The Scared Stiff Read online

  She turned back to us, smiling sweetly, and said, “He’ll bring the car to the front.”

  “Thank you.”

  But we weren’t quite finished; she still had the VISA card authorization to go through. But enough juice remained in that account so there wasn’t any problem. She got her approval number over the phone and wrote it on the slip. Then I signed the slip, she stapled a bunch of papers together, put the resulting stack of documents into a folder, pressed the heel of her hand down onto the folder to establish the crease so it might stay shut, handed the folder to me, and said, “Enjoy your stay in Guerrera.”

  “I’m sure we will,” I said.

  “Your first time?”

  “Oh, no,” I told her. “We’ve been here before.”

  “Well, enjoy it anyway,” she said, which I thought cryptic, and the front door opened behind us, to show the same undershirted man, just as sweaty and dirty as before.

  This time, he was the one who barked out the remarks, while she listened poker-faced. She nodded when he was finished and said to us, “The car is here. The gasoline tank is full. If you bring it back full, there’s no additional charge; otherwise we charge three dollars and fifty-one cents U.S. per gallon.”

  Which was, in this particular case, not going to be an issue. But that was hardly a point I’d mention, was it? So I thanked her and gripped my rental contract folder, and Lola and I got smiling to our feet.

  The undershirted man held the front door open for us, then held the passenger door of the Beetle open for Lola. The little mounded vehicle was white and gleaming, like her outfit. It looked like an igloo that had skidded south.

  I got behind the wheel in the slightly cramped space and put my hand on the ignition. Before I started the engine I looked at Lola, who was looking at me. We were both very solemn. “Well,” I said, “looks like we’re gonna do it.”

  “Looks like,” she said.

  7

  The next day, Wednesday, I was back in the Impala with Arturo, this time headed for Rancio, way up north, and once again I was in my Guerreran clothing.

  The reason for this trip? There would soon come a time when I shouldn’t be in Sabanon but would still need somewhere to stay in Guerrera. Up in Rancio, it seemed, there was Cousin Carlos, extremely trustworthy. “You remember him from the wedding,” Arturo assured me.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He was there.”

  “Arturo, everybody was there.”

  “He’s Tia Mercedes’s son, a big guy, great big belly on him, long mustache that droops down next to his mouth.”

  “That’s half the cousins who were there,” I said.

  So finally he gave up. “You’ll remember him when you see him.”

  “Fine.”

  Well, I didn’t, but it hardly mattered. He remembered me from the wedding. “You put on some weight,” was the first thing he said to me.

  “I think you’re about the same,” I said, gazing at all that stomach in a formerly white T-shirt.

  What Cousin Carlos mostly looked like was a pillow that was trying to stand upright. From a thick balding head with a face even more stubbly than mine (plus that droopy mustache and ocher teeth), he proceeded downward and outward through meaty sloping shoulders to a virtual ski slope of a body. Tree-stump legs supported this mass of flab, so he looked both powerful and extremely out of shape. If you ran, he probably couldn’t catch you, but if he caught you, watch out.

  Cousin Carlos was in the auto parts business. He had a long low tin-roofed building that was one-sixth shop and five-sixths garage doors. Two of the garage doors were open when we arrived, with trucks and truck parts scattered inside and out and half a dozen grease monkeys — and never had that phrase seemed more appropriate — roaming over the mess as though trying to remember what the trucks had looked like when they were all in one piece.

  Rancio, being the smallest and poorest part of a three-nation border with Colombia and Venezuela, mostly supports itself by smuggling, and I had no doubt that Cousin Carlos’s auto parts business was more or less a front, but it did look like an active and prosperous one.

  Once Arturo had introduced us and we’d admired each other’s form, Cousin Carlos squinted at the huge sun high in the sky and said, “Let’s go eat.”

  “Good,” I said.

  He turned to yell what sounded like dire threats at his crew, who blinked at him and scratched their behinds with their screwdrivers. Then he walked off down the dusty street, and Arturo and I followed.

