The picture was of a young woman, at most a year or two older than I was now. She stood under the dappled shade of the yellow bell tree in the boarding-house yard. The picture had been taken at an angle, as if the photographer had knelt before her, so that about her face was a halo of blooms just starting to turn with, here and there, small seed pods already forming. She wasn’t dressed up for the occasion of the photograph yet her attitude seemed formal, an obeisance to the camera. She held her arms stiffly, without grace or purpose, by her sides. She was pretty with an open brown face and long black hair that had been swept to one side to lie flat against her shoulder like a curtain. She wasn’t smiling and looked, if not exactly unwilling, at least uncertain, unable to refuse. She didn’t look like a Morelos or a Lopez; her eyes lacked the self-assurance of the other portraits. Rather, she looked like any other pretty village girl with clothes slightly too big for her, her likeness snatched without ceremony. There was only the one photograph of her and I knew exactly which volume it was hidden in. I went straight to it now. I remembered details like that easily; it was me who Aunt Mary asked to fetch things she couldn’t find.
I was inspecting the girl’s picture when the sound of a key in the front door cracked the soft, still ochre of the room and, startled, I made to push it under a seat cushion. America walked into the sala. She took in the albums stacked on the piano, the one open on my lap, my hand sliding out of the upholstery. ‘Haven’t I enough to do without you making more of a mess?’ she said sulkily. She dropped the bag she had been carrying, pointed to it on the floor. I picked it up and carried it through to the kitchen. The bag smelled of fish. I unwrapped the grouper and baby squid and slipped them into bowls, covering them over with water. I left the bowls on the counter next to the sink. I was drying my hands when America burst through the kitchen door. ‘Have you any business at all looking at these, Mister?’ she said with unexpected ferocity. Her voice made me jump. ‘Where did you find it?’ She thrust a photograph at me, jerking it away again as I reached for it. The girl under the yellow bell tree. ‘The boys see it?’ I shook my head. ‘Tell the truth now!’ she shouted.
‘They haven’t been home all morning.’ My voice sounded wheedling. America glared at me. She stalked over to the Frigidaire and placed the photograph on top of it, pushing it as far back as she could. She had to stand on her tiptoes to do it. I looked away before she turned round again. She moved over to the counter and tossed the baby squid roughly into the sink. She turned the tap on full. Water spattered her blouse. I lurched forward and turned the tap down, retreating again quickly. America grabbed a knife. One by one she stabbed each squid between the eyes and squeezed out the ink, plunging them into the water to rinse them before dropping them back into the bowl. When she was done she moved away. I slid a plate over the top of the squid to cover them.
‘Who is she?’ I ventured.
‘I’ll tell her I caught you snooping,’ America said tautly without looking up. I didn’t repeat my question. America carried on working in silence, clattering dishes once or twice when I glanced over at the Frigidaire. Pretty soon I stopped looking, though I remained conscious of its white bulk as I moved round the kitchen during the afternoon.
In the morning, when I checked the top of the Frigidaire, the photograph of the girl under the yellow bell tree had gone. I looked, of course, through the albums a few days later, expecting to find it back in one of the sleeves, expecting that switching albums might represent the limits of America’s ingenuity. But I’d underestimated her, for there was no trace of it.
A Ride through the Backcountry
With his mother gone, Dub was scarcely to be seen at the Bougainvillea in the evenings. At first, America sent me out nightly to fetch him, but more often than not when I arrived at the garage it was locked, the windows dark. If Earl was still about, he’d profess ignorance even as he frowned up at the building opposite. At those times, I looked up at the balcony of BabyLu’s flat and usually the doors were open, a light on, sometimes music floating out into the evening.
Dub brought back more of her books for me, his eyes eager as he dropped them onto the kitchen table in the mornings before he left for work, waiting till America was out of the room. He told me how BabyLu put them aside in a pile near the door so she wouldn’t forget, as if he wanted me to think well of her even though we both knew she was Eddie Casama’s mistress. I was flattered by the books, by the knowledge that she thought of me at all, though I also knew they meant he always had an excuse to return to her.
With better claims upon his time, Dub’s bike grew dusty and even America remarked on the dulled chrome, the encrusted paintwork. She grew weary of worrying about him. She left it later and later before asking me to look for him, and then after a while she didn’t ask at all. The last time she sent me down to the garage neither of us expected I would actually find him, but when I arrived he was on the forecourt cleaning down the bike. It looked like its old self again. He smiled when he saw me and shot a glance across the road and up to BabyLu’s balcony. I followed his gaze to where she stood, watering her plants. ‘She wants me to take her out on it,’ he said. ‘She wants to feel what it might be like to leave town, even if it’s just to come back again later.’
I watched him work. He was careful with the machine, as he was with his guitar. I thought about how often Aunt Mary scolded him for shoving aside the antique figurines she’d brought back from Europe to make room for his drink, his keys, his helmet. I wondered how he was with BabyLu, whether he treated her as if she were fragile, irreplaceable.
We watched as BabyLu’s balcony doors closed and her curtains were drawn. A minute later she emerged from her apartment building and slipped quietly across the street. She had on jeans and a light jacket and her headscarf. She looked like an American movie starlet. Dub laughed when he saw her and reached out to pull at the knot of her scarf. I was startled by the familiarity, as was she. She jerked her head away and reproached him with her eyes, glancing along the street. But she was smiling as she removed her scarf and pushed it into her pocket to grasp the helmet he held out to her. She fiddled with the straps for a while and then, giving up, winked at me as she lifted her chin to let Dub fasten them, his fingertips as delicate as if he were picking out splinters. ‘Bye-bye, Jo-Jo,’ she trilled as she climbed on behind him, her voice cloying and comical, childish. I watched them ride away, waiting till they’d disappeared from sight before I started back to the boarding house.
The following day, Dub recounted how their evening had unfolded. He had taken her along the coast road as far as Little Laguna. She’d pulled faces at him in the rear-view mirrors all the way. At Little Laguna they’d taken a rowboat out to a floating bar to sip cocktails while the sun set over the water. When they returned to shore, they’d continued down the coast before cutting through the backwaters to ride through the villages back to Puerto. They’d stopped a few times for a cold drink at a roadside shack or for her to take a picture or disappear into the bushes to relieve herself. Afterwards they’d sat together for a while on the wall of a bridge to watch carabao carts laden with sugar cane or bamboo roll by and, in the distance, people walking across rice fields towards narrow plumes of smoke that rose from behind the treeline. I wondered if he’d glimpsed BabyLu the village girl then, however fleetingly, but of course it was too tender a question to voice. Dub’s first account of their evening stopped there and I thought he was simply being discreet. What he didn’t say then was that when they returned, as the bike cruised into Prosperidad, they saw Eddie’s Mercedes waiting in front of her building.