In Flames (2 page)

After work the first day I stopped off at the club to play some tennis, shower, drink a few rum coolers before supper outside on the bar terrace.

And I stuck around awhile longer for a few more drinks. Though everyone was friendly, my vague unease persisted even at the club, circling like a cloud of insects hungry and tenacious. The ride that night from the club back to the hotel didn't help any, but confirmed the fears that had been building ever since my arrival on the island. I was a little loaded and didn't drive my leased car but left it in the club parking lot. I took a cab, the driver unarmed. Passing an avocado orchard, pear-shaped fruits in moonlight the size and shape of cannonballs, we rounded a curve beside the carbonized ruins of an old villa and a crumbling swimming pool, the remains battling the woods for existence. The taxi braked abruptly for a wrecked car blocking the road, and at once a dozen men in torn shirts, tattered jeans, and camouflage hats swarmed from the bush, surrounding us, all of them aiming rifles at the cab windows. A thug rapped the barrel of his weapon on the driver's side, motioning us to get out of the car. The cabbie said, “Don't resist, señor, it's dangerous.”

Earlier that night I'd heard several accounts at the club bar about road robberies, enough to know how to act if I wanted to live.

“This close to town, señor, they only want money. They don't want noise.”

“Sure, no noise.” Though half in the bag I was sobering up fast enough. “It's okay,” I said, stepping from the cab. “
Buenas tardes,
hermanos
, I'm a U.S. citizen. Here's my ID. See, there's the eagle seal.”

“Señor, they can't read. They don't understand English. Show them your money.”

The thieves peered into the cab and opened the trunk. Nothing to steal but the car itself and it wasn't worth the effort. The thieves might encounter a military roadblock, vehicle checkpoints frequent everywhere around the city.

I flipped open my wallet. “Here you go, take the cash. It's all yours.” I had about three hundred dollars. They helped themselves and faded back into the woods, leaving behind two men who drove off the wreck. I was astounded. “Is it always this bad? So close to town?”

“Bad and bad, señor. The rebels need money.”

“You've been robbed before?”

“Everyone has.”

“No police?”

“Señor, some of them might be police.”

And I grew more worried. I'd heard even worse stories traded at the club bar. The cabbie could have spotted I was soused and not taken me directly to the Nacional, but driven me up into dark hills to some backcountry road, where his pals would roll me and leave my body in a sewage-filled ditch and I'd drown in the muck before I ever regained consciousness. It happened. I could spend my whole year on assignment in San Iñigo worrying about my life, before deciding this anxiety was only a distraction from finding a way to live with the place. Living abroad—almost anywhere, and especially in the tropics—can end up like that, it makes you or it unmakes you. Only those free to leave at any time can afford to be sentimental about these wild places, or nostalgic once they've left the jungles behind, content with self-serving pieties about nature at its rawest.

The Club Saint Ignatius had a few rooms for bachelors, simple rooms, not as comfortable as the Nacional, but if I lived at the club I could drink what I wanted at night and simply roll into bed. Forget worrying about cab rides and robberies. The club hired Xy Corp. contractors, big beefy Special Forces types patrolling the grounds and the perimeter fence, trained guards armed with Uzi submachine guns and fierce-looking Rottweilers. No San Iñigo islander in his right mind would try a run past the guards and their killer dogs.

And so at the end of my first week, I moved out to the club. After closing the bar late that Friday night and losing track of time, I intended to sleep in on Saturday. When I turned off the lamp in my room I could see Christ the Redeemer glowing in the dark on the distant headland and behind Him the lights of the new harbor, my workplace. Earlier that week we'd mounted steel towers on flat barges out in the bay, from which iron pilings pounded into seabed. Day and night—
clang
boom
clang
boom
—the noise reverberated like ritual drums in the hills. The Saint Ignatius was a fair distance from the harbor and in my new quarters construction noises stayed muffled. I was settling in, life was looking up, no need to lose any sleep. I could kick back for the coming year and unwind in my adopted home, another exercise of hubris that would nearly kill me.