  The chief characteristic of most Guerreran towns, it seems to me, is dogs, but the chief characteristic of Rancio is motorcycles. Also mopeds and motorbikes. Everywhere in Rancio you can hear them, a block away, on the other side of the house, zipping past, or just idling in front of a bodega. And the ones that aren’t in motion are usually upside down in the roadway, being worked on by the owner and half his family.

  Cousin Carlos walked us through about five blocks of this, during which I began to believe I’d never be able to hear again. But then he stopped at a whitewashed board wall, ten feet high, with razor wire along the top, a full block wide. He had a key for the whitewashed door in the middle of this wall, which he unlocked; he stepped inside and looked back for us to follow. So we did.

  Quite a contrast. Here we had a low plain white stucco house of the style you see in the better Florida developments, with a redbrick patio between it and the wall, flanked on both sides by tall lush tropical plantings: many bright flowers, many huge leaves. The inside of the wall was painted a light brown, and abstract metal sculptures had been fastened to it here and there.

  “Very nice,” I said, and I meant it.

  “Better around back,” he said, and led the way to the left, where a path went around the house, flanked by more wall.

  The back was an even bigger surprise, because here was a green lawn, and there was the river. It wasn’t a swimming river, so where the wall ended in the shallows on each side, razor wire had been strung, in several coiled lines, just beneath the surface of the water. This was a viewing river. Seated here, you could view it without the slightest worry that anything out there would come ashore to view you back.

  In addition to well-tended green lawn, the rear of the house also featured a small and sparkly swimming pool, all light blue interior and pink stone surround, and another patio, this one shaded by a large blue-and-white canvas awning. A white plastic table and six white plastic chairs stood on the patio.

  Cousin Carlos waved toward the patio. “Sit,” he said, and went on into the house.

  Arturo and I sat. “This is a hell of a great place,” I said. “Is this where I’ll stay?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, and grinned and pointed a finger at me. “Mi casa…”

  “… Es his casa,” I finished, jabbing a thumb toward the house.

  “Very good, hermano,” he said, and he smiled, approving of me.

  I said, “Do I talk money with him?”

  “No no no, I did that,” he said. “Mostly, he isn’t doing it for the money anyway, he’s doing it for family. I told him, you’re working a little scam; when it’s done you’re gonna get a whole shitload of money, and he gets forty million.”

  “Siapas,” I said.

  “Well, yeah, sure. Two hundred bucks, right? That’s around forty million.”

  “It’s easy to be a millionaire in Guerrera,” I said, and Arturo laughed.

  An older woman came out of the house then, clearly a servant, heavyset and waddling, dressed in a white apron over an ankle-length black dress. In thick gnarled hands she carried plates and snowy napkins and silverware. She set the table for three, then said, to both of us, “¿Cerveza?”

  “Si,” we both said, and she nodded and went away.

  Arturo grinned at me. “You learned that word pretty good.”

  I knew what he meant, but I said, “Si?”

  “Cerveza,” he said. “Gimme another cerveza.”

  “Here it comes now.�
��

  Heineken; very nice. Cousin Carlos didn’t pay for all this stuff from his auto parts business.

  Arturo and I sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, drinking our Heineken from the bottle, watching the lazy river, and then Cousin Carlos came out in better pants and a guayabera shirt that on him looked like a balloon just starting to lose its air. He was carrying his own Heineken bottle. Plopping heavily down into another chair at the table, he said, “I ain’t goin’ back there today. Fuck ‘em. I hate the fuckin’ place, Arturo, but when I don’t go there I get bored. And those assholes I got workin’ there…” He shook his head.

  Sounding mildly interested, Arturo said, “Yeah? Who’s that? I didn’t see anybody working there.”

  “Yeah yeah,” Cousin Carlos said, and to me he added, “You like guacamole?”

  “I love guacamole.”

  “Good, ‘cause that’s what we’re havin’.”

  Arturo said, “Where’s Maria?” To me he explained, “Carlos’s wife.”

