“Okay, let’s go. You look on the right side and I’ll look left.”
“All right.”
We slowly drove the route back home. There were surprisingly many people walking on either side of the road. April took her job seriously. She reminded me that Will was wearing a red jacket. Neither of us could recall whether he had worn a hat or cap that morning. April was clearly distraught.
“He must have ridden home with someone,” she said. “That’s what he did. Idiot.”
I turned the defroster on full to keep the windows clear.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I said.
About halfway home April leaned forward. “Is that him?”
I crunched over to the icy shoulder and honked the horn. It was Will. He walked over and climbed into the backseat.
“What the fuck,” April said.
I looked at him. His hair was wet. He had not worn anything on his head. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“I think so. I’m freezing.” I could see the fear in his face. He looked down at his feet.
“What is it?” I asked. I leaned over the seat to see that he was wearing sneakers. His feet were soaked.
“My feet are numb,” he said.
“April, get in the back. Will, get up here.”
“My feet hurt,” he said.
“Get up here,” I said again. “Now!”
April opened her door and got out to move to the back. I helped Will climb between the seats into the front. I turned the heat on full and directed it through the floor vents. “Take off your shoes and socks.”
“What?”
“Take off your shoes and socks, stupid!” April screamed at him. She was angry and afraid.
“It’s okay, April,” I said.
Will got his feet exposed and under the blowing heat as I pulled back into traffic. “What were you thinking?” I asked.
“He wasn’t,” April said. “He wasn’t thinking. A person needs a brain to think. He doesn’t have a brain.”
“I’m sorry,” Will said. “This is making my feet hurt worse.”
“That’s just the feeling coming back,” I said.
“I bet you’ve got frostbite,” April said.
I said nothing.
“Stupid,” April muttered, falling back into her seat. “You’re going to lose your toes.”
“What?” Will looked at me.
“You’re not going to lose your toes.”
“They hurt,” he said.
“Stupid!” April shouted into his ear.
“Enough of that,” I said to her.
“Dad,” Will said.
“Try to relax,” I said to Will, but it was meant for both of them. I wanted to ask him what he had been thinking, but I was more concerned with his toes at that moment. “Hang in there. We’ll get you home and warmed up.”
Linda must have been looking out the window the whole time because she was outside as soon as we drove up. She saw him in the front seat.
April got out.
“Stay here,” I said to Will. “I’ll get some boots so you can get inside.”
“Where was he?” Linda asked as I ran past her.
“Walking,” I said. “I need to get him some boots.”
“The idiot was walking through the snow in sneakers,” April said, heading for the house.
When I came back with a pair of my boots, Will was near tears, but not crying. I got the boots on him and helped him into the house. Linda turned off the car and followed us in.
“What were you thinking?” Linda asked.
I put Will in the chair in front of the fire in the kitchen. Linda peeled his jacket off of him. The color in his feet looked encouraging. “You scared us, honey,” Linda said.
“I’m sorry,” Will said.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I said.
“I just thought I could walk home.”
“In sneakers?” Linda asked.
I looked at Will and then at Linda. “I think we can talk about that later,” I said. “I’ll make you some hot chocolate.”
But first I had to pee. I walked down the hall to the washroom. From outside April’s door I could hear her crying. I opened her door and saw her lying facedown on her bed. I sat beside her.
“He’s so stupid,” she said.
“He’s okay now, honey,” I said.
“He’s going to lose his toes.”
“He’s not going to lose his toes,” I assured her. “Everything is okay.”
She sat up and hugged me.
1979
Down at the dock the fishermen had set out. I watched their boat sputter, smoke, and churn and I wished I were with them instead of where I was. Richard took my plate back into the cantina. When he came back out he was followed by the Bummer and Carlos.
“Seems we have a new passenger,” Richard said to me. Richard tossed me a bottle of water.
It was clear he didn’t like it and neither did I, but it was the Bummer’s show. “Want me to drive?” I asked.
“No, I’m good,” Richard said.
The Bummer didn’t look at me, but Carlos did. He smiled, said, “I don’t take up much room.”
I ignored him, watched the two of them fall into the backseat.
Richard drove us back onto the road.
The Bummer was alert, almost on edge again. He checked his pistol. “Another hour,” he said.
“I heard it’s hot out here,” Carlos said. I understood that he was not talking about the weather.
“Who did you hear it from?” I asked.
“From people who know,” he said.
Richard looked over at me. “Be cool,” he whispered.
I nodded.
“Ja, be cool,” Carlos said in his annoying accent.
The road began to climb up and away from the lake when the Bummer instructed Richard to turn right onto an even less developed track. Soon the Caddy was bottoming out every few feet.
“Stop the fucking car,” the Bummer said. “This is as far as this piece of shit will take us. Everybody out.”
We got out and stood in the open heat. The landscape was dry and menacing. There was a sudden stiff wind and then nothing. The lake was perhaps half a mile away. I looked around for any sign of people, structures, paths, anything. There was nothing to see.
