He leaned into the car, the crown of his head b.u.mping against the roof, a giant jack-o"-lantern hovering in the dark. "You disappear. You get?"
"I get."
"Stay disappear. For you."
I patted his leathery cheek. "For me?"
He withdrew his head from the car. "For me too."
A thump on the roof with his palm, and the car took off, throwing me back against the rusty frame. It was black as night can get in Lima. By accident or design all the streetlights were out. The driver used neither headlights, taillights, fog lights or any other kind of light, inside or outside. He ground through the gears in time to fly through a stop sign.
I held on to the driver"s seat and braced myself for impact. "Where are we going?" I shouted over the noise of the wind.
The driver said nothing.
"Bus station, that right?"
Still, nothing.
"Which bus station?"
Lima has half a dozen bus stations. Depends on where you"re going, what company you"re taking. I tapped him on the shoulder. He overtook a taxi, cut him off, then veered right down a narrow side street.
"First bus out of town," he said in Spanish, his voice an effeminate whisper, as though he were afraid to allow himself more forceful expression.
"Going where?"
He said nothing.
I tapped him on the shoulder again. This time he grabbed my hand, twisted my fingers in a direction they were not designed to go.
"Cuzco."
I folded my arm, then my body in the direction he held my fingers. I could not break his grip. "Anywhere but Cuzco," I said. "I"ll give you anything you want. What about Ecuador? Guayaquil"s nice this time of year."
Lili"s grave was in Cuzco. Where we"d buried the bones. Tombstone and everything. I"d covered the slab in flowers. Didn"t do any good.
Cuzco was soaked in memories for me, like a discarded rag stuffed into a Molotov c.o.c.ktail. I"d left for a reason. I"d sworn I"d never go back.
The man said, "Boss say you go to Cuzco. You go to Cuzco."
"If I don"t want to go? If I refuse?"
The driver looked at me again in the rear-view mirror. He smiled. Half his teeth were missing, the others black and rotting. He said, "Break your legs and check you in as luggage."
He released me. I sat back and shook my hand, flexing my fingers. "Please," I said. "Have pity. Not there. Anywhere but there."
An early morning garbage truck loomed ahead of us, entering an intersection. We ran the red light, horn blaring, missing the front fender of the truck by inches.
The driver said, "Tell it to the major."
I climbed aboard the double-decker bus. It was raining, a rare drizzle in this seaside desert city, just enough to moisten the dust on the windshield and coat exposed skin with a thin glaze of liquid smog.
Villega"s money had been enough for the bus ticket and not much more. I"d be lucky to buy a meal or two with the change left over. But for the major, that was generous, and his altruism had me on high alert. Why would he let me go? If he wanted to silence me, he could have just had me killed, like he said. Unless...
Unless they let me go on purpose. Unless they wanted to see where I"d lead them. Was Ambo that desperate? Was I his only clue to where Pitt might be? Yet another reason not to go to Cuzco.
The bottom level of the bus was full. I looked at each face. Dawn broke over the horizon, casting a jellylike orange glow over the brown Indian faces snoozing in their ponchos. I climbed the staircase to the upper deck. More Indians. There were no empty seats.
I was about to get off, proclaim the utter absence of available seating to my inimitable chauffeur below, when a hairy white finger pointed toward the front of the bus. The TV overhead blared the usual Hollywood action drek, dubbed in Spanish, blasting at high volume. Underneath was one open seat.
I grunted. "Gracias."
"No problem," the man said in English. He wore a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. A backpack snuggled between his knees. Yellow earplugs bulged from the side of his head.
I trudged to the front, slid past an old woman who smelled like cheese. I collapsed into my seat. The noise from the television gave me an instant headache. I lifted myself up, looked back. The man in the red cap stared in my direction, unblinking. The engine roared. The bus lurched. I lifted a hand, waved over the top of my seat. His expression did not change.
NINE.
I fought to stay awake. It"s a twenty-hour bus ride from Lima to Cuzco. Sea level to 3400m. I had no cocaine. No cigarettes. No booze. And no way of getting any, either. The only thing I had in my favor was the nonstop racket from the television and the headache it gave me. Thank G.o.d for Mexican voiceover actors, who made everything sound like a ridiculous telenovela.
