a blue tinge. And this blue-green was carried through the veins of some leaves; red-green through others. And color, though it was endlessly variegated, was only the start of it. For there was texture too—the glossy finish of those leaves that were first to turn to black; the fine hairs that coated some leaves; the tiny hooks that protected the stems of others.

It seemed the invention of the forest never tired. There was nowhere the green couldn't reach. Whenever they arrived at the top of a hill and looked ahead, it was green that met their eyes, a smoky, bluish green filling the distance. Even Louise could find this dispiriting.

More often it was what was closest to hand that drew her interest—the hollows, the shadows, the suddenly parted green curtain that revealed one more secret: small purple orchids that attached themselves to tree trunks and glowed like anemones; trailing plants like guy ropes that came down from the trees and rooted themselves in the earth; the extravagant white flowers she'd seen some women wearing in their hair.