The Travel Writer (6 page)

* * *

Hours later, on my way to the bathroom, I studied the passengers on both sides of the plane: Bolivians mainly, their faces pallid in the flickering blue-gray lights of television screens deployed above them. My gaze snagged on one passenger, several rows back and on the other side of the plane. He was a young Anglo, scowling as he pounded on the volume control on the arm of his chair. I stared harder through the dimness. It was Kenny.

He spotted me instantly, waved ferociously with his whole arm, and then gave me the finger. I twisted my neck to glance behind, pretending to assume he was giving the finger to a flight attendant at my back or maybe to one of the pull-down movie screens, and then hustled on to the bathroom. But when I stepped out of the stall he was there, in high-top sneakers and an old Marlboro Man T-shirt.

“Coe moe ess tass?” he said, brandishing a copy of
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Speaking Spanish
. “Got a last-minute deal. Lisa helped me find it. This was the only flight that had discount seats.” Just my luck, but not really that surprising. There were only a few flights from the U.S. to La Paz each week.

A refrigerator-size lady of distinction, fake pearls dangling from her neck, pushed us
back to get at the bathroom, and we found ourselves in the bubble of peace beside the galley. A male flight attendant was dozing in a seat, his head cocked to one side, a dribble of spit shining in the lower corner of his mouth.

“So you took a vacation,” I said.

“Who knows? Maybe I’ll never come back.” Kenny grinned. The sunlight from outside caught his eye, and he gestured toward the window. The sky was as blue as a child’s nursery. “Maybe I’ll find her,” he said more softly. He could have been daydreaming about pitching in the World Series. “Look. You speak Spanish? We’ll split a hotel room.”

“I’ve already got a place to stay.”

“You want to make this a competition? You’re too smart for that.” He put his hand infuriatingly on my shoulder. “You speak Spanish. I know Hilary. Let’s do this for her sake. Let’s take over this game, you and me.”

I let him keep the hand there. “This isn’t a game,” I said. “I knew Hilary too.”

“You knew my girlfriend!” He shook his head, still grinning, admiring my obstinacy. “You think you’re some kind of hero?”

He removed his hand, but not the grin. I was irrationally moved not just to despise him but to hate him.

“What if you found her,” I asked, “and she said she was fine, and told you to fuck off and never come back and never tell anyone. Would you do it?”

“She wouldn’t say that. We had a connection. We didn’t go to fancy-ass colleges, like everybody else at work. We didn’t pay for drinks with Dad’s American Express. Nobody understood us but us! That’s what we said once.” Then he fell silent, and his grin faded from his face as his thoughts wandered off. “But if she did say that, I’d be broken up. Coming all this way to get shot down like that. Maybe you’re right. It’s a terrible, terrible risk I’m taking.”

He put both hands below the little window and braced himself against the wall, as if stiffening his body for the test ahead.

“I’m not a gambler,” he said. “I went to Atlantic City once, and even when I won, I hated it.” He pantomimed dealing cards. “Just watching the cards, I hated it. I know how to play. My dad taught me. But we never played for money like they do there.”

“What are you going to do when we land?”

He had no idea.

I told him how to get a reliable taxi from the La Paz airport and recommended a safe, cheap hotel near the Plaza Murillo. I even made him repeat the name and address, and when he couldn’t, I wrote it down for him on the back of one of my business cards.

You don’t taxi up to a gate in La Paz; you stop short in the middle of the tarmac and unload yourself and your hand baggage down the stairs. Then you follow the yellow lines to the entrance at the terminal, while uniformed airport officials stand watch to make sure you don’t get lost or make a break for it. It’s a good fifty-yard stroll in the fresh (if distressingly thin) air, so there’s room to stretch your legs and run if you want to catch up to someone who was sitting well in front of you on the plane and therefore got a good head start disembarking, and that’s what Kenny wanted.

He slowed when he caught up, and matched my pace without looking at me, as if he just happened to remember he wasn’t in such a hurry after all.

“We’re at thirteen thousand feet, Kenny,” I said. “If you do that again, you’re going to faint.”

