He sat on the curb. Certainly, it would be better to go back the way he had come and catch a cab near Boystown that would take him to the border, or to a hotel by the border. He could wake early and be gone, pay his twenty-five cents and slip through the turnstile and back into Texas where he’d left his car. He’d leave in the morning and drive; it might still be cool. He could find a beach at Brownsville or South Padre or farther north at Mustang Island, or he could go on to Louisiana. The future wavered before him with the nebulous possibility of a fever dream. He could imagine heat and bare shores, nights drinking cocktails that were too sweet and too cold on canopied decks surrounded by the sea. There was no reason to stay sitting here.
He stood and as he did so he knew he would not go back.
Once, he had watched the sunset with Samantha in Key West. They’d kayaked around the key and snorkeled with manatees in the cypress mangroves. They watched the sun fall and ate key lime pie so sweet that his teeth ached, and that night when he touched her, her skin was rough with blown salt. Ethan could feel it still, the salt on his tongue, and knew that he had stumbled beyond the borders of the real world, knew that there was that moment and all those that preceded it, and no imagined future could possibly unfold beyond it. He could not go back the way he had come. He could not walk these streets unmolested and—if Yolanda was telling the truth—unmurdered. And he could not believe the future he had imagined. Behind him, to the north, the named world, the world he knew, fell away into the jagged silhouettes of ruins.
He turned toward the door, walked up the cracked tile path. Nearby, a cock crowed some false advertisement of morning. Ethan looked down to his wrist but could not read his watch. He raised his hand and banged on the door and then banged again and again because he knew dawn was still a long way off. He banged and waited and listened until somewhere a light went on and he heard a slow scuffling from inside. The door opened to an old woman with a woven bonnet tied about her head and a face shrunken and webbed as untanned alligator skin. Ethan found suddenly that he could remember no Spanish.
“Yolanda,” he was saying. “Mirabelle. I’m here to help.”
The woman held up a paraffin lamp and peered closer, and he realized how absurd he must seem—some drunken gringo come wandering out of a brothel, standing in soiled clothes and a bloodied face, gesturing as to the deaf.
“Por favor,” he said, and pointed inside. He heard windows opening, feet sounding in the street behind him, a dog barking and barking. He realized that he was leaning on the doorframe, supporting himself with one hand while the other still held the bottleneck. He dropped it and it broke by his feet. He looked down at the glass, where the glass must be, but could not see it. “Mirabelle,” he said again. “Mirabelle.” And then the old woman was turning and beginning to walk into the dark of the house, turning and looking back at him and nodding her head. In that moment, the night’s thousand other possibilities fell away, and he followed her in through a hallway that smelled of vanilla and into a kitchen with a wooden chair and a table and a hung picture of the Virgin Mary listing on the wall toward a bead curtain and the rest of the house.
“Siéntate,” the woman said, and he did, fell into the chair. She left the lamp on the table and stepped out of the room and turned off whatever other light she must have lit. For a moment he heard her footsteps passing through the house, heard the settle and rustle of her robes swish across the floor like fallen leaves blown against pavement, and then the steps stopped as suddenly as if she had just frozen there in place and stood standing and waiting somewhere in the dark of the house.
On their last night in Key West Samantha turned from the open window and let her robe fall from her shoulders. Outside, dusk bled the day’s last light across the horizon and Samantha stepped out of her robe but put up her hair so that he could see her face, and walked to the bed where he sat as the purple light through the window spread across her left shoulder, her collarbone, her dark and salty hair. She did not close the shutters, but came to him on the bed and stood before him and took his head in her hands and pulled it to her belly. This is the memory’s hinge, where he goes first, and where, always, it starts to bend. She pulled his face to her stomach and he kissed her skin, caked with the sea and her sweat, and the moment turned like a tide, became frantic, and they clawed at each other like drowning swimmers fighting to stay afloat—and then when they slowed and settled he turned her around so they both could look out at the sun on the water as sudden wind worried the curtains about the sill and the last purple light spread on her skin like a bruise.
In and out of sleep and Ethan dreaming himself into the bar again, but this time sitting with Yolanda and saying, where is the bathroom? and her not understanding and him trying it again in Spanish, dónde está el baño? and her laughing and pointing and him waking, then, in the wooden chair, with the lamp’s flame dwindling to darkness on the table.
Revealed in its light: the room was empty but for the table, a sink, the hanging Virgin. Ethan had to piss very badly. He stood and the chair dragged against the floor and when he tried to steady it he heard his ring rapping on wood—he found his hands were shaking. His watch, he saw now, no longer ran—it had stopped at eleven thirty, though he had no idea how long ago that was. Very soon, he would have to find a bathroom.
Beyond the curtain the house was dark. Was there even a bathroom inside? Probably—but how to find it? No doubt the old woman was sleeping again, and perhaps there were others in the house as well. A husband? Siblings? Mirabelle—whoever she was? Outside, cocks began to crow.
