“I won’t.”
“There’s food here, what you need. And beer in the refrigerator. After work tomorrow, I gotta go to Rancio to lure you out, then I gotta find you not home, Esilda say you gone, I tell the cousins, I get back here maybe around seven.”
“Okay.”
“Could be we go out dancin’ then,” she said, and grinned at me. “I bet you like to dance.”
Danger? What the hell, this situation was dangerous all the time. “I love to dance,” I said.
“I knew you would,” she said. “Lola wouldn’ take up with nobody didn’ like to dance.”
“That’s right.”
“And other things,” she said, and laughed, and then yawned, holding the back of her hand to her mouth.
I said, “Time for — uh, time for sleep.”
“You bet.”
She raised the glass to me again, and we both finished the rum. She switched off the light and crossed to open the curtain, and illumination from the bedroom made it possible for me to find my way.
She stood beside her bed, yawning. I said, “Good night, Luz. And thanks again.”
“You gonna have a good time here,” she told me.
“Not too good, I hope,” I said, and she laughed and unzipped her cut-offs, and I went into my new room.
23
Luz got back from work later than she’d said the next
day, almost seven-thirty, and when she came in she seemed rattled and angry and a little scared. She also looked very different, because she wore her office clothes. It was interesting to see she could contain all that animal exuberance when she wanted to: not hide it, that wouldn’t be possible, but not flaunt it either.
Her white blouse was cut full and buttoned to the neck, where a small gold crucifix hung from a wispy gold chain. Her skirt was black and not too tight, and ended just below the knee. Her shoes were black and low-heeled and maidenly.
She hurried in, dressed like that, with this upset and distracted look, carrying a brown paper bag, and thrust the bag at me. “Open that. I gotta change.”
“Okay.”
I was feeling a little dopey. I’d spent most of the day with her photo novels, a kind of comic book that uses posed photos of actors instead of drawings. Luz had a whole stack of them on the floor beside her bed. They were in Spanish, of course, but the stories were not hard to follow. They were mostly love stories of the most sentimental sort, like Esilda’s soap operas, but they were also quite sexy, and several of the women looked a lot like Luz. The only difference was, these were actresses faking it. I couldn’t imagine a situation in which Luz would fake it.
Now she marched away through the scarlet curtain into the bedroom, taking her upset and alarm with her, and I looked into the paper bag. It contained two bottles of rum. I opened one, put the other on the shelf, and was pouring when she came tripping back in.
Now, this was Luz. A tight red skirt the size of a sweatband, glaring orange blouse with nipples that pointed at me as though to say I know you, great golden hoop earrings with parrots in cages in the middle of the hoops, and thonged clogs that rattled. “Gimme that glass,” she said, and emptied it in one.
I drank more moderately, then held the bottle up. “Yes?”
For answer, she held the glass toward me. I filled it, and this time she took only a healthy swig before she said, “I don’t like it.”
“What don’t you like?”
“I tol’ ’em, he isn’t there, that Barry Lee he’s gone, the maid told me he gone away, she don’ know where he gone to; they get mad at me.”
“Who gets mad at you?”
“All them from Tapitepe. Manfredo and Luis and the other Luis with the bad arm and José and Pedro and poco Pedro.”
“They got mad at you? They think you warned me?”
“No, no,” she said. “Come on, we sit down.”
The sofa was very old. It had sagged to about an inch from the ground and then been covered with serapes. Luz dropped into it as though going backward into a swimming pool, while I levered myself slowly downward, holding the sofa arm.
When I finally reached bottom, she said, “They think I’m stupid, I say something got you scared. Not today, they know you not there today, ’cause Carlos say that to Luis with the bad arm and poco Pedro when they talk to him to make sure he’s at his shop, you know. What they figure, these guys, I’m the one, I’m the stupid, I said something before that got you scared. So now they gonna cut me and all this shit.”
“They’re gonna cut you?” This was terrible.
But she dismissed it with an angry wave of the hand. “No, they just talkin’, ’cause they mad, ’cause you got away, now they gotta look for you.”
“Where?”
“They gonna go talk to Artie.” She gave me an angry smile. “Maybe he’s gonna punch their heads in, whaddaya think?”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“So would I,” she said, and bounced all her parts around on the sofa, and said, “You hungry? You wanna go eat?”
“Luz, you know,” I said, “I got almost no money. I’ve been living on Carlos.”
“So now you’re living on me,” she said, and whomped herself on the chest. Her grin was now less angry, looser, more Luz. And rum. “You’ll pay me back some other time,” she said. “I got a good job.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I will pay you back.”
“I know,” she said. She finished her rum, put the glass on the floor, and said, “So now we go eat, then we go dancin’, and...” She leaned forward, looking around at the floor, then over at me. “Help me outa this, Felicio,” she said. Meaning the sofa.
That was the trickiest moment so far.
24
Dancing was never going to be a sensible idea, what with me having to hide out and Luz being Luz, but I’d agreed to it last night, full of tension and rum, so here we were.
The Napalma equivalent of Club Rick, at least on a Thursday night, was a mostly open-air bar along the river between Luz’s house and the factory, whose name I never did find out. It was less than a ten-minute walk from the house. There was a thatch-roofed open-sided part, with the bar and a small dance floor and some tables, and a much larger open part, with Japanese lanterns strung on poles and trees, all these soft colors of light against the surrounding darkness, like a kind of pastel chiaroscuro. There were long plastic picnic tables out there near the riverbank, and a pounded-earth dance floor between the tables and the bar. The music was a live band full of guitars and trumpets and amplifiers, all wailing away.
We ate our dinner — chicken and rice and plantains and fried tomatoes and plenty of grease and several beers — at one of those plastic picnic tables, sharing the table with a shifting population of other diners. Luz knew almost everybody, of course, but the noise level, between the blaring band and the shouting customers, was so high she couldn’t even pretend to introduce me.
After dinner, we danced, along with the rest of the happy, heaving, sweaty crowd, all moving together but not together under the pink and canary and aqua and jade lights, shifting, dipping, shoulders up with pride, mostly bare feet pounding the dirt. Luz made love to the world, to the music, to the night, to the air, to me, to everybody, and laughed through it like another trumpet.
At times we’d pause for a beer, sitting sprawled on the bench of one of the picnic tables, watching the other dancers and breathing like sled dogs, letting the air dry the sweat on our faces. But one of those times, when we reeled off the floor, she pulled at my arm until my ear was close enough, and said, “Felicio, I gotta go home.”