The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Nathan Oates The Empty House

From The Antioch Review

After the plate of undercooked beans and crumbly tortillas, Ryan had half an hour before his bus for Huehuetenango, so he ordered coffee. The waiter, an old man with gray hairs hanging from his nose, said he had something special and hurried into the back. By that evening Ryan would see his old friend Jim. It’d been eight years since they’d spoken and in that time Jim had become a Maryknoll priest, a missionary, posted here in Guatemala. There really was no accounting for life, Ryan thought. The old man came out of the back with a cup, taking small steps.

“Nescafé,” he said, setting the cup down and putting his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Bueno. Muy bueno.”

“Gracias,” Ryan said, touching the handle of the cup, but the old man stood squeezing his shoulder until he lifted the cup, sloshing a bit over the rim, and took a sip. It was bitter and grainy. He smiled up into the tangle of nose hairs and said, “Deliciosa.”

“Nescafé,” the man said, delighted. As he went back to the kitchen he glanced over his shoulder, miming sips.

Here Ryan was, in a country covered with coffee plantations, and he was served instant coffee, which probably cost twice as much as local grounds. And this wasn’t a Western tourist hotel where the need to impress Americans might drive the owners to such stupidity; he was in a shitty little café near the Guatemala City bus station. There were only two other patrons, both young, scraggly-looking men, asleep over their yellow plastic tables. But this was one of the pleasures of traveling: You were always allowed to marvel at the incongruities that, when they faced you in your everyday life, say, in the suburbs, you simply rolled right past, thinking, big deal, let’s get moving. That would be him in a few weeks, back in America, at his sister’s house in Florida. Florida! As though they were all retired and worn down and exhausted by life, which, he felt sure, his sister, younger than he by two years, would be soon enough, since she was getting married in a week and would probably have a kid, buy a Volvo, start saving for college. And then if she were in a coffee shop and they served her Nescafé, well, she’d probably just be annoyed. What is this shit, she’d think.

Nescafé, he thought again, sloshing the last bit of coffee around in the slick of grounds, with a sinking feeling that he’d overplayed the moment. The irony wasn’t as dense as he’d hoped. Anyway, what good was irony without anyone to share it?

Hooking his blue duffel bag over his shoulder — though travelers were now all using new, internal-frame backpacks, he stuck with his old Diadora bag with a sense of Luddite pride — he went up to the bead curtain that hung between the dining room and the kitchen and called for the check.

In the blue haze of the station men clambered atop buses, shouting at the crowd that tossed up luggage. The drivers, some in gray uniforms, others in white shirts and jeans, chatted together off to the side, smoking, together summoning the strength to plunge these buses out onto the crumbling roads that clung to and wound around the sides of mountains through remote areas purportedly — though who could know how much of the “official news” to believe — full of revolutionaries and bandits.

The highways all over the country, Ryan knew, though he’d not actually traveled much in Guatemala, were spotted, particularly at the sharper turns in the passes, with clusters of white crosses where buses had overshot the road, breaking a window through the jungle canopy, crumpling on the mountainside. He’d seen many such crosses in Chile and Peru, up in the Andes, riding on buses just like these. He wasn’t about to be fazed, or worried. Or maybe he was a little bit worried, a tiny, niggling fear that crept through his stomach. But he was used to this fear, and in a way, he thought, it was a comfort: proof, amid the chaos and violence, of his individual, coherent self. The fear was the same each time he boarded a bus or was stopped by the police, and so it was a reminder that, despite all he’d seen and all he’d learned about the terror of the world, at the core he was still Ryan. Himself.

Stuffing his duffel beneath the seat, he flipped through the Time magazine he’d bought in Antigua. He scanned the table of contents for familiar names, but didn’t recognize any. Most of his friends had gone into television, thinking, rightly, that’s where the money was. He was one of the few to stick with newspaper work, and one of the very few to have left the country. For six years now he’d been covering the political troubles in Chile and Argentina. The culture of fear. Though, looking through Time, you wouldn’t have any idea this was happening. He’d always half-expected his work to make him famous, to win him Pulitzer Prizes, get him on staff at the New York Times. This hadn’t happened. Four of his articles had been picked up for the Herald Tribune, over six years. This wasn’t bad. Better than most. But it was never enough. The world just didn’t care.

