LITMIR.BIZ

      Copyright © 2013, Nelson Family Partnership

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the authors or copyright holders.

      The Risk of Returning is a work of fiction. The characters and portrayal are the product of the authors’ imaginations, and any resemblance to individuals living or dead is coincidental. The country of Guatemala is portrayed fictionally as a location, along with aspects of its history and geography, and references to public persons, institutions and events.

      The quote from The Magician’s Nephew is from

      The Chronicles of Narnia ©CSLewis Ptc Ltd 1950-56.

      Extracts from the poetry of Emily Dickinson are taken from

      Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson Poems ©1961 by Little, Brown & Company, Inc.

      Cover and book design, Ed Atkeson, Berg Design

      Cover art work by Scott Nelson, ©“The Road”

      Printed in the United States of America

      Wipf and Stock

      An imprint of Wipf and Stock, Publishers

      199 West 8th Avenue

      Eugene, OR 97401

      ISBN: 978-1-4982-1922-8

      EISBN: 978-1-4982-1923-5

      Second edition

      First printed by Troy Book Makers, Troy, N.Y.

      To order additional copies of this title, contact a local bookstore,

      or visit WipfandStock.com

      For all the storytellers of Guatemala who have broken through the long crust of silence and fear. This story does not pretend to take a place among those brave disclosures, though it owes a great debt to them, and to the wider, overarching story of the country and its people.

      desaparecido -a

      noun, masc. or fem.

      A kidnapped, missing person

      (Latin Amer., political)

      Guatemala

      August 1987

      ONE

      We were barely off the ground and on the way when I knew it was a mistake.

      It began with Pat Crane. I met him first. No significance to that in itself. Somebody has to be first, and he certainly was. We met in the air, shortly after take-off, 30,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico.

      I had noticed him earlier at the departure gate in Miami, a heavy red-bearded man reading a newspaper. I hardly glanced at him then, or he at me, aside from the way adult males do, with an instinctual check of the territory. But in retrospect it’s a wonder he wasn’t watching for me there, holding high my name in magic marker, a certain prescient light in his eye.

      The flight was delayed, this second leg of the trip. Announcements were made, repairs to something in the instrument panel. The waiting area was full. A big percentage of the passengers were apparently Central American, loaded down with shopping bags bearing the logos of Miami stores. They chattered cheerfully, their voices reaching my ears in a familiar orchestrated sound, the Hispanic lilt. I don’t mean I understood it. The language was no longer mine, other than a phrase here and there, an old song I recognized but couldn’t sing.

      I wasn’t taking it well, this delay. It seemed ominous to me, though I knew it was only the state of my mind, that like a lost child was seeing things in every tree and post. Not that I felt lost exactly, more like mislaid, as if someone had set me down and forgotten where I was, a notion that might have struck me funny at another time. I tried to read, paced the corridor, and stared out the windows at our stalled behemoth.

      My seat when we boarded the plane was on the aisle next to the portside wing. At the last minute a dozen teen-aged kids swooped on board like a flock of noisy birds, filling spaces in front and on either side of me, chattering across the aisle and singing snatches of songs. All wore the same white T-shirt with the same logo, “Gringos For Jesus.” Gringos they were, in a fair-skinned, orthodontal sort of way. Two of them filled the empty seats in my row, a boy in the middle and a girl by the window.

      When we were airborne, I removed the headset from the seat pocket, hoping to pick up some decent jazz in the aircraft offerings. As I plugged it into the arm rest, the boy turned toward me confidentially and mumbled something. I unwired myself and asked him to repeat it. He did. Would I like something, I thought he said. Kids had only just begun saying “like” and it still caught me off-guard. “Like what?” I asked. He tried again, still mumbling, his words run together, rapid fire. I leaned closer. “Where would I like to go?” No, wrong. “Where will you go,” he said. “Where will you go if we all go—like down?” His hand took a dive.

      “I go like down, too?” I said. I put on a dead face, eyes rolled back. When in doubt, play the clown.

      Not funny. The boy looked frustrated. He mumbled a correction and I had to ask him to repeat it. He raised his voice then, a lot.

      “Heaven or hell! I mean like heaven or hell! Where are you going?”

      That got attention, everybody’s, that is. Suddenly the chatter around us stopped. An audience of young faces peered at us over the seats. I might have been confronting a room full of students on the first day of classes. I felt the same first-day wash of tenderness and panic. The boy was waiting for an answer, his face ruddy with responsibility. I wanted to set him at ease, get him off the hook. Nothing came to my lips. It was not my day for that kind of finesse, but it was his for persistence. His fingers reached for what looked like a tract in his shirt pocket.

      Walking away was clearly best for all. I glanced about for a different seat. Nothing empty in front of us. I turned to look behind and found my face mere inches away from another. In a slapstick, it might have been God’s own, a fairly young God with a bushy red beard, like the Norse god Thor, but it was only the reader in the waiting room, seated in back of me now and leaning forward to speak.

      “There’s an entire unclaimed row in the rear,” he said. “Shall we go for it?”

      Why not? I took up my pack with a wave to the kid. He looked relieved. “Have a good trip,” he said.

      The man ahead of me in the aisle was big. He wore the rumpled look of a guy who carries an extra hundred pounds and is tired of tucking in his shirt. The bowl of a briarwood curved out of his suitcoat pocket and a faint smell of pipe ashes trailed behind him. When we reached the empty row, he motioned to me to enter first. “Do you mind?” he asked, wheezing a little. “It’s easier for me on the aisle.” He was in every way wide, his eyes widely spaced, hair abundant over the ears. I felt oddly narrow and colorless beside him, eyes too close set,

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