The Harder They Come (4 page)

Everyone was in motion now, people clambering to their feet, pulling down bags, looping packs over their shoulders, white hair, trembling hands, a shuffle of sneakered and sandaled feet. In the same moment the driver came up out of his seat, as if to block their way, and what Sten was thinking was
Just let him try
. It might have been a standoff, might have gotten out of hand—people were scared, angry, impatient—but then the doors to the clinic swung open and the paramedic, one of their own, was hurrying up the walk to them, bringing the news.

Sten watched the man duck into the shadow of the bus, then reappear in the stairwell, his face neutral. He was saying something in Spanish to the driver, something detailed, but nobody could fathom what it was. Sten felt his stomach clench. But then the first Bill, who was standing in the aisle now with the others, called out, “So, Oscar, what’s the deal, is the guy going to be okay or what? And when are we going to get out of here?”

The paramedic turned and blinked up at the faces ranged above him as if he couldn’t quite place them.

“Well?” Bill demanded.

“They’re going to need a statement.”

Sheila let out a groan. “What sort of statement, what do they want? We didn’t do anything.”

The paramedic—Oscar—held up a hand for silence. “But they say they can do that on the ship.”
On the ship:
those were the incantatory words, the words they’d all been waiting to hear, the spell broken, relief at hand. Everyone exhaled simultaneously. “For the witnesses, that is, and I guess that includes all of us.” His
eyes settled on Sten. “Except you—they’re saying you’re going to have to wait here till the police arrive.”

He didn’t know whether to grin or grimace. His face felt hot. His back ached, low down, where he must have tweaked something out there in the mud lot, one of the tight lateral muscles that didn’t get enough use, one of his killing muscles.

“But don’t worry,” Oscar went on, “I’ll stay with you, in case you need an interpreter.”

“Yes, okay,” Sten said, barely conscious of what he was assenting to, and then he was moving forward—dehydrated, lightheaded, unsteady on his feet—and Carolee, the bag looped over her chest and clutching her hat as if it were a lifeline thrown over the side of a sinking ship, was following along behind.

There was a waiting room in the clinic and it wasn’t much different from what you’d find in the States: fluorescent lights, gleaming linoleum, a smell of bleach and floor wax to drive down the faint lingering odor of body fluids. Nurses glided through one door and out another, a trio of hard-faced women sat staring into computer screens at the front desk and a forlorn cadre of the sick, hopeless and unlucky slouched on folding chairs in an array of bloody bandages and mewling infants. There was air-conditioning, and that was a blessing. And a restroom. The first thing he did, as soon as Oscar directed them to seats in the far corner of the room, was lock himself in the men’s, turn the tap on full and let the cold water (tepid, actually) run over his face. He wet his hands and worked them through his hair, which he wore long, in the fashion he’d adopted as soon as he’d got out of the service and gone off to college, no hard-liner and no fool either, because what woman in San Francisco in that day and age would look twice at a man in a crewcut?
Baby killer,
that’s what they’d shouted at him when he boarded the bus at the airport, but the accusation only puzzled him. He didn’t want to hear about babies,
alive or dead, or Vietnamese self-determination or the jungle that was a kind of death in itself. He only wanted to get laid. Just that.

When he came back to the waiting room, Carolee and Oscar were making small talk, just as if they were lounging over drinks at the Martini Bar on the ship. He heard her say, “And your youngest son, what’s he do?” and then she glanced up with a smile and patted the seat beside her.

“He’s in computers,” Oscar said. “Actually paying his own rent, which is kind of a miracle these days, if you know what I mean—”

“Oh, yeah,
we
know,” she said, and he thought she was going to say something about Adam, but she didn’t, and that was all right, that was a blessing, because for the first time in years, it seemed, Adam had gone right out of Sten’s head—he wasn’t worrying about where he was, what he was thinking, what kind of trouble he was going to get into next, because they were in enough trouble themselves. “Don’t we, Sten?” she said, and gave him an odd look, as if she wasn’t attached to the moment, and he supposed she wasn’t and no sense in pretending otherwise. This was hard. As hard as anything that had ever happened to them, and she’d had to stand there and watch it unfold.

