The Scared Stiff

23

Luz got back from work later than she’d said the next

day, almost seven-thirty, and when she came in she seemed rattled and angry and a little scared. She also looked very different, because she wore her office clothes. It was interesting to see she could contain all that animal exuberance when she wanted to: not hide it, that wouldn’t be possible, but not flaunt it either.

Her white blouse was cut full and buttoned to the neck, where a small gold crucifix hung from a wispy gold chain. Her skirt was black and not too tight, and ended just below the knee. Her shoes were black and low-heeled and maidenly.

She hurried in, dressed like that, with this upset and distracted look, carrying a brown paper bag, and thrust the bag at me. “Open that. I gotta change.”

“Okay.”

I was feeling a little dopey. I’d spent most of the day with her photo novels, a kind of comic book that uses posed photos of actors instead of drawings. Luz had a whole stack of them on the floor beside her bed. They were in Spanish, of course, but the stories were not hard to follow. They were mostly love stories of the most sentimental sort, like Esilda’s soap operas, but they were also quite sexy, and several of the women looked a lot like Luz. The only difference was, these were actresses faking it. I couldn’t imagine a situation in which Luz would fake it.

Now she marched away through the scarlet curtain into the bedroom, taking her upset and alarm with her, and I looked into the paper bag. It contained two bottles of rum. I opened one, put the other on the shelf, and was pouring when she came tripping back in.

Now, this was Luz. A tight red skirt the size of a sweatband, glaring orange blouse with nipples that pointed at me as though to say I know you, great golden hoop earrings with parrots in cages in the middle of the hoops, and thonged clogs that rattled. “Gimme that glass,” she said, and emptied it in one.

I drank more moderately, then held the bottle up. “Yes?”

For answer, she held the glass toward me. I filled it, and this time she took only a healthy swig before she said, “I don’t like it.”

“What don’t you like?”

“I tol’ ’em, he isn’t there, that Barry Lee he’s gone, the maid told me he gone away, she don’ know where he gone to; they get mad at me.”

“Who gets mad at you?”

“All them from Tapitepe. Manfredo and Luis and the other Luis with the bad arm and José and Pedro and poco Pedro.”

“They got mad at you? They think you warned me?”

“No, no,” she said. “Come on, we sit down.”

The sofa was very old. It had sagged to about an inch from the ground and then been covered with serapes. Luz dropped into it as though going backward into a swimming pool, while I levered myself slowly downward, holding the sofa arm.

When I finally reached bottom, she said, “They think I’m stupid, I say something got you scared. Not today, they know you not there today, ’cause Carlos say that to Luis with the bad arm and poco Pedro when they talk to him to make sure he’s at his shop, you know. What they figure, these guys, I’m the one, I’m the stupid, I said something before that got you scared. So now they gonna cut me and all this shit.”

“They’re gonna cut you?” This was terrible.

But she dismissed it with an angry wave of the hand. “No, they just talkin’, ’cause they mad, ’cause you got away, now they gotta look for you.”

“Where?”

“They gonna go talk to Artie.” She gave me an angry smile. “Maybe he’s gonna punch their heads in, whaddaya think?”

“I’d like that,” I said.

“So would I,” she said, and bounced all her parts around on the sofa, and said, “You hungry? You wanna go eat?”

“Luz, you know,” I said, “I got almost no money. I’ve been living on Carlos.”

“So now you’re living on me,” she said, and whomped herself on the chest. Her grin was now less angry, looser, more Luz. And rum. “You’ll pay me back some other time,” she said. “I got a good job.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I will pay you back.”

“I know,” she said. She finished her rum, put the glass on the floor, and said, “So now we go eat, then we go dancin’, and...” She leaned forward, looking around at the floor, then over at me. “Help me outa this, Felicio,” she said. Meaning the sofa.

That was the trickiest moment so far.