Fault Lines

By Jan Underwood

A boy who wants to die. A girl who would do anything to live. A stranger with their fate in her hands.

Cathie Ayala has never been to Santa María, the country of her parents' birth. Now her beloved godmother has gone missing in that South American nation's political turmoil. Risking her safety and sense of self, Cathie sets out to find the woman who raised her.

Instead she stumbles on two young people facing crises of their own. Injured in a terrible accident on her way to her fiesta de quinceañera, Jewel seems to have one foot in this life and one in the next—while Nicky is reeling from a spectacular failure to solve his own existential problem. The companions must succeed or fail together, navigating not only a war zone but each one's relationship to death and life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jan Underwood
• Release date: Dec 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201602673

Jan Underwood

Jan Underwood is the author of two previous novels, Utterly Heartless and Day Shift Werewolf, and a collection of short stories. She has lived in several Spanish-speaking countries and is in her thirtieth year of teaching Spanish in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband and cat. You can learn more about her work at www.funnylittlenovels.com.

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Map of Santa María

Diagram Description automatically generated

Santa María,

South America

MAY 1983

Tuesday

CHAPTER 1 

NICKY

He knew he would hit one sooner or later.

Nicky Boseo could be very systematic when he put his mind to it. He understood this about himself: he could make a plan and stick to it.

The LTD Crown Victoria flattened weeds as it went, leaving a trail behind it so that when Nicky reached the edge of the field and turned the car around, he could see what ground he’d covered and be certain not to miss any spots. It was like mowing the lawn, neat parallel stripes lining up in the grass. Nicky could attend to detail when he wanted to.

Darla didn’t think so. She thought he was dreamy and inefficient. Darla had a number of names for Nicky’s dreamy states—Mr. Thorazine, Captain Cumulus, Will Robinson after the character in Lost in Space. Her mean little nicknames stung him, not that she would notice. For the hundred thousandth time, Nicky thought of the innumerable, tiny injustices she’d inflicted, the infinite pinpricks, none of which alone was worth his taking a stand, but which, over time, had the cumulative effect of leaving Nicky bleeding. He ran down the list in his mind once more, the database of Lilliputian spitefulness Darla directed his way.

But Darla wouldn’t be calling him names anymore. He remembered that now, and at once felt the wet, rich, rising sadness of this awareness, which was by now familiar and also in its way very satisfying.

––––––––

The sky was white, and sunlight glared off the greenery that stood at the field’s ragged edge. Nicky was driving as fast as he could, and the dust he kicked up came right in the open windows in thick clouds and stuck fast to his sweaty face. He gripped the steering wheel with two halves of the torn yellow customer copy of the rental car agreement, because the vinyl was too hot to touch with his bare hands.

Beneath the armpits of his shirt were two long ellipses of sweat; tickling rivulets ran through the hairs on his chest and filled the crevices formed by the folds of his belly fat. He had his sunglasses, thankfully, because at this hour—it had taken him half the day to get the rental car together—the world was so washed out by brightness Nicky could hardly see without them.

He reached the end of his row, where there stood a sorry stand of young trees, most of whose lower limbs had been hacked off. Braking sent up a rolling wall of dust so thick it obscured his view completely and forced him to pull his sweaty shirt over his mouth and nose. Nicky’s physical discomfort had long since surpassed the boundaries of what was bearable. Under normal circumstances, he would not have undertaken any task that led to this much unpleasantness. He did so now only with the knowledge that it would be over spectacularly and soon.

He made a three-point turn and repositioned the Crown Victoria as quickly as he could without sloppiness. As when he used to mow the lawn, he proceeded according to Dad’s dictates: overlapping, slightly, the freshly trodden foliage with his right front tire, so there would be no possibility of a gap between the rows.

Nicky’s greatest concern just now was that someone would see him, that someone would stop him and demand an explanation. Of course he could offer no such thing—he could barely get himself a bottle of Coca-Cola in Spanish—but all the encounters he could imagine made him want to hide. He pictured barefoot children clustering by the shorn trees to watch him drive back and forth—as barefoot children had been clustering to watch him since he’d arrived in the country earlier that day. He imagined them hailing him, challenging him, perhaps even chasing the sedan.

