After the Plague

Mexico

He didn’t know much about Mexico, not really, if you discount the odd margarita and a determined crawl through the pages of Under the Volcano in an alcoholic haze twenty years ago, but here he was, emerging pale and heavy from the sleek envelope of the airliner and into the fecund embrace of Puerto Escondido. All this — the scorching blacktop, the distant arc of the beach, the heat, the scent of the flowers and the jet fuel, and the faint lingering memory of yesterday’s fish — was an accident. A happy accident. A charity thing at work — give five bucks to benefit the Battered Women’s Shelter and win a free trip for two to the jewel of Oaxaca. Well, he’d won. And to save face and forestall questions he’d told everybody he was bringing his girlfriend along, for two weeks of R. and R. — Romance and Relaxation. He even invented a name for her — Yolanda — and yes, she was Mexican on her mother’s side, gray eyes from her father, skin like burnished copper, and was she ever something in bed….

There were no formalities at the airport — they’d taken care of all that in Mexico City with a series of impatient gestures and incomprehensible commands — and he went through the heavy glass doors with his carry-on bag and ducked into the first cab he saw. The driver greeted him in English, swivelling round to wipe an imaginary speck of dust from the seat with a faded pink handkerchief. He gave a little speech Lester couldn’t follow, tossing each word up in the air as if it were a tight-stitched ball that had to be driven high over the fence, then shrank back into himself and said, “Where to?” in a diminished voice. Lester gave the name of his hotel — the best one in town — and sat back to let the ripe breeze wash over his face.

He was sweating. Sweating because he was in some steaming thick tropical place and because he was overweight, grossly overweight, carrying fifty pounds too many and all of it concentrated in his gut. He was going to do something about that when he got back to San Francisco — join a club, start jogging, whatever — but right now he was just a big sweating overweight man with bare pale legs set like stanchions on the floor of the cab and a belly that soaked right through the front of his cotton-rayon open-necked shirt with the blue and yellow parrots cavorting all over it. And there was the beach, scalloped and white, chasing along beside the car, with palm trees and a hint of maritime cool, and before ten minutes had ticked off his watch he was at the hotel, paying the driver from a wad of worn velvety bills that didn’t seem quite real. The driver had no problem with them — the bills, that is — and he accepted a fat velvety tip too, and seven and a half minutes after that Lester was sitting in the middle of a shady tiled dining room open to the sea on one side and the pool on the other, a room key in his pocket and his first Mexican cocktail clenched in his sweaty fist.

He’d negotiated the cocktail with the faintest glimmer of half-remembered high-school Spanish — jooze naranja, soda cloob and vodka, tall, with ice, hielo, yes, hielo—and a whole repertoire of mimicry he didn’t know he possessed. What he’d really wanted was a Greyhound, but he didn’t know the Spanish word for grapefruit, so he’d fallen back on the orange juice and vodka, though there’d been some confusion over the meaning of the venerable Russian term for clear distilled spirits until he hit on the inspiration of naming the brand, Smirnoff. The waitress, grinning and nodding while holding herself perfectly erect in her starched white peasant dress, repeated the brand name in a creaking singsong voice and went off to fetch his drink. Of course, by the time she set it down, he’d already drunk the better half of it and he immediately ordered another and then another, until for the first twenty minutes or so he had the waitress and bartender working in perfect synchronization to combat his thirst and any real or imagined pangs he might have suffered on the long trip down.

After the fifth drink he began to feel settled, any anxiety over travelling dissolved in the sweet flow of alcohol and juice. He was pleased with himself. Here he was, in a foreign country, ordering cocktails like a native and contemplating a bite to eat — guacamole and nachos, maybe — and then a stroll on the beach and a nap before dinner. He wasn’t sweating anymore. The waitress was his favorite person in the world, and the bartender came next.

