by David Masiel
“I suppose we all need to unburden ourselves.”
“That’s right. We do. I got one. Feels like a train wreck in my gut, but the truth is—I love you. It ain’t just ruse. I love you and I want you. I don’t want you for him, I want you for me. And it made me jealous back there in Salina Cruz. I said things just to hurt. Some not even truthful things, and I’m sorry about that.”
“Perhaps it’s you who needs to have his confession heard, Snow.”
“Well, I’m more like the kid’s gramps that way. Screw confession and unction. I don’t need a priest to absolve me, I’ll handle that myself.”
She turned forward then, as if the whole thing had been settled, though for the life of him Snow couldn’t see that it had. He watched her face flashing in the dull, intermittent street light as they headed out of Limón. Her eyes glowed yellow and pulled him out of his false bravado, and he leaned his head back, wishing he had a cold beer to wash away the metallic taste in his mouth and trying hard as he could to find fault in her—in her beauty, her character, her remoteness, her heat—but he couldn’t. The bus stopped on the outskirts of town, long enough to duck into a roadside market and buy a case of Pilsen beer, which Snow lugged back to his seat on his shoulder, just ahead of two young Americans, early twenties frat boys on a solo spring break, eschewing Cabo for the minor adventure of the most peaceful country in Central America.
Snow befriended two coffee farmers on their way back home from a bender in San José, and before long he was trading cold bottles of beer for slugs off a bottle of some local firewater called guaro, which tasted like cheap rum and made his face glow and his belly rumble—he wondered if it cured dysentery or caused it.
“¡La pura vida!” Snow yelled, and hoisted the guaro bottle like a moonshiner. “¡La pura vida!”
“Sí, sí, pura vida,” said the coffee farmer, and patted Snow on the back.
Up two rows some locals felt bad for the two young Americans and one of them offered up his seat to the kid with the backpack. Two hours later they were still riding the range and the local asked for his seat back, but the American was asleep, his head bouncing left and right. “Pardon me,” the local said in English. But he got no response, only a death curl on a bouncing seat. “Pardon me, excuse me,” and finally the American woke up, bleary-eyed and looking like he had a hangover.
“Yeah? What?”
“I have my seat back,” the local said.
“No way, dude, you gave it up,” said the American, and half rolled in his seat, turning his back to the local, who straightened up and was promptly knocked to the floor by the thump of a chuckhole beneath them. He ended up sprawled out over two women three rows forward, and by the time he pulled himself up and toward the frat boy, he was looking around for allies. By now most of the bus was asleep; even the driver seemed to catch a few winks in between turns in the road.
“Excuse me,” the local said again, his English halting. “Excuse me, Mr. American.” He tapped the kid on the shoulder.
The kid shrugged him off with a complaining groan. “Dude, get out!”
When the local was about to tap again, Snow stood up, said, “Lo siento mucho para mi paisano,” and grabbed the kid by both shoulders, hoisting him kicking and flailing while he tossed him forward a good six feet, where he landed face first in the aisle. Snow felt the pinch at his chest, like he’d dislocated a rib in the process.
“Dude, like what the fuck? Mind your own fucking business!”
“That’s just it, bub, I gotta do business in this country, and norteño assholes like you don’t help. Now sit your dumb ass on the boards and shut your piehole.”
As Snow came walking back he saw Beth staring at him with eyes wide open. “Good show, Harold,” she said.
When Snow turned back to the American kid, he saw him stretching out on the aisle with his backpack under his head. “He gave me his fucking seat,” he said.
All occupants of the two rows directly in front of the conflict had awakened, and now they clapped their hands in appreciation before going back to sleep. A warm rush came to Snow’s chest. The priest turned, mildly interested. Beth patted Snow’s arm, and George smiled after three days being downcast, looked at Snow with something like affection for the first time since PC, an image corrupted only by the fact that he was holding Beth’s hand at the time. Even the driver grinned in the rearview, right before he hit a pothole going fifty miles per, and four people fell out of their seats and thumped the deck like sacks of corn.
