The Scared Stiff (2 page)

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.

Sabanon is prettier from a distance than up close. It's on the Guiainacavi River, a small meandering stream, tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the Orinoco, up in Venezuela. Sabanon is built inside one of its elbows, so that the slow-moving brown water glints past it in the sunlight on three sides.

The main approach to town is from the fourth side, the north, the road down from San Cristobal, which here is crumbling two-lane asphalt. The first bit of the city you see, and beautiful it is, is the gleaming white steeple of the church of San Vicente, where Lola and I were married. That slender white spire striking up out of the deep greens of the jungle makes it look as though there must be a giant knight on horseback down in there, at the very least. But what's down in there, as you soon see, is Sabanon, a crumbling cluster of low buildings in the brown embrace of the river.

The town is made of wood, most of it decades from its last paint job, though here and there some owner has recently gone mad with purple or carmine or ocher, creating a little extravaganza you can't look at directly until after sunset. The town has a population of four thousand, and there are maybe seven satellite dishes perched on roofs, one of them belonging to my in-laws, which we gave them three years ago when I thought I was, or would soon be, rich.

There's only the one paved road, coming into town, running straight through it to the river, where it becomes a thick-planked wooden dock flanked by a fish market and gasoline storage tanks. The other streets in town are packed dirt, parallel to or perpendicular to La Carretera, "the highway," which is what the locals call the main drag. None of the other streets are named.

The Tobón house, painted fuchsia at my expense when Lola and I got married and at last beginning to fade, thank God, was two blocks to the right of La Carretera and one block from the river-bank. Two stories high, built on stilts, its exterior walls vertical wood planks, its ground floor is partly enclosed to hold the freezer and hot-water heater and some guns and fishing poles and Madonna, the brood sow. The open part of the downstairs contains boats and stray concrete blocks and pieces of automobile and the vertical lines of plumbing. The family lives upstairs, in a number of airy connected rooms.

The trip from the airport took just under two hours, so when we drove into town, around four-thirty, the shadows were deep black and stretched out long from right to left ahead of us, making the sunny parts of town even brighter and more intense. Then we turned off onto the Tobóns' street and our only fellow traffic was dogs, mostly parked in the middle of the road. Arturo honked and yelled and laughed and steered around the dogs, who knew him and therefore ignored him, and parked beside the fuchsia house. In the sudden silence I could hear Madonna grunting her complaints the other side of the fuchsia wall beside me.

"Mi casa…
" Arturo said, and grinned at me, and raised an eyebrow, and waited.

"…
es su casa,"
I said, and pointed at him.

"And don't you forget it! Come on, let's have a beer."

We collected our luggage and went around to the outside staircase, to see Mamá and Papá crowded together in the doorway at the top, two short wide people grinning broadly and yelling at us in Spanish. Up we went, and dropped our luggage so we could be hugged and kissed, and then picked up the luggage again to take it to "our" room, a small corner storage room that was converted, sort of, to a bedroom whenever we'd visit. There we changed into shorts and tops and went back out to be handed our first beers.

We sat in the living room, a big airy space that got some morning sun but was cool and shady the rest of the day, soft breezes moving through the glassless windows in two walls. Arturo had gone to another room, but now he came back, carrying a white legal-size envelope. "Here you go, Felicio," he said.

With a flutter of excitement, I opened the envelope. The one piece of paper inside was thick and folded in thirds. I unfolded it, and looked at the birth certificate of Felicio Tobón de Lozano, born to Lucia Tobón de Lozano on July 12, 1970, in Mother of Mercy Hospital, Sabanon, Guerrera. Father, Alvaro Tobón Gutierrez. Birth weight, six pounds, one ounce.

We're going to do it, I thought. This makes it real.

Arturo laughed and whacked my shoulder. "Monday," he said, "we'll go up to San Cristobal, get your driver's license."

"Make me legal," I said.

Arturo thought that was very funny.

San Cristobal, like Sabanon, is a river town, but then again they're all river towns in this part of the Americas. Until the bulldozer was born, the rivers were the only roads through the jungle. San Cristobal is built on the Inarida, another Orinoco tributary, larger and slower and greener than the Guiainacavi. It's a border river, with the neighboring nation of Colombia across the way.

