Paraíso

  I waited on the porch, listening to the man move through the rooms. Sunlight was just beginning to hit the tops of the taco palms, and the mountain range behind the town marched off to the south in exquisitely modified shades of blue.

  When the man came back out, I shook my head as if confused. “You say you want to take her for a test drive?”

  The man picked up the copy of The Sound and the Fury and riffled the pages. “William Faulkner,” he said. “I don’t know him. It’s your book?”

  “No, hers.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A family.”

  “What kind of a family?”

  I just shrugged.

  “Speaking of families.” The man replaced the book, face down. “I’m half Mexican. Look at it this way. Your sister’s and my kid will only be a quarter Mexican. You’ll hardly be able to tell.”

  Jefe appeared at the gate and stood there watching silently. Both of us ignored him.

  “She told you she was pregnant, didn’t she?” Chuckling and patting his stomach. “It’s getting hard to miss.”

  “I haven’t seen her. I thought she might be with you.”

  The cat’s eyes narrowed. “When did you get here?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “You’ve been here ever since?”

  “Ever since.”

  “How the fuck did you get here, with the roads out?”

  “Flew.” I watched the eyes widen and braced myself. The man moved like a cat, but I had him on weight and height. Suppose he had a knife?

  So be it.

  “You look like a straight shooter,” I told the man, thinking of Wendy’s last will and testament. “So let me ask you a straight question. Did you ever threaten my sister’s life?”

  “Is that what she says?” The man didn’t seem surprised. “She’s deluded. You know how women are in her condition. She’s carrying my baby. Why would I want to kill her?”

  “You tell me,” I answered.

  The man held up his right arm and unrolled the sleeve of his shirt to exhibit a red crescent scar on the forearm. “A love bite,” he said. “One of many. She makes love like a tigre. Only I know how to really handle her.”

  “I bet you’re a tigre yourself,” I said. “Did you take anything out of her room just now?”

  “Are you calling me a thief?”

  “I heard you in there. Now you have something in your pocket.”

  The man pulled out the film canister and flourished it. “This? These are photos she took of me surfing. See? She’s written my name on it. She was going to make me prints. You can tell her I picked them up myself. Okay? I’ll save her the trouble.”

  Jefe had come into the yard and was standing near the Mercedes. Slowly he reached out a huge hand to touch the front fender.

  “Jefe!” The man’s voice cut like a whip, and Jefe jumped back. “Vete!” He ran out of the gate like a frightened child.

  “Why is he so scared of you?” I asked.

  “He took some of my tools a while back. Just wandered away with them. He’ll never take any again.”

  “Well, anyway,” I said. “Thanks for bringing the car over. How much do we owe you?”

  “We? I thought it was your sister’s car.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “There’s still a lot to do,” the man said. “This was only a test drive.”

  “That’s all right. We’ll take it as is. How much?”

  “I can’t let you have the car in this condition.” The man walked down the steps into the yard, me following. “What if it broke down again here in Paraíso? I’d be a laughingstock. Nobody would respect me anymore.”

  The Mercedes’s front window on the driver’s side was open, and I leaned down and put my head inside. The familiar smell of oil and leather made me light-headed. I noticed the dashboard clock, mounted on the walnut door of the glove compartment, had stopped at 11:11. The urge to open the door, wind the clock, and reset it was almost irresistible.

  A hand on my shoulder. “Excuse me,” the man was saying. So I turned to face him.

  I’d been concentrating on the eyes, and the foot came out of nowhere straight into my crotch, seeming to lift me a couple of feet into the air. The sky split with a screaming white lightning bolt.

  I was a throbbing heart of pure pain at the center of the universe, radiating glowing sizzling red waves into darkness with a single high note focusing. A violin stretched beyond the highest register, bowed by a maniac.

  Strong Current

  I just feel a little tired,” Wendy said to Felipe. She was resting on a canvas cot in Felipe’s little cabin up the Sierra de la Laguna, where he harvested his honey. It had been almost five hours of steep, rough climbing, on and off the horse, and her belly was a little crampy. Nothing serious.