  “Up in Caracas,” Cousin Carlos said. “She’ll come back the weekend. She’s got her dealer up there.”

  “I’m sorry I’m gonna miss her,” Arturo said. “Maybe next time.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Dealer, I thought. Drug dealer? Arms dealer? Who are these people? Is Arturo certain I can trust them? Am I certain I can trust Arturo? Maybe Lola and I should have one more discussion about this.

  The servant woman came out again, with one big bowl nested among three little bowls. She put the little bowls around on our plates and ladled guacamole for us from the big bowl, then left the big bowl in the middle of the table and waddled away again.

  We didn’t stand on ceremony here. Cousin Carlos leaned his head over the table, tilted the bowl up with one hand, grabbed his tablespoon with the other hand, and started shoveling. Arturo did a modified version of the same thing — that is, a bit more civilized — and I did a modified version of what Arturo was doing.

  The servant woman came back with a plate of tortillas; we ate them. She came back with more beer; we drank it. She came back with a big platter of fried chicken legs; we ate them. Meanwhile, she was taking away the empties, and now she brought more beer; we all sat back and belched and considered the river. Life seemed good. I wasn’t even very much worried about the missing Maria’s dealer.

  After a few minutes, Cousin Carlos roused himself a little, like a cloud changing shape, and I saw that he was thinking about his responsibilities as a host. He frowned at me and said, “You want coffee?”

  I looked at him. “For what?”

  He considered that. “Clean your teeth,” he decided.

  I pondered that concept: coffee as a tooth-cleaning agent. It almost seemed to make sense. “Nah,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”

  “De nada,” he said, which was perfectly true.

  We spent some more time contemplating the day. I was reaching the stage where the low flat green movement of the river was becoming a metaphor for life itself — I was becoming stunned into philosophy, in other words — when Cousin Carlos, looking at the river, said, “You comin’ here soon?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, and roused myself. I sat up more straight in my chair, became businesslike. “By the weekend,” I said. “At least I hope so. It depends on a lot of things.”

  “De nada,” Cousin Carlos said.

  Arturo said, “I’ll phone you when.”

  “De nada,” Cousin Carlos said, and the servant woman came out, looking faintly worried or aggravated or upset. She stood next to Cousin Carlos’s chair, bent forward as though she were in church, and muttered some things to him.

  Cousin Carlos at first looked startled, then irritated, then fatalistic. He shrugged and grumbled something, and the servant woman bowed even more deeply and went away, rubbing her hands in a fretful manner, as though she’d been told to go get the doctor.

  Cousin Carlos looked over at me. “You get to practice,” he said, and touched his finger to his lips.

  Oh, good: a dress rehearsal, completely unexpected, and me half zonked from beer and sun and heat. But what the hell, I was going to have to do this eventually, so why not start now?

  The plan was, I intended to stay at this house of Cousin Carlos for any length of time from one week to three, depending how things progressed in the outer world and how my mustache was coming along. During that time, I would have to pretend to be Guerreran, because I couldn’t exactly be hidden, in a small town like this, even behind Cousin Carlos’s fine privacy wall, and I certainly couldn’t present myself as the mysterious American. Which meant I had to be a Guerreran who, somehow, didn’t speak fluent Guerreran Spanish.

  Okay. The story was that I was Ernesto Lopez (chosen because I could both pronounce it and remember it), an old friend of Cousin Carlos from his days in Ecuador, managing the Coca-Cola plant, and that now I was a deaf mute as an after-effect of syphilis. The syphilis was cured now and I was getting back on my feet and would only be staying with my old friend — compadre — Carlos until I got a job and my own place.

  The syphilis part wasn’t my idea, it was Arturo’s. He said it gave the story believability, that anybody in Guerrera would understand a person might have some lingering problems after syphilis. I think the real reason for that detail was that Arturo is a smart aleck, but what was I going to do? Go along. I went along.

