She wishes she could expose him to his minions. How can they trust a leader who hordes the last bit of food for himself? “Have any of you seen that candy bar I had in my pocket?” she asks, hoping to arouse a spark of suspicion. The boys perk up, eagerly search around. But the bar has vanished.
Maybe your leader would know where it is? she almost asks. But just then, as if sensing what’s on her mind, he strides in, his red bandanna back in place, no doubt hiding a Cheshire grin on his face.
WHEN STARR’S CELL PHONE rings, Alma jumps, shocked at its nearby sound. There it sits on the chair beside her where she laid it down during their interview this morning.
Alma lets it ring because not only does she not know if she is allowed to answer it, but she is unsure what button to press even though Starr walked her through the easy-as-pie instructions last night before going to bed. She will give herself away as an impostor, not knowing how to answer her own cell phone—the one professional prop that seemed to convince her disbeliever.
“Answer it,” he orders her. “You can tell them what we have been telling you.” He must think the call is from the authorities, and the fact that they’re using a high-tech cell phone rather than the mayor’s five-year-old means they’re ready to meet his demands.
Alma squints trying to read the small print on the teensy buttons. Finally, she presses the right button, because when she holds the nearly weightless phone to her ear, a big, booming voice is saying howdy at the other end. It’s Daddy and he wants to know how his little girl’s doing. Why the hell hasn’t she called him today?
“This is … a friend, Mr. Bell. Starr is fine.”
Her captor obviously feels uneasy hearing her speak English. He prods her with his gun. Just feeling that pressure on her arm makes Alma’s hand begin to shake. What if it goes off? What if he shoots her by mistake? “What do you want me to say?” she whispers frantically. “It’s a personal call.”
“Hang up!”
That’s easier said than done. What button to push with her fingers trembling like crazy? In a panic, Alma returns the little phone to the chair beside her. She can hear daddy’s far-off voice demanding an explanation.
The thunderous explosion sends Alma flying away from her chair, sure she has been shot. She finds herself on the floor, covering her face, feeling an ache in her leg as if she has pulled a muscle. She lies still, waiting for a shocking burst of pain, afraid to move, lest she find out the limb she is trying to move is no longer attached to her body.
Slowly, Alma collects herself. Air floods her lungs. She has not been shot but her left leg has been struck by a flying scrap of plastic which has cut a nasty flap of skin off her thigh. It has begun to bleed. She hopes it is one of those cuts that looks worse than it is. “I’m hurt,” she moans, not daring to complain too loudly. No telling what this crazy guy might do. First, he shoots the clock, now the cell phone, Alma is probably next. Not three feet away, the chair that held the cell phone has been demolished, the phone a scattering of springs and teensy pieces of metal, one of them, Alma now sees, has cut her right forearm, also bleeding.
“What are you doing?” The young poet has run in from the back with a drawn gun. Before she even sees him, she can tell from his voice that he has removed his kerchief. No doubt he thought troops were storming the front door and came running without bothering to cover himself. Now he is just eyeing the red-bandanna guy with a super-pissed-off look on his face. Only incidentally does he seem to notice Alma, wailing it must be in fear of her own spilled blood for nothing really is hurting that much. “You shot her?” he confronts the leader, who looks a little sheepish about wounding a journalist without meaning to.
In a moment, he recovers his bravado, drunk on the error he has set going that can only end badly, he is beginning to sense. He raises his gun toward his questioner, furious to be found making a mistake. “No, I didn’t shoot her. Though I should. Shoot her, shoot you.”
“Put that thing down, Bolo,” a voice from behind urges him. It’s one of the older boys at the windows. “We’ve got enough problems with guardia all around us.”
Bolo, Alma is thinking. She doesn’t remember seeing that name on Camacho’s list. One of the bad elements. She tells herself to remember that name, in case of what? Will she even be able to continue carrying off her role as journalist? She looks around and spots her notebook lying across the room. The pen is nowhere in sight.
