Cut Off Read online

  CUT

  OFF

  JAMIE

  BASTEDO

  CONTENTS

  Cut Off

  Dedication

  Currents

  PART I

  Aliens

  Practicing

  Command Performance

  Flight Of The Bumblebee

  Wonder Boy

  The Source

  XBS

  First Blog

  Class Discussion

  Eldorado Mine

  Party’s Over

  The Saddest Song

  Earthquake

  Math Class

  Protest

  PART II

  Swapping Planets

  Falling

  Roll Call

  Lunch Break

  Sixteenth Birthday

  Crawling

  Blackbird

  Bein’ Ian

  The Concert

  Sabotage

  Jammed

  Revolt

  Cyber Attack

  Listening

  Loba’s Lullaby

  Drowning

  Nose Hill Walk

  Dr. Pozniak

  Remake

  Beemer Trip

  Green Men

  Chameleon Eyes

  Bed of Roses

  Concussion

  Brain Damage

  Back Online

  Abduction

  PART III

  The Drop

  Welcome Circle

  Mistaken Identity

  Cold Turkey

  Solo

  Has-Been

  Debrief

  Circle-Up

  Trail Blazing

  Flight

  The Cabin

  Carcross

  A Second Chance

  Canoe Lesson

  Whitewater

  Hot Springs

  The Americans

  The Flats

  Flipped

  In The Pocket

  The Island

  Red Dog

  Fire

  Storm

  The Offering

  Team Captain

  Tulita

  Homecoming

  Sky Device

  Acknowledgments

  Interview with Jamie Bastedo

  Other books by Jamie Bastedo

  Copyright

  In memory of Doug Ritchie

  Cada cual con su taburete

  tiene un puesto y una mision.

  (Each with their stool

  has a place and a mission.)

  Humanity’s greatest desire

  is to belong and connect.

  – Jason Russell

  Be yourself.

  Everyone else is already taken.

  – Oscar Wilde

  CURRENTS

  Looking back at seventeen, the memories pour through me like currents in a wild river:

  The shadow of tapping shoes on a marble floor.

  A rock bouncing off my zebrawood guitar.

  A yellow iPhone slapping the surface of a pond.

  The sound of crunching plastic, popping glass.

  Blood pooling on a computer keyboard.

  A long howl gushing out of the mountains.

  I wrestle with each memory. I struggle to tame them in my words, in my music. I scout them like a scary set of rapids, searching for a safe way through.

  Part I

  Xela, Guatemala

  All through my childhood Segovia’s name hovered in the air, the gentle god of the classical guitar.

  – Glenn Kurtz, Practicing

  Aliens

  I was born into a family of aliens, and not one of us was from the same planet.

  My mom’s name is Gabriela—Gabby to her buds and family. Her people are K’iche’ volcano-dwellers from the mountains. Real live Mayans. Her people were here first. Before the Spanish came and wrecked everything. First people. Native people. Indígenas. My mom grew up dirt poor. But she got lucky. She got a job with a big mining company. She met my dad when he was in a good mood. He wanted to be seen with someone from her planet. She wanted to live on his.

  My father’s name is Edgar McCracken. A Scottish-born miner from Calgary. He came here to dig gold and take it back to Canada. He used to play a lot of classical guitar. He wanted to be famous—like, I mean, world famous. A guitar hero. I guess he thought he was pretty good. No one else did. Now he’s a guitar zero.

  Even my dog was an alien. Loba, the she-wolf. A Belgian Malinois, the only one in town. A bully breed. Her great-great-grandparents were bred to rip the faces off attackers. Our so-called guard dog. Before we got Loba, she was a sniffer dog at the airport. But she flunked out. The narco cop who sold her to Dad later admitted she was “demasiado dulce”—too sweet.

  Dad wanted to put Loba down. Called her useless, a freeloader, resented spending his money on her food.

  As if we couldn’t afford it.