So he drove as fast as the Crown Victoria would allow, and he turned fast, though his progress was impeded by the slim stumps and occasional bare poles of what had once been trees, chopped into firewood one limb at a time by boys with machetes. These gray and pointed ghosts, alone in the field, complicated Nicky’s U-turns. Once, in the dust and glare, he failed to see a sharp stub and ran over it with a terrible bump and scrape that made him wince. He regretted any damage to the rental, but it was in the service of a good cause.

Darla always said that Nicky didn’t understand when concern was called for and when it wasn’t. Nicky felt awkward, for example, about stopping on the second floor when he was in an elevator full of people bound for the fourth. When he’d waited tables, he’d been uncomfortable interrupting patrons to ask if they’d needed anything else, even though it was what they’d expected of him. Sometimes he would just ride to the fourth floor and back, or forgo tips, rather than inconvenience others.

Yet his superego had not stopped him from telling an acquaintance at a party that his girlfriend had a pair of elastic-waist pants just like yours that Darla referred as her fat pants. It had not stopped him from drinking all the Old Tawny port from a neighbor’s cabinet when he was house-sitting.

There’s something the matter with your sense of judgment, Darla had told him once. She was right, though it was like a squirt of lemon juice in the eye to hear her say it. He had no sense of judgment, and he knew it, and he had no idea where to get one.

Still, Darla had a mean streak. She got a little zing from making unkind remarks. They shocked Nicky, briefly and painfully, like sparks of static electricity. Nicky himself had whatever the opposite of a mean streak was. He had a nice streak, one that allowed other people to take advantage of him. In his imagination it was pink, nearly as wide as himself, and the texture of marshmallow cream. That was how bad days went for them: Darla going zing, zing, zing, and Nicky walking around with his insides full of scorched marshmallow.

Nicky gunned the engine and sped north again. He could scarcely breathe through the dust, but it was much too hot for him to roll up the windows. The car had A/C, but either it was broken or he’d been unable to figure out how to turn it on. The Ford itself was a bitter disappointment. He’d envisioned renting a Jeep, and he’d asked for one at the agency, but this was what he’d gotten, a full-sized four-door that was hardly a substitute for the rugged 4WD vehicle he’d wanted, and which in fact was not coping well with the terrain. At least it wasn’t a Pinto. That would have been the final humiliation.

At 2.99 percent APR and nothing down, Darla had just about been able to swing the purchase of her Pinto. She’d spent her free nights perusing the options: eight-track tape deck, A/C, leather seats, cruise control. (In the end she’d had to pass up most of these.) To Nicky, those choices were all a fog, but he’d respected Darla’s passion for her vehicle. The Pinto had come with a strict set of rules: no food in the car, parking in corner spaces (to reduce the likelihood of it getting dinged), premium gasoline only. She’d washed and waxed and vacuumed it and had its maintenance done ahead of schedule.

The day the Pinto had gotten smashed, Nicky, if he’d been a religious man, would have gotten on his knees in gratitude that he hadn’t been the one behind the wheel. The accident had been Darla’s fault. After his initial, brief fear for Darla’s safety—she’d been fine—Nicky’s relationship to the whole period surrounding the accident had been a sensation of swimming in relief that it was Darla and not he who’d been at fault. She’d been mad enough as it was.

The day of his fucking up still lay ahead.

Some weeks later, the car had needed to go into the shop, and Nicky had offered to take it. The guy in the parking lot of the shop had said simply, Dropping off the Pinto? You already called ahead about it, right? Okay, I think we can have it done by tomorrow. Why don’t you check with us between ten and twelve and see if it’s ready? And Nicky had handed him the key.

Pinto? said the guy on the phone the next morning. Hang on. He was gone for a while, and then he came back and said, What’s the name? You say you dropped it off yesterday? I’m not seeing the paperwork on it. Who’d you talk to? After a little more back and forth, Nicky’s stomach dropped into his feet, as he described to the mechanic the casual car thief in the auto shop parking lot to whom Nicky had delivered the key.