He’d just drained his glass and turned to flag down the waitress — one more, he was thinking, and then maybe the nachos — when he noticed that the table at the far end of the veranda was occupied. A woman had slipped in while he was gazing out to sea, and she was seated facing him, bare-legged, in a rust-colored bikini and a loose black robe. She looked to be about thirty, slim, muscular, with a high tight chest and feathered hair that showed off her bloodshot eyes and the puffed bow of her mouth. There was a plate of something steaming at her elbow — fish, it looked like, the specialty of the house, breaded, grilled, stuffed, baked, fried, or sautéed with peppers, onion, and cilantro — and she was drinking a Margarita rocks. He watched in fascination — semi-drunken fascination — for a minute, until she looked up, chewing, and he turned away to stare out over the water as if he were just taking in the sights like any other calm and dignified tourist.

He was momentarily flustered when the waitress appeared to ask if he wanted another drink, but he let the alcohol sing in his veins and said, “Why not?”—“¿Por qué no?”—and the waitress giggled and walked off with her increasingly admirable rump moving at the center of that long white gown. When he stole another glance at the woman in the corner, she was still looking his way. He smiled. She smiled back. He turned away again and bided his time, but when his drink came he tossed some money on the table, rose massively from the chair, and tottered across the room.

“Hi,” he said, looming over the chewing woman, the drink rigid in his hand, his teeth clenched round a defrosted smile. “I mean, Buenos tardes. Or noches.”

He watched her face for a reaction, but she just stared at him.

“Uh, ¿Cómo está Usted? Or tú. ¿Cómo estás tú?”

“Sit down, why don’t you,” she said in a voice that was as American as Hillary Clinton’s. “Take a load off.”

Suddenly he felt dizzy. The drink in his hand had somehow concentrated itself till it was as dense as a meteorite. He pulled out a chair and sat heavily. “I thought … I thought you were—?”

“I’m Italian,” she said. “From Buffalo, originally. All four of my grandparents came from Tuscany. That’s where I get my exotic Latin looks.” She let out a short bark of a laugh, forked up a slab of fish, and began chewing vigorously, all the while studying him out of eyes that were like scalpels.

He finished his drink in a gulp and looked over his shoulder for the waitress. “You want another one?” he asked, though he saw she hadn’t half finished her first.

Still chewing, she smiled up at him. “Sure.”

When the transaction was complete and the waitress had presented them with two fresh drinks, he thought to ask her name, but the silence had gone on too long, and when they both began to speak at the same time he deferred to her. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

“Biotech. I work for a company in the East Bay — Oakland, that is.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Really? Is that like making potatoes that walk around the kitchen and peel themselves? Cloning sheep? Two-headed dogs?”

Lester laughed. He was feeling good. Better than good. “Not exactly.”

“My name’s Gina,” she said, reaching out her hand, “but you might know me as the Puma. Gina (the Puma) Caramella.”

He took her hand, which was dry and small and nearly lost in his own. He was drunk, gloriously drunk, and so far he hadn’t been ripped off by the Federales or assailed by the screaming shits or leached dry by malarial mosquitoes and vampire bats or any of the other myriad horrors he’d been warned against, and that made him feel pretty near invulnerable. “What do you mean? You’re an actress?”

She gave a little laugh. “I wish.” Ducking her head, she chased the remnants of the fish around the plate with her fork and the plane of her left index finger. “No,” she said. “I’m a boxer.”

The alcohol percolated through him. He wanted to laugh, but he fought down the urge. “A boxer? You don’t mean like boxing, do you? Fisticuffs? Pugilism?”

“Twenty-three, two, and one,” she said. She took a sip of her drink. Her eyes were bright. “What I’m doing right now is agonizing over my defeat two weeks ago at the Shrine by one of the queen bitches in the game, DeeDee DeCarlo, and my manager thought it would be nice for me to just get away for a bit, you know what I mean?”

He was electrified. He’d never met a female boxer before — didn’t even know there was such a thing. Mud-wrestling he could see — in fact, since his wife had died, he’d become a big fan, Tuesday nights and sometimes on Fridays — but boxing? That wasn’t a woman’s sport. Drunkenly, he scrutinized her face, and it was a good face, a pretty face, but for the bridge of her nose, a telltale depression there, just the faintest misalignment — and sure, sure, how had he missed it? “But doesn’t it hurt? I mean, when you get punched in the … body punches, I mean?”

