Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  “Hey. Let me ask you something,” Austin said, hopping into the empty hammock beside her. He hoped to find the words that would make the hard question he wanted to ask come across easy and joking.

  “Did I pay Tiphaine for you?” Kirstie giggled and started to search through her backpack, taking out a bottle of sunscreen, a pocket camera, a cigarette lighter, and a Dutch fashion magazine as if to divert his attention. She laid these on the sand and looked at them as though they belonged to someone else.

  “Come on,” he said, pushing through his shame. “How much? It’s a game Tiphaine and I play.”

  Kirstie stared at Austin intently, as if calculating what he might do. “Then, you should guess.”

  “I don’t want to guess. Just tell me.”

  Eventually she whispered, “Twenty American dollars.”

  As Austin let the information sink in, he asked if she was enjoying Honduras and listened distractedly as she told him of her travels so far.

  “Me and Marie? Yesterday we hitchhiked to Santa Rosa … I got a tattoo, see?” She lifted up her shirt and showed him a small sun tattooed around her belly button. “I traded the guy a gram of coke for it, so it was only half the price it would’ve been if I’d paid in cash.”

  “Where did you get the coke?”

  “Marie met up with Chato last night in Santa Rosa, so I got him to give me some at a good price. It’s the first time I’ve been high.”

  “And did you enjoy it?” It was hard to keep the disgust from his voice.

  “They’re meeting again in a few days, at an Italian restaurant called Geminis. Do you want to come with me? I could buy some more.”

  Earlier that day, Tiphaine had been whitewashing the trunks of palm trees with Olivia when she glanced back at the restaurant and saw Luz coming toward them with Sebastian on her hip. He was playing with his grandmother’s earrings, flicking them with his pudgy fingers. Luz, with her expertly pencilled lips and pantsuits and stylish short hair. Behind them, Tiphaine could just make out Chato sitting at the bar, but she’d already spent her anger. She felt the same sadness that sluiced through her veins since Sebastian’s birth; it surged and found release only when she got high then poured out into the open whenever she was coming down. She was exhausted from staying up all night with the Germans, and she couldn’t stop the paint brush from shaking in her hand.

  Sebastian slid down from Luz’s hip and ran with his arms out, airplaning up to Olivia, who lifted him up in her arms. The little boy smiled at Tiphaine, showing her his small pearl teeth. Oh, how she adored her son. This close to him it seemed easier to breathe. She tickled him until he gasped. “Ma puce. You’re such a silly puce. I love you.”

  “Dale un beso a tu mama,” Olivia said, tucking his hair behind his ear.

  But Sebastian did not want to kiss Tiphaine.

  “No.” He shook his head violently.

  Olivia tilted him toward his mother once again.

  “No!” Sebastian giggled and shrieked.

  Luz hesitated for a moment, but then couldn’t stop the words from charging out. “A mother,” she said, “should spend more time with her children.”

  Tiphaine wiped her forehead, leaving a wet streak she could feel on her skin. “I didn’t ask for your opinion, Luz.”

  “Hah! Just keep thinking you know what’s best. Keep thinking you know and we’ll see!”

  Tiphaine set her paintbrush on top of the bucket and couldn’t think of anything to do but reach out and tickle him again.

  “It’s good thing I’m so busy today. Now you won’t miss a minute with him.”

  “Yes, we have fun, don’t we?” Luz said to Sebastian, taking him away from Olivia and nuzzling his neck. She laughed. “Tiphaine, you should remember you don’t become a mother just by having a child.”

  Luz’s words continued to buzz in Tiphaine’s head hours later, as she trailed listlessly behind Austin through the night market, where vendors hawked shampoo or merengue cassettes, and little boys with black polish and rags and lungs like Pavarotti sang out for shoes to shine. Tiphaine cowered whenever Luz came to visit, often retreating from her own home by finding chores at El Principe that needed to be done to excuse her absence. She felt useless in the face of the cruel competence with which Luz could run any household, especially one as barely managed as Tiphaine’s. No one needed her: not her burned cooking nor her nursery songs. Then again, what mother wouldn’t give her son everything he asked for? A terrible mother, like her.