The bus left the middle-class neighborhood around the station, rattled past two large shopping centers, then turned onto a narrow side street. They went through what seemed to be a shipping district: streets were full of trucks, idling up on the curbs, or pulled halfway into warehouses. Men with machine guns herded a crowd of peasants onto the backs of cargo trucks while a fat man in a tight suit brandished a clipboard. After the warehouses the bus passed along the edge of a market where people were screaming at one another across tables loaded with fruit and flies. From there the neighborhoods deteriorated until they were passing the slums along the mountain, shacks with plastic walls, heaps of trash sending up translucent waves in the sun. Then the bus was free of the city.

Earlier that morning he’d taken a different bus over the mountains from Antigua, where he’d been “on vacation” for a week after a long flight from Santiago. He’d managed to make himself into a real tourist, he’d thought: taking a tour of the heavily guarded jade factory, visiting the crumbling cathedral, and breakfasting each morning in the flower-flooded patio of his pension, listening to the elderly British couple at the next table whisper over cups of tea about whose fault it was that they’d missed their charter flight to Tikal or some other failure in their trip. Nights he’d gone to bars, surprised at first by the hordes of gringos there to study Spanish at the language institutes despite the civil war. But then the gringos had their own take on reality. A few had told him earnestly that the civil war was overrated. It wasn’t really a war, you know. He’d been disgusted by their obliviousness. He was glad to be back on the trail of a news story, a potentially radical and important one.

Jim was a Maryknoll, which meant he was dispensing medicine, teaching literacy skills to the poor, instructing them in the proper way of Catholic worship, and, although of course he’d never admit this, encouraging dangerously leftist ideas. The political naivete of the Catholic project in Guatemala was the seed of Ryan’s projected article. Though he sympathized with the ideals, it was suicidal. There were rumors of recent massacres in the mountains just outside Huehuetenango. Whole villages dumped in the woods. The military blamed the EGP; the Catholic clergy blamed the military; the military blamed the clergy for supporting the EGP; the clergy said they were doing humanitarian work. According to a reporter Ryan had spoken with in Guatemala City, there was a rumor a young woman had escaped, taken for dead amid the pile of bodies by drunk, blood-lusting soldiers. Eyewitnesses were rare. If Jim could hook him up with this woman not even American newspapers would be able to ignore the article. Ryan could, with some luck, make the world care. At least for a moment.

Along the highway the jungle was flattened back a hundred feet. There were gleaming puddles of water in the deep tracks of heavy equipment. Yellow backhoes leaned on piles of earth. Men squatted in the shadows of the wheels, smoking. He knew the trees had been pushed back to reduce the risk of guerrilla ambushes, and that the forests were also ravaged by a beetle that burrowed into pines and cut off the sap flow. The remaining trees were whittled at in the night by local farmers for fuel. He thought this would be a good way to open an article on Guatemala: a new, unused highway and a disappearing forest.

It’s possible that not all the buses are quite so broken-down as the one I rode to Huehuetenango when tracing the path Ryan, my older brother, must have taken back in 1982. For one thing it was years later, 1997. The civil war had ended the year before.

I got on the bus early and had a seat, but soon people filled the aisle, bumping each other with bags of vegetables and fabrics. The driver climbed along the side, thrusting his hand in the windows, demanding fares. I gave my seat to an old woman with a chicken in a wooden box. Not far out of Antigua the young woman beside me in the aisle threw up, splattering my shoes, strings of saliva hanging from her lips, her face pale. She grabbed my shirtsleeve for balance. She dry heaved a few more times, then straightened up, wiping her mouth. She was younger than I’d first thought, maybe around my age, mid-twenties, wearing a loose, large T-shirt that said Nike in flaking black script. Her long black hair was pulled into a thick braid that went all the way down her back.

“Gracias,” she said. I kept my hand on her arm. She smiled weakly and tucked her head down, shoulders shaking before she got sick again. For an hour we went on like that, I holding her up, she throwing up and dry heaving. It was the closest I’d felt to any Guatemalan while I was down there. When we reached her stop, a small town whose name I didn’t know and couldn’t find on any maps later, she said something to me, more than just thanks, and I nodded, though I hadn’t understood. I wanted to hug her. I didn’t want her to go. Maybe, I thought, I should get off the bus, talk with her, make sure she gets home all right. But this was just an excuse, I knew, to avoid going to Huehuetenango.

