Judson Carmichael - The Scared Stiff

I stared at her. Guerrera. Her homeland, her little country down in South America. “Lola,” I whispered; now I was whispering too.

“I’ve been lying here awake,” she told me, “just thinking about it. We know people there, we have family there.”

“They keep terrible records down there,” I said. “The police force isn’t the most advanced in the world.”

“The death can be there,” Lola said. “The funeral, too.”

As excited as Lola by now, I said, “We can get a death certificate in Guerrera for a pack of cigarettes!”

“A little more than that,” she said, “but not much.”

I contemplated this wonderful idea. “It could work,” I said.

She pointed at me. “It has to be you,” she said.

I said, “It has to be me? Why?”

“If I go down there,” she told me, “and have a convenient accident, a local girl who moved to the States and her husband insured her for a zillion siapas, everybody will smell a rat. We don’t want to raise suspicion.”

“Okay, you’re right,” I said. “It has to be me.”

“But not now,” she said. “It’s too soon since you talked to Steve about life insurance.”

“You’re right. We’ll wait till January,” I said. “We can hold off for four months. We’ll wait till we’d normally go down there anyway, for our post-Christmas visit.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Then the gringo has his accident, and his grieving widow can talk both to the locals and to anybody who comes down from the States.”

“That puts it all on you, Lola,” I said. “That could get pretty tricky.”

“I’d love it,” she assured me. “Come on, Barry, you know me.”

I did. I grinned at her. “Okay,” I said. “Looks like I’m gonna die.”

“I’m sure you’ll do it very well,” she said.

“Thank you. Only, what then? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Guerrera.”

“Barry,” she said, “I thought about that too. All I’ve been doing is lying here thinking. I don’t know everything, we’ll have to figure some of this out together, but I know how to get you back to the States when it’s all over.”

“Good. Tell me.”

“I had two brothers that died young,” she reminded me. “There’s birth certificates on file up in San Cristobal but nothing else. With a birth certificate, you can make up a whole new identity.”

“You mean, become one of your brothers.”

“Grow a mustache,” she said. “Work on your tan. You could look Guerreran with no trouble at all. Wait a minute, my brothers’ names...” She thought, trying to remember, then remembered. “Who would you rather be, Felicio or Jesus?”

“Jesus!” I said.

She looked at me in some surprise. “Really? I didn’t think you’d—”

“No no no no no, I don’t want to be Jesus; that’s not what I meant. I want to be the other one.”

“Felicio.”

“Felicio. That’s not bad.”

“It means happy,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I said. “I’ve become one of the seven dwarfs.”

“Felicio Tobón de Lozano,” she said, rolling the name around in her mouth.

I said, “So I’d come back to the States as him—”

“And live with your sister.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

The first time Lola and I flew from New York down to Guerrera, it was to meet her parents, Alvaro and Lucia, and her brother Arturo. The second time, three months later, was when we got married in the little white stone church in Sabanon, the up-country town where Lola grew up.

Since then, we visit Guerrera regularly once a year, in January, bringing belated Christmas gifts, escaping the northern winter for two weeks, usually maxing a credit card or two. The transition from Long Island’s icy damp to Guerrera’s humid heat is always blurred by several hours of air-conditioning in planes and airports, but it’s still a kick to step out onto the portable stairs and suddenly feel that warm moist hand of the tropics press against my face.

General Luis Pozos International Airport at San Cristobal, capital of Guerrera, was built with American money, to keep the Commies out, and you have to admit it worked. Communism has not taken over in this part of the world; it’s still feudalism around here, same as ever. But the American money meant American design, great flat open paved areas baking blindingly in the sun, surrounded by squat square buildings with flat roofs. The local people would have left trees wherever possible, and open walls and wide eaves, so shadows and breezes could moderate the air without killing it. But it wasn’t their money, was it? So there you are.

The local officials, young, in their pressed uniforms and close neat haircuts, tend to be very serious, very dignified. As usual, I handed over my passport without a word and tried to look innocent. Or at least not guilty.

Lola has dual citizenship but has never renewed her old maroon passport. She travels as an American, though she always does say something to the immigration official in guttural Guerreran Spanish to let him know she’s really a local, and he always smiles and thaws and welcomes her home.

Unfortunately, though I’ve learned a rough-and-ready Spanish over the last fourteen years, I never did become fluent, which I lately regret. It would really come in handy. Because we were doing it, we were going to do it.

That’s the way it’s always worked with Lola and me. One of us gets an idea, we discuss it, the enthusiasm builds, we say, “We’ll do it!” — and we do it and never look back. (Usually don’t look forward, either, which frequently becomes a problem, but let’s not dwell on that.)

When officialdom finished with us, we went out the other side of the building, and there was Arturo, leaning on the twenty-year-old pale green Chevy Impala that’s his pride and joy. It rocks and rolls on Guerrera’s smallpox-scarred roads like a fishing boat in a high sea, and Arturo loves it, left hand out the window to press palm down on the roof, right hand clutching hard to the steering wheel.

Arturo’s a big guy, big-boned, thirty-eight years old, three years older than Lola and me. He works in the tobacco fields sometimes, uses his Impala as a taxi sometimes, does fairly good carpentry and adequate plumbing and terrifying electrical work sometimes, but mostly he just hangs around. He has a wife and some children in San Cristobal, and technically he lives with them, but where you’ll find him is at his parents’ house.

Now he threw us a big grin and an “¡Hola!” and relieved Lola of her big leather shoulder bag and canvas overnighter. I went on carrying my own two bags, and we went around to the back of the Impala for Arturo to unwind some wire and open the trunk. In the bags went, the wire was refastened, and we all slid onto the wide front bench seat, Lola in the middle.

Arturo started the engine, and Lola said, “So, Artie, how are you?”

“How could I be?” He grinned and winked past her at me, then spun the wheel and drove us away from the anticommunist airport building. “Same as ever, I’m great,” he said.

We drove through the chain-link fence, its gate kept open by day and closed by night; no red-eye flights in or out of Guerrera.

Lola said, “How about the other thing? Are we all set?” We’d been scheming with him the last four months, by e-mail.

“Oh, sure.”

We were on the highway now, the Impala gathering speed. The capital, San Cristobal, stood just a few miles north of the airport, but Arturo had turned the other way, toward Sabanon, eighty-five miles to the south.

The flat baking airport disappeared behind us. Dark-green hilly jungle out ahead. A few trucks laden with coffee sacks or beer cases or workers or sugarcane, and us. The wind felt good and smelled alive.