Blood of Paradise (9 page)

She sounded frightened, angry. Jude could sympathize. And though he hadn't kept up with the news from Iraq too well, he did know marine commanders had studied tactics with LAPD, hoping to combat the urban insurgency the way the cops had suppressed the gangs. There it was again, he thought, that nexus, gangs and terror, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“I knew about your dad. Being in the Corps, I mean. Until you mentioned it tonight, though, I didn't realize your brother—”

“Yeah,” she whispered, staring at nothing. “Yeah yeah yeah.”

Giant mango trees and
ceibas
loomed overhead, interspersed with smaller, spindly
pacún
and
hicaco
. The thick sweet smell of corn broth came from a nearby
champa
.

“What's your brother think of your life down here?”

“You mean my politics?”

Jude sighed. “I mean whatever.”

“He's a lot like my dad. And for an old leatherneck, my pop is pretty hip. Rides an Indian, reads Vonnegut, loves to surf. Shared a blunt with him once—UC Santa Cruz, my graduation party?” She shivered at the memory. “Never again, boy, let me tell you.”

A goat tied to a
pepeto
tree foraged through low-lying
zacate
vines while scrawny cattle drifted like ghosts down the dusty lanes, which were pitted with large rocks. The truck lurched along, past a low plaster wall on which someone had spray-painted
Smok Weed
in fluorescent orange. Beyond the wall, two boys with sticks darted through the dark trees chasing a dog.

Eileen lived in a small four-room house—the usual, concrete block and tin, garlanded with barbed wire, the windows barred—a few hundred yards from the beach. Locked up all day, inside it was stifling but clean, despite a hint of souring fruit rinds.

The main room was piled high with blouses, skirts, scarves, all hand-embroidered, plus handwoven mats and baskets. It looked a little like a vendor's stall at the Mercado de Artesanías. “Welcome to the home of Harriet Handicraft,” she said, gesturing him in.

She struck a match, lit a kerosene lamp, then gave him a brief tutorial on her work: bright
camisetas
of orange and red cotton, with yokes of white lace shirring, sewn in Izalco; scarves with hand-knotted fringe made in Ahuachapán; wraparound tie-dyed skirts called
refajos
made in Nahuizalco; shallow brown baskets called
viroleños;
woven mats made from tule rushes planted under a new moon. Many items looked neglected, like they'd been tucked away somewhere for years.

“You see anything like this now, it's mostly for tourists,” she said. “Seventy years ago, the
campesinos
used this kind of thing day-to-day. But in the thirties, after the rebellion under Martí got crushed in La Matanza, anyone so much as looking like an Indian got shot on sight. Interest resurfaced a little in the fifties, when the old women complained their daughters and granddaughters didn't care anymore. But things turned bloody again. Now those old women are dead. And the younger women who haven't forgotten the old traditions never knew them to begin with.”

She leaned down to smooth the fabric of a handwoven tablecloth, then stood back, like the curator of a small, dingy, forgotten museum.

“I feel like a paleontologist sometimes. These are my sad old bones.”

The next room was tiny, hardly more than a closet, with a narrow cot and a wood stool used as a bed table. Beyond it, toward the back, lay the equally minuscule kitchen and bath. To Jude's surprise, the house had running water, fed by a nearby well, and he went immediately to the kitchen's cast iron sink to wash the gritty sweat off his face and arms. When he was done he shook the water off, not wanting to towel dry. The moisture felt good on his skin.

Bringing the lamp with her, she came up behind him, touched his arm. “Help me put the hammock up outside. I can't sleep in here tonight. And I've got a couple beers. They'll be warm but …” Her voice trailed away. She lifted her necklace and ran the chain back and forth below her bottom lip. “I'd like it if you stuck around for a while. Talk some more. I don't want to leave things the way they sit right now.”

They hung the hammock between two four-by-fours supporting a sheet of tin that served as a roof out back. It covered a patch of broom-swept sand, rimmed with painted gourds, beyond which stood a patchy copse of
quebracho
trees, decimated for firewood.