  Felipe smiled and nodded from the grate, boiling water for damiana tea on a mesquite fire. Wax honeycombs in wooden frames decorated the dark little room and there was the cot, a rough table, a kind of window-ledge settee, a sink with a bucket of water from the well, shelves of cooking utensils, mugs, and plates, and the cooking grate. The cabin was among tall pines on the edge of a grassy meadow, set with white-painted beehives. It could have been in Maine.

  “But I did pretty well for someone in my condition, don’t you think?”

  He concentrated on pulling leaves from a damiana stalk, looking out the small open window over the sink. “Yes, doña. Do you like it here?”

  “It’s lovely, Felipe. How long have you had it?”

  “Oh, it’s not mine. I just use it.”

  “Whose is it, then?”

  “I don’t know. No one ever comes here but me. The trail is too bad.”

  “But don’t you get lonely here by yourself?”

  “I’m not by myself, doña. Up here I’m closer to God.”

  She didn’t know how to answer.

  “And,” he went on, “I have my horse and my chaquaca.”

  He went outside where she could hear him whistling softly and came back with a California quail perched on his forefinger. The little cock was a perfect creation—dawn gray breast, egg brown wings, black head with its sassy shako, canary yellow bill—he’d found wandering alone as a chick and brought home.

  “Hold out your finger,” he said. He held out his alongside hers, closer and closer until the two fingers touched and the quail stepped nonchalantly from one to the other. She wondered if it had felt the strange spark of energy between them. The quail’s eyes were black, and its feet, wrapped securely around her finger, were pink. It cocked its head and seemed to look into her soul.

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Of course.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ah, that I don’t know.” He smiled and shook his head. “I just whistle and he comes. He is never far away.”

  She passed the quail back, testing the current. It made her wonder what kissing him would be like.

  Crazy. She was losing it up here on the mountain. Raging hormones, et cetera. And everything so strange and unconnected. He had meant to rescue her, surely, and it was a perfect escape: hole up for a few days until the roads were fixed and Clamato could drive her out (he hadn’t been around when she and Felipe had gotten back from the fruitless mission to the break). But here they were, a man and a woman alone in a remote cabin. He might be in another place completely. You just couldn’t tell. Those eyes. That smile. A long, thin, dark, warm finger with a clear, strong nail, the finger connected to a strong, dark hand, the hand to a sinewy wrist that disappeared into a white, long-sleeved shirt.

  She ran a hand lightly over her belly. “Felipe. You know I’m going to have a child, don’t you?”

  “Claro.” His eyes undifferentiated black, like the quail’s eyes.

  “Do you know who the father is?”

  “Claro que si.”

  “Of course you do. That’s why you brought me up here, isn’t it? Not just to see the bees.” />
  “Yes.” He moved his finger to the window ledge, and the quail stepped onto it. Then he poured the boiling water into the pot of damiana leaves and tamped them with a spoon. “Damiana will make you strong again. Is it all right? No problems?”

  “I don’t think so. I just feel very tired.”

  “You should have ridden more. We should have gone slower. I’m sorry. The trail is very ugly.”

  “The trail is beautiful. Everything is beautiful up here. I feel like I’ve seen it all before.”

  “Well, maybe you have.”

  “My brother and I tried to get here when we were children. We ran away together.”

  “Ah. You knew where you were going. That’s good.”

  “You’d like him, Felipe. He loves to dance.”

  “Does he look like you?”

  “I haven’t seen him for a long time. But he used to.”

  Felipe poured out a cup of tea and handed it to her reverentially.

  “Thank you, Felipe.” The damiana tasted bitter and potent. “I wish I knew what you were thinking.”

  “I’m thinking of you, doña.”

  “Really? What about me?”

  “Of how beautiful you are. And how blessed.”

  “Why, thank you.” She shook her head and smiled over the cup’s rim. “I don’t feel very beautiful right now. Or very blessed.”