“This way,” the Bummer said, heading off down toward the water.
“You don’t carry a gun?” Richard asked Carlos.
“Nobody wants to shoot me,” Carlos said. “Besides, guns are heavy. And they smell of oil. And you have to keep them clean.”
“So, the answer is no,” Richard said.
I was behind the two of them, bringing up the rear. We were passing through a wooded area. I could see a clearing ahead and possibly a shack.
“Is that where we’re going?” I called forward to the Bummer.
He didn’t answer. At the edge of the clearing he had us stop. We came up to stand with him. “The Nicaraguans,” he said. “They use that shed. There are two more beyond it.”
“How do you know this?” I asked.
Still, he ignored me. “Your brother is around here,” he said to Richard. “There’s a chalet over the rise.”
“Tad is there?”
“He’s somewhere around here.”
I stared ahead at the shack. Just beyond it I could make out the wall of a white tent. Its front flap moved with the breeze off the lake. I looked left to the water and for the first time the beauty of it came to me. There was movement on its surface and some life. I felt ungenerous for not having seen it as beautiful until then. And even then I wondered if my finding it so was not some self-preservative reflex, an attempt to close out the immediate world in which I found myself. I attended to the color of the water and could not name it. It was not green, I thought, and so I knew that there was green in it, but still blue, as green as a blue can get and still be blue. We only ever spontaneously deny the presence of things that are actually there or should be there. The palms swa
yed.
“What now?” Richard asked.
The Bummer sat on the ground and put his back against a tree. “We wait for a while. Watch.”
I looked at the sky. It was going to rain just like it had rained every day we had been there. It appeared it might rain earlier. I realized that I never spotted the clouds rolling in, only that it was raining.
Around noon it still had not rained, but I continued to feel it coming. A man walked by the shack and then another. They were not carrying rifles and that made me feel a little less tense, but hardly relaxed.
“Is that your brother?” the Bummer asked.
Richard stood and looked. “It is!” Before the Bummer could stop him he ran out into the clearing. “Tad!” he shouted.
Tad turned. Even from that fifty or so meters I could see the confusion on Tad’s face. I could also see that he was in no trouble at all. He looked back to be sure he was seeing correctly. I ran after Richard and saw another wave of confusion as he spotted me and this time fear washed over him.
Tad ran to meet us. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“We came to find you,” Richard said. “We thought you were in trouble. Mom is worried sick.”
“You need to get the fuck out of here,” he said. “Fuck. Fuck. You really have to go. Now.”
“We thought you might be hurt or in jail.”
“I’m fine. What the fuck, Ricky.” Then he saw the Bummer and Carlos slowly walking toward us. “Who the fuck are they?” He saw the Bummer’s rifle. “He’s got a gun? Jesus, Ricky, tell the guy to hide that thing.” He looked back at the shed.
“What are you doing here?” Richard asked.
“Let’s get back into the trees. Come on.” Tad tried to turn Richard and me around.
“Are you all right?” Richard asked.
“I’m fine. But you have to get out of here. How the fuck did you find me? Fuck, Ricky.”
“We’re here to take you home.”
“I’ll be home soon enough.”
“Just like that, we’re supposed to turn around and leave you here.” Richard was angry. “We flew all the way down here and find out you’re what … what is this … some kind of drug operation?”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“Hey!” someone shouted from the shack.
“Shit,” Tad said. He turned back to the voice. “Everything’s all right! Todo está bien!”
“Who is that?!” The man had pulled a pistol from his pocket. He stopped and called back, “Los hombres con armas!”
The Bummer raised his rifle and leveled it at the man.
I fell down while trying to back away from him. Tad was more afraid than any of us because he knew who the other men were.
The man from the shack shouted again, “Ven rápido!” A man came out of the tent with a rifle.
“Fuck,” Tad said. “Just run.”
Carlos was already running. I ran after him. Richard and Tad were behind me. I heard a shot and turned to see the Bummer squeeze off a round. Then he was running too. We ran into the trees and kept running.
Tad kept swearing and saying we were all dead, fucked. “I can’t believe you showed up here. You’re a fucking English major.”
Fear pushed me into anger and I grabbed Tad by the front of his shirt. “Listen, you fuckup, your brother came down here for you.”
He slapped my hands away. “Get the fuck out of my face.”
The Bummer pushed Tad. “Keep moving.”
“Who the hell are you?” Tad asked. He leaned as if to fight. “Touch me again, asshole.”
The Bummer pushed the barrel of the rifle into Tad’s side. “I said, run, motherfucker.”
We all ran again. I felt a pop in the back of my calf, the leg of the sprained ankle. It hurt like hell, but I kept running. We ran past the path we had taken to get there and it ended at the lake. We stopped behind a sandy berm and a stand of short palm trees. The rain started to fall. It was sudden and hard. Carlos inexplicably tried to light a cigarette, but failed.
Tad was too confused and mad to say anything.
“What now?” I asked the Bummer.
