Hard Red Spring (51 page)

“You called her Telema. She was on the same flight as us?”

“It seems so, Maya.” Jean studied the roadside, amazed that the painted political logos had made it this far. The rocks and trees now had party affiliations.

“Did you know she was coming to Guatemala, too? What's she doing here?”

Jean could not decide on an answer. Telema often claimed her travels were tied to her research. But it was entirely possible she was following Jean. Or she came here for some other reason that had nothing to do with Jean, something charitable, something illegal. Bank accounts, drugs, aid, fighting her Great White Beast. She claimed she was being followed, but knowing Telema, it could have just been a young admirer she had acquired on the plane.

“Baby, why don't you look out the window? It's lovely countryside.”

Maya glanced up and, on cue, their window framed a starved cow, grazing in a pile of wet, swollen roadside garbage.

“Lovely,” she declared.

“Well,” Jean tried, “at least it's free-range.”

“Trash-fed.”

They both smiled, taken aback at the intersection of their jokes. Maya allowed a few moments before lowering her head again to her magazine. Jean glanced over her shoulder: “How to Talk to a Man.”

Being interested in his interests will automatically make
you
interesting,
Jean read from a bolded section in the middle.
For starters, ask what he does for a living. Even if you know nothing about his line of work, you can find common ground with it. For example, if he's in advertising, talk about your favorite commercials.

“You won't have anything to read on the plane ride back,” Jean tried. “How about we read some of the Mayan folktales instead?”

“You brought those?”

Maya had not heard these folktales for a long time. She had claimed, when she first heard them, that they were boring. “Nothing happens,” she had complained at the age of six. But now Jean would try again. She and her daughter slid down into their seat like school friends and Jean read the tale of the Jaguar and the Deer:

A deer went to look for a place to build himself a house. There was also a jaguar who was out looking for a place to set up a house. He came to the same place the deer had chosen, and thought he would build there also.

The next day the deer came and thoroughly cleared the ground with his antlers. The jaguar came later and said: “It seems somebody is helping me.” Then he stuck some big poles in the ground and set up the framework.

The next day the deer came back and when he saw this, he said: “It seems somebody is helping me.” Then he covered the house with branches and made two rooms, one for him and the other for whomever was helping him.

The next day the jaguar saw that the house was finished. He went in one room and fell asleep. The deer came later and went to sleep in the other room.

One day the two came at the same time. When they saw each other, the jaguar asked the deer: “Was it you who was helping me?”

The deer answered: “Yes, it was me.”

Then the jaguar said: “Let's live together.”

“Yes, let's live together in the same house,” said the deer. They went to sleep and the following morning the jaguar said: “I'm going hunting, so sweep the floor, prepare wood and water, because I'll be hungry when I come back.”

The jaguar went to the woods to hunt and got a very large deer. He brought it home and said to his companion: “Let's eat what I have caught.”

But the deer didn't want to eat; he was very much afraid. He couldn't sleep all night long on account of fear. Early the next morning he went to the woods and met a very large jaguar. Later, he met a large bull and said to him:

“I met a jaguar who was bad-mouthing you.”

The bull went looking for the jaguar and found him resting. The bull came up to him slowly, leapt on top of him and gored him. Then the deer went off dragging the dead jaguar. When he got home, he said to his companion:

“Let's eat what I have caught.”

The jaguar approached him, but he didn't want to eat; he was very frightened. That night he couldn't sleep thinking about the deer killing jaguars; and the deer couldn't sleep thinking about the jaguar killing deer. Both were very frightened.

At midnight, the deer moved his head, his antlers struck the wooden walls of the house. The jaguar and the deer were frightened by the noise, and both of them ran out of the house without stopping. And so the deer and the jaguar each went his separate way.

“What do you think?” Jean asked Maya, who was sucking on her thick ponytail in concentration, watching out the window. “Do you still think nothing happens?”

“No, I think it's interesting,” she said, reopening her magazine. But her eyes skimmed above it, studying the seat in front of them.

Triumph! But Jean knew not to push it. Maya would have to ask for more herself. She closed the book and returned it to her bag.