  So now the story would be told for the first time, and we would all see how it flew. I felt suddenly very nervous, full of stage fright, and I didn’t want to turn around to look at the house when this visitor should come out, but there came a moment when Cousin Carlos and Arturo both stood up and turned around, so I did too.

  My first thought was: I don’t want this woman to think I have syphilis. She was a beauty, probably in her mid-twenties, black-haired, chisel-cheeked, with a generous red mouth and large dark fiery eyes. Her body was hard and tightly curved, as though it had been constructed to contain electricity. She looked like Lola crossed with a panther, and I thought, Oh, my!

  She came out of the house prancing, as though going onstage, which maybe is what she was doing. She fell all over Cousin Carlos with hugs and kisses, which he accepted with small nods and small smiles, patting her in safe spots. Then she suddenly discovered the presence of Arturo and fell all over him with hugs and kisses, and Arturo wrapped her in a bear hug, lifted her feet off the ground, and bit her neck until she squealed. Then he released her, grinning and whacking her on the behind, and she turned, disheveled, giddy, delighted, having the time of her life, to discover me.

  She almost fell all over me too with hugs and kisses — I could see the automatic response gathering in her eyes and her mouth and her shoulder muscles — and then she realized she had no idea who I was.

  And why should she? Even assuming she were somehow another relative, another cousin, who had been at our wedding, that was fourteen years ago. She would have been in her early teens, at most, and she was unlikely to remember much about the gringo groom from way back then. And even if she did have some memory of that former me, this present me, unshaven and shabbily dressed, would not serve as much of a reminder.

  So she didn’t know who I was, but this woman was direct: she asked me. I could more or less make out the words, in her rattle-quick Guerreran, as she looked directly at me, and I was so disorganized and surprised that I almost spoke. I don’t know what I thought I was going to say, but I could feel the words welling up, and just in time I clamped my lips shut and gave Carlos a wide-eyed look, as though to say, Who is this, and what does she want?

  Cousin Carlos took her near arm and started to explain. Arturo wrapped an arm over her shoulder, folded his hand against her side next to her breast, and did his own share of the explanation. Surprise crossed her very mobile face, and then pity for the poor deaf mute — I smiled bravely — and then — oh, yes, I could tell when Arturo, that bastard, got to the syphilis. You could see her knees press together.

  After that, I was
more or less left out of the conversation, which was what we’d wanted, wasn’t it? We all sat at the table, and more beer was brought out, including one for our new guest. We sat in an arc behind the table, so we could all see the river, with the woman at one end and me at the other, Arturo next to me. The three chatted, enjoying one another, she going on with a great deal of animation, and I sat and watched her. From time to time she’d catch my eye and toss a quick smile in my direction, like one flower petal out of a basket, and then she’d concentrate again on the other two.

  We drank that beer, and then all at once Cousin Carlos heaved himself to his feet and made a pronouncement that seemed to me to be saying, one way or another, “The party’s over.”

  The woman pouted prettily but then also got to her feet, and so did Arturo and I. Arturo gave her another bear hug and bite and gestured to me that we were leaving.

  For the hell of it, I stuck out my hand to her. She hesitated, just the fraction of a second, then showed her own brave smile as she took my hand in her strong narrow fingers and gave it one strong shake. I smiled my gratitude, and as I turned to shake hands with Cousin Carlos (who had no trouble with the concept), I noticed the woman was now holding her right hand out from her side, and her smile was more fixed than before.

  I smiled and nodded farewell to Cousin Carlos, who merely nodded at me, not being a man to waste his smiles. He and Arturo said a word or two, and then Arturo and I departed, taking again the path around the side of the house. As we left the lawn area, I looked back, and it seemed to me the woman was just turning toward the swimming pool. I knew what she was going to do: rinse that hand in chlorinated water.

  I followed Arturo around the house and through the door in the wall and out to the grubby street again, full of the sounds of motorcycles. We walked along toward Cousin Carlos’s shop and the Impala, and I said, “I just wish it didn’t have to be syphilis.”

  Arturo laughed. “She got to you, hermano. I knew she would!”