Chapter Thirteen part 2―Oswaldo arrives as Biff is born again
Beepbeepbeepbeep.
Harriet Hopwood, eyes puffy and full of sleep, reached to silence the alarm clock. A dark young man, red-haired with a hint of freckles―a blending of transoceanic bloodlines―squirmed backwards onto the warm spot she had just vacated. He snored gently.
"You didn't have any idea where you were, Ozzie," Harriet whispered softly as she nibbled at an ear. The snoring stopped.
Oswaldo opened one eye and reached out to hold her. "I am here, mariposa," said Oswaldo, not yet awake.
"Butterfly, mariposa," Harriet recognized the Spanish word.
In El Rosario and Sierra Chincua scientists reported over two hundred million butterflies had perished in an unseasonable fall of sleet, casualties to the careless footfalls of los caballos apocalípticos, the great wild cattle of Armageddon usually accompanied by plague and locusts, not butterflies. Night after night Oswaldo Patricio Meléndez O'Rourke y Nuñez was in a dream of running, fleeing a pursuit from which there was no escape. Harriet noticed and radiated motherly concern that the sheets were nightly drenched with sweat―"Bad dreams. I'll get you some of that nighttime liquid from the store."
"Sí, corazón. Una dolorosa pesadilla, a nightmare." Someone must have survived the explosion―the other, the second explosion after that first explosion which had vaporized Oswaldo's parents. Oswaldo was not close to Don Paco and Doña Inez but mourned his parents appropriately for all his then five years. He had been especially fond of the golden cocker spaniel which perished with them. He speculated it was Tío Patricio who ordered the wiring of Don Paco Nuñez' Land Rover with the plastique that precipitated his orphanhood. He returned to the window to observe Harriet's departure from between the slats of her venetian blinds. There are too many explosions in my life, thought Oswaldo. One at least had been left alive from explosion number two.
They were after him―after us, for Harriet ran beside him. Miguel, Patricio, the corduroy, Harriet and himself, they were all running, an ensemble. Five runners—play fives, lucky numbers in the voodoo dream books. Miguel had filled many arks with losers; he folded his losing tickets into origami animals. In the numbers, any combination of fives, the numbers of Mama Coca.
In the street, a powder blue Celebrity, a veteran of many Maine winters, coughed to life, a cloud of blue exhaust erupting from its tailpipe. Harriet's breath steamed as she emerged from the car to scrape at the layer of frost on her windshield with a small plastic rectangle―a credit card. She looked up at him as she scraped. Successful, she held her arms above her head and clapped her mittens together to demonstrate that she was entitled to a victory lap. A momentary halo of ice crystals fell and powdered her hair. Harriet waved as she drove away. He would not tell her of this.
They were after him―the money. Its inaccessibility helped. Thirty miles away,
taped and wired around the tub of a stranger’s washing machine. Before this, the
washing machine had never moved―rusted, left to be a lawn ornament deep under
the drifting snows of winter, the tall grasses of summer. It had seemed the
perfect hiding place. And now it was gone.
"Hiya, kid." The speaker had worn faded bib overalls and leaned against the
sagging door of a likewise sagging truck. The vehicle had been red once, Oswaldo
observed; it was an ancient Chevy.
"Uh... how do you do?"
"I do alright. Pease, Harry Pease." The man held out a hand that wore woolen
gloves with the fingers cut away―a fishmonger's mittens. "Just checking out the
junk in Harriet's yard. She asked me to come and clean things up. You must be
why. Guess I'll start with the fridge. Gimme a hand?" he asked.
Harry backed the truck between waist-deep drifts to where Oswaldo stood,
balancing the derelict refrigerator. "OK. Let 'er go and back off," Harry
shouted. "Fast." Oswaldo did as ordered. The refrigerator toppled forward as
Harry slammed into it with the lowered tailgate of his truck. "Got 'er," said
Harry Pease.
There was a secret foreboding as palms wet, mouth dry, Oswaldo heard the washer
crunch under the impact of the Chevy's tailgate, with it his one hundred thousand dollars, to be entrusted to the wobbly ministrations of Harry Pease and
his truck. A stranger, ¡Maron!
"Perdón, but where does this go?" Yet another trip for the money; the
washing machine was to be hauled to an undisclosed landfill.
"My place."