I’d put off going there until the very end of my trip. I don’t want to give the impression that I had any real, tangible hopes of finding my brother still alive in Guatemala. He’d appeared on a list from the State Department, marking him as missing. Disappeared. They’d called my parents two months after the wedding to tell them Ryan had been in the country, but had not been heard from since the day his plane had landed. They knew he’d gone to Huehuetenango, apparently to visit an old friend working as a priest there. That was the last they’d heard.

I went down to Guatemala to see the place where, in some ways, my family had broken apart. But traveling alone down there was harder than I’d anticipated. The country was rough, my Spanish was bad, and after getting violently ill for a week in Panajachel I spent most of my time in Antigua, which was crowded with tourists: Swedes and Americans and Danes shopping in boutiques and drinking all night in the gringo bars and clubs, admiring the city’s beauty, the pastel painted walls of the Spanish colonial mansions, the ornate lampposts over cobblestone streets. Antigua felt, beyond the architecture, European and safe.

This is not to say that one doesn’t still encounter fear, even there. Once, walking with my camera, taking pictures of flower-dressed ruins destroyed in an eighteenth-century earthquake, I strayed too far down through the city. I lowered the camera and noticed an old man, face-down in the street, as though he’d stopped for a sip of sewer water and died. His hands, flopped out above his head, were cracked and looked as though they were made of chalk. I turned to find my way back uptown when a group of young men spotted me and began following, shouting faggot, pussy: pinche huecho, concha. Each time I glanced back the four flung out their arms, like birds defending a nest.

Thinking back I’m not sure how afraid I should’ve been; maybe the boys just wanted to scare me a little, or maybe they wanted to take my wallet, stuffed with quetzals, my watch, my camera. I hurried past gringo bars and the central park with the ornate fountain, three angels, heads thrown back, hurling white arcs of water. It was near the fountain that the boys fell off my trail. That should have been the end of my fear, but a moment later, on the far side of the park, I passed the police station — two cops were outside smoking cigarettes — and then the fear only got worse, became terror. The boys might’ve mugged me, at worst kicked me a few times, but these men, with their big stomachs and machine guns, could arrest me on a pretense, murder me, and no one would stop them.

Even in my short time down there I knew this sort of thing happened. I’d met a young Danish man in a bar who’d been thrown in prison for insulting a drunken policeman. In his cell the guards had kicked him until his liver ruptured. His skin was tainted yellow. Patches of green flesh sagged beneath his eyes. He flew back to Denmark for surgery the next day, or that’s what everyone at the bar said.

I left all this out of the e-mails and post cards I sent home. I mentioned the flowers, the way people from each of the five towns in the mountains around Lake Atitlan wore different brightly colored woven shirts, like jerseys. I wanted my parents to know I was all right. I was a gringo, and so I could be scared and worried about myself but I’d always be safer than most. But how could I say this to my parents, my mother in particular?

There was, throughout my childhood, a shrine to Ryan in his old bedroom. The room hadn’t been left untouched — he’d hadn’t really lived there since he left for college — but on one dresser were several photographs of him: his graduation from college, a picture of him in New York before he went to South America, then one he’d sent from Santiago of him at a rooftop restaurant in the early-morning, the sheer, snow-capped mountain peaks not yet cloaked in smog. There were the post cards he’d sent along with his news articles in a binder, arranged chronologically. This little shrine wasn’t hidden away, or something to be ashamed of. Nor was it something every guest was shown. It was just there.

Ryan went to college when I was five and I remember only glimpses of him: a bag of candy corn he gave me as a present one Thanksgiving — probably just left over from Halloween — while he was in college. I left the candies in their bag on the windowsill, liking the way the streetlight glinted silver off the plastic, until the following spring when they melted in the sun and my mother threw them out: his long hair toward the end of college that our mom hated. “Where are my scissors?” she kept saying at his graduation, lifting up long frizzy locks and snipping them with her fingers. Then he moved to New York and was busy with reporting, then he was off to South America and didn’t return home for years.