Bleary-eyed, burnt-out, waking became dreaming, the nightmares returned, my eyes wide open, the road ahead an endless stream of dust and sorrow, and the day that Pitt betrayed me shoehorned its way into my brain.
It had started as a weekend getaway at their rustic cabin on the coast, but took a number of unexpected turns along the way. Mode of transportation for one.
"Get yourself to the airport, and the rest is on us," Pitt had said. Easier said than done, considering the b.a.s.t.a.r.d taxi drivers" union kept the airport fare artificially high. Four hours of local buses later, I finally arrived at the airport with a crowd of janitors and security guards. I made my way to the private departures terminal, where Pitt escorted me onto the tarmac.
"Ain"t she a beauty?" Ambo shouted when he saw me.
He threw one arm around me and another at his Piper Mirage four-seater. Leaning against the fuselage, munching a carrot, reclined Lynn, sungla.s.ses covering half her face. Despite the cold and gray, she wore a green bikini, a transparent yellow sarong draped around her waist. The bikini top covered her nipples, but not much else.
She pushed off from the plane, crunched her carrot. "His very own salad shooter."
"It slices, it dices, it purees!" Ambo clapped me on the back. "What do you think?"
"You know how to fly this thing?" I studied the propellers, ignoring the busty ghost in my peripheral vision.
He laughed. "Is oil from Texas?"
We were aloft then, the four of us, a chitty-chitty-bang-bang of the skies, Ambo at the wheel, Pitt his copilot, Lynn and I in the backseat, avoiding knee contact.
"So you"re Pitt"s mother," I said, turning to her.
"Birthed from these very loins." Her broad lips, thick with red, twisted in a cartoon squiggle. She looked out the window at the long strand of beach below.
"Name"s Horace." I held out my hand. "I don"t believe we"ve had the pleasure?"
"I don"t believe we have."
Ambo shouted over the roar of the motor, "She"s my trophy wife."
"Trophy wife?" I shouted.
"First prize, oil drilling. Picked her out of the catalog. On special, too. Ain"t that right, dear?"
She laughed. Her hand squeezed my crotch, and I set my face to frozen. "And me so lonely in that li"l ol" catalog, too."
I tapped Pitt on the shoulder. The hand on my crotch held me tight. "Dude. You never told me your mom"s a babe."
"For good reason. Daddy here"s the jealous type!"
Pilot and copilot high-fived, and the plane dipped sideways, sending my guts skyward. Ambo put his hands back on the wheel. I swallowed hard. Shifted sideways, sat as far from Lynn as I could, but with her Valkyrie wingspan she clutched my nuts tight in her hand.
The plane landed with a series of b.u.mps in Chiclayo, the biggest city near the surfing mecca of Huanchaco, in northern Peru. A shooting pain stabbed my s.c.r.o.t.u.m. Lynn had shoved a crumpled piece of paper into my jeans. I opened my mouth, let my chin bob with the movement. With my palm, I pushed down on my pants, crushed the paper. I looked out the window, fascinated by a pa.s.sing windsock.
A security detail waited for us. We caravaned to Huanchaco in three black SUVs. Bulletproof, Pitt boasted.
"Great," I said. "Someone"s taking shots at us?"
A shrug. "Doing what we do, we don"t make a lot of friends."
The "rustic cabin" turned out to be a beachside mansion. Four enormous Greek columns supported the entryway. My flip-flops echoed on the polished marble floors. A butler in a red Hawaiian shirt and white polyester slacks showed me upstairs to my room.
"Tomorrow"s surfing," Pitt said, shoulder against the door frame of my room, watching me unpack the dirty canvas sack I used as luggage. Extra pair of jeans I found in a dumpster. Check. Long-sleeved shirt I hadn"t washed in six months. Check. Three soap dishes of cocaine. Check.
He threw a wetsuit on the bed and said, "Eat light, easy on the booze, up at dawn."
"What"s this for?" I asked, fingering the neoprene.
"Water"s cold out there, man. You"re going need it."
