“Tomorrow … No, I can’t. I’m expected at that jungle lodge for four days.” Quickly, she added, “But I’ll be back by Friday. I’d love to go to the museum with you then.”
He did not respond. They had arrived at the waterfall, where a rivulet splashed over rocks into a pool ringed with flowering bushes. He leaned on a railing, staring into the water, and seemed deep in thought, his silence making Maggie tense. I am free for a whole week afterwards, she wanted to stay. She need not spend it on the beach; her plan could change.
Instead, she asked, “What are these flowers?” The bushes were mantled with delicate purple and white blossoms.
“We call them Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. This is because so quickly they shed their petals. Yesterday they were violet, today they are white, and tomorrow they are gone.”
His gentle words and the tinkling water sounded as a melody. She felt light-headed; she wanted to touch him, to let go, to be daring and even foolhardy.
“Friday is too long,” he said in a soft voice.
“Excuse me?”
“Too long to wait.”
She looked into his grave dark eyes, her chest thumping. She started involuntarily as he closed distance between them, and now felt unable to move. He held back at the last moment, as if waiting for her to bridge the remaining few inches.
She closed her eyes and took the jump, landing awkwardly, their lips misaligned; her initial sensation was of smoky sweet breath and bristly moustache. She was overcome by the gentle power of his kiss, and she put her arms around him and pressed herself to his body and opened her mouth to him: overbold, abandoning reserve. When she drew back to catch her breath, his lips traced paths down her cheeks and the long curve of her neck and the hollows beneath her ears.
“Forgive me,” he murmured, “I cannot hold inside what I feel.”
Again he kissed her on the mouth, and she was caught up in a rapture she could not resist. His hands were clasped behind her hips, and his tongue was moving in her mouth. The feel of his phallus engorging against her groin was sending electric messages down her spine to her toes, messages answered by a sudden cramp in her right foot. She pulled away from him, hopped several times on her left leg, a performance that recalled to her mind a one-legged barnyard chicken at Lake Lenore.
He took her elbow, expressing concern, and she said she was fine. “Just a cramp.”
When her foot muscles finally unwound, she started babbling about her narrow size-ten feet, of all things. What a disaster.
Pablo, however, seemed to find the episode funny, and she began to relax enough to share in his laughter. He offered his arm, and after escorting her to their table, he bowed, excused himself for “the untimely demands of nature,” then made his way to the washroom.
She sat down heavily on her chair and gulped back her Café Rica, her heart pounding, her hands unsteady, her mind a snarl of anxiety, hope, and desire.
Never on a first date: the ancient rule existed for a reason. And he would probably think her of easy virtue if she disobeyed it. Pablo possessed Latin sensibilities and would respect her for declining such an early invitation. She would hint that the subject could be reopened when she returned from the Eco-Rico Lodge.
Several minutes passed as she romped in the playhouse of her mind. “One must grab thees moment in life. The flowers of tomorrow will soon be gone, but tonight they bloom for us.” Dare she speculate that this might be that explosion of stars she had long dreamed of? Can love truly come at first sight? Surely, it grew slowly, survived longer than the flowers of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
The waiter asked if she cared for anything else; when she shook her head, he joined the maitre-d’, and they began staring at her and whispering. Was Pablo ill – what was taking him so long? Suddenly, she was feeling needles of anxiety.
From a distant copse came the full guaco of the Laughing Falcon. “Guah-co! Guah-co! Guah-co!”
“Oh, God,” she said aloud. Quickly, she unstrapped her fanny pack and zipped open the money compartment. It was empty except for a few coins: eight hundred U.S. dollars had vanished.
She opened the compartment with her traveller’s cheques. Relief allayed some of her outrage; they were still here, but she had cashed in all but three hundred dollars. He had not taken her Visa card, but she was near her limit.
Never had she felt so betrayed, so damaged, so emotionally defiled. She felt dizzy, sick to the stomach. The waiter laid the cheque before her; she paid with her card, then asked him to order a taxi, and she waited for it outside on the steps, feeling so empty within she could not find tears to shed.
