“Me too, me too.” All except Eduardo, that is. He just sneered and lived in his dirt.
Ultimately, she knew these boys better than they knew themselves, boys playing soldier in the mornings, beisbol and futbol in the afternoons, gathering to drink and boast and lie as the sun fell into the trees. They were the spawn of prostitutes and addicts, uneducated, unwanted, unloved, raised by grandmothers, raised by no one. They knew nothing but cruelty. Their teeth were bad. They’d be dead by thirty. As the days accumulated she began to gather herbs at the edge of the jungle and sort through the store of cans and rice and dried meat and beans, sweetening the clearing on the hilltop with the ambrosial smell of her cooking. She found a garden hose and ran it from the creek that gave them their water to the lip of the empty swimming pool and soon the boys were cannon-balling into the water, their shrieks of joy echoing through the trees even as the cool clear water cleansed and firmed their flesh and took the rankness out of their hair. Even El Ojo began to come round to hold out his tin plate or have his shirt washed and before long he took to sitting in the shade beside her just to pass the time of day. “These kids,” he would say, and shake his head in a slow portentous way, and she could only cluck her tongue in agreement. “You’re a good mother,” he told her one night in his cat’s tongue of a voice, “and I’m sorry we had to take you.” He paused to lick the ends of the cigarette he’d rolled and then he passed it to her. “But this is life.”
And then one morning as she was pressing out the corn cakes to bake on a tin sheet over the fire for the arepas she planned to serve for breakfast and dinner too, there was a stir among the boys—a knot of them gathered round the table and El Ojo there, brandishing a pair of metal shears. “You,” he was saying, pointing the shears at Eduardo, “you’re the tough guy. Make the sacrifice.”
She was thirty feet from them, crouched over a stump, both hands thick with corn meal. Eduardo fastened his eyes on her. “She’s the hostage,” he spat. “Not me.”
“She’s a good person,” El Ojo said, “a saint, better than you’ll ever be. I won’t touch her—no one will. Now hold out your hand.”
The boy never flinched. Even when the shears bit, even when metal contacted metal and the blood drained from his face. And all the while he never took his eyes from her.
By the time the call came, the one Aquiles had been awaiting breathlessly through five and a half months of sleepless nights and paralyzed days, spring training was well under way. Twice the kidnappers had called to name their price—the first time it was five million, just as the Chief had predicted, and the next, inexplicably, it had dropped to two—but the voice on the other end of the phone, as hoarse and buzzing as the rattle of an inflamed serpent, never gave directions as to where to deliver it. Aquiles fell into despair, his children turned on one another like demons so that their disputations rang through the courtyard in a continual clangor, his abuela s face was an open sore and Suspira Salvatoros cleaned and cooked with a vengeance even as she waded in amongst the children like the referee of an eternal wrestling match. And then the call came. From the Chief. Aquiles pressed the cell to his ear and murmured, “Bueno?” and the Chief ’s voice roared back at him:
“We’ve found her!”
“Where?”
“My informants tell me they have her at an abandoned tourist camp in Estado Bolivar.”
“But that’s hundreds of miles from here.”
“Yes,” the Chief said. “The amateurs.”
“I’m coming with you,” Aquiles said.
“No. Absolutely no. Too dangerous. You’ll just be in the way.”
“I’m coming.”
“No,” the Chief said.
“I give you my solemn pledge that I will sign one truckload of baseballs for the sons and daughters of every man in the federal police district of Caracas and I will give to your son, Aldo, my complete 2003, 2004 and 2005 sets of Topps baseball cards direct from the U.S.A.”
There was a pause, then the Chief ’s voice came back at him: “We leave in one hour. Bring a pair of boots.”
They flew south in a commercial airliner, the Chief and ten of his men in camouflage fatigues with the patch of the Federal Police on the right shoulder and Aquiles in gum boots, blue jeans and an old baseball jersey from his days with the Caracas Lions, and then they took a commandeered produce truck to the end of the last stretch of the last road on the map and got down to hike through the jungle.
The terrain was difficult. Insects thickened the air. No sooner did they cross one foaming yellow cataract than they had to cross another, the ground underfoot as slippery as if it had been oiled, the trees alive with the continuous screech of birds and monkeys. And they were going uphill, always uphill, gaining altitude with each uncertain step.