Though Ryan wasn’t physically present, he permeated my life. My mother cried often when I was young, and though I can’t be sure it started with Ryan’s disappearance, I assume they were related. I remember once going upstairs to tell her I was going to play soccer and finding her sitting on the edge of the bed, sobbing. Her whole body was involved, shoulders shaking, head bobbing, hands clutching at her pants, then coming to her face, then grabbing her hair.

“Mom?” I said, and she looked up, still sobbing.

“Honey, yes, what is it?” she said. It was terrifying to hear her voice, trying to be so normal in the midst of all that awful shaking grief. I couldn’t remember why I’d come up there. She came across the room, wiping her tears. She put her hand on my head and asked again what I wanted. I hated Ryan then.

One of his articles, a short thing published in the Herald Tribune about the American expatriate community in Santiago, says it’s tempting to imagine ourselves the victims, to imagine the violence is because of us, about us, but it isn’t, and one needs to always remember the thousands in the mountains, in the cities, who have no voice, whose fear will never be recorded. But what good was this to my mother?

Ultimately, I went to Guatemala with two hopes: perhaps I could find out who I was — I’d always felt my self was in some ways missing and was connected to the mystery of what had happened to Ryan — and maybe my trip could bring a kind of solace to my mother. Perhaps through action, through really engaging the world, I could forge clarity out of the mess of life.

Ryan’s bus slowed as it reached the small town of Chimaltenango. An old man climbed aboard; his gums were stained black, as though a bottle of ink had spilled in his mouth. He held a sack of avocadoes on his lap like a favorite grandchild.

As the bus pulled clear of the town a clutch of children gave chase, dragging strings tied to plastic bags, trying to fly them. Ryan waved to the kids and one let out a triumphant shout, leaping in the air, his bag jerking along the ground.

He hadn’t seen Jim for eight years and wondered if he’d recognize him. But of course they’d be the two gringos at the bus stop. He imagined Jim with the long hair he’d had in college, curling into a loose cloud, though this was hard to match with a pinching white priest collar and those sticky black polyester pants and shirt.

It was difficult to connect Jim, whom he’d always thought of as the smartest of his college friends, with the fact that he was now a Maryknoll. Ryan had a rich, full contempt for religion. One just had to consider the situation here in Guatemala, with General Rios Montt who believed he was some kind of prophet and the massacres were the will of Jesus. But if Jim hadn’t turned to religion they might never have connected again. His sister had forwarded Jim’s letter. The letter had jokingly said it was Ryan’s adventurousness that had helped him decide to leave the States and work in Latin America.

Ryan had written back, saying perhaps he’d come for a visit. Jim had written an encouraging letter: maybe Ryan could even write an article about the work they were doing there in Guatemala? Sure, Ryan wrote back. Maybe.

Reading Jim’s letter, he had felt as if a cord, trailing back into his past he’d thought long severed, was suddenly pulling on him. And, over the past five years in Chile, he’d met many expatriates, had so much work, felt caught in something so important, that it was easy to lose track of those back in America living the fife you’d not been able to stand the thought of; but here was another friend, someone he’d lost track of, who’d chosen a similar path. They were different from most Americans.

When he called from his pension in Antigua he’d been full of nervous energy. The letter with Jim’s number was tattered from a week in Ryan’s wallet and from his having read it so many times. A woman who answered, perhaps a nun, said yes, Padre was in.

“Diga?” Jim’s voice shouted, so familiar, so wonderful to hear.

“Is this the infamous Father Jim?” Ryan said, feeling his old self, his self from college — naive, ironic, ridiculous — rising up in a rush.

“It just might be,” Jim said, with a laugh. “Ryan. I’m surprised you called.”

“Of course I called. I was so moved by your letter, I just had to.”

“Right,” Jim said, then cleared his throat, sounding suddenly older. “So, you’re in Guatemala? You said in your letter you might be stopping through.”

Ryan said he’d tried hard to be a tourist for a week and Jim responded politely, but there was a distance in the conversation. When Ryan asked if he should come visit, as Jim suggested, the man said, “Of course. Did I say that in my letter? Of course you should.”

“Jim, if this isn’t a good time, that’s fine. I haven’t even been up to Tikal yet.”

“No, everything is fine. It’s fine. You should come.” Jim then tried to steer the conversation onto more even ground, asking about old friends, but after a few minutes of this Ryan asked if Jim was frightened.

“Who isn’t?” The line was staticky. Maybe they were being taped, Ryan thought.

