In the photograph, the woman is knee-deep in the ocean, caught in a posture of surprise as a cold wave slaps against her bottom. Her back is arched and her eyes are wide, her thin brows raised high. Her elbows are tight against her sides, and her hands are at her face in a girlish half clench. Her lips are puckered in a tiny perfect O. Splashes of sea foam blur in the air around her. Her swimsuit reveals more thigh than the kid has ever seen. Her nipples jut, pressing against taut fabric. The photograph is sepia-toned, and she is the color of honey.
Nothing in the picture shows scale. No swimmers, no birds, no trawlers or tankers or banana boats, just a blurred horizon, dimly streaked light and dark. The kid wonders if she is taller than he is. He must meet her. He believes he will, someday, believes that she will receive him, that his possession of the photograph connects them in some way they both will honor if not fully understand. Such mysteries, he believes, are the very workings of love.
There is a curved shadow of a finger creeping in from the left border. The kid imagines the finger is his own, that he is the one who snapped the picture. He imagines he can feel the cold water winding around his calves, tickling and numbing. He imagines a softly tugging undertow.
Alvaro, fully cocooned in his tarp, feels another sand flea bite his ear. He is being eaten alive. He unrolls himself and dances in the sand, a furious chorea of swatting and scratching. A man lying nearby sleepily calls out, “Shut up!” and Alvaro tromps toward him and steps on his neck. The man sputters; his legs wheel, his arms flail, his fingers clutch. Alvaro leans harder, feels his bare sole grinding against cartilage, and then releases. “Next time,” he says through his teeth, “I will snap it.” The man clutches his throat and begins to weep, softly.
Alvaro sees the kid faintly outlined in the dark and slips over the dunes toward him. Lessons must be taught. The gambler is not a man to be trifled with.
In his tent, the general dreams:
He is younger, not yet so thick around the middle. He wears his medals, bright reminders of all he has done in the Queen’s service. Night. A whispered, vespertine invitation unfurled in the royal arbor. Tight shadows hiding pearly ankles. Bougainvillea and damiana, creeping ivies, the most fragrant of honeysuckles. Later, a surreptitious climb to her chambers. His legs wobble. His meaty lips quiver. His nose — still years away from the day it is torn off by a bullet — itches. (His nose! What a glorious nose it was, long and full, with an amiable bulb at the tip!) He tries the knob, and it turns.
Hinges creak. Then silence: a long, swollen moment. The scrape and hiss of a match, and one by one, three candles light. The Queen lifts the white sheet, inviting. She is wonderful to discover. He is forced to twist his neck. Vague sensations of galloping and trotting, advancing and encircling. She spins, a slippery diagonal glide, playing herself like the Ponziani Opening. She thrusts out. He tries not to gasp but does. The moment scares him, because he knows what will come next, what comes next every night, what comes next both in the dream and in the memory from which it steals — her jagged, mocking laugh as she grasps him by the throat, nails sharp in his flesh. With one word, with one wave of my wrist, she says, you will have nothing. You will walk along the wharves at midnight, in rags, alone, longing. And you will come to like it there, where the air reeks of waste and rotting shellfish, and where the only girls are toothless whores who beg for needles full of grace and then flick open knives, go straight for your pockets, and say “Surprise” as they slit your throat. She climbs off him, and he lies there, discarded, shrinking, and helpless, listening to threads popping as she tears the medals from his tunic.
The general awakens long enough to wonder if the traitorous Sergio had similar dreams in the nights before his head came off. It has long been said that all men who have loved the Queen are fated to dream of her.
Sergio remains silent, caught, as he was, on the wrong side of the bolo knife.
The head. The sand. The sea glowing yellow-green. Monkeys howling in the dark.
“You weren’t paying attention,” Alvaro says. “I could’ve stolen the head. Easily.”
“I heard the sand moving under your feet. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot.”
“If you lose the head, you will die. The general will demand it.”
“I’d expect nothing less. This is my duty to the cause.”
“Listen closely, kid: there is no cause. This whole war is about the general’s cock. He’d call a cease-fire in a flash if the Queen offered him another night in her bed. Do you even know why Sergio was killed? Why it’s his head upon which your life depends?”
The wind picks up, and palm trees rustle, urgent. The kid mumbles no. He hadn’t thought to ask.
“The general believes Sergio was the Queen’s lover,” Alvaro says.
“That’s impossible.”
“Exactly: impossible. When could it have happened? Sergio never laid eyes on her. He was with us from the beginning, spent every night sleeping beside us. It’s as likely that you have fucked the Queen.”
“You’re saying I couldn’t?”
“Shut up, boy. I’m saying the general is a delusional fool. He imagines rivals and traitors all around him. Today it was Sergio. Tomorrow it could be you.”
When the kid speaks, his voice flutters. “The general is a great leader,” he protests.
From inside the tent, a moan escapes the general’s throat. It drones softly on the swift salt breeze.
“The general’s mind was carried off along with his nose,” Alvaro says. “Listen. Do you hear? That’s him, huffing and puffing and yanking his cock. You’ve never heard it before? Every night, three, four, five times. Someday it’ll break off in his hand. And you speak of greatness!”
“Then why are you his teniente? Why do you fight at all?”
“I fight because I enjoy killing,” Alvaro says. “I enjoy it greatly.”
Heavy waves bully the shoreline. The kid is silent.
Alvaro smiles into the dark; faith is so easily stolen, and it is so rarely recovered. His hand shoots out to pluck the photograph from the kid’s pocket, but the kid blocks him, holds fast to his wrist with strong fingers.
“It’s mine,” the kid says.
“I don’t like you thinking about my girl like that.”
“Like how?”
Alvaro drives his knee into the kid’s groin. “Don’t play innocent,” he says. “You’re among men.”
The kid writhes in the sand and finds himself looking into Sergio’s wide and dead and fly-spotted eyes. The pain, the sight, the stench, all unbearable.
“I could just take her from you, if I wanted,” Alvaro says over him, “but I’m a sportsman, so I’ll win her back. I’ll flip a coin. If I win, you give her to me.”
The kid rolls away from the head and retches, once, twice, a third time. “If I win,” he manages, “you tell me her name. And where she lives.”
“Happily,” Alvaro says. “So. Will it be heads or castles?” The kid staggers to his feet and steps away from Sergio. “Castles.” He’s had enough of heads for one night.
The coin is in the air, spinning.
Even if the beach were bathed in moonlight, the kid would not have noticed that Alvaro had two coins in his hand, flipping one while tucking the other against the fleshy mound near his thumb.
Even if there were moonlight, the kid would not notice that the coin is now spinning from head to head, creating a blurred and fluttering but uninterrupted image of the Queen.