Though the Chief had insisted that Aquiles stay to the rear—“That’s all we need,” he said, “you getting shot, and I can see the headlines already: ‘Venezuelan Baseball Star Killed in Attempt to Save His Sainted Mother’”—Aquiles’ training regimen had made him a man of iron and time and again he found himself well out in front of the squad. Repeatedly the Chief had to call him back in a terse whisper and he slowed to let the others catch up. It was vital that they stay together, the Chief maintained, because there were no trails here and they didn’t know what they were looking for except that it was up ahead somewhere, high up through the mass of vegetation that barely gave up the light, and that it would reveal itself when they came close enough.
Then, some four hours later, when the men had gone gray in the face and they were all of them as soaked through as if they’d been standing fully clothed under the barracks shower, the strangest thing happened. The Chief had called a halt to check his compass reading and allow the men to collapse in the vegetation and squeeze the blood, pus and excess water from their boots, and Aquiles, though he could barely brook the delay, paused to slap mosquitoes on the back of his neck and raise the canteen of Gatorade to his mouth.
That was when the scent came to him, a faint odor of cooking that insinuated itself along the narrow olfactory avenue between the reeking perfume of jungle blooms and the fecal stench of the mud.
But this was no ordinary smell, no generic scent you might encounter in the alley out back of a restaurant or drifting from a barrio window—this was his mother’s cooking! His mother’s! He could even name the dish: tripe stew! “Jefe,” he said, taking hold of the Chief ’s arm and pulling him to his feet, “do you smell that?”
They approached the camp warily, the Chief ’s men fanning out with their weapons held rigidly before them. Surprise was of the essence, the Chief had insisted, adding, chillingly, that the guerrillas were known to slit the throats of their captives rather than give them up, and so they must be eliminated before they knew what hit them.
Aquiles felt the moment acutely. He’d never been so tense, so unnerved, in all his life. But he was a closer and a closer lived on the naked edge of catastrophe every time he touched the ball, and as he moved forward with the rest of them, he felt the strength infuse him and knew he would be ready when the moment came.
There were sounds now—shouts and curses and cries of rapture amid a great splash and heave of water in motion—and then Aquiles parted the fronds of a palm and the whole scene was made visible.
He saw rough huts under a diamond sky, a swimming pool exploding with slashing limbs and ecstatic faces, and there, not thirty feet away, the cookfire and the stooping form of a woman, white-haired, thin as bone. It took him a moment to understand that this was his mother, work-hardened and deprived of her makeup and the Clairol Nice ’n Easy he sent her by the cardboard case from the north. His first emotion, and he hated himself for it, was shame, shame for her and for himself too. And then, as the voices caromed round the pool—Oaf! Fool! Get off me, Humberto, you ass!—he felt nothing but anger.
He would never know who started the shooting, whether it was one of the guerrillas or the Chief and his men, but the noise of it, the lethal stutter that saw the naked figures jolted out of the pool and the water bloom with color, started him forward. He stepped from the bushes, oblivious to danger, stopping only to snatch a rock from the ground and mold it to his hand in the way he’d done ten thousand times when he was a boy. That was when the skinny kid with the dead eyes sprang up out of nowhere to put a knife to his mother’s throat, and what was the point of that? Aquiles couldn’t understand. One night there was victory, another night defeat. But you played the game just the same—you didn’t blow up the ballpark or shoot the opposing batter. You didn’t extort money from the people who’d earned it through God-given talent and hard work.
You didn’t threaten mothers. That wasn’t right. That was impermissible. And so he cocked his arm and let fly with his fastball that had been clocked at ninety-eight miles an hour on the radar gun at Camden Yards while forty-five thousand people stamped and shouted and chanted his name—High and inside, he was thinking, high and inside—and, without complicating matters, let’s just say that his aim was true.
……
Unfortunately, Marita Villalba never fully recovered from her ordeal.
She would awaken in the night, smelling game roasting over a campfire—smelling carpincho with its rodent’s hide intact—and she seemed lost in her own kitchen. She gave up dyeing her hair, rarely wore makeup or jewelry. The machine shop was nothing to her and when Romulo Cordero, hobbled by his wounds, had to step down, she didn’t even come downstairs to attend his retirement party, though the smell of the arepas, empanadas and chivo en coco radiated through the windows and up out of the yard and into the streets for blocks around. More and more she was content to let Suspira Salvatoros look after the kitchen and the children while she sat in the sun with her own mother, their collective fingers, all twenty of them, busy with the intricate needlepoint designs for which they became modestly famous in the immediate neighborhood.
