The Scared Stiff

11

“Arturo,” I said, bouncing around in the backseat like a single piece of popcorn, “stop a second.” I was in back as we drove too fast out the potholed dirt road from the Scarlet Toucan after we’d drop-kicked the Beetle into the river, because I was supposed to be changing clothes, out of Barry and into Felicio, but the road flung me around so much I couldn’t do a thing. “Stop, will you?”

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “We gotta clear outa here.”

“Just stop while I get these pants on, Arturo.”

So he did stop, though reluctantly, and I at last finished getting dressed, switched to the front seat, and slammed the door, before Arturo sent us leaping forward again. Braced, I said, “One question.”

“It was beautiful, man,” he said. He grinned, and his teeth gleamed in the reflected headlight glow; the dashboard lights didn’t work on the Impala either.

I repeated myself. “One question, Arturo. Who was that guy?”

He risked a quick glance at me. “What guy?”

“The guy we put in the Beetle.”

“How do I know?” he asked me. “He was just somebody Ortiz had around. He said we was lucky, he had a guy the right size and sex and age and everything.”

“Arturo,” I said, “that was no peon, that was no nameless indigent. That guy had a manicure.”

“He did?” Arturo made the turn onto the main road, heading north, and we could both relax a little. “A manicure,” Arturo repeated, and grinned and shook his head.

“What’s going on, Arturo?”

“Looks like,” Arturo said, “somebody else got a scam working.”

“Just so it doesn’t make trouble for me.”

“How can it? The body come from Ortiz, the body’s goin’ back to Ortiz.”

“Well, that’s true.”

He gave me another grin. “And whaddaya thinka that Beetle, out there in the air?”

I grinned back at him. “It was great.”

He nodded, watching the dark road. “It was beautiful, hermano. I shoulda brought a video camera.”

I laughed, feeling the tension ease down another notch. “Arturo, we couldn’t stand there making a movie.”

“Be a hell of a movie,” he said.

It was almost two-thirty in the morning when we finally pulled to a stop in front of the anonymous wall surrounding Cousin Carlos’s place. Carlos had given a key to Arturo, who gave it to me, and it worked first time, as simple as if I’d been coming here this way for years.

I waved to Arturo, who yawned and waved back, and I went on inside as he drove off. I’d asked him earlier if he didn’t want to stay here tonight, rather than do more hours of driving, but he said that was okay, he wasn’t going all the way home to Sabanon but would stay over in San Cristobal. Maybe that meant his alleged wife and putative children were about to get a rare and precious Arturo sighting.

In any event, I was now on my own. I let the door in the wall snick shut behind me, which put me in darkness alleviated only slightly by star shine, just enough to make out the general shape of the building. Arturo had told me what I should do next. The same key would unlock the front door of the house. I should go in there, and I’d see a nightlight down the hallway to my right, which would be in the kitchen. I should continue on past the kitchen to the door at the end of the hall, which would be open. That was my room.

Yes. The key worked on the house door, as promised. I stepped inside into greater darkness, with what might have been a living room in front of me. I could vaguely see hints of the windows that would overlook the pool and the lawn and the river. A hall extended to my right, as advertised; the spill of light from a doorway on the left down there must be the kitchen. And the black rectangle beyond it would be the doorway to my new room.

I moved slowly and silently down the carpeted hall, not wanting to wake anyone. More of those free-form metal sculptures were on the walls here, like the ones I’d noticed on the inside of the perimeter wall. They were interesting abstract things, at the same time both primitive and sophisticated. They didn’t seem to go with Cousin Carlos at all. But you never know about people.

I reached the kitchen and looked in, and Luz was there, looking at me. She was seated facing me at a large heavy mahogany table, a paperback photo novel open in front of her, along with a beer bottle and a plate containing half a thick sandwich. She gave me a very loose smile, with mischief twinkling in those large dark eyes, and said, “How you doin’, Ernesto?”

I knew enough now to pretend I hadn’t heard her, but that I would realize she’d spoken because I’d seen her lips move. So I smiled and nodded and waved my hand at her, and continued on along the hall, thinking, Damn it, what’s she doing here?

Can it be she wants to check me out anyway, that the thought of syphilis — cured, after all — is becoming less of a deterrent? I don’t need this, I really don’t. I don’t need Luz hanging around, and I don’t need Lola hearing that Luz is hanging around.

I was closing the door of my pitch-black room when what she’d said floated through my brain again: “How you doin’, Ernesto?”

In English.