Love on the Road 2015

by Sam Tranum

  He was right. I got in no more than the occasional ‘Oh no!’, and nodded yes or no to indicate I was listening to his life story. I was fascinated by what he was doing in an infinitesimal railroad town in Central America without even a superficial knowledge of the language.

  Stew hadn’t talked long before I knew he was a man of intense likes and equally intense hates. Among the former were trains, beer, football, the New York Times and Ticas. Among the latter: as a WWII vet, he hated Hitler; as the victim, he felt, of motor vehicles, he hated Henry Ford.

  He told me about bringing back his teenage bride from England after the war. They’d had a daughter and two sons before Aggie had been hit and killed by a Ford driver. He had raised the kids alone, banning cars from the household. As was natural, his sixteen-year-old daughter dated in them and his boys took to drag racing like pelicans to fish.

  ‘They’ll never give me grandchildren. They’re married to Henry’s offspring,’ he tried to joke. ‘I kept my eye on the doughnut since Aggie died and, here I am, a stone’s throw from a train and not a car in sight.’

  Then he told me about that fateful day in San José, in bumper-to-bumper traffic on streets wide enough for oxcarts. He’d been with the light, he said, ‘Imagine? Still I got knocked down.’

  I told him about the man I’d met who had explained: ‘I’ve lived in the States, and you have to prove you can’t hit a pedestrian before you get a license. Here we have to prove we can before we get ours.’ His joke didn’t sound all that funny to Stew.

  He told me about his weekly trip to San José to pick up the New York Times, which he’d arranged to have saved for him at a stand. ‘I take pictures at the stops,’ he said, proudly. ‘My artwork graces more mantels between here and San José than the Virgin Mary, I bet.’

  Stew got his yen for trains at an early age. ‘We were poor. Lived on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. For me, it was the right side. I could spell “Chesapeake and Ohio” before I could spell my own name. My mother saved to buy me a Lionel engine when I was six or seven, during the Depression. She added a car whenever she could. She knew how I loved that train that went by, the high point of my day. I joined the army as soon as I could, just to ride a troop train. Now look at the marvellous monster at my doorstep.’

  Stew lived in a room of the Manglares Hotel, where we ate. It cost fifty cents a day. Except for the lack of English speakers to share his thoughts with, he said he was in heaven. ‘I take the train to San José for my papers and read them one at a time on the correct days. So I’m a week late. I can’t do anything about the news anyway, as long as I don’t bet on the Dodgers after the game is done and they lost.’ He laughed. ‘You’re the first person I could have bet with anyway. These Ticos spend their days like birds, scratching for enough to live on. They’d have no time to go to a baseball game if there was a team around.’

  Breakfast long since eaten, Stew suggested he show me the town: ‘It’ll take all of five minutes. You saw the depot. There’s a pulpería. The Clara Luz cantina. Not much else. This hotel is the social centre. Careful not to lean on that rail,’ he demonstrated. ‘It’s a killer.’

  He pointed to the estuary below, flowing in. The lake I’d seen from the train was not a lake at all. It was the estuary, which, twice a day, with the tide, looked like one and had to be boated across. When the tide was out, you could walk the width of it. In Mata, you didn’t tell time by the clock, but by the tide. I saw a house across the way, which Stew said was for sale. ‘Why would anyone want to live on that narrow stretch between the Gulf and the estuary?’ I asked out of curiosity, never dreaming how it would figure in my future.

  ‘See those kids fishing with a string, winding their lines on Clorox bottles? I buy all they catch every day for a Kennedy half dollar. Ticos dote on that coin ever since Jack Kennedy sent the National Guard to help them when a volcano choked San José with lava during his term. The kids are ecstatic, and I have fresh fish for supper. Anna – you met Anna Delia – the girl at the hotel, cooks them. She’s my novia. We’re getting married on her seventeenth birthday.’

  Stew had said something that I couldn’t appropriately comment on with an, ‘Oh, no!’ He could see the expression linger on my lips.

