A Scarcity of Condors Read online

  “So am I,” Jude said to his crystal-clear windshield, holding hands with the future.

  Looking forward and moving on.

  On the morning of October 17, 1973, Cleon Tholet was arrested on the streets of Santiago. After being detained five days at the Estadio de Chile, soldiers transferred him to the Villa Grimaldi detention center, where he endured six weeks of brutal interrogation and torture. When he was transported again, this time to the Estadio Nacional, he weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds and his dark hair had gone the color of dust. Manhandled once more into an army jeep, he was driven around for an hour, then dumped onto the street in Santiago’s red-light district.

  No one dared come to his aid as soldiers administered one final beating. Prostitutes, madams and pimps peeked from behind doors and windows as Pinochet’s men climbed back into their jeep and started the engine. They drove off, not around Cleon’s body, but over it, breaking every bone in both his legs.

  As a boy, Jude couldn’t believe his father didn’t remember the moment when he was crushed beneath the wheels. Of course, the very young couldn’t grasp how trauma rearranged memory. How the human brain consciously decided when to cover its eyes and turn away from certain events, refusing to let them be written in books of life. Jude didn’t understand until his own leg was broken and his mind turned its back and refused to acknowledge. Overnight, his bond with Cleon deepened past filial to the profound devotion of war mates.

  “So we’re compañeros now,” Jude said, while still in the hospital recovery room.

  “Yes.” Cleon gathered him in arms and held him tight. “We are.”

  It was all that could be said and at that moment, all Jude needed to hear. Beyond Cleon’s embrace, he sensed the plate armor of his mother, sister and brother sliding into place, rolling the five Tholets into a tight ball, like an armadillo. Jude at the center, cloaked in the unique courage and resilience of his people. Keenly aware they would kill for him, and he for them, and from now on, family was the only thing he could trust in the world.

  Out of Cleon’s six complicated, messy fractures, all but the right tibia knitted properly back together. The right shin bone rejected internal fixation with titanium screws, so doctors backed everything out and did an external fixation, pinning the bone from the outside in.

  The leg stubbornly resisted skin grafts and electromagnetic bone stimulation. It sulked through physical therapy and its painful mood swings were more unpredictable than a heartbroken teenager’s. A glutton for attention, the tibia got into a co-dependent relationship with Cleon’s ankle, then invited his knee for a threesome, which made his hip jealous. After forty years of managing the orgy of chronic pain, Cleon took the extreme measure of having his hopeless limb amputated below the knee, followed by a double hip replacement.

  “Look at that now,” he said to Jude, six weeks post-surgery. Standing on his left foot, he flexed and extended his right knee, showing off his new prosthetic.

  “Papi, that is one handsome leg,” Jude said, bending to touch the glossy black plastic that made up the calf. “Look at that, they even give you some muscle definition.”

  “I can get it customized,” Cleon said. “I found websites that will airbrush anything you want on it.”

  “What, like lightning bolts?”

  “Why not? Look at the range.” Still holding Jude’s shoulder, he made circles with his calf, clockwise and counter. The black plastic smoothed into a titanium ankle that fitted into a false foot, smartly dressed in a tennis sock and Nike sneaker.

  “How’s the knee feel?”

  “Fantastic.”

  “You’re like the bionic man.”

  “And, wait for it…” Cleon let go of Jude’s shoulder and put all his weight on his false foot. Arms extended, he lifted his left foot off the floor and balanced. Only a couple seconds before he grabbed onto Jude again. “I held it longer at therapy.”

  “I believe you. This is amazing. Let me see you walk. Give me your best runway.”

  Cleon walked slowly down the little hall. The lateral tilt in his hips would never straighten out. He would always limp, but the gait on the artificial leg was confident. He pivoted slowly to face Jude again, ran a hand through his white hair and raised one eyebrow.

  “Caliente,” Jude said. “Muy macho.”

  “Now we can both set off alarms at the airport.”

  Jude laughed. He had an intramedullary nail and four screws in his own leg. Some TSA agents at Sea-Tac knew him by name.

