Ken Douglas - Scorpion

He was looking down, at the floor, and she imagined that he was feeling twice rejected. She wanted to fold her arms around him and hug him into her like she would a lost child. She wanted to tell him everything was going to be all right. There were other women out there, she wanted to say, and someday soon he’d meet one and then the heartache would be gone. Instead she said, “I’m ready to go, if you are. I just have to make a quick phone call.” She had to call Earl, but she shivered with the thought that it wasn’t going to be the kind of call he was expecting.

“ But you said.”

“ I think the airline can probably get by without me right now. They probably won’t even notice I’m gone,” she said.

“ I have baggage, but I imagine I can get it tomorrow or the next day,” he said. Then he followed her toward the phones.

“ I’m sorry about your girl.” They were at the phones.

“ Thanks,” he said. He turned and faced her for a second with mist covered eyes. The pain there was real and it looked like it cut deep.

“ I’ll make the call from the hotel,” she said. Earl could wait. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked as they made their way to the street.

“ Sure,” he said. Then he raised his hand for a taxi.

A rusty Toyota pulled up to the curb. The car was fifteen years old, but the tires were new. “You want a taxi?” the driver said. His rich baritone and dark ebony skin conspired to hide his age, but the gray hair and wrinkled hands gave it away. He was old and he reminded Maria of her own father.

“ Yes, to the Hilton Hotel,” Broxton said.

“ I’m your man,” the driver said with a smile in his voice.

He opened his door and started to step out of the car, but she stopped him, saying, “That’s okay, we don’t have any baggage.”

“ Makes it easy on these old bones,” he said. Broxton opened the front door and put his carry-on bag on the front seat. Maria unclipped her small bag from the trolley and laid it next to his. Then they climbed into the back.

“ Dependable Ted, at your service.” The driver turned and handed her a card. “You need a taxi, anytime, day or night, you call me, hear? I’m dependable, like my name, the name on the card, Dependable Ted.”

“ I’ll be sure to do that.” Maria handed his card to Broxton.

“ Now you sit back and enjoy the ride. I might not be the fastest taxi in Trinidad, but I’m the most dependable.” Broxton laughed for a second, then he turned glum. On the plane he seemed bulldog-strong, now he was puppy-dog meek. She needed to get his mind off that girl.

“ Very lush here,” she said, making conversation as the taxi started winding its way along the access road, heading for the highway that would take them into Port of Spain, about a half hour away.

“ Your first time in the tropics?” Broxton asked her.

“ This is my third flight out of Miami, she said, so I guess you could say I’m new to the tropics, if you don’t count Texas. You?” He chuckled and she took that as a positive sign.

“ I spent a year in Mexico,” he said, slipping the driver’s card into his shirt pocket.

“ Looking for drug smugglers?” she asked.

“ Hardly. All I do is process the paperwork. The most exciting thing that ever happens to me is when the computer crashes. Even that scares me.”

“ Then why did they pick you to protect the prime minister?”

“ Because of who my future father-in-law is, or rather who I thought my father-in-law was going to be.”

“ I can’t believe that,” she said with a smile in her voice.

“ It’s true,” he said. “I’m sort of like an analyst. They give me the data and I try to put it all together in my trusty laptop. Some days I never see the outside.

“ That explains why you can live a year in Mexico and still be so white,” she said.

He laughed, and she felt like she was definitely making progress.

“ Hablas Espaniol,” she said, using the familiar form.

“ Claro,” he answered.

“ Most Americans don’t bother. They expect us to learn their language.”

“ Us,” he said. “You have a slight Mexican accent, but you’re American.”

“ How can you tell?”

“ It’s in the way you walk and talk. Like you’re sure of yourself. Like you’re an American.”

“ I don’t understand.”

“ Americans stand out, wherever we go. We can’t help it. Black, white, red or yellow, we’re all the same when you start comparing us with the rest of the world.”

“ I don’t know if I can believe that,” she said.

“ I’ll give you an example. Years ago, when I was a child, I was in Nairobi with my parents. It was the first anniversary of the death of Jomo Kenyatta. People had walked for miles to pay homage to the great man at a rally in this huge park in the center of the city. They were all black and as they passed my dad would say ‘Jambo, Hello,’ and they’d say Jambo back, and smile at us. But when this one man approached, my dad said, ‘Hello,’ and he said, ‘Hello,’ back. He asked where we were from and my dad told him Long Beach, California, and he answered back by saying he was from Portland. He was as black as everybody else, but he was different. He was an American. My dad knew it and so did everybody else.”

She thought about what he said. He didn’t sound like a racist or a nationalist, he was just telling the truth, and truth was truth, even if it wasn’t politically correct. Then she asked, “How about the Europeans? Do we look different from them too?”

“ Especially them,” he said, laughing. “You should see us blundering around in their countries trying to communicate. When they don’t understand we just talk louder, till eventually we’re almost shouting.”

“ Your girl, the one in the paper, she’s Danielle Street, the literary agent, isn’t she?” She didn’t want to put the subject back onto something that would hurt him, but she had to know.

“ You’re a novelist?” Broxton asked. She saw the way his eyebrows arched and the way he bit into his lower lip. This wasn’t a pleasant subject for him.

“ I wanted to be once. I sent my manuscript off to an agent in Los Angeles, and shortly after it was rejected I received a letter from Ms. Street in New York.”

“ And?” Broxton said. She had a feeling that he knew what was coming next.

“ The letter said that she was told by another agent that I had a book worth publishing. The other agent was unable to take on any new clients, but felt that my work was worthy enough to mention to the Street Agency and would I please send her a copy of the manuscript right away.”

“ Which of course you did,” Broxton said.

“ Of course,” she said, meeting his eyes.

“ And,” Broxton said again. His hands were folded in his lap. The fingertips were white. He didn’t want to be talking about this.

“ She recommended an editorial service,” Maria said.

“ And for only four or five thousand dollars they could make your manuscript publishable,” he said.

“ Something like that,” she said. “But there was no way Earl ever would have let me have the money.”

“ Earl doesn’t sound like a man I’d like, but it’s probably a good thing you didn’t get the money.”

“ Rip off, huh?”

“ Usually.” Broxton nodded. “The old Dani never met a manuscript that five thousand in her pocket couldn’t fix. She owned the editing company.”

“ Who did the actual work?”

“ College kids mostly. She paid them peanuts. Usually the manuscripts never went anywhere, however once in a while one got published.”

“ How’d she get my name?”

“ She paid the secretaries in the other agencies for a list of all their rejections.”