Aquiles went back to the major leagues midway through the season, but after that moment of truth on the hilltop in the jungle of Estado Bolivar, he just couldn’t summon the fire anymore. That, combined with the injury to his rotator cuff, spelled disaster. He was shelled each time he went to the mound, the boos rising in chorus till the manager took the ball from him for the last time and he cleared waivers and came home to stay, his glory gone but the contract guaranteed. The first thing he did was take Suspira Salvatoros to the altar, defeating the ambitions of any number of young and not-so-young women whose curses and lamentations could be heard echoing through the streets for weeks to come. Then he hired a team of painters to whitewash every corner of the compound, even to the tiles of the roof. And finally—and this was perhaps the hardest thing of all—he sold the vermilion Hummer to a TV actor known for his sensitive eyes and hyperactive jaw, replacing it with a used van of uncertain provenance and a color indistinguishable from the dirt of the streets.
She knew in her heart it was a mistake, but she’d been laid off and needed the cash and her memories of the Strikers were mostly on the favorable side, so when Mrs. Striker called—Gretchen, this is Gretchen? Mrs. Striker?—she’d said yes, she’d love to come over and hear what they had to say. First, though, she had to listen to her car cough as she drove across town (fuel pump, that was her father’s opinion, offered in a flat voice that said it was none of his problem, not anymore, not now that she was grown and living back at home after a failed attempt at life), and she nearly stalled the thing turning into the Strikers’ block. And then did stall it as she tried, against any reasonable expectation of success, to parallel park in front of their great rearing fortress of a house. It felt strange punching in the code at the gate and seeing how things were different and the same, how the trees had grown while the flowerbeds remained in a state of suspended animation, everything in perpetual bloom and clipped to within a millimeter of perfection. The gardeners saw to that. A whole battalion of them that swarmed over the place twice a week with their blowers and edgers and trimmers, at war with the weeds, the insects, the gophers and ground squirrels and the very tendency of the display plants to want to grow outside the box. At least that was how she remembered it. The gardeners. And how Admiral would rage at the windows, showing his teeth and scrabbling with his claws—and if he could have chewed through glass he would have done it. “That’s right, boy,” she’d say, “that’s right—don’t let those bad men steal all your dead leaves and dirt. You go, boy. You go. That’s right.”
She rang the bell at the front door and it wasn’t Mrs. Striker who answered it but another version of herself in a white maid’s apron and a little white maid’s cap perched atop her head, and she was so surprised she had to double-clutch to keep from dropping her purse.
A woman of color does not clean house, that was what her mother always told her, and it had become a kind of mantra when she was growing up, a way of reinforcing core values, of promoting education and the life of the mind, but she couldn’t help wondering how much higher a dogsitter was on the socioeconomic scale than a maid. Or a sous-chef, waitress, aerobics instructor, ticket puncher and tortilla maker, all of which she’d been at one time or another.
About the only thing she hadn’t tried was leech gathering. There was a poem on the subject in her college text by William Wordsworth, the poet of daffodils and leeches, and she could summon it up whenever she needed a good laugh. She developed a quick picture of an old long-nosed white man rolling up his pantlegs and wading into the murk, then squeezed out a miniature smile and said, “Hi, I’m Nisha? I came to see Mrs. Striker? And Mr. Striker?”
The maid—she wasn’t much older than Nisha herself, with a placid expression that might have been described as self-satisfied or just plain vacant—held open the door. “I’ll tell them you’re here,” she said.
Nisha murmured a thank-you and stepped into the tiled foyer, thinking of the snake brain and the olfactory memories that lay coiled there. She smelled dog—smelled Admiral—with an overlay of old sock and furniture polish. The great room rose up before her like something transposed from a cathedral. It was a cold room, echoing and hollow, and she’d never liked it. “You mind if I wait in the family room?” she asked.
The maid—or rather the girl, the young woman, the young woman in the demeaning and stereotypical maid’s costume—had already started off in the direction of the kitchen, but she swung round now to give her a look of surprise and irritation. For a moment it seemed as if she might snap at her, but then, finally, she just shrugged and said, “Whatever.”
Nothing had changed in the paneled room that gave onto the garden, not as far as Nisha could see. There were the immense old high-backed leather armchairs and the antique Stickley sofa rescued from the law offices of Striker and Striker, the mahogany bar with the wine rack and the backlit shrine Mr. Striker had created in homage to the spirits of single-malt scotch whiskey, and overseeing it all, the oil portrait of Admiral with its dark heroic hues and golden patina of varnish. She remembered the day the painter had come to the house and posed the dog for the preliminary snapshots, Admiral uncooperative, Mrs. Striker strung tight as a wire and the inevitable squirrel bounding across the lawn at the crucial moment. The painter had labored mightily in his studio to make his subject look noble, snout elevated, eyes fixed on some distant, presumably worthy, object, but to Nisha’s mind an Afghan—any Afghan—looked inherently ridiculous, like some escapee from Sesame Street, and Admiral seemed a kind of concentrate of the absurd. He looked goofy, just that.
