‘Sure,’ said Dub unhappily.
She gave him a long look. ‘This evening is important to me,’ she said. ‘If you can’t behave graciously, you may have your dessert in the kitchen, if America has room for you.’
Dub didn’t return to the table but slipped up to his room and closed the door. He didn’t answer when I took a plate of America’s sponge up to him and I brought it down with me again. A little later, I heard the front door close and the sound of a motorbike engine, but the voices in the dining room continued without pause and Aunt Mary didn’t emerge.
I was kept busy in the kitchen, brewing coffee and clearing up with America. Every now and then America and I paused in our work and glanced at each other when we heard the voices rise to a crescendo, but we couldn’t make out what was being said.
Eddie Casama and Connie left early. I read the disappointment in Aunt Mary’s face and understood that nothing had been resolved. She walked upstairs to Dub’s room and pushed the door open and when she came downstairs her mouth was a thin line. ‘Did he say where he might be heading?’ she asked me. I shook my head. And then she asked me what I knew, whether her son was seeing a woman, whether there was some connection with Edgar Casama. And, for the first time, I lied to her and knew that she saw it. She looked at me, through me, and then without another word she left the kitchen and retired to her study.
View from the Headland
Two days after Eddie Casama ate at our table, Dub came to see me in my room. He stooped a little as he stepped through the door. He’d never set foot in it before and I saw his surprise as he looked about him. ‘Not much of a window,’ he said. ‘I’d go crazy. It’s like a … ’ He glanced at me, reddened.
‘I don’t spend so much time in here,’ I lied.
He threw a book onto the bed next to me. ‘She said you had to read this one.’ I glanced at the upside-down cover, recognised a detail from Picasso’s Guernica, a painting that Benny had marked in one of his mother’s art books. I touched the book lightly. If Dub hadn’t been there, I might have raised it to my face, sniffed it. The Age of Reason. It looked like a serious book and I was flattered. I’d read everything she’d sent me, even rehearsed opinions on them in case she ever asked, though of course she never did.
Dub moved further into the room and I was conscious of an urge to shrink back against the wall to accommodate him. He sat down against the wall, in the same spot Benny had occupied, and stretched his legs out, pushing his feet into my bedding. I’d been reading when he came in and he smiled at the book already in my hand. Dub had little interest in books. He was too alive, too connected to the world to need to evade it. ‘Good?’ he asked, looking away again before I answered.
‘Sure,’ I shrugged, though I was only a few pages into it and, my thoughts still in thrall to the last book I’d read, I was disinclined to enter a new world just yet. I thought how if he’d been Benny I’d have said as much.
‘One of hers?’ Dub’s voice softened. I’d noticed before that he never referred to BabyLu by name when he spoke about her with me; she was our only common ground.
‘One of your mom’s actually.’ He frowned up at the doorway at the mention of his mother. He didn’t say anything for a while. I listened for any sounds coming down the passageway. I’d left America in the kitchen but I couldn’t swear she was asleep; it was too quiet.
‘You want to go for a spin?’ Dub said suddenly.
‘Now?’
‘Sure, why not. America’s sleeping out there. Mom’s in her study.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What don’t you know? How to have fun?’
I stared at him, surprised. Then I stood up.
America opened her eyes as we came out of the passageway and watched us, silently, as we crossed the kitchen, her eyes slitted like a cat’s. I pretended not to notice. She’d looked fed up all evening, banishing me to my room a little earlier than usual, but I wondered now if she’d wait up just so she could grill me when I got back. I didn’t care; I’d never been on a motorbike before.
Dub wheeled the bike out onto Esperanza before starting the engine. I locked the gate behind us. He held out a helmet, the same one he’d given to BabyLu. It still smelled of her. It was tight as I pulled it on and I struggled for a while with the straps, as she had done. Dub, already astride the bike, glanced back at me, his foot tapping lightly against the gear lever. I gave up and climbed on behind him, the straps hanging loose under my chin.
We cruised down Esperanza and took the coast road out towards Little Laguna. Out here, the street lights fell away and the night swamped in towards us, submerging us. The road became coy, revealing itself only by degrees in the headlight. The wind tugged at us and I clung to Dub as BabyLu must have done. He slowed down. I took a long, deep breath. The smell of the sea was sharp and clean. I felt fully awake, exhilarated.
Ahead of us a signboard floated in the darkness, marking the way to Little Laguna Beach, but Dub sped up as we neared it. I wasn’t disappointed; I didn’t want to stop at all. A minute later he slowed again and turned onto a short track that pointed towards the headland. The track was uneven and the bike crawled along, the wheels crunching over sand and shingle. Soon enough we stopped and Dub turned off the engine. He looked over his shoulder at me, waited as I dismounted first. I was still in my shorts, my legs stiff with cold, and I moved slowly, clumsily, back from the bike. Around us the blackness seemed almost solid, as if I might reach out and at any instant encounter its surface. I could barely make out my feet.
Dub left the bike’s headlight on and we followed the path it cut, our shadows sliding ahead of us over the rocks. We climbed a short way over the boulders and, as the light thinned, we stopped, settling ourselves side by side to look out over the sweep of the bay. Down below, the lights of Little Laguna were strung like beads in the darkness and overhead the sky was crammed with stars. It was nothing like the stretch of coast at Esperanza, punctuated by the jetty and lined with shacks.
The wind was playful, capricious. It smoothed Dub’s hair down over his face, gusted it away again. He started talking, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of wind and sea. He talked about Little Laguna, about the bars, the sunsets, about women in bikinis or in diving suits, about fights he’d seen, about freshly caught fish still struggling in buckets sold to foreigners on the beach at sundown. As he talked, I watched the lights down below. Little Laguna Beach was no more than five kilometres out of town along the coast road, a fifteen-minute ride in a jeepney from the jetty. I’d never been.
He fell silent and stared into the distance, and I knew that he’d brought her here too. ‘She sat right there,’ he said, ‘where you are now. The night I took her for a ride. We were gone maybe three hours. He was supposed to be away on business but when we came back his car was in the street. You know, when she saw it she wanted me to ride on but I wasn’t afraid of him so I pulled up. The car was empty. He was already upstairs. Well, he owns the place, I guess. His driver was on the sidewalk, leaning against the bonnet like John Wayne, rolling his sleeves up like he was getting ready to get his hands dirty. I wanted to go up with her but she wouldn’t let me. When she handed back the helmet, she pushed it into me so hard I almost fell off the sidewalk.’ His hand came to his chest, rubbing it lightly at the remembered sensation. He sat up a little straighter. ‘His driver looked me up and down but he didn’t come over.’