The Scared Stiff

22

There was a car over there, in the darkness beside that building, its headlight glass picking up a glint from the streetlight down at the corner. In Rancio, as in most Guerreran towns, there are public lights only at intersections, so the mid-blocks tend to be very dark.

Still, I felt exposed out here. The street side of the wall around Carlos’s property was whitewashed, and even in the darkness it seemed to me I must make a clear silhouette against it. But I forced myself to move slowly, to shut the outer door carefully, silently. In my other hand I held the cardboard suitcase, my only weapon of defense. Which meant, if I was attacked, I was dead.

The door was closed. I released the knob. I did not run across the street, but I strode fast.

Yes, that was a Honda Civic in the darkness, and by day it was probably orange. At the moment, it was merely metallic and dark, with a person at the wheel. I opened the passenger door, and the interior light leaped on, and it was Luz, wearing blue jeans cut off at the hip and a very tight white T-shirt that said LECHE in large red letters across the front.

“Hello,” I whispered, and shoved the suitcase onto the minimal seat in back.

“Get in, get in.” She sounded like a violin tuned too high.

I got in and shut the door, bringing darkness back, and immediately she started the engine, with a great grinding noise they could probably hear all the way to Brasilia. Then she put it in gear, and the car lurched forward and stalled. She said a word that contained one jagged syllable.

I said, “Luz, take it easy, nobody can see us.”

“I heard that one before,” she said, and started the car again, with the same racket, and this time managed to move it forward.

I wanted to settle her down some before she ran us into a tree. Trying to sound nothing but calm and serene, I said, “I really appreciate this, Luz. Thank you.”

“Lemme get us outa town,” she said, spinning the wheel and accelerating down the dark street. “Then we be okay.”

I twisted around to look back at the neighborhood we were leaving and saw no one, nothing. The time was a little after eleven on a Wednesday night, and Rancio was asleep.

Luz made a fast turn at the next corner, and only then did she switch on the headlights, which meant the dashboard lights came on as well. I looked at her, shoulder to shoulder in this small car, as she concentrated fiercely on the street ahead. My own concentration was a bit more scattered. Leche means milk in Spanish; spelled with a slight difference, it means something else in English.

Napalma, where Luz lived, was another town along the Inarida River, like Rancio and San Cristobal. It was beyond San Cristobal, another seventy-five miles of meandering road alongside the meandering river, and a few miles after San Cristobal it gives up being asphalt to become dirt. Napalma is the end of the road. Not a happy thought.

Luz’s tension continued until we were well out of Rancio, and even then she would clench up at every sight of headlights, either behind us or in front. Fortunately, there was very little traffic. It was clear that nobody was following us, nobody knew what Luz was up to, but she was extremely nervous anyway. I thought she probably knew her own cousins well enough that all this fear was justified, so I didn’t try to argue her out of it.

There was little conversation until we got past San Cristobal. I tried to keep my eyes on the road. Luz did keep her eyes on the road, and we did the thirty miles from Rancio to San Cristobal in twenty-eight minutes, according to her little dashboard clock, which on that road was pretty spectacular.

She had to slow going through San Cristobal, but she didn’t like it. “Crouch down,” she told me. “Like you’re asleep.”

“There’s no room to crouch down.”

“Then put your head in my lap.”

“I’ll just keep my hand over my face like this,” I said.

That didn’t really satisfy her, but she accepted it. San Cristobal, being the capital, was still awake at eleven-thirty of a midweek night, with bars and restaurants open, cars moving, pedestrians here and there, groups talking in little parks along the way. Luz was convinced every one of those people was in league with her cousins, and by the time we got out of town I was beginning to feel almost as paranoid as she was.

But now we had the road to ourselves. Nobody was going to Napalma tonight, and whatever farmers or suburbanites lived along here were asleep, with no lights on. By crouching a little, but not putting my head in Luz’s lap, I could see in the outside mirror on my side the lights of San Cristobal dwindling behind us, then erased, and there was nothing back there but black.

Luz had seen it too. The sigh she gave was so long and heartfelt she must have been holding her breath since Saturday. “Ho-kay,” she said. “We gonna be all right now.”