I closed the window shutters to the room and heard the screech and thunder of a jet making a low pass overhead as if it had left the airfield only moments before. The noise wasn't the jumbo-sized roar of a long-distance aircraft on the way to Miami or Mexico City and the hour was too late for a regional commercial flight. I lay in the dark thinking of all the things a jet plane might be doing at night flying so low over San Iñigo, where it was headed and who was at the controls, and as the engine sound faded heading east along the coast toward the mountains where the rebels hid, I fell asleep. It was cool as a sea cave in my air-conditioned shuttered room.

Harsh sunlight splashed over my face, stinging my eyes.

Slowly, quietly, the door to my room opened, and I shot up on my elbows, yanked back to life like a marionette, a morning jolt as sudden as electric current racing through my body as if I were under an impetuous captor's control, some sadistic San Iñigo robber sticking live wires in my skin. I grew panicky and I couldn't remember what I was dreaming only a few seconds before, blurry images from the night holdup flashed and I imagined someone with a rifle opening my door.

“It's only me,” she said. “I'm just checking. After last night, it was so late when you closed the bar…” Elaine Ferguson, Walter's young wife. And I realized that under the sheets I was naked, my right hand numb and clenched.
The clenched fist
, at least I was sure about that much. The fist was part of my dream, but I couldn't recollect exactly how. My left hand lay flat, unresponsive, lifeless in my lap, the sheet sticking to my stomach and legs, my body rank with sweat and I stank. “What do you want?” I spoke with the irritation of subsiding fear. “Elaine, good morning, I'm sorry, you scared the hell out of me.”
Could she smell my body odor
…Rum gives you an awful hangover.
Why was I naked
…I couldn't remember much, El Cristo Redentor and a screaming jet engine the last I recalled from the night before. And now Elaine could observe my pale skin, and the lines where my new tan began. She was so cool, so utterly confident as she stepped into my room closing the door silently behind her. “Sleep well?” She picked up my clothes from the floor, shaking these for insects before placing them on a chair. A roach flew off into a corner. For a moment I hesitated about getting out of bed, and a thought aroused me, I wanted her to stay. Elaine in her clingy red dress who was grinning at me, a touch teasingly. “I want to know if you'd like breakfast in your room.” She was making fun of me. “Tea or coffee? Not more rum, I hope.” She moved closer to the bed, smiling broadly, as though she'd love to sink her teeth into my flesh, as though I were different enough from other men around the club to merit some special kind of treatment. What, I wondered, did this woman still young—early thirties max—ever see in Walter Ferguson, a good thirty-five years her senior and hardly hiding the difference in age. A life of tropical ease was her reward.

Standing by my bed she shifted restlessly from one foot to the other, the in-the-flesh reverie of every bachelor's more ambitious ambitions, a disturbing dream in clingy red something or other miraculously unsupported by undergarments, and I was pretty sure there was nothing much under all that red, a tower of swan-simple curves rising to a cranberry-colored crown, a fresh white rose tucked behind her ear, glossy mouth twitching into rapid slippery shapes, smiling, then not, her Ritalin-bright eyes assessing me as assiduously as she might appraise a local worker's questionable labors in the club kitchen. “Look at this, will you…” She wet her fingers in her mouth and placed them on my bare shoulder, gently rubbing my skin. “You've got a bad bug bite. Right here.” She sat next to me on the bed, and started licking the insect bite on my shoulder all the while holding my gaze with her eyes. And this was how we began. Sudden, awkward, sloppy, over way too soon. Elaine looked as startled as I was.
Wasn't that something
…“Coffee or tea?” She pulled her dress down over her bare breasts and buttocks and thighs. Her behavior was like a vote of confidence in me.

“I'd like to eat breakfast outside,” I said, “on the bar terrace, if that's okay.”

She closed the door quietly behind her.

On the terrace overlooking the marina and beach, a dark-skinned young man served me breakfast.

I may have seen him working behind the bar perhaps, but it was too soon for me to differentiate one server from another at the Saint Ignatius. As the sun rose higher and the day grew hotter I thought ahead to evening when I would see Elaine again. I wished she would put the key in my door and enter without a word, and I'd be waiting in bed and she'd pretend I was the only man around who interested her and I'd have a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket full of ice on the floor beside my bed and both of us would be naked, relieved the hot day was past, welcoming the cool air and drinking cold wine and loving each other all night. This was how I wished it would be once the day was over.