The red bandanna seems to spend an eternity reconsidering whether to put his gun away. “Okay,” he finally says, again using the word as if it were a Spanish word. He not only puts his gun down, but like a teenager whose dignity has been wounded by being shown up in front of strangers, he stomps out of the room. Her defender now comes to kneel by Alma’s side. He looks even younger with his nose and mouth uncovered. A mobile, sensitive face. “Let’s see the leg,” he says, and over his shoulder he tells one of the young men to go get la doctora from the back patio.
This is how Alma, who is not a journalist, but goes by the name of Isabel, ends up being a patient of la doctora Heidi Castillo, assisted by el doctor Cheché Pellerano, in the small examining room off the hall where she caught sight of the leader eating her PowerBar. Alma is not sure of the diagnosis, as it takes her a while to figure out that the two doctors are telling the young men one thing and her another. “It is a bad cut,” they pronounce, then later in a whisper, assure her that all the wound needs is a cleaning and bandaging. “We need to take her to a hospital for some stitches,” la doctora asserts, seconded by el doctor. Understandably, the two doctors are devising a way to get out from under the cross fire that is sure to come between the armed guardia and these stupid kids. Why shouldn’t each one try to save his or her individual, valuable life? They have been stuck here for three days already. They want to go home to their families, for whom no doubt they were making this sacrificio of working at a remote clinic for what is probably a pretty good salary.
“I’m not leaving without Richard,” Alma tells the two doctors. “El americano from the green center,” she adds, because they don’t seem to know what Richard she is talking about.
They both look perplexed, especially la doctora Heidi, who seems to be about Alma’s age, a long-faced woman with beautiful, liquid eyes that moisten up readily—a good professional feature, Alma can’t help thinking. La doctora has been told there is a wounded journalist in the front room. But Alma seems somehow connected to el americano, whose casual approach to everything is what has caused all this trouble in the first place. Before Richard, there used to be round-the-clock armed guards patrolling the Centro. But he, and la americanita, who must be Starr, changed all that. That’s what left them wide open to these local gangsters who have grown desperate and killed the hen that would have laid enough golden eggs for everyone.
La doctora asks the young guard and el doctor Pellerano if they would step just outside the examining room while she dresses la señora’s wound. The boy guard hesitates a moment, but he is still a boy, just starting to feel enough confidence to slip his hand under his girlfriend’s blouse and touch her breasts. His modesty is still stronger than his cunning. Out he goes, with Dr. Pellerano, keeping the door slightly ajar por si acaso.
As soon as they are alone, la doctora tells Alma point-blank, “We have to get you out of here.”
“But I don’t want to go without my husband.” Alma confesses all. The doctora’s face softens. She has been in love herself, knows how a woman might cleave to a good man. “Is Richard doing all right?” Alma has seen him only briefly this morning but has heard his voice in the hallway all day long.
“He is feeling well,” la doctora answers briskly, back to business. “Only a disturbance in his stomach,” she adds, dismissively. So that’s it. He has been going to the john. And here Alma thought he’d been unsuccessfully trying to talk his way to the front room so he could beam her an eyeful of scolding and a smile of tender concern.
“There is something muy urgente to discuss,”
the doctora whispers, looking over her shoulder at the slightly opened door. As she cleans up Alma’s leg, dabbing at it, la doctora explains that a plan is in place. Last night, she sent word with one of the women who cook, a person of total confianza. The hostages are all on the back porch—seven in all, now eight with Alma. Once it is dark, the guardia can slip in the back entrance to the Centro. Under the cover of darkness, the guardia can easily approach from the rear, overpower the two or three backporch guards, rescue the hostages, and then storm the front waiting room where the captors tend to congregate at night with their leader, listening to the radio and watching the small cable television.
Clean and easy. No one gets hurt.
“They get TV up here?” Richard never told her that.
Solar panels, a dish. La doctora waves away Alma’s question. Time is short. Soon the boy guard’s suspicion will overwhelm his modesty. As she bandages up the leg, la doctora goes over the exodus plan. What a mastermind, Alma can’t help thinking. La doctora Heidi Castillo should be working for the military. Whatever happened to the Hippocratic oath? But la doctora is trying to save lives, a clean and easy plan, in which no one is going to get hurt if they follow her instructions.
