Night Vision Read online

  I knew “these people” well because I spent years working in Central and South America before returning to Florida, where I opened a small research and marine specimen business, Sanibel Biological Supply.

  The illegals of Central America and Mexico are, in my experience, a gifted people. Strong, tough, smart and family-oriented. All the components required of a successful primate society.

  However, simpatico or not, I am also pragmatist enough to understand what too many Tomlinson types fail to perceive or admit. In a world made orderly by boundaries, an unregulated flow of aliens into any nation makes a mockery of immigration law. Why wait in line, why respect legal mandates, if cheaters are instantly rewarded with a lawful citizen’s benefits?

  It is also true, however (as I have admitted to Tomlinson), there is a Darwinian component that must be considered. People who are sufficiently brave, shrewd and tough enough to survive a dangerous border crossing demonstrate qualities by virtue of their success that make them an asset at any country, not a liability.

  Long ago, though, I learned I cannot discuss such matters with anyone who is absolutely certain of their political righteousness. So, instead, I listened.

  “The undocumented workers have it tough, man,” Tomlinson said, as he stared out the window. “They’ve got to watch their asses from every direction. The only thing they’re more afraid of than the feds are their own landlords. Say the wrong word, don’t jump when the boss man says jump, all it takes is one vicious phone call. And the dude who runs the trailer park is about as vicious as they come. He’s a bodybuilder. A great big bundle of steroid rage, full of grits and ya’lls and redneck bullshit.”

  I baited my pal, saying, “You’re the expert on better living through chemistry,” as I slowed and studied the road ahead. We had crossed the small bridge onto San Carlos Island. I could see the pterodactyl scaffolding of shrimp boats moored side by side, floating on a petroleum sheen of black water and Van Gogh lights.

  On my right were fish markets and charter boats. To my left, a jumble of signage competing for low-budget attention.

  As Tomlinson told me, “Just past the gravel drive, take the next left,” I spotted a faded wooden sign that read:

  RED CITRUS MOBILE HOME PARK

  RVS WELCOME!

  VACANCY

  “A vacancy in March?” I said, slowing to turn. “That tells me something. It’s got to be the only place around with a vacancy this time of year.”

  Sitting up, paying attention now, Tomlinson said, “Doc, I left out a couple of important details. One is that Tula—she’s a thought-shaper.”

  I shot him a look.

  “Of course, to a degree, we all have the ability to shape people’s thoughts. This girl, though, has powers beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed.”

  Thought-shaper. It was another of Tomlinson’s wistful, mystic fantasies, and I knew better than to pursue it.

  “The second is: People at Red Citrus call her Tulo. So just sort of play along, okay?”

  I said, “The masculine form?”

  “You know how damn dangerous it is for a girl to cross Mexico into the States. Tula wants people to think she’s a boy. She’s a thought-shaper, remember? And the young ones, the adolescent kids from Central America, have more to fear than most.”

  I turned, shifted into first and proceeded beneath coconut palms and pines, weaving our way through rows of aluminum cartons that constitute home for many of the one million illegals in the Sunshine State.

  When my truck’s lights flushed a couple of peacocks, I wasn’t surprised. Exotic fowl are common in the low-rent enclaves where migrant workers have adapted to living under the radar. They depend on exotic birds, not dogs, to sound a private alarm when outsiders arrive.

  The cry of a peacock is high-pitched. It is a siren whine that morphs into a series of honks and whistles. That’s what I thought I was hearing as I parked the truck and stepped out into the summer-cool night.

  It was a cry so piercing that I paused, ears alert, before turning to Tomlinson, who was visible in the glow of a security light as he pushed the truck’s door closed. His hair was tied back with a red bandanna, which he was retying as we exchanged looks.

  The scream warbled . . . paused for a breath . . . then ascended. As if reading my mind, Tomlinson said, “That’s not a bird! It’s a person—a man, I think!” and then he sprinted toward the source of the sound.