“Well, me,” he said. Was this a lie? He wasn’t sure.

“You’ve always been the brave one.”

“That’s very true,” Ryan said, smiling ironically at his reflection in his room’s mirror. “I am incredibly brave.”

“Maybe you can inspire me, when you visit.” There it was again: the old Jim.

“You haven’t given up drinking, have you? Because I’m not sure I can look at you in a priest getup without at least a few drinks.”

“Ryan, I’m a priest. All we do is drink. And love Jesus. And mankind and so on.” He would meet Ryan at the station, but right then he really needed to go.

The weekend before my own bus ride to Huehuetenango I went to the embassy in Guatemala City. They had no information, not even the records of Ryan’s disappearance. Or at least they didn’t show them to me. They showed me nothing, though they were polite. They asked how my hotel was. They gave me their business cards. They told me to travel safe. Back in Antigua that night I met a guy from Chicago, whom I’ll call Chris. We watched the Red Sox games — this was the only bar in all of Guatemala with satellite TV — and talked about places we’d been, places we thought we were going. He asked if I’d been to Tikal. I said I’d missed it, too hard to get to. We discussed the new highway that was scheduled to open soon from Guatemala City to the ruins, cutting the trip from sixteen hours to four.

The next night, when Chris didn’t show up, the bartender from Virginia told me Chris’s story. He was traveling with his fiancée. They’d been up in the Tikal region a few months before and had gone camping in the mountains. A group of men had found their campsite and had tied him to a tree and forced him to watch while they raped and beat his fiancée. She was in Antigua, but never left their hotel.

Why would they stay in Guatemala? I asked. The bartender said he didn’t know. “But that’s crazy,” I said. “Why don’t they just get out of here?”

“What? Dude, how should I know?” He turned away to watch the Red Sox.

I didn’t tell my parents I was going until after I’d bought my plane ticket. My father listened, didn’t say anything, and handed the phone to my mother, who said, “What? What’s this?” I tried to explain. I told her the countries weren’t nearly so dangerous anymore. “Being on an Interstate is more dangerous,” I told her. I wasn’t sure if this was true, but it sounded right. “You are not going, do you hear me?” my mother said. But what could they do? They couldn’t stop me. I needed to get out into the world.

My mother had always encouraged me to live through the imagination, particularly after Ryan disappeared. She made me take typing instead of shop and was always happy when I went upstairs to work on one of my fantasy novels instead of going out to play. I remember once my father came upstairs, home from teaching at the university, and sat me down and said it just wasn’t healthy for a kid to spend so much time alone. Out my bedroom window I could see two of my neighborhood friends chasing a couple of girls, shouting and jumping. My mother came up during this talk and told my father to leave me alone. “What’s the problem?” she said. “He has an imagination. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m proud of him.”

She did this to keep me safe. She’d already lost one son to the world.

But, after graduating from college and working for three years in customer service jobs, I decided I needed to go to Guatemala. I’d been thinking of doing it for years, but had put it off because of my mother, and I’d hoped how I should live my life and who I was would be clearer in the working world. It wasn’t, and eventually going to Central America was all I thought about, all I wanted.

What I found during those six weeks in Central America wasn’t what I’d been looking for. Nothing had been resolved. I still had no better sense of who I was, or who Ryan had been. After the trip I stayed with my parents for a couple of months, figuring out what to do next. During those months with my parents — they didn’t look at my pictures, didn’t want to hear anecdotes — I wondered if I’d gone down there only for myself? Is that what all this was? Was it all just for me?

With the wedding as an excuse, Ryan felt like less of a coward for leaving Chile. He’d spent too many years there, had angered enough people that if he was murdered the embassy wouldn’t be able to guess who’d done it. The article he’d written about a rumor of children stolen from their dissident mothers and given to military families had caused the biggest stir. Death threats had come in, both on the phone and in the mail. He’d come home late from dinner downtown one night to find his front door open. His first impulse was to turn, run. But he pushed the door open, flicked on the light. Nothing, as far as he could tell, had been stolen, but everything was ruined: curtains torn from the walls, the pillows and mattress gutted, books pulled from the shelves, ripped up. Someone had pissed on a pile of pages in the middle of the room. The next day Jim’s letter arrived and since he hadn’t bought a ticket home yet, Ryan planned his trip through Guatemala.