HYMNS TO A DYING PLANET
– 1 –
As Slack pulled up to his gate, the curtain of night was about to ring down, the sun diving toward the mangled hills, the virgin forest raped last year, squatters swarming, slashing, burning. Where guapinoles and cedros once stately stood, where cassias had showered the jungle with coral flowers, now were clapboard shacks. What God gives, man fucks.
There had been lusty birdsong here, sublime voices that perfumed the air with sound. Now instead, brassy rasping radios bellowed syrupy rancheras. At night, no longer came the haunting moans of the pootoo, lamentations to the moon. Slack should have heeded this bird’s gloomy warnings, fled into the jungles before the conquistadors came with their noise and squalor, their clutter of offal, discarded wrappers and plastic Coke bottles littering the road, fouling his driveway.
The fifty acres across the road had been a forest reserve, nature’s lush living factory, pumping out oxygen for man and his evil machines. When the squatters came, government officials stood by shrugging, shuffling their feet, at a loss. The forest is gone, señor. Se fué.
Slack felt a back spasm as he closed his gate. To add to his distemper, he had slipped a disc on the river today while fishing a Prussian housefrau from a foaming back eddy of the Naranjo River. She had clung to him like an octopus as he strained to boost her into her inflatable kayak – a vaudevillian interlude for the others in the package group, mingy Germans who thought a tip was a piece of advice.
His elderly Land Rover toiled up the parallel strips of cement toward the house he had painstakingly built in a grove of mangoes and flame trees and wild forest, eight acres of solitude. Defiled now by the barrio across the road, its precaristas casting him furtive guilty looks. They were not landless poor, not campesinos, but shop owners from town, friends of the jefe of the municipality, a man on the pad.
The owners of the former reserve were seeking an eviction order; the Costa Rican courts moving with their characteristic blinding speed, the case might get to court in a decade.
It wasn’t until the diesel engine coughed and rattled to a stillness that Slack looked at his house and saw its gaping wound – window shutters had been forced open, the grill bent. A car jack, that’s how the pissers do it. He rent the air with expletives.
His back twinged as he stepped from the vehicle and climbed the steps, bending to ease the pain as he checked the boat shed — still secure, his kayaks safe. He unlocked the front door. Had they got into the bodega? No, but they’d tried, he saw the pry marks by the lock. A pair of birding binoculars, his cell phone, and his short-wave radio were gone, he had forgotten to put them away. Some clothing, too. T-shirts. His best hiking boots. Se fué.
He could drop by the Rural Guard office. He was a generous tipper, he could offer a reward – if the cops nabbed the thieves might they agree not to fence his goods at their usual outlet in San José?
The home invaders were uncouth, lacked culture — they had not taken any of his poetry collections or his Dickens, Molière, or Conrad. Even more miraculously, still gracing his shelves was a third of a bottle of Ron Rico. He tilted it to his lips and felt its burn, its pain.
The hole boarded up, the bottle emptied, Slack returned to his vehicle, morose, pondering the machinations of vindictive God. Why was He persecuting Slack Cardinal? Why, when there were so many more qualified assholes?
These were the days of his despair, futile, lonely, his muse barren — no lines had he penned for months, not since Esperanza left with a thief of love for the glitter of McDisneyland, conveyed there on a sixty-foot sloop, bought like a beautiful slave with promises of diamonds and Cadillacs. Lady Esperanza, how vain behind the mask of Tica innocence.
No other woman had tempted him since, though many had offered, budding flowers from Oshkosh or Oshawa, down here for the tropical romance: de rigeur, can’t go home without it, a tale to tell their pals in the office, almost made it with this big gangling beach bum with a kayak business. Claims he’s sort of a poet or something.
Slack was intimidated by women, though he wasn’t sure why. Women were different now, direct, determined, ballsy. They had left Slack behind. He was forty-eight, old-fashioned, a child of the sixties, that conservative age: he fell for the unliberated ones like Esperanza, splashy and narcissistic, flirty and false. He had not been able to keep up with her, she had taunted him: qué hombre más macho, what a man.
Now there was no one to endure his black moods, no one to massage his aching back. Maybe he would return to the Bronx, that borough of his wasted youth, and marry a chiropractor. Though he would be better off pairing with a shrink, he had been becoming more neurotic over the years, excessively eco-anxious, blocked creatively. Illness was in his genes, his mother had suffered a paranoid disorder.
