palms across her skirt again. “Come help me with the biscuits, Sarah.” Mary Rutledge had learned to refer to cookies as biscuits, just as George’s English grandmother Louisa had insisted that they should be called. After all, Quinta Louisa was named for her, and her spirit still pervaded the finca.
Eventually the Papal Nuncio negotiated an agreement between the leaders of the Conservative Party in the Gran Hotel and the Somozas. Some of the foreign visitors who had been staying in the Gran Hotel were taken to the homes of the expatriates and their friends in Managua until they could arrange flights out of the country. Armando and Beatriz Chulteco returned to their home and welcomed a German businessman as their guest. After his two terrifying nights as a hostage in the hotel he was sleeping soundly in the Chultecos’ guest room, when Beatriz’s perverse Siamese cat pounced onto his stomach in the middle of the night. His anguished scream was imitated as the story was told over and over at dinner parties over the next several months while Nicaragua settled back into its normal life, or what appeared on the surface to be normal.
The first order of business for the Rutledges after they were able to drive back into the city was searching for the mother of the injured boy. Remarkably the telephones had never stopped working during the tense days while the Guardia (National Guard) restored order in the city. (Telephones were controlled by the military; and permission to have one in a private home required proving that it contributed to military security, which in practice simply involved making one of the many customary bribes that foreigners as well as wealthy national citizens paid to a bureaucrat.) Mary had called the Baptist Hospital every day to check on the condition of the child and to give assurances that the hospital would be paid for his care and room accommodation.
Mary, or occasionally George, when she had an appointment, always drove Sarah to the American School each morning and picked her up each afternoon. It required more than two hours out of every day, but the only alternatives were a boarding school in the United States, like George had attended, or one in England, like the one where his father had been sent. Mary believed that long drives each day were worth her time and effort so that Sarah could remain with them at Quinta Louisa for as long as possible.
On the first day that the American School reopened, however, George planned to drive Sarah to and from school. Mary wanted to return with him to pick Sarah up in the afternoon and try to find the injured child’s mother in the barrio. George wanted to bring Sarah home and then return alone to search for the mother by himself, but Mary insisted on accompanying him when he picked Sarah up. Then George wanted to bring Sarah home and return to the city with Mary, if she insisted on going with him.
“That’s foolish, George. We don’t need to make two separate trips into the city. Sarah can go with us after we pick her up.”
“Well, how’s this? We can go early and make our inquiries before school is dismissed.”
“We can’t predict how long it may take us to locate the child’s mother in the barrio. It might take a few minutes. It might take hours. Besides it will be a good experience for Sarah.”
As usual in such differences of opinion, Mary’s plan prevailed, although Sarah was aware from the sour, pained expression on her father’s face that he didn’t believe it would be a good experience for her at all.
Barrio Arbolito was a rather notorious neighborhood. Directions in Managua were given from old landmarks—two blocks north and a block and a half west from where the little tree used to be—where the little tree used to be also gave the name to the barrio, Arbolito, little tree. The little tree had disappeared years ago, but the name stuck.
The doors of most buildings were closed against the afternoon light and heat. All of the old downtown neighborhoods would be closed and shuttered when the sun was brightest and the dust and smoke from traffic heaviest; but the confinement was even more pronounced in Barrio Arbolito than in other poor neighborhoods, because prostitution was the principal business. Those who work at night must sleep in the daytime. Poverty and squalor were also more evident in the daytime than they had seemed on Sunday night, even in the midst of the gunfire; but the memory of the child in the street and the sounds of the gunshots still echoed in Sarah’s memory, like bullets ricocheting in her mind.
George Rutledge approached an older boy sitting on a doorstep. “Young man, we are looking for the mother of the little boy who was shot Sunday night. We are the people who took him to the hospital.” It was harder to find anyone in a prostitutes’ district, because people living there were trained not to give out information.
“I don’t know who she is.”
George looked at him with a stern, unbelieving stare. He probably knew. Perhaps he could be intimidated into supplying information. He would not be coaxed. Children here were too hardened by the time they were ten or twelve for gentle persuasion. If all else failed, he could probably be bribed. “You know, of course, that a little boy was shot here last Sunday.” George used the firm, almost angry voice of interrogation.
“Yes, señor.”
“Do you know which house he lived in?” George took some change out of his pocket and began rattling it in the cup of his left hand.
“I do not know where they lived.”
“Maybe you can take us to talk with someone who would know something.” George held us fifty centavos between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The boy didn’t extend his hand. He waited for the money to be offered first, the ritual etiquette from a pubescent son of a whore, without a shirt, whose hands were black with layers of dirt and whose face was streaked with brown grit and stains. A younger boy appeared from inside the house and stood with them, as if he belonged to the party. “Is this a friend of yours?”
“He’s my brother.”
“Can I guard your car?” The younger boy hadn’t heard the questions about the wounded child.
“Here’s fifty centavos for you, too. I’ll give you another córdoba if the car’s all right when we return and a córdoba for your big brother if he takes us where we can get some good information.” The younger boy also waited for George to hand him the coin. Even though they would have stolen everything from the car if it had been left unlocked and unwatched, they wouldn’t violate the code of proper behavior, not with a gringo patrician.
The older boy led them in the direction of the local pulpería, a small, one room shack where candy and bottle drinks and tortillas and cakes and cigarettes were sold. It would be the obvious place to take them, the obvious place for them to begin making their inquiries even with his help. George wrinkled his chin at Mary and Sarah.
“You do not get any more money unless we receive some good information.” George then turned to Mary and Sarah. “Are you sure you want to come? It would be better for you to wait in the car.”
“We’re coming with you. Here, take my hand, Sarah.”
They passed the pulpería and turned down an alley between the tightly clustered houses on the street. Sarah saw a family living under a plastic and tarpaper tent inside the corner of a crumbling building with only two walls left. Such a degraded hovel was not allowed in sight of the street; it must be hidden from the slightly more respectable poor dwellings. The boy stopped at a door even rougher and cruder than the others, made from unpainted boards that were uneven at the bottom with cracks between them.
“Open up. Open the door, old woman. These North Americans gave me a córdoba to lead them to someone who could tell them about the boy who was shot on Sunday night.”
The old woman who appeared at the door might