He leaned his head against the bus window. Dirt blew into his eyes as the stubby landscape scrolled past, dark silhouettes of mountains in the distance, streaked with webs of rain, strands cut, hanging loose.

When he woke, his neck stiff, the old man with his sack of avocadoes had moved a row closer. “Buenos tardes,” the man said, his Spanish clipped with an Indian accent.

Avoiding the old man’s stares, he tried to read the few reports about the civil war he’d got after two days of asking — the embassy had given him almost no information, and what he did have was mostly blacked out. The heat bore down and he gave in to it, sitting stunned for the next several hours as they pulled in and out of ruined towns.

His flight was in three days. He’d land in Miami. His sister worked in the administration of a small private university along the western coast. Her husband-to-be worked in a chemistry lab.

He’d seen his family only twice in the past six years. And now his sister’s world was filling out with the things one’s life was supposed to be filled with, while he had only his career; but it was a better career by far than if he’d stayed in America and become a lawyer, a banker, a teacher. It wasn’t wrong, he thought, to take a kind of pride in his life.

In Huehuetenango the bus stopped in the street, the station no more than an office with glass doors. Jim wasn’t there. Ryan waited on a bench, watching the driver toss cargo from the bus’s roof. Maybe Jim had forgotten. Or was just busy.

After an hour it was clear Jim wasn’t coming. According to the map the church where Jim worked was just a few blocks away. The sun lit up the tops of the buildings, reflecting off high windows. Though it was still early evening the streets were nearly empty.

The yellow and white church was at the far end of the square, bell towers visible above thick green trees. Flagstone paths wound around flower beds, past empty iron benches. Birds lined the buildings and chased each other off unlit lampposts, disappearing into the dark trees.

Ryan saw the body as the path opened up before the church. At first he thought it was a drunk. He’d seen that before, men passed out in the gutters, along the sidewalks. You just stepped over them and kept going. But as he got closer he knew this wasn’t the case. The black clothes were tattered, one pant leg pushed up over a white sock, the dark hairs flattened against the pale skin. The kneecaps had been shot out, jagged, crusted wounds with bright, hard slices of bone. The face was turned to one side, but Ryan knew it was Jim. Pieces of flesh had been torn from his face. Crusted holes where the eyes should have been.

Behind him a car rattled past, small and brown, the windows clouded with dirt. He stepped around the body and went toward the church. The sun had fallen and light struck only the point of the steeple. The strap of his duffel cut into his shoulder. He drew close to the end of the square and then he thought, Not the church and turned quickly down a side street. He stopped against the wall. The square was still empty, save the birds and the body he could no longer see. Ryan pulled the map out of his pocket. Four hotels were noted. One a few blocks off, near the local market. He patted his wallet, buttoned the front of his coat, and then unbuttoned it. Through the closed windows overhead he could hear the low murmur of voices.

The concierge was chatting and smoking with the bag boys in the lobby when he pushed through the glass doors. They all followed him to the check-in desk, as though they were old friends, finally together. He ground his teeth until they squeaked in order to control the shakes as he signed in. One of the boys went up with him to his room, though Ryan had no bags other than the duffel, which he carried. The boy leaned against the doorway and nodded, smiling, as though he were waiting for a punch line. Ryan closed the door in his face.

He turned the lock and took off his coat and sat on the bed. His face felt filthy and looked, in the mirror across the room, as though he’d been beaten. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his eyes and wiped them with a thin, stiff towel.

Had I found the same hotel? I found the one closest to the church, but it was fifteen years later. A lot changes in that much time. Though the war had been over for a year, threat leaked from the city’s rundown buildings. I spent one night in the town, then took the bus back to Antigua. I hated myself. Was I trying to pretend it was the same now for me as it’d been for Ryan? Did I want to be Ryan? Of course I did, to some degree, and this meant I wanted to face violence. But also to live. To be always on the edge, the way Ryan had put himself. Glance right and see death, spreading like a stain over life. But then why wasn’t I in Haiti? I was a coward. That’s why I took notes, always scribbling throughout my time in Guatemala in my small notebook, little fragments of phrasing and descriptions I’ve put together into this story.

