American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [46]
“Sure you do!” the teniente almost screeched. “Claro que sí!”
The men out front stopped talking to one another. They froze in rapt attention. A hand slipped around the tall spike of the gate.
My mother stood slowly, her face suddenly notched with concern. George read the anxiety in her eyes. Just as slowly, he moved back from the big man, stepping from relish to dread.
“Come on!” the teniente called, in a voice that was higher than his own. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go grab the wheel!” Canales lunged forward and grabbed George’s arm, and his men at the gate shifted like cogs in a gearbox. Mother seized George’s other arm. I scuttled back on the grass, propelling myself by the heels of my boots. My brother’s eyes were pinched, and I could feel myself ready to cry.
“No,” Mother said firmly. “No. He’s not going anywhere. He has other things to do. The boy stays with me.”
“Hyeh, hyeh!” the police chief barked. “Stay here? When he can come on rounds with the guardia civil? Those ‘other things’ can wait, señora. You will come with your father’s old student. No es cierto, Georgie?” Isn’t that right?
The man pulled on George. My mother pulled back. She had concluded by then that this was no lighthearted invitation. The lieutenant had not come to share pleasantries and ask George on an impromptu outing. All this—the late-afternoon visit, the men at the gate, the car in the road—was part of a careful plan. They were here because the son of Don Jorge, a little half-gringo, would make a good buffer, a portable human shield. With the child of the jefe in his arms, the policeman could be sure the rebels would leave him alone. It was suddenly apparent to Mother that he was prepared to kidnap her son for that assurance, if necessary.
They tugged at him like that, the man babbling his baby talk, the woman clutching her child, until she threw two adamant arms around George and, in so doing, pinned herself to the policeman’s chest. George began to cry. So did I. Then the wind changed, the men at the gate called out to their chief, and he retreated hastily, tripping backward along the walk like a marionette dancing offstage.
Out in the street, a car door slammed shut. Mother took us indoors, shaking.
I mark that day as the threshold of a new awareness. Until that moment, I had always feared ghosts. I had been afraid of the night, of dark forces, of the dead, black light. It had never occurred to me to fear mortal men. But I could see from the grimness of my mother’s eyes, from the way she clasped George to her chest, that ordinary humans were just as terrifying—that we had survived a struggle as deadly as any bout with El Aya Uma. That a policeman who professed to be a friend of my father might steal my brother away as smartly as “The Thirsty One” could rip a head off a neck.
This lesson in the way the world worked was more troubling for another reason. I had been shown leyendas to live by, been given an instrument to deflect evil; Antonio had taught me how to call up historias, turn a qosqo against the night, or against a curse, or even against a root that was growing under my house. But something told me that I could not have sucked the black light out of Teniente Canales, spit it out into a stone. If he had not decided to let go of my brother, if he had not been called away—for whatever reason—some terrible thing might have befallen us. For all my father’s bright swagger—for all our big house and lush garden and eager servants—there would have been nothing we could do.
When Vicki came downstairs from her room, her curly hair tousled and her eyes weary from reading the book tucked under her arm, she found the three of us sitting on the sofa, silently staring ahead. She rubbed her eyes with her fists, yawned, slumped into a chair, and opened her book again. We sat for hours, it seemed, like that: my mother stroking George’s hair, George looking through the window, I glancing down at the place in my cotton dress where I figured my umbilical to be.
When Papi came home, he said Canales would never have hurt us. “Of