As they made their way through the highlands, more people squeezed into the bus to stand in the aisles. A generously proportioned woman in Mayan costume took the liberty of nudging Jean and taking over the outer corner of their seat with one formidable buttock. Not feeling she had the right to protest, Jean moved in closer to Maya. At every curve, their arms and thighs touched, and Jean no longer worried about the driver's recklessness. She stopped imagining identical buses barreling the other way around those curves. Outside, along the edge of the road, a large stone sculpture of a Mayan warrior faced the direction from which they had come. Jean took a chance, put an arm around her daughter. She did not resist. For the first time since seeing Telema on the plane, Jean felt the possibilities of this trip returning.

~~~~~

She was elegant and terrifying, half Nicaraguan, an invasive species who used her body when she spoke, wrapped it around her students' “American notions,” and patiently squeezed. Mostly, it took only minutes, but she could also take an entire semester, enjoying the last dying kicks as much as the student inevitably did. With her dark hair piled on top of her head (she couldn't be bothered to style, comb, or cut it), she moved carefully, deliberately, as if to maintain its precarious balance. The black scarf always tied tight around like a tourniquet. Students constantly milled in the hall outside her office. The professor put out no chairs for them, so they stood, shifting from foot to foot in a loose line, like cattle bringing themselves to slaughter.

Jean had waited with these young hopefuls two hours for her first meeting with Professor Telema Espejo de la Hoz. With nervous dread, she studied flyers taped all over the hall, advertising alternative lives she could have chosen for herself decades ago.
Join the Aikido Club! Teach English in Egypt!
Things unthinkable then:
The Gay/Straight Alliance
and, more cryptically:
Government Secrets: We worry so you don't have to. Join us for a panel discussion on the American Social Conscience in Daggett Lounge.

When she finally made it into the cool disarray of the office, it occurred to Jean she had no idea why she was there.

“You're a bit older than the rest of them,” the professor said, pointing at the closed door that separated them from the undergraduates. She said older
like a compliment, and Jean took it as one. She was forty-nine. She was older than the professor.

“I'm not a full-time student,” she managed, her mind reeling. “I already have my bachelor's. And two master's degrees.”

“What did you study?” Telema asked, sucking on a piece of hard candy.

“English undergraduate, then two MFAs.”

“Two MFAs.” The professor rarely smiled, but now she did. “Painting and photography? Theater and music?”

“No, fiction and fiction.”

Telema laughed out loud. It gave Jean great pleasure to think of the bewildered undergraduates hearing this outside the door.

“I love made-up things,” she declared. “So what does a professional liar find interesting about Guatemalan history?” she asked. “What will your paper topic be?”

And there it was, her purpose. But she paused, reconsidering her plan to tell the professor all about Maya, about the therapist's advice to take this class. In three seconds, she abandoned it. She became convinced then that a child would be a turn-off for this successful woman, presiding from her academically shabby office chair, who owned herself completely. Jean had lost women before, mentioning Maya too soon.

Jean felt the hand on her knee, landed there for a brief moment, like a butterfly, like a blessing. “If you're interested in fiction, Guatemala is the perfect subject.”

“Yes, but you didn't like my paper topic. You gave me a C on my proposal. I've never had a paper proposal graded before,” she retorted, able to recollect her frustration. The C had disturbed Jean. There was no reason to care, really. She was taking this class for personal enlightenment, for Maya, and she had tried to convince herself for a week that she didn't care about the grade. She had a degree, a 4.0 grade-point average, from a much better school, had two master's degrees from much better schools. She wanted to write a paper on what interested her. But more and more, she began to feel differently, like she was getting a C in parenthood. And that was why she was here, why she stood in line for two hours instead of going to work.

“What's your paper topic?”

“I called it ‘Hot Blood, Cold War: The CIA-Orchestrated Coup in Guatemala.' It's about—”

“I know what it's about.” The professor sighed in practiced weariness
with depressing histories, politics, or maybe just Jean already. “But it's completely boring. I have to read this, you know.”

“You're grading based on entertainment value?”

“No, I'm grading based on what I believe the grade will do for you.”

“And what will a C do for me?”

“It won't ruin your life or cause trouble for me—in this complex discipline, I can always prove someone deserves a C—but it will completely discourage you from thinking you know history. And it will discourage anyone from hiring you for anything that will allow you to shape history any more than the average consumer. Whatever you write about I'll give you a C, your paper topic doesn't matter. But don't tell them that out there,” she said, flicking her eyes to the door. “They're all getting C's, too.”

“I don't understand,” Jean said, wanting desperately to understand. She liked this woman. The C no longer bothered her. What bothered her was being lumped in with the undergrads in the hall.

“Your paper topic is a complete delusion, all paper topics are. The Cold Warriors did not have hot blood, Ms. Roseneath. The CIA was and still is stacked with literate gerbils stuck in the résumé wheel, toppling governments for the ‘experience.' Buffoons who got A's in history and thought it meant something. I refuse to give the CIA any more recruits. I've always given everyone C's.”

“I'm forty-nine years old, I'm a successful editor. I'm not going to join the CIA.”

“Everyone is more involved than they think, and life is unpredictable.”

“Not mine. I'm too old. My life is practically over already,” she joked. “The CIA wouldn't even take me. Legally, I can't testify in court, for the drugs I did in college.”

“So what are you saying?” The professor cracked down on her candy. “You want to get an A?”

“I'd like to earn an A. I have a personal stake in this class.”

“A personal stake,” she repeated wistfully. “A personal stake for a fiction writer. What else would you like to write about?”

“Could I research the height of the civil war? The eighties?”

“No, you may not. That's not history.”

“It's not?”

“No. The university has defined history as anything that happened twenty or more years ago.”

“When did they do that?”

“Last year, when I told a theater full of students that Pat Robertson
helped murder over ten thousand Guatemalans through his little funding scheme called Operation Open Arms. The students complained that I was being political, so now the official policy is twenty years or more.”

“But the class is called
Twentieth
Century Guatemalan History—”

“Oh, don't worry. It's too bad for you, of course. Right now the history's stuck on Carter. He's lovely, the only real deviation in a century. In two years, I'll have more fun.” She stared at Jean, deciding something. “Okay, your new paper topic is ‘Cold Blood, Cold War: The CIA-Orchestrated Coup in Guatemala.'” The professor was done, shuffling papers, tapping them square as if closing the file on Jean. But Jean did not want to leave.

“Can I ask you a question about your grading policy?”

“Sure.” She opened a metal drawer, dropped the papers inside, and slammed it shut with a dramatic, morgue-like finality.

“Doesn't it get you in trouble? Do students complain?”

“Hardly anyone notices my grading policy because everyone knows to take my class pass/fail.”

“Pass/fail? That's an option?”

“Oh yes, these days it is. Kids just take it pass/fail and they never know what their real grade was anyway. They pass, simply that. How narrowly, they have no idea. So they're happy and I'm happy and uncompromised in my stance.”

“But you told me. Aren't you afraid I'll complain?”

“You're too old, and probably have too much to do to file a lawsuit. And your parents aren't going to call the dean demanding an explanation, are they?” The professor grinned and tilted back in her chair. “Plus, I'm a visiting professor. Distinguished visiting professor of the humanities. What can they do to me?”

“You're visiting? From where?”