The Sleeping World (16 page)

“I'm glad you told me,” I said.

“You don't have to be here, Marco,” Alexis said. “It's not your family. It's not your fight.”

“It is my fight,” Marco said. I knew why he was there. The pig outside the warehouse hadn't really been Marco's hit. The gun they got from him was because of Alexis. Marco needed to be there because of Alexis, Alexis only, who hadn't even asked him, and Marco was so proud of that. He'd volunteered before he could be asked. I didn't mention La Canaria. The last time I'd seen her, she was strung between two guys crossing the plaza past midnight. Alexis had seen her, too. We would all pretend she didn't exist until they got back together again.

“Are you sure, Mosca?”

I nodded.

Alexis sighed—out of relief or fear, I couldn't tell.

“I didn't want to ask you,” he said. “But it'll be safe, I promise.”

“We're meeting at the library,” Marco said hesitantly. “And since you're always there—”

“No one will suspect you,” Alexis interrupted. “You're ­always studying, that's why it'll work.” He was smiling, almost, excited about the plan, excited to play the part he'd practiced. They had talked about it together. Which meant Marco had seen the photo of my parents before I had. Alexis had shown him first.

I nodded again. “I'll help.”

Alexis and Marco would meet the militants in the philology library to exchange information. I would be the lookout, signal them if anyone came too close. I wouldn't know anything else. Alexis needed us, and we would do whatever he needed. We would help him find the men once we had their names and addresses. My task would end at a certain early point. I wouldn't see them, I would be asked to walk away. We made the plan and promised.

Marco left before our abuela came back. Alexis slipped the photo into its envelope and rolled it carefully. I watched it disappear into his jacket. He rubbed his thumb and index finger over his clavicle.

It had been almost a game. The phone calls from new cities his bragging rights: playing spy, playing soldier. But whether he knew it or not, in that moment Alexis's body told me what the game had become. I looked at him and knew what he would do when he found the men he was looking for. He thought he was invincible, his sternum pressed proudly against his white T-shirt. But I knew how each muscle would coil and spring, their future actions already wrought into them. If he found those old men, he would make them scream, and I would hear their screams, louder than I imagined but gentler, too, radiating off of his skin every time he moved. He wouldn't be able to deny those
sounds. I wanted to turn away from the violence already written into his body, but the inevitability followed me like a spell.

* * *

Marco pressed down on my hands on the lamb until I wasn't trying to pull away. He lined up his fingers beside the metal teeth where he could grip the trap without cutting himself. Berta called for us on top of the hill.

“Now,” he said.

I pressed down into the wool and muscle, bringing blood to the surface, the lamb struggling beneath me. Marco pulled on the trap. With the sound of a rubber boot squelching up through mud, the metal came out.

“Bring him here,” Berta called. The dogs were behind her and raced up to us, sniffing the trap and barking at Marco.

Marco picked up the lamb and ran up the hill with it. My hands were covered in greasy blood and lanolin. Berta squirted the wound with iodine. The wool around it turned the yellow of a sunflower just about to die.

* * *

Because I didn't go. I promised Alexis I would help him and I didn't. I didn't show up at the library that day. The night before, I had followed Alexis in my dreams, just awake enough to panic, followed him to where he would take the men when he found them, saw him standing over two wrinkled
fachas
, his back to me, his face nothing I would see again.

An English exam was rescheduled at the last minute—it was just the excuse I needed. I took the exam, did well. Really, I was too afraid. I thought of Mamá standing in Abuela's kitchen, handing us sweet crackers and saying she'd be back soon. The policemen knocking at our door. The piles by the river.

And I thought, If I don't go, the plan stops. Alexis's muscles won't have to coil and kill. There will be no more men on their knees. No one will be held accountable, and our parents' names will rest where they had for years, buried deep in the silt of memory, asleep, asking for nothing. I was wrong.

* * *

Marco didn't mention the lamb at dinner. Berta placed it on the hearth, as close as she could to the fire without singeing its wool, and wrapped it in a blanket. It hadn't moved since Marco pulled it out of the trap.

We had taken too long to gather and separate all the lambs. Franz would take them to the town the next day. The sound of the grieving ewes echoed over the hills, down into the stone chimney, coating our meager dinner. La Canaria and Grito were silent, trying to speak to each other without words but neither knowing how. If they found a way out of this, they had better tell me. I was worried they would only do so if they needed me. I picked at the blood under my nails.

“Why did you care so much about it?” I asked Marco when Berta stepped outside. There was even less food that night than the one before.

“It doesn't matter,” Marco said. “It's going to die anyway.”

Ten

The snow came the next evening while we were peeling wrinkled potatoes and dumping the black bits into a dirty bin. We'd spent the day getting the plot ready for the seeds that Franz was supposed to bring back from town. Berta was worried because he hadn't returned, and all evening long she kept looking up as if to make him appear.

