Grave of Hummingbirds (3 page)

SIX

A
ll the police were able to establish was the murdered woman’s identity. She came from Búho, and her family had reported her missing a few days after Independence Day celebrations had ended.

Days after Gregory handed the body over to Búho’s medical examiner, her father came to show him a photograph before the wings, tattoos, and shaved head had transformed her. Enrique Torres Arroyo wore an ill-fitting suit, short at the wrists and ankles and chafing his neck. The padding beneath his skin had shrunk into uneven clumps, as though grief had worn his face to resemble the stuffing of old upholstery.

They sat together in Gregory’s study, where they abandoned coffee for tequila.

“She was still a young woman,” the man said into his drink.

Gregory strained to hear him but said nothing and waited for him to go on.

When Senor Arroyo spoke again, his voice cracked. “You know her name? Her name is Gabi. Gabriela. Did they tell you that?” He scraped his forearm across his eyes. “She was accepted, just before she came here, she was accepted to the university. It was her dream.”

Empathy and compassion made Gregory slow to respond. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “You have my deep condolences. It’s a terrible loss.”

“We couldn’t send her after she left high school. She had to save the money herself. Three jobs she worked. For what?” Senor Arroyo’s glass shook. He raised it to his mouth and concentrated on drawing the alcohol in, holding it in his mouth before he swallowed. “Why, why? She was . . .” His voice broke. “She was . . . ,” he said and then heaved the word out. “Loved.”

Gregory gave up searching for the right thing to say and chose instead to sit quietly and listen.

Senor Arroyo shook his head. “I thought at first, maybe it was political. But Gabriela wasn’t mixed up in politics. The police think it’s one man who did this. You saw her, Doctor. You examined her. Please tell me why he did such things. Terrible things. He hurt her. Why? Why? You have to tell me something, you hear me? You understand?” His voice rose, and he controlled it with a ragged hiccup. “I mean no disrespect, but I have nothing. Give me something. I beg you.”

Gregory had nothing to offer. “I know this is cold comfort,” he said, “but I think Gabriela wasn’t aware of what was happening to her.” He touched the man’s shoulder, where the slump of his back strained the seams of his suit. “The pathologist found traces of morphine.”

“What kind of a man does this to a woman? A monster. A monster. You would think such evil would stand out; he would have a mark or something. How can a man hide such a nature?”

Gregory shook his head.

“They said he hadn’t . . . interfered with her. You know. Sexually . . .”

“No,” Gregory responded quickly. “There was none of that.”

The man sighed and passed a frayed handkerchief over his face. “Do you have any idea who could have done this to my child? Any suspicions?”

“No, I cannot imagine. But the police will keep the case open. They’ll keep looking.”

“And so will I.” Senor Arroyo got up to leave and placed his glass on Gregory’s desk with care. “I will come back and find this creature, and I will do to him what he deserves.” His red-rimmed eyes on Gregory’s were steady. “I can promise you that.”

As days turned into weeks, with no suspects in custody, Gregory picked at the landscape as though it were a scab. He scratched and cleared and probed for cloth, skin, fingernail fragments, hair, blood, or tracks—something, anything, that would lead him to a place or a person.

He found trails of feathers, sandal scuffs, boot prints, and the paw marks of a coyote. He came across a puma with a bullet between his eyes, flies gathered in the corners of black-rimmed lids. With regret Gregory ran his hands through the red-brown fur, briefly touching the head and the small, rounded ears.

He visited every tattoo parlor in Búho’s art district and searched online for others in the area, hoping someone might recognize the work.

One of the artists glanced at the photographs Gregory showed him and grimaced. “They’re not professional,” he said. “Maybe a backyard job. Or someone did them with a blindfold on.”

Exasperated, Gregory thrust the photos at him. “Really. That’s ridiculous, and not helpful. Look again. It’s important.”

The artist raised his eyebrows and took the photographs. “Okay then, let’s see.” He took his time, then shook his head and said, “Whoever did these can draw but isn’t skilled. Could be a beginner, an apprentice.” He gave the photographs back to Gregory. “Or he might have been working in bad light with shitty equipment.” He shuddered. “Looks painful.”

Discouraged, Gregory became suspicious of every man in the village and began to watch some of them, descending quietly at night and pacing the eerie streets. Now and then he stopped to speak to the rotating guards, lingering after they thought he’d left.

