T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

And then he wasn’t thinking anymore, he was dreaming. He was alone, hiking up a trail deep in the redwood forest, everything cool and dim in the shadow of the trees, his legs working and his heart beating strong and steady so that he could see it there out front of him, at arm’s length, beating, beating. He kept going, up and up, till he wasn’t walking anymore but gliding above the ground, sailing on stiffened wings, and that seemed perfectly natural, as if all his life this was what he’d been meant to do. He might have been a bird. He was a bird. But the strangest thing was there were no other birds out there with him, no creatures of any kind, no people even, nothing but the trees and the sky and the earth unscrolling beneath him in silence absolute, dream silence, a silence so profound it could be broken only by the mechanical squawk of a loudspeaker— Doctor Hernández, venga al teléfono, por favor —that sheared off his wings and dropped him down here in the hard wooden seat of the Red Cross Clinic, awaiting judgment.

“You were asleep,” Carolee was saying. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

It took him a minute, so much harder at his age to come back to the world, and then he sat up and gazed blearily round the room, his eyes shifting from Oscar’s face to Carolee’s before dropping to the watch on his wrist: 6:15. Was that right? He blinked at Carolee. Blinked at Oscar. “Jesus,” he rasped, “they going to make us wait here all day?”

Oscar — he’d been asleep too — rose from his chair, stretching. He was wearing shorts, plaid shorts, and below the hem of them his kneecaps were discolored, smudged still from where he’d knelt over the dead man in the mud. “I’ll go check at the desk.”

“No, don’t bother.” He was on his feet now too, a sudden jolt of anger searing through him as if he’d touched two ends of a hot wire together. “Come on, Carolee,” he said, reaching a hand down for her, “we’re out of here.”

“But Sten, they haven’t come yet. The police. They’ll think — I don’t know what they’ll think.”

He just shook his head, took her hand and pulled her up. “Sorry, friend,” he said, nodding at Oscar, and then he was guiding Carolee back across the waiting room, out the double doors and into the scorching stink of the evening, charcoal and dogshit and the fumes of the cars, fish, dead fish, and if he brushed by the pair of policemen in their pleated blue uniforms with the Fuerza Pública patches on their sleeves and their faces of stone, he really didn’t give a good goddamn whether they’d come to pin a medal on him or haul him off to Golgotha. He was out in the street, that was where he was, striding through traffic, calling — no, yelling, bellowing—“Taxi! Taxi!”

AND THAT WAS ALL kinds of fun too, trying to communicate to the cabbie just where he wanted to go, and how did you say “boat”? Barco, wasn’t that it? He all but shoved Carolee into the backseat, then slammed in himself, twisting his neck toward the cabbie and in the process catching a glimpse of himself in the rearview. His eyes, furious still — burning, consumed — were sunk in a nest of concentric lines like pits on a topographic map, the eyes of a seventy-year-old retiree pushed to the limit. There were red blotches on his cheeks. His nose looked as if it had been skinned. And his hair, not yet gone the absolute dead marmoreal white of the rest of the duffers on the ship, but getting there, hung limp over his ears. But his eyebrows — his eyebrows were exclusively and undeniably white, and how had he never noticed that? White and pinched together with the glare of the sun that picked out the two vertical trenches at the bridge of his nose and ran them all the way up into the riot of horizontal gouges that desecrated his forehead. He was old. He looked old. Looked like somebody he didn’t even recognize. “ Barco, ” he announced to the driver. And then, to clarify, added the definite article: “ El barco .”

The driver was dressed in shorts and sandals and the ubiquitous flowered shirt open at the collar and he wore some sort of medallion dangling at his throat. He didn’t have an iPod, but he sported the same wispy goatee as the bus driver and the two thieves in the lot — in fact, and this came to him in a flash of ascending neural fireworks, the guy could have been the bus driver’s twin brother, and if that wasn’t an irritating thought he couldn’t imagine what was. All right. They were in the cab, that was all that mattered — but the cab wasn’t moving. The driver — the cabbie — was just staring at him.

“ El barco, ” he repeated. “I want to go to el barco .”

“The boat,” Carolee put in. “The cruise ship in the harbor. The Centennial ?”

“Oh, the boat, sure, no problem,” the cabbie said, grinning, then he put the car in gear and started up the street. A joker. Another joker. He’d probably learned his English at Cal State.

“Ask him how much,” Carolee said. No matter the exchange rate or the deals she finagled in the shops, she was sure they were getting ripped off, especially by cabbies. Before they’d left, she’d gone online to browse the travel sites and make detailed lists of dos and don’ts: photocopy your ID, leave your jewelry aboard ship, avoid fanny packs (“one-stop shopping” in the thieves’ jargon), dress down, talk softly so as not to broadcast your nationality, stay sober, carry a disposable camera ashore, and always get the price up front before you get into a cab.

“How much?” he said, or croaked, actually, deep from the well of his ruined voice.

“Oh, it’s not much,” the driver said, accelerating, “nothing really. Only a mile or so. I’ll give you a break, don’t worry.” And he mentioned a figure — in colones —that seemed excessive, even as Sten tried to do the math.

“ Demasiado, ” Carolee said automatically.

The driver, and he was a cowboy too, swinging into the next block with a screech of the tires, glanced over his shoulder and said, “Maybe you want to go back to the clinic? Maybe you want to wait for some other cab?” The car slowed, made a feint for the curb as if he were going to pull over and let them out.

“ Demasiado, ” Carolee repeated.

Raising his voice to be sure he was understood, not simply by the driver but by his wife too, Sten said, “Just drive.”

The first thing he did when he got back aboard and passed through the gauntlet of rhapsodically smiling greeters, puffers, porters, towel boys and all the rest of the lackeys who were paid to make you feel like Caesar returning from the Gallic wars every time you set foot on deck, was step into the shower. He should have deferred to Carolee, should have let her have first shot at it — and he would have under normal circumstances, but he was too wrought up even to think at that juncture. He’d thrown some money at the cabbie while she stood there on the pavement fooling with her hat and bag, then he took her by the arm and marched her up the gangplank and into the elevator and on down the hall to their cabin, impatient with everything, with her, with the lackeys, with the card key that didn’t seem to want to release the lock — and was this the right cabin? He drew back to glare at the number over the door: 7007. It was. And the card did work. Finally. After he’d tried it backwards, forwards and upside down and angrily swatted Carolee’s hand away when she’d tried to help — and why, amidst all this luxury and pampering, couldn’t they manage to code a fucking key so you could get into your own fucking cabin you were paying through the teeth for? That was what he was thinking, cursing under his breath, but then the light flashed green, the door pushed open and before Carolee could pull it shut he was already in the bathroom, stripping off his putrid shirt and sweaty shorts to thrust himself under the showerhead and twist both handles up full.