Our first goal Monday morning was the government administration building on the Avenida de los Americas downtown, a broad two-story gray concrete box with a veranda stretched along the street side. The building is, of course, air-conditioned, and right now I needed air-conditioning. I needed to dry my upper lip.

Arturo and I made our way down the long central hall to the men's room. There I dabbed my upper lip with paper towels until it was dry enough so Arturo could apply the spirit gum. Then, eyeing myself closely in the mirror above the sink, I attached the mustache.

It was bushy and dark brown, my mustache. I had bought it in a theatrical supply store in New York. Starting tomorrow, I would grow a mustache of my own. I couldn't have started it before now, but I needed photo ID right away.

"Looks great," Arturo said, peering over my shoulder at the mirror.

It changed me, it really did. My hair is dark brown like the mustache, and my eyes are dark, my nose snub, my jaw firm. Normally I look like almost any kind of American ethnic from Greek to Puerto Rican — I'm mostly black Irish, actually — but with this mustache I looked absolutely Guerreran.

Pity I couldn't sound Guerreran. Well, we'd deal with it.

The Motor Vehicle Department was farther down the hall, a doorway on the left. We went in and found that the room stretched away down to our right, beyond a chest-high counter. Two lines of people stood patiently waiting their turns in front of the two clerks behind the counter.

To our left, a chest-high shelf contained forms and pens, the pens chained to the shelf. Arturo and I went there, me bringing my new birth certificate out of my pocket, and Arturo chose a form and filled it in. When he was done, I signed it, with the new signature I'd been practicing the last two days:
Felicio Tobón de Lozano.
Then we joined one of the lines.

This first line took twenty-five minutes, during which I was sharply aware that I still had not quite broken any law. I could still back out of this, grab Lola, hop a plane, go back to Long Island, find some other way to solve our problems. (There was no other way.) But once I got to the counter, it would be too late.

Suddenly I was sure my mustache was slipping. I nudged Arturo, and when he looked at me I wiggled my mouth at him, to ask,
Is it okay?
He frowned massively, not getting my meaning. I touched two fingertips to the mustache, which felt very strange and bristly there, as though I had a woodchuck attached to my face, and he still gave me blank looks, so finally I leaned close to him and waggled my eyebrows as meaningfully as I possibly could and muttered, "Okay? S'okay?"

"Oh, sure," he said.

The couple on line ahead of us turned sadly away from the counter, and I could tell from their expressions they'd just had the experience universal in Motor Vehicle Departments the world over: they'd been sent home for more forms.

We stepped forward, and I gave the clerk my cheeriest smile along with my form, but then I felt the mustache strain against the flesh as I smiled, so I dialed down to mere comradeship. Meanwhile, beside me, Arturo had gone into the spiel.

It isn't going to work, I thought. Somewhere in this building are policemen, heavily armed policemen, and all of a sudden they're going to rush into this room and grab Arturo and me and drag us away to some basement somewhere and beat us with rubber truncheons they got from the CIA until we tell them everything, which will take about nine seconds. How could we possibly have thought we could get away with this?

While I was struggling to smile, and to keep my panic down inside, Arturo told our story to the clerk behind the counter. What he said was: I had laryngitis. I'd been working in Mexico for years and knew how to drive but didn't have my Mexican driver's license anymore, and was going to become my brother Arturo's partner in his taxicab business, but had to have a license first, and couldn't wait for the laryngitis to clear up before coming in to apply, because I have this big family to take care of, which Arturo (winking at the clerk) has no intention of supporting. And here's my form, filled out and signed. And here's Arturo's driver's license and his cabby license.

The clerk looked at my form. He looked at me; I coughed. He turned the form over, made a red X on one line, and slid it toward me, along with a pen. "Sign here," he said, too fast. I understood some of what people said, and most of what I read, but generally people talked too fast for me.

I signed:
Felicio Tobón de Lozano.
I did it fluidly, easily, as though I'd been doing it all my life. I returned form and pen to the clerk, and he compared the two signatures as though that would tell him something.

Without waiting to be asked, I brought out the birth certificate and opened it on the counter. The clerk looked at me, looked at the birth certificate, lowered his head over it for a minute, and then said,
"Gracias."

I moved my lips, nodding, and put the birth certificate away.

Next was the eye chart. I saw the clerk gesture toward it, as he spoke to the both of us, and I knew exactly what he was saying: "If you can't talk, how can you tell me what letters you see?"