“In the tits?”

He just nodded.

“Sure it hurts, what do you think? But I wear a padded bra, wrap ’em up, pull ’em flat across the ribcage so my opponent won’t have a clear target, but really, it’s the abdominal blows that take it out of you,” and she was demonstrating with her hands now, the naked slope of her belly and the slit of her navel, abs of steel, but nothing like those freakish female bodybuilders they threw at you on ESPN, nice abs, nice navel, nice, nice, nice.

“You doing anything for dinner tonight?” he heard himself say.

She looked down at the denuded plate before her, nothing left but lettuce, don’t eat the lettuce, never eat the lettuce, not in Mexico. She shrugged. “I guess I could. I guess in a couple hours.”

He lifted the slab of his arm and consulted his watch with a frown of concentration. “Nine o’clock?”

She shrugged again. “Sure.”

“By the way,” he said. “I’m Lester.”

April had been dead two years now. She’d been struck and killed by a car a block from their apartment, and though the driver was a teenage kid frozen behind the wheel of his father’s Suburban, it wasn’t entirely his fault. For one thing, April had stepped out in front of him, twenty feet from the crosswalk, and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was blindfolded at the time. Blindfolded and feeling her way with one of those flexible fiberglass sticks the blind use to register the world at their feet. It was for a psychology course she was taking at San Francisco State—“Strategies of the Physically Challenged.” The professor had asked for two volunteers to remain blindfolded for an entire week, even at night, even in bed, no cheating, and April had been the first to raise her hand. She and Lester had been married for two years at the time — his first, her second — and now she was two years dead.

Lester had always been a drinker, but after April’s death he seemed to enjoy drinking less and need it more. He knew it, and he fought it. Still, when he got back to his room, sailing on the high of his chance meeting with Gina — Gina the Puma — he couldn’t help digging out the bottle of Herradura he’d bought in the duty-free and taking a good long cleansing hit.

There was no TV in the room, but the air conditioner worked just fine, and he stood in front of it a while before stripping off his sodden shirt and stepping into the shower. The water was tepid, but it did him good. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and repositioned himself in front of the air conditioner. When he saw the bottle standing there on the night table, he thought he’d have just one more hit — just one — because he didn’t want to be utterly wasted when he took Gina the Puma out for dinner. But then he looked at his watch and saw that it was only seven-twenty, and figured what the hell, two drinks, three, he just wanted to have a good time. Too wired to sleep, he flung himself down on the bed like a big wet dripping fish and began poking through the yellowed paperback copy of Under the Volcano he’d brought along because he couldn’t resist the symmetry of it. What else was he going to read in Mexico — Proust?

“No se puede vivir sin amar,” he read, “You can’t live without love,” and he saw April stepping out into the street with her puny fiberglass stick and the black velvet sleep mask pulled tight over her eyes. But he didn’t like that picture, not at all, so he took another drink and thought of Gina. He hadn’t had a date in six months, and he was ready. And who knew? Anything could happen. Especially on vacation. Especially down here. He tipped back the bottle, and then he flipped to the end of the book, where the Consul, cored and gutted and beyond all hope, tumbles dead down the ravine and they throw the bloated corpse of a dog down after him.

The first time Lester had read it, he’d thought it was funny, in a grim sort of way. But now he wasn’t so sure.

Gina was waiting for him at the bar when he came down at quarter to nine. The place was lit with paper lanterns strung from the thatched ceiling, there was the hint of a breeze off the ocean, the sound of the surf, a smell of citrus and jasmine. All the tables were full, people leaning into the candlelight over their fish and Margaritas and murmuring to each other in Spanish, French, German. It was good. It was perfect. But as Lester ascended the ten steps from the patio and crossed the room to the bar, his legs felt dead, as if they’d been shot out from under him and then magically re-attached, all in the space of an instant. Food. He needed food. Just a bite, that was all. For equilibrium.