“Good,” I said.

“Time for some rum,” she decided.

“Rum? Where are we going to get rum?”

“I got rum,” she told me. “On the floor behind you. Can you get it? Should I?”

She turned, moving her arm, and LECHE loomed. “No, that’s okay,” I said. “I can do it.”

I waited till she had both hands back on the steering wheel and then reached into the narrow space between us, down to the floor behind my seat, and there it was, a bottle wedged under the seat to keep it from rolling. I eased it out and brought it up front with us.

“Here you are.”

A quick look, and she said, “Open it, okay?”

“Sure.”

It was a clear glass quart bottle of a very cheap South American dark rum, about half full. I unscrewed the cap and handed it to her.

“Steer,” she said, so I put my left hand on the wheel as she put her head back and went glug-glug-glug. “Aw, that’s good,” she said, and grinned at me. Wiping the bottle mouth with her palm, she said, “Have some.”

I took the bottle and she took the wheel. My first reaction was, No, I don’t want cheap rum, I don’t want to share the bottle with you, I want to keep my wits about me. That was followed a nanosecond later by an opposite reaction, much stronger. “Thanks,” I said, and tilted my own head back.

Very sweet. Molasses. A waterfall of sweetness, but attached to a dynamo. Powerful, like an engine of sweetness, like a love song from a heavy metal band.

“Wow,” I said.

“Good stuff,” she said.

“You want more?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Keep it in your lap, and if I want it I’ll reach for it.”

“Right,” I said.

You smell Napalma before you see it. It isn’t a bad smell exactly; in fact, it’s yet another kind of sweetness, like a little spray of sugar caught high in your nose; and it comes from the factory. The town is situated inside a deep curve in the Inarida, where a natural rock shelf makes for an unusually deep harbor, and the factory is built there, partly out over the water.

It’s a fish processing plant, taking all kinds of fish from the river and turning them into great sacks of fertilizer. The sacks are loaded on barges that float down the Inarida to San Cristobal, and from there they’re flown all over the world to feed gardens the people of Napalma could barely imagine. Luz worked at the factory, not on the factory floor but as a clerk in the billing department.

It’s a twenty-four-hour factory, one of the few late-night operations in the entire country. We drove past it, the main town being just beyond, and the primary factory structure was three stories of rattletrap sheets of corrugated tin, many bare lightbulbs, a parking lot full of little beat-up cars, and a few people visible in shorts and T-shirts and yellow hard hats.

Just beyond the factory were four bars, mostly open-air beer gardens, all open and doing business. Then the lights faded, and we were actually in Napalma, another little river town with rickety wood houses on stilts. Some of the houses on stilts were built out over the river, and one of these was where Luz lived. There was a row of similar houses, the front third on land, the rest on pilings over the water. All the houses were dark. A streetlight gleamed far away and stars shone on the river, but still the neighborhood was very dark.

Luz stopped the car in front of her place. The interior light popped on again as she opened her door, and then I opened mine, and got myself and the rum bottle and my suitcase all out onto the weedy ground. I said, “Should I leave the bottle in the car?”

“How much is in it?”

We bent down at the opposite open doors, I held the bottle in the light in there, and we both looked at it. There was less than two inches of amber liquid left.

“Bring it in, we’ll finish it,” she said.

Was that a good idea? Probably not, but I was past worrying about good ideas. I shut my door, picked up my suitcase, and followed her into the house.

It was shoe-box shaped, with a front room that was part living room and part kitchen. Luz turned on a table lamp perched on the TV set, with a bright pink shade on it that made the room dim but rosy, as though it were a pleasant comfortable place just a little too near Hell.

A doorway with a scarlet curtain over it led farther back, to the part of the house over the river. Luz went through this curtain, me following, and turned on a lamp on her dresser, with a bright golden shade that made this room look as though it had been deep-fried.

This was Luz’s bedroom, with her clothing and her shoes and her scent and her personality strewn all over it. It was dominated by a low double bed with extremely wrinkled orange sheets and distorted pillows. Many many photos from magazines were on the wall above the bed, ranging through all levels of piety and celebrity, from the Madonna to Madonna.