The murder raised anew the unvoiced questions that had plagued him when Nita was alive. Her secrets left impressions behind, subtle as windblown footprints in the dust. He tracked elusive clues to her work, to incidents that he’d noted and those he imagined he’d missed. If he discovered what Nita had hidden from him, he would find Gabriela’s killer.

Besides Gregory, sculpture had been Nita’s greatest love. She had spent hours in her studio mixing concrete and carving chestnut or sycamore-maple figures, always in motion. She’d explored conflict and asymmetry, the point at which one extreme overpowered its opposite. In the house, a rough wooden pelican struggled off the ground and a restless life-size male figure seemed poised to leave his corner in the living room.

Sometimes Alberto modeled for her, as did Rufo and, on occasion, Isabella, Raphael’s wife. The couple lived in Colibrí, where Raphael was in charge of the community watch, and from time to time, Isabella came up to the house to act as housekeeper. Gregory could understand Nita wanting to work with Isabella, but God knew what she saw in the governor’s wild red hair and grim features. The only time Gregory ever saw any softness in the man was around her.

“Half the men in the village are in love with you,” Gregory had said not too long ago into the back of Nita’s neck before he teased the skin with his teeth, pretending to be angry.

“Only half?” She gasped and tried to get away, but he held her hips and nudged her thighs apart with his.

He worked her nightgown up over her legs and murmured, “Rufo,” then lifted it off her back until it scooped at her shoulders. “Alberto, Carlos, even . . . Father Alfonso,” he said and lifted the satin up, up, and as he bent her over their bed, she let it fall.

Her fingers clasped ribbons and quilt, opening, closing; cotton and silk and wool pleating in her hands.

What is it you confess to that priest?
Gregory asked her silently as she slept in his arms.
What shame could you possibly have to share with anyone, even me, let alone him?

Nita was one of a few teachers at the only school, which accommodated seventy children. Each boy and girl got to know her well, and many loved her.

Something niggled in Gregory’s mind and came to the fore as he sifted through memories—an incident that had moved her, one she’d spoken of more than once. After she miscarried, her students handed her a card they’d made that wished her well.

“We are sorry, senora,” they said, words tripping, hesitant, out of unison.

Alberto came to her as she sat immobile at her desk, sorrow washing away the lesson she’d prepared, and he used both hands to wipe her eyes.

After that, she went to church at least four times a week, until she got too ill to get out of bed and Father Alfonso came up to the house. Gregory left them alone together, on more than one occasion slamming the door as he stormed out of the house to give them privacy.

There was something not quite right about Father Alfonso, a supercilious piety that made Gregory set his jaw and grind his teeth. If Gregory were a violent man, he’d be tempted to beat Nita’s secrets out of the priest, but he’d be wasting his time. Bound by the Sacramental Seal, Father Alfonso would never betray her.

SEVEN

E
leven months after what became known as the Condor Killing, the police had no suspects. The case took on the sheen of an urban legend. People spoke of the murder in hushed tones, embellishing the bits they’d picked up until it became less a crime than a supernatural phenomenon.

But for Gregory and Enrique Torres Arroyo, the victim’s father, it refused to fade. Now and again they met in the village or Gregory spotted him on the logging road. A few times he saw him with Rufo or Father Alfonso.

At home, Gregory still whipped the curtains closed each evening and stepped outside during the night to check on the horses and aviaries. The sense of being watched gradually eased, but his mind settled into a state of constant vigilance that wore him out.

Colibrí lay two miles east of Gregory’s house, farther down an adjacent slope. Each year in the July winter, hundreds converged on the village to celebrate Independence Day. Bulls came down from where they grazed, wild in the rangelands, to stampede through the streets—bewildered actors in an elaborate role play that Gregory shunned. Every year around this time he distanced himself from the fiesta and stayed out of the village. Trampled or gored, the injured and the near dead came to him. Sometimes Father Alfonso followed to deliver the last rites.

Gregory and Nita had watched the main ceremony only once, when they were children. After that he knew to take her away, the first time up the shaggy slope where torrents of water toppled over the drop into the lake. They squeezed into a recess behind the waterfall that was big enough for the both of them and huddled close. As they got older they improvised, leaving the center of Colibrí every year to avoid the spectacle of a frenzied bull made to leap around the village square with a condor tied to his back.

The huge bird represented Pájaro’s people, and the mad dash symbolically reversed the Spanish conquest. Although both animals usually survived the trauma, Nita felt their bewildered terror as if it were her own, and no amount of Gregory’s scholarly analysis could make her see beyond their struggle. The essence of Pájaro’s Independence Day celebrations lay in blood and sacrifice and the appeasement of neglected gods. All she saw was suffering.