“Hey,” he said, nudging Gina with his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said, flashing a smile. She was wearing shorts and heels and a blue halter top glistening with tiny blue beads.

He was amazed at how small she was — she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. April’s size. April’s size exactly.

He ordered a Herradura and tonic, his forearms laid out like bricks on the bar. “You weren’t kidding before,” he said, turning to her, “about boxing, I mean? Don’t take offense, but you’re so — well, small. I was just wondering, you know?”

She looked at him a long moment, as if debating with herself. “I’m a flyweight, Les,” she said finally. “I fight other flyweights, just like in the men’s division, you know? This is how big God made me, but you come watch me some night and you’ll see it’s plenty big enough.”

She wasn’t smiling, and somewhere on the free-floating periphery of his mind he realized he’d made a blunder. “Yeah,” he said, “of course. Of course you are. Listen, I didn’t mean to — but why boxing? Of all the things a woman could do.”

“What? You think men have a patent on aggression? Or excellence?” She let her eyes sail out over the room, hard eyes, angry eyes, and then she came back to him. “Look, you hungry or what?”

Lester swirled the ice in his drink. It was time to defuse the situation, but quick. “Hey,” he said, smiling for all he was worth, “I’d like to tell you I’m on a diet, but I like eating too much for that — and plus, I haven’t had a thing since that crap they gave us on the plane, dehydrated chicken and rice that tasted like some sort of by-product of the vulcanizing process. So yeah, let’s go for it.”

“There’s a place up the beach,” she said, “in town. I hear it’s pretty good — Los Crotos? Want to try it?”

“Sure,” he said, but the deadness crept back into his legs. Up the beach? In town? It was dark out there, and he didn’t speak the language.

She was watching him. “If you don’t want to, it’s no big deal,” she said, finishing off her drink and setting the glass down with a rattle of ice that sounded like nothing so much as loose teeth spat into a cup. “We can just eat here. The thing is, I’ve been here two days now and I’m a little bored with the menu — you know, fish, fish, and more fish. I was thinking maybe a steak would be nice.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, no problem.”

And then they were out on the beach, Gina barefoot at his side, her heels swinging from one hand, purse from the other. The night was dense and sustaining, the lights muted, palms working slowly in the breeze, empty palapas lined up along the high-water mark like the abandoned cities of a forgotten race. Lester shuffled through the deep sand, his outsized feet as awkward as snowshoes, while children and dogs chased each other up and down the beach in a blur of shadow against the white frill of the surf and knots of people stood in the deeper shadows of the palms, laughing and talking till the murmur of conversation was lost in the next sequence of breakers pounding the shore. He wanted to say something, anything, but his brain was impacted and he couldn’t seem to think, so they walked in silence, taking it all in.

When they got to the restaurant — an open-air place set just off a shallow lagoon that smelled powerfully of sea-wrack and decay — he began to loosen up. There were tables draped in white cloth, the waiter was solicitous and grave, and he accepted Lester’s mangled Spanish with equanimity. Drinks appeared. Lester was in his element again. “So,” he said, leaning into the table and trying to sound as casual as he could while Gina squeezed a wedge of lime into her drink and let her shoe dangle from one smooth slim foot, “you’re not married, are you? I mean, I don’t see a ring or anything….”

Gina hunched her shoulders, took a sip of her drink — they were both having top-shelf Margaritas, blended — and gazed out on the dark beach. “I used to be married to a total idiot,” she said, “but that was a long time ago. My manager, Gerry O’Connell — he’s Irish, you know? — him and me had a thing for a while, but I don’t know anymore. I really don’t.” She focussed on him. “What about you?”

He told her he was a widower and watched her eyes snap to attention. Women loved to hear that — it got all their little wheels and ratchets turning — because it meant he wasn’t damaged goods like all the other hairy-chested cretins out there, but tragic, just tragic. She asked how it had happened, a sink of sympathy and morbid female curiosity, and he told her the story of the kid in the Suburban and the wet pavement and how the student volunteers were supposed to have a monitor with them at all times, but not April, because she just shrugged it off — she wanted an authentic experience, and that was what she got, all right. His throat seemed to thicken when he got to that part, the irony of it, and what with the cumulative weight of the cocktails, the reek of the lagoon, and the strangeness of the place — Mexico, his first day in Mexico — he nearly broke down. “I wasn’t there for her,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. I wasn’t there.”