  “And how pure.”

  She lowered the cup, on the verge of laughter. A veray parafit knight erroring, indeed. As if Dulcinea had been pregnant into the bargain.

  He just stared back. He had used the word pura. Que pura. Didn’t La Purísima in Mexico refer to the Virgin Mary? The Holy Virgin.

  My God! He’d said he knew who the father was, and that was the reason he’d brought her to the cabin. God the Father! Could it be possible?

  How could she put the question? No, it was too much. The more she thought about it, the less she wanted to know the answer.

  “You know, I’m very far from being worthy of you, doña,” he said finally.

  “You’re wrong, Felipe. It is I who am not worthy of you.”

  He shook his head. “God will judge in the end, doña. Only He knows what is in my heart.”

  El Farolito Sings

  A wizened but rugged old gringo looped my left arm around his neck, levered me onto my feet, and half-dragged me to the porch. My body felt paralyzed but tenderized, as if stung by a Pompilidus. Sometime during my red trance of pain, I’d felt a liquid shoot forcefully from my mouth. What had that been? I could barely sit on the edge of the porch without falling over. “And you must be Peter,” the man was saying. “What happened, you forget how to fly?”

  While I told him, the man arched his back slowly, hands on his hips, and looked at the sky. “Where was Wendy in all this?” he wanted to know. “Didn’t you come to spirit her away?”

  “She wasn’t around when I got here yesterday. The girl down the street gave me the key and said to wait, she was supposed to be back any minute. I waited for her all night. That mechanic … what’s his name? What’s your name, while we’re at it?”

  “They call him Marco Blanco. They call me Pancho Clamato.”

  “Well, thanks for your help. He thought she was going to be here, obviously.”

  “Ob-vee-ously.”

  “So did you. So where the hell could she be?”

  “Well, she probably went out on the same road you came in on. They got it fixed, right? That’s pretty fast work.”

  “Wrong.”

  Clamato was amazed to hear of my trip down the beach. “Wow! So you lost the Bug, hunh? Guess I won’t be tryin’ that myself. See any good waves?”

  “They were big, that’s all I know.” I propped myself with an arm to keep from slumping sideways. “Maybe I better lie down for a while.”

  Clamato got me inside and onto the bed, and then paced around, stopping in front of Wendy’s portrait of Isabel. “You know who this is?”

  “Yes. The girl told me. A crazy artist who once played the accordion naked in the local theater.”

  Clamato nodded. “I was there. She wasn’t bad.”

  “What do you think?” I asked. “I mean, about her and my sister.”

  “I think it’s good. They’re happy, and Isabel’s a tough lady. Your sister needs all the help she can get. She always been bi?”

  “I haven’t talked to her for a while.” Thinking of Claire. “It’s possible.”

  “A while?” A stagy double-take. “Well, the Peter and Wendy bit must have been tough. You guys couldn’t wait to get away from each other, right?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “I bet it is.” He favored me with the sight of his teeth. “You’ll have to tell it to me sometime.”

  Clamato said he’d ask around while I had a chance to recover. Flat on my back was the only semibearable position, and oddly enough the mortal ache in my balls centered my mind on the Mercedes.

  Our mother is at the wheel. My sister next to her in the middle, and I by the window, which I’d cranked open in the heat. Our mother in a light blue sleeveless shirtwaist and us in shorts and tee shirts. We are just going, maybe on one of those aimless drives to the open country at the foot of College Avenue or over to the Montgomery estate along Darby Paoli Road or out Goshen Road to the Radnor Hunt country. Early summer, and the color is fresh green, like snow peas.

  My sister’s arms and legs are covered with fine blond hair. I have no real hair of my own except on my head, so hers makes me envious. In fact, I envy the comfortable way she inhabits her whole body (she can easily do things that I can’t: handstands, handsprings, arches, one and a half gainers and backflips off the diving board, et cetera). Suddenly, I want to make her less comfortable, so I start jostling against her extra hard when we go around corners. She jostles back, and then we begin to giggle.

