The Scared Stiff

24

Dancing was never going to be a sensible idea, what with me having to hide out and Luz being Luz, but I’d agreed to it last night, full of tension and rum, so here we were.

The Napalma equivalent of Club Rick, at least on a Thursday night, was a mostly open-air bar along the river between Luz’s house and the factory, whose name I never did find out. It was less than a ten-minute walk from the house. There was a thatch-roofed open-sided part, with the bar and a small dance floor and some tables, and a much larger open part, with Japanese lanterns strung on poles and trees, all these soft colors of light against the surrounding darkness, like a kind of pastel chiaroscuro. There were long plastic picnic tables out there near the riverbank, and a pounded-earth dance floor between the tables and the bar. The music was a live band full of guitars and trumpets and amplifiers, all wailing away.

We ate our dinner — chicken and rice and plantains and fried tomatoes and plenty of grease and several beers — at one of those plastic picnic tables, sharing the table with a shifting population of other diners. Luz knew almost everybody, of course, but the noise level, between the blaring band and the shouting customers, was so high she couldn’t even pretend to introduce me.

After dinner, we danced, along with the rest of the happy, heaving, sweaty crowd, all moving together but not together under the pink and canary and aqua and jade lights, shifting, dipping, shoulders up with pride, mostly bare feet pounding the dirt. Luz made love to the world, to the music, to the night, to the air, to me, to everybody, and laughed through it like another trumpet.

At times we’d pause for a beer, sitting sprawled on the bench of one of the picnic tables, watching the other dancers and breathing like sled dogs, letting the air dry the sweat on our faces. But one of those times, when we reeled off the floor, she pulled at my arm until my ear was close enough, and said, “Felicio, I gotta go home.”

That’s right. She got up very early this morning, and by now it must be very late. (My Rolex was back at her house, in the fruit box next to the futon. It hadn’t seemed to go with my Felicio costume.) So I nodded, too winded to answer, and she took my hand, and we staggered on out of there.

The night was just cool enough and dry enough to restore us some when we left that place and walked toward home. Luz had kept hold of my hand, and that was okay with me. We were pals now.

We walked in silence for the first few minutes, and then she said, “You’re okay, Felicio. I like you.”

“Well, thanks, Luz,” I said. “I like you too. And I’m very grateful to you.”

“And Lola’s great,” she said.

That surprised me, but I had to agree. “Yes, she is.”

“Before she met up with you, you know,” she said, “she was stuck-up. I was jus’ a little kid, but I remember. Everybody said she was too big in the head. How do you say that?”

“Like that, pretty much,” I said. “I don’t see her that way, though.”

“Now I know,” she told me. “Now I know, back then, she jus’ lonely. She knows she’s smart and she knows she’s good and she knows something good is suppose to happen, but she don’ see it coming. Not till she gets away from here. Not till she meets up with you. She don’ belong here, she belongs in the north.”

I said, “Lola and me, we were both one leg of the same pants. We weren’t any good to anybody until we got together.”

She laughed. “That’s a funny way to talk about pants,” she said.

When we got to her place, she walked through the dark living room and switched on the light in the bedroom, and then I could follow.

Ignoring me, she was already pulling that orange blouse off over her head. I kept eyes front and beelined through my own curtained doorway.

“Buenas noches,” she called through the curtain, and yawned in the middle of it.

“Good night, Luz,” I said. I touched my warm forehead to the cool curtain. “It was a terrific night. Thank you.”

No answer. I think she was already asleep.