The lamb rasped in the corner by the hearth. It was beginning to smell. Its meat ruined. The window in the kitchen was small and held only a view of a stone courtyard with a finger's width of sky. We didn't notice it cloud, and we didn't see the snow start. Out the window over the stone stable, only darkness was noticeable, twilight forgotten and now night. There were no lights to glint off the snow. We didn't even know we were working in the dark until we could hardly see. The night piled layers of cloth slowly over our mouths, so thin we didn't notice until we couldn't breathe. Berta lit a kerosene lamp and put it in the window, and then we saw the snow. Falling, it caught the light the way water does. I gasped in surprise and Berta did, too. Only she knew what it meant.

She placed her face to the window and cupped her hands around her eyes, held her breath to not fog the glass. She wiped
the glass from the heat of her skin and leaned in again. Then she left the kitchen and opened the door. The wind shook the jars and the shelves. Marco had to help Berta close the door. We all looked up at her, waiting for her to speak, but she didn't. She just sank to the floor like a glob of spit down a wall. She was whispering quietly and quickly; I couldn't understand her. Marco leaned down next to her and she turned her face away, mumbling, her hands covering her mouth.

“Is Franz still out there?” Grito asked, and Marco nodded.

I went to the window. The snow was falling fast.

We stayed in the kitchen all night. Dawn was just a slight shift: the air outside the window turned from a wall of easing black to a wall of cascading grays. The snow kept falling, pressing against the warped glass of the kitchen window. It had a texture and mass that I couldn't keep my eyes off of. Each flake possessed a huge strength, to support its own weight and not collapse the way my lungs felt they would. The glass jars on the shelves jittered constantly, moved by the wind coming through all corners of the room, calling attention to their emptiness. Berta kept a small fire going, but the woodpile was shrinking. The smoky wet logs did nothing against the wind. There was hardly anything to eat. We huddled close to one another, the air stale with our recycled breath yet cold, too. The lamb died and Berta opened the door enough to put it outside because it smelled so bad.

“Where did that trap come from?” Grito asked Berta. He'd finally gotten out of Marco what had happened to the lamb.

Berta didn't answer him but stroked her daughter's hair, which was matted and dark with grease. A thin line of black grime circled the girl's neck. The gray light was an in-between place, one I didn't want to be in, one where I didn't belong. The fire didn't do much except make the shadows at the window look alive.

“Is the trap yours or what?” Grito said.

“It's not mine,” Berta said, looking out the window. “No one comes up here to hunt, either. At least not that I know of. And they wouldn't put a trap where my sheep are.”

“Whose is it, then?” Marco asked. “It was hidden. It was supposed to catch something, but it couldn't have been there long.”

Berta kept looking out the window. She was no longer expecting Franz to appear but something else, something she was afraid of seeing. She wouldn't answer about the trap. They stopped asking, and the words she could have said circled the house silently until they batted up against the window harder than the wind.

“Franz's uncle wants to take the boys to live with him,” Berta said, still turned toward the window. “He thinks we can't raise them all by ourselves here.”

“But that's the point, isn't it?” Grito said. I was surprised he'd even been listening to her. She wasn't waiting for an answer. “This is something you do by yourselves. Getting help would ruin it.”

Berta didn't seem to hear him. The boys were too skinny, proof of how far their plan of independence had failed.

Marie waddled slowly over to where Grito and La Canaria were sitting by the fire. She touched La Canaria on the knee and said something. She had the look that children get when they've decided to love, no matter what it is. It can happen so quickly, a squash with a curly stem, a rabbit in an alley, someone passing in the park they will never see again. The girl looked at La Canaria and spoke, her hand still on La Canaria's knee, her tinny voice rising in a question. I couldn't tell if it was baby talk or a language I didn't understand. The words seemed formless, too soft and particular to contain meaning.

La Canaria got up quickly and Marie stumbled back. She
didn't hit anything. I looked up, but Berta hadn't seen. La Canaria knelt next to the boys, who were sprawled out on the dusty floor playing game after game of tic-tac-toe on an old newspaper. The youngest one was debating where to put his next
x
. La Canaria bent over him and whispered in his ear. It was hard not to look at the boys. All day they'd been edging closer to me. The little one threaded his bottom lip behind his teeth, concentrating on what La Canaria was trying to show him. It wasn't enough that he looked just like Alexis, who was blond before his hair turned black; he had to move like him, too. I tried not to remember the boy's name. Listening to La Canaria, the little one held his hand over each square until she nodded and then he made his mark. The older one cried out. “It's cheating!” he said in English. La Canaria just shrugged and whispered again to the little one. He drew a new game and on the second round placed his
x
in the same spot. They kept playing, the little one always winning. The older boy didn't get it; he kept thinking he would win the next round.

“He's right,” Grito insisted. “I used to hate it when people would play like that.”

“It's a dumb game,” La Canaria said. “If it's that easy to beat.”

