“No, Luz, thank you, but no, I can’t...”
I can’t go live with Luz, with her bouncing around, falling out of her clothes all the time, telling me she likes to fuck. I’m true to Lola, like I discussed it with Maria, but that doesn’t mean I have to torture myself.
She leaned toward me, just to emphasize the problem. “What else you gonna do?” she asked me. “I’m tellin’ you the truth, Felicio. See? I’m even callin’ you Felicio.”
“Thank you.”
“You stay here,” she said, “you gonna die. For real. Where else you gonna go?”
I looked away from her, as an aid to thought. Where else would I go? Maybe it was true, I was going to have to hide out with Luz until I could figure out something else. Maybe get a message to Arturo, have him come pick me up, hide me somewhere safe. Safer.
I said, “You want me to go with you now?”
“Not now,” she said. “They all around, those guys, they see you in the car, they gonna come get you. Wait till tonight. After Carlos go to bed tonight, you come out. You know where he keep that big car?”
“Sure, across the street.”
“Next to it, on that side,” she said, and waved a breast as she pointed, “is just dirt. I’m there in my car, orange Honda Civic.”
“What time?”
“Whenever,” she said. An accommodating girl. “I come around ten, you come out after Carlos goes to bed. You don’ wanna have to tell him where you goin’.”
“You’re right about that,” I said.
She jumped to her feet, shrugged her breasts back into the blouse, and as I also stood she grabbed my hand in both of hers and said, “I’m really sorry. Felicio. I don’ want nobody gets hurt.”
“I feel that way too,” I assured her, and disengaged my hand.
She started away, then turned back and shook her head and other parts and said, “You know, Felicio, every time I think, Well, now I know how stupid men can be, I’m wrong. They always stupider.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“See you tonight,” she said, and bounced out of there, and I went the other way to jump headfirst into the pool, causing the water to steam.
Jesus H. Christ on a crutch.
22
There was a car over there, in the darkness beside that building, its headlight glass picking up a glint from the streetlight down at the corner. In Rancio, as in most Guerreran towns, there are public lights only at intersections, so the mid-blocks tend to be very dark.
Still, I felt exposed out here. The street side of the wall around Carlos’s property was whitewashed, and even in the darkness it seemed to me I must make a clear silhouette against it. But I forced myself to move slowly, to shut the outer door carefully, silently. In my other hand I held the cardboard suitcase, my only weapon of defense. Which meant, if I was attacked, I was dead.
The door was closed. I released the knob. I did not run across the street, but I strode fast.
Yes, that was a Honda Civic in the darkness, and by day it was probably orange. At the moment, it was merely metallic and dark, with a person at the wheel. I opened the passenger door, and the interior light leaped on, and it was Luz, wearing blue jeans cut off at the hip and a very tight white T-shirt that said LECHE in large red letters across the front.
“Hello,” I whispered, and shoved the suitcase onto the minimal seat in back.
“Get in, get in.” She sounded like a violin tuned too high.
I got in and shut the door, bringing darkness back, and immediately she started the engine, with a great grinding noise they could probably hear all the way to Brasilia. Then she put it in gear, and the car lurched forward and stalled. She said a word that contained one jagged syllable.
I said, “Luz, take it easy, nobody can see us.”
“I heard that one before,” she said, and started the car again, with the same racket, and this time managed to move it forward.
I wanted to settle her down some before she ran us into a tree. Trying to sound nothing but calm and serene, I said, “I really appreciate this, Luz. Thank you.”
“Lemme get us outa town,” she said, spinning the wheel and accelerating down the dark street. “Then we be okay.”
I twisted around to look back at the neighborhood we were leaving and saw no one, nothing. The time was a little after eleven on a Wednesday night, and Rancio was asleep.
Luz made a fast turn at the next corner, and only then did she switch on the headlights, which meant the dashboard lights came on as well. I looked at her, shoulder to shoulder in this small car, as she concentrated fiercely on the street ahead. My own concentration was a bit more scattered. Leche means milk in Spanish; spelled with a slight difference, it means something else in English.
Napalma, where Luz lived, was another town along the Inarida River, like Rancio and San Cristobal. It was beyond San Cristobal, another seventy-five miles of meandering road alongside the meandering river, and a few miles after San Cristobal it gives up being asphalt to become dirt. Napalma is the end of the road. Not a happy thought.
Luz’s tension continued until we were well out of Rancio, and even then she would clench up at every sight of headlights, either behind us or in front. Fortunately, there was very little traffic. It was clear that nobody was following us, nobody knew what Luz was up to, but she was extremely nervous anyway. I thought she probably knew her own cousins well enough that all this fear was justified, so I didn’t try to argue her out of it.
There was little conversation until we got past San Cristobal. I tried to keep my eyes on the road. Luz did keep her eyes on the road, and we did the thirty miles from Rancio to San Cristobal in twenty-eight minutes, according to her little dashboard clock, which on that road was pretty spectacular.
She had to slow going through San Cristobal, but she didn’t like it. “Crouch down,” she told me. “Like you’re asleep.”
“There’s no room to crouch down.”
“Then put your head in my lap.”
“I’ll just keep my hand over my face like this,” I said.
That didn’t really satisfy her, but she accepted it. San Cristobal, being the capital, was still awake at eleven-thirty of a midweek night, with bars and restaurants open, cars moving, pedestrians here and there, groups talking in little parks along the way. Luz was convinced every one of those people was in league with her cousins, and by the time we got out of town I was beginning to feel almost as paranoid as she was.
But now we had the road to ourselves. Nobody was going to Napalma tonight, and whatever farmers or suburbanites lived along here were asleep, with no lights on. By crouching a little, but not putting my head in Luz’s lap, I could see in the outside mirror on my side the lights of San Cristobal dwindling behind us, then erased, and there was nothing back there but black.
Luz had seen it too. The sigh she gave was so long and heartfelt she must have been holding her breath since Saturday. “Ho-kay,” she said. “We gonna be all right now.”
“Good,” I said.
“Time for some rum,” she decided.
“Rum? Where are we going to get rum?”
“I got rum,” she told me. “On the floor behind you. Can you get it? Should I?”
She turned, moving her arm, and LECHE loomed. “No, that’s okay,” I said. “I can do it.”
I waited till she had both hands back on the steering wheel and then reached into the narrow space between us, down to the floor behind my seat, and there it was, a bottle wedged under the seat to keep it from rolling. I eased it out and brought it up front with us.