by Tom Epperson
“Salud,” says Roberto.
“Salud.”
They bump glasses and drink. Daniel smacks his lips and says “Ahhh,” and then he holds the glass up and looks at it. “You know, if you’d never seen a glass of beer before, you’d be amazed at how beautiful it was. The white foam, the golden beer. The way the bubbles sparkle as they stream up.”
“So have you decided what you’re going to do?”
Daniel reaches for his cigarettes.
“Maybe you’re right, maybe I should leave. But that doesn’t mean I have to go to Saint Lucia. I can go anywhere. Antarctica, for example. I can take pictures of penguins.”
“That’s true. But why not Saint Lucia? It’s a cool place and you’ve never been there. And I need somebody to hang out with.”
Daniel lights his cigarette, then shrugs.
“Okay. Why not?”
“Great.”
They sit in silence for a while. Drinking their beers, listening to the birds. And then Daniel says, “Did you know Ernesto had two sons?”
Roberto shakes his head.
“He said they were very different. ‘As different as the night is from the day,’ he said. One was kind of loud and happy, like him. The other was very shy and had deep thoughts. He was crazy about them,” and now Daniel shakes his head. “They were good people. They didn’t deserve to die.”
“No.”
“Did you love her?”
Roberto looks at Daniel. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Roberto. I know you. You’re a romantic. You fall in love at the drop of a hat.”
Roberto drinks some beer, looks at the pool. “I don’t know how I felt. Suddenly I met her, and then suddenly she was dead.”
“I hope you don’t blame yourself.”
“I do. I do blame myself.”
“It was the war that killed them. They knew what they were getting into.”
The peaceful morning erupts with snarls and yelps. Tantar and Ramón are fighting beside the pool. Ramón quickly capitulates, lying on his back with Tantar’s teeth clamped around his throat.
“Tantar!” yells Daniel. “Let him go! Now! Tantar!”
Tantar releases his grip, and Ramón jumps up and runs away. Tantar is panting and looking pleased with himself.
“Tantar’s getting old,” says Daniel, “and he likes to be left alone, but Ramón’s always pestering him. So every so often he has to show Ramón his balls are still bigger than his.” Now he finishes his beer and stands up. “I guess we should get going.”
“I’ll be up in a minute.”
Daniel heads up the hill. Tantar joins him, with Ramón circling around them at a respectful distance.
There will come a day when Roberto will think about Lina and what she meant and he will hold his head in his hands and moan in grief and horror at what happened, but that day is not today. Today is for feeling the warmth of the air on his skin, for being happy to be here on this earth. It will be a long hectic day of travel, he’ll be changing planes in Caracas and his connection time there is short, and so he savors a few moments of calm and solitude. A rowdy band of parakeets chitter in the trees. A bee nuzzles a flower. A woodpecker hammers. A speck of a spider descends from the top of the arbor via an invisible strand of silk. The arbor has a blue railing, and black ants are running along it, going and coming, seemingly in a huge hurry.
Time to go. Roberto walks past the pool and up the stone steps toward the house. A wind rustles the trees. He’s reminded it’s Sunday as he hears a church bell tolling in the distance. I call the living. I mourn the dead.
He goes in the bedroom, takes off his swim trunks, and puts on his clothes. He takes his phone out of its charger. He packs up his suitcase, tries to straighten up the bed a bit. Now he goes to the window and takes a last look.
A green hummingbird flies up. It hovers in front of the window, gazing in at him, and then it zips away.
Roberto rolls his suitcase down the hall to Daniel’s room. The door is closed. He’s about to knock, but then he hears Daniel’s voice inside. He must be on his cellphone. Roberto can’t make out the words, but he sounds angry, upset. And now Roberto goes ahead and knocks.
Daniel opens the door. He’s still in his red and white swim trunks. He’s holding his cellphone.
“Is everything all right?” says Roberto.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I’m talking to my agent. She booked me for some bullshit job I never wanted in the first place, and now that I’ve done it they don’t want to pay me. And it’s a lot of money.”
“Sorry.”
Daniel smiles ruefully. “That’s the way it goes. Just give me a couple of minutes. I’ll meet you by the car. And don’t worry, you won’t miss your plane.”
Roberto nods. Daniel shuts the door. Roberto stands there a moment. He doesn’t hear Daniel’s voice again. Now he walks on down the hallway. The wheels on his suitcase make noise on the tile, are silent when they hit a rug.
He goes out the front door and walks to Daniel’s car. He’s disturbed by what just happened. It seems like a strange time to be talking to your agent. He’s pretty sure Daniel was lying. He hopes Daniel’s not in some kind of trouble.