Grito was pissed off, but it was too close in the kitchen to yell at La Canaria. None of us wanted to go out to the barn where we'd slept. The floor was probably covered in snow.

“You can't just tell him how to win,” Grito said. “It doesn't make sense as a game now.”

“Why do you care?” La Canaria said.

“Don't they have any books they can read?” Grito asked Berta. She'd been staring out the window, really at her own reflection. The window was completely snowed in.

“Excuse me?”

“Books, you know,” Grito continued, trying to sound nicer. His hands wouldn't stop moving, picking at the bits of scalp clumping at the nape of his neck beneath his hair. “Books or games, so they have something to do.”

“They're fine,” she said. “Look, she taught them a game.”

I could tell Grito was angry, but I was the only one besides La Canaria who knew that. His nails worked a patch of skin behind his ear over and over. He picked up Marie, who was leaning too close to the fire, and sat down holding her. “Do you like living here?” he said.

“I don't think she understands you,” La Canaria said. Berta had already turned back to the window.

“Do you like living here?”

Marie pulled at Grito's ponytail and then rubbed her hand across his nose, leaving it speckled with ash from the hearth.

“She doesn't know how to talk,” La Canaria said.

Grito stood up, holding Marie awkwardly, and she squirmed, too loose in his grasp to trust him. Berta turned toward them, and Grito placed Marie on the ground by her brothers. “I'll show you something,” Grito said to the children.

The boys bent their heads over the newspaper, bored of the game and drawing pictures of houses and animals that might have been sheep or dogs. But they were too bulky to be distinguishable and instead seemed threatening, their mouths big, and not easily named. Grito laid a new piece of newspaper over the old one. The boys both cried out. La Canaria stood over them and pointed down at Grito. Right then she was the magician's assistant, wearing only feathers.

Grito drew a new tic-tac-toe game but added extra lines and lines that intersected the new ones. The grid became more complicated, branching out at different angles. It took him several minutes, but then he gave the boys their pencils and
stepped back. He nodded when the little one put down his
x
. He nodded when the older one drew more lines to intercept his brother's
x
. “That'll keep them quiet for a while.”

“They were quiet,” Marco said. I didn't know he'd even been paying attention.

“They were until she pissed them off.”

“I'm bored. And I'm hungry.” La Canaria said the last words louder, looking over at Berta, Berta at the window, Berta not turning. La Canaria brought her face a centimeter from Marie's nose. “What have we got to eat, little girl?”

Berta could probably understand La Canaria's Castilian. She was speaking slowly, as if to an animal.

“Find me something to eat,” La Canaria said. Marie giggled and stuck out her tongue. La Canaria bit at it. Suddenly, the little boy looked up, looked right at me. There was no way he could look the way he did, exactly like Alexis, almond eyes and curled lips almost too pretty for a boy, so much that I couldn't look away this time.

“Do you think Franz left before the storm started?” Marco said in English. His words brought the walls in closer. A bleeding in the air, layers of sense tearing. I listened to the one city still inside me, Paris, Paris, blocking out all other sound. The boy kept looking at me. Beneath his hand, the game Grito had made stretched the whole length of the newspaper and continued unabated onto the stone floor. The brothers were no longer playing with or against each other, just extending the game, placing their marks farther and farther away.

* * *

By afternoon the snow had stopped, but Franz hadn't returned. Berta made us coffee, weak and mostly chicory. She handed us the cups. “You have to leave,” she said slowly in Castilian.

None of us had spoken in several hours. The boys were upstairs sleeping and the girl sat silent where the lamb had been.

La Canaria stood up quickly. “We're not going anywhere.”

Berta didn't move and didn't look at La Canaria. Berta was really small. Her body formed around tiny bones, not an extra ounce of fat except for her belly, a tumor jutting out of her. She bent down to pick up Marie and spoke to me in English. “I don't like to do this, but I can't keep feeding you. I'm sorry. You can make your way to a road that's been cleared and get to town. I can't go anywhere with the children.”

“We're not going out there,” La Canaria said, stepping closer to Berta.

La Canaria probably wouldn't hit a girl holding a baby, a pregnant girl, but we were all shaky with hunger and cold. La Canaria wouldn't really have to do anything. Berta was alone and was acting strong, but there were four of us. “I'm not going out in that snow. You haven't even paid us.”

“I don't have any money to pay you with. We obviously don't have any money.”

“You
puta.
The guy that brought us here said—”

Marco stepped between them and turned to Berta. “We'll leave. We'll get to town and come back to help you.”

This wasn't what Berta had said, but it was a way that Marco could accept what we were being told to do. I didn't think he was ready for the alternative. He didn't look at Grito but kept talking. “This is a freak storm, right? The snow will melt soon and we'll be able to get back here. We'll find Franz and we'll come back.”

Grito nodded and La Canaria stepped away from Marco. Berta gave us extra sweaters and plastic bags for our boots.

“Follow the river,” Berta said. “It will lead you to the highway.”