“I’m all right,” Innocent said, with a strange kind of dawdling emphasis. “I’ve had a very strange day, Kirby.”
Kirby ruefully touched his shoulder, where Innocent’s bullet had kissed him. “Haven’t we all,” he said. Around them, the Indians conducted their own conversations in their own language, nodding or smiling at Kirby and Innocent in hospitable incomprehension from time to time. Tommy and Luz were at some other fire, waiting for Rosita to give up and come home.
“This morning,” Innocent said, “I was in despair. Would you believe that, Kirby?”
“You seemed a little hot under the collar.”
“That, too. But it was mostly despair. When I got out of bed this morning, Kirby, I was prepared to throw my entire life away.”
“Not to mention mine.”
“Mine, Kirby,” Innocent insisted, but still with that same new languid manner. “I didn’t take my laps in the pool this morning,” he said. “Can you imagine that?”
“I guess not.”
“I never skip my laps in the pool. I didn’t eat breakfast. I didn’t eat lunch.”
“Okay,” Kirby said. “That’s a couple of things I can’t imagine.”
“It was love that did it to me, Kirby. At my age, after all these years, I fell in love.”
“With Valerie Greene?”
“Strange thing,” Innocent said, “until just now I couldn’t even use the word. Love. I could say I missed her, I was angry about her loss, I liked the idea of her, but I couldn’t use the word love. I could plan to shoot you because of it, but I couldn’t say it. Plan to throw my entire life away without ever saying that word.”
“My God, Innocent,” Kirby said, “you’ve had an epiphany.”
“Is that what it is? Feels pretty good.” Innocent smiled and sipped a bit from the jar.
“But,” Kirby said, hesitating, not wanting to spoil Innocent’s good mood or changed personality or whatever the hell this was, “but, Innocent, are you sure? I mean, how well did you know Valerie Greene?”
“How well do I have to know her? Kirby, if I knew her better, would it make me love her more?”
“It wouldn’t me,” Kirby said, remembering his own less than satisfactory last sight of Valerie Greene.
“I spent one afternoon with her,” Innocent said. “Just Platonic, you know.”
“You didn’t have to say that, Innocent,” Kirby said comfortably.
Innocent chuckled. “I suppose I didn’t. Anyway, I expected to see her again, and it didn’t happen. I was thirsty, and the water went away.”
“You’re a wonder, Innocent,” Kirby said. “I never knew you were a romantic.”
“I never was a romantic. Sitting here now, thinking about it, I think maybe that’s what was wrong. I was never a romantic, never once in my life. Do you know why I married my wife?”
“No.”
“Her father had the money I needed to buy a certain piece of land.”
“Come on, Innocent, there must have been more to it than that. There were other girls with fathers with money.”
“There were two other potential buyers for the land,” Innocent said. “I didn’t have time to fool around.”
“So why Valerie Greene?”
“Because,” Innocent said, “there was nothing in it for anybody concerned. She’s an honest girl, Kirby, she’s the most completely honest girl I ever met in my life. And smart. And earnest. And something more than just out for a good time. But the main thing is, no matter what she does, where she is, what’s going on, she’s always one hundred percent honest.”
“You know a lot about somebody you spent one afternoon with,” Kirby pointed out.
“I do, that’s right.” Innocent smiled, remembering something or other. “She wants to give happiness and receive happiness,” he said. “She’s not out to buy or sell anything. She doesn’t try to get an edge.”
“You’ve got it bad,” Kirby told him.
“I’ve got it good,” Innocent said. “And now that I believe you and these people here, now that I’m in this nowhere little nothing village and I know for sure Valerie’s out there, not far, not dead, now that I know she’s not dead, it’s just fine, isn’t it?”
“If you say so.”
“She’ll be back,” Innocent said. “Some time tomorrow she’ll be found, these eyes will look at her, this mouth will say, ‘Hello, Valerie.’” He beamed in anticipated pleasure.
“Innocent,” Kirby said, with wonder in his eyes and in his voice, “you’ve regained your innocence.”
Innocent pleasantly laughed. “I suppose I have. Never knew I had one to lose. Kirby, maybe this would have happened anyway, maybe it’s that man’s change of life thing, but it needed somebody good to bring it out, and that was Valerie. This is a whole new person you’re looking at, Kirby.”
“I believe you,” Kirby said.
“He was tucked away inside me all the time, I never knew it.”
“The love of a good woman, huh?”
“Go ahead and laugh, Kirby, that’s okay.”
“I’m not laughing, Innocent,” Kirby told him, in almost total sincerity. “I think it’s great. So this is the Innocent I’ll be seeing around Belize City from now on, is it?”
Innocent’s smile was sleepy, comfortable, self-confident. “I know better than that, Kirby,” he said.
“You mean it won’t last?”
Innocent said, “Kirby, did you ever visit someplace that was really nice, a place that made you happy, so you started to think maybe you’d like to just stay there forever?”
“Sure.”
“But then after a while you realize it isn’t your place, you don’t fit in except as a visitor, you don’t belong there and you never will. So you go home, where you do belong, and where you’re happy most of the time because it’s the right place where you ought to be.”
“Okay, Innocent.”
“From time to time,” Innocent said, “you remember that other place, and how nice it was to visit, but you don’t make the mistake of thinking you can go back and live there. So that’s what’s happening now, Kirby. I’m visiting some other me, a real nice me that I never knew before.” That lazy smile softened Innocent’s features once more. “But don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll go home to the real me when the time comes.”
“In that case,” Kirby said, now completely sincere, “I’m glad I was here to meet the other fella.”
16
Pillow Talk
Voices. Murmuring voices.
Valerie opened her right eye and followed the progress of an ant as it tottered along the dark damp ground, carrying a big piece of chewed-off leaf above itself like a green sail. Her left cheek was pressed against that ground, so her left eye remained closed, while her right eye tracked the ant and her right ear received the input of those murmuring voices without attempting to decipher.
Mouth: dry. Body: extremely stiff. Head: painful. Knees: stinging. Hair: matted. Brain: semiconscious.
Her right arm was bent up at some little distance from her face, lying on the ground, leaving a miniature arena in which that ant-sail bobbed as though on a dark brown lake. Valerie watched the pale green triangle until it reached her thumb, reversed, turned right, reached the knuckle at the base of her thumb, reversed, turned left, and carried on out of sight, into the great large ocean of the world.