As for Gregory, the people needed his medical skills if the bird was hurt. Nothing should prevent the condor from flying free once the fiesta was over. Should any harm befall the sacred messenger to the mountain gods, punishment would be swift and consequences catastrophic to harvests. Lightning would strike and death would follow in the wake of a wounded condor.

Gregory had his own reasons to see the bird fly off safely once they were done. The condor was an endangered species protected by the Ministry of Agriculture, and the festival had been outlawed. It persisted only in Colibrí.

With winter deepening and preparations underway for another year’s festival, Gregory rose early and stood by the kitchen window, looking out over the lake. A reticent dawn hung at the water’s edge, and in the slow light, night clung in the forest, black softening to deep greens where a cold sun touched the outer trees.

An insistent hammering on the front door startled him. Almost a year had passed since Gabriela’s murder, and part of him expected to find Rufo on the threshold with another body. He stepped into the hallway and stared at the shuddering wood.

“Gregory, help, help me.” Manco Pacheco Iglesias, Alberto’s father, pounded on the door again.

Gregory opened it and tried to make sense of the rush of words. “Slowly, slowly, Manco. What’s happened?”

“It’s very bad, Gregory. Very bad. Come see what you can do. Please, now. I swear, he didn’t mean . . . you understand . . . boys can be so stupid.”

Gregory spotted Alberto in the back of Manco’s battered pickup truck. “Wait. Manco, what are you saying?”

“Come, follow me. I think, I don’t know, I’m afraid she’s dead. But you will know. You’ll know what to do. This one, he’s just a boy, with no sense.”

They reached the truck, and Alberto made no effort to dodge the flat of his father’s hand. The palm struck him on the side of his head and knocked him sideways. Gregory grabbed the man’s arm, but Manco shook him off and hustled him into the front seat. He clung to the dashboard as they set off along one of the narrow mountain passes.

When they spotted the splayed wingspan and slack neck, Gregory, too, thought her dead. The condor lay in a crevice between two boulders, her leg trapped. Blood glistened, slick against the black feathers, seeping scarlet into the white fluff of her ruff at the base of her neck.

Manco stood by, murmuring a plea for mercy to angered gods, as Gregory ran his fingers down her back, then around to her chest. He could scarcely believe the heartbeat he felt above his hands. She was broken in places—that much he knew. Even if she lived, she might never fly again. He dreaded the prospect of having to euthanize her.

Alberto approached, silent and sullen.

“Help me, Alberto,” Gregory said. “Come, lift her head. Be careful. She’s alive. If she moves, watch her beak. Don’t do anything until I tell you to.” Slowly, he eased her leg out of the crack. “Now. Be careful. Gently . . .”

Together they lifted and lowered her onto a blanket that Manco produced from the back of the truck.

Gregory stared at the boy, whose face was level with his as they squatted over her. “What happened?”

“I shot her,” Alberto said, jaw tense and mouth sulky.

Gregory drew back from what he saw in that face—something wild and trapped that didn’t cower, wouldn’t submit—something familiar. For an instant he felt as though he gazed at a young, furious reflection of himself.

“I didn’t mean to. She just flew into the bullets. I was just . . .” Alberto lowered his eyes. “What will happen to me?”

Gregory turned to Manco. “Please, can you help us get her on the truck?” To Alberto, he said, “Nothing. Nothing will happen to you.”

The bird would never see her home in the highlands again. Miraculously, Alberto’s bullet had done only surface damage that would heal quickly; most of her injuries had resulted from the fall. The bones in her left wing were fractured. Back at the clinic, Gregory hydrated and stabilized her, then immobilized the shoulder and elbow joints. He wondered if she’d left an egg, perhaps a chick behind. As little as two years ago, he would have searched, but not now. The air, thin and cold, would cut his throat and cloud his mind, and he would not survive such a climb without serious preparation.

A few days after the bird’s operation, Gregory stood at the counter by the sink in the kitchen, cutting chunks of meat he’d left outside the refrigerator overnight. He rinsed his hands and dug his knuckles into the small of his back. Strips of weak sunlight filtered through the blinds he’d just opened, and he stood with his eyes closed, finding illusory warmth in the pale light.