Darla was not one to hold grudges or to punish Nicky for his sins. But neither did she outwardly forgive him. She and Nicky went back to taking the bus to work, to the grocery store, to the laundromat, between his apartment and hers. Darla couldn’t even buy an old beater until the Pinto was paid off, which would be two years away. She never said to Nicky, It’s only a car, or It could have happened to anybody. Nicky was perpetually sorry. It was a Sisyphean task, being sorry for the loss, being sorry uphill all day long, with Darla never saying, It’s okay. And so they’d continued, together but not happy. His fault, her fault. Mostly his: he was riddled with faults, he knew.

––––––––

The Crown Victoria jolted and bounced continuously as it moved over the rough ground.

Nicky considered whether he ought to have tried a different rental agency, but the humiliation of his encounter with the agent had been too heavy a weight for him to lift twice. He had practiced the words from his phrasebook a dozen times or more: kee-see-AIR-uh alkee-LAR oon OWtoh. Meaningless syllables, nonsense words. Darla might think he was neurotic, but Nicky had understood that the people he spoke to in memorized babble might answer him in Spanish he couldn’t understand. In preparation for his visit, he’d tried to anticipate all the questions he might be asked and to assemble into one long utterance a sentence that would address all contingencies. He wrote it out phonetically and practiced it. It shamed him that he had to go through all this preparation. Most people, he knew, would wing it. Of course, Nicky rehearsed many of the conversations he had in his mother tongue as well. He practiced them in his mind, and after a conversation had taken place, he reviewed it for shortcomings. He frequently recycled the parts he considered successful.

Today it had seemed doubly imperative that he prepare. Any sort of official transaction made Nicky nervous, and the specter of Spanish loomed over him. Then, too, he dreaded the possibility that someone would figure out what he was up to. Kee-see-AIR-uh oon Jeep poor fuh-VOR. SOH-loh oon DEE-uh. A one-day rental only.

When he’d entered the agency—followed by a gregarious pair of barefoot boys trying to sell him, as well as he could ascertain, a newspaper cone full of some kind of fruit he’d never seen before—he’d approached the man at the counter and with painful care uttered his opening phrase while offering his stolen credit card and the fake ID that made him old enough to rent a car. Oon Jeep.

The gentleman at the counter answered Nicky in fluent English. Nicky was so flustered that right away he agreed to settle for the staid, suburban family car.

––––––––

At the end of the row in the field, Nicky stopped the car and let it idle. He wiped his sleeve across his mouth and stepped into the punishing heat to appraise his work. On the back seat lay his bags. He hadn’t brought much, of course. He’d felt bad about running up Darla’s Visa bill on round-trip airfare, but they wouldn’t let him enter the country on a one-way ticket. The return ticket, floppy now in the heat in Nicky’s partially unzipped bag, was stuffed there with his passport and his billfold, items he no longer needed to keep track of. The important things were the notes he’d taken in the public library, folded small so he could tuck them away in places where Darla wouldn’t run across them. Not that she would—when did she ever rummage through his stuff?—but he had felt transparent in those days of planning, as if his fault lines were visible to everyone.

Nicky studied the area he’d driven. He tried to lean on the open car door in a grim, manly way, but the metal was hot as a stove top, and he jerked his arm away when his bare skin touched it. It had taken an hour to get here from Ciudad Madre Dolorosa. Late in the previous year, according to AP reports, this region, with its dusty villages and sorry trees from behind which he hoped no barefoot and curious children would emerge, had been the locus of a bloody struggle between government forces and anti-government insurgents. Darla might think he was a dimwit, but Nicky knew how to conduct research. Not wholly confident of his ability to find what he wanted on the ground, he’d hedged his bets by coming to this departamento, described in one memorable article as a poppy seed muffin of active minefields—so generously had those explosive deterrents to insurgency been sprinkled over the whole terrain.