There was a phone on the nightstand beside the bed. He picked it up. The dial tone sounded like a horn intended to drown out screaming. He put the receiver down. There were no buses until morning. He had the numbers for the embassy. They’d tell him to just take the next bus. The phones were probably monitored. He thought of calling his sister. No one knew where he was.

For an hour he watched television and then called for room service. The concierge told him there was no service. Where could Ryan eat? There was, the concierge said, a restaurante, cerca, comida fresca.

Behind the swollen blue lips of Jim’s corpse Ryan had seen a line of jagged broken teeth.

The bedspread was a bright paisley pattern and Ryan sat on it with his eyes closed, running his hands back and forth, as though his fingers were inches deep in crumbling petals that loosed up a bright smell into his nose.

The last time he’d visited his sister she was living in Wisconsin, working at a small two-year college. She’d driven him around the depressing town, pointing out the new McDonald’s, the small hotel whose restaurant had been the first to obtain a liquor license, and then she’d taken him to her small brick house on the outskirts. Beside the fold-out couch she’d set out a pile of new, green towels. Maybe, he thought, smacking the hotel sheet cover, she’d bought those towels just for him.

After a few minutes he put on his jacket. He’d eat, come back, watch television, sleep, wake up, and get on the bus to Guatemala City. In two days he’d be in Florida. He’d sit with his sister and drink a beer. He’d be able to hear the water, pulling at the pilings of her dock. They could walk down, after the sun had set, having put on warmer clothes against the cool night air, and watch ghost crabs scuttle up the sand.

The bag boys were outside smoking and their whispering seemed to chase him down the street. Curtains were drawn over all the windows, so only slices of yellow light fell onto the dark paving stones. A car rolled past and Ryan felt his legs tighten. He wasn’t hungry. Had he ever felt hungry? How was that possible? What the hell was he doing out here? He should’ve just stayed in his room till morning. But then the restaurant was there spilling yellow light over the cracked street. Behind him in the square church bells tolled nine times.

The restaurant had three round tables, a pair of metal folding chairs at each. On the wall was a dirty soccer pennant. At one of the tables an old man scooped watery beans into his mouth. Ryan sat down as a short overweight woman brought him a pitcher of water and a plastic plate with four thick tortillas on it. He asked for a beer. She nodded and smiled. Her two front teeth were missing. A television crackled — hysterical laughter — out of the back room into which the woman disappeared, the thick rug falling back into place. Flies drifted up off the empty tables and a large beetle hummed furiously about the light.

The old woman delivered his beer. It was warm and bitter, but he finished it before she left the room and asked for another.

It was awful to leave Jim’s body in the square. But what could he do? Drag the body out of town? Bury it? Put it in his duffel and take it back to the embassy? The military wouldn’t stand for that. But then, maybe the men who’d done this had moved on, had frightened themselves with killing a gringo, a priest no less. Maybe they’d already been reprimanded by their superior, or executed.

With his second beer the woman brought his beans and chicken. The chicken was covered with wilted, almost-brown tomatoes. The beans were warm and crisp on top and he ate them, sipping his beer. When I went out for dinner in Huehuetenango the food was almost inedible, pocked with puddles of water, trembling with parasites. The chicken was sticky and pink. There is no way of knowing if it was the same restaurant, if he’d even gone out to eat at all. Perhaps he’d been too afraid. Perhaps the men had come to his hotel room.

Beetles hummed into the light when the men opened the door. They were all young, sixteen to eighteen. The bulges of guns could be seen on the hips of two, while the third, who remained out in the street, carried a machine gun. They wore cobbled-together suits. The one who stood in front, a short kid, maybe eighteen, wore a baggy pinstripe jacket and tight tuxedo pants that rode up above his military boots.

“Señor,” he said and smiled. Dark metal braces pushed out his lips.

Ryan could barely get his beer back to the table.

“Perdóname, señor,” the boy said, stepping forward, his hands out. The old man at the next table stared at his plate. The kid in front of Ryan had terrible acne, clusters swollen red. He asked Ryan to please come with them.

Where?

Please, sir, the kid said, smiling. He reached out and put a hand on Ryan’s arm and squeezed gently. Ryan stood up and the kid nodded and said, “Si, señor. Questions, yes?”

Two of the boys walked alongside him while the third, cradling the machine gun, followed. The windows along the street were silent. He could hear the crunch of his shoes on the loose stones. Ryan asked where they were going.