  I hesitated, reached behind the seat, then went running after him, struggling to slide a palm-sized Kahr semiautomatic pistol into the pocket of my jeans.

  TWO

  A FEW MINUTES BEFORE THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD TULA CHOIMHA heard the screams for help, a huge man with muscles pushed through the trailer door, stepped into the bathroom, then stood for a moment, grinning at what he saw.

  The man finally said, “Hah! I knew you was a girl! By God, I knew it the first time I saw your skinny little ass from behind! It was the way you walked.”

  He paused to stare, then added, “Fresh little peaches up top. Nothin’ but peach fuzz down below.”

  Tula, sitting naked in the bathtub, looked where the man was looking, hoping, as always, to find a miracle. But there was only her own flat body to see.

  The girl recognized the man. He was the propietario of this trailer park, maybe the owner, too. The man scared her. But the man’s wife—or girlfriend, maybe—a woman with muscles and an evil face, scared her more.

  Automatically, Tula used her hands to cover herself. But then she took her hands away.

  The man had fog in his eyes—most people did—and Tula decided it was safer to be still, like a mirror, rather than behave like a frightened vessel that could be taken by force, then filled.

  The man, whose name was Harris Squires, looked at her strangely for a moment. It was almost as if he recognized her face and was thinking back, trying to remember. Then he tilted his head and sniffed twice, nostrils searching. He was a man so large that he filled the bathroom space, his nose almost touching the low ceiling. Squires’s nose was flat and wide, like a gorilla’s, but he was the palest man Tula had ever seen. A man so white that his skin looked translucent, blue veins snaking out from beneath his muscle T-shirt and tight jeans.

  “Know how else I knew you was a girl?” he asked. “I could smell you, darlin’. Man-oh-man”—his grin broadened, showing teeth so even that it was as if they had been filed—“I can wind-scent a virgin from seven counties away. What’s the word for virgin in Spanish?”

  Harris Squires didn’t speak Spanish, although he’d learned a few phrases. But his girlfriend, Francisca Manchon—Frankie—spoke bits and pieces of it. She had taught him some things to say. Frankie called male Mexicans chilies, or greasers. Women were chulas. Harris didn’t understand what the last term actually meant, but he guessed it wasn’t very nice, knowing Frankie.

  “No entiendo,” Tula said to Squires. But she did understand. English was her third language. Spanish was the second—and even most Mexicans were unaware that her people, the Indígena of Guatemala, grew up speaking Mayan.

  Gradually, Tula had acquired Spanish in the marketplaces of Tikal and Guatemala City. English had been learned from nuns at the convent where she and her brother had lived ever since their father was murdered and their mother had been forced north, to the United States, to provide money.

  That was four years ago.

  Six months earlier, Tula’s brother had come north looking for their mother. Now he had disappeared, too.

  El Norte—it was the way they spoke of the States in the mountain villages. El Norte was always said with a mixture of hope and dread because, in the ancient religion of the Maya, north was the direction of death.

  The man stepped closer. “What’d you just say?”

  “Yo no comprende,” Tula repeated, shrugging her shoulders, feeling the man’s eyes on her like heat. Squires leaned in.

  He asked, “What’s on those necklaces you’re wearing? They’d look real nice on Frankie.”

>   She didn’t respond, hoping he wouldn’t make a grab for the jade amulet and the silver medallion she always wore on leather straps, day and night, no matter what.

  Instead, the man reached and began massaging the back of Tula’s neck with his fingers. The girl didn’t flinch. Instead, she found the bar of soap and began to lather her feet, her movements masculine and intentional, her expressions sullen, like a child.

  The man stood, his smile gone. “Bullshit! You speak damn good English, you little liar. You and old man Carlson was spying on me last night, weren’t you, goddamn it? You and your special buddy—I snuck back here a few nights ago and heard you two whispering. You was speaking pretty good English, so you can stop your lying right now.”

  Harold Carlson was one of the few gringos who lived in the trailer park. Tula trusted him because she trusted her instincts. Carlson, already an old man at sixty, was also a drunk, probably a paint sniffer judging from the half-moon darkness of his eyes.