At La Fortuna, on the mid-mountain shores of Laguna de Arenal, they found a cab to take them to see lava flows. The cabbie was a playful, thin character in his thirties named Cayetano. Snow offered him a cold beer and an extra hundred dollars, so Cayetano said he’d take them to the best spot for viewing lava flows and sitting in hot water. “Talk of hot water!” he said. “Fifty feet from you it boils!”
“¡Pura vida!” Snow said, and chugged another beer, his eyes catching the glint of lights, bouncing off a sign reading CURVO PELIGROSO. He glanced into the backseat, where he caught a glimpse of Beth, and though he didn’t linger on them, he saw them pressed tight to each other in the back and felt a surge inside him, half aroused by the sight of her and half jealous of the sight of him, wanting to reach a hand back there like a dance chaperone and push between them. He reached back with beers instead, levered open a third for himself, and offered one to the cabbie. “I do not drink while driving,” he said. “But when we stop and it is hot in the pool, a cold beer would be most welcome.”
“They ain’t so cold anymore,” Snow said.
Just then, they rocked up a dark road, off the paved path, and upward along a two-lane dirt road through the trees of a sparse forest, cresting the hill before the glow of fire. At one bounce, Snow glanced back and saw the pair kissing. He turned his head forward and stared at the floorboards, his feet there, flat on the deck, anchored. He slugged back more of the beer. He imagined her tongue, searching. He imagined her pressing body, thought he heard a gentle moan escape the backseat, but refused to turn to it. Any arousal at playing the voyeur had evaporated, but he kept telling himself it had to be, they had to get through this, though still it made him angry. He knew he’d be better for her, knew he’d make her feel things she could never feel with a neophyte. But there were other feelings: she’d feel all his desire, his tenderness, his need to cradle her, to love her forever. Jesus—love!—it near flattened him to the seat to think she might actually be falling in love with the kid.
The headlights picked their way along the ridge and the driver pulled off the side at a wide spot, braking abruptly to send the backseat pair into a scattered clutching of each other, hands to the back of the front seat. Snow looked out toward a trail that led to the river. He could see the glow of lava through the trees, and the sound of howler monkeys out there, or maybe a jag or two. He’d never seen a jaguar in the wild, and was sure he didn’t want to, not at night near a pool, anyway. He checked his knife, wished he’d brought a gun, pushed open the passenger-side door, and grabbed the beer. “Let’s hit the hot pool,” he said into the back, and saw the two sitting facing each other, not quite able to see in the darkness but then catching sight of her finger inside the kid’s mouth.
He slammed the door and started down the trail.
The cabbie followed. “Keep an eye out for a wooden wall, we will turn right at it. Will those two find their way?”
“Never can tell,” said Snow. “I think they’re groping for it right now.”
But their groping and Snow’s groping went in two different directions, and they didn’t follow, not right away. Snow and the cabbie found a flat rock overlooking a pool in the river, a back eddy swirling inside, feeding warm water there, in a space protected by rocks.
Snow imagined her liquor-soaked tongue in his mouth letting hot liquid pour into him, his neck aching in dull throbbing bands like fingers there to choke him out. Then he felt the night air against his face, cooler than down on the co
ast, and heard the kids finally, back behind him, running, calling his name. “Here!” Snow barked, and sensed their turning; they’d lost the trail and were pushing through underbrush, giggling in tipsy ecstasy, while Snow focused on the opposite bank of the river, the smell of burning tinder, the smoking mass of lava as it curled into the river and fell like an orange tongue that steamed and hissed as it hit water, turning to black piles of stone. The cabbie was right: river water boiled along the far bank.
As they stood there prepared to take the plunge, Snow could feel the warmth against his face, and from the trees heard the screech of some wild animal or another, until Snow looked up and saw the wide eyes of a howler monkey. “Territory,” he said. “You got to respect territory!”