  ‘I know. I know,’ he said. ‘I’m old. She’s young. But Ticas don’t care. Boys their age aren’t able to offer stability. My pension is like riches in this community. I’m the official loan officer, beer buyer, moneybags. At home, I’d be nobody, eking by. Sometimes people pay me back or buy me a beer, sometimes not. So what? I’ve found the grail that that stranger said I would. It’s a miracle. Cars are out, trains in, and I’ll marry another country girl in a year or so.’

  Stew did look old beside the teenager, but he felt young. That counted. His enthusiasm for everything was that of a young man.

  ‘How can you plan a wedding when she knows only gringo and gringa and all you know is cerveza and novia in Spanish?’ I asked.

  ‘Easy,’ he said, patting his pocket dictionary. He had a small notebook and pencil at the ready. He showed me the name of their church, the trousseau they bought week by week. ‘We’ve got the ring and other jewellery. She’s as happy as a pig in mud and so am I.’

  We drank a Coke at the pulpería. ‘These people put this crap in baby bottles,’ Stew said with disgust. ‘They believe the ads that say it’s nutritious.’

  We strolled over the bridge that crossed the estuary. Missing boards left holes that could have swallowed a baby buggy. Natives of all ages casually walked around them without complaint. A sandy street of huts stretched ahead of us. We turned, though, and went back to the hotel, a sprawling one-story building with its few rooms facing the river that the estuary formed.

  A boy of about five saw us return and ran up to Stew, ‘Foto, foto!’ he cried, pleadingly. Stew got his Polaroid. He, I found, could not resist a child. As the colours in the picture emerged, the boy’s eyes popped. He squealed. ‘Gracias, gracias!’ He must not have been introduced to Stew’s magic before. He flailed the snapshot with glee as he ran from the restaurant.

  Stew said, ‘These kids are like the grandchildren I’d love to have.’

  As we heard the next train approach, Stew walked to the tiny station with me and we exchanged addresses. We’d write. But I could see why Stew was hooked on the primitive little paradise. It wasn’t the last time I’d be there myself.

  When I visited Mata de Limón, I brought Stew thick paperbacks to read, and when I was home, he sent me thick accounts of the goings-on in his Eden. Many of them, he wrote from one of his favourite bars: the one beside the cemetery in Orotina, or the one he favoured along a channel in Puntarenas, where he watched the barges go by and the prostitutes ply their trade, and drank his beer and described it all to me.

  I noticed that his praises of Anna Delia lost strength as time went on. The wedding day had approached and been postponed. I said to myself, This bodes ill. Anna had acquired some coveted possessions. Stew, not the dirty old man some suspected he was, had preserved her innocence. Successive postponements, he took nonchalantly. She’d brought youth, hope, and excitement to his life, but she’d passed the bewitching age. In spite of his white crew cut, his white beard, his beer-belly bulging over the inevitable cutoffs, his taste in females seemed to be arrested at about age sixteen. He told me once, ‘You leave Gringoland and move in with me and you’ll never have to worry about a thing as long as I live. Just keep in mind, I don’t go for Norteamericana women, and none old enough to vote.’

  I watched, read and listened to Stew’s affections switching from Anna Delia to one sister and then another. In each case, the wedding date came and went; he’d had the attention, they’d had the gifts and a certain prestige. No one seemed disappointed at the outcome.

  Remember the house I saw across the estuary the first day I met Stew? The one sitting precariously on a narrow peninsula between the Gulf of Nicoya and the estuary? I had scoffed at anyone wanting to live in such a vulnerable spot
, subject to high tides, huge storms, even earthquakes. I bought it. And, yes, I did live through all of the above. I never regretted it.

  Stew had always shared his ups and downs with me. One prime ‘up’ had been his getting acquainted with his English-speaking banker, who was helping him attain pensionado status, so that he’d never have to leave his Eden. They met every Monday when Stew took the train to San José to get his newspapers. One particular Monday, Alexis was out of town. Stew picked up his bundle of papers and headed for the pub, planning to read the Monday issue over breakfast and then carry the rest home.

  The New York Times spread in front of him, he was engrossed enough to be startled to hear in excellent English, ‘May I serve you, sir?’

