“Lawyers aren’t paid to be honest.”
“You hear how they talk about me?” Viera said in the tone of the beleaguered man of the house. “If I can manage this without breaking the cork, it will be my biggest achievement of the day.” The corkscrew was a complicated tool with arms that lifted like wings as Viera twisted it. After much careful but noisy manoeuvring, he managed to extract the cork. “Hah! Success!” He sniffed the mouth of the bottle. “Oh, yes. We shall enjoy this.”
Helen Viera shook her head, the corners of her mouth turning white. Victor saw how Viera’s relentless cheer could grate. Was it natural to him? Or had he learned it as a counter to his wife’s attitude, to Lorca’s high-voltage outbursts? Of the responses available to a man at close quarters with such women, relentless cheer may well have been the best.
Helen shooed them out of the kitchen, and they sat in the living room in a sudden shy silence. This Viera rushed to fill with a not very interesting story about an immigration officer who had been found to be corrupt. Lorca sat staring into her drink, swirling her glass slowly as if she had lost something in it.
“I wonder where Bob is,” Viera said when the room was once again silent. “Lorca? Did you hear me?”
“I’m sorry. What did you say, Miguel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is Bob?” Victor asked brightly, as if the prospect of meeting someone with that name were a particularly happy one. In fact, he was a little deflated to learn he was not the Vieras’ only guest.
“Bob?” Viera said. “Bob runs the support group Lorca goes to. I haven’t met him yet, but I hear only good things. Tell Ignacio about him, Lorca.”
Lorca didn’t look up.
“Lorca? Can you tell Ignacio a little about him?”
“I don’t want to right now.” Her voice, so cheerful just moments ago, was now husky with dismay, as if she were ashamed of having been happy.
“Oh, come on, little sister, cheer up.”
Victor stared at his shoes, which he had spent a long time polishing. They were second-hand-all his clothes were second-hand, sifted from the musty counters of Salvation Army outlets-and the shoes pinched his feet. He wanted to take them off, but then they would see the holes in his socks.
The doorbell rang and Lorca sprang up to answer it. The next few moments, when Victor recalled them later, were a mosaic of discordant images: Lorca flying to the door, a red blur in her rush to answer it, the door opening, and a broad, ungainly man with a profuse brown beard taking up the entire living room, booming out greetings, shrugging off an overcoat the size of a tarp. He shook first Viera’s hand, then Victor’s, squeezing his fingers in one hairy fist, gripping his bicep with the other.
“Bob Wyatt!” he boomed. “Glad to know you, Ignacio!” Then, turning with an uptilt of the beard and a ferocious sniffing: “Oh, something smells fabulous! Who’s in the kitchen! Who’s in that kitchen cooking up a storm! There’s some culinary artist doing very creative things in there, and I want to meet her.” He seemed to be everywhere at once, the great smooth boulder of his back turning this way and that, like a bear’s. Now he was in the kitchen booming out compliments to Helen before he’d even been introduced. “Bob Wyatt! Lorca’s friend from TVA! Great to meet you! Boy, this is a treat for me! I’m the worst cook in the state! I spend my life in restaurants-if you can call ’em that-places run by guys named Aristotle and Cosmos. Terrible!”
Victor had never met such a loud man; not even his uncle was so loud. Confidence blasted from every inch of him-from the heroic bush of his beard to the size-thirteen cowboy boots on his feet. And that wall-shaking voice, somewhere between trombone and timpani.
“How was your trip to Washington?” Lorca asked when he was settled into a chair with a beer.
“Splendid!” he cried. “Absolutely splendid!
Victor pictured him catching a salmon in his great paw.
“What were you doing in Washington?” Viera asked.
“Groundwork. Project we’ve got coming up. You know about the certification hearings? Aid to El Salvador?”
“A little. Military aid, right?”
“Right. Every six months the administration has to satisfy Congress that El Salvador’s making progress in land reform and human rights. If they fail, that’s fifty million dollars the El Salvador military doesn’t get.”
“It’s not the President who decides?”
“Nope. It’s the Appropriations Subcommittee of the House Foreign Relations Committee.” The words rolled easily off his tongue, as if the corridors of power were his home address.
“You sound like you know your way around,” Viera said. “You go there a lot?”
“Nah. Not anymore. Used to. Used to be an organizer.”
“Organizer?” The English word was a new one to Victor.
“Labour organizer. Political side. Getting people out to vote. Believe me, it was just as glamorous as it sounds. I was working the phones night and day.”
Behind him, two sliding doors parted and Helen Viera appeared. “Dinner’s ready,” she said. “What are you all talking about? Everyone looks so serious.”
“Just politics,” her husband said. “Nothing you have to worry about.”
Helen’s face hardened at this brush-off, and Victor felt a sudden sympathy for her. She was the outsider in the family, not Lorca. “Don’t let it get cold,” she said, and retreated to the kitchen.
Viera rose. “Gentlemen, we have our orders.”
They seated themselves around the dining room table while Lorca and Helen brought in the food. There was baked ham, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and some other vegetables Victor didn’t recognize.
“Tremendous!” Bob shouted. “Absolutely tremendous, Helen!”
He would be the kind who always remembers people’s names-also the kind to use the first name on first meeting. But even Helen slowly warmed under the onslaught of his bonhomie.
The wine was poured, they clinked glasses, and then the next few minutes were filled with the passing of dishes and jokes about how much Viera and Bob put on their plates, and how little Lorca put on hers.
“You couldn’t keep a rabbit alive on that,” Bob said. “Six, seven days, you’d have one dead bunny.”
“Oh, Lorca has to make her little points,” Helen said.
Bob smiled, ducked his head to his wineglass to avoid the sudden chill. His bearish hide was apparently not too thick to sense female hostility.
“I am not making any point,” Lorca said. “I am simply eating what I can. It’s not to make any point.”
“Sure, Lorca. I believe you.”
“Why do you say such things? The meal is good, and now you accuse me of something.”
“Good wine,” Viera said. “Good choice, Ignacio.”
Victor felt his cheeks redden.
“God, I meant to bring some wine myself,” Wyatt said. “Left it too late, and then the damn store was closed. The one near me, anyway.”
“Don’t think about it. We have plenty to drink,” Viera said. “But these Appropriations people-the committee. You talked to them in Washington?”
“God, no. Not the committee. The hearings aren’t till June. But I want them to know we’re coming.” He took a sip of wine, his ease implying that Bob Wyatt was a force to be reckoned with around Capitol Hill. “I’ve been hustling administrative assistants, smoothing the way for people from TVA-people like Lorca, if she’ll come-to testify at the hearings.”
“I will never do this,” Lorca said quietly.
“Testify?” Victor’s heart was racing. “A person could get killed, testifying against the military. The Guardia is not going to let-how much? fifty million dollars? — get away without doing anything to stop it.”
“I understand your concern, Ignacio, believe me I do. It’s not unfounded. But the fact is, you’re not in El Salvador anymore. You’re in the United States. We do some bad things around the world, real bad things. God knows, we have a habit of backing the wrong people. But in our own yard? Different story. They’re not going to let