Gina was squeezing his hand. “You must have really loved her.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I did.” And he had loved her, he was sure of it, though he had trouble picturing her now, her image drifting through his consciousness as if blown by a steady wind.

Another drink came. They ordered dinner, a respite from the intensity of what he was trying to convey, and then Gina told him her own tale of woe, the alcoholic mother, the brother shot in the face when he was mistaken for a gang member, how she’d excelled in high-school sports and had nowhere to go with it, two years at the community college and a succession of mind-numbing jobs till Gerry O’Connell plucked her from anonymity and made her into a fighter. “I want to be the best,” she said. “Number One — and I won’t settle for anything less.”

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

She looked at him. Her drink was half gone. “I know,” she said.

By the time they were finished with dinner and they’d had a couple of after-dinner drinks, he was feeling unbeatable again. It was quarter past eleven and the solicitous waiter wanted to go home. Lester wanted to go home too — he wanted to take Gina up to his room and discover everything there was to know about her. He lurched suddenly to his feet and threw a fistful of money at the table. “Want to go?” he said, the words sticking to the roof of his mouth.

She rose unsteadily from her seat and leaned into him while she adjusted the strap of her right heel. “Think we should take a cab?” she said.

“A cab? We’re just at the other end of the beach.”

She was staring up at him, small as a child, her head thrown back to take in the spread and bulk of him. “Didn’t you see that notice in your room — on the bathroom door? I mean, it sounds almost funny, the way they worded it, but still, I wonder.”

“Notice? What notice?”

She fished around in her purse until she came up with a folded slip of paper. “Here,” she said. “I wrote it down because it was so bizarre: ‘The management regrets to inform you that the beach area is unsafe after dark because of certain criminal elements the local authorities are sadly unable to suppress and advises that all guests should take a taxi when returning from town.’ “

“Are you kidding? Criminal elements? This place is a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere — they ought to try the Tenderloin if they want to see criminal elements. And besides, besides”—he was losing his train of thought—“besides …”

“Yes?”

“There’s nobody in the whole country taller than five-four, as far as I can see.” He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Criminal elements!” And he was still shaking his head as they stepped out into the night.

Call it hubris.

They hadn’t gone two hundred yards, the night deepening, dogs howling in the hills, and every star set firmly in its track, when they were jumped. It was nothing like the way Lester had visualized it while stalking home after the bars closed on Twenty-fourth Street, half hoping some sorry shithead would come up to him so he could break him in two. There were no words, no warning, no “Give me your wallet” or “I’ve got a gun” or “This is a stickup.” One minute he was trudging through the sand, a drunken arm draped hopefully over Gina’s shoulder, and the next he was on the ground, two pairs of booted feet lashing diligently at his face and ribs while a whole fluttering rush of activity washed round him, as if a flock of birds had burst up off the ground in a panic. He heard a grunt, a curse, the unmistakable crack of bone and cartilage rearranging itself, and it was Gina, Gina the Puma, whaling away at the shadows with both fists as he shoved himself up out of the sand and the boots suddenly stopped kicking and fled.

“You all right?” she said, and he could hear her hard steady breathing over the hammering of the waves.

He was cursing into the night—“Sons of bitches! Motherfuckers! I’ll kill you!”—but it was all bluster, and he knew it. Worse, so did she.

“Yeah,” he said finally, his chest heaving, the booze and adrenaline pulsing in his temples till the blood vessels there felt like big green garden hoses crawling up both sides of his head. “Yeah, I’m okay…. I took a few kicks in the face maybe … and I think — I think they got my wallet….”

“Here,” she said, her voice oddly calm, “are you sure?” And then she was crouching, feeling around in the sand with spread fingers.

