We bounced onto the rough road, the sun rising behind us out of the black sea. Jesse nudged my toe and we turned to watch the convent ruins till they were blurred by dust. His road was little more than a rutted track, with uprooted trees in piles to either side, their roots clinging to soil, still moist. At the cemetery a great tangle of vines smouldered. It must have been near there that the older graves and the bones and shards had been found, but Berman was too groggy to ask. And then the road turned away and we were passing cane fields and cornfields where I recognised some of the people working. I remembered driving Dad’s car a hundred-sixty klicks an hour along the Alberta highway, watching the needle climb. I remembered when I was a kid riding in the back of a truck to Alouette Lake for a family picnic, giggling as the car skidded sideways when another car came at us. All those times driving my drunken father from the bar to the farm. That awesome ride home from the bank with Jesse the day we got going, quit drugs, took a powder, booked out of there, split, got loose, hit the road.
When Sucre saw three women walking, he slowed down and shouted, “Nice, eh, hermosas? Make your life easier, no? You will go like this right to the city.”
From then on, it was all jungle. Whenever we passed someone, Sucre called out: “What a convenience, isn’t the road great?”
Cradled against Sucre’s fat armrest, rocked by the rutted track, I got drowsy and let my head fall in a kind of half-sleep.
“Wake up, Ken,” he called. “You will dance with me tonight, yes?”
“Leave him alone,” said Jesse.
“I don’t know why,” he said. He tweaked the collar of Jesse’s dress, then replaced his fingers on the controls. “I feel sad today.”
“Think of the car,” she said. “You will soon be driving the car.”
“I know. I know.”
The road was terrible. Sucre was cursing, and I realised that his project was not finished, he had abandoned the job — perhaps because of Berman, or Pedrarias, or the Towers, or the whole cocktail, but we had to crawl along, among half-buried tree trunks and strewn branches, over great mud hills, avoiding crevasses. There was no way a car, even a four-wheel drive, could use this road.
Jesse slipped around Sucre’s chair to check on Berman. “He’s very hot,” she said.
I turned. The professor was out of it and his bandage completely red.
“The town is not far,” said Sucre.
The bay looked empty until through the trees we saw hundreds of tiny boats with dirty sails on the blue-green water, and then we were blinded, on the loose gravel of a little street of adobe huts on one side and low brick buildings on the other. The huts gave way to houses and office buildings. The port was a jumble of corrugated shacks and warehouses and cement-block buildings crowded into the narrow foreshore, half taken up with hotels and skyscrapers. Sucre parked in front of a bank’s double glass doors.
“You bring back the money, Mr Berman, and I’ll get you to the hospital.”
Berman didn’t move.
Two security guys wearing revolvers were walking toward us.
“To hell with you,” Sucre said and got the bulldozer rolling again.
At the hospital Sucre and I lifted Berman down and laid him on the blacktop by the doors. A nurse rushed out waving a clipboard. “What has happened to this man? You must fill in papers!”
Sucre shrugged. I gave her Berman’s leather satchel. Orderlies appeared with a gurney as we pulled out of the parking lot.
We abandoned the bulldozer at the gate to the docks. I felt sick again, really sick. The air smelled of fruit, rancid coconut, seaweed, sulphur. Generators droned on, loud as a city. Nausea was a book Jesse and I read. “To love someone you have to jump across an abyss. My place is nowhere. I am unwanted.” I puked beside a corrugated shed, exquisitely red in the late sun, Sucre peering through a paint-spattered window, rapping his knuckles on the glass. I grazed my palm along the wall and it came away powdered with rust. A skinny man in a dark suit and white sneakers opened the door and led us along narrow alleys between tall warehouses, across little courtyards. Somewhere near here the cops had grabbed us. We passed a bar, the stink of beer and cigars horrible, and came to a ship moored to iron cleats by thick cables, the hull reaching into the sky, the four of us stopped in deep shadow. I was blown away. Another book we read was On the Road. “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
Across from the ship was a warehouse with doors you could drive a crane through right next to a regular-sized door.
