The Scared Stiff

3

The first time Lola and I flew from New York down to Guerrera, it was to meet her parents, Alvaro and Lucia, and her brother Arturo. The second time, three months later, was when we got married in the little white stone church in Sabanon, the up-country town where Lola grew up.

Since then, we visit Guerrera regularly once a year, in January, bringing belated Christmas gifts, escaping the northern winter for two weeks, usually maxing a credit card or two. The transition from Long Island’s icy damp to Guerrera’s humid heat is always blurred by several hours of air-conditioning in planes and airports, but it’s still a kick to step out onto the portable stairs and suddenly feel that warm moist hand of the tropics press against my face.

General Luis Pozos International Airport at San Cristobal, capital of Guerrera, was built with American money, to keep the Commies out, and you have to admit it worked. Communism has not taken over in this part of the world; it’s still feudalism around here, same as ever. But the American money meant American design, great flat open paved areas baking blindingly in the sun, surrounded by squat square buildings with flat roofs. The local people would have left trees wherever possible, and open walls and wide eaves, so shadows and breezes could moderate the air without killing it. But it wasn’t their money, was it? So there you are.

The local officials, young, in their pressed uniforms and close neat haircuts, tend to be very serious, very dignified. As usual, I handed over my passport without a word and tried to look innocent. Or at least not guilty.

Lola has dual citizenship but has never renewed her old maroon passport. She travels as an American, though she always does say something to the immigration official in guttural Guerreran Spanish to let him know she’s really a local, and he always smiles and thaws and welcomes her home.

Unfortunately, though I’ve learned a rough-and-ready Spanish over the last fourteen years, I never did become fluent, which I lately regret. It would really come in handy. Because we were doing it, we were going to do it.

That’s the way it’s always worked with Lola and me. One of us gets an idea, we discuss it, the enthusiasm builds, we say, “We’ll do it!” — and we do it and never look back. (Usually don’t look forward, either, which frequently becomes a problem, but let’s not dwell on that.)

When officialdom finished with us, we went out the other side of the building, and there was Arturo, leaning on the twenty-year-old pale green Chevy Impala that’s his pride and joy. It rocks and rolls on Guerrera’s smallpox-scarred roads like a fishing boat in a high sea, and Arturo loves it, left hand out the window to press palm down on the roof, right hand clutching hard to the steering wheel.

Arturo’s a big guy, big-boned, thirty-eight years old, three years older than Lola and me. He works in the tobacco fields sometimes, uses his Impala as a taxi sometimes, does fairly good carpentry and adequate plumbing and terrifying electrical work sometimes, but mostly he just hangs around. He has a wife and some children in San Cristobal, and technically he lives with them, but where you’ll find him is at his parents’ house.

Now he threw us a big grin and an “¡Hola!” and relieved Lola of her big leather shoulder bag and canvas overnighter. I went on carrying my own two bags, and we went around to the back of the Impala for Arturo to unwind some wire and open the trunk. In the bags went, the wire was refastened, and we all slid onto the wide front bench seat, Lola in the middle.

Arturo started the engine, and Lola said, “So, Artie, how are you?”

“How could I be?” He grinned and winked past her at me, then spun the wheel and drove us away from the anticommunist airport building. “Same as ever, I’m great,” he said.

We drove through the chain-link fence, its gate kept open by day and closed by night; no red-eye flights in or out of Guerrera.

Lola said, “How about the other thing? Are we all set?” We’d been scheming with him the last four months, by e-mail.

“Oh, sure.”

We were on the highway now, the Impala gathering speed. The capital, San Cristobal, stood just a few miles north of the airport, but Arturo had turned the other way, toward Sabanon, eighty-five miles to the south.

The flat baking airport disappeared behind us. Dark-green hilly jungle out ahead. A few trucks laden with coffee sacks or beer cases or workers or sugarcane, and us. The wind felt good and smelled alive.

Arturo leaned forward to look past Lola at me, and grin his wide grin, and call, “¡Hola, Felicio!”

Felicio. Felicio Tobón de Lozano, that’s me. Get used to the name. With my own big smile, I called, “¡Hola, Arturo! ¡Hola, hermano!”

Brother. That’s a Spanish word I know.