  He looked up into big brown eyes, half covered by light brown hair, surrounded by an ivory complexion, a beauty quite unlike the country girls he’d been courting. The waitress, thinking his silent awe was a lack of English, tried her question in French. Still stunned, Stew stuttered an order. He wrote me, ‘I don’t know what I ordered but, as she went to get it, I saw a dream walking.’

  Stew ceased writing me after that about nature’s marvels on our black-sand beach, about the wide-winged manta rays that heaved themselves out of the Gulf so far away that he’d see them splash before hearing the report of it. About the primitive dogs we both loved, diving into the surf to come out with fish or digging ferociously in the sand to find bright-coloured crabs for their lunches. All he wrote about were Patricia’s charms.

  Before his last beer that Monday, he’d decided to talk Patricia into becoming his housekeeper. They took a bus to the hovel she shared with a large family, got her mother’s consent, packed her few possessions and caught the last train to Mata de Limón.

  Meanwhile, I’d bought a ticket to attend his wedding to Vilma, which, not surprisingly, had gone the way of the others at age seventeen.

  I read on the way to the airport, ‘My new housekeeper can’t cook, won’t wash or iron, but the local ladies need the work. Patricia pays her way when she walks across the room to make me a mean cup of instant coffee.’ Same plot, I said to myself, new leading role. I was half right.

  Stew’s letter failed to prepare me for his walking dream. Anna Delia had laughed with him, not at him, as they stomped around the dance floor. Patricia had no such compassion. ‘No thanks,’ she sulked when invited to dance. The country Ticas had made him feel vital, loved his flattering them with newly learned words, like bonitas muchachas. Patricia scoffed at his efforts. They exclaimed in awe at his gifts. Patricia never said thanks.

  I concluded that Stew had had no real desire to consummate the marriages he had planned. Maybe he doubted his potency. Maybe he aimed for the unattainable for some other reason. He had overwhelming respect for the young girls, and I think he believed they had loved him. As with his train rides to the city, he enjoyed the trip, not the destination.

  The village had blossomed in his presence. He gave Christmas parties and engagement parties, the Manglares rang with marimba bands and dancing, with piñatas and merrymaking at the least excuse for a celebration. No one for miles around was excluded from the Cokes and beer. The good gringo became a legend in his own time.

  Enter Patricia. A separate entity. Her seventeenth birthday obviously would not pass without disappointment if Stew made altar-bound plans that fell through. No matter how she acted, to him she could do no wrong. I believe the love he’d felt for Aggie in London had revisited. He spoke of similarities in their complexions, in the French that Aggie had spoken to soldiers on ‘R&R’ when he’d met her in 1942, of the fact that they were both waitresses and both the same age.

  Even though Patricia clearly played Stew for a sucker, displayed no sense of humour, and showed neither the whimsy he usually enjoyed nor the kindness of the country girls, Stew had fallen so deeply in love this time that he didn’t recognise her cunning.

  ‘She’s like an idol to me,’ he said, almost apologetically.

  When I met Stew’s banker friend, Alexis, I spoke of my misgivings. He agreed the stage was set for disaster.

  Back again in Michigan, I received missives, one of which said he’d proposed to Patricia and been turned down. ‘I think, in time, she’ll marry me,’ he wrote, optimistically. ‘You be sure to come so I’ll have someone on my side of the church.’

  Then along came a thin letter, ominous in that it didn’t require Stew’s usual double postage. He used no salutation.

  ‘Patricia is pregnant,’ assaulted my eyes. My confidence in Stew’s impeccable integrity was shaken. I stopped reading for a minute. Then read on.

  ‘NOT ME,’ he printed in caps. ‘I wish it were. She went down to the beach with a boyfriend I didn’t know about.’ I’d have suspected he was protecting non-existent innocence in her case. ‘I want more than ever to marry her and give the child my name. She says no. More later.’

  Every letter following that one updated me on Patricia’s condition. She stayed on with him, making the instant coffee and no more. Her salary continued. He pre-paid her hospital bills. ‘She might marry me after the birth,’ he’d say in most letters.