“But we have to get you out of here,” la doctora goes on quickly. Either Alma has to be out of the compound—that’s why they’ve been pushing so hard to have her evacuated—or out of this examining room. “So you can be with us on the back porch when the rescue comes.”
Suddenly, it seems awfully inviting to leave this place. To rest in the mayor’s house and await a reunion later tonight with Richard. “Either way,” she tells the doctora, too embarrassed to come out and say that she’d like to leave now but with Richard, who is arguably sick himself. The rest of the hostages can wait for their rescue operation that la doctora has worked out for tonight.
“If we ask for you to be evacuated …” La doctora’s voice trails off, as she works out the options in her head. Alma can guess. If their request for her evacuation is refused again, as it was in the beginning, then the captors might not let Alma go hang out on the back porch in her critical condition.
So the plan is set. “We must get you to the back porch. I will say that I have cleaned the wound, and it is much more superficial than I thought, no stitches required. That you are faint because you are closed up in here without air. Okay?” She, too, uses the English word. Alma wonders if okay is now a global word, a bit of Esperanto from that bright land of promise where everything is okay, which is why so many people around the world want visas to go to the United States.
“Okay,” Alma agrees. But as the doctora turns to call the two men back in, Alma wants to be sure, “No one’s going to get hurt, right?”
La doctora looks sadly over at Alma. Her eyes moisten up. “You think I want to risk anybody’s life here?” She has thought up a plan that will not violate the Hippocratic oath, a maneuver in which everyone goes home, or behind bars, unharmed.
WHILE LA DOCTORA NEGOTIATES with the leader over letting Alma join the back porch hostages, Alma lies on the examining table, trying to make out what is being discussed in the front room.
She closes her eyes, and her young guard must think that she has fallen asleep because he yanks off his ski mask—it is so hot in this windowless room. But when he notices her eyes flickering closed after she opened them only to realize she shouldn’t have, he quickly pulls the mask back over his head. “Don’t bother,” Alma tells him. “The women gave out all the names last night.”
This seems to convince him because he pulls off his mask again. A cowlick of black hair stands up at the back of his head. He can’t be a day older than sixteen. He might not even have a girlfriend. “One of them is my mother,” he confesses a moment later.
He is in trouble any way he cuts it. “Are they going to give us visas?” he wants to know.
“I don’t know,” Alma tells him, although of course she knows: they are not going to get visas; they are not going to get jobs with the green center; they might not even get a meal from the autoridades. The brief window of hope is now closed if it was ever open for these young fellows.
“Maybe if you give up now, you could get a pardon,” she suggests. The young ones especially, maybe Richard and Emerson can plead their case. They’re kids; they should be given a second chance to make something of themselves. But Alma knows damn well how their story will end. This is a place without first chances to begin with, which is why these kids got desperate in the first place.
A phone has begun to ring. For a second, Alma thinks she has dreamed up the shooting of Starr’s cell phone. But no, it’s that old, funky phone in the front office. There is a scurry back and forth in the hallway beyond her door. She thinks she hears Richard talking to someone in English.
“What will they do to us?” the boy persists. His young face is worried. Maybe he isn’t even sixteen. Maybe like the Killington ski-mask boy, he wants a visa so he can go to the United States, earn good money, and win back the good graces of his mother and family.
“If I were you, I’d surrender now,” Alma says, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice so as not to give the plan away. “You might get a better deal. Use your time of punishment to study, go to school when you get out.” She wishes he could read. She’d give him the autobiography of Malcolm X, explain how this black guy at the bottom of the American heap memorized the dictionary in prison, became a great leader. She brings up Abraham Lincoln, who was born in a log casita, no bigger than where this boy probably lives with his mother and half dozen siblings. Alma makes Lincoln sound like a poor Midwestern campesino, president only recently. The point is not to trick the boy but to give him some narrative of hope, a piece of string he can take hold of to make his way out of this hellhole labyrinth.
