The Scared Stiff (11 page)

"Oh, going along," I said. "Helping out where I can."

Arturo turned his happy smile on Carlos. "That right? Felicio being useful?"

"Ernesto," Maria said.

"He's a good driver," Carlos said.

I said, "I've got my own chauffeur suit."

"A whole new career," Arturo said, happy for me.

I said, "You heard from Lola."

"Oh, sure," he said.

Maria said, "Carlos and I are finished. You sit here and get your messages."

"Thanks, Maria," I said.

They went away, and I said, "What did she say, Arturo?"

"Well, she couldn't say much, you know. On the telephone and all."

"She could say
something
."

"Yeah, but you know," he said, "she had to talk like you was really dead, so what I had to do was — uh, waddaya say?"

"Translate," I suggested.

"No. Get at the
meaning
. You know?"

We both thought about it. "Interpret," I suggested.

"That's it," he said, and slapped his knee. "I had to interpret what she says, so when she says, 'I love Barry so much, and I wish he was still around so we could be together and I could tell him how much I love him,' I interpret that, you see, that it means I should say, 'She loves you and misses you and wishes you could be together.' "

"Me, too," I said.

"I told her that," Arturo assured me. "I told her, 'Wherever he is, Lola, I'm sure Barry feels the exact same way."

"Thank you, Arturo. Did she say anything about the insurance?"

"She give all the stuff to the insurance man, and it don't look like a problem. It looks like a week or two, and then they send the check."

"That's great. It's time for me to get my passport."

"Sure. When?"

"I gotta drive Maria to the plane Monday," I said, "so I'll be right there in San Cristobal, dressed up in my chauffeur suit, with the tie and all. How about then?"

"Easy," he said.

I grinned at him. "Every day in every way, Arturo," I said, "I'm getting less and less dead."

Monday, after lunch, I put on my chauffeur suit and drove Maria to the airport. She sat in back, explaining it. looked better that way, and the fact that she felt the need to offer the explanation took the sting out of it.

But it also confirmed the realization I'd come to after the cool way she'd dealt with Carlos's show of jealousy at lunch. There was no invitation for me in that woman. She was self-contained to a remarkable degree. She'd brought Carlos into her life, for whatever reason, but she mostly inhabited her world by herself. I needn't feel I was letting an opportunity slide; there was nothing there.

So as we drove I spent more attention on the beautiful day outside than on the beautiful woman behind me, and when I thought about beautiful women at all, it was mostly Lola. How close we were to being together again.

We were a quarter hour out of Rancio, amid the usual traffic, when Maria said, "You're very quiet today, Ernesto."

I looked at her in the rearview mirror, and her ironic smile was aimed at the back of my head. "Well," I said, "I am a deaf mute."

"Even for a deaf mute," she said, "you're being very quiet. I believe you miss Lola."

"A whole lot," I said.

She nodded. "You know, when you first came to stay, I wondered if you were going to be difficult. You understand what I'm saying."

"Yes," I said.

"My response was all prepared," she told me, and met my eyes in the mirror, and smiled again. "I was going to be flattered but distant."

"And just a little contemptuous," I said.

The smile became a laugh. "Just a very little," she agreed. "It would have been amusing for both of us. Poor Ernesto, you're a faithful husband."

"I am," I said.

"There are very few faithful husbands in this part of the world," she said. "It is not a trait that is particularly valued."

"I think that's true everywhere," I said. "But Lola and me… it isn't that I'm being faithful to her. It's that I don't have any other way to live. To go do something else would be like breaking a bone."

"Yes, of course," she said, and switched to look at the back of my head again, speculatively. "It seems like a contradiction, but it isn't," she decided. "You aren't the faithful type, actually, you're a rogue."

"Thank you — I think," I said.

"Oh, I know you like being a rogue," she assured me. "What the English call a chancer. You're unfaithful to the entire world, so why are you faithful to your wife?"

"Maybe that's why," I said, and met her eyes in the mirror. "Maybe I need one little island in a sea of untrustworthy water. And so does Lola."

"You're each other's island."