“We wait and then get back to the car.”
It rained for about fifteen minutes and then stopped as suddenly as it had started. I was soaked. I looked over at Richard. A bullet hit the palm tree right next to me. Stupidly, I turned to look instead of ducking down. I saw two men with rifles hunched and running toward us. The Bummer shot at them and the men fell to take cover. Richard was shaking. I suppose I was also, but I didn’t feel it. The Bummer pushed his pistol toward me.
“What?” I asked.
“Take this,” he said.
I ducked my head into my shoulders as a bullet hit just above me.
I reached out and grabbed the gun by the grip. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
He looked me in the eye and said, “Shoot everybody but me!”
“What did he say?” Richard asked me.
I turned to Richard. “He’s crazy,” I said. More shots rang out. “Fuck.”
“Bummer!” Richard called. “What now?”
I turned back to the Bummer. His face was flat in the sand.
“What is it?” Richard asked.
“Bummer,” I said. “Bummer.” I moved closer to him. “I think he got shot,” I said to Richard.
Carlos crawled over. He turned the Bummer over. The was a neat hole in his forehead just about his left eye.
“Oh, shit!” Richard screamed. His legs started running even though he was lying on the ground.
I glanced up and over the mound and saw the men running away. They were not looking back for us at all.
“Is he dead?” I asked Carlos.
“Oh yeah,” he said.
“They’re gone,” Tad said. “But they’ll probably come back. In fact I know they’ll be back.”
“The car is this way,” I said. I put the Bummer’s pistol in my pants.
Richard was badly shaken. “What the fuck were you doing?” he asked his brother. He pushed him in the chest.
“I was doing business with them until you showed up.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Richard said.
“He’s dead?” Richard asked Carlos again.
Carlos wasn’t paying any attention to Richard. He was looking up the hill, looking for danger.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said. I wanted to get home. I needed to get home. That was all I was thinking. I kicked Richard’s leg. “Let’s go.”
Carlos grabbed his shoulder bag.
“Asshole, aren’t you going to take his damn picture?” I asked, staring Carlos in the eye.
“Why? Nobody’s going to miss him.”
Paris
I was unsure what I felt as I left that lunch with Victoire and her beautiful mother. I dropped the gifts I’d bought for my family at the hotel and kept the necklace for Victoire with me. There was a very light drizzle and I decided to forgo the metro and walk up the rue du Cherche-Midi to Saint-Germain and the gallery. I imagined what any number of my friends would have said if they had witnessed my lunch, Richard especially. They would have told me that my affair was at the very least ill-considered, and if anything the mother should be the object of my desire. As I walked, as I listened to those imagined voices, I fell more deeply for Victoire and felt increasingly more stupid with every degree of descent. Yet I had not been so relaxed in years.
I arrived at the gallery, chatted with Etienne about the placement of the two remaining paintings, and then followed my same route back to my hotel, entertaining the very same thoughts and arriving at the same concluding feeling. I climbed the stairs to my room and was about to shower when the phone rang.
It was Linda.
“I was going to call you,” I said.
“Well, the snow has stopped.”
“Glad to hear it. How are you? The kids?”
“Everyone is fine,” she said. She sounded distant. “Why don’t you tell me
what you’re doing?”
I was thrown by the question and its directness.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“You’ve been getting drunk again and I don’t like it.”
“What?”
“You expect me to believe the clerk rang the wrong room. You were out drinking with Etienne or you were passed out drunk.”
I decided to attempt a skip over this. “I was just with Etienne discussing the placement of the remaining pieces, but I haven’t been out drinking with him. The opening is tonight.”
“I don’t know why you have to be there for this,” she said.
“I think it’s really helped for me to be involved,” I lied. “Especially tonight. You know how people like to see the artist. Is anything wrong?” It was a stupid question as she had already expressed her concern about my drinking.
She was silent on the other end, the stupidity of my question having not gotten by her.
“Linda?”
“How much have you been drinking? When I called the other night, did you not answer because you were drunk?”
“I didn’t answer because the phone did not ring,” I told her. Another lie.
“How much are you drinking?”
“You’ll be happy to know that I have not been drinking at all.” I realized how ludicrous that sounded.
“Kevin.”
“Okay, I’ve had wine with dinner. That’s it. Call Etienne and ask him if he’s seen me take a drink. Call the clerk and ask him if I’ve been stumbling in.”
Her silence betrayed her disbelief. I felt accused and oddly relieved. She was not concerned that I was having an affair, but that I was drinking too much. I wondered if I was just so much a bore that she could not imagine me having an affair, then came back with the sad truth that she actually trusted me. I was being accused and should have been, but was guilty of something else, something worse. My pathetic history, my sorry past failure had surfaced as effective camouflage for my current indiscretion.
“Really,” I said. “I feel good.”
“Will really misses you,” she said.
“I miss him, too. I miss all of you. Just a few more days and I’ll be home.”
“I’m about to do the shopping. Do you want anything in particular from the market?”
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