  Penny Tholet came around the corner and kissed Jude. “No more showing off,” she said, putting Cleon’s cane in his hand. “Rest it. You need to ice?”

  “I need nothing.” Cleon’s hand threaded through Jude’s hair and gave his head a little shake. “It all went okay today?”

  “It went fine. I think I left a lot of shit behind, too.”

  “Good, good, come sit.” He tucked his hand around Jude’s elbow and pumped the cane like a drum major as they walked, until Penny’s glare made him set the tip down.

  They sat in the kitchen, drinking wine and nibbling. They all spoke Spanish: Cleon with the mushy accent of a Chilean native, Penny with the inflection of a Western Canadian who learned the language as a young adult, and Jude’s weird blend of the two. Out and about in the world, he made his Spanish sit up straight and behave, but at his mother’s kitchen table, he let it be a mess.

  “How did the house look?” Penny said.

  “Old,” Jude said. “You could barely see it from the road because all those pines grew old, too.”

  “Good,” Cleon said. “Let it stay hidden.”

  He leaned to scoop up Walter, his chihuahua, and daintily fed him a cracker. Sitting in Cleon’s lap, the little dog was even more miniaturized. Cleon’s broad shoulders and barrel chest overflowed the kitchen chair. He was top-heavy by design, compensating his weak and painful legs by maximizing his upper body strength. One of Jude’s earliest memories was watching Cleon do wheelchair pull-ups in their detached garage. Strapped into the seat, hoisting himself aloft, wheels and all.

  Jude would hold his father’s feet while he did pushups on his thumbs. Cleon could crack walnuts in one palm. His torso was magnificent when clothed and in the summer months, he kept himself carefully concealed. He wore long shorts to the pool or beach, way before jams became popular. The length hid scars where leg bones were broken by jeep wheels, then re-broken by doctors. A perpetual T-shirt hid the livid marks from chains and live wires on his chest and back.

  Jude learned both the art of physique and the art of obscurity at his father’s knee. He worked out obsessively after his attack and concealed the provenance of his own scarred leg with fish tales instead of clothing. A motorcycle accident (he didn’t own a bike). A skiing mishap (he didn’t ski). A skydiving incident (oddly, the fib most people took at face value).

  “Are you ashamed of what happened to you?” his therapist asked.

  “No,” Jude said. “It’s just such a drag to explain. Literally. I don’t like dragging all that shit into the open and talking about it. It isn’t pleasant for anyone involved.”

  “But it’s the truth.”

  “I’ll tell that truth to the people who need to know it.”

  Phil looked steadily at him. “While you make sure those people are few and far-between.”

  Fucking Phil. He’d been shrinking Jude’s head since Jude was seventeen. Before Cleon and Penny searched real estate listings in Seattle, they researched adolescent psychologists who specialized in trauma. Jude had an appointment before the moving van even arrived. The first two therapists were duds but something clicked with Phil. Jude went to him once a week his entire senior year of high school. Every three months during college. Then as needed in his adult years. Phil was the one non-family member Jude was utterly, brutally honest with. Phil knew all Jude’s tricks and tactics and bullshit. He le
t Jude get away with zippity-doo-dah.

  Which was a blessing in its own sucky, cursed way.

  “Did you see anyone else you know?” Penny asked.

  “Nobody,” Jude said. “But I wasn’t looking too hard.”

  She patted his hand. She’d recently taken the plunge and cut her hair off. The pixie cut looked fabulous on her, but her hand kept going nervously to the back of her neck, where her own scar from Chile was now revealed. A long, raised welt ran from behind one ear almost to her nape, the souvenir of a soldier’s rifle butt. At least she thought it was a rifle butt. She was hit from behind and the blow sent her into early labor with Jude.

  Like her son and husband, Penny had a significant gap in her memory. Only a few fragments of Jude’s birth stayed on the record, recollections that languished as the years went by. Inwardly, Jude regarded the scar with a mix of pride and awe. Out loud, he teased Penny about not remembering and she’d shrug it off, quipping, “At least the son of a bitch saved me an anesthesia bill.”