“Are you in pain, señora?” the young boy asks because suddenly Alma’s eyes are moist, like la doctora’s eyes, with tears.
Yes, she could tell him, but not from the cut on my thigh. But from this blind alley history keeps taking you to. And here you are again, and there is not a thing I can do for you. She thinks of Walter or Frank, the collusive look he gave her. Fat chance these kids are going to get off as easy as she wants them to.
“You can become a lawyer, a doctor. There are all kinds of organizations that give money. My husband and I will help you. Once you know how to read and write, many doors will open,” Alma goes on; she can’t stop herself from imagining a way out for him because this is the way it has to begin, the story that is not a story, that might just happen if she gets him believing it can really happen to him.
THE RED-BANDANNA LEADER is reluctant at first to let Alma join the other hostages—after all, the two doctors originally made it sound like Alma’s leg was so bad, it might even require amputation. He doesn’t want her life on his head. Alma is relieved to hear this. The bully with the bad temper might have a workable heart after all.
Alma gives a convincing show of miraculous recovery, swinging her leg over the side of the table and taking a hop down, trying not to wince when her foot hits the floor.
“My leg is fine. But I do feel faint. I need air,” she complains, clutching her chest. If this were an audition, she would lose the part for overacting. But the young man seems convinced. Women’s ailments. He, too, can be hoodwinked by them.
“Okay,” he tells her. She can go have her dinner with the others. “Dinner?”
He laughs, a little throaty sound under his kerchief. It turns out that he has worked out a deal with the guardia, and food and cigarettes are on the way. In exchange, he has agreed to release all the women prisoners after—he is getting more savvy—their side of the bargain is in their hands. Alma is somewhat surprised that he has agreed to this compromise, but she can tell by the way he swaggers as he tells her that he considers this a victory, the beginning of negotiations that will ultimately get them amnesty, if not their visas. Even he is beginning to scale down his golden dream for the future.
AS ALMA LIMPS
ONTO the back patio, she is surprised to see that it has grown dark. A dim light has been turned on. Bugs and moths beat their wings against it. Everyone looks milky, spectral, but there is a feeling of palpable hope among the hostages.
Richard cannot contain himself. He rushes forward to find out how her leg is doing. He had gotten a curt report from la doctora. His wife, who calls herself Isabel and pretends to be a journalist, has a superficial cut on her right thigh and a bruise on her forearm. Nothing serious. Of course, she is okay.
“I am okay,” Alma tells him. In fact, she’s probably doing a lot better than he is. His unshaven face is drawn, his thin hair uncombed. There’s such a forlorn, orphaned look about him. He is wearing his windbreaker, zippered up against the cooler night air, a present she bought him out of a catalog that turned out to be on the pinkish side of maroon, but still he stoically wore it in Vermont. Here, who cares? Seeing him, Alma’s eyes fill up. Their vulnerable, valuable lives seem all the more valuable, vulnerable. “I hear from la doctora your stomach’s acting up.”
“No big deal.” He waves away her concern. Of course, it’s never a big deal with Richard. Probably not a big deal to be held hostage for three days by a bunch of desperate guys with guns. It’s okay, he had said, just a little ice, as they skidded over the side of the mountain.
She touches his hand. Rescue is on the way, her eyes tell him. We will soon be out of here.
I know. He smiles back at her. We will be saved.
One of the guards comes over and jerks his head for los americanos to move into the roofed patio area where the staff are sitting on benches, waiting for deliverance. La doctora gives her a collusive nod: Good. You are here. El doctor Cheché smiles, expansive with the freedom that is coming. “Señora, how are you feeling?” As for the rest of the hostages, there are two women and two men, all of them wearing lab coats, their names emblazoned over their hearts. The introductions are brief, telegrammatic, as the guards get nervous when the hostages talk too much among themselves. Mostly, eye contact. Soulful and deep eye contact. Alma is sure they all know the plan. We are in this together, their eyes say. We must be prepared; we must stay out of harm’s way when the guardia come. By tomorrow at this hour, we will be celebrating our freedom. We, the lucky ones.