Yes, Max could talk all day to people who didn’t understand him, but with tourists who spoke English, he just shut up. He let her take over, had never been much for small talk. He’d nod out on the stair or watch the light play on the plaza tile through the trees—who knew what he was thinking—while she talked to the tourists about wristwatches that stopped in the tropical air, places to use the bathroom. All travelers love to talk about shit and bugs. He didn’t need anyone but her.
Last month in Nicaragua they’d met two sisters who had been too scared of getting robbed to do anything but hide in their room, mosquito nets lowered around them. Max and Jane had brought the sisters along with them for a few days, showed them the ropes. They’d been in awe of Max—in the old way. (People used to be so impressed with Max.) Last fun he and Jane had had.
What she herself had been in awe of at one time, she couldn’t quite reach anymore when she looked at him. She’d been thinking for two years now about leaving him.
But what was left for him without her? Middle age giving way to old age and the difficulties of that, disenfranchised family, cemented-in views that were now outdated, no friends, no money, no hobbies that one could do while sitting still, no abilities of any kind other than not speaking fifty-eight languages, a keen knack for spotting animals no one else could see in the trees, a knack for drinking the locals’ water anywhere in the world (this last was no cheap trick: you had to be determined, unafraid of illness or death, although in most places consuming water wasn’t considered a special skill, you don’t get a paycheck for being thirsty).
All either of them had was this thing they’d created, this twoness between them. If she left (or made him leave, rather—there could be no question of her walking off and leaving him somewhere, unimaginable, he, the walking man) what was left for him?
Did he think about that? What did he think about? All these years with him and she still didn’t know.
For Jane, sure, there might be enough. She was still young enough to create more for herself, to make it someplace, find someone. An adequate life, a job in retail, maybe, or being a company rep or an exec or something. Maybe she’d find that life exotic after the one she’d led. Or nicely quaint. So far she hadn’t done it because of what it could become in the long run—what they’d always feared, what they’d always been running from, the drab, the dull, the dumb, and then death. She’d always said she could never go in for a regular job, house, kids, vacation a few weeks a year. Avoidance of this had been their mainstay, their mythology. But now this option seemed inviting compared to what Max would become by himself, alone, aging. Might as well be dead.
So that’s how Jane thought of him, and Max, in a place deep inside himself, knew it. And knew, too, that she might be right. But he also knew it didn’t matter, for he had already done the one great thing he would do (not travel all over the world, anyone could do that—didn’t even need the resources, just the desire): he’d loved this one woman for eighteen years.
The gunman held the piece of rope in his hands. He put down his gun and began to forcibly tie Max’s hands together behind him.
“Now, is this really necessary, mate?”
Jane looked on, uncertain. All right, no, they’d never had their hands tied before, but that didn’t mean they should get excited, right? She couldn’t stop him somehow, could she? How? Grab the gun? “I wonder if this is a stitch-up,” Jane said.
Max was nodding. “They’ve mistook us for foreign intruders. These fellows are trained to think that anyone near the mountains is trying to take over their government.”
“I don’t wonder with your shave,” she said. “We look like riffraff.”
They were sitting facing each other by the fire pit. The gunman was sulking by the clotheslines with his phone. Jane was parched.
“You know,” Max said, “I don’t think this is a military man. I believe what we have here is an insurgent. A rebel of some kind.”
They both looked at the gunman.
“I’m sure I’m right about this,” he said. “Look at the uniform. It’s not a proper military uniform. The top and bottom don’t match.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Who can tell who wears what?” Jane said.
Max considered. “What war do they have going on here? Do they have one?”
“I thought it was over ages ago.”
“Insurrections, maybe? Mountain revolts?”
“Well, if we read the papers,” said Jane, smartly. “If we spoke Spanish.” She couldn’t resist.
“Hey,” Max called to the gunman, “are you a revolutionary or a soldier? We can’t tell.”
The gunman didn’t know he was being spoken to.
“Some new revolution, perhaps,” Max said, looking back from the gunman.
“No doubt,” Jane said. One they hadn’t heard of, since they didn’t read the papers, since they didn’t speak the language, since they didn’t care what was going on around them other than what they could see before them. Only way to know a country is just to be in it, he’d always said. Walk the land. Be among the people. The political stuff was so boring. It changed every month.
“This is the dullest thing that’s ever happened to us,” she said.
“Get off,” Max said. They’d been through worse, Max thought. This wasn’t going to be something they always talked about. Besides, what was this—a situation? Were they being kidnapped? If so, Max wondered whom this guy thought they were going to call for money. No one in Max’s family was going to donate to the cause. And these revolutionaries or whoever they were better have a man who spoke a little English, because if you thought Max was bad at languages, he doubted his family believed other languages existed.
Things had been better in Africa, Max was thinking. Things had been better in New Zealand. Only the Americas. The Americas got them all right. Every time.
“Cállate” the gunman called to the American, who blinked at him and stopped talking for a moment but then went on talking. The gunman went over and punched the American in the face and came back.