When she turned round, both the Strikers were there, as if they’d floated in out of the ether. As far as she could see, they hadn’t aged at all. Their skin was flawless, they held themselves as stiff and erect as the Ituri carvings they’d picked up on their trip to Africa and they tried hard to make small talk and avoid any appearance of briskness. In Mrs. Striker’s arms—Call me Gretchen, please—was an Afghan pup, and after the initial exchange of pleasantries, Nisha, her hand extended to rub the silk of the ears and feel the wet probe of the tiny snout on her wrist, began to get the idea. She restrained herself from asking after Admiral. “Is this his pup?” she asked instead. “Is this little Admiral?”
The Strikers exchanged a glance. The husband hadn’t said, Call me Cliff, hadn’t said much of anything, but now his lips compressed.
“Didn’t you read about it in the papers?”
There was an awkward pause. The pup began to squirm.
“Admiral passed,” Gretchen breathed. “It was an accident. We had him—well, we were in the park, the dog park … you know, the one where the dogs run free? You used to take him there, you remember, up off Sycamore? Well, you know how exuberant he was…”
“You really didn’t read about it?” There was incredulity in the husband’s voice.
“Well, I—I was away at college and then I took the first job I could find. Back here, I mean. Because of my mother. She’s been sick.”
Neither of them commented on this, not even to be polite.
“It was all over the press,” the husband said, and he sounded offended now. He adjusted his oversized glasses and cocked his head to look down at her in a way that brought the past rushing back.
“Newsweek did a story, USA Today—we were on Good Morning America, both of us.”
She was at a loss, the three of them standing there, the dog taking its spiked dentition to the underside of her wrist now, just the way Admiral used to when he was a pup. “For what?” she was about to say, when Gretchen came to the rescue.
“This is little Admiral. Admiral II, actually,” she said, ruffling the blond shag over the pup’s eyes.
The husband looked past her, out the window and into the yard, an ironic grin pressed to his lips. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said, “and it’s too bad he wasn’t a cat.”
Gretchen gave him a sharp look. “You make a joke of it,” she said, her eyes suddenly filling, “but it was worth every penny and you know it.” She mustered a long-suffering smile for Nisha. “Cats are simpler—their eggs are more mature at ovulation than dogs’ are.”
“I can get you a cat for thirty-two thou.”
“Oh, Cliff, stop. Stop it.”
He moved to his wife and put an arm round her shoulders. “But we didn’t want to clone a cat, did we, honey?” He bent his face to the dog’s, touched noses with him and let his voice rise to a falsetto,
“Did we now, Admiral? Did we?”
At seven-thirty the next morning, Nisha pulled up in front of the Strikers’ house and let her car wheeze and shudder a moment before killing the engine. She flicked the radio back on to catch the last fading chorus of a tune she liked, singing along with the sexy low rasp of the lead vocalist, feeling good about things—or better, anyway. The Strikers were giving her twenty-five dollars an hour, plus the same dental and health care package they offered the staff at their law firm, which was a whole solid towering brick wall of improvement over what she’d been making as a waitress at Johnny’s Rib Shack, sans health care, sans dental and sans any tip she could remember above ten percent over the pre-tax total because the people who came out to gnaw ribs were just plain cheap and no two ways about it. When she stepped out of the car, there was Gretchen coming down the front steps of the house with the pup in her arms, just as she had nine years ago when Nisha was a high school freshman taking on what she assumed was going to be a breeze of a summer job.
Nisha took the initiative of punching in the code herself and slipping through the gate to hustle up the walk and save Gretchen the trouble, because Gretchen was in a hurry, always in a hurry. She was dressed in a navy-blue suit with a double string of pearls and an antique silver pin in the shape of a bounding borzoi that seemed eerily familiar—it might have been the exact ensemble she’d been wearing when Nisha had told her she’d be quitting to go off to college. I’m sorry, Mrs. Striker, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to work for you and Mr. Striker, she’d said, hardly able to contain the swell of her heart, but I’m going to college. On a scholarship. She’d had the acceptance letter in her hand to show her, thinking how proud of her Mrs. Striker would be, how she’d take her in her arms for a hug and congratulate her, but the first thing she’d said was, What about Admiral?