“Maybe you want to go freshen up?” he said, sinking into the seat. “They’ve got a real bathroom here, with hot and cold running water. Paper towels. The works. Knock yourself out.”

“Yes,” she said, rising from the chair with her black cloth bag still looped across her chest, “I think I will,” and then she was sidestepping a child in a wheelchair and making her way across the room.

They both watched her go. There was a crackle of Spanish over the address system. A baby, exasperated beyond endurance, threw back its head and began to howl. He turned to the man beside him, to Oscar, and shook his hand. “I want to thank you for doing this,” he said.

A shrug. “Least I can do.”

“What about your wife, she okay with it?” The wife, short, plain, with an expressionless face, a straw hat and an oversized turquoise necklace one of the goatees had jerked from her throat and dropped casually on the pile in the middle of the blanket, had gone back to the ship with the rest of them.

Another shrug, more elaborate this time. A smile. “Once a paramedic, always a paramedic.”

“The guy’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s dead. You could see that when you let go of him. But we have to try—and I tell you, I’ve seen people come back to life so many times I wouldn’t want to be taking odds. You do what you can and the rest is out of our hands, you know what I mean?” The loudspeaker crackled again, more Spanish. Oscar looked up, concentrating, then shook his head. “No, it’s nothing, it’s not for us.”

“But again, thanks for this. I owe you. When we get back to the ship, the drinks are on me.”

“No apologies. What you did out there was amazing, it really was. Word is”—he lowered his voice—“there’s been problems lately, the kind of thing the Costa Rican government, not to mention the cruise line, doesn’t want to get out. It’s not just robbery. Sometimes—again, I’ve heard rumors—they want more than that.” He shot a glance round the room, then leaned in confidentially. “They can get brutal. With the women especially. In one case I know of they raped them all, young, old, they don’t care, right in front of the men. Daughters even. Kids.”

“Jesus.”

“So what I’m saying is you don’t have to thank me, I should be thanking you.”

There was movement at the door. Sten glanced up, expecting the police, but it was only another patient, a boy of ten or so, his head wrapped in gauze and the right side of his face looking as if somebody had taken a cheese grater to it. The woman with him—his mother, his aunt, maybe a big sister—looked like
a saleslady from one of the high-end stores, pink dress, heels, eye shadow, but the face she wore was the face of despair.

Distracted, he watched the woman guide the boy across the floor to the admittance desk and begin making her case to the secretary there, who barely glanced up from her computer screen. The boy was unsteady on his legs, leaning into the woman for support, and Sten could see where her dress had begun to go dark under the arm and across her breast with what might have been perspiration but wasn’t. He couldn’t understand what she was saying, but her voice rose up suddenly to jackhammer the secretary, who kept pointing to the seats in the waiting room with an increasingly emphatic jab. The woman in pink was having none of it. Her voice raged on until there was no other sound in the room. The lights flickered. The air conditioner blew. And then, as if it had all been decided beforehand, a nurse emerged to escort her and the boy into the inner sanctum and the little sounds came creeping back, people coughing, sneezing, conversing in low voices against the pain that had summoned them there. Sten could feel his blood racing. “High drama, huh?” he said.

Oscar, who’d been watching the boy too, turned back to him. “Bicycle,” he said. “Or motorbike. Bet anything.” His eyes flicked to the doorway behind the desk and back again. “And a concussion on top of it.”

Sten shifted in the chair, which had begun to dig into his backside. He wanted to stand and stretch, but instead he just sat there, bearing it. People crowded the room, faces everywhere. Somewhere a machine was whirring. Babies cried. Somebody’s phone rang. “So what now?” he said, shifting again. “I mean, what are the police going to do—I’m not in trouble, am I?”

“You? They ought to give you a medal.”

“Right, sure. But do you know anything about the laws down here?”

The thin stripe of mustache quivered and it took him a
moment to realize Oscar was working up a grin, as if all this was funny, as if now, sitting here exiled in this little chamber of horrors, the real fun was about to begin. “They ought to give you a medal,” he repeated.