He was light-headed and short of breath; his head was aching and his vision was graffiti-tagged with black squiggles. I knew exactly what he was feeling because I was feeling the same way, but at least I’d been expecting it. He must have thought he was terrified, when in fact he was only nervous and maybe a bit surprised to find himself where he was: in the gray asphalt sea of luggage trucks, taxiing planes, and passengers following the yellow line like Dorothy and the Munchkins, while all around us, red-headed in the twilight, loomed the snow-peaked mountains of the Cordillera Real, just north of La Paz. He was too self-conscious to stop and twirl his head about at the sights, but between extended, pain-fighting blinks and grimaces, his eyes darted up and around, again and again, like a fly trapped in a car.

Once inside the terminal, I surveyed the immigration lines and chose the one farthest to the left, hoping that clueless people with line-clogging immigration problems would be too lazy to walk that far. A dozen people were in front of us, more than half in business suits: a good choice. I thought of my illiterate plane neighbor and turned to the gathering crowd behind me, but I couldn’t see her.

I told Kenny to get his passport ready, but he smirked and waved it in my face, to prove that I had underestimated him yet again. His smirk drooped immediately.

“Take slow, deep breaths,” I advised. He looked carsick.

He nodded. “Whoa,” he said, and pointed with his passport.

Scotch-taped to the wall beside us was a flyer with Hilary’s picture and the following text, in both English and Spanish:

“Maybe they have some leads,” said Kenny.

“I’m sure they do,” I said. “You should shoot down to the embassy first thing in the morning. I’ll tell you which
trufi
to catch.”

He didn’t respond; he was concentrating on his breathing.

The immigration agent stamped both our passports without as much as a
Buenos días
. At the baggage claim I saw the four Americans from first class. They had regrouped well behind the perimeter of luggage hunters ringing the belt and were chatting merrily, relieved to be free of the scrutinizing gazes of Third World customs and immigration officials, while a porter piled a nearby cart ever higher with their luggage. In their midst, holding a clipboard, stood Pilar.

To come upon her suddenly, without the benefit of mental preparation, was almost too much for my oxygen-deprived brain. I felt as if I had just stepped into a freezing shower, and then the chill passed over me, and all that was left was the shivering grin on my face. I lunged toward her; between the stare and the grin, I could hardly now pretend not to have seen her, even just to buy a few moments to compose myself.

The Americans saw me coming and widened their eyes and their smiles to welcome a fellow pale-skin, but Pilar stepped in front of them, like a basketball player intercepting a pass. I stopped short, wondering whether to kiss her on the cheek. Did we qualify as friends again? Her body was shielded by her clipboard, but then she dropped her arms in surprise.

“You’re early,” she said.

“I decided to spend a few days in La Paz,” I said. “They let me change my ticket.” The Americans behind her abandoned their inquiring expressions and returned to their chatting, confident that I either was irrelevant or would be fully explained later.

“We’re waiting for some VIPs from the Lima flight.” She pronounced it “vips.” “Who’s this?”

Her voice echoed in my mind; I couldn’t pin down the meaning of any of her words. Control yourself, I thought, and tried to conjure up the many, many times I’d slept with her and
thereby overcome my panic with brute lust, but my powers of concentration seemed to have leaped overboard. I could dimly discern, bubbling over in my subconscious, memories of our last meeting, in a Best Western in the town of Wall, South Dakota, just outside the Badlands. She had patted me on the butt like a football player, just before I abandoned her for a Guilford minivan back to Rapid City. Why had they made her stay on in Wall?

Kenny had eased up behind me. “I’m Ken Rawls,” he said, barking his name like a stockbroker. “You Bolivian?” His gym bag was slung over his shoulder, the frayed strap pinching the Marlboro Man’s ten-gallon hat.

“No, Kenny,” I said. “She’s Pilar. A friend of mine.”

Kenny nodded. It didn’t surprise him that I bumped into friends at the La Paz airport.

“I’m here to find Hilary Pearson,” he said.

“You brought a deputy?” Pilar asked me, frowning.

“He’s on his own,” I said.

“I’m a friend of hers,” said Kenny. “I love her.”

“Why do you need to tell her that?” I said.

