Authors: James Mills
“Ask her.”
Skidding to a stop, her mother said, “Auntie Dana, it’s really nice to see you.”
“Michelle’s pregnant.”
“Yes, Mom, I’d meant to tell you.”
“Stop it, Michelle. Excuse her, Auntie Dana. I think she’s trying to be funny.”
“Then she’s not pregnant?”
“Oh, yes, she is pregnant. And we’re all just delighted.”
“Is her husband here?”
“She doesn’t have a husband. The father is a very nice young man.”
“Oh, I’m sure he is. Well, yes, of course he is.”
Michelle left them. A waiter stopped with a tray of champagne. Michelle smiled at him and shook her head.
She’d arrived home from Cambridge a week earlier, on a Saturday, and the next day after church, sitting around the living
room with the family before lunch, she’d said, “There’s something I have to tell everyone.”
Weeks ago she’d told them about Gus, but they’d never met him.
Nolan, her older brother, looked up from the sports section. “Getting married?”
It was supposed to be funny, but no one smiled.
She said, “This is really hard. This is the—” Her voice broke. Her mother nudged Nolan over and sat beside Michelle on the
sofa. Michelle turned her face to her mother’s shoulder and began to cry.
Nolan said, “What’s happening?”
Her father said, “Be quiet, Nolan.”
Michelle heard the men get up and knew they’d gone to the porch.
“I’m pregnant, Mom.”
Her mother tightened the hug but didn’t speak.
Michelle raised her head and said, “I really love him, Mom.”
“I thought you did.”
“But I don’t want to marry him.”
“Does he want to marry you?”
“I think he does—I know he loves me—but he doesn’t want to be forced. I don’t want to marry him like that, because he thinks
he has to. I want him to marry me because he just can’t
not
marry me. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do, honey.”
Michelle wiped the tears.
“I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’ve prayed about it, and I know one thing for sure—I don’t want to hide that I’m pregnant,
lie about it, pretend that I’m not. I don’t care who knows.”
“I think you’re right. What do you want to do?”
“I’m only twenty. Barely. Two months ago I was a teenager.” She hesitated, her eyes watering. “I think I should have it adopted.”
She didn’t tell her mother that she’d told Gus she was ending the pregnancy.
“But I don’t want to have it adopted here. I don’t want to spend the next ten years, however many years, looking at every
child I see in Montgomery and wondering if it’s mine. I don’t want that for you and Dad, either.”
“Do you think you should call Gus, talk to him about it?”
“He’d think I was pressuring him—and maybe I would be. I don’t want to do that. This is my decision, Mom.”
A pastor at their church asked friends at a Montgomery adoption agency, who recommended an agency in Milwaukee. Six weeks
before the baby’s due date Michelle moved there with her mother. A month later she took out a sheet of notepaper on which
she had written Gus’s phone number, laid it on the table by the phone in the hotel, and picked up the receiver. She hesitated,
thought about it. What would she say? “Are you still sure you don’t want to marry me and have the baby?” Make him say no all
over again? Torture them both? Anything she said, even the fact that she’d called, would be misunderstood. He’d be sure to
think she was pushing him. He wasn’t going to change his mind. It would be a painful disaster. With tears in her eyes, she
set the phone down and put the paper back into the pocket in her purse.
Two days later, the birth was artificially induced. Michelle, under a general anesthetic, never experienced labor, never saw
the baby, never heard it cry, never had any direct awareness of its presence outside her body.
When she awoke in the recovery room she knew she had lost more than her child, that she was less alive than she had been before
the birth. The baby had been hers, it was
gone, and something of herself had gone with it. Something had been amputated, and she would never have it back.
Three days later Michelle returned to Montgomery. She awoke the first morning back and began to cry. At six that evening,
she’d been in bed all day, crying and talking to her mother about the baby.
“How do you think she is?”
Her mother said, “She’s fine, Michelle. Of course she’s fine.”
“They said she was healthy. But they didn’t say anything about the parents.”
“She’s with people who want her very much and will love her dearly.”
“They make mistakes, though, sometimes, those agencies.”
“No, honey. They didn’t make a mistake. That little girl is with loving parents.”