I opened the window. The thin white curtain fluttered into the room on the evening breeze. The ocean rolled and crashed against the beach a hundred meters away.
"It have to be so early?" I asked.
The sharp edges of the crumpled note still stabbed at my left nut. I enjoyed the pain. I had left it there. All throughout dinner I had wondered. What did she want? She hadn"t looked at me, lifting forkfuls of seule meuniere to her lips, licking away the creamy sauce with a darting tongue.
Pitt was yammering on about surfing. Could he tell? Did he know? Did he suspect? Act natural. I put my right foot on the bed frame, rested my elbow on my knee. What would he think if he found out? He couldn"t find out. It had to end. That was the only solution.
"What"s that in your pocket? Let me see."
"See what?"
His hand grabs my crotch, pushes me back against the wall. He"s got his hand on the bulge now. I"m fighting him off but he"s about to pull the paper from my pants, so I knee up between his legs. He bends over. I knee up again, into his face. His nose explodes. He sits back on the bed, and I connect with a left hook to his eye.
"Blame the moon," Pitt said, and grinned, his undamaged, perfect face beaming chaste friendship at me.
I blink. Shake my head. The vision dissipates. Schoolyard nightmares. The peculiar charisma of the schoolyard bully: push me, beat me, rob me: give me more.
"The moon?"
"Tide waits for no man," he said, and punched me in the shoulder. He left the room with an Indian war cry, chopping an imaginary tomahawk over his head.
I went into the bathroom and shut the door. I fished the jagged paper from under my t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. It was an electricity bill, still in its envelope. On the back, printed in her precise, feminine hand: the dunes 2 a.m.
I tore it into pieces, again and again, until they were practically dust. Open lid. Flush. Again. Again. Again. The toilet was empty, but still I flushed.
I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. It had to end. The choice was simple: her or her son. She was a decent lay, or at least as decent as I deserved. But Pitt...he was a worse human being than I was. Just being around him made me feel better. Which was more important? s.e.x you can pay for. Listening to Pitt"s atrocities was priceless.
No. It had to end.
I stared at the alarm clock. Hypnotized by the glowing red numbers. Every half an hour I got up to renew my dose: snort of c.o.ke in each nostril, swig of pisco to wash it down.
Two fifteen. I sighed. I got out of bed, went to the window. The full moon shone on the beach, its weakened spotlight hiding the earth"s blemishes. The sand sparkled silver. Palm trees swayed and rustled in the night breeze. A woman walked the dunes, her figure draped in a flowing cotton robe. She moved in slow motion, doing T"ai Chi.
I crept down the stairs barefoot, my flip-flops in hand. I slid my feet into the sandals, stepped out onto the cool sand. She stood on top of a dune, between two tall palms, her feet apart, knees bent, arms out, holding an imaginary ball.
She had shown me some T"ai Chi one drunken afternoon in a filthy motel in Callao. "Let"s play with the imaginary ball," she"d crooned from the bed, and leaped naked onto the floor, crunching a c.o.c.kroach underfoot. It was her way of relaxing when nothing else worked, she had explained, after her screaming subsided and she"d washed off her foot. When drugs and alcohol didn"t work, she had purred into my ear, and there"s no eligible male nearby, T"ai Chi is all you"ve got left.
That. Or a bullet in the brain.
I climbed the dune. Put my hands in my pockets, affected nonchalance. I stopped next to her and looked out at the sea. "It"s over," I said. "You know that."
Her eyes remained closed. She breathed slowly, lips unmoving. "Security"s watching us."
I looked back at the house. A dark shape clung to the roof. Cigarette smoke curled from the window of an SUV parked by the side of the house.
"Good night, then." I put a foot into empty s.p.a.ce, launched myself down the dune.
"He"s going to take you." The sea murmured on the sand. The tide was coming in. I could taste the salt spray on my lips. "Like he took me."
I looked up the dune at her. I had the sudden urge to crouch low, stand up inside her imaginary ball. Instead, I scooped up a handful of sand, letting it stream through my fingers.
"Take me," I said. "What does that mean?"
"What he wants, he takes. He wants you."
"Who does? Pitt?"
"Ambo. Look what happened to my husband."