The kid with the acne looked up at Ryan and smiled and nodded and squeezed his arm again. They walked through town to a poorer section. The shacks became conglomerations of tin scraps. Fires could be seen through gaps in the walls, but there were no voices. “Questions,” the kid said, massaging Ryan’s arm, the fingers pressing down, then loosening, pressing.

The boys stopped Ryan beside a brown car with dirty windows. The doors slammed and the engine clattered and they bounced over the pitted road. The boy with the scarred face sat in the back with Ryan, smiling at him, the dark braces, slick with saliva, catching bits of light. The two up front talked about something Ryan couldn’t make out. They drove out of town.

The conversation up front escalated. The boy in back got involved, leaning forward and shouting curse words at the other men. They were talking about soccer teams.

The boy turned to Ryan, grinning and shaking his head. He pointed at the driver and said, “This pendejo says Guate isn’t the best team. Can you believe that? What’s wrong with him?”

Ryan shook his head and tried to smile.

“Do you love Guate? Are you a fan?” the boy asked, his smile fading. Before Ryan could answer he said, “Because I hope I’m not riding here with two idiots.”

“You dumb fucker!” the driver shouted.

The boy leaned forward and slapped the back of the driver’s head lightly. “Just drive, you Guate-hating pinche huecho.” The boy smiled at Ryan, shaking his head, as though this wasn’t to be believed.

Out of town the car stopped. Sounds of the jungle, birds and howling insects, became louder as the men opened their doors. Ryan stayed in the car.

“Please come out. Questions only,” the acned kid says, smiling.

Ryan considered letting them shoot him in the car. But then a last hope filled him. It was possible, after all, that they did just want to talk. Why would they kill another American? They could just be taking him to talk with someone who would explain that the priest had been the work of the rebels. They’d assure him they were doing all they could to find the communist murderers.

A hand pulled him out of the car and pushed him toward the jungle. He stepped into high grass. The forest was a black wall.

He stumbled and the boy behind caught his shoulder, held him steady. “Cuidado.”

Ryan looked at the kid. He thought of his sister in Florida, his family gathering for the wedding, all those aunts and uncles he never thought of, and his younger brother. What was his brother doing now? For a moment Ryan couldn’t remember how old he was. Then it came, a sudden rush of memory: ten! When he thought of his brother, he thought of him riding a bike, wobbling and happy.

The boy with the braces and acne told him to keep walking down the path. Ryan didn’t see anything that looked like a path. Down there he’d find a man who wanted to talk. Just to ask some questions. Nothing else. It wasn’t a big deal. Then he could go. “Nueva York,” the boy said, and laughed.

“Bueno,” Ryan said. Maybe, he thought, feeling this didn’t make any sense, but feeling it deeply nevertheless, rising up, as though from somewhere behind his stomach, like a truth, that if he explained to these men about his brother things would be different. I hardly know my brother, he’d say. He’s going to be in Florida. Florida? the men would ask, glance at one another. Cuântos años? Ten, Ryan would say and smile, because ten, they could all understand this. They knew what it meant to be ten and to have a brother and to not know this brother, because who, the men would all be saying together through their looks, knows a brother? They’re like strangers, Ryan would say. Very much like strangers you encounter in a crowded city, or perhaps on a trail, out in the woods, walking past, and you both nod hello because you happen to be there, on the same trail in the middle of the forest — How unlikely to encounter another person! What are the two of us doing here on this trail, passing? — and so you nod and say hello.

Ryan walked ahead of the boys who’d all stopped. There was nothing but the dark forest. Somewhere, in there, was a house. Thickening grass pulled at his legs. He just needed to get to the house and for a moment he thought he could make out, between two trees, a path. Already he could imagine what the house would be like; perhaps it even stood, now, at that moment, empty and dark. They’d light some candles, or switch on the generator, and wait in the empty house for the colonel to show up. It was a mistake. It was the communists. And then he would be on the plane, back to Florida, where his sister was waiting for him, where he would see his parents and his brother and he’d tell them all this story, of his run-in with the military in Guatemala, of Jim’s death, of the horror that was life down there and everyone, happy from the wedding, dazed with wine and cake, would lean forward and shake their heads, for wasn’t it unbelievable, how terrible those countries could be?