“She is in here,” said the skinny guy. I could smell him, his sweat and breath, sweet with rum.
“Here!” Sucre thrust out an envelope and the guy took it delicately.
The darkness inside the warehouse was hot, fat and slimy. Light can’t penetrate such air, and I couldn’t see Sucre, couldn’t see Jesse, though they were right in front of me, breathing. Then a bank of overhead floods rained light so pure it woke up silver wheel rims and bolts and handles.
“A beauty,” the skinny guy said. “A sexy Latin beauty.” He leaned toward Jesse, then rolled his eyes at Sucre. “It’s World War Three now.”
The car was hunched in the centre of the cement floor, a glossy black pool that a fish might break from. When Sucre got to it he stroked the sleek scientific curve, dipped his hand, broke the surface.
A battered wood case, padlocked and bound with scarred leather straps, stood by the car.
“Let’s see inside,” said Sucre.
“Be quick,” said the skinny guy. He tossed the keys.
Sucre unlocked the case and opened it. He crooked a finger at Jesse. “Try something on.”
“Here?” said Jesse.
“Go ahead,” said Sucre. He folded his arms. “Take a look. See if you like anything.”
The skinny guy was going to protest, then just put his hands in his jacket pockets when Jesse sank her arms in and the colours danced and riffed. It was theatre. The men looked like patient proud dads. We were human audience. We were bears. We were gorillas. Jesse picked through soft leather boots, silk hats, sundresses, jackets, a klatch of skirts, swimsuits, underwear, tossing a selection on the hood of the car where they floated, slipped, mixed, and finally she set a small glass box of jewellery on the stained cement floor.
Sucre and the skinny guy laughed as Jesse pulled her old dress off over her head and stuffed it inside the trunk, her body a matter of fact, the physical girl, but also substance and essence inside out. These men were growing unsure of something. Control, yes, but something else. I couldn’t lift a finger, could only witness. Oil collected on my lips.
“All of this counts,” she said, her body blazing. “It’s part of our ticket.”
The world beyond the doors, gulls screaming and a longshoreman singing, was fathoms beneath this brilliant heaven, blinding white, as she dressed, paying critical note to every wrinkle in the black tights, fine fishnet, snapping the elastic against her belly. “What d’you think?”
“Of course,” said Sucre.
“Maria,” whispered the skinny guy.
“Now this,” she said. Black silk shirt and a short pleated black skirt. Soft flat-soled ankle-high black leather boots. Wide leather-and-chain belt, leather-and-chain necklace, big silver earrings.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Okay?”
“Hot.”
“A rich little orphan.”
She stepped forward and put sunglasses over my eyes then shrugged into a thin dark leather aviator jacket, folding the black fleece collar evenly down in front and behind, then tugged on a black leather cap and black leather gloves, and posed directly under one of the floods, feet apart, gloved fingers stretched to the ceiling, and her shirt rode to her ribcage, her belly-button ring flashed.
The myth looks like the sand map, before any cities, of a prehistoric swamp. The modern bear and gorilla shift foot to foot as Jesse twirls once, th
e skirt fanning out, and then sits on the case, her legs wide, chin on one hand.
“Let’s go,” said Sucre. “Show’s over.” He turned his back on her, slid into the driver’s seat and the car purred into life. He revved the motor. Rolled down the window. Popped the hood.
The skinny guy, an automaton now, lifted the case in. The trunk was the hood. He pointed a remote control at an electrical panel on the wall; one of the great doors swung open to warm salt air, ship’s lights, thousand-foot cranes and wheeling gulls, a line of arc lamps on poles.
We were on a lonely street late at night, the car nearly soundproof, almost silent. A girl’s leather jacket squeaked against a leather seat. A man’s breath, thick with frustration. The dash patterned with electric blue, green, red numbers and symbols, the armrest bristling with silver switches. There was Sucre’s sunburned neck, Jesse’s black-nest hair. My hand smelled of rust and sweat. I wanted no one to speak. Not Jesse, not Sucre. What was important was that no one should try to describe the feeling inside the warehouse when we had all been aware of something.