"Bueno." If the condition of this man's truck could be trusted as an indicator
of his work ethic, the washing machine would lie unmolested in the yard of Harry
Pease for many years. But thoughts of the absent money bore down upon him and for weeks he wandered vacant-eyed
about the house, forgetful of the mechanics of everyday life. Boiling water was
poured on the table as he missed the coffee carafe while he stared into space. A
marmalade spoon was set dripping and sticky on the tablecloth. He
inadvertently flushed a magazine down the toilet. There had been a costly visit
from the plumber. He neglected the daily intimacies that give substance and
meaning to life and love. Harriet was puzzled, then hurt by his distracted
absent-mindedness, and that he could not bear. He must tell her all. Of the
money and its hiding.
Harriet was ironing with the radio on, humming a different tune, an adored
maddening habit. He was sure the music was important to someone, a homing tone,
the buzzing of the hive. The radio was Mozart; Harriet hummed rock 'n' roll. He
had come to her for reassurance. She kissed him lingeringly on the neck and
Mozart continued alone, a disconsolate plucking at mandolins and harpsichords.
He was shriven with a kiss for penance. Harriet was not preoccupied with
reforming the world into her image. "Well, then we have nothing to worry about."
"Corazón..." Relief at even so minimal a confession made him feel warm and weak.
He hugged her to keep from falling over. She was right, there was nothing to
worry about. It was all glowingly simple, such a rightness of things.
"Just stay away from it is all. If they are keeping an eye on you, let that
be their problem, not yours." His confession had put a sparkle in her eyes and a
spring in her step. And for Oswaldo the world as reflected by his beloved, his
adored, was again a beautiful place. But the obsession, though lessened, had not
passed.
Oswaldo flinched as a reverberation, a momentary figure, moved in the mirror over Harriet's dresser―himself, his reflection. "I am a frightened monkey, a furtive loiterer to no good purpose," he said the words aloud. Tío Patricio's monkey was Miguel the origami man, an analog of Mama Coca herself, meaning no disrespect. Miguel then, who played at being a monkey with his origami animals.
Stalker and prey, jackal and capybara, the tracker and the tricker, must meet
then―Oswaldo and Miguel who was dead.
Harriet threw him a kiss from the departing automobile. She was gone; he was alone.
The money and the washer survived their trip unblemished, the money undiscovered. Several thousand miles to the south, the butterflies hung, frozen stiff. Orange and black bodies of Danaus Plexippus, the common monarch, clung to the trees, then fell. "Something in the milkweed," the norteamericanos said about the dying butterflies. With a wet winter, an unseasonable sleet and no blossoms of helianthus, aster and verbena to browse to keep up their strength on the long flight north, the butterflies died in their millions.
In the first year the Monarch butterflies failed to migrate north, Amy Fisher shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the face. In New York a bewildered teenager stared from the front pages of the Post, News and Times. Mary Jo's husband, Joey Buttafuoco, was Amy's lover and worked on Ferraris. On the inside pages a Texas woman reported seeing a vision of Christ after a near-death experience, "He was radiant, a Spirit being," she said in an interview. After her return she had an encounter with a passerby's guardian angel. In El Rosario and the Sierra Chincua overwintering colonies of dead butterflies were free for the gathering by the shovelful, the bucket and the truckload.
In the second year, Oswaldo Patricio Meléndez O'Rourke y Nuñez arrived in Harriet Hopwood's life unannounced and unforeseen. "I see you in the corners of my eyes, beloved," he had said. That eyes might have corners was uno tropo, a figure of speech. In return Harriet presented him with her love and a book to help with his language studies.
"This is your book. You are giving it to me."
"It's the library's. You know―the big red building with the soldier and the cannon? Keep it as long as you want."
"Querida, there will be an excise, a late fee." Money, always money.
Harriet kissed him. "I can slip it into the after-hours book return box―it's a regulation government mail box painted blue and welded shut. Vandals dump snow in the box in the winter, and in the summer, the few pensioners in the neighborhood who do check out books return them at the desk."
The book was a children's picture book printed on glossy paper. There were pictures of many colors, whimsically drawn. The book had a shiny plasticized cover, librarian friendly; the smudges of small fingers would easily wipe away.
He had swum a river, an international boundary, dragged down by whirlpools in miniature tidal eddies. He was on his own, a refugee, and covered with the welts of many insect bites. Strapped about his chest in a water-logged body pack he carried one hundred thousand dollars and the battered figurine of a neglected saint. Expedito, the gambler's saint, Hodie his motto―do it now, today, the saint of immediate gratification.
"If you want to take getting sucked to the ocean bottom by the weight of wet money as an allegory, feel free," said the saint. The voice of the saint was that of Mama Coca, the Andean Avon Lady.
"I prefer not to," said Oswaldo, gasping for breath.
"Good boy," said the voice, the voice of the Fata Morgana, Orange Virgin, Lady of the Wild Things, etc., etc...
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