He joined her, glad to be down on his hands and knees and relieved of the effort of holding himself up. His wallet? He didn’t give a shit about any wallet. The sand was cool, and the regular thump of the waves conveyed itself to him in the most immediate and prescient way.

“Les?” She was standing now, obscuring the stars. He couldn’t make out her face. “You sure you’re all right?”

From a great reeling distance he heard himself say, “Yeah, I’m fine.” Her voice was insistent, the voice of an intimate, a wife, a lover.

“Come on, Les, get up. You can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. Just give me a minute.”

Then there was a brightness, a burning-hot soldered light fused to the cracks of the blinds, and he woke to find himself in his bed — his Mexican bed, in his Mexican hotel, in Mexico. Alone. Without Gina, that is. The first thing he did was check his watch. There it was, clinging like a manacle to his wrist, dividing his naked forearm from his meaty pale hand and indifferently announcing the time: two thirty-two. All right. He heaved himself up to a sitting position, drained the plastic water bottle he discovered behind the tequila on the night table, and took a minute to assess the situation.

There was a rumor of pain between his ribs, where, he began to recall, two pairs of sharp-toed boots had repeatedly inserted themselves in the waning hours of the previous night, but that was nothing compared with his face. It seemed to ache all over, from his hairline to his jaw. He reached a hand to his cheek and felt a tenderness there, and then he worked his jaw till the pain became too much for him. His right eye was swollen closed, there was a drumming in his head and a vague nauseous feeling creeping up the back of his throat. To top it off, his wallet was missing.

Now he’d have to call up and cancel his credit cards, and he was a fool and an idiot and he cursed himself twice over, but it wasn’t the end of the world — he had ten thin crisp hundreds hidden away in his carry-on bag, or his shaving kit, actually, where no one would think to look for them. It could have been worse, he was thinking, but he couldn’t get much beyond that. How had he managed to get himself back last night? Or had Gina managed it? The thought made him burn with shame.

He took a shower, clapped on a pair of coruscating silver-lensed sunglasses to mask the desecration of his eye, and limped down to the restaurant. She wasn’t there, and that was all right for the moment — he needed time to pull himself together before he could face her. The waitress was there, though, eternally responsive to his needs, wearing another down-to-the-toes peasant dress, this time in a shade of blue so pale it barely registered. She smiled and chirped at him and he ordered two tall Smirnoff-and- naranja with soda cloob and three fried eggs with tortillas and a fiery serrano salsa that cleared his airways, no doubt about it. He ate and drank steadily, and when he looked up idly at the sea stretching beyond the veranda, he saw nothing but a desert of water. He had a third cocktail for equilibrium, then went down to the front desk and asked the attendant there if she knew which room Gina was staying in.

“Gina?” the woman echoed, giving him a blank look. “What family name, please?”

He had no idea. She’d told him, but it was gone now, obliterated by vodka, tequila, and half a dozen kicks to the head. All he could think of was her professional name. “The Puma,” he tried. “Gina the Puma.”

The woman’s hair was pulled back in a bun, her blouse buttoned up to her throat. She studied him a long moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

“Gina,” he repeated, and his voice got away from him a bit. “How many Ginas could there be in this place, for Christ’s sake?”

When she answered this time, she spoke in Spanish, and then she turned away.

He began a methodical search of the place, from pool to bar and back again, suddenly desperate. He had to explain last night to Gina, joke it away, rationalize, apologize, spin shit into gold; she had to understand that he was drunk and his judgment was impaired, and if the circumstances had been different he would have wiped the beach with those scumbags, he would have. Startled faces gaped up at him from the recliners round the pool, maids in pale-green uniforms flattened themselves to the walls. Then he was in the blast of the midday sun, searching through the palapas on the beach, hundreds of palapas, and practically every one with a sunburned tourist lounging beneath it. Soon he was sunburned himself, sweating rivulets and breathing hard, so he stripped off his shirt, threw himself into the waves, and came up dripping to the nearest unoccupied palapa and sent a skinny little girl scurrying away to provide him with a piss-warm beer.