7.
Jesus was being interviewed on the hotel-room TV about the attempted murder and subsequent kidnapping of Professor Berman, then the news anchor’s voice said the police were seeking Miguel Sucre in connection with recent violence at the Estate Pedrarias. “Paul Berman, a professor and businessman in the mining industry has been admitted to the Central Hospital with life-threatening injuries.” A photograph of Berman appeared on the screen.
“Tonight you dance with all men,” said Sucre. “You will dance with whoever I say. I am going out for a while.”
From our room we had a view of the town, the harbour, ships at dock, three at anchor in the bay. The million lights were hard to take after only lamplight, faint glimmers from the village shacks, for weeks. Traffic noise rose to the window mixed with coarse voices and exhaust fumes, and something in me started to buzz, like a long hit of skunk over crack.
I sat crosslegged on the bathroom floor watching Jesse soak in the tub. “Why don’t we leave now?”
“We could, but we’d get nothing.”
“What can we get?”
A rooster crowed down in the street, very near, then a dog began to bark and she stood, water beading on her skin.
“Something’s changed. Like a huge change.” She shook her head fast and her hair whipped out, cool spray. “Can you feel it?”
“I can feel it,” I said. “Yeah.”
In the room were two double beds, and I curled up on one while Jesse laid out clothes on the other. White shorts and a red halter-top, blue jeans and steel T-shirt, cream lace camisole and jodhpurs . . . I dozed, eyes half shut while she counted, matched, tried on, compared, discarded, talking to herself.
“Eleven costumes, eleven gates. The black outfit is the first gate.” She wiggled back into her warehouse skirt, arms wide to her reflection in the full-length mirror. Black hair against jet-black shirt, red neon highlights. “Eleven different girls.”
“Eleven?” I asked.
“If you dance with me, then I won’t mind anything. It will work out.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “Is this what we planned in Pit Meadows?”
She cocked her head. She played with her hair, lips pursed. She turned from the mirror and laid her hands on my shoulders. “We are okay. We’re together and we’re not hiding anything from each other, right?”
“Sucre isn’t really powerful,” I said.
“It’s beginning,” she said.
Then Sucre was in the room, lifting Jesse to her feet, grabbing her ass, bunching the black skirt. “You are a sexy little ghost, cuchura. So pale.” He pulled away and tossed me a white plastic bag. “This is so you can come, too.” In the bathroom he splashed water on his face, spread suds over his beard, and shaved.
Inside the bag was a white suit. I put it on. I looked handsome, older. I went out onto the balcony and closed my eyes and saw a body stretched on a rocky beach. A dead girl, blue and shiny, striped with wet seaweed. A dead boy, blue and shiny, striped with wet seaweed. Gold is still passing through this land, kissing men’s fingers. Jesse’s clothes from America, Europe, Japan, a thousand skirts on a thousand girls, tell little stories in a million heads — such a skirt, such legs, the end always the same symptom, the small useless invention to mask the lie. Ghosts are greedy and we pay the price in beauty by waiting and waiting for them to decide to haunt. Every time gold passes hands traders are devalued. We must look for the bliss between people, not the transaction, that’s what Jesse told me. We must look for the signs of stress — starvation, obesity, sorrow — and we must leap the abyss into each other’s arms before the crack is too wide.
Sucre washed soap from his cheeks, cleaned his ears with the corner of a towel, put on a new shirt, tan trousers, a light linen jacket.
I helped Jesse pack the ten outfits. Sucre called for a porter and while we waited he shared his bottle with me, ignoring her. The porter carried the case to the elevator and we all rode to the lobby where, in the mirrored walls, I spied three strangers, a fat father and two children, a child in black, one in white, lost in a forest of potted trees.
8.
The air on high, cool in the car, one road into another following the bay’s steep hills, coasting from jungle to the beach, blowing by buildings around the harbour.
