Nicaraguan Gringa. John Keith

at Los Ranchos next week.”

      “That’s all right, Daddy. You tried. I shouldn’t have insisted so much.”

      Suddenly they heard shots and saw people run from doorway to doorway. The merry voices became shrill with fear and then muted into whines and cries as the doors closed and the crowds thinned and darkness transformed the street into a black tunnel of terror. Only the headlights of the old Austin picked out a few cringing figures, no longer dancing, now staggering into some opening before it was locked against them. A woman ran across the street in front of them carrying a young child in her arms with another young child who held her hand. The older child couldn’t keep up with her, and she dragged him by the arm. Then he fell. She paused for only a moment and bent down and tried to lift the fallen child, but she could not manage both children, and she ran into one of the last open doorways abandoning the injured child in the street. They could see now it was a little boy. George swerved to avoid running over the small body and then accelerated.

      “George! Stop!”

      “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll shoot us!”

      “Stop!” Mary was screaming and opening the door of the car as if she intended to jump out while it still sped along. “We have to see about the child.”

      George stopped and put the car into reverse. Even before he had stopped again, Mary had leapt from the already opened door and was running toward the fallen child in the street. George followed his wife immediately out of the car, and Sarah slipped out behind her parents and saw a wound and bloodstains on the little boy’s shoulder and realized he had been struck by one of the bullets. He was small, only three or four years old, with a dirty, flat, sweet Indian face. Sarah could smell the big chocolate stains around his mouth and thought of the chocolate soda she had been prevented from ordering at the Eskimo. She began to cry.

      “Sarah, get back in the car. Right now!”

      Sarah obeyed her father, but from the car window she looked down at the little boy in the street. He was wearing a ragged shirt but new shorts. He was barefooted. Sarah’s mother put her head down close to his face and chest. “He’s breathing, but he’s unconscious, maybe he fainted or is in shock.” His eyes were closed, but little bubbles of saliva gurgled out of the corner of his mouth. Blood ran down his right arm. His right hand twitched. Sarah could hear gunshots still striking and ricocheting in the distance.

      George knelt beside his wife. He was shaking. “¿Tu madre? ¿Dónde está? ¡Vámanos con prisa!” (Your mother? Where is she? Let’s leave quickly!) He mumbled, almost whined incoherently. Mary appeared calm, almost clinical, without feelings, without fear. She looked around for the mother of the child, who had disappeared in the darkness; but there was no one on the street to tell them which door she had entered.

      “George, you carry him to the car.” Sarah’s father didn’t respond, so her mother picked the child up herself. He was heavy for her. He was bleeding badly, and blood had soaked through Mary’s sweater and blouse and moistened her shoulder. “Can you drive?” George nodded and followed his wife blindly, almost staggering, as the older child had followed the mother across the street. “George, can you drive? Answer me.”

      “Sí.” They got into the car, where the motor had been left running. Mary took off her scarf and tied it tightly around the child’s shoulder and cuddled his head on her bosom. George seemed to be heading down his usual route toward the South Highway.

      “No, George. To the hospital.”

      “El Retiro?”

      “No, Baptist. The Baptist Hospital, George. Hospital Bautista.” He still seemed to be driving toward the site of the public hospital, El Retiro. “No, no, George. The Baptist Hospital.” He didn’t seem to respond to English. “El Hospital Bautista, Jorge. A la Clínica Bautista.”

      When they reached the hospital, George carried the child inside; and Sarah followed them without receiving any protests or instructions from her parents. Mary knew some of the missionary nurses and communicated the situation to them immediately. Even though the child had lost a large amount of blood, the wound didn’t seem to be critical, and Mary’s scarf had stanched the flow of blood to some extent. A Nicaraguan doctor thought that the little boy would survive and recover. Mary told him that they would return soon to see about the child and promised to cover all his expenses. They would try to locate his mother tomorrow, if the shooting and violence had ceased in the besieged barrio (neighborhood).

      “Let’s go home now, George.” He was silent. His terror had passed. Now he was silent out of shame. He was pulling at his fingers, popping the joints.

      Sarah had never seen her father behave in such a frightened way before, and it terrified her more than the gunfire.

      Mary turned toward George on the long, silent drive to Quinta Louisa. Once she reached out to him but withdrew her hand just inches before her fingertips touched his arm. “It’s all right, dear. It’s all right. Everything will be fine.” The whispered words were intended as much for Sarah as for her father, but Sarah didn’t believe anything would ever be all right again, and nothing would ever be fine for her in Nicaragua again.

      Sarah’s mother tucked her into bed late that night, but for the first time in her life Sarah’s father didn’t come to give her a goodnight kiss; and his absence frightened her even more than seeing the wounds of the injured child, more than the bloodstains on the street and on her mother’s blouse, more than the words of her mother and the silence of her father in the car on the way home to Quinta Louisa.

      Because Armando and Beatriz Chulteco lived in the center of Managua, in one of the old homes just off Roosevelt Avenue, Sarah’s parents invited them to spend several days at Quinta Louisa until order was restored in the city. Although a few shots were fired back and forth on Monday, the Nicaraguan army had established complete control by Tuesday morning; but with stores still shuttered and tensions high, Mary and George believed their friends would probably be safer and would certainly be calmer on the finca (farm) with them.

      The newspapers reported fewer than twenty people killed, but family members of coffee workers from the village counted almost sixty friends and acquaintances known to be slain, and the count must surely have been even higher. Sarah sat with rapt attention listening to her parents and the Chultecos narrate the facts and rumors about what had happened.

      Both political parties customarily rounded up campesinos (peasants) from the rural villages during the election campaigns and brought them into the city on big trucks and offered them a drink and a sweet. The outing was a rare and coveted celebration for the peasant laborers, who paid little attention to which political party was sponsoring the rally.

      Now at the peak of the cotton harvest, trailers of raw cotton packed outlying streets on the weekend, waiting to be the first in line to be drawn into the gins on Monday morning. Underneath the cotton, rifles had been hidden; and communist guerrillas from Colombia retrieved the guns and stationed snipers on the roofs of some of the taller buildings along Roosevelt Avenue. They set cars on fire along some of the side streets. The snipers then fired into the crowd of campesinos from both directions, so that they were trapped in panic on the central street.

      Some of the leaders of the Conservative Party were arrested and jailed, although Armando swore that they had played no part in the riot and had no knowledge of the plot by a few Nicaraguan communist sympathizers and foreign terrorists to destabilize the country. Some Conservative Party leaders had rushed into the Gran Hotel and held the guests hostage at the dinner party to which the Rutledges had been invited but had declined to attend. The hostages were confined until the opposition political officials were assured that they would not be executed by the Somoza regime. Anastazio Somoza, the younger brother of the former President and now a candidate for the Presidency himself, was the Chief of the Nicaraguan army. He surrounded the hotel with tanks whose cannons were trained on the entrances.

      “He would have blown the building down in a quick moment if his older brother had not been more level headed.” Sarah looked at Don Armando with wide eyes and a gaping mouth.

      “Really?”