Hollie, the woman insists, as if she is trying to wake him from sleep. Are you the father? El padre de Hollie Nolina? We are very much afraid.

We are very much afraid.

In the first grade she hit a boy and they kept her after school. The boy’s name was Simon Bolivar Jones. He was angry at her and had called her vicious names because she climbed to the top of the tall slide the wrong way, up the slide and not the steps, and stood up there and danced, shouting, her hands outstretched. No boy could do it.

“You should let her come home. She hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s being punished for an act of bravery.” He isn’t sure whether he has just spoken in Spanish or English.

Sí, the voice answers after a moment. Claro que sí.

“Where is she?”

No estamos seguros. We think they must have taken her into Honduras, where they’re camped. A large patrol has gone to look for her. Thirty people, more than half of them from the village where she lives. There were more who wanted to go. Even an eight-year-old boy. Hallie has many friends.

Even an eight-year-old boy. Thirty people.

The words are so much fine dust suspended in the air before him, in the long, trapezoidal block of sunlight from the window. He examines the dust. He sees the word “Hallie.” It was Codi who stood up and danced on the slide.

“You should let her come home,” he says again. He can remember precisely the muscular line of Mrs. Navarrete’s disapproving jaw. “Let my daughter come home now.”

The voice rejects this statement, says nothing.

He touches the corner of his eye and is surprised to find moisture on his fingertips. He stares at an iron coal bucket beside the fireplace, trying to recall its history, how it came to him. He thinks, for no reason, that this iron coal bucket could save his life, if only he could remember. He remembers instead that he no longer delivers babies, the telephone call could not possibly be Mandy Navarrete. It is a woman from another country, who knows his daughter. He is trying hard not to look at the dust in the air but the sun has illuminated each particle so that it glows. Each word burns.

“Is there something I can do?” he asks finally. “I know she has friends in the Ministry of Agriculture. Do they know?”

“Everyone knows. Our Ministry of Agriculture, your Ministry of Agriculture.” There is a pause. “You understand that this occurs every day. We’re a nation of bereaved families. The only difference this time is that it happens to be an American. It happens to be Hallie.” The voice weakens again, and he waits, and it goes on. “We sent a telegram to your President and the NBC. We think if they are embarrassed enough by their contras, they could do something.”

If they are embarrassed enough.

“Wait. Let me take down the number where you are. So I can call you tomorrow.”

“I’m in the office of a church in Managua. Nobody here knows anything. You can call the Ministry of Agriculture if you want. Or your President. He is the responsible party.”

He understands that she is being as helpful as she can. She is a kind, tired voice. He doesn’t want her to hang up, because then his life will begin. There is a pause while she talks to someone else who is there with her, and then she returns to him and says, “I’m sorry.”

“Is there anything more? Besides waiting?”

“I’m sorry. There is nothing.”

Carefully he puts down the receiver and looks at the air in front of the window in this empty room. The dust. He listens inside himself for a long time before he understands that it’s the teakettle that is screaming.

COSIMA

21 The Tissue of Hearts

Hallie was somebody’s prisoner. Whether my eyes were open or closed, I saw her with a white cloth tied tightly over her mouth. That’s the only image that would ever come.

If she couldn’t scream, I did. I was in every way unreasonable, especially with the kids at school. Even at the time, I was lucid enough to be thankful that Rita had dropped out. One member of my family had already yelled at her; she didn’t have to know that neither one of us had all our tires on the road.

The students had tried to be cooperative. They went to Tucson to assist the Stitch and Bitch Club, as I’d requested, and found the city to be a superb adventure. They discovered a video arcade; Raymo sweet-talked more than ten young women into buying piñatas; there were rumors that Connie Muñoz gave Hector Jones a hand job in the back seat of the bus on the way home. What did I expect? They were teenagers. I knew that, but still I screamed at them because Black Mountain was poisoning their mother’s milk and all they cared about was sex and a passing grade.

I had rational intentions. I talked about evapotranspiration and rain forests and oxygen in the biosphere, how everything was connected. The last virgin timber cleared and milled to make way for a continent of landfills choking on old newspapers. It was a poetic lecture. Marta made the mistake of asking me how much of this poetry was going to be on the test.

I glowered. “Your life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die.”

The whole front row looked stunned. Their pens stopped moving.

“What you people learn for a test you forget the next day. That’s bullshit. That’s a waste of your brains and my time. If I can’t teach you something you’ll remember, then I haven’t even been here this year.” I crossed my arms and glared at them. “You kids think this pollution shit is not your problem, right? Somebody will clean up the mess. It’s not your fault. Well, your attitude stinks. You’re as guilty as anybody. Do you, or do you not, think the world was put here for you to use?”

Nobody was fool enough to answer. I observed during the long silence that half the kids in the room were wearing stone-washed jeans. I yanked up Hector Jones by the arm and made an example of him. I have to admit I disliked Hector partially for unfair reasons: his father was a former hoodlum named Simon Bolivar Jones who’d been noticeably unkind to me in school.

“Stand up here,” I said. “Show everybody your jeans. Nice, right? Turn around. Nice ass, Hector. Wonderful jeans. They were half worn out before you bought them, right?” I smacked Hector lightly on the butt and let him sit down.

“You know how they make those? They wash them in a big machine with this special kind of gravel they get out of volcanic mountains. The prettiest mountains you ever saw in your life. But they’re fragile, like a big pile of sugar. Levi Strauss or whoever goes in there with bulldozers and chainsaws and cuts down the trees and rips the mountainside to hell, so that all us lucky Americans can wear jeans that look like somebody threw them in the garbage before we got them.”

“Trees grow back,” Raymo said. Raymo was a brave young man.

“Excuse me?”

He cupped his hands around his mouth and spoke as if I were his deaf grandmother: “Trees…grow…back.”

I cupped my hands around my mouth and said, just as loudly, “Not if the whole…damn…mountain is gone, they don’t.”

“Well, there’s other mountains.”

“Sure, there’s some other mountains,” I said, feeling that I might explode if I weren’t careful. “If you got hit by a truck, Raymo, I guess your ma would say, ‘Well, I have some other kids.’”

About half the class thought that was funny. The other half was probably trying to figure out how to get out of my classroom alive.

I stared them down, ticking like a bomb. “Sure. Trees grow back. Even a whole rain forest could grow back, in a couple hundred years, maybe. But who’s going to make it happen? If you had to pay the real price for those jeans-the cost and the time and the work of bringing that mountain back to life instead of leaving it dead-those pretty jeans would have cost you a hundred dollars.”