As for the gunman, we may wonder who he was and where he came from. He was much like a regular gunman for the insurgents: He’d been born not ten kilometers from this spot and loved it here, despite the rain, the poverty, the fighting. He’d grown up doing gunman activities and wanting to do them. He’d learned how to shoot at age nine (he was now nineteen), he knew people who’d died by bullet, he’d shot people he hadn’t known, he loved the cool nights of the dry season, he’d had his share of fistfights and knife fights and preferred fists because knives were too psychological and fistfights ended fast. He believed in no land tariffs. He believed in school for kids (he himself had gone three years). He’d buried his mother and two brothers.
He was different from a regular gunman in that he’d been to the States once, had hated it, and had not wanted to stay. He preferred to stay here, where he had the hope of one day being a leader, though he knew that those who knew him would say there was little chance of that. He lacked charisma, they would say. And maybe he was different in that he didn’t hate all Americans, though he wished those two over there weren’t there.
One other fact about the gunman: he’d never loved. He wasn’t a psychopath or anything so ugly as that. He’d had women (and once a man) but he couldn’t say he’d ever felt love, and he understood this was strange, since the men he knew were always loving their heads off all over the place. He just felt dry. He had desire and lust but never longing, and this bothered him.
But it was only a fact about him, not a defining characteristic, one short fact among others—another being that he could fall from anywhere and not hurt himself, had been like that since he was a kid, could fall out of trees, off roofs. He was known for it, had earned nicknames.
What was that sound? That faint roar in the distance? Was that the bus?
Jane looked over at Max. He’d heard it too. But what were they going to do about it?
The gunman listened for
his men but heard only the Wednesday bus, a day early this week apparently.
As for Max, he’d already done the great thing he would do.
They were quiet, all of them, contemplating the glassy future. “Look,” said Max at last. “There’s going to be a moment when you can get away. I want you to take that moment and do something with it.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Get away.”
“How? Where? What about you?”
“Don’t sit there asking questions like that when the moment comes, all right?”
Jane was thinking: See? He had a plan. If this fellow with his gun thought a piece of string would hold Max back, well, he had another think coming. There wasn’t a knot Max couldn’t untie. It was as if he’d been a sailor. And Max had vision. He knew how to see monkeys in the trees. When no one else could see anything but green, Max would spot dozens.
Max was brave, had always been brave. She knew that. He had talents. A punch in the face was nothing to him. She’d seen him stand still when the gorillas came after you. That was brave. They had gone to the gorilla preserve in Tanzania some years back, the one people make films about. The gorilla experts, they say to you, “Okay, listen up, folks. This is what’s going to happen. The gorillas are going to come after you. They’ll make a big noise and throw dirt and run right at you. It’s what they do, the gorillas. It’s a test. You have to just wait it out. When they charge, don’t move—stay where you are.” They tell you that and you repeat it in your mind, Stay where you are, stay where you are, but then when this five-hundred-pound gorilla charges at you, you just throw up your hands and run screaming. Supposedly it takes months to learn how not to. Only way to make friends with the fellows, the guides said.
Max was the one who hadn’t run. Even the professionals—the newer ones, anyway—ran. The scientists ran, but Max didn’t. Jane had been amazed. Everyone had been.
Maybe she’d go back to England, see her sister. Maybe she’d go back to New Zealand, where she had friends. She wouldn’t go back to Africa, though things had been better there.
Jane looked up and realized Max had scooted to his feet, hands still behind him, so fast she hadn’t heard him. The gunman strode over shouting and Max shouted back. The gunman raised the gun to his face. Jane was screaming. But she got up and ran screaming into the forest (didn’t sit there asking questions) because what else was she supposed to do? He’d told her to do that and if he had told her to, it meant that this was his plan for her and so he had a plan for himself, too—which was what? That he get punched in the face again? That he get shot? That he get himself killed? That he not care about himself as long as she got away? What kind of a plan was that? She realized she was still screaming so she stopped. Then she heard a shot and started screaming again.
He would one day love. By the time he got around to it, this day with the two Americans would have been long ago (two years) and so much would have taken place in the meantime (he’d leave the insurgents, move to the city with his uncle) that he wouldn’t even think of them anymore, except when he had to use his right arm (constantly), because that’s where the American (Brit, actually, and New Zealander, but the gunman would never know that) had shot him, and the place still ached after all this time. The American had brought out his hands, untied, and grabbed the gun with a grip the gunman never would have expected—not so hard that he couldn’t have wrenched it away—he was trained for this sort of thing, after all, had killed a man in four minutes with his hands. But the problem was the shoe. It was too big, his foot slid in it, and at the very moment he needed to have a good grip on the ground he couldn’t get it, and the American toppled him over and shot him in the arm and then stood over him, staring like a fucking American, gun hanging at his side. The last thing the gunman saw, before the blood made him lower his head, was the two of them turning away, running, the woman pulling the man’s arm.
