That’s right. She got up very early this morning, and by now it must be very late. (My Rolex was back at her house, in the fruit box next to the futon. It hadn’t seemed to go with my Felicio costume.) So I nodded, too winded to answer, and she took my hand, and we staggered on out of there.
The night was just cool enough and dry enough to restore us some when we left that place and walked toward home. Luz had kept hold of my hand, and that was okay with me. We were pals now.
We walked in silence for the first few minutes, and then she said, “You’re okay, Felicio. I like you.”
“Well, thanks, Luz,” I said. “I like you too. And I’m very grateful to you.”
“And Lola’s great,” she said.
That surprised me, but I had to agree. “Yes, she is.”
“Before she met up with you, you know,” she said, “she was stuck-up. I was jus’ a little kid, but I remember. Everybody said she was too big in the head. How do you say that?”
“Like that, pretty much,” I said. “I don’t see her that way, though.”
“Now I know,” she told me. “Now I know, back then, she jus’ lonely. She knows she’s smart and she knows she’s good and she knows something good is suppose to happen, but she don’ see it coming. Not till she gets away from here. Not till she meets up with you. She don’ belong here, she belongs in the north.”
I said, “Lola and me, we were both one leg of the same pants. We weren’t any good to anybody until we got together.”
She laughed. “That’s a funny way to talk about pants,” she said.
When we got to her place, she walked through the dark living room and switched on the light in the bedroom, and then I could follow.
Ignoring me, she was already pulling that orange blouse off over her head. I kept eyes front and beelined through my own curtained doorway.
“Buenas noches,” she called through the curtain, and yawned in the middle of it.
“Good night, Luz,” I said. I touched my warm forehead to the cool curtain. “It was a terrific night. Thank you.”
No answer. I think she was already asleep.
25
So once again, in the semicool of the evening, I stretched out naked on my futon. I’m too tired to sleep, I thought, especially after doing nothing all day. So I’ll just lie here and...
“Get out! Get out!”
It was a shrill whisper, full of panic and urgency. I sat up, completely bewildered. No idea where I was, what was going on. Stupidly, I said, “What?”
“Get out get out get out!”
Voices, male voices, nearby. The futon, the glassless window, the darkness, Luz’s panic-stricken voice, thumps of boots on the front room floor.
The cousins! I was naked, in the dark, I couldn’t remember what I’d done with my pants, where’s anything, what can I do?
Still seated on the futon, I grabbed the windowsill, pulled myself up, put a leg over the sill, and my terrified toes found a tiny ridge along the outside, the same height as the floor within. The floor was the platform the house was built on, and the platform extended less than an inch beyond the rear wall.
My toes clung to that slender line, as I turned my back to the window and put the other leg over. Now I had about six toes on the narrow band of wood, and one arm around the window frame, pressed to the wall.
Light came from the other side of the doorway, turning the scarlet curtain into dark blood, a scab, a wound. The cousins were in there, in the bedroom. If they opened that curtain—
The window was very near the corner of the house. Even if I could move sideways, there wasn’t room enough to hide between the window and the end of the wall. And in the other direction, toward the lavatorio, there was nothing to hold on to at all.
I hated this, but what could I do? I grabbed the windowsill with both hands and lowered myself. One foot reached down and down, the toes of the other turned prehensile against that sliver of platform.
It was no good. Nothing but air, nothing to hold onto. I had to let the other foot slide down off that ridge while I gripped the windowsill, so I hung there with my feet straight down. Water tugged at my ankles, warmish water, from right to left.
Above me, light increased; the curtain was open. I let go of the windowsill.
Chest-deep water, tugging at me, wanting me to go leftward with it, wanting to take me along for a ride, past the fertilizer factory, past San Cristobal, on past Rancio into Venezuela, on to introduce me to its big brother the Orinoco, who would coast me on his broad shoulders all the way to the delta and out to the North Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Paria, and the narrow passage by Trinidad called the Serpent’s Mouth.
No, thank you, I’m already in the serpent’s mouth.
I reached in front of me and touched the slimy post holding up the house. It was an unshaped log, with the bark gone, and it was as slippery as a fish. Still, I rested my palm against it, tried not to think about the soft squishiness around my toes, the mud or worse on which I stood, in which I stood, and tried instead to concentrate on what was happening above my head.
Dim light was at the window up there, which meant the curtain was still drawn back and I was seeing illumination from the bedroom. Somebody was looking into the back room and not seeing anybody.
What now? Would he come in the rest of the way, light the kerosene lantern, look around, find my Rolex? Find my passport, my driver’s license, my clothing, my suitcase?
No. The light dimmed. It was a person he was looking for, not a Rolex. In what dim light he had to work with, he’d seen there was no person in that room, and that’s all he wanted to know.
Plainly I could hear their boots, above me, scuffing around in the bedroom. Indistinctly I could hear the voices, Luz trying to be outraged but merely being scared, the male voices gruff and discontented.
Splash-sssssshhhhhhhhhh... Oh, for God’s sake, one of them’s using the lavatorio!
I couldn’t stand being here, in this piss-warm water, while piss splashed down twelve feet away: downstream, thank God, but still. What if somebody in the house just over here to my right decided to get rid of tonight’s beer? Or tacos?
Where I stood was not completely inky black. There was starlight, and it reflected off the water, and I could make out the post in front of me and the building above me and the other houses up and down the row. And I could see a support board attached to the post in front of me at an angle just above the water-line, then up at a diagonal to the end of a floor beam halfway between here and the bank. Moving my feet with great reluctance, I got around to that support board and used it to pull myself along the side of the house.
The water got quickly shallower, so that it was only to the top of my thighs when I reached the other end of the board, and I was pressing my hand to the rough plank siding of the house instead. Ahead of me was land, and up beyond that point was the side window to the front room. Light gleamed from there, a searchlight band of it that I didn’t dare walk through. Of course, it wasn’t as bright as a searchlight, it was merely the rosy glow from Luz’s pink-shaded living room lamp, but it would show movement.
Where were they? The sounds of voices, it seemed to me, still came from the bedroom. They weren’t going to have sex with her, were they? They were all cousins. On the other hand, these guys struck me as the kind who’d go to family reunions to pick up girls.
I couldn’t go past the window, but maybe I could get close enough to peek inside, if I stayed out of the band of light. I moved forward, the water now to my ankles, the mud under my feet firmer, the slope steeper. I came up to land, very steep and stony, pulled myself along the side of the house, and here was the window. I chanced a peek inside, and the room was empty.