  She had left halfway through preparing dinner.

  “I’ll finish it for you,” Luz said, smiling as she stirred the brown Mexican mole sauce that Tiphaine had always hated but Chato loved. Yet it was a smile that said, “Because only then will I know it’s done right.”

  Chato admonished her. His mother was in town. What could she be thinking by leaving?

  “I have to go to the market tonight. I forgot something. Ingredients for a special order that the cooks need tomorrow for breakfast.”

  “This is an emergency?”

  “I have to go,” she said. Then she had gotten into her car and driven away.

  Now, Tiphaine watched as Austin walked just ahead of her through the crowd, drifting past stalls heaped with mountains of plantain and pineapple, behind which women with their black hair parted down the middle gossiped about the men in their family. She was glad Austin was here with her tonight. Their frequent jaunts to the night market had become one of the high points of her week. Admiring the ease with which he fended off beggars or bargained with vendors, she was reminded again of how different he was from the other tourists; he was looking for something deeper than a holiday fling or a pocketful of postcards or a drug-fuelled adventure to keep from his parents and to brag about to friends. Austin had chosen to stay here in Honduras, just as she had. The difference was, unlike her, he could still leave.

  “Austin, how much longer do you think you’ll stay here?” Tiphaine asked, cutting open a bag of limes with a knife. She was standing in the kitchen at El Principe in her bare feet while Austin carried the market groceries to the table.

  “College will still be there when I go back,” he said, unloading watermelons, oranges, tortillas, and chickens with hard-to-pluck pinfeathers still dirtying their wings. “If I decide to go back.”

  Something in his voice was sharp. There was a new force in the way he spoke to her, so changed from his usual fumbling awkwardness. Distracted, she let the bag slip from her hands, the limes spilling across the floor. Austin got on the ground with her to pick them up and when her tank top slipped forward, revealing the top of her breasts, she smiled at him.

  He smiled back, baring his teeth, his expression more wolfish than she was used to from him. Caught off-guard, Tiphaine started putting the limes back into the bag.

  “God, it’s late,” she said, to break the tension. “I don’t want to go back home, but Chato’s mother is probably saying terrible things about me. What do you call a mother who eats her young?”

  “So stay.”

  “I will, I think,” she said, feeling strangely rudderless. “At least until she falls asleep.” Sebastian would already be in bed by now, curled up under his mosquito net. Had he even noticed she was gone?

  “You should be glad you don’t have a mother-in-law,” she continued, retrieving two bottles of beer from the industrial-sized cooler and a glass from the cupboard for herself. She set down a beer in front of Austin. She leaned back in her seat and stretched her legs out in front of her so they reached under the table, near his feet. “But maybe you want a wife, no? The two go together. Yet I can’t imagine you married.”

  He jerked his beer off the table, anger sparkling in his eyes, but he didn’t say a word.

  “Don’t you have a date tonight?” she said, wanting to push him. She poured her beer into her glass. She found his silence unsettling. Did he suspect something?

  “Naw. No one wants me tonight.” He gazed at her steadily as he spoke.

&nb
sp; For long minutes, Austin and Tiphaine sat quietly together at the table; him, scheming, her, exiled from her own house.

  Watching his sun-cracked lips close around the mouth of the bottle, she was uncertain if she had done wrong by him. Guilt. She lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring into the air, tried to banish the feeling by submerging herself in the sound of the conga drums playing somewhere in the distance. But her guilt continued to swirl within her just as the beer swirled in her glass, her hand shaking. She had never felt this hollow.

  “There is a new Italian restaurant in Santa Rosa,” Austin said at last.

  Above them, the bare light bulb torched the wings of clumsy moths.

  “Yes,” she said. “Geminis.”

  “Why don’t I take you there for dinner,” he said. “To thank you for all you’ve done for me.”