  My little sister Sofi is the red-haired Scottish lass of the family. We look so different, I’d say one of us was adopted if it weren’t for our Mayan noses.

  Then there’s old Uncle Faustus, my grandmother’s brother. He used to pick coffee in the mountains. That’s where he lived most of the time—in his head, I mean. Walking those mountain trails. Humming those Mayan songs.

  So there we were, all living on Planet Xela, in the western highlands of Guatemala.

  I know what most people think when they hear that word. Guatemala. Drugs and guns. Crooks and corruption. Violence and poverty. Sure, all that happens in Guatemala. But there’s other dark stuff no one’s heard about.

  Stuff only I can tell, have to tell, if I don’t want my demons to come back.

  Practicing

  Mimita, my grandmother, was the first to see it. Mi regalo. My gift. After watching me fool around on a toy guitar at age four, she told everyone that I was a niño prodigio—a child prodigy. “Get a real guitar in his hands,” she told my mother, “or his heart will break with longing. ¡Qué talento!” What talent! “Exactamente como su padre.” Just like his father.

  Mimita was also the one who named me.

  Indio.

  Native son. Wild child.

  Nine years later, I was sitting in my magic spot, below the domed skylight of the practice room. The acoustics there were so sharp I could hear myself blink. Under the dome, it was impossible to hide a mistake.

  I opened the case and took out my instrument, a classical guitar made just for me from Brazilian zebrawood and Canadian spruce. My dad always gave me the best guitars money could buy. He loved buying guitars. It was his only hobby. I won’t say how much this one cost. It’s kind of embarrassing. But I will say that its voice was incredible.

  Some classical guitars shine in the low end, with boomy bass notes that drill into your chest and bust open your heart. Others have amazing mid-range tones that can mimic a singer’s voice. Some guitars are famous for their sweet high-end tones that can jerk the tears out of your eyeballs.

  This guitar had it all. I could get any kind of voice out of it I wanted. At least, when it was in tune.

  I tapped a tuning fork against my knee and brought it to my ear, then plucked the low E string with my thumb. During the night, my guitar had wandered out of tune. It fought with the tuning fork, sending out a fast, whining vibration that got my ears buzzing. I tweaked the string’s tuning peg until the whine slowed down, then dissolved as the two sounds melted into one.

  I repeated this step with each string, smoothing any choppy sound waves with tiny twists of the pegs. Finally I strummed an open E chord with the back of my fingernails, Flamenco style. My guitar shivered with delight.

  I shivered with it, itching to play.

  That morning, I had to practice twenty right-hand finger exercises, the Hungarian gypsy scale, and a
Russian tune I’d been working on for over a month, “Flight of the Bumblebee.” It’s a frantic piece that rides a non-stop roller coaster of sixteenth notes. Scares the pants off normal players.

  Me? I was loving the ride. Climbing the notes up and up. Spiraling down in a funnel of crazy loops and dives. Then up again, higher each time, until the final streaking climb to the highest note on my guitar.

  I’d pretty much nailed it but, as usual, Dad wasn’t satisfied.

  I caught him stealth-listening at the door again.

  My roller coaster nosedived in the dirt.

  Through the crack below the door, I could see the shadow of his tapping shoes on the shiny marble floor. I taunted him with random bursts of notes. I sped up. His shoes sped up. I stopped. They stopped. I held the silence, feeling it get heavier and heavier, until he barged in without a knock.

  I hugged my guitar tighter. “Can’t you just let me play, Dad?”

  “Why are you stopping?” he asked. “I’ve got another concert for you and we don’t have much time.”

  We? I thought. Who’s doing the practicing around here?

  He told me I was to perform “Flight of the Bumblebee” at the Concierto de Navidad, the annual free Christmas concert in Xela’s Gran Teatro.

  I stared at the galloping notes on my sheet music.

  “All the usual Xela bigwigs will be there,” he said.

  Yup. All the bankers and beer-makers.