They sat face-to-face in the hammock, legs dangling to either side of the webbing, rocking a little to feign a breeze, and sharing a warm Pilsener, passing the bottle back and forth. Eileen talked about her siblings: four sisters, three brothers. “You come from a big family,” she said, “you see the world in a whole different light, trust me. Not just because Pop's a marine. Or he has five girls.”

She was the sixth child out of the eight and by her account wasn't the wildest by far—that privilege belonging to the oldest, Bebe. She lived in a Paris squat, espoused unisex anarchism, sported elaborate Maori tattooing the length of her body, was pierced everywhere imaginable (a thought left hanging), and shaved her head. Their mother would not speak to her, nor Bebe to Mom. Dad the ex-marine once ventured off to Paris, to reconnoiter.

“Reportedly, they got blind on Bourgogne Rouge and Pop carried her home piggyback through the Sentier. I don't think Mom's quite forgiven him yet.”

She pressed Jude now and then about his own family, but he knew better. It wasn't time for that. Always, after a quick, bland response, he turned the query back around to her. Luckily, she liked her family, liked talking about them.

Occasionally she lifted her foot, nudging his leg with it as though to prod him to say more. The fourth or fifth time she left it there awhile, her sandy, leathery sole lingering gently against his inner thigh. Then, suddenly, she rose from the hammock and grabbed the lamp. “I have
got
to take a shower.” He caught something in her voice and, glancing up, saw she had her hand held out in invitation.

The bathroom was hardly bigger than a phone booth and it seemed even smaller in the lamplight. They had to stand face-to-face, one of them straddling the toilet. A gooseneck showerhead jutted out from the concrete wall, curving over the mirrorless sink then pointing straight down to a rusty drain in the floor. Given the arrangement, a shower meant the whole bathroom got wet.

They jockeyed for position, Jude dodging the showerhead as the small of his back parked against the sink while Eileen sat on the toilet and removed her denim shirt, her bra, then slipped her cutoffs down her legs. As he watched, Jude caught a hint of ammonia; the place was scrubbed clean. No off-putting odors for this girl. He wondered if that meant she had sex in here a lot.

She tossed her clothing out the door then took off her glasses, reaching to one side of him to drop them inside her travel kit on the sink. Her eyes swam a little as her focus adjusted, and he reflected again on that odd nakedness he loved so much, intensified now by her being, well, naked. She smiled up at him, two red ovals marking where the frames had rested on her nose.

Only then did it dawn on him the sneaky way she resembled his sister. He hadn't caught it before. Eileen was taller with less tortured hair but they shared the same freckled skin, the same warm brown eyes. And yet it wasn't just physical or even primarily so: They both had that brainy, strong-willed, don't-call-me-pretty sense of pride while remaining strikingly feminine. And their names: Colleen, Eileen. Christ, he thought, what a bonehead. He felt his arousal weaken and yet, just as quickly, it returned as she said, “So this is what a girl's gotta do to get your attention.”

She reached up, took his T-shirt in her hand, and tugged, pulling his face, now in full blush, toward hers. She ran the tip of her tongue along his lips to moisten them first, then pressed her mouth to his, rubbing gently back and forth. She let go of his shirt, folded her arms behind his neck, and held him close, darting in and out with her tongue, the occasional bite, playful and gentle, her breath tasting yeasty from the beer. With her fingertips she gently traced circles on his nape till gooseflesh rippled across his shoulders and down each arm. His back began to ache from bending over but he feared breaking the spell if he straightened up.

She pulled back, uncurled her arms, and reached for his belt buckle. “I will confess to being turned on when I'm jaybird naked and you're not, but it's time to press on to the next phase, don't you think?”

She helped him out of his clothes and promptly took him into her mouth. She moved her lips and hand in unison, up and down, over and over, till he was slick with her spit and beet red. Meanwhile, her other hand reached up from underneath, faintly brushing the wispy hair on his scrotum, and it was right about then he stopped thinking about his sister.

She smiled, feeling him shiver. “Change places?”

He went to sit down as she stood but it took a couple moves to accomplish the change of positions. She laughed and kissed his ear and it felt like being forgiven for every stupid, clumsy thing he'd ever done.