Ethan sat and then stood, circled the room. He looked down at the floor. Cracks lined with uneven seams of sand and red dust ran through the concrete. Down the hall he had entered he could see that the front door hung unevenly against the first blue light of dawn. A breeze caught and soughed in the upper, unfinished rooms; the cocks kept screaming. Everywhere, now, he perceived the cloying smell of vanilla. In the street a car revved its engine, peeled out. Ethan made his way to the sink. It was empty but for two dry glasses. He rinsed them and put them on the table. What was left of the alley’s slop had slimed into mud on his clothes, and he peeled off his shirt and scrubbed it under the faucet. He washed his face and his arms as thoroughly as he could; he put his wet shirt back on and waited a moment and listened. Still, there was no sound of the old woman anywhere in the house. The street was quiet, his head ached from the scent of vanilla, he could not stand straight for the pressure on his bladder. He stopped waiting, unzipped his fly, and began to piss in the sink. He tried to hurry, but there was no hurrying it. Who are you, he thought, when you are doing this?
He never heard the front door open, but heard her footfall behind him, her voice.
“Please say the glasses are not still in the sink.”
Still pissing, he looked over his left shoulder—there was no stopping now—and saw her, Yolanda, standing on the kitchen threshold, framed against the hallway in the day’s first light.
Ethan tried to shrug.
“I didn’t want to go creeping about the house.”
She didn’t say anything, just watched him for a moment until he turned away again, stared at the wall and listened to the sound of his urine on the metal sink basin, which seemed now as loud as a waterfall suddenly sprung up out of ether in the room.
“The glasses?” she said again.
He tilted his head back toward them. She sighed and stepped into the kitchen and set a bottle on the table.
“For when you are finished,” she said.
He was finished. He zipped his pants, ran the sink for a moment, let it drain, and ran it again. Behind him, he knew she was watching as he stood there and refused to turn around. I’d be embarrassed, he thought, if I weren’t so drunk. But he wasn’t drunk, not anymore, and he realized that this was a sign of something else, some new collapse of character. A total lack of shame—another thing stripped from him before he realized it. He wondered how he looked to Yolanda, a stranger in h
er house pissing in her sink, and wondered more at how little he cared. Then he remembered to wash his hands and twisted on the faucet again, the third time now, rinsed his hands and faced her where she sat at the kitchen table. His hands were dripping on the floor and he dried them on his damp and muddy pants and held them up to the air, to her inspection.
“Manners,” Ethan said.
She looked down at her feet as if she were embarrassed, though really, she could not be embarrassed. How could she be, this woman who must have seen far worse things that very night? She stared back up and past him at the far wall, the Virgin hanging there. He saw her play her thumb across the burn scar on her right index finger. For a moment the cocks stopped crowing and the room was warm and quiet in the slow, paling light.
“I’ve never seen a toilet with a faucet in it before,” Ethan said finally.
She laughed, and as she laughed she reached up and forked her fallen hair out of her face with her fingers. A familiar gesture. Sam-antha, he thought, and then no, not her, he could never remember her doing that. It was the fingers in the hair that he remembered. His fingers holding her hair back, pulling it out of her face as she vomited.
In the time he stood at the sink the room had grown light. Outside, beyond their silence, the world was waking into screeching tires, occasional gunfire reporting on the wind. Ethan crossed the room and sat before her at the table. The bottle faced away from him and he couldn’t read the label. He nodded at it.
“Am I supposed to hit someone with that, or drink it?”
She held the bottle out so that he could see it.
“Rum,” she said. “From my hometown.”
He lifted the bottle and read the label—Product of Copal—and didn’t say anything. Doyle had told him how it was there, how girls would flee to the border; maybe they’d make it to Belize or Guatemala, or maybe they didn’t even get that far before they met men, coyotes, who offered to ferry them into the United States. The women would join the men—often they had no other choice—and it wasn’t until they were halfway there that the coyotes would raise the price. When the women couldn’t pay they were beaten, sometimes raped, and then offered an option: rather than be turned over to the border guards, they could work off their debt. Two-thirds of the prostitutes from Mexico to Arizona were Central American migrants.
Ethan looked down at the table, then up and away at the Virgin Mary hung crookedly, as if she were about to fall, at the far threshold. He could smell Yolanda sitting across from him, could smell cloves and her sweat, cigarette smoke and rose hips rising above the vanilla scent in a steam of heat from her body. Her hair no longer framed her face in a tight black oval but was pulled into a ponytail so that he could see the whole of her jaw, her cheekbones higher and sharper than what was common here, and the start of her scar blooming in a wide crest above her collarbone before narrowing into a thin raised line across her throat and down into her breasts. He stared at it, and knew he was staring, but could not stop. He found that he wanted to reach out and touch the scar, to feel it under his fingers, and he knew she was watching him watch her, he knew she must see where he was looking and he turned his eyes back to hers, met her gaze and couldn’t tell if the movement of pain he saw there like the ripple of wind across a lake’s surface was a reflection of himself or something almost hidden, breaking through.
“Rum?” she said, and poured two glasses before he answered.