As Gretchen closed on her now, the pup wriggling in her arms, Nisha could see her smile flutter and die. No doubt she was already envisioning the cream-leather interior of her BMW (a 750i in Don’t-Even-Think-About-It Black) and the commute to the office and whatever was going down there, court sessions, the piles of documents, contention at every turn. Mr. Striker—Nisha would never be able to call him Cliff, even if she lived to be eighty, but then he’d have to be a hundred and ten and probably wouldn’t hear her, anyway—was already gone, in his matching Beemer, his and hers.
Gretchen didn’t say good morning or hi or how are you? or thanks for coming, but just enfolded her in the umbrella of her perfume and handed her the dog. Which went immediately heavy in Nisha’s arms, fighting for the ground with four flailing paws and the little white ghoul’s teeth that fastened on the top button of her jacket. Nisha held on. Gave Gretchen a big grateful-for-the-job-and-the-health-care smile, no worries, no worries at all.
“Those jeans,” Gretchen said, narrowing her eyes. “Are they new?”
The dog squirming, squirming. “I, well—I’m going to set him down a minute, okay?”
“Of course, of course. Do what you do, what you normally do.”
An impatient wave. “Or what you used to do, I mean.”
They both watched as the pup fell back on its haunches, rolled briefly in the grass and sprang up to clutch Nisha’s right leg in a clumsy embrace. “I just couldn’t find any of my old jeans—my mother probably threw them all out long ago. Plus”—a laugh—“I don’t think I could fit into them anymore.” She gave Gretchen a moment to ruminate on the deeper implications here—time passing, adolescents grown into womanhood, flesh expanding, that sort of thing—then gently pushed the dog down and murmured, “But I am wearing—right here, under the jacket?—this T-shirt I know I used to wear back then.”
Nothing. Gretchen just stood there, looking distracted.
“It’s been washed, of course, and sitting in the back of the top drawer of my dresser where my mother left it, so I don’t know if there’ll be any scent or anything, but I’m sure I used to wear it because Tupac really used to drive my engine back then, if you know what I mean.” She gave it a beat. “But hey, we were all fourteen once, huh?”
Gretchen made no sign that she’d heard her—either that or she denied the proposition outright. “You’re going to be all right with this, aren’t you?” she said, looking her in the eye. “Is there anything we didn’t cover?”
The afternoon before, during her interview—but it wasn’t really an interview because the Strikers had already made up their minds and if she’d refused them they would have kept raising the hourly till she capitulated—the two of them, Gretchen and Cliff, had positioned themselves on either side of her and leaned into the bar over caramel-colored scotches and a platter of ebi and maguro sushi to explain the situation. Just so that she was clear on it. “You know what cloning is, right?” Gretchen said. “Or what it involves? You remember Dolly?”
Nisha was holding fast to her drink, her left elbow pressed to the brass rail of the bar in the family room. She’d just reached out her twinned chopsticks for a second piece of the shrimp, but withdrew her hand. “You mean the country singer?”
“The sheep,” the husband said.
“The first cloned mammal,” Gretchen put in. “Or larger mammal.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Sure. I guess.”
What followed was a short course in genetics and the method of somatic cell nuclear transplant that had given the world Dolly, various replicated cattle, pigs and hamsters, and now Admiral II, the first cloned dog made available commercially through SalvaPet, Inc., the genetic engineering firm with offices in Seoul, San Juan and Cleveland. Gretchen’s voice constricted as she described how they’d taken a cell from the lining of Admiral’s ear just after the accident and inserted it into a donor egg, which had had its nucleus removed, stimulated the cell to divide through the application of an electric current, and then inserted the developing embryo into the uterus of a host mother—“The sweetest golden retriever you ever saw. What was her name, Cliff? Some flower, wasn’t it?”
“Peony.”
“Peony? Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“I thought it was—oh, I don’t know. You sure it wasn’t Iris?”
“The point is,” he said, setting his glass down and leveling his gaze on Nisha, “you can get a genetic copy of the animal, a kind of three-dimensional Xerox, but that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be like the one you, well, the one you lost.”
“It was so sad,” Gretchen said.
“It’s nurture that counts. You’ve got to reproduce the animal’s experiences, as nearly as possible.” He gave a shrug, reached for the bottle. “You want another?” he asked, and she held out her glass. “Of course we’re both older now—and so are you, we realize that—but we want to come as close as possible to replicating the exact conditions that made Admiral what he was, right down to the toys we gave him, the food, the schedule of walks and play and all the rest. Which is where you come in—”