Several piss-warm beers later, he began to feel like himself again — and so what if he’d lost his shirt somewhere in the surf? He was in Mexico and he was drunk and he was going to find Gina and make it up to her, ask her to dinner, take a cab — a whole fleet of cabs — and buy her all the steak and lobster she could hold. He drank a tequila with wedges of lime and some true, cold beers at a tourist bar, and when the shadows began to lengthen, he decided to continue up the beach to see if she’d maybe taken one of the water taxis over to Puerto Ángel or Carrizalillo and was only now coming back.

The sun was hanging on a string just over the horizon, pink and lurid, and the tourists were busy packing up their sunblock and towels and paperback novels while the dark people, the ones who lived here year-round and didn’t know what a vacation was, began to drift out of the trees with their children and their dogs to reclaim their turf. He kept walking, intent on the way his toes grabbed and released the sand, and he’d got halfway to the boats before he realized he’d left his sunglasses somewhere. No matter. He never even broke stride. They were nothing to him, one more possession, one more thing he could slough off like so much dead skin, like April’s desk and her clothes and the straw baskets and pottery she’d decorated the apartment with. Besides, there was hardly any glare off the water now, and these people, these coppery little grimacing Indians who seemed to sprout up all over the beach once the sun began to close down, they needed to see him, with his flaming belly and his crusted cheekbone and savage eye, because this was what their criminal elements had done to him and he was wearing the evidence of it like a badge. “Fuck you,” he was muttering under his breath. “Fuck you all.”

At some point, Lester looked up to orient himself and saw that he was just opposite the restaurant from last night. There it sat, squat among the trees, its lights reflected on the surface of the lagoon. A soft glow lit the bar, which he could just make out, figures there, movement, cocktail hour. He had a sudden intimation that Gina was in there, her dark head bent over a table in back, a drunken intimation that counted absolutely for nothing, but he acted on it, sloshing through the fetid lagoon in his sandals and shorts, mounting the three steps from the beach and drifting across the creaking floorboards to the bar.

It wasn’t Gina seated at the table but a local woman, the proprietress no doubt, totting up figures in a ledger; she raised her head when he walked in, but looked right through him. There were three men at the bar, some sort of police, in black shirts and trousers, one of them wearing dark glasses though there was no practical reason to at this hour. They ignored him and went on smoking and talking quietly, in soft rapping voices. A plastic half-gallon jug of tequila stood before them on the bar, amid a litter of plates and three water glasses half-full of silvery liquid. Lester addressed the bartender. “Margarita rocks,” he said. “With hielo.”

He sipped his drink, profoundly drunk now, but drunk for a reason. Two reasons. Or three. For one thing, he had pain to kill, physical pain, and for another he was on vacation, and if you can’t be legitimately wasted on your vacation, then when can you be? The third reason was Gina. He’d come so close, and then he’d blown it. Criminal elements. He glanced up at the cops with an idle curiosity that turned sour almost immediately: Where were they when he’d needed them?

And then he noticed something that made his heart skip a beat: the boots. These guys were wearing boots, sharp-toed boots with silver toe-caps, the only boots in town. Nobody in Puerto Escon-dido wore boots. They could barely afford sandals, fishermen who earned their living with a hook and thirty feet of line wrapped round an empty two-liter Pepsi bottle, maids and itinerant merchants, dirt farmers from the hills. Boots? They were as likely to have Armani blazers, silk shirts, and monogrammed boxer shorts. Understanding came down like a hammer. He had to find Gina.

Dusk now, children everywhere, dogs, fishermen up to their chests in the rolling water, bats swooping, sand fleas leaping away from the blind advance of his feet. The steady flow of alcohol had invigorated him — he was feeling no pain, none at all — though he realized he’d have to eat something soon, and clean himself up, especially if he was going to see Gina, because his whole body was seething and rushing, and everything, from the palms to the palapas to the rocks scattered along the shore, seemed to have grown fur. Or fuzz. Peach fuzz.

