LITMIR.BIZ

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I said.

      “George Patton Crane,” he offered. “But do call me Pat.” Not a trace of whimsy. “First time to Wah-day-mallah?” That’s how he pronounced it, as I hadn’t heard it in years. I mumbled something about “long ago,” but he was on another track already, the book he had seen in my hands back there in Miami, that old novel, The Red Badge of Courage, which he had noticed especially because his grandfather had been a distant kin to the author, but a copy he suspected could be owned only by an English professor, considering its tattered condition, and who else would be reading it anyway? “Am I right in that decoding process?”

      I nodded, smiling carefully.

      “And what prestigious institution do you represent?” Crane asked.

      “Shawmut Junior College,” I told him. “Boston.” I was sure he had never heard of it, because neither had I until this second.

      He was in sociology himself, he said, before I could ask. In fact, in the course of the next hour I was careful to ask nothing that might be taken as a lead, and couldn’t have found an opening if I had tried. He had been working on his doctoral dissertation at NYU for eight years now, he said, and “one might ask—might well ask—” why he had not thrown in the towel long ago, considering the roadblocks presented by the needless requirements of a soft and self-conscious science. But at least he had a publisher in waiting, he said, and Deo volente, would soon have a book.

      He used his hands as he talked, sometimes close to his chest as if conducting a small choral group, sometimes punctuating his sentences with a flourish: quotes, periods, even a semicolon. His advisors kept insisting on a wider statistical base, he said, but lordamercy, his topic was embedded in the unstatistical, the un-pie-chartable spaces of human life. And one might wonder, mightn’t one, what all that had to do with the destination of this plane? He answered that with a “drastically stripped down version” of his life story, which took the better part of the next half hour. He was an AB, he said, an army brat. His father had been a military advisor, so as a kid he was dragged around, ad infinitum, nauseum and absurdo, to various parts of the world.

      We were interrupted twice by flight attendants, first with drinks, then with food, a late lunch of sorts. I had no appetite, but Crane apparently did. He stopped talking long enough to feed himself with zest, the little plastic fork in his left hand and the knife in his right, looking like a bear at tea in a British fairy tale. When he began talking again it was to “let me in” on the heart of his thesis, U.S. expats. He was on the way to “Wah-day-mallah” right now to find fresh material among ABs and MKs—missionary kids, “the lost children of Peter Pan”—and he was already on the lookout for a good interview.

      “Really,” I said, with what courtesy I could muster. If he had tied me to the seat and sat on me, I couldn’t have felt more like a hostage. He had been back repeatedly in the last eight years, he said, “in spite of dire travel advisories.” Times were when he’d come across dead bodies himself on the street, early morning before they got scooped up.

      “Really,” I said again.

      “Did you happen to be there during those days?”

      “What? Oh. No.”

      “Of course nothing has actually changed. It’s just a little sneakier.”

      “Right. Of course.”

      “What’s yours?” he asked.

      “Mine?” I’d lost a thread somewhere.

      “Reason,” he said. “There are only so many right now. Research, religion, or reconnaissance.” He even looked roguish, or tried to. Why was I on this plane, that’s what he wanted to know. I considered the “reasons” I could give him, and knew I would not, even “I don’t know,” which was closest to the truth. He was leaning toward me, his body overflowing into the seat between us. All the old warning lights began to flash. I resisted an urge to adjust my jacket over the money belt, where I’d put my father’s letter. Instead, I pulled out my glasses and began to unwrap the slice of carrot cake that came with the lunch.

      He was watching me, waiting for an answer, the nosy bugger. I considered telling him, in some configuration of courtesy, that it was none of his business. Or I could just maintain the silence, which is what I did, tearing open the stubborn package with my teeth and biting into the terrible cake. That worked. He excused himself and settled back in his seat for a nap.

      I turned to the window and the diminishing light beyond it. By now the plane had dropped through cloud cover and I could see mountains below, an extension of the Sierra Madres, draped in green quilts of vegetation, white mist rising between them so deliberately you’d swear the whole range was on fire. Dusk deepened with the long descent and soon the lights of the capital city spread across what seemed to be a plateau, its edges dropping off sharply here and there into oblivion. I was straining to make that out when we touched down, and the pilot’s voice welcomed us in both Spanish and English to La Aurora International Airport. I reset my watch. It was a few minutes before 6:00, Central American time. Pat Crane opened his eyes.

      I managed to maneuver away from him as he probed for his luggage in the overhead. But standing in the stalled line waiting to deplane, I felt warm breath in my hair, and when I entered the terminal he was beside me, moving with the crowd. At least he was not talking, both of us wordless as we walked between life-sized blow-ups of black-haired Mayan women lining the walls with Eight Million Smiles. A gigantic quetzal bird, made of turquoise and scarlet paper, hung from the ceiling, its preposterous tail feathers waving in the air.

      I slipped ahead of him in the line to the caged window where passports and tourist cards were processed, then headed off to the baggage carousel on the lower level. A packed crowd filled a balcony there, shouting and waving at the people they had come to meet. One man at the railing circled a huge bottle of pink Pepto-Bismol over his head. “For the galloping shitskies,” said Crane helpfully, over my shoulder. As I picked my bag off the conveyor belt, he grabbed his, too, riding right behind mine. And so together we joined the line for customs inspection.

      Crane’s suitcase was given a perfunctory exam by two men, and he stepped several feet aside. My inspector was younger than the others, very young, I thought. He said something to me in Spanish.

      “I don’t understand,” I answered.

      He proceeded to explain in English, so muddled I could only shrug in return. “Okay,” he said, and as the two older men stood by watching, began to transfer to the counter every single item, first from my suitcase, which contained only clothes, and then from my pack—tapes, books, an apple, granola bars, Walkman, toiletries case. This he unzipped and emptied— toothbrush, deodorant, nail clipper, beard trimmer—all of it looking remarkably mundane. I think that bothered me the most. Nothing interesting here, let alone drugs or contraband. He asked me to empty my pockets. I did. Change, comb, mints. I would be patted down next, I supposed, money belt removed, letter extracted.

      But now the kid turned his attention to my books. He placed the four paperbacks side by side on the table, a Spanish-English dictionary (new), The Red Badge of Courage, a copy of Walden and the Final Harvest edition of Emily Dickinson (all old). After flipping through each, he picked up the novel and brought it over to the other men.

      “But why?” I protested. They ignored me. Cover half off, the book was passed from hand to hand among the three of them.

      Now Crane, the empty pipe hanging from his mouth, stirred his bulk and walked forward. “Dispense uds, señores,” he said. There was a moment of exchange, a question and an answer. The book along with every other item was replaced methodically in the bag and I was signaled to go.

      “What the heck was that all about?” I asked, as we passed into the lobby.

      “Just an aberration,” he said. “They don’t usually do it to U.S. tourists.”

      “Oh, that’s comforting.”

      “The kid’s a trainee, I think. Just showing off.”

      I glanced about for a men’s room, saw a

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