  Lucille Penelope Cambie was plump and round-faced, with the same sweet, tilted-chin serenity as the Queen Mum. She loathed her first name and permitted only a select few to acknowledge its existence. Growing up bright and shiny in Vancouver, she was Penny. During her life as a civil servant in Chile, her circle of Santiaguinos detected the ferocity beneath the placid exterior, and they shortened Penelope to Lupita—the little wolf.

  It was Lupita who survived Pinochet’s coup, fighting for her disappeared mate and her one vulnerable cub, engineering their flight back to Vancouver. As more and more Chileans fled the murderous regime, the British Columbian port city amassed a thriving ex-pat community and Lupita became queen of a new pack. Waiting at the airport, baby Jude in a stroller, welcoming refugees off planes. Organizing. Administrating. Advocating. Settling. Devoted to the people of her adopted country with her flat-toned Spanish and every drop of her Anglo-Saxon blood.

  When the Chilean community turned against the Tholets in the wake of Jude’s attack, the family took it hard, but the She-Wolf took it hardest. The second coup on her life broke the floor from under her feet and she spent two weeks at Swedish Behavior Health in Ballard, Washington. It took months for her to regain her footing as Penny. Never again wanting to be called Lupita by anyone. She recovered her shiny sweetness, but it was the pale green of aged copper, weathered by the elements and underlaid with the tiniest current of mistrust. A sadness lingered behind her eyes, but it could quickly turn to a snarl if she felt her family was being threatened.

  She was never the same, Jude understated.

  But which of us was?

  The front door exploded open. “Hello,” his sister yodeled over the stamp of wet boots.

  Jude smiled, his question answered.

  Serena Tholet’s real name was Suzanne. She became Serena when it became evident nothing, absolutely nothing phased this extraordinary child. She was six when a neighbor’s house caught fire on Ormidale Street. The blaze spread and consumed the Tholets’ backyard shed and Serena’s playhouse. Amidst the chaos, Serena stood at a distance, placidly watching the firefighters, and said to the chief, “Well, this is a revolting development.”

  It became one of the family’s mottoes. When life threw a curveball or thrust a wrench in the gears, a Tholet would sigh and declare, “Well, this is a revolting development.”

  Serena was the one you wanted on the scene of an accident, during a crisis, in the midst of tragedy. She worked a suicide hotline in college, volunteered in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and received a citizen’s citation from the mayor of Seattle when she helped a woman deliver her baby on a bus.

  She swept into the kitchen, followed by her new boyfriend, Giosué. Jude’s curiosity sat up. He hadn’t yet met this Italian beau, but he was already a little obsessed with the name Giosué.

  Jossuway.

  Now that was a name that would sound good in the dark. And the owner was rather easy on the eyes, too.

  Jude had a habit of crushing on his sister’s boyfriends.

  “Hey, Jude,” Serena said, throwing arms around him. “Don’t make it suck.”

  “Nice ‘shmere,” he said, caressing the back of her cashmere sweater. “Can I borrow it?”

  “Get your own,” she said. “Mami, I saw stork balloons on the Nouns’ porch, did they have another baby?”

  “They didn’t have a giraffe.”

  “Who are the Nouns?” Giosué asked.

  “Neighbors down the street,” Jude said. “We call them the Nouns because they name their kids things. Liberty. Courage.”

  “Are those boys or girls?”

  “Girls.”

  “Nation and Pride” Penny said. “Those are boys.”

  “What’s the newest one?” Serena asked.

  “Boy,” Penny said. “Rodeo.”

  “Rodeo’s not a bad name, actually,” Jude said.

  “Yeah, for one of the Village People,” Serena said, pouring two more glasses of wine.

  “Ridiculous names,” Cleon said. “All of them. If their surname were a simple noun, too, maybe they’d work. Rodeo Brown. Nation Green.”

  “Those are adjectives, Papi.”

  “Their last name is Wiesnewski, for fuck’s sake,” Cleon cried. “Who names their kid Rodeo Wiesnewski? Excuse my French,” he said to Giosué, whose laughter and wine were about to come out his nose.

  “We’re kind of a weird bunch,” Jude said, handing him a napkin.

