T. Boyle - After the Plague

He finished his drink in a gulp and looked over his shoulder for the waitress. “You want another one?” he asked, though he saw she hadn’t half finished her first.

Still chewing, she smiled up at him. “Sure.”

When the transaction was complete and the waitress had presented them with two fresh drinks, he thought to ask her name, but the silence had gone on too long, and when they both began to speak at the same time he deferred to her. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

“Biotech. I work for a company in the East Bay — Oakland, that is.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Really? Is that like making potatoes that walk around the kitchen and peel themselves? Cloning sheep? Two-headed dogs?”

Lester laughed. He was feeling good. Better than good. “Not exactly.”

“My name’s Gina,” she said, reaching out her hand, “but you might know me as the Puma. Gina (the Puma) Caramella.”

He took her hand, which was dry and small and nearly lost in his own. He was drunk, gloriously drunk, and so far he hadn’t been ripped off by the Federales or assailed by the screaming shits or leached dry by malarial mosquitoes and vampire bats or any of the other myriad horrors he’d been warned against, and that made him feel pretty near invulnerable. “What do you mean? You’re an actress?”

She gave a little laugh. “I wish.” Ducking her head, she chased the remnants of the fish around the plate with her fork and the plane of her left index finger. “No,” she said. “I’m a boxer.”

The alcohol percolated through him. He wanted to laugh, but he fought down the urge. “A boxer? You don’t mean like boxing, do you? Fisticuffs? Pugilism?”

“Twenty-three, two, and one,” she said. She took a sip of her drink. Her eyes were bright. “What I’m doing right now is agonizing over my defeat two weeks ago at the Shrine by one of the queen bitches in the game, DeeDee DeCarlo, and my manager thought it would be nice for me to just get away for a bit, you know what I mean?”

He was electrified. He’d never met a female boxer before — didn’t even know there was such a thing. Mud-wrestling he could see — in fact, since his wife had died, he’d become a big fan, Tuesday nights and sometimes on Fridays — but boxing? That wasn’t a woman’s sport. Drunkenly, he scrutinized her face, and it was a good face, a pretty face, but for the bridge of her nose, a telltale depression there, just the faintest misalignment — and sure, sure, how had he missed it? “But doesn’t it hurt? I mean, when you get punched in the … body punches, I mean?”

“In the tits?”

He just nodded.

“Sure it hurts, what do you think? But I wear a padded bra, wrap ’em up, pull ’em flat across the ribcage so my opponent won’t have a clear target, but really, it’s the abdominal blows that take it out of you,” and she was demonstrating with her hands now, the naked slope of her belly and the slit of her navel, abs of steel, but nothing like those freakish female bodybuilders they threw at you on ESPN, nice abs, nice navel, nice, nice, nice.

“You doing anything for dinner tonight?” he heard himself say.

She looