He yelled for his friend, who came running. Using the bloody sock, they put a tourniquet on the ankle, and with his friend’s help my brother hobbled home and called for my mom.
Because it was a weekend, she happened to be at home and she examined his ankle as it spurted blood all over the kitchen linoleum.
“Looks pretty bad,” she said succinctly. And as always, she knew exactly what to do.
She stuck a Band-Aid on it.
Then she told Micah to put his hand over the Band-Aid, and told him he might want to rest it for a while before he went outside to play again.
As wild as we were, my mom always made it a point to bring us to church every Sunday, and that continued in California. My brother and I were often bored and would poke each other. The challenge, however, was that the other wasn’t allowed to flinch, and the poker couldn’t appear to be moving, so that our mother wouldn’t catch us.
Dana didn’t like this particular game very much, and while my mother didn’t know what was going on, my sister certainly did. She took church very seriously—because our mom did, I suppose, and she wanted to be just like her—and in between her prayers, she would frown at us, trying to get us to stop.
Dana loved to pray. She prayed in the morning, she prayed at night. She asked God to bless everyone she knew, one at a time. She prayed for relatives and friends and strangers, dogs and cats and animals at the zoo. She prayed to become kinder and more patient, despite the fact that she didn’t need help in either department. She seemed completely at ease with the world, and had a way of making others comfortable around her. In her own gentle way, my sister had quietly become the rock that my brother and I began to cling to whenever misfortune befell us.
But as much as Dana loved church and praying, it was her fault that we never arrived at Mass on time. Usually we rolled in about ten minutes late, and always after the rest of the congregation was seated. I didn’t mind coming late (as I said, I was frequently bored), but I didn’t like the way everyone would turn to watch us as we tried to find a seat. And in moments like those, I wished my sister would be a little more like my brother and me, at least in one respect.
Three Weeks With My Brother
Dana, despite her other wonderful qualities, was not a fast mover. When she woke up in the morning, she never got out of bed right away. Instead, she would sit cross-legged on the mattress and simply stare into space, looking dreamy and disoriented. She would stay in that position for twenty minutes—“Waking up” as she described it—and would only then begin getting ready to go. And even then, everything was slow. She ate slowly, she dressed slowly, she brushed her hair slowly. Where our mom could tell Micah and me to get ready and we’d be dressed within minutes, my sister took her time. My brother and I had to walk to school, but more often than not, my mom would have to drive my sister in, so that she wouldn’t be late. It made us crazy at times, but she never let our complaints bother her.
“People are just different,” Dana used to observe serenely, whenever we’d tease her about it. And my mom never let my sister’s lateness bother her. As she explained it to us, “She just needs a little more time to get ready.”
“Why?” Micah or I would ask.
“Because she’s a girl.”
Oh.
Still, Dana had the occasional wild impulse. On our one and only cross-country vacation in the summer of 1976, the family loaded into our Volkswagen van—the only car we had from 1974 to 1982—and spent a few weeks traveling around the west. We visited the Painted Desert and Taos, New Mexico, before finally arriving at the Grand Canyon. It was, of course, one of the greatest sights in the world, but as children we didn’t much appreciate it. Instead, on my sister’s suggestion, we decided it would be much more fun to slip behind the viewing ropes and approach the unstable, cordoned-off edge of the canyon while our parents were buying us lunch. There, we discovered a small ledge, maybe three feet down.
“Let’s go down there,” my sister suggested.
Micah and I looked at each other, glanced at the ledge, and shrugged. “Okay,” we replied. I mean, why not? How dangerous could it be? It didn’t look too unstable.
Anyway, we climbed down and sat on the ledge for a few minutes, three little kids with their legs dangling free. Far beneath us, we could see the Colorado River snaking through the canyon and hawks circling below. The differing strata of rock resembled a soft-hued, vertical rainbow. After a while, however, we got bored.
“Hey,” my sister said, “I have an idea. Let’s pretend we slipped off the edge of the canyon and scare people.”
Micah and I looked at each other again, impressed. This would normally have been one of our ideas. “Okay,” we answered in unison.
Now, squatting on the ledge, we raised ourselves slowly and poked our heads and arms over the top of the canyon. No one noticed us at first. Beyond the ropes about thirty feet away, we could see a group of people taking pictures and staring off in different directions, marveling at the natural beauty. When my sister nodded, we suddenly began screaming for help at the top of our lungs.
Heads immediately whipped in our direction, and people saw what seemed to be three little children clawing for their lives in an attempt to hold on. An older woman swooned, another grabbed at her heart, another clutched at her husband’s arms. No one seemed to know what to do. They continued staring at us with wide, fearful eyes, frozen by shock and horror.
Finally, one man broke free from the spell he was under, and was stepping over the rope when we saw my mom come rushing toward us.
You can probably guess what happened next.
“Stay there while I take a picture, kids!” my mom yelled.
As fun as it was, sadly we couldn’t stay at the Grand Canyon. A few minutes later, our family was told that we had to leave.
“Now,” as the ranger on duty so kindly put it.
Six months later, my brother and I had our BB guns confiscated by the sheriff. Not because of the BB gun wars, but because my brother went a little too far. Basically, what happened was this: There was no one to play war with one afternoon, so my brother recruited a couple of first-graders for a different kind of game. He told them to bend over and hold the cuffs of their pant legs out, so he could shoot through the material.
“Don’t move, or I might accidentally shoot your leg,” Micah explained patiently. “I just want to practice my aim.”
Anyway, as I said, the sheriff came and took away his gun.
A week later, they came again and took my gun, too. My brother had used it to shoot holes in a couple of neighbors’ windows.
And just like that, our days playing war were over.
CHAPTER 7
Three Weeks With My Brother
Lima, Peru
Sunday, January 26
When it was time to bid farewell to Guatemala, we boarded our plane and headed to our next stop, Lima, Peru, a city of eight million and home to nearly a third of Peru’s population. Once the capital of a Spanish empire encompassing Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Peru, Lima was one of the world’s wealthiest and most luxurious cities in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Exploitation, mismanagement, and poor planning eventually weakened the Spanish empire, however, leading to Simón Bolívar’s eventual rout of the Spanish forces in 1824. A succession of governments over the next 175 years finally led to democratic elections in 1980, and I was anxious to see how the country was faring.
Lima was sweltering when we landed. It was summer in South America, far warmer than it had been in Guatemala. As we boarded buses, TCS handed out bottles of water, and introduced the local tour guides, who would speak to us about the culture and history of the places we visited. We were also given a radio and earpiece, which we turned to the same frequency as our guide. Thus, even up to a hundred feet away, we could always hear what was going on.
The central plaza was crowded when we arrived. It was one of the few open areas in the center of the city, colonial in design, and crisscrossed with curving sidewalks lined with freshly planted flowers. Kids played games in the grass and played in the fountains, trying to keep cool in the summer heat. Others did their best to sell us souvenirs, and crowded around our group the moment we stepped off the bus.
We took photographs of both the Presidential Palace and the cathedral where Francisco Pizarro was buried. Pizarro, I knew, was one in a long line of historical figures whose reputation largely depends on perspective; while known in Spain as an explorer, he had also captured Atahualpa, the leader of the Incas. When he demanded and received as ransom a roomful of gold for his release, he promptly executed the king anyway before enslaving the natives. I couldn’t help but wonder what the descendants of the Incas thought about his church-sanctioned burial place.
From there, we made our way to Casa Aliaga, which was located just off the main plaza. Literally, “Aliaga’s House,” it was one of the most striking examples of early Spanish architecture in the city, yet from the outside it blended into the other structures on the block. Unless you knew it was there, a person could walk by without noticing it.
Beyond the doors, however, was a home that boggled the mind.
Casa Aliaga has been owned by the Aliaga family for over four hundred years, and is still occupied by the Aliagas today. Designed in typical hacienda fashion, rooms surround an open courtyard, complete with a hundred-foot-tall fig tree stretching to the sky. It is also home to one of the finest art collections in South America. Because the house is so large and expensive to maintain, the Aliagas open the house to tourists, and Micah and I wandered through with wide eyes. Everything, with the exception of the plaster walls—the banisters, door frames, crown moldings, and railings—had been intricately carved, and paintings covered every available wall space. The furniture, mostly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was so ornate that it was impossible for us to bring our cameras into focus.
As we were walking through the house, Micah finally turned to me.
“Can you believe this place?”
“No. That tree . . . well, everything really . . . it’s incredible.”
“I’ll bet you’re getting some good ideas for the next time you remodel, huh?”
I laughed. “I have to admit that it would be nice to have paintings of famous ancestors.”
“You mean if we had any.”
“Exactly. While the Aliaga family was building this place, our ancestors were probably putting shoes on horses and working the farm.”
He nodded and looked around. Our group had dispersed throughout various rooms in the house.
“Be honest though—would you want to live here?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “It’s . . . unbelievable, but it’s not really my style. And the upkeep must keep the owners awake at night.”
“I know what you mean. I mean, can you imagine how long it takes to dust this place? Christine would die.”
The TCS crew began herding us together, counting heads, and making sure everyone was accounted for. After leaving Casa Aliaga, we climbed back on the bus for the ride to the hotel.
This would become our routine over the next few weeks. While a tour like ours has advantages, the schedule is carefully predetermined, and in many places there’s little time to linger or explore on your own.
It was the night of the Super Bowl. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were playing the Oakland Raiders, and a number of people in the tour wanted to watch it, including Micah. Because he lived in Sacramento, the Raiders were his favorite team and he’d even been to a few of the games that year. We weren’t even sure the game would be broadcast in Peru, and there was a veritable whoop on the bus when TCS confirmed that it would be. The game would be on via satellite in the bar, and would stay tuned there throughout the game; apparently, this required quite a bit of finagling by the crew of TCS; few people in Peru care about the Super Bowl, and a soccer game—which was important to Peruvians—wouldn’t be shown.
Wanting a good seat, Micah and I were among the first to arrive and we began ordering traditional pregame goodies. Others gradually joined us. Half the crowd favored Tampa Bay, the other half favored Oakland, and by the time it was ready for the game to begin, the hotel bar looked like a bar in any city in the United States. There wasn’t a local anywhere near the place.
There was no pregame show; instead, roughly five minutes before the start of the game, the television flickered once or twice, and we found ourselves watching the teams lining up for the kickoff.
“See, everything we’re doing is new,” Micah said. “Be honest, who do you know who’s ever watched the Super Bowl in Lima?”
“No one,” I admitted.
“Having fun yet?”
“Having a blast,” I answered.
“You thinking about work?”
“Nope. Just thinking about the game.”
He waved a french fry at me. “Good. There’s hope for you yet.”
“Turn it up!” someone yelled from behind us. “We can’t hear in the back!”
The bartender used the remote, and the volume began to rise. With it, the familiar sounds started to register. We heard the roar of the crowd, the names of the players as they were announced in the stadium, then the coin toss. Only then did the announcers begin their commentary.
Everyone leaned forward.
“What the hell are they saying?” someone shouted.
“I don’t know,” another answered. “I think they’re announcing it in . . . Spanish.”
Of course, it made perfect sense once you thought about it.
“Spanish?”
“It’s the official language of Peru,” Micah offered. “And Spain.”
No one thought it was funny.
“I thought it was coming in on satellite,” someone grumbled. “From the States. Maybe it’s in English on another channel.”
The bartender surfed around; this was it. Spanish or nothing.