  “Well,” Serena said, rummaging in her big shoulder bag. “Speaking of family and weirdness and names, I have a surprise.”

  She pulled out four boxes, each emblazoned with the logo of a popular ancestry website. “I bid on them at a silent auction. It’ll be fun.”

  “What do these do?” Cleon said, turning the box over in his hands.

  “DNA testing,” Jude said. “You find out your ethnic heritage.”

  “I’m Jewish.”

  “Ah, but how much Jewish?” Serena said.

  Cleon held a hand level with his eyes. “This much?”

  Penny was breaking the seal on her box. “Well, we already know I’m an homogenized Anglo-Saxon,” she said. “Will this tell me how many shades of white I am?”

  “To the fraction,” Serena said.

  “My family took one recently,” Giosué said.

  “Let me guess,” Jude said. “You’re Irish.”

  “Dude, my mother had some serious explaining to do.”

  Jude laughed. He loved a player. And dude in an Italian accent was seriously adorable.

  “I’m joking,” Giosué said. “No surprises. We’re an old Sephardic family.”

  “From Venice,” Serena said. “They do a big reunion every year. Our flight is already booked.”

  Giosué winked at Jude. “She only wants me for Venice.”

  “Well, I only want you for Venice, too.”

  The dude was nice enough to blush.

  Serena opened her laptop on the table. “I made an account this afternoon. I have to make a tree for us and attach the kit numbers.”

  Cleon held up the tiny, sealed test tube. “Is this for sperm?”

  Penny swatted him.

  Jude held up his. “This could get messy.”

  “I needed two,” Giosué said.

  “Smartasses,” Serena muttered above her clicking fingers. “It’s for your spit. Fill it up to the line.”

  “I don’t know if I can salivate on command,” Cleon said, cracking the seal on his.

  “I’m gay, I have to salivate on command,” Jude said.

  Penny swatted him.

  “Just fill the damn tubes,” Serena said. “Giosué, start reading me off the kit numbers.”

  “This is like a reverse toast,” Jude said, trying to be suave as he let the saliva drip into the vial.r />
  “To family,” Cleon said, spitting.

  They took their drinks in the living room where Cleon could put his leg up and ice his hamstring. Giosué, wine glass in hand, prowled the bookshelves and artwork before examining the magnificent gallery of family photos on one wall. Jude watched him draw a pair of reading glasses from his inside pocket and peer closer, taking in sepia portraits, old black-and-whites and modern digital photos.

  Serena leaned to refill Jude’s glass. “Stop fucking him with your eyes,” she murmured in Spanish.

  “Can’t,” Jude said. “Does he have a brother?”

  “None who crave dick.”

  “Challenge accepted.”

  She swatted him. It was one of those nights when he’d leave his parents’ house with bruised arms.

  “Where were your Jewish relatives from?” Giosué asked Cleon.

  “France a few hundred years ago. Migrated to Italy after they were thrown out by the reigning prick du jour.”

  “What part?”

  “Place called Asti. In the northwest.”

  “I know Asti, sure. Your parents were born there?”

  “My father, yes, but he lived in Vienna most of his life. That’s him there.” Cleon pointed. “No, the next one over.”

  Giosué studied the formal portrait of Jude’s paternal grandfather. Born Feivel Tholet in Asti, he moved with his family to Vienna in his teens, where he became Felix Tholet. Both he and his brother, Louis, attended the University of Vienna, Louis to study art and Felix to study botany.

  “They pursued the most genteel and useless of all genteel and useless degrees,” Cleon said. “And both of them became rich men.”

  Felix eventually became the assistant director of the Botanical Gardens while Louis became a renowned sculptor. Felix married while Louis remained a bachelor.

  “Bachelor in the biblical sense,” Jude said. “Meaning he was gay.”

  The Anschluss came in March of 1938 and Austria was absorbed into Nazi Germany. By May, the Nuremberg Laws restricting Jewish business were passed. Felix was ousted from his role at the Gardens. Reading the writing on the walls, the Tholets fled to France, narrowly missing Kristallnacht.