A morning sea breeze caught the mast lines at nearby boat moorings, whipping the ropes in a rapid noisy beat that could be heard as far up from the marina as my breakfast table on the terrace. Clipboard in hand, Elaine crossed over from the bar checking on the help and jobs to get done around the club. Businesslike, down-to-earth, she stayed upbeat and chirpy concentrating on her work and never once glancing my way. I could still smell her skin, feel her breasts in my hands, her taste in my mouth overpowering breakfast coffee, and all the while she ignored me.

A gardener showed her a basket of flowers freshly cut from club grounds and she pointed to a perfect white rose. The gardener stripped the thorns, clipped the stem and handed her the flower, which she tucked behind her ear, replacing the rose she'd left behind in my bed. Under her clinging red dress she wore nothing, I knew this for a fact and it excited me so much I had to look away.

Aside from not dropping by my room again, for a week Elaine behaved exactly like this. Same close attention to running the club, fresh white rose in her hair, same style clinging dresses in colors radiant as San Iñigo sunsets, nothing underneath, and after that remarkable first morning the same inattention to me. I became convinced she was a woman more in love with mystery than anything else, a willing captive to caprice. And what could I do about that, nothing. I got to work on time every day at my harbor job, no distractions there. And each evening when I came back to my room at the club, I could hear her voice clear and precise, sometimes quite sharp commanding the help, her footsteps moving with determination past my door, never stopping.

Ferg noticed me in the bar one evening. “Still at it, standing guard on the same spot?” His eyes, tone, frown, all the evidence hinted strongly at a growing, if undefined, disappointment with me, perhaps even anger. He didn't like what he saw, and didn't pretend to. I felt foolish, a shit-eater grin was all I managed. What could I say,
I'm infatuated with your wife, now what
…

Trying to sleep that night I thought with regret about how I could summon a clearer image of Elaine stretched out in her husband's bed than I could of her entwined in the sheets on my bed. Obsessions may ease for a time but that doesn't mean they die off. I was fixated, I wanted to listen to her breathing beside me in bed, hear her inquiring voice at my door but the door never opened with her standing there, the key to my room in her hand.

In the evenings I drank rum coolers with juices from most of the fruits grown on San Iñigo until I found these too sweet and cloying, and I made my default drink of choice a straightforward double rum with club soda, lime, and extra ice. After dinner I drank more of the same, why not, and shot pool or played a few rounds of poker in the game room. The regular card players let me sit in but had little to say to me, and I had even less to say to them. I won some, lost some, and each evening after a half-hour or so I excused myself. “Got to get up early for work.”

They nodded, knowingly. Still I had no real idea what the other club members did on the island besides gambling at the club. Local men liked to hang around street corners and chat, or sit drinking coffee and chat, or lean out car windows and chat. And all the time they jabbered, they waved and poked their hands to make their points or show emotion. Club Saint Ignatius members didn't talk nearly as much and rarely gestured, all signs they would always remain whoever they were when they first arrived in San Iñigo and would never go native.

Each day Elaine made her rounds, busy with her clipboard, the general at her post ignoring me. Tropical sunshine did nothing to dispel self-doubt from descending over me like a cloud of tenacious insects. Whenever I entered the bar some club veterans started turning their backs, looking away while I searched for a dinner table or ordered a drink. Perhaps—I tried telling myself—this was only my imagination, too much work at the harbor in that hot sun, where merely taking a step caused an eruption in sweat.
It was the heat, yes, that's what it was
…I wasn't used to extreme heat. By the end of a workday and after an hour of hard tennis, I melted, too tired to be sociable and everyone's affable buddy. Soon with time I thought I'd grow more accustomed to routine and heat, like the club regulars who'd acclimatized to San Iñigo and developed immunity. Life could have been worse, much worse; I could have been stateside, perhaps unemployed, certainly earning less, trapped on toll booth lines in roaring winter blizzards, fighting flu, dying to get home and eat supper and go to bed.
Count your blessings, things will look up
…I developed a San Iñigo mantra.