His shockless Rover jounced over potholes past rolling farmland, fields of rice and sorghum, pastures where flop-eared Zebu cattle browsed, abandoned now by their camp followers, egrets toiling for home, white slingshots in the darkening sky. Now the vast holdings of the compañía, its palm plantations, their clusters of orange fruit. Above, grumpy clouds were blotting the sun’s dying rays, still rainy season in the Pacific wet zone, and only two weeks to Christmas with its annual swarm of locusts in their bikinis and Birkenstocks.
Ah, yes, the eco-warrior Cardinal: how haughty and patronizing you are to the vacationing bourgeoisie upon whom you depend not to starve. How Janus-faced is this protector of the wilderness, complicit in its betrayal, a card-carrying member of our doomed destructive species. Environmental angst, that’s what it was called, helplessness in the face of this planet’s coming Armageddon.
He could see the lights of Puerto Quepos, the old banana port, ramshackle and impoverished when Slack first came here, now fattening on tourism, cashing in on the golden beaches that lay three miles beyond the hills. The town had folded up early this Sunday evening, no cars beside the brothel, businesses shuttered, streets abandoned to a few strolling tourists and the fallen drunks they were cautiously stepping around.
He rolled through the silent town, toiled up Cardiac Hill to the ridge, the ancient spew of a volcano, a thousand feet above the ocean. The new hotels blinked past, freshly painted vacancy signs beckoning guileless guests: this was Manuel Antonio, instant resort, buy a chunk of land, put up a piece of crap and call it paradise.
There had been almost nobody here twelve years ago, when Slack first beheld these exotic shores and declared himself at the end of life’s sweaty journey. Manuel Antonio was forever to have been his hideaway, his final safe house. Now it had been discovered, desecrated, carved up by roads and power lines.
Turning off the main road, he descended to Bar Balboa, where there would be friends and sympathy. His back still aching, he hobbled painfully from his vehicle as a ribbon of lightning slithered through the western sky, starkly sketching the jungle below, the national park, its beaches and islets, the infinite sweep of the Pacific. A long surly grumble, then Zeus’s angry bark. The gods were displeased with Slack Cardinal; he was a snivelling complainer. Did they know how quickly his self-pity could turn to rage?
He paused near the entrance and, out of old habit, clocked the area. Never enter a place suddenly, observe what’s around you, evidence of the enemy’s presence, escape routes. The drill: burned into memory, recast as instinct. He spotted two top-of-the-line Land Cruisers, both with American diplomatic plates. A man lounging in the shadows nearby, a quiet watcher. What occasions this visit from the agents of the imperialist raj?
The restaurant was small, eight tables, six bar stools, the rich essences of garlic wafting from the kitchen. The food had much improved since Billy Balboa hired a Spanish chef. Slack eased his aching body onto a stool at the burnished bar and asked Billy for a double Ron Centenario with orange juice. Billy handed him a pile of old tabs instead, his bar bill unpaid since July.
“Pura vida. With sorrow I bring up a matter of two hundred thousand colones.” Billy was pot-bellied and pale, his skin never touched by the tropical sun. Slack had once seen him sober, a few years ago, during national elections, when they padlock the bars.
“Billy, I’ve just had a day like the Battle of Stalingrad. I got robbed, my back is fucked, and I’m suicidal.”
His voice had raised dangerously. Billy held up a hand in warning.
“So shoot yourself. I have big customers tonight, personas de clase alta.”
He brought out the bottle, topped up his drink, splashed some in a glass for Slack, and nodded along to the tale of his Falstaffian labours on the river, the pillaging of his house, an unbroken torrent of gloom.
The rain had begun to pummel the tile roof, drowning conversation. Slack looked around: a few familiar faces here, gringos, permanents, some illegal, hiding from Migración. Slack no longer had that problem, he was a citizen now, a legal, a Tico.
At a corner table, eating jumbo shrimp, those must be the big customers, diplomats, three men and two women. More careful scrutiny, however, revealed one of them to be a local blackguard, Juan Camacho, the mayor of Quepos. El Chorizo, they called him, he even looked like a sausage, mottled and soft and meaty.
