Criminals Read Online Free PDF Page B

cigarette. “You’ve captured him, dear!” Eleanor said. The driver’s eyes were abnormally bright yet full of calm. Amy looked away from them.
    The women in the study group knew how to choose a live chicken, and behind which cement wall in the open market the sellers of porkwere sequestered, and where the veterinary hospital was, and which teacher at the International School belonged to which religion. All of this tired Amy, made her balk.
    She had always been efficient. Why in this country was she going in circles in the heat, when all the vendors had the same red chilies, the same sheaves of long beans, to find the vendor who had smiled at her? She didn’t want to choose a live chicken swung by the legs with straw between its toes; she went in secret to the new supermarket to get chicken in a package. Quite suddenly she was not practical, not enterprising. She wouldn’t have a car. They took the cheap taxis when they had to go somewhere. If she had to go out she scraped her hair back or wore a scarf. They could say foreign women, too, had to veil themselves, as a faction was proposing, and she would do it gladly.
    In a storm, blue lightning flew through the house along the wiring and spat out of the outlets. She would sit on the floor with her back to the inner wall of flagstone, at the farthest point from any outlet, and plug up her ears. If John was home to see it he said, “Is this the girl who saved Guatemala?” He liked to be reminded of how long he had actually known her, as if years held the power of gradual sanction.
    She had always been one of the calm ones who could be put to work with the dog handlers. Hours after the Guatemala earthquake she had been on the plane. They worked through the aftershocks, twenty-hour stretches in the rubble with dogs. For a surprising number of days they could dig out bodies that were alive; she had seen a slab of concrete act as a perfect tourniquet.
    By the time she was in her mid-twenties she had stepped out of floatplanes and cargo jets all over the world. Sometimes on her return she could hardly say what country she had been in. A place of crumpled awnings, statues lifted off their bases, roads heaved into ditches, where her team had sat on sand, seen eels and bright fish in a new lagoon where houses had been standing a few days before. The dazed figures lining up to get out were not the men and women they had been previously, any more than she was the same person who hadbeen pacing with her coffee in an airport hours before. Once you felt your teeth bite down on ash, or used your hands to gouge out mudbanks, once you herded the mesmerized, all airports, all normal sleeping and eating, were set aside. Rescuer and rescued were indistinguishable, like heads bobbing in the water in a lifesaving class.
    Her boyfriend Tommy had put this choice of hers down to being raised with no mother, raised with brothers. Raised by brothers, to strap on a catcher’s pad, gap the spark plugs, go for the two-year EMT course after graduation. Though she knew her brothers had expected her to go to college, even to medical school. She was smart enough for that, they thought. But she wasn’t and she didn’t want to.
    She couldn’t brag that she was a natural, that nothing suited her better than to grab a duffel and pass through terminal doors into the smoke and tears of whatever place had been flooded or crushed or quickly rigged up as shelter.
    After a few years of that she went to nursing school. She nursed. She got married.
    Always, Amy had boyfriends to spare. But except for the one prolonged, impossible crush on a married man, once she met Tommy she settled in, waited years to marry him. His mother, with five sons grown, had been waiting, too. So had Amy’s brothers: the wedding swarmed with brothers, hers and his, nearly a dozen of them.
    Tommy was not the baby, as she was in her family, though he was the last to marry. In the receiving line his