“I understand, Ken,” said Pilar, laying on the professional warmth so thickly that I was jealous of him. “She’s a very lovely woman.”

“You knew her?” said Kenny.

“I met her about a year ago, at my old job,” she said. “We used to play darts at the hotel bar.”

I remembered that Pilar had once told me that after she arrived in Miami, friendless and confused in a strange country, she spent the summer shut up in her bedroom in her aunt’s house, chucking darts and luxuriating in the air-conditioning.

“She played darts?” Kenny asked.

“Are you coming into town?” I heard myself ask. “Let’s split a cab. Afterwards we could get a bite.” Get a bite? “And talk. So we can get down to business.”

“I want to, but I wasn’t ready for this. I have clients.”

“Right,” I said, “but maybe—”

“And I’ve got another load in from Colombia in an hour. But of course I want to talk to you. I thought you were coming straight to the Matamoros. Why are you staying in La Paz?”

“Oh. No reason. Just … checking out a few hotels.” I hitched up my eyebrows and twitched my nose at Kenny. She probably thought I was about to sneeze.

“We’re gonna look for leads,” said Kenny. “Try the embassy, maybe troll the bars for the word on the street. Jake the Snake here can translate. He knows Spanish.”

“Really? He must have been practicing,” said Pilar.

“I’m scraping you off my shoe the minute we leave the terminal,” I said to Kenny.

“Please excuse us for a minute,” Pilar said. I fixed Kenny with a dog owner’s “stay” glare and followed her behind a family and their luggage empire.

“Who is he?”

“Just some nut,” I said, cheered that we were again a conspiracy of two. “I met him on the plane. Don’t worry. He doesn’t know anything. I’m not bringing him along.”

“Maybe you should. They asked me if you were bringing a photographer. They’re very serious about pictures, and everybody knows yours are horrible. But you can’t tell him
anything
.”

“I won’t. I know to be careful. Gonzales came to my apartment the other night. He threatened me. And you too. Who is he?”

“My God. I’m so sorry. What did he do?”

“Nothing. He just tried to scare me.” I decided that complaining of the damage to my monitor and to Yertle’s sense of security wouldn’t reflect well on my courage.

“He works for the hotel. I don’t know anything else about him. He never comes to Bolivia. Jacob, if you don’t want to do this—”

“I came here, Pilar.”

“Did you tell him anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Thank you. Jacob, I wish we had more time. I have more to tell you.”

“About Hilary?”

“Yes. I’ve learned something new. First I have to get these people in their van. Meet me in the terminal in fifteen minutes.”

She withdrew to her Americans.

“What was that about?” Kenny demanded.

“Time for you to hit the road,” I said. “Have you got the address I gave you?”

“I thought I was sticking with you.”

“Sorry. I need to talk to the girl. You understand that, Kenny—a guy like you wasn’t born yesterday. Take a cab into town.”

“Whoa.”

“It costs five bucks. They’ll take dollars.”

“They got meters? What if the guy tries to rip me off? I’ll wait for you. It’s cheaper to share.”

“So long, Kenny.”

He wandered off toward the exit, his head bobbing nervously above the crowd.

* * *

Back in the terminal, I ordered a
café cortado
from a stall-in-the-wall coffee shop and bore it carefully back to the plastic bowling seats that provide so little comfort in so many second-rate airports and bus stations.

“Jacob.” She stood above me, then plummeted to the chair beside me. Again, no greeting, no kiss; no chance to test our level of intimacy, though her face was inches from mine. I was dimly aware of a shimmering of colors and sounds behind her and all around me, but was unable to divert any fraction of my attention from her.

“What have you learned?” I said. “Where should we start?”

She paused, searching for the right words. “I’m sure she’s alive.”

A man ran over Pilar’s foot with his roller bag, and she yipped in surprise. We turned, but the offender was lost in the crowd. I saw, over her shoulder, a lone fair head above the crowd. It was Kenny, gawking in our direction from near the coffee stall.

“What’s your evidence?” I asked quickly, before she could spot him too.

“It’s very powerful. It’s tangible.” She raised her eyebrows, as if trying to convince herself that the topic was extremely interesting, but then let her gaze droop in disappointment. “Maybe we should discuss this later.”