  “Stop that, you two,” our mother says. “Driving this wretched car is hard enough without you playing the fool.”

  “If you don’t like this one,” my sister says, “why don’t you ask Daddy to buy you another one?”

  Yeah! Why hadn’t she done that long ago? Why does she keep driving a car she hates? Instead, I ask: “Mummy, why is Wendy so hairy? Is she going to get hairier and hairier?”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

  “When she grows up is she going to be as hairy as a dog?”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “I am not,” Wendy says. “Peter’s going to get hairier and hairier, because he’s a boy.”

  “Well, maybe I made a mistake,” our mother says, smiling. “Maybe I mixed you two up when you were born. Nobody’s perfect, you know.”

  We drive on for a while, and the Mercedes seems so full of thoughts it’s hard to breathe. Finally, I reach out, grab a few of the long blond hairs on my sister’s forearm, and pull them back against the grain. Not too hard, but she screams extra loudly just to be obnoxious. Our mother jumps and swerves but manages to swerve back nanoseconds before she hits a telephone pole.

  Her face is red and excited, like at a party or after she’d been arrested and released, and her voice sounds pleased. “If we’d hit that pole, we’d all be dead.”

  “Would you be happy, Mummy?” my sister asks.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, we’d be together in heaven, wouldn’t we?”

  “No. You’d be in hell because you made it happen.”

  “Peter would be in hell too, because he pulled my hair. Daddy would still be alive. So you’d be stuck in heaven with all the other angels.” She giggles. “If Hannah was there, she could cook heavenly meals and you could have a party every night.”

  The Mercedes swings left, over the little bridge at the start of Goshen Road, and roars up the steep hill past Earle’s Woods. Through a couple of stop signs, and we’re on a straight stretch among plowed fields doing over 100 miles an hour on the speedometer.

  “How much farther are we going
?” The wind sucking my words out the window.

  And our mother hissing, “We’re going all the way to hell.”

  I put my arm around my sister and watch the landscape fly past. Her body is shaking as she snuggles against me. Her eyes are closed.

  In the early afternoon, Clamato reappeared carrying a greasy brown paper bag and two bottles of Pacifico beer. “Fish tacos from Pilar’s. Just the thing for swollen nuts. How do they feel?”

  “Like bruised peaches.”

  “Youch.” He took down two plates from the shelves and put a taco on each. Handing me a plate and one of the beer bottles and sitting on the foot of the bed with his share. “Salud.”

  The fish taco was light, flaky, and tangy with salsa verde. “Delicious,” I said to Clamato. “Have you ever been kicked in the nuts?”

  “Hasn’t everyone?”

  “Not me, until now.”

  “You must have had a sheltered childhood. Don’t worry, you’ll live to love another day. Hey, I got a lead on your sister, or at least a theory.”

  Clamato had learned that Felipe Reyes’s honey cart was not in its usual place, and nobody had seen Felipe himself for a couple of days. Very unusual: he was generally a fixture on the plaza. “He’s got kind of a thing for your sister. You know the story of Don Quixote?”

  “Yes.” I’d been on the verge of asking, Doesn’t everyone? I remembered vividly the entry in my sister’s journal about Felipe’s rescue attempt on the beach. Who was rescuing whom?

  “Yeah, well.” Clamato raised his beer bottle. “Here’s to noble intentions. Felipe has a place up in the mountains somewhere where he gets his honey. Maybe it’s better than nothing.” The problem, he went on, would be finding Felipe’s place in the virtually trackless sierra. A perfect hidey-hole.

  “You probably figured out that Marco had a few more reasons for coming over here than just a test drive.” He told me about the surf incident, and Wendy’s series of photos. “She was going to give them to the father, but he’d already left when she got out there. I know because he came over here to say good-bye. Marco must have known it too.”

  “Well, now Marco has them,” I said. “He went in the house and got them out of her room. The canister had his name on it. He showed it to me.”