Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [128]
David acquired a Huffy bike with fat, leaky tires. The tangelo grove was five or six miles uphill, near the lake and deep in Fitzgerald property. He went the last ten minutes on foot, through the trees.
The pregnancy had made Mina enormous and emotionally fragile. She accused David of not loving her, of abandoning his own child, of preferring politics to love, and drinking in bars instead of spending time with her. She threatened to tell her parents about him. “They’ll make you marry me,” she said.
“Or have my legs broken.”
“They’ll learn to love you because I do.”
He begged her not to tell them, not yet, fearing that El Cuarto would exact his revenge on the villagers.
Invariably, Mina broke into tears and, mortified by her emotions, fled. He was tempted to follow and soothe her, but he was also relieved to see her go.
FROM living outside in the wet spring, the dispossessed villagers came down with flu and bronchitis. Many also suffered from gastrointestinal ailments due to drinking from park spigots whose water was piped directly from the river. Even with donations from nearby churches, food supplies were insufficient. The park had flush toilets, but no showers or hot water. David, in meetings with union negotiators, lobbied for sturdier temporary housing, yet nobody had any clear ideas about what that was or how to go about constructing it. Meanwhile, the lawyers lamented that the workers had left their village, thereby relinquishing their squatters’ rights—never mind that they’d been intimidated by poised bulldozers and armed guards.
During the day, when not strategizing with lawyers and activists, David gathered with the men at the El Nido, the cafe in Rito that predated Happy Yolanda’s. They drank coffee, sat at tables, and were relieved to be indoors, dry, away from the damp tents and suffering women. David stayed in the El Nido longer and longer, switching from coffee to beer after lunch and sometimes forgetting to climb down off his bar stool when the time came to start the long uphill bike ride to the tangelo grove. He began keeping the company of a few older men who were known for their drinking capacities.
He was half drunk in the El Nido when news came in that Mina Fitzgerald had taken a bad fall down stairs in her father’s adobe. She’d broken an arm, and someone said she’d gone into premature labor. That was too bad, the village men agreed, but bad luck ran in that family. First, the doña drinking herself ill, then a daughter pregnant without a husband, now this. The men laughed a little. No matter how rich you are, they said, trouble sniffs you out, finds your door.
David sat at the bar until nobody would associate his leaving with the news about the rich, knocked-up gringa. He hitchhiked to the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Buchanan, where he found Mina sitting up in bed. One arm in a cast, she gazed at him with such deadness that he already felt forgotten.
“You okay?” he whispered. “Is the baby okay?”
With her good hand, she waved him away. “It’s over,” she said. “My father will talk to you.”
El Cuarto materialized behind him.
Even at such close range, William Fitzgerald IV wasn’t a large man. He was actually rather delicate: white-haired, soft-spoken, executive in manner, his clothes the color of sand. “I believe we can settle this little matter quietly, in a civilized fashion,” he said, or something like it; David would never have a precise memory of this scene, which sat in his mind as a blur of undifferentiated pain. The two men moved out of the room, down the hall, where El Cuarto produced a cashier’s check made out for fifteen thousand dollars. “To help you finish medical school. No strings attached.”
David would remember arguments, but could never be sure if he spoke them aloud. At some point, a private cop materialized in regulation blue.
El Cuarto, calm and condescending, went on as if speaking to a child who didn’t know the language.