He let himself drift back to summers he’d shared with Nita, with the landscape untrimmed and the weather unstable, cold only at the beginning and end of days. The forest swelled, fierce and flamboyant, and children sat high in trees hung with clumps of sweet rosy mangoes, tearing the skin off the ready ones and hurling the seeds at playmates. Summer brought the sudden fury of thunderstorms and rutted roads that were fleetingly slick, their furrows turned to muddy wrinkles in the baking aftermath. The heat filled with the futile crack of small teeth on walnut shells and persuaded a ten-year-old girl to swim alone in a vest and panties, away from the boys.

After he and Nita were married, Gregory confessed that he followed her on furnace-hot days along the river’s small tributary to a secret shallow spot, where she took off her clothes and, in her functional white underwear, waded in. His head averted to respect her privacy, he stood guard behind the boulders and brush to make sure no one saw her lying on her back in the water, splashing about, or drying in a crosshatch of warm light. Many times he wanted to leave a bouquet of rose angel, blackberry, and honeysuckle for her to find beside her blouse and skirt, but he never did.

“If I’d known you were there, I might have taken more off,” she said to him years later, husky with memory. “I’d have taken my time.” She teased open her jeans, maneuvered them over sinuous hips, and stepped out of the pool they made at her feet.

She threw her shirt at him.

Gregory, slicing onions next to the sink, heard the suggestion in her voice and turned. The cotton hit him in the face and wrapped its empty arms around his ears. He tossed it away, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and sniffed. “And you would have fried my fifteen-year-old brain.”

She took the knife from him and tugged at his belt, lifted her mouth to kiss him, and buried her fingers in his hair. “How’s your thirty-five-year-old brain?”

“Mmm. Gone. I’ll make you smell of onions.”

He’d been chopping garlic and cilantro, too, and had prepared a rub of olive oil, ground pepper, and coarse salt. She straddled him with his fingers gripping her butt and her hair dangling into the herbs and fuming white rings. The window nearest to them became clouded with their breath and steam from the stove; he held her up for as long as he could before carrying her to the sofa, where nine blushing tulips reached out of their vase on a table beside them, cups open and stems dipping.

He braced himself above her, and when she begged for his mouth, he dropped to an elbow to give it to her, lips and tongue and teeth and every part of her brimming with him, every space between them expanding and shrinking until nothing was left hollow, every sound opening into the hushed corners of the house.

Life and death had passed since then. Gregory’s vision misted as he stepped outside with the buckets of food and fresh water. Some of it splashed onto his boots.

He passed the enclosures where sierra finches, seedsnipes, toucans, and macaws sang of their yearning for the skies, the wind, and the diminishing canopy of their rain forest. A few were chicks who’d been separated from their parents; others had hurt their wings. Three required surgery and gradual rehabilitation after sustaining spinal and leg injuries in a logging accident. Some would be ready to leave soon.

The barn was cool and quiet. Used to her stillness whenever he entered, Gregory paused, giving her time. Then, as he knew she would, she tried to stand, and as she struggled, he could hear her, find her in the scant light.

“Ah, my beauty. Good morning, good morning. Have you rested well?”

She lurched toward her food, dragging an immobilized, bandaged four-foot wing along the floor, and darted her head at the meat he’d prepared for her.

While she ate, he spoke. “You know I must check your wing. You don’t want me to, you never want me to, and I don’t blame you, but things could be worse. We’re not so bad together, you and I.” He got nearer. “I want to move you outside soon. Wouldn’t that be just what you need, just what we prayed for?” He was almost there. “I’m preparing an aviary for you. It’s not a mountain, but it’s better than the dark. And if we are clever, and we are, we will never let anyone hurt you again.”

Close now, he could almost touch her. “Come. Come to me.”

But she would not, and part of him was glad she resisted him. Gregory didn’t want her tame and meek. Swiftly he reached for her and held her against him with all the cautious strength he could muster in one arm. With the other, he slipped a noose over a beak that could slice the eyes out of his face. He tightened it and soothed her as she tried to heave away from him.

“
Shshsh
,
shshsh
, it’s me. Only me.”

Alberto visited each day. He stayed away from the barn but did everything else: swept out the cages, carried buckets, and assisted Gregory as he allocated food for the birds. The boy worked fiercely, as though the activity would erase the shooting of a sacred messenger out of the sky. The aviaries gleamed.

Gregory saw all species of patient at his clinic, with complaints ranging from a headache to the flu to a festering paw. Alberto offered to polish the steel table and launder the sheets that covered the examination bed, but Gregory declined. “Thank you, Alberto. As you can see, things are in order, and Isabella comes in to help, too. I’m grateful for your offer, but you know you are forgiven.”