  She knew it would bring her only trouble. Still, she couldn’t fight the desire to rebel against her own instincts. As easily as slipping a needle under her skin, she heard herself saying yes.

  Tiphaine seemed lost in thought as she negotiated the dangerous curves of the road that led to Santa Rosa, her hands vibrating on the steering wheel, a cigarette between her fingers. Bordered by the ocean on one side and trees on the other, it was the only paved throughway that led to the town. Austin had heard that tourists were regularly robbed on this road by thieves pretending to have a flat tire or placed pylons on the road and then, armed with machetes, jumped lazily from the bushes.

  They had just passed a rare building, a lone pharmacy open late, when Tiphane suddenly slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting an iguana.

  “Nearly a goodbye party,” she said, putting the car back into gear.

  All week Austin had imagined what he would say to Tiphaine during the drive. Yet all he could focus on now was the hard line of her jaw, her cupid lips, and the glint in her eye as dangerous as the flash of a knife, and how even so, he couldn’t imagine a single man on earth who wouldn’t do anything for her. He was reminded of the policemen he’d seen talking to her in the evenings when he was emptying out the garbage cans. Whatever she said to them, they always left her and her altered books alone when even the cooks knew what she did to those tabs. It was possible that no one had ever complained. But he wondered about luck and when hers would run out.

  “The thing that’s different about us is that you can leave whenever you want,” she said, as if sharing only the tail end of a conversation she was having with herself.

  “But why would I want to? So I can go home and get some nine-to-five job I have to wear a suit and tie for? No thanks.”

  “I think you look at my life and think it’s all fun and games.”

  “What’s wrong with having fun in life?”

  She shot him a condescending glance as she took another drag of her cigarette.

  “Life’s what you make of it. I mean, it’s not rocket science.” He stared out the window at the water and the dying sun, questioning for the first time just how she’d made it this far.

  When they arrived at Geminis, they parked under some coconut trees and passed a mountain of split-open husks crawling with geckos. They walked toward a nearby plaza where a Mariachi band was playing and dancing couples glided between stone benches, their shadows long and graceful in the setting sun. In less than half an hour the sky would be black. The speed with which night swallowed day still amazed Tiphaine; only in the tropics could something change its nature so quickly. As they strolled along the wooden pier that led to the restaurant, they took off their shoes; the pier’s boards were still hot beneath their feet. Rocking fish boats and the children playing on the boardwalk were silhouetted against the sunset’s glow.

  As they neared the restaurant, Austin motioned toward the sand. At first she wasn’t sure what he was pointing at, but then the fading light reflecting off the ocean cast an orange shimmer onto the figures.

  Two figures.

  Their faces drifted toward each other, closing the space the sun’s dying rays had formed between them as Chato pulled the Dutch girl Marie into him for a deep kiss.

  Tiphaine grabbed the sea wall in front of her and felt a shifting in her bones, a settling – and then nothing. She watched the two figures until the clouds rolled in and it started to rain, streaks striping the sky. Then Chato and Marie joined the other people caught in the downpour who ran under store awnings and held newspapers over their heads, laughing and crowding against one another.

  Back in the safety of the car, Austin silent beside her, Tiphaine sat smoking and holding her hands, the one thing she could do, while the palm trees outside bucked under the weight of the rain. The trembling rose from deep within her until her shoulders were shaking, too. The image of Chato and Marie flashed in her mind, their faces turned up to the rain, and Marie opening out her arms to him.

  If she’d been alone Tiphaine might have marched up to them, grabbed Marie by her hair and shoved her face into the sand. Or driven back to El Principe and burned the place down. Or told Chato she was leaving, going back to Paris.

  Run. That’s all she wanted to do. And take her son with her.

  Instead, she threw her cigarette out the window and fixed her makeup in the rearview mirror. “So?” she said at last. “What are you going to order when we get inside?”

  When Marie returned from the beach the next day, she discovered her hammock and backpack missing from the luggage loft.

