But what Annie saw in front of her now was a coati. Not very small and probably old, the coati, like all the inhabitants of the urban forest, was obsessed with a trash can. With its hind legs at the base and its tiny hands stuck into the opening that might be hiding the remains of cookies and sandwiches, the animal let its long, striped tail slide along the base of the trash can while it impatiently slipped into the orange box. Of course, the children and the tourists nearby didn’t miss the opportunity. “A coati in the trash,” they said, and smiled, though slightly perturbed by the intrusion of all that street garbage into the routine of a wild animal. As if they weren’t precisely the ones, Annie thought, who made the trash can what it is. The coati, dizzy now, with a final effort succeeded in grabbing the contents out of the top part of the trash can — that is, an enormous wad of plastic bags, cups, and bottles smelling like a rotting picnic — which exploded and scattered onto the ground. The children clapped and the tourists accelerated their picture taking until the animal left with its morsel and the audience dispersed in boredom.
Annie was disturbed. They’re amused by the mess the coati makes and never think about the fact that it’s not the coati who’s going to clean it up. They find it reasonable, as long as they don’t have to bother with anything besides transferring the photos to their computers. Because some things had survived from the years Annie lived in Oregon, and this was one — walking angrily to the mess, she began picking it up item by item and depositing it back into the trash can. The cups with the remains of orange juice and the napkins with scraps of ham disgusted her, naturally, but caused nothing close to the shock she experienced when she discovered a human finger wrapped in a piece of paper that had fallen from a plastic bag.
She’d opened the paper carefully and, realizing that a new phase was beginning for her, observed the relatively fresh, though purplish, index finger with its dark nail and the stump of bone emerging from the other end. Some dried bloodstains were interrupted by the folds of skin, as if the finger, after being covered in its own blood, were still able to move. Annie lightly nudged one of the stains, and the dark red skin came off in her hand, occupying a small area of her own index finger as if it had come from there. It was fascinating. She would never again see, for no reason, by sheer luck — or not exactly luck, but chance, improbability — what she was seeing now. A finger that no longer belonged to any human being, that would remain there, among the coati’s paws and the remains of food, until garbagemen hauled it away and made it disappear. This finger doesn’t have an owner anymore, she thought, and it will be mine. She rewrapped it in the paper and threw the rest of the refuse into the trash can. Walking with determination, holding the object between her fingers, with a challenging expression for any forest ranger who might have witnessed her actions, she headed for the park exit and then to Jonas’s house.
“Want some more, Annie?”
It was almost ready when she arrived. Jonas was putting the finishing touches on the lines on the glass table and was rolling a ten-dollar bill to offer to the girl. Happy at the coincidence — “You always show up when I’m ready to take a hit,” said Jonas, “you sense it” — Annie placed the finger on the other end of the table to avoid getting powder on it. She positioned the bill to snort the first line at the same time that Jonas noticed that finger in the napkin and wondered what the hell he was doing fucking and providing cocaine to a crazy gringa like her.
Deep in concentration, it was only after the second line that Annie perceived the puzzled gaze of the man before her. She smiled slightly, kissed him, and took the finger from him.
“I found it this morning on my walk,” she said, while caressing the bloodstains on the dry skin and then Jonas’s still-cool skin. “It was in a trash can.”
The man listened to the rest of the story with a degree of skepticism. It was inconceivable that she actually wanted to keep the finger in the refrigerator. “Annie, that’s part of someone’s body.”
She didn’t seem very shocked. She wanted to find out whose finger it was, that was all. A nut job. Jonas hugged her tightly because after all she was sexy, though crazy, and he asked her to wash her hands before taking hold of his dick.
Annie agreed to this request, but she couldn’t accept throwing the finger away. She preferred to find a plastic container for it and place it in the freezer. Then she commented that Jonas was a good person.
“I was very lucky to run into someone like you for this.”
He felt it better not to ask whether “this” was primarily the amount of cocaine he had been supplying her in recent weeks, or the sex, or something else that he would never discover. In any case, Annie was well supplied with coke for the day, and with the finger comfortably in the freezer she felt at ease to pay with what might be the best blow job in Jonas’s life. They learn quickly, he thought, and know how to use it to their advantage. Because Annie, seeing the right moment to repeat the question of half an hour earlier, swallowed the rest of the cum and began to speak as serenely as her state of lethargy would allow.
“You really don’t know anyone who might know where the finger came from?” she asked craftily as if she were going to suck it again, and he had no way out but to sigh, stroke her hair, and reply: “There’s a guy missing a finger who sells me blow. But it’s his pinky, and yours is an index finger.”
Even so, she seemed sufficiently interested, and before Jonas knew it he had promised to take her with him to the favela on his next buy.
He usually went up the hillside a few times a week. He tried to organize orders so he could go less often, but new orders could appear suddenly and he never wanted to miss the chance to make a quick deal. Especially now that Annie, having come into his life out of nowhere, consumed nearly as much as the powder ought to be generating.
But Annie was worth it. A bit weird with that talk about always recovering, true, but goddamn, what a body, and she knew how to use what she had, knew how to rub her hard nipples against him until he said, “Of course, sweetheart, we’ll go up the hill together so you can see a man missing a finger while you hide your pet finger in your pocket.”
It was a house like any other. As if at any moment a kindly grandmother would appear in the living room with a bowl of beans and chicken. Instead of that, two powerfully built men with all their fingers offered Jonas a taste of the new shipment. If he had been a gentleman and ceded the offer to Annie, she would have accepted. But he was the one who had to judge what he was about to buy, and she made an effort to keep quiet and concentrate on the fingers of the men in front of her while grasping the finger in her pocket. Smiling, one of the men came over and asked Annie if she loved Jonas. Because she didn’t understand a word he said, she just smiled back as if she in fact did love him. Jonas, even with his back turned at the moment, was surprised by the question, and the sudden reminder of the blow jobs in recent weeks lightly stiffened his cock. The man then asked if she was afraid of losing him. Annie smiled again in her easy ignorance, but Jonas, distracted, didn’t hear the question.
In the final analysis, it wasn’t a good idea to stay in that country without speaking a single word of the language, and that was why Jonas brought up the subject when they were back at home and she was sucking him again.
“Are you sure you don’t want to learn to speak Portuguese?”
His expression was too serious for Annie to simply smile and go wash the cum out of her mouth as if she didn’t have to speak anything, not even Portuguese. So she became serious too and, a bit tired of so many blow jobs, replied: “I’m not going to take any classes.”