They lifted their glasses and touched them. It was a strange thing to do and he wondered who initiated it. Here the action was completely out of context, and his arm hung there, holding the glass in some perversion of an earlier toast, a moment jarred suddenly back to him: celebrating Samantha’s promotion in her penthouse apartment, raising champagne flutes heavy with strawberries. The sound of crystal chiming on crystal. Wind and snow on glass. He drank and felt the kick of it in the back of his throat, the sudden pulsing in his lips, the capillaries opening in his face and the lightness of the empty glass in his hand. Yolanda smiled, poured them both some more. They drank in silence. Ethan had no idea why he was here beyond that, if he could imagine that every choice had led to this, for a year he’d wanted to see something he could not recognize, something as complete and incomprehensible as loss.
Now, though, he was sitting across the table from a woman who had a scar cut halfway across her body. He sat at her table and drank her rum and looked at her as if she were a painting, a model from his former life, someone to be photographed. If you tried hard enough you could render your life into a series of personal idioms—incomprehensible as loss—phrases that had no meaning beyond your own expression of self-pity. He thought again of his reaction to the way they touched glasses. When everything in the world is beacon to your own life, you are not living in the world anymore. He finished his rum. He wanted, suddenly, to leave.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” he said.
“You should start with thank you.”
Ethan spun his glass around on the table. Spun it and clinked his ring against it and spun it again.
“I don’t know what I should thank you for.”
“I saved your life tonight.”
“It’s funny,” he said. “But I don’t feel saved.”
Yolanda stared at him a moment and he was struck by the strange sound of his own voice, the bitterness in it. Away from Boystown’s other whores, Yolanda looked young and tired. Her shoulders were bony under her shawl.
“How you feel and what you are can be two very different things,” she said.
“It must be easy for you to say that.”
“Because I’m a prostitute?”
Ethan didn’t answer. His back itched, the air of the room felt heavy and warm, spinning and syrupy against his face. He looked at the bundle she had carried with her, swaddled in blankets like a baby.
“Is that my camera?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t easy to get back. Your clothes are gone.”
“I guess I shouldn’t have brought a camera into a brothel,” he said. He watched her face as he said it, brothel. The word sounded obscene to him, soiled. He hadn’t needed to use it, but had chosen to anyway. He did not want to know why.
“I thought maybe you were one of those men who likes to bring a camera to bed?” she said.
“I’m a photographer.”
“Like for the newspapers?”
“No,” Ethan said. “I took pictures of furniture mostly. Sometimes fingernails. For catalogs.”
“In Boystown, we do not have any nice furniture,” Yolanda said.
Ethan stood and moved to the sink. He washed his hands again and splashed water on his face. It was warm, brackish almost. It smelled gaseous, like an air pocket popping upward from a jungle river. He found himself scratching his jaw.
“I’m filthy,” he said. In the moist heat of the room his shirt had not begun to dry. He stood before her, scratched his face—he could not stop scratching it—and watched her watch him. Now that the adrenaline of the night—the brothel and the bar fight and the flight through darkness—had diminished, his body felt simply swollen and empty, a clown balloon slowly deflating. He seemed to himself huge and gangly, everybody’s lost gringo. He sat back down and poured another glass of rum.
In one continuity of motion, Yolanda pulled her shawl over her head, grasped its sides, shook it flat, dropped and caught one end and folded it all, gracefully, without putting it down. Ethan wondered at the simple dexterity of the action: it must be practiced, the balance of flourish and economy could not be haphazard. But why? In Copal, women line-dried their clothes and then folded indoors. He registered a pang that for a moment he could not place. Then, as it always was: Samantha. Samantha, for all her yankee breeding, could not fold her clothes. What difference does it make? she asked once and he answered—by this point sanctimonious and sure and feeling the first inklings of anger—how can you expect order in your life when you don’t maintain it, and she’d just looked back at him s
adly, her beautiful face not beautiful at all in the light of their room, but florid and splotchy, consumptive. She shook her head with a misery surpassing anything he’d seen before—his mother’s futile bangings at Chopin, all of Samantha’s little drunks up till now—a look forlorn past weeping and its attendant repair, a look that said, even this is beyond me now, now to fold clothes is still too much.
Here, that moment echoing in a perfect reverse. Yolanda placed her shawl in her lap. Her shoulders were surprisingly sun-darkened for a woman who worked by night.
“I once wanted to be a model,” she said. “Two Dutchmen came to my island and offered to photograph me for a magazine. They said it could lead to much. They said maybe I could be in a calendar. They offered to bring me to Europe. They said that in Europe many were concerned by the plight of the former colonial subjects. But my father, he was Colombian and strict and he would not let me. He said, ‘Yolanda, you do not know what such a deed might buy you.’”
She paused and waited, she seemed to want the line to set in. As if she were telling a parable, a story he was supposed to draw some lesson from, but it seemed simply leaden and false. If there were lessons to be learned, he would not learn them. He realized that he did not smell good. How’s that for an epiphany?
“Well, now certainly you know what your actions buy you,” he said.
“Tonight,” she answered without inflection, a voice as cold as a mineral strain in fresh water, “tonight they bought you your life.”
Another debt, Ethan thought, unpaid and unpayable.
“Who was that guy?” he said.
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