The area matched Nicky’s mental image of a war zone. Soldiers in fatigues had been manning a checkpoint at the departamento’s border. (That stop had been his sweatiest moment until now, but they hadn’t spoken to him, instead waving him through as soon as they’d caught sight of his blue American passport.) The land here was denuded: whatever roadside woods had not already become cooking fires for villagers had been leveled by army units to prevent ambush.

Nicky had remained focused on his task during his many hours with the public library’s microfilm reader. He had not sought to understand the conflict. He had not read the demands of the revolutionaries or the claims of the ruling party and its militia. He had looked only for information on captured territory and for the locations of armed confrontation, skipping the political analysis.

He wouldn’t have been allowed to enter an area of active fighting, of course. But that was the advantage of landmines—they remained, long after the conflict was settled or forgotten. The Santa María government had turned its back on this departamento. The population was either quelled or had surrendered to the rebels, Nicky didn’t know which, but the dusty country that had once been bean fields and corn fields and forest was now a no-man’s land of active mines, which was what Nicky needed.

He was pretty sure this was the right area, a pocket of the tropics that had produced more amputees than any slice of geography since Vietnam. He’d covered maybe a quarter of this particular stretch of ground. There was nothing to do but get back in the broiling car and keep driving. Dizzy with heat and anticipation, he needed to keep at bay thoughts of failure. Failure would make insanity of this project, but if the wheels of his vehicle could just meet with a landmine, the project would be a magnificent, incendiary success. Nicky turned the Ford the other direction and headed south.

Within minutes, the car began shuddering and coughing. He tramped on the gas; the sedan made three or four violent jerks forward and came to a standstill. Nicky didn’t move. The car hissed gently, rising dust flouring its sides. No wind moved in the grass, but malevolent insects creaked and whirred. Nicky wondered if the car was overheated, and if he would be able to figure out, by looking under the hood, where water might be helpfully added. Not that it mattered; he had brought no water with him.

He could pursue his task on foot. He considered this idea and knew he was too hot and too cowardly to try. Maybe if he just sat there long enough, he would die of heatstroke and dehydration. But that would be slow and terribly uncomfortable. He could not walk to a village. If he made it to a village, he would not be able to explain himself. If he explained himself—he had his phrasebook, and it no doubt included a page on car trouble—no one would come back to the Crown Victoria with him through a field of active landmines. Perhaps the car would start again after it had cooled.

Nicky sat in the motionless air and thought about Darla. He thought about her freckled arms and chest and raspy voice. By now she would know he was missing. He had left his apartment, ostensibly for work, forty-eight hours before. Darla would have called, would have come knocking. Would have learned that Nicky had never shown up at Submarine Supreme. He wondered if she’d called his parents, or the police. He didn’t know, really, what she would do, or how she would feel. She would be annoyed with him, and later she would be sorry, about this and about everything. She would regret having been so sharp with him all the time. That thought was very gratifying.

But Darla would also be free, and that was Nicky’s gift to her; she’d be free of him, because he was annoying, and he knew it. She would start over with someone else who was more efficient and quicker on the uptake, someone who had a better sense of what to say to people and what to do and not to do, someone who was more socially appropriate, and maybe thinner.

After all that he had suffered, and all that he had planned, and all that he had carried out already, he could not face the possibility of failure. The spurt of motivation that had been with him all morning abruptly sputtered out, and he found himself in his most familiar state: as though lying under a massive steam iron, his interest in everything, including his own death, pressed completely flat. He dug inside himself but came up empty-handed. He could not find any volition, nor even the desire to look for it. All he could find was dull self-hatred for his own passivity. If he didn’t get the car going now, the shame itself might kill him.

Then he started to cry, because he understood suddenly what was the matter with the car. It was out of gas.

CHAPTER 2

CATHIE

In her thirty-four years, Catherine had rarely flown by herself, and she’d never had a window seat. She pressed her forehead and fingertips, like a child, against the airplane window’s thick pane, gazing at the coastline of white sands and waters of impossible emerald. When she stepped