"We
are
the island," I said, "and I need to be with her again."

"Poor Barry," she said, which was the first time she'd used my former name, and without the usual mockery.

I didn't think I could stand sympathy. Smiling back at her, I said, "Poor Felicio, in fact."

That made her laugh and restored our relationship. "You aren't a man," she said, "you're an anthology!"

I was about to say something, I don't know what, but when I looked in the mirror I saw, beyond her, a red light flashing. "A cop is stopping us," I said.

"What?" Annoyed, not at all worried, she twisted around to glare out the back window. She said something in Spanish that I doubted was a prayer, then faced front and with great irritation said, "We might as well stop."

"I thought so too," I said, pulling over to the weedy verge and touching the brakes. "But what do I do, Maria? He's going to ask me questions."

"Leave your window closed," she told me, "and I'll open mine. When he comes to the car, I'll order you not to speak, to let me handle it. So he'll hear me say it."

I was now stopped, and the police car was going past to pull onto the shoulder in front of me and switch off its red dome light. It was a big American car, black and white, POLICIA on doors and trunk. A brown-uniformed driver was at the wheel, and two plainclothes men in back.

I said, "Can we get away with that?"

"Of course," she said, and I realized that in her mind a person with her capacity for imperiousness, in a country like this, should be able to get away with anything. I hoped she was right.

Both rear doors of the police car opened, and the two men got out. Both wore white guayabera shirts and black sunglasses and modified black cowboy hats with gold stars pinned on the front. One wore dark jeans and boots, the other tan cotton slacks and soft tan shoes. Both had black holsters on their belts, on the right side, flaps shut.

The one in jeans leaned against the trunk of his police car, unsnapped his holster flap, then folded his arms and looked at me, without expression. The other one came forward, and I heard Maria's window lower and felt the sudden moist hot air stroke the left side of my neck. She snapped at me in Spanish to let her handle this, sounding very aggravated, and I sat to attention, staring back at the one staring at me. The other one stopped next to me and tapped my window with a knuckle, and I pretended not to hear him. My hands were on the steering wheel, correctly, at ten and two o'clock.

Maria demanded to know what this fellow wanted, so he gave up on me and moved farther back along the car. He called her Maria, with a little too much familiarity, and hoped Carlos was well, and she told him not to worry about Carlos, and he said but he did worry about Carlos.

It was quite a battle they had, without ever stating the topic, all words and attitude. He used the power of his position, and she used the power of her imperial status. He spoke insinuatingly, as though to say, I could be rough, but I'm choosing not to, and she spoke with condescending grace, as though to say, I could dismiss you like the peon you are, but I'm choosing to give you a moment of my valuable time.

Then he straightened, as though tired of it or having made his point. "You want to be careful on this road," he said. "And tell Carlos I might come visit him."

"You won't," she said, but he'd already turned away. As he strolled back to his car, making a laughing comment to his deadpan partner, Maria slid her window closed and said,
"¡Lechón!"

In the rearview mirror, her face was very angry. She caught my eye and made a brushing-along gesture. "Drive on!"

Now I really was the chauffeur, and she really was her highness. "Yes, ma'am," I said, but at the moment she was impervious to irony. I put the Buick in gear, and we drove out around them as they got back into their car. In the rearview mirror, I saw them U-turn and recede.

We drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she said, "I'm sorry, Ernesto, that pig had me out of sorts."

"I got the idea you didn't like him. Is it okay to ask what it was all about?"

"It was nothing to do with me," she said. "Carlos had a disagreement with a man a week ago—"

"Sunday before last?"

"Yes. You know about it?"

"I was there."

"Oh. Well, that man is a friend of this pig, Rafez, and he—"

"Rafez? Rafael Rafez?"

Her expression in the mirror was astonished. "You know him? How on earth do you know him?"

"He groped Lola, the night I died," I said. "She had to give him a bloody nose before he'd lay off."

Delighted, she said, "Really? Lola gave him a bloody nose?"

"All over his white linen suit, the bastard."

"But that's wonderful," she said. "Brava for Lola. Oh, now I feel one hundred percent better. Thank you, Ernesto."