Later, that image, the two of them in that instant, would come into his mind again and again, but it would no longer be there when he finally did love, because his own image, his own love, came back at him instead. But the Americans (New Zealanders, rather) stayed in his mind for longer than most things.
You would have thought that going through that would keep them together, and it did for a while, but humans go through all sorts of episodes, and it doesn’t always settle their hearts.
At the end of it all, after she’d left—well, after he left (because she made him) and, not knowing what she was doing, she left too—and after they both found themselves in countries far away from each other, in places that didn’t have the energy or beauty the two of them had once found in such places together (although there is nothing unique in that, the world dims over time—though maybe it wouldn’t have had the evil tint that it eventually seemed to Max to have, or the lifeless, meaningless tint that it seemed to Jane to have, if they hadn’t parted ways)—after all that, each of them installed on separate continents, she wrote a letter to no one of significance: one of the sisters they’d met in Nicaragua with whom they’d traveled for a few days. Jane wrote to explain, felt she had to explain to this stranger why she’d left him (or made him leave, the walking man) and what it had felt like.
It was like leaving him in the clearing with the gunman. That’s how it felt. Like she’d been given a chance to get away, and he hadn’t. He’d given her a chance and she’d taken it, knowing where she was leaving him and in what condition, knowing the fear and loneliness he must have felt, but she’d done it, run on a bed of leaves and needles, under a canopy of trees (didn’t ask questions)—or that had been the plan, though it hadn’t turned out that way.
At first she was running. She realized she was still screaming and she closed her mouth. She heard the shot and started screaming again. She was moving away, running through a jungle made of roots and water and bugs, the sun coming through the branches.
Then she slowed, then stopped. She didn’t move, thinking.
She turned and went back.
She could see a break in the trees and was moving toward it. Should she go in there? She didn’t know who had been shot—Max or the gunman. She was pushing away the branches, she was pushing herself through, and then she stepped out to greet him (I came back for you) or to be shot.
2
To the Ocean
At the desk they said they encouraged guests not to walk, but she was determined. She took the useless map and they set out, she and her husband, following the boardwalk. When the boardwalk ended, they followed the path, she saying the whole way, “Of course we can walk. Why don’t they want us to walk!” until the path ended and they stepped out onto a field, which she determined was a golf course. They hiked across that—“Bourgeois assholes,” she was saying, marching along, swinging her arms. Her husband kept saying, “Oh, here’s where it ends,” and “I don’t think we’re allowed in there,” and “I’m not walking in that,” while she thought, If I had married someone else, it wouldn’t be like this. She thought longingly of a man she might have married, blurry, nondescript, one who no doubt would be laughing and running up the hills. This, while her sister sent a text: Where are you? We took the shuttle. We’ve been here half an hour.
Later, at the picnic, her husband would describe it to the sister, who’d be laughing. “Oh, I can see it!” the sister would say. “I can see her coming down the side of the mountain, struggling through the trees, bruised and bleeding.” “There she goes!” her husband would say about her imaginary figure cutting through the brush. And the sister and husband would both continue to tease her throughout the day, provide running commentary on her actions. “Making sandwiches for the revolution,” they’d say. “Pouring coffee for the revolution. Having a swim for the revolution.” When they clearly didn’t understand her at all.
Before all that, while they were still on their way, she and her husband came to the edge of the golf course and looked out over the cliffs and beyond, the first glimpse of their destinatio
n—the water, hazy and distant. There was so much to get through between here and there: trees, a whole forest of them, the downside of a steep mountain, tall grasses, weeds to your hips, misunderstandings, ticks and mosquitoes and spiders and other disappointments, lost jobs, lost faculties, dying parents, and so much more. “Don’t,” he said, but she would do it. She steadied herself to walk in.
The Vice President of Pretzels
Now, I’ve been eating the pretzels with my wife since we met in 1962 and I don’t think they are especially good. I certainly don’t think they are “thicker,” but she had been eating them far longer than I, and she insisted the formula had changed, or perhaps the machinery, and that as a result they were very slightly “thicker,” and she would no longer eat them and complained about them for months. She tried to call the manufacturer but got only recorded voice greetings. She wrote emails and even letters but nobody answered. My wife is not one to give up on a thing and I’d be hearing about it until I died. So one day I was looking at the package, while she complained behind me, and I said, “By God, we should drive to the factory and tell them in person.” We are retired now and have an RV. According to the package, the factory was only two states away.
We drove sixteen hours, camped at the Walmart overnight, and in the morning we arrived at the factory, far off the highway in the middle of long rectangles of fields. We parked our RV in the lot and went up to the front desk. My wife tried to explain at reception but the woman behind the desk had a look on her face and was obviously not impressed. I thought we’d have to leave, head home without having achieved our objective, but then a man in a suit walked in the front door and stopped. “I can’t help but overhear,” he said. “I’m the vice president of the company. What seems to be the trouble?”
Wait Till You See Me Dance Page 5