Each bar was just another drinking hole and more or less the same as any bar anywhere despite Jesse’s changes, each response to her display duplicating the ones before in nearly every detail. Sucre would have the first dance, then every guy he wanted got to dance with Jesse, and there were a lot — not because she was more beautiful and younger and better dressed than the other girls, but because Sucre was working his large angle. Some of her partners were brilliant forest birds, some terrible raptors. Their shrieks got louder as the night got busier and more complex, and I didn’t know the dialect, didn’t know how to say words, not in any language, but they danced away, danced, and across the globe were wars and conflagration and mass exodus while here something warm, tender, got released into the air (small love, solitaire, burdened by habit), then something tart, risky. Sucre ebbed and flowed. One minute he was at my side, watching Jesse Green, next he was in deep conversation with some guy, next I saw him through the window at the curb, leaning on his car, showing kids the dash lights and stick shift and glove box. The four leather bucket seats. Sometimes he treated them to a ride round the block. Between clubs he parked on dark streets and Jesse picked her next clothes and scrambled into them by the light from the open trunk while he pissed in an alley.
On a narrow lane in a thunderous industrial zone, where the air vibrated heavy monotonous shit from a nearby factory, Jesse Green took off her black outfit and pulled on red tights and high red boots and got into a red slick mini-dress, zippered crotch to throat, and I helped her with the pink earrings, and clipped twelve gold bangles on her right wrist.
Next, she stood on a wide sidewalk between the car and a brick building with rows of high, dark windows, and unzipped the red dress, peeled the boots and tights and put on cream cotton panties, cream socks, tight faded yellow jeans, tan suede shoes, and there were angry words from above, and light spilling from windows. The shirt was pale gold silk and ended above her navel, the long sleeves embroidered with yellow thread, and when I looked up, men were hanging out the windows, watching her tits push out pure gold, so I buttoned her shirt up tight, and saw the shadow on her belly, that gully that splits a person right from left.
Sucre rode more kids round the block. Jesse and I waited on the sidewalk between tall office buildings. On the other side of the street was the bank we’d tried earlier in the day. The road was under construction. Fences of rough wood barricaded a long trench that disappeared into the distance, marked by flashing orange lights. When Sucre roared back and parked, he and I sat on the front of the car and with the slouching kids watched Jesse take off her clothes.
She shrugged away the shirt, kick
ed off shoes and socks, slid down jeans and panties (skin pale as paper in the orange flashes) and put on a sky-blue lace bra, slipped into a blue lycra bodysuit, pushed her feet into blue boots with spike heels, and the kids lost interest and wandered off.
Sucre offered me a cigar and a blue flame.
Jesse angled a navy beret on the side of her head, crouching beside the car to study herself in the passenger window. Round her neck she clipped an azure pendant, yoni, and in her ears midnight earrings, lingam. Short asymmetrical royal-blue leather wrap skirt, long buttonless alpaca coat thrown over her right shoulder.
The next place we parked was near the docks and I could smell the sea and something dead that gulls were fighting over near an old motorcycle partly hidden behind overflowing trashcans.
Sucre wound up the windows. “Okay, Jesse. Ken, get into the front with me.”
“Why?”
We sat gazing out of the windshield of the air-conditioned car.
In the headlights she undressed and stood naked a moment looking at the motorcycle, then up at the stars, her body slick with sweat from the hours of dancing, then she put on a short belted olive-green trench dress and cyan high heels.
“She’s a good girl,” he said. “You’re both good kids.”
“It’s so hot,” she said, getting into the back of the car. “Am I glad to get rid of the alpaca.”
My jaw ached from clenching so much, and my teeth were coated with the dark oil that kept backing up from my stomach. We stopped at a gas station to buy toothbrushes. In the washroom I cleaned my teeth and watched myself in the mirror. Qué sopá? The floor was wet and muddy. I sat on the toilet and massaged my scalp, my forehead, with cool wet fingers. Back at the car Sucre was gone. I put my feet on the dash and wiggled my toes in the air from the vent.
Travellers May Still Return Page 4