"
De nada
," I said.

Laryngitis again, and in two hours I had my passport. I loved it. It was a dull red, with harder covers than my old American passport, and the picture inside looked just like Felicio Tobón de Lozano, with his round swarthy face, bushy mustache, messy dark hair, and a black necktie this peasant was obviously not at all used to wearing. With this passport, I could travel the world.

With this passport, I could get back with Lola. That was the point. This passport was my passport to Lola.

Arturo promised he'd phone Lola to tell her their brother Felicio had a passport now, find out what news there might be, and then come let me know.

But it wasn't Arturo who snuck into the house two days later, Wednesday afternoon, while I was reading last week's
Newsweek
out by the pool. It wasn't Arturo who went
hiss! hiss!
at me until I finally heard it and turned around to stare at the living room doorway. It was Luz.

Damn. I'd almost forgotten about Luz. The only time I'd seen her, since the night I'd come here and she'd spoken to me in English, was at the funeral, all in purple. But now here she was, hunched in the doorway, her face a Kabuki mask of stress and agitation, her breasts threatening to jump out of her gold scoop-neck blouse as she clutched the air with scarlet-nailed hands, gesturing to me to come over, hurry, come over quick.

Well, I'd have to deal with it, that's all. Not looking forward to this, I got to my feet and went over to the living room, as she receded into the dimness ahead of me. I went in, prepared to explain whatever was necessary to explain — the sanctity of marriage? — and she said, with a broken sob in her voice, "Oh, Barry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's all my fault."

"Ernesto," I told her. "Or maybe Felicio. Anything but Barry."

"It's all my fault," she repeated, and clutched at my arm to draw me toward a sofa. "I'm sorry. I just didn't know they were so stupid."

"You didn't know who was so stupid?" I asked, as we sat together on the sofa. Her black skirt ended where her legs began, and her knees were angled toward me.

"My cousins," she said, which covered half of Guerrera.

I said, "Which cousins?"

"From Tapitepe," she said, naming the south-easternmost town in the country, at the border with Venezuela and Brazil. "Manfredo and Luis and the other Luis with the bad arm and José and Pedro and
poco
Pedro, little Pedro."

"Ah," I said.

"You met them," she assured me, "at your wedding."

"I met all the cousins at the wedding," I said. "I don't necessarily remember them. What's the problem, Luz?"

"I tol' them," she said. "Not
them,
exactly, I tol' a few others — in the family, you know — and now they know too, and it's all my fault. But I didn' know, Barry, I didn' know they—"

"Felicio," I said.

"I didn' know how they'd be," she said. "I swear it. I didn' know."

"How they'd be about what? You mean, you told them about me?"

"They know about it," she said. "How you not really dead. Because you gonna get millions of dollars from the insurance and the whole family's gonna be rich."

"Well, no," I said. "Not millions, and the whole family—"

"So they think that's good," she said. "Very good. But I tell them, We can't say anything outside the family, because if the insurance finds out, then the family don' get nothing."

"Luz," I said, "the family was never going—"

"So they say," she went on, "if the family gets all this money if Barry Lee is dead, how come he's alive?"

I looked at her. "Say that again?"

"Why have the risk?" she asked me. "That's what they say. Why have the risk? If the insurance find out Barry Lee ain't dead, nobody gets nothing."

"Luz," I said, "they were
never
going to get anything."

"Millions," she said.

"Not millions," I told her. "Listen to me, Luz. Not millions. It isn't millions. Carlos is getting a couple hundred, and Arturo is getting some, and Mamá and Papá are getting some, and that's all. The rest of the family isn't getting anything."

"Millions," she said, blinking at me.

"No," I said.

She looked at me, and I didn't say anything else, and gradually I could see it sink in, until finally she said, "You not gonna share with the family?"

"Not a penny," I said. "Not a
siapa
."

"But they helpin' you!" she exclaimed, and sat up straighter on the sofa, aiming her breasts at me.

I said, "No, they're not. Carlos is helping, and Arturo is helping. What are the rest of those people doing?"