  But, as Tula knew, the depth of a man’s decency could sometimes be judged by the depths of his own despair. People who were kind, after years of being wounded by their own kindness, naturally sought ways to dull the pain.

  Carlson was her patron. After their first conversation, she had thought of him that way. He would help her, given the chance, because that is what a God-minded person would do. After only eight days in the States, Tula felt confident because she had already acquired two patrons.

  Her second patron was a man as well. He was a strange one, named Tomlinson, who did not have fog in his eyes. Even though he resembled a scarecrow with his straw-bleached hair, Tomlinson was one of the few people Tula had ever met whose kindness glowed through gilded skin.

  Tula continued lathering. She had seen what Squires had done last night, but Carlson, the old man, had not. Squires had gone to the bed of a rumbling truck, lights out, and dragged something malleable and heavy across the sand, then down the bank into a little mangrove lake that was surrounded by garbage dumpsters and palm trees.

  The sack had sunk in a froth of bubbles, Squires watching, before he returned to the truck.

  It was a human body, Tula guessed. Something weighted in a sack. Tula had seen enough corpses being dragged through the streets of her village to know. They were old people who had ended their lives in a gutter usually but sometimes a young man who had died from drinking too much aguardiente.

  Also, Tula had been old enough during the last revolution to remember corpses drying among flies in the courtyard.

  Her father’s charred body had been among them.

  Tula hadn’t intended to spy on Harris Squires last night. She had been sitting in the limbs of a ficus tree, listening to owls speak. There were two big owls, one calling from nearby, the other answering from across the water where the strange boats with metal wings were tied side by side.

  The shapes of the boats—their triangular silhouettes—had reminded Tula of the jade amulet she wore around her neck. And also of small pyramids that were covered with vines in the lowlands west of Tikal. These were familiar stone places that the girl often climbed alone in darkness so that she could listen to the great owl voices converse while she stared, unblinking, at a jungle that strobed with fireflies.

  The owl voices and the sparking fireflies invited visions into the girl’s head. At the convent, Sister Maria Lionza had taught Tula about this phenomenon, and the nun was seldom wrong about such things. Tula had been living at the convent, under the nuns’ guidance, learning the healing arts, and also studying the Bible along with her other lessons.

  Sister Maria was a fierce woman given to fits of epilepsy and kindness, and she was particularly kind to Tula, who was her favorite.

  “My brave little Maiden of Lorraine,” Sister Maria was fond of saying. “Our blessed saint spoke of you in one of my visions. And now you are here with us. A messenger from God.”

  It was only within the last year that Tula had begun to suspect that Sister Maria was actually preparing her to join the nunnery and, perhaps, the Culta de Shimono. It was a secret group—a mythical cult, some said—that caused the villagers to cross themselves at night while whispering of wicked nuns who were actually brujeriás.

  The English word for bruja was “witch.”

  Thanks to Sister Maria’s secret teachings, Tula had experienced many visions in the last four years. The most disturbing vision had come into Tula’s head three times—all within the last few months—so she knew the vision would come true if she didn’t act.

  In the vision, Tula could see large white hands choking her mother to death, fingers white around her soft throat. In the vision, Tula’s mother was naked. She appeared diminished by her submissiveness, a fragile creature clinging to life, while the big hands suffocated the soul from her body.

  It was a difficult vision to endure.

  Now, because Tula had yet to answer him, Squires leaned a shoulder against the bathroom wall, getting mad, but nervous, too. Tula could read his eyes.

  He said, “Tell me what you saw last night, you little brat! You were watching me, weren’t you?”

  Tula didn’t react, but she was relieved. If Squires had known for sure that she had watched him struggling to drag a corpse into the water, he would have killed her. He wouldn’t be standing here, asking questions.