T
he wheels of the twin-prop Cessna touched the asphalt, and Gus looked out at the mountains and plains of northern Colombia,
struggling, as he had every day since Michelle left Cambridge, to keep his mind off what might be happening to her. He was
tagging along with his father on a business trip, hoping it would give the two of them time to talk to each other. They had
never been close, often quarreled, and with his father approaching seventy, Gus wanted to do what he could to heal their relationship
before it was too late. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life asking, Why didn’t I do more to get close to my father?
Why didn’t
I ever tell him I loved him? Because he did love him. Sometimes he wasn’t sure why, but he loved him.
As Gus turned his head to look toward the front of the passenger cabin, he heard a sharp
Pop!,
saw a window burst inward and the back of an empty seat tilt violently sideways, its headrest exploding in shredded fabric.
His father’s soft, almost inaudible voice said, “Someone’s firing at the plane.”
The plane stopped.
A black BMW screeched to a halt out of sight beneath the left wing. In a moment, the Cessna’s door opened and two soldiers
entered behind a tall, slender man in his seventies wearing a beige suit and wide smile.
The man said, “Please do not be alarmed. I am afraid we have a party of hunters in the woods, where it is quite forbidden.
They are after the wild boar. The security forces are seeing to them now. Shall we disembark?”
The elderly man stepped up the aisle to Gus’s father.
“It is so good to see you, Stephen. I apologize for this inconvenience.”
His words seemed unnaturally refined, and were it not for the other man’s Latin coloring, he and Gus’s father might have been
brothers. His father’s own regal aspect had intimidated Gus since early childhood. His speech had always been as controlled
and secure as a bank vault, and his countenance, smiling or angry, was as controlled as the voice. When Gus was a child he
had made innocent attempts to move in behind the face and the voice, but had never even come close. His mother, a compulsive
supporter of crusades, causes, and charities, identified herself in Gus’s young mind as a glitteringly dressed specter always
on the move, arriving and departing, fleetingly applying pecks to the cheek.
“It’s all right,” Gus’s father said to the slender man, looking a little gray. “Nothing to apologize for at all. May I introduce
my son? Gus, this is Señor Vicaro-Garza.”
Vicaro-Garza, owner of thousands of acres of cattle land as well as vast forests, had flown them to his ranch for the weekend.
Gus’s father sat on the board of a paper company dependent on Vicaro’s timber.
Gus, still recovering from the gunfire, shook hands.
It was midafternoon and the sun was blazing. Señor Vicaro led Gus and his father up wooden steps to the top of a platform
where fifty guests sat on folding wooden chairs overlooking a small bullring. Vicaro raised fighting bulls, selling them to
the Mexican bullrings and hoping eventually to export them to Spain as well. Because bulls were said to inherit their physique
from the father and their courage from the mother, Vicaro periodically held
tientas
at his ranch to test the courage of the female calves. Those that passed were used for breeding. The others were butchered.
Across from the platform, soldiers with automatic rifles perched on the top of the ring’s wooden wall. In the BMW racing across
the tarmac from the plane, an American congressman who had boarded the plane with them in Bogotá had told Gus that the gunshots
shattering the plane’s window had no doubt come from rebel guerrillas in the countryside around Vicaro’s ranch. Vicaro had
recently shifted financial support from their leader to a coca-trafficking member of the Colombian senate. The congressman,
a young man in spectacles, explained that his “committee work” in Washington involved fact-finding trips to Latin America.
“When it comes to what’s happening in the region,
Vicaro’s the oracle. Anything he doesn’t know, his guests know.”
The soldiers on the wall were joined by children crawling precariously along the ledge, risking a ten-foot drop into the ring.
One of the children, a bully-faced boy of about fifteen who was too fat to climb to the ledge with the others, leaned against
a wooden barricade about two feet in from the ring’s wall. He wore a black T-shirt and expensive-looking black leather boots
with pointed metal toes. The other children amused themselves by dropping things on his head—paper cups, wads of chewing gum—and
he retaliated angrily by snatching at their ankles, which dangled just out of reach.
“Who’s the kid?” Gus asked the congressman, who was in the seat beside him.
“Vicaro’s son. Ernesto.”
“He looks too young.”