“With Camacho, that is the U.S. ambassador and Senator Walker from Washington with their wives.” Billy had to shout over the rain. “They are paying cash. They are not running a tab since five months.”
Senator Chester Walker? Here? Chuck, he liked to be called, thicker of waist than he appeared on the tube, but a tall, ruggedly handsome man, you could mistake him for Charlton Heston. Soldier’s haircut, metal grey, he’d be about sixty. Next to him in melting makeup, poured flawlessly into a tight dress, his wife, Gloria-May Walker, the former Vegas dancer.
What the hell were these banana Republicans doing in this far-flung outpost of their empire? Then he remembered – there’d been a conference in San José, something about Pan-American security, terrorism, he’d heard about it on the short-wave he no longer owned. A day off for sun and surf, Mayor Juan Camacho their guide to the hot spots of Manuel Antonio, looking for some way to shuck them.
Ex-Colonel Chuck Walker: Vietnam war hero, U.S. army secret ops, a dubious history of piloting America’s undeclared war in Nicaragua. He was probably here to enhance his international image, he was about to make a run at the primaries, all the right noises, God, unborn babies, and the freedom to bear Uzis. A political lightweight, a dark horse, sitting on the far right rim of the Republican party.
The other man would be Ambassador Gerald Higgins, a presidential crony from the deep South, rewarded with a pleasant little trough in Latin America. Older, avuncular, good listener. Polite, tightly wrapped wife. The Secret Service agents were easy to spot, two at an adjoining table, one at the far end of the bar with a mug of coffee.
Slack was so absorbed by this sighting of a rare species that he paid little attention to a voice behind him, something in Spanish to Billy about a radio for sale. He slowly swivelled in his seat and saw a Sony twelve-band short-wave in the clutches of a skinny hand. The young man holding this radio was brazenly wearing one of Slack’s T-shirts, “Mono Titi Tours, River and Ocean Kayaking.” Slack had seen him hanging around the squat, Flaco, they called him, his nickname, thin enough to squeeze between bent bars. A crackhead like most of the local thieves, it showed in his eyes, his spastic movements.
“I am interested in that radio,” he said.
&
nbsp; Flaco paled, recognizing Slack, and he began to back-pedal as Slack slid off his stool. “I found it on the road! By the Boca Vieja bridge!” As Slack took one long step forward, Flaco peeled open the blade of a knife: it was Slack’s, his Swiss Army knife, the raton had ripped that off, too.
Slack feinted, bobbed, caught Flaco by the wrist and twisted it, driving him to the floor with a scream of pain. He kicked the knife loose, then lifted him by the ankles and shook him like a salt dispenser until the birding binoculars and the cell phone fell from his pockets.
Slack retrieved them, along with the knife, and bent to Flaco and sliced through his belt. “Now I’m going to cut your pinga off.” It would be a noble gesture in support of population control.
But Slack contented himself with jerking down Flaco’s pants, shaming him, revealing the shrivelled apparatus of his sex. Still screaming, grabbing his crotch, the skinny thief scrambled out into the rain. The Secret Service guys stopped looking distressed, removed their hands from their jackets, humourless, not joining in the general laughter.
Billy Balboa put on a sour face, letting him know matters could have been handled more delicately, Slack wasn’t good for business. But friends who’d enjoyed the show bought him drinks, and even the senator was smiling at him, maybe he liked the way Slack handled the natives. His wife kept staring at him, a contemplative smile as if she was sizing him up.
Slack treated his comrades in turn, generous, his credit was good here. Boisterous with drink, he launched into one of his harangues: this was a land where thievery was a respected way of life, the beaches unsafe, the cops crooked, mobs from Spain and Italy moving in, taking what that asshole Camacho over there wasn’t keeping for himself, look at him truckling to the rich and powerful. The mayor was glancing at him, nervous. Slack realized he was fairly borracho, told himself to slow down, maintain some vestige of aplomb.
“I gotta see an ol’ friend,” he said, and pointed himself in the direction of the men’s room, a route which took him near the senator and his group, he had to squeeze past Gloria-May Walker’s chair.
The Laughing Falcon Page 4