“What is that?” said the cabbie, drinking his beer now. “I am going to take my clothes off,” he said. And stood up.
The kids were behind him then. Snow eyed them for some sign of what had gone on in the cab after he’d left. “Go that way twenty yards and you’ll be boiled alive, Georgie!” cried Snow. “Stick to the downstream hole!” Then he stood up, stripped out of his jeans and boxers, pulled his shirt off over his head, and with an open beer in one hand plunged straight off the flat rock and into the river, his bronze upper torso like a shadow over a moon-white ass, his arm raised, hand clutching the beer. Pura vida, he thought, the Costa Rican national motto. He felt the cold water at his feet, rising in gradations to his torso, until at the top it felt warm and steamy.
“Ahhhhh!” he said, bursting from the water to shake his hair. “Watch out for jaguars—they swim like fish and this might be their turf.”
“Howler monkey are more worry,” said the driver, behind him to take the hot plunge, water splashing up and over Snow’s face and head and into his eyes.
Then came Beth, who in the dark stripped fast to nakedness and flew into the water, swirling downstream in inebriated silence, Snow letting out whooping spirited calls of joy into the dark steaming waters of the volcanic river.
Beth turned, beads of water glistening moonlight over her tight black hair. She drew the kid’s clothing off as if by magic, ignored the eyes of an arboreal creature only fifteen feet away, unnerving Snow with its watchful eyes, until he dipped backward and let his feet rise out of the water, the skin of his ankles burning in the night water, and a lizard flashed past him, scampering like a demon across the water. It startled him, sent a chill through him. A Jesus lizard, so-called for obvious reasons. He heard the sounds of the jungle then—as if the lizard had tuned him in to the submerged humming of the forest, the night birds and buzzing insects, and the pale glowing eyes of animals—and he wondered again if a jaguar was among them. The guaro still burned at the back of his throat, and he felt rain begin to patter out of the night sky.
“Look.” Snow pointed, and Maciel turned to see lava seeping into the far end of the pool, the water sliding over a short fall and steaming, and the steam enveloped them. Snow could feel fish nibbling at his legs, while he watched through wafting bands of steam, rain-steam on lava, obscuring and revealing, alternating as the kids began a passionate tongue kiss, slinking off into the far end. She clutched tight to him, her legs wrapped around him underwater, Snow figured, and he kept wondering if he was inside her now, if her lips had flared in the water’s heat, or her own heat, opening to fold over his head and draw him into her.
Snow’s mouth ached for her. Bracelin was right, he hated the kid now and half thought to let the mate kill him. He would have Beth to himself if he let something like that happen, except that another part of him knew that it was just such thoughts that kept him from her. The crunching crackling sound of lava burning wood filled his ears, and he watched the face of the cabbie and the arching neck and buzz cut of Beth, dark and matted, glistening in the fire glow, merging and nuzzling to the kid’s head as his own lips fell forward to her neck. Their eyes glowed like baboons, the smell of burned wood from a tree fire smoldering as a bank of molten rock urged past, and the hot sliding feel of her body straddling someone else. Snow turned away then, his own eyes rolling to see the wide-eyed face of a monkey, big and dangling like a human boy, and the boy inside Maciel, coming out all wild and passionate and adoring. Then Snow was over to them without even realizing it, his body making firm strong crawl strokes to propel him there, to reach his hand between them, aroused in spite of himself, aroused to the point of wanting to press himself to her bare body and urge himself into her. “What the hell you doing!”
He saw in their faces the same question of him. “Oh, Jesus!” she said, and slithered off then, away from them both, and swam away, left the old boatswain there grasping at black water, the kid staring at him in stunned silence, his eyes glowing to the shrieks of howler monkeys, gaggling their warnings behind the wall of night.