An hour crept by. Nothing happened. More people came dragging through the double doors and they brought more squalling babies with them, more bandages, more broken bones and abrasions, more grief, but the police never showed. Oscar, depleted of small talk, leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. Carolee kept saying, “This is ridiculous,” and Sten kept agreeing with her. Beyond the windows, the sun stood high still, though it was past five now, cocktail hour, and he couldn’t help thinking about what they were missing aboard ship, the outward-spooling loop of activities that lassoed every moment, as if to sit on deck and look out to sea would crush you with boredom. He didn’t need activities. He needed rest. He needed a drink to wash the bad taste out of his mouth. The Martini Bar was all ice, the bartop itself, frozen and planed smooth, and the air-conditioning was like the breath of a deep cave in the hills back home in Mendocino.

At some point, he must have closed his eyes too. He’d been thinking about the first time he and Carolee had come south of the border, a summer vacation when they were in their twenties, backpacking through Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Carolee had stepped on a sea urchin in one of the tidal pools and the spine had broken off in her heel, which became instantly infected, and so they’d had to go to a clinic like this one, or was it a hospital? That was in Mexico, in the Yucatán. They’d waited then too, waited eternally, until finally a doctor no older than they took them into a back room strewn with medical debris, gave her a local, extracted the spine and shot her up with penicillin. Sten had had to carry her out of there. And then, two days later, he was the one who collapsed, sick with a gastrointestinal bug because he’d ordered
oysters—
ostiones
—and didn’t know the term the waiter threw back at him:
ceviche
. He’d expected them fried or maybe baked in an Oysters Rockefeller kind of thing, but here they were, served up cold on a plate of ice, and Carolee sitting across the table grinning at him. “They look good,” she said, folding a chicken taco into her mouth. And he, whether out of some macho impulse or maybe just the stupidity of youth, sucked them out of their shells, all twelve of them, and then ordered a dozen more.

It got worse. They were snorkeling someplace—Belize, he thought it was, or maybe Isla Mujeres—and stayed out too long because it was magical, beyond compare, the reef there alive with every kind of fish you could imagine, and it wasn’t just sunburn they suffered all the way down the blistered crab-red lengths of their bodies, from the backs of their necks to the calluses at their heels, but sun
poisoning
. Within hours their legs swelled up with fluid, as if they’d somehow shot over to Africa and contracted elephantiasis. They could barely walk, and she with her sore foot to begin with. Clutching at each other for support, sweltering, sick, staggering like drunks, they made their way up the street to their hotel, local rum—fifteen cents a shot at the lobby bar—their only consolation. And then, a few days later, they began to peel, and as he crouched there over the unmade bed, absently stripping the dead skin from his legs while Carolee snored beside him, he noticed the ants coming in beneath the door in a wavering dark line that snaked under the bed to climb the wall and exit through a crack below the windowpane. They seemed to be carrying something, these ants, like the leaf-cutters you saw in nature films. But they weren’t carrying leaves—they were hoisting pale shriveled translucent flakes of skin, human skin.

“Give me the Nordic climes,” he’d told Carolee when she sputtered awake, and told her again and again, through all these years, making a routine of it, a joke, but a joke that wasn’t funny, not in the least. “Oslo,” he’d say, “Helsinki, Malmö, Reykjavik, what’s wrong with Reykjavik?”

And then he wasn’t thinking anymore, he was dreaming. He was alone, hiking up a trail deep in the redwood forest, everything cool and dim in the shadow of the trees, his legs working and his heart beating strong and steady so that he could see it there out front of him, at arm’s length, beating, beating. He kept going, up and up, till he wasn’t walking anymore but gliding above the ground, sailing on stiffened wings, and that seemed perfectly natural, as if all his life this was what he’d been meant to do. He might have been a bird. He
was
a bird. But the strangest thing was there were no other birds out there with him, no creatures of any kind, no people even, nothing but the trees and the sky and the earth unscrolling beneath him in silence absolute, dream silence, a silence so profound it could be broken only by the mechanical squawk of a loudspeaker—
Doctor Hernández, venga al teléfono, por favor
—that sheared off his wings and dropped him down here in the hard wooden seat of the Red Cross Clinic, awaiting judgment.

“You were asleep,” Carolee was saying. “I didn’t want to wake you.”