  “Your things have been confiscated,” Tiphaine told her.

  “Confiscated?”

  “You owe one week of back rent on your hammock space.”

  Chato and Austin glanced up from the wooden table where they sat playing cards as usual. Austin guzzled from his beer, afraid to meet Tiphaine’s eyes. Chato leaned back in his chair and spit onto the ground. Even the cooks behind Tiphaine stopped gossiping as Marie replied that she put money on her bill every third day. “There’s no way I owe you that much.”

  “Your backpack has been confiscated,” Tiphaine said again, her eyes unblinking. “I give people credit out of kindness. But this is also a business. When the bill is so high, and you won’t pay, there is nothing I can do.”

  Marie made her own calculations and barked that she would pay this much and not a penny more.

  Tiphaine shook her head. Then she calmly picked up the debt book, folded it under her arm, and went into the kitchen.

  Marie looked at Chato. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  Chato shrugged.

  “I’ll go to the police,” Marie yelled at Tiphaine’s back.

  “And I will show them these records,” Tiphaine called over her shoulder. “You think I don’t already know every policeman here?”

  Kirstie, who had been hanging her bathing suit to dry on the fence, now stood beside her sister at the counter. She took Marie’s elbow and tried to pull her away, which only enraged her further.

  “I’m not going to stand for it! Do you think I’ll put up with this kind of treatment?” Marie glared at Chato as she walked over to his table and stood there, her feet planted in the sand.

  Chato put his hands behind his head and raised his eyebrows as if to say, What can I do? He shook his head again. “Let me tell you about Tiphaine,” he said, staring drunkenly. “She’s loca, crazy. Pay her. That is the best thing to do.”

  Marie flicked her cigarette at the sand by his feet.

  “Forget it,” Kirstie said again, touching Marie’s arm. “Let’s just go.”

  But Marie was not going to give up. She and her sister took a colectivo to the police station, sitting together in the front seat, sweat pooling under their thighs because of the plastic seat covers, the air from the back window sucked up by a pregnant woman on one side and two kids bouncing up and down in their school uniforms on the other.

  At the station, Marie told the commandante that the owners of El Principe were cheating their customers, selling drugs, and running a brothel. Her sister could confirm the one and she could tell him where to look f
or the other.

  The commandante shook his head sadly, frustrated by these demanding tourist-types. Twenty years ago, none of these resorts had existed. Now they jutted out like broken limbs on every sheet of sand.

  “Unless you take my complaint of fraud and everything else I’ve told you about seriously, I’m not leaving,” Marie said.

  The commandante could only sigh as he went to fetch his logbook.

  That evening, the police marched through the bamboo gate of El Principe. They were smiling, jovial, as always, but something about their shiny black leather boots and machine guns seemed more threatening than usual, as though gleaming with some kind of truth.

  Near the last hammock at the back of the palapa hut, Austin stood as still as he possibly could, not wanting to draw attention to himself. With the least amount of motion he could manage, he fumbled with the plastic straws filled with coke he kept in the front pocket of his cutoff shorts and dropped the straws to the ground. Then, with his foot, he covered the powder and the straws with sand. The police couldn’t arrest him if he had nothing incriminating in his possession. When he looked up again to take in the commotion of lights crashing and glass shattering as the police tore apart the resort with terrible efficiency, he thought maybe he’d made a mistake staying in Cayo Bonaire for as long as he had. If he didn’t get arrested and thrown into a Central American prison, he swore to himself he’d fly home as soon as he could.

  The police had Chato against the wall. He raised his eyebrows, threw out his hands, and shrugged in the casual way of someone who has nothing to hide. On the other side of the palapa hut, an officer was speaking to Tiphaine, her eyes cast down.

  Before, she’d always seemed so out of his reach. Austin knew he was being selfish, wanting to see her break, but she’d wounded him and no one should be allowed that kind of power. Now it appeared as though Tiphaine’s luck had finally run out. The police were taking the place apart.