Maciel hauled himself out of the pool and onto the bank, where he sat naked with weeds growing up between his legs. Snow turned to see Beth rise naked out the far end and put her clothes on and move off toward the cab. Snow hoisted himself and followed. “Get your clothes,” Snow said to the kid, as he was already sliding into his own, looking at the kid lift up and move like a jackknife through the orange dark.
Snow caught up to Beth as she got into the front passenger seat of the cab, dimly backlit by the overhead. Snow put out his hand to stop the door from closing, and she immediately swung her legs out the door but stayed seated, as if ready to get back in or run off, depending. “You got to understand how this makes me feel, here, Bethy.”
“This has nothing to do with you, Harold.”
“You in love with him or something?”
She rolled her head, half shaking it, half nodding it. “I don’t want to have this conversation with you.”
The kid and the cabbie were far back now, and Snow half hoped they’d been swallowed by lava or a hungry jag. “You of all people ought to understand. I got this here, I got for you—” and he dug into his pocket, his heart racing, and gave her the box. She looked up at him but didn’t take it. “What is it?”
“Go ahead—open it. It’s for you.”
She looked up at him, as if she could see what it was, see right through his eyes to what it was. “I can’t accept that.”
He let his arm drop, holding the boxed diamond down at his side. “It don’t have to be defined any way you know. It can be whatever you want it to be. As long as we’re together, I don’t care.”
“What if she wants to be with me?” the kid said from behind.
Snow turned to see him standing there in blue jeans and wet short hair with that cross tattoo peeking out from under his black shirtsleeve. “This don’t concern you, George. So why don’t you put your fingers in your ears and hum the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ for a spell.”
“But it does concern me.”
“No it don’t!” Snow shouted, and the kid flinched.
“Harold. I’m thirty next month,” Beth said. “I’m thirty and no one will tell me who I can and cannot fuck.”
Snow stood upright, ran his hand through his hair and felt how thin and long it had gotten, and let out an exasperated breath. Then he leaned down close and talked in a hushed voice. “So okay, okay, so you gotta fuck him, fuck him. Just come away with me when you’re through.”
“Harold.” She looked at him. “Don’t you see? I already am fucking him”
Snow was frozen a count. He felt his nostrils itch, then the burning. In an instant he could have pushed it straight into his eyeballs where it would come out as tears. “When?”
“Panama City.”
“Ah, Jesus—Jesus—” He was taken by how it surprised him.
“I love her,” said the kid. “It’s true. Say what you want. It’s true.”
Snow let his arm droop from the roof of the cab. He stepped back and leaned against the door. The girl just stared at the kid from her place on the seat, but Snow couldn’t tell what she was thinking, if that wasn’t the weirdest way for someone to inform you he was in love with you, or if s
he shared it, or was afraid of it, or hated and mistrusted it. Whatever it was lay thick between them. “You two got to understand what position this puts me in with the mate.”
“I understand you need me to appear to be yours. I’m not sure I see how it’s in my interest.”
Snow couldn’t imagine how anybody would see the world so differently than he did. “If this puts me in a position with the mate, it puts you in a position with the mate. And you?” he pointed at the kid. “You better steel yourself, buddy.”
Maciel’s face hardened, turned into his grandpa before Snow’s eyes. Snow remembered that look on the heels of some insult to the dignity of a woman. Old Joaquin was such a prude deep down. That was the reason the old man could kick ass; he fought for honor, or for love, or ideals—and all as if his life were at stake. For a man who had no God, Joaquin Maciel fought his own private Holy War.
“You got your granddad in you, I see that.”
“So what if I do? Some bad old man he was, huh? What about you, Harold? What about the things you’ve done?”
“I ain’t done shit.”
“Yeah? You sure about that? You sure there isn’t something back there that you did? Never mind my grandfather. What about you? What judgment’s out there for you, Harold?”
“What the fuck you talking about? You got some God vision, you think? See the first and the last and all that crap, George?”
“What about Vietnam, what happened there? Merchant ships during the war years, wasn’t that it?”