  “Plus a plane-load of mine developers from around the world, coming to tour our gold mine.”

  I looked up at him for the first time. He’d been playing with his facial hair again. The latest was a skinny Latino moustache. “What’s with the new ’stache?”

  Dad touched it as if checking it was still there. “Oh, it might win a few votes in the villages near the mine. I paid for a busload of them to come to the concert.”

  He rubbed his hands together. I noticed his right-hand plucking nails were freshly trimmed. Nails that hadn’t stroked guitar strings in years. “This concert will be good for business,” he said.

  I didn’t know if he meant the gold business or guitar business.

  In the guitar business, my father had been pushing me harder than ever.

  “Every child prodigy needs a reliable stage dad,” he once told me. “Someone on the inside to cultivate your talent, line up gigs, protect you from crowds.”

  Yeah, and steal my spotlight.

  “Beethoven had a stage dad,” he’d said. “Mozart, too. Even Michael Jackson. And look at them!”

  Sure, look at them. Mozart burned out at thirty-five. Jackson drugged and dead at fifty. Beethoven dead in his mid-fifties from alcohol poisoning.

  Like all their fathers, mine was strict as hell but had a nose for scrounging gigs. Since starting to play seriously at age seven, I’d performed for all kinds of audiences from here to Panama City. Talent shows, recitals, weddings, conferences. I’d even played a roving minstrel riding a donkey in an Easter parade.

  I was “the Wonder Boy from Xela” who could play anything on guitar, or so the newspapers said.

  My father drilled the basics into me when I was little. When other kids were out heading soccer balls or throwing food fights at school, I was being force-fed Mozart minuets and Bach preludes. But I ate it up as fast as Dad could dish it out. Then, when his gold mine took off, he had no time for lessons so he hired Guatemala’s best classical guitar teacher, Magno González.

  That’s the way Dad told it, anyway. But I think he’d maxed out and had nothing more to teach me. I think he was scared by my talent. Not just scared. Jealous.

  The better I played, the more nuts he got over my practicing and performing. Why? I think he wanted me to be the classical guitar god he never was.

  Whatever.

  The truth is, I loved performing, the feeling of power and control I felt nowhere else but on stage. Just bringing my hands into position over my guitar, before striking a note, could silence a crowd. And the applause! I couldn’t get enough. Performing gave me an escape from the grind of practicing, guitar lessons, and home-schooling. From endless hours cut off from the world, behind the ten-foot walls and razor-wire that surrounded our property.

  So I welcomed the Christmas gig. It would be no big deal. I’d played in the Gran Teatro before, Xela’s fanciest concert hall. The catch for this gig was that it was the first time my father pulled out the Segovia card, a name that would haunt me for the rest of my childhood. Dad’s hero, Andrés Segovia, the Spanish god of classical guitar who brought the instrument out of the closet and onto the world stage.

  Dad had a plan for me. He wanted me to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” in double time. “You can do this, Indio,” he said, standing over me with both hands clamped to my shoulders. “If you truly want to be the world’s next Segovia, you have to!”

  I turned my face away, grossed out by the smell of Scotch on his breath. “Who says I want to?”

  The world’s next Segovia? I couldn’t tell if he was serious or it was only the booze talking.

  I got my answer a few nights later when his mining buddies showed up for a nightcap.

  COMMAND

  PERFORMANCE

  It happened three days before the Christmas concert. I was sweating over a metronome, ramping up the tempo of “Flight of the Bumblebee” by ten-beat-per-minute jumps. I could feel the muscle memory building in my fingers. I pushed myself hard but never rushed. Every note had to be super clean before I let myself jump to the next level.

  I was already way past the tune’s original tempo of 170 beats per minute, the way Rimsky-Korsakov wrote it. I discovered I could play faster with a pick instead of my fingernails. My goal became not double time, not even triple time. I was gunning for seven times normal speed, about 1200 beats per minute, and I was almost there.