Once he was seated and square she braced herself against the sink, lifted one leg and cocked her foot on his thigh, like she had out on the hammock, but now so he could reach her. She raised one arm behind her to hold on to the shower spigot for balance as he pressed his face to her bush, loving the briny musk of her smell and wondering if he should tell her that.

With one finger he reached inside, half expecting to encounter sand. You found sand damn near everywhere—in your hair, your ears, between your toes—why not here? But the flesh felt perfectly smooth. Slippery. Warm as a mouth.

He found the pebbly surface about two inches up and in and gently massaged in a circular, come-hither motion, reminding himself not to go at it like he was trying to flip a switch. It was something he'd learned from the mountains of smut on base in the service. Two things you never lacked on a military base: men with male authority issues, and jerk-off fodder. Lesbian porn, in particular, had always proved instructive. If you paid attention and could manage your inferiority complex, it was hard not to learn a trick or two. Still, he felt a little like a dance student, staring at his feet, counting his steps out loud.

Kissing her belly, he pressed closer, his free hand grabbing her hip for balance. She let him go on for a while, uttering warm little humming sounds, helpless sounds, then leaned back and moved her foot from his thigh to his shoulder. Removing his finger, he buried his face in her, licking her labia up one side then down the other, running his tongue in circles at the top, then repeating the circuit, varying up with long, slow movements all the way around. The hair of her muff tickled his nose so he quickened his pace, not wanting to lose his concentration, pressing a little more firmly, aiming high and staying there now—so she could plan on where his tongue would be. She sensed the change, found her own sweet spots and pressed in when she wanted it hard, eased back when she wanted it gentle, her hand at his nape, guiding him. His face got sloppy, his tongue began to ache, his breathing turned to a wheezy moan as the tang of her wetness soured in the back of his throat.

She let a little whimper leak out as a shiver launched up from the small of her back. She stopped him, lowering her leg. Reaching inside her travel kit, she pulled a foil package out and bit it open, then rolled the condom down his shaft, squatted on his lap, and slipped him inside.

She pulled him close and he buried his face in her chest, smelling the vinegary warmth of her armpits. He licked and bit her nipples or kissed her throat as she rode him, and she clutched him tight as she came, a soft, mewling, throaty cry—that voice, he thought, God how I love that voice—the sound like a long ghostly
no
but with a whimpering peal of surprise in it, too.

He felt good. He felt useful.

He began to slow his rhythm, but then she stood up and took his hand, urged him onto his feet as she turned her back and leaned over the sink, hands against the wall. For the first time he saw the tattoo on her right cheek, a red and black rose with
Smarty
written in a scroll underneath. Something she'd done for some other guy, he supposed, then drove the thought away as he entered her, pulled her back to him, the plump softness of her behind caressing his belly.

Grabbing her hips, he began easing her back and forth, gentle at first then stronger as he felt his own climax peaking. His pelvis began to smack against her rump and she turned her head toward him, murmuring into her shoulder, “It's okay, come on … give it to me ….” Barely a whisper, said to spur him on. And it did. He felt conflicted but too late. He pressed his face against her back, shuddered and, unwittingly, mimicked her own sound as he came.

As always, the guilt swam up from somewhere almost instantly. He should've lasted longer, should've pleased her more—these were the words banging around inside his head, but the guilt felt blacker than that, deeper.
Give it to me
. He wondered if she was the kind who liked to get hit, remembering their exchange from earlier:
I don't hurt people. It's not what I do
.

“Where did you go?”

He glanced up. She was smiling over her shoulder but with little darts of worry in her eyes. He wrapped her up in his arms, tight, to chase his thoughts away. With her fingertips she traced the hair on his forearms, his hands.

“I seem to remember something about a shower.”

She reached for the spigot. Even knowing the water would be cold didn't prepare him. His spine locked, his knees buckled. She turned, clutched him to her, laughing, rubbing his skin hard: “Me too. Warm me up, warm me up!” He chafed her back as she reached for the soap cake on the sink and lathered up, washing herself, then him, then her again, back and forth, kissing him in between statements like, “You're a very attentive lover” and “Don't worry, okay?”