  After the appropriate number of months came the letter about the momentous birth. Stew’s enthusiasm emanated from the pages. ‘His name is Pablo. We call him Pablito. He is the son, the grandson, the miracle I’ve always wanted. Patricia still won’t marry me, but I won’t give up. I must have this boy with me. In a few days of his life, he’s become MY life.’

  Patricia had a plan of her own.

  She lived with Stew off and on. His love, I saw as I read his letters, switched from Patricia to Pablito. She had to have felt it too. She’d whisk the beloved child away intermittently and leave Stew devastated. She’d return; he’d be elated. She’d leave without Pablo. Stew would hire a nursemaid and revel in his new responsibility. He dreaded the day the train bearing Patricia would pull in to the station, a stone’s throw from the house he had built after his beach house had been confiscated.

  Alexis wrote that Stew drank heavily when Pablo was gone. When the child was with him, he moderated his habits. Stew wrote, ‘I even eat vegetables now, so Pablito will too.’ He sent scrawls the child would draw of English words Stew had taught him. Alexis wrote that, to see Stew take Pablo across the still-worsening bridge to school, they ‘look like a Hummel sculpture’.

  Pablo’s birthdays required even bigger celebrations at the Manglares. I declined Stew’s pleas to come to them. When Pablo was three, Patricia married a gringo, according to Stew.

  ‘She’s taking Pablo to Pennsylvania. My life is the pits. I want to adopt him. He’s a grandson to be proud of …’ Patricia knew better than to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

  Alexis wrote spasmodically of Stew’s extreme grief and his stepped-up consumption of guaro. I heard less and less from Stew himself until before Christmas one year.

  ‘Patricia says if I send her two tickets, she’ll bring Pablito home for the party this year. I went down on the double and have mailed them to her. Please, please join us. I think she wants to LEAVE Pablito this time. I feel it in my bones, and I couldn’t be happier. I knew she’d get tired of him in the marriage to the gringo.’

  Long distance, I revelled in the carols – Stew sang them in English while everyone else, of course, sang in Spanish – the piñatas, the ice cream and cake, all the kids overindulging, the marimba band and the beer for the adults, who were also overindulging. But I didn’t go down. I didn’t want to know first-hand about what I felt sure was to be a major let-down for my friend.

  The next thin letter confirmed my suspicion. Pablo had gone back to Pennsylvania with Patricia. She’d had free passage home to see her family. Stew gave up hope. He ended his letter: ‘Come on the tenth anniversary of our meeting in this wonderful town and we’ll celebrate.’ I could feel the village’s anticipation.

  When I arrived at the hotel and asked, ‘Where’s Stew?’ the clerk wiped her eyes on her apron. She mumbled, ‘Cirrhosis of th
e liver.’ I’d come too late.

  Alexis arrived later that day. He’d inherited Stew’s little house and had come to close it up. He looked less crestfallen than I’d expected, as he too had admired Stew and had become his best friend in Costa Rica. He’d spent a lot of time with him, watching as he brought great pleasure to the humble people who had adopted him as he’d adopted them.

  ‘Stew had been very sick,’ Alexis told me. ‘Patricia’s mother had come to take care of him, but she was at the cantina when he died. He was ready to go. I wish you’d been here for the funeral. Stew would have enjoyed it. Imagine: forty kids rode the train to Orotina with him. We buried him in the cemetery next to the bar, the one he missed that first night on his way to Mata de Limón. Men fought for the privilege of carrying his casket. We all managed to take part. It was an unusual sight. Stew would have laughed and stomped his feet for joy at the sight of men, women and children, dressed in their best, some of them riding the train for the first time in their lives, just to be with him on his last day.’

  Alexis and I wept as we walked to the depot, passing under the ‘Luna de Miel’ sign I’d seen the day I met Stew. ‘Honeymoon,’ Alexis translated. Stew had had a long honeymoon with Mata de Limón. Thank goodness he’d been able to read that ‘Cerveza’ sign from the train, or he’d have ridden on to Puntarenas and we’d all have missed out on Mata’s legendary friend –Pablito’s pinch-hitter grandfather.

  12.

  Refugees of the Meximo Invasion