Red Weather

2. Ciudad Coatepeque

5 2 CiudadCoatepeque Neva’s gold wedding ring had stretched the many miles between Atlanta and New Orleans. Her diamond solitaire had taken her high into the thin air over the Gulf of Mexico and down on the other shore. Her camera far into southern Mexico. The gold bangle she’d inherited from one of her mother’s friends had brought her here, across the border to Coatepeque, and bought her meals for a week. Coatepeque—a country that barely made the news, eclipsed behind Nicaragua’s revolution and El Salvador’s death squads. She pawned everything when she left Atlanta, and if she didn’t find work soon, she didn’t know how she would manage. She’d thought of calling her brother, but the last time they talked on the phone he had made her so angry she slammed the receiver down. Even if she swallowed her pride, called him to say, You were right about Will, how would he get any money to her here? The man in the Atlanta pawnshop had spoken to her from behind a cage. Almost exactly an arm’s length behind the cage, jewelry shone from glass cases—heavy class rings with dark red or blue stones, brooches in the shapes of animals or flowering branches, a man’s thick gold ring crusted with diamond chips—a “gent’s ring” her father called them. On the walls were electric guitars, a shiny black vacuum cleaner, too many eight-track tape players to count. The long, pointed nail of the man’s left pinky stood out against his short, meaty fingers. “I don’t get much for shortwaves,” he said. “Nobody wants ’em—” He broke off. “Let go of her purse, Philip,” he said, and Neva turned in surprise to see a young man with a runny nose holding her purse in the air behind her, the strap still wrapped around her shoulder. “Let it go.” When Philip released her purse, it swung against the counter with a thump. He was a blur out the front door of the shop. 6 The man sighed. “He really ain’t so bad. Just a pothead.” She was careful after that. In the restroom of the Amtrak station, she hid money in small caches all over her body. Two twenties flattened under the insole of her left shoe. Two more safety-pinned between her breasts. The rest tucked into a little cloth purse hung from a belt loop inside the front of her pants. She worried that she would forget where she’d put the money, so she drew a picture of herself in her journal, with a star over each and every cache. She kept one day’s spending money in the pocket of her jacket, the one with the zipper. But no one ever looked twice at her money, not even after she crossed the border, and every bus stop was a chaos of men shouting, “Lady, lady, over here, lady,” of children selling sweets and cheap souvenirs, of policemen walking the length of the bus, thumbs tucked into the waistbands of their uniformgreen pants, automatic rifles slung across their bodies. Ralph, the man who was supposed to rent her an apartment, was late. On the other side of the zócalo stood the white, pyramid-shaped Heroes Monument, its base plastered with posters from the last legislative election. Politics seemed to be everywhere in Coatepeque City— graffiti spray-painted on walls and wooden fences, posters layering every vertical surface. A boy and a girl sat on the first step. He bounced a small red ball; the girl watched, reaching for the ball once, then pulling her hand away as the boy caught it with a deft motion. A mariachi band hovered in front of her, music bursting from them, sure that she would relent and drop a few coins into the sombrero the little boy—the bandleader’s son perhaps—held out to her. The bandleader played a guitar the size of a cello. A powerful, clear tenor voice emerged from a frail-looking singer who leaned on a cane and closed his eyes while he sang. As her money dwindled, Neva had started ignoring the bands. She was too broke. She took a paperback out of her bag and started reading. It always worked. In a few minutes, the mariachi band drifted away, still playing, toward the verandah of the Grand Hotel. They knew every American had money. They knew that even...