“Vicaro has children younger than that.”
“Where’s the mother?”
“Ernesto’s? Who knows? The mothers of Vicaro’s children are too numerous to mention. Or count. Or remember.”
Vicaro waved to a man on horseback who held a metal-tipped lance resting on his right stirrup. The man smiled and waved back.
A few seconds later, a wooden door swung open and a calf three feet high, its horns well formed, trotted aggressively into
the ring.
The rider maneuvered the horse sideways, lowered the lance, and caught the charging calf between the shoulder blades.
Blood flowed, and the crowd cheered. For once, Gus was glad Michelle wasn’t with him. She loved animals, and this would have
enraged her.
As the rider backed off, preparing to receive another charge, a wad of paper struck Ernesto on the head. He made a sudden
leap, grabbed an ankle, and brought its owner tumbling heavily into the ring. His fists pummeled the smaller boy.
The calf, attracted by the movement, swung toward the boys. Ernesto ducked behind the barricade, intentionally blocking the
other boy’s way. The calf lowered its horns and charged. As the audience gasped, the boy scrambled to his feet, raced to the
gate, and slipped out. Ernesto laughed.
The rider lowered his lance, and the wooden gate swung open. Ernesto waited for the calf, blood flooding down its black flanks,
to move past him on its way out of the ring. Then he pulled his leg back and with astonishing aim, strength, and cruelty drove
the steel point of his boot hard into the calf’s hindquarters beneath the tail.
That evening, at a cocktail party in the ranch’s wood-paneled reception hall, Gus stood with a glass of Dom Pérignon, marveling
at the odd collection of guests— bankers, generals, actors, cowboys, journalists, senators, and cops.
He watched as Ernesto, carrying a glass-laden silver tray, approached one of the tuxedoed bankers. The banker took a glass,
smiled. The cuff on Ernesto’s extended hand pulled back to reveal a gold, diamond-ringed Rolex. The white dinner jacket concealed
much of his excess weight, and the polite smile covered the brutality displayed only hours ago in the bullring. He continued
on his rounds, the obedient son passing drinks, speaking briefly with each of the guests.
Gus marveled. Ernesto seemed transformed in this adult atmosphere of champagne and social chatter. Maybe it was
adolescence—one foot in the nursery, the other in the world. Right now the boy appeared so thoroughly at home he might himself
have been the host.
“He’ll run the whole show by the time he’s twenty.”
Gus turned to see the congressman. He said, “You think so?”
“He could just about run it now. Don’t let the thuggish behavior you saw at the
tienta
fool you. He’s every bit as clever as his father. And even nastier, if that’s possible. The old man brags about the kid’s
meanness, encourages it, says he wants a tough son. When he was eight, he played the violin, loved it, good at it, and one
night Vicaro grabbed it out of his hands and smashed it to splinters against the bedpost. Pushed an AK-47 at him, helped him
hold it, and blew out the wall to the bathroom. True story. Kid hasn’t been the same since.”
Gus didn’t know what to say.
“Watch him. He looks like he’s passing champagne, but he’s not. He’s studying everything, remembering everything. An extremely
ambitious, Machiavellian little bastard. He could be president of Colombia by his thirtieth birthday. What a boost that’d
be for the family business.”
“What is that business, exactly?”
“You name it. Timber, tobacco, airlines, hotels—if it makes money, Vicaro’s hand is in it, probably up to the shoulder.”
“And cocaine.”
It was a breach of etiquette.
“Well … I suppose … discreet and indirect.”
Gus drifted in the tide of guests, thinking of Michelle, worrying about her, longing to be with her. He’d shattered something
that could never be repaired. A thousand times
he had wanted to call her, to hear her voice. But how could he call her? To say what—that he worried about her, wanted to
be with her, that he was sorry? By now it would be weeks or months since she had ended the pregnancy. It was done. He knew
she would never forgive him. You can’t smash something rare and beautiful and then stand sorrowfully over the fragments wishing
them back together.
The next morning Gus and his father flew back to the family home in Connecticut. They had had time together, and Gus felt
closer to his father at the end of the trip than he had at the beginning, but there remained a great distance between them
that Gus despaired of ever bridging.