  I hoped this little surprise might get Dad to ease up on my practice schedule, at least over Christmas.

  I’d stayed up late to practice, just crossed the 1000 beats per minute mark, when Sofi stormed in with her fingers jammed in her ears. “Enough! Enough already! I can’t sleep!”

  She was wearing her Drama Queen pajamas and had a Scottish fire in her blue eyes—that look I knew too well from Dad. “Okay,” I said. “You win.”

  I went straight to bed and conked out.

  At 2:00 AM, I woke to someone else storming in.

  Dad.

  “Indio, wake up!” he shouted, yanking one of my legs off the bed.

  “What? What?”

  “I’ve arranged a special concert for you.”

  I had a crushing headache. The joints of my left fingers were sore and swollen from screaming up and down the fretboard.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun,” he said. “Right now.”

  He grabbed my guitar off its stand. I hated the way he held it, like he was strangling it around the neck.

  “Hey, watch my—”

  “And just who do you think paid for this?” He looked at my gorgeous guitar like he was about to smash it.

  Like he had that kind of power over me.

  Which he did.

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming. But who—?”

  “Just come!” He steadied himself against the doorframe, trying to focus on me. “And keep those dumb pajamas on. They’re perfect. You know, Wonder Boy!”

  I ground my teeth at the sound of his laughter as he shuffled down the hall to his study. Where he stored all the guitars he never played and the booze he always drank.

  They weren’t cruel to me, Dad’s mining buddies. They didn’t scowl every time I flubbed a note like Dad did. They didn’t critique my playing after each tune like he did. Dad’s mining buddies knew dick about classical music, even clapped when I finished tuning. After a few pieces, they ignored me, diving back into their drinks and dirty jokes. I became nothing more than a background musician at Dad’s private cocktail party. But every time I tried to sneak away, Dad’s arm shot out, pointing to my chair.

  I sat dow
n and played another piece. And another.

  It wasn’t till 4:30 AM, when Dad face-planted over his desk and everyone jumped up, that I ran out of the room crying.

  FLIGHT OF THE

  BUMBLEBEE

  I climbed the worn limestone steps of the Gran Teatro, counting them, one-two-three, one-two-three, like notes on a page of music. My cheeks stung in the chilly evening air, but the handle of my guitar case was all sweaty. I told myself to wash my hands again before walking on stage. Better check my nails while I’m at it.

  A hundred pigeons exploded in front of us and ripped through the Greek columns lining the steps. One of them dropped a white bomb on Dad’s pinstripe suit. His curse echoed off the cathedral gates way across the Parque Central. “SHIT!”

  That’s right, Dad, shit.

  Sofi burst into giggles.

  Mom’s hand shot out to grab Dad’s arm like he might’ve struck my little sister. With her other hand, she whipped out a hanky and wiped the mess off his lapel.

  Dad glared at her like it was her fault.

  People wearing tuxedos, fancy evening gowns, and traditional Mayan dress streamed by my spluttering father. I stopped to stare at them, my fans who had come to hear me play. Or maybe to see their kids on stage dressed up as reindeer.

  Whatever.

  All that mattered was my music.

  “Try not to fart while I’m playing, okay?” I said to Sofi.

  She gave me a lung-popping hug. “Go, Wonder Boy!”

  Mom ran up the steps and kissed both cheeks. “Vaya con Dios, niño.” Go with God, son.

  Old Uncle Faustus twirled his cane.

  Dad flicked me a wave, then drew a quick “S” in the air, his secret code for Segovia.

  I turned my back on my family and walked away, head down, counting my footsteps to the stage door. One-two-three, one-two-three …

  My act followed a couple of off-key choirs and a Christmas play starring way too many angels. A stage manager with a beard halfway to the floor tapped me on the shoulder. I checked my nails one last time, took a deep breath, and walked onstage, hugging my guitar.

  The applause I got when I stepped into the spotlight was almost embarrassing.