Judson Carmichael - The Scared Stiff

At San Cristobal, we dropped Rafez off at police headquarters. “Enjoy the rest of your stay,” he said, as he got out of the car.

“Thank you, I will,” I said.

Now there was the final hundred miles to Sabanon. I stayed in the front seat, mostly because I was too weary to move, it having been a hectic night and it now being past four-thirty in the morning. The driver was not a garrulous type anyway, so as the lights of San Cristobal faded behind us I went to sleep, not waking up until he made the right turn onto our street in Sabanon, which caused me to fall over against him. He had to elbow me out of the way while steering around the turn, and it was the elbow in the ribs that woke me.

Dawn. I blinked at the familiar street. Some workers were already up and out, trudging barefoot to their jobs. The driver stopped in front of our fuchsia house, and I got out, as Madonna greeted me with a snurf. I would have forgotten the vinyl bag on the floor at my feet with everything I owned in it if I hadn’t tripped over it.

“Gracias,” I told the driver, who nodded at me with that flat look of his. I shut the car door and trudged up the outside stairs and into a living room full of empty beer bottles.

I thought I might be hungry, but I didn’t care. Home is Felicio, the prodigal son. Home and very very sleepy.

I went straight to bed.

The first question, of course, was how we were going to tell Lola to bring sixty thousand dollars in cash with her. Was her phone tapped? Was this one? I thought probably not, in both cases, but it’s always dangerous to assume you have privacy. We wouldn’t use e-mail for the same reason, even if we still had it. That is, Arturo was webbed up here in Guerrera, but at home on Long Island we’d lost our Internet access to insolvency months ago.

I had finally gotten out of bed sometime after noon on Sunday. The family, back from mass, was sitting around in the living room, starting the day’s beer consumption and watching soccer on television. They hadn’t known I was in the house, so when the spare room door opened and I staggered blearily out, a certain amount of beer was spilled.

Once that was cleaned up and the TV switched off, I could tell them all my most recent adventures. Arturo made angry noises about the behavior of Manfredo and them from Tapitepe, while Mamá and Papá clucked and expressed horror on my behalf for all the trouble I’d gone through. Arturo, through being a cabby, knew Rafael Rafez by reputation, and the reputation was not good. “He’s a bigger crook than the crooks,” he told me.

“He wants that money from me,” I said, “and that’s all he wants, and he’s going to get it, so there won’t be any trouble. I know he’s a crook, Arturo, that’s why he’s taking a bribe, but he has reason to stay bought, including whoever’s in my grave out there, so I believe he will stay bought. The question is, How do we tell Lola to bring the money?”

Arturo said, “You think somebody listenin’ to her phone?”

“Or this one.”

He shook his head. “Not this one,” he said. “Nobody around here got stuff to do that kind of thing except they get it from the CIA, and the CIA don’t care about us.”

“All right,” I said, “the other end. So what you do, when she calls, you say it’s a bad connection, it’s probably her phone, she should go out to the pay phone by the gas station and call you from there, because the pay phones are always better.”

“Bullshit, man,” he said.

“What you tell her, Arturo,” I said, “is that you remember Barry saying it one time, about the phones in the States: that the pay phones are always better.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you said that, I remember now.”

The first time the phone rang, at six-thirty, Arturo took it, and it was Dulce de Paula. When he hung up, he told me, “Keith Emory disappeared.”

“Think of that,” I said.

“She reported it to the police.”

“Good.”

The second call came a little after seven. Arturo took it again, and talked a long time, and then hung up and nodded at me and said, “Okay.”

I said, “What took so long?”

“She didn’t want to do it.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe it. “She didn’t want to do it?”

“She says it’s cold up there.”

“Of course it’s cold up there. It’s winter.”

And the first thing she said, when the phone rang again ten minutes later and Arturo answered and then handed it to me, was, “It’s freezing out here.”

“I wish I was there to warm you,” I said.

“So do I,” she told me. “What’s going on? I told Artie, we can’t get the check until next week.”

“Lola,” I said, “hold on. There’s something else.”

“What?”

It was awfully good to hear her voice, but this wasn’t exactly the love scene I’d had in mind. It was all too businesslike, and I could hear her teeth chattering. I said, “In the first place, I miss you a whole lot.”

“I miss you too,” she said, but I know her; I could hear her humoring me.

So I got to it. “Okay, I know you’re cold there. The thing is, we got a little complication here. I can’t tell you about it now, I’ll tell you when you get here—”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here. But the thing is, you’ll have to bring sixty thousand dollars in cash with you.”

“ What? That’s a whole lot of money!”

“It’s ten percent, if you think about it,” I said. “And I need it in order to leave the country.”

“Something’s going on,” she said.

I said, “Of course something’s going on! It got very complicated down here, wait’ll I tell you about it.”

“I can hardly wait,” she said.

I said, “And I can hardly wait to see you again. To hold you again. You know what I mean.”

Softer, she said, “I do. And I feel the same way.”

I could sense the family’s eyes on me. “I can’t tell you everything I want to,” I said, “you know, in the living room here.” And from the family’s expression, I understood they saw no reason for all this northern restraint.

“Well, I can tell you,” she said.

“Please do.”

“I want you inside me,” she said.

I believe I moaned. The family looked at me with quickened interest. I said, “Oh, yes. Burrow in. Hibernate.”

“Well, don’t go to sleep” she said.

“Very active hibernation,” I assured her. “Rolling and stretching. Snuggling in.”

“Mmmm,” she said. Then she said a few more things I couldn’t properly respond to, and I could tell she wasn’t feeling as cold as earlier. Her teeth had stopped chattering.

And what power words have to evoke memory. All the senses had come alive. “Come home soon,” I whispered. By that point, nothing much above a whisper was possible to me.

“I will,” she promised. “Wet dreams, sweetheart.”

“Count on it,” I said.

She didn’t call Tuesday. She didn’t call Wednesday. She hadn’t called by two o’clock Thursday afternoon when Rafael Rafez came by.

I was in the living room, looking out at nothing happening in the sunshine out there, when that white Land Rover stopped out front and Rafez stuck his head out the car window. He’d seen me up here, and he gestured I should come down.

He was out of the Rover, strolling in the shade of the house, when I came down the stairs. He was snappily dressed, as usual, this time in a flowing amber gaucho shirt and ecru linen pants. “How you going, amigo?” he asked me.

“Pretty good,” I said. “ Bueno , I guess.”