That was when he stepped in the hole and went down awkwardly on his right side, his face plowing a furrow in the loose sand, and the bad eye, wet with fluid, picking up a fine coating of sharp white granules. But it was no problem, no problem at all. He rolled over and lay on his back a while, laughing softly to himself. Criminal elements, he thought, and he was speaking the thought aloud as people stepped round him in the sand. “Sure, sure. And I’m the Pope in Rome.”

When he finally got back to the hotel courtyard, he hesitated. Just stood there glistening in the muted light like a statue erected in honor of the befuddled tourist. On the one hand, he was struck by the impulse to go back to his room, wash the grit from his body, do something with his hair and fish another shirt out of his bag; on the other, he felt an equally strong urge to poke his head in the bar for a minute — just a minute — to see if Gina was there. Ultimately, it was no contest. There he went, feet thundering on the planks, the sand sparkling all over him as if he’d been dipped in sugar.

There. There was the waitress, giving him an odd look — a blend of hopefulness and horror — and the thicket of heads bent over plates and glasses, the air heavy as water, the bartender looking up sharply. Ever hopeful, Lester lurched out onto the floor.

This time he got lucky: Gina was sitting at a table just round the corner of the bar, the farthest table out on the veranda, her legs crossed at the knee, one shoe dangling from her toes. There was music playing somewhere, a faint hum of it leaking in out of the night, Mexican music, shot full of saccharine trumpets and weeping violins. It was a romantic moment, or it could have been. But Gina didn’t see him coming — she was turned the other way, in profile, the sea crashing behind her, her hair hanging limp to her shoulders — and it wasn’t till he’d rounded the end of the bar that he saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man sitting across from her, a drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Lester saw a dangle of red hair, muscles under a Lollapalooza T-shirt, the narrow face of an insect.

In the next instant he loomed up on the table, pulled out a chair, and dropped into it with a thump that reverberated the length of the dining room. “Gina, listen,” he said, as if they were right in the middle of a conversation and the man with the insect face didn’t exist, “about last night, and you’re not going to believe this, but it was—”

And then he faltered. Gina’s mouth was hanging open — and this was a mouth that could cushion any blow, a mouth that knew the taste of leather and the shock of the punch that came out of nowhere. “Christ, Les,” she said. “What happened to you — you’re a mess. Have you looked in the mirror?”

He watched her exchange a glance with the man across the table, and then he was talking again, trying to get it out, the night, the way they’d come at him, and they weren’t just your average muggers, they were the law, for Christ’s sake, and how could anybody expect him to defend her from that?

“Les,” she was saying. “Les, I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

“I’m trying to tell you something,” he said, and his own voice sounded strange to him, distant and whining, the voice of a loser, a fat man, a maker of bad guesses and worse decisions.

That was when the red-haired man spoke up, his eyes twitching in his head. “Who is this jerk, anyway?”

Gina — Gina the Puma — gave him a look that was like a left jab. “Shut up, Drew,” she said. And then, turning back to Lester: “Les, this is Drew.” She tried to inject a little air into her voice, though he could see she wasn’t up to it. “Drew wants to know where he can get a good steak around here.”

Drew slouched in his chair. He had nothing to say. Lester looked from Gina to Drew and back again. He was very far gone, he knew that, but still, even through his haze, he was beginning to see something in those two faces that shut him out, that slammed the door with a bang and turned the key in the lock.

He had no right to Gina or this table or this hotel, either. He couldn’t even make it through the first round.

Gina’s voice came to him as if from a great distance—“Les, really, maybe you ought to go and lie down for a while”—and then he was on his feet. He didn’t say “Yes” or “No” or even “See you later”—he just turned away from the table, wove his way through the restaurant, down the stairs and back out into the night.

It was fully dark now, black dark, and the shadows had settled under the skeletons of the trees. He wasn’t thinking about Gina or Drew or even April and the kid in the Suburban. There was no justice, no revenge, no reason — there was just this, just the beach and the night and the criminal elements. And when he got to the place by the lagoon and the stink of decay rose to his nostrils, he went straight for the blackest clot of shadow and the rasping murmur at the center of it. “You!” he shouted, all the air raging in his lungs. “Hey, you!”