Luz grinned at me in a loosely ironic way, gestured at the bed, and said, “I know you don’ wanna sleep there.”

“Thank you,” I said. Nothing else I could have said, it seemed to me, would have been safe.

At the back of this room were another pair of doorways covered by scarlet curtains. Luz went to the one on the left, saying, “I got no electricity back here, but there’s a kerosene lamp.”

“Okay.”

She pushed aside the curtain and went in. I pushed aside the curtain and stood in the doorway, since there wasn’t room for both of us in there. A window without glass let in the sight and sound of the river, plus its aroma, mixed with the odor of the factory. Luz bent and lit a wooden match and from that lit a small kerosene lantern with a clear glass chimney. It smoked at first, until she lowered the flame.

The room was very small. A futon on the floor was neatly covered with one sheet and one blanket. In the corner beside it stood a wooden crate, its open interior facing the futon. This would be my bedside table, with the kerosene lantern and a beer bottle containing a bright red hibiscus standing on top of it.

I said, “That flower’s great. Thank you, Luz.”

“Make it like home,” she said. “Come on, I show you the rest.”

I backed into the main bedroom and she followed and then turned to the other curtained doorway, saying, “This is — oh, I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Lavatorio.”

“Lavatory,” I suggested.

“Where you piss and like that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I get it.”

She pushed aside the curtain, and it was a closet. That’s all. A closet. No light in there. But then, with whatever golden glow managed to creep in there from the bedroom, I saw the round hole in the floor. And the river was below.

All at once, I remembered my entire lifetime’s experience of North American plumbing, North American bathrooms. All those great huge tubs, Jacuzzis, bidets, powerful flushing equipment, masterful drains, gleaming porcelain and tile, thick towels, mirrors rimmed with gleaming lightbulbs.

Okay. I’m going through these things now, and I can do it because I’m going to get back. I’m going to have that other life again, and this time I’m going to keep it. Because it’s mine, I’m supposed to have it, and I want it. Six hundred thousand dollars. Just keep saying that, I told myself. Six hundred thousand dollars.

Luz looked at me, quizzical, wanting to be sure I grasped the concept. “Ho-kay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I get the picture.”

“You wanna go?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Well, I do,” she said. “You get us a couple glasses. In the shelf beside the refrigerator.”

“Right,” I said, and she let the curtain drop with herself inside. I turned away, and as I crossed the bedroom I heard the strong stream hit the river.

I had left the rum bottle on the square table at the kitchen side of the front room. Now I found two jelly glasses on the shelf, put them on the table, and was just carefully pouring an exact amount of rum into each glass when Luz came in, smiling broadly, saying, “Boy, I needed that. That’s a long time. You sure you don’ want to?”

“Later,” I said. “Here’s your rum.”

She took the glass and clinked with mine. “To your long life,” she said.

“Afterlife,” I said. “And to yours.”

We drank, and she said, “I gotta get up early, be in the office six-thirty, so I gotta set my radio alarm, but you don’ need to get up. And, just in case, you know, you shouldn’ go out and around.”

“I won’t.”

“There’s food here, what you need. And beer in the refrigerator. After work tomorrow, I gotta go to Rancio to lure you out, then I gotta find you not home, Esilda say you gone, I tell the cousins, I get back here maybe around seven.”

“Okay.”

“Could be we go out dancin’ then,” she said, and grinned at me. “I bet you like to dance.”

Danger? What the hell, this situation was dangerous all the time. “I love to dance,” I said.

“I knew you would,” she said. “Lola wouldn’ take up with nobody didn’ like to dance.”

“That’s right.”

“And other things,” she said, and laughed, and then yawned, holding the back of her hand to her mouth.

I said, “Time for — uh, time for sleep.”

“You bet.”

She raised the glass to me again, and we both finished the rum. She switched off the light and crossed to open the curtain, and illumination from the bedroom made it possible for me to find my way.

She stood beside her bed, yawning. I said, “Good night, Luz. And thanks again.”

“You gonna have a good time here,” she told me.

“Not too good, I hope,” I said, and she laughed and unzipped her cut-offs, and I went into my new room.