He rolls his suitcase to the trunk end of the Twingo, and looks around. He’s surprised by how much property the tall white walls enclose. He walks off slowly through the trees. He sees Doki sitting under a bush, observing him with his blue, crossed eyes. He thinks about Caroline. She would love to have a place like this. Of course she would probably spend months, if not years, and untold tens of millions of pesos, remodeling it. He thinks about the desk she bought him, waiting for him in front of the window, where he’s to write his book. A Town Called Contamana. He already has the first line: “Between the mountains and the sea lies a town called Contamana.”
Roberto sees some old weathered boards nailed to a tree trunk, and up in the tree a tree house. He would have loved to have something like that when he was a kid. He remembers falling out of the eucalyptus tree at Andrés’s house and breaking his arm. In the emergency room with his parents, he was manfully trying not to cry. It’s funny, his mother seemed to take it all in stride, but his father, a doctor, seemed very shaken. How gray and anxious his face was as he looked at his son.
And now Roberto sees through the trees a small, curious-looking structure. He walks toward it. It rises to about the height of his nose. It has a green tile roof, and little windows with lace curtains in them. He bends down and peers through a window. He sees a round table with four chairs, an armchair, a pink wooden stool. All of it scaled for little kids or dwarfs.
There’s a rubber Donald Duck welcome mat in front of the door. Roberto pushes the door open, and crouches low to enter. Now he squats in the middle of the playhouse and looks around.
The walls are painted orange-pink. On the table are teacups and saucers, a silver tea service, two blue glass goblets. There’s a glass cabinet with a few books in it, and glass figurines of animals and insects.
Roberto doesn’t know anything about Ramiro Navia’s children, but he would guess they’re a mixture: the tree house is for his boy or boys, the playhouse is for his girl or girls. He moves over to the cabinet, being careful not to bump his head on the ceiling, and then he squats down again. He leans his head to the right, trying to read the titles on the spines of the books. He hears something behind him, and sees Daniel reflected in the glass door of the cabinet as he comes in.
“Hey Daniel, isn’t this—?” Cool, he’s about to say, but he sees in the glass Daniel raising his arm and pointing his gun at the back of Roberto’s head. Roberto jerks his head to one side as the gun fires, making a tremendous sound in the confined space. The glass breaks in the cabinet and he feels a searing pain in his neck and he turns and lunges toward Daniel. He grabs his right arm and grapples for the gun, Daniel’s still wearing his swim trunks, his naked flesh seems gross against Roberto, his contorted terrible face is just inches away.
“D
aniel,” screams Roberto, “what are you doing?”
Daniel’s much bigger than Roberto and they crash and thrash around in the tiny house, and Daniel becomes red and slippery with blood from the wound on the side of Roberto’s neck. Roberto’s head bangs against the ceiling and then he falls back on the table with Daniel on top of him and the table turns over and the teacups and saucers shatter on the floor and his glasses fall off and he yells, “Stop it! Stop it, Daniel! Stop it!”
They’re both on the floor now and Roberto struggles to get up and then Daniel grabs a leg of the little pink stool and hits Roberto in the head with it. He falls back against the orange-pink wall. He sits there, dazed. Daniel’s looming over him, he’s just a blur. He’s pointing the gun at him. Roberto can hear him panting. Roberto’s breathing hard too. He’s holding a hand over the wound in his neck.
“Daniel,” he gasps. “What’s going on? Have you gone crazy?”
“They’re coming for us, Roberto! They’ll torture you before they kill you, I can’t let them do that!”
“Who’s coming?”
“The Army. They know about us. Diego told them.”
“But . . . how do you know?”
“They called me. I had to tell them where we are, they said they’d kill my mother if I didn’t!”
Roberto gazes up at the pinkish blur of Daniel’s face, the gleam of his gun.
“You’ve been working for them, haven’t you? Like Lina said.”
“I had to, they would have killed my mother, they would have killed me!”
Roberto can tell Daniel is crying now. His gun arm has dropped a little, but now he raises it again.
“I love you, Roberto.”
Roberto lifts his arms in an imploring way, like the man at the end of the dock in Jilili.
“Daniel, don’t do this! It’s not too late! We can run! Let’s go! We can get away, we’ve always gotten away! Daniel—”
Roberto’s smitten in the forehead with a flash of white light. A moment of wild confusion follows, a babble of voices, and then silence. He sees a street. It’s after a rain, and the sun has come out. He sees bright drops of rain dripping out of the trees. But what happens beyond that, he cannot report.
About the Author
Tom Epperson is a native of Malvern, Arkansas. He received a B.A. in English from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and an M.A. in English from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, then headed west with his boyhood friend Billy Bob Thornton to pursue a career in show business. Epperson’s co-written the scripts for One False Move, A Family Thing, The Gift, A Gun, a Car, a Blonde, and Jayne Mansfield’s Car. His book The Kind One was nominated in 2009 for both the Edgar Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel. His second novel, Sailor, was published in 2012. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Stefani, three pampered cats, and a frisky dog.
www.tomepperson.com