  Not that that meant he wouldn’t anyway. Tula guessed that he would invent some excuse, drive her to a quiet place, then befoul her body, as men did to young girls, and kill her. Or ... or he would ask someone else to do it. Fog covered the man’s eyes, but fog didn’t cloud the truth that Tula sensed: Squires was capable of murder—his spirit was already stained with blood, she suspected—but he was also a weak man tainted by the ugliness of people close to him.

  Squires’s wife, Tula sensed, was a poisonous influence. She had seen the woman only twice, but that was enough. The man called her . . . Frankie? Yes. She was a tall woman with large muscles, but her spirit was withered by something dark inside. Frankie was a man-animal, Tula was convinced, who enjoyed feeding on the weakness of smaller humans.

  This man, Squires, was the same in that way.

  For the weak, silence is among the few weapons available. Tula was using silence against Harris Squires now.

  Squires tried his bad Spanish, saying, “Hear me, puta!”

  He said it twice, but it didn’t cause the girl to look away from her toes, so he returned to English, his voice softer. “I saw you, chula—you know that. I saw you sitting alone in a tree like a little weirdo. And you saw me.”

  It was true. At first, Tula didn’t believe Squires could see her, sitting among branches, listening to owls, but then she realized he could. The man, after dragging the sack to the water, had leaned into the rumbling truck, then stood, holding binoculars to his eye. They weren’t normal binoculars, Tula realized, as the man turned in a circle, searching the area, and then suddenly stopped, leaning to focus on the small space she inhabited.

  When the man had jogged toward her, yelling, “Who the hell are you? Stay right where you are!” Tula had dropped from the tree and run, vaulting roots, then a wire fence at the boundary of the trailer park property.

  Last night, she’d slept curled up on the floor of a bathroom stall, and she had spent most of the day in hiding, too, expecting Squires to appear. Now here he was.

  Yes, Squires had seen her. His binoculars allowed him to see in darkness, like a night creature. Tula had heard rumors of such devices from women who lived in widow villages, created by the government after the last revolution for wives who had lost their men. In such villages, they knew about war, and the behavior of drunken soldiers, yet it surprised Tula that a man like Squires would own such a device for he did not look like any soldier she had ever seen.

  “Was Carlson with you?” Squires demanded. “You two are buddies, don’t try to deny it. The little weasel has been begging me for your mama’s phone number the last couple of days.”

  Tula moved her legs, using the washcl
oth to hide some parts of her but to reveal others.

  For a moment, Squires’s expression signaled slow confusion, then he shook it and said, “You know, I just might know where she’s living. I bet she’s got some pretty little peaches on her, too—I wouldn’t mind helping you find the lady. You want that phone number? Play your cards right, chula, I’m the man who can give you everything you want and more.”

  Tula sensed that Squires was lying about knowing her mother, so she ignored him, dipped her face into the water and washed.

  Her eyes were closed, but she could feel what was happening when Squires dropped to his knees. His hips were against the rim of the bathtub as he grabbed a fistful of her hair. Then the man pulled her head back, saying, “Answer me, you little brat!”

  The girl opened her eyes and sat still, muscles relaxed, letting silence communicate what she wanted the man to hear. Tula waited until he finally took his hand off her.

  Slowly, Squires got to his feet and backed away. “What the hell’s wrong with you? You a retard or what? You don’t look even a little bit afraid. By God, I’ll teach you! Just like I’ll teach your whore of a mama to jump, once I find her!”

  Tula’s head snapped around when she heard that. Her eyes found Squires’s eyes, and she said, “Don’t talk about my mother that way. You have no right!”

  That caused the man to smile, taking his time now, because he had finally won this game of silence. “See there?” he drawled. “By God, you speak the language as good as me.”

  The girl said, “Why be so mean? If you know where my mother is, you should tell me. This is a chance for you to do God’s work.”

  “God’s work?” Squires said, rolling his eyes and laughing. “You’re a damn comedian. You think I keep track of every Mexican spends a few nights in this park? Besides, what do I care? Unless ...” He paused to give the girl a theatrical smile. “Unless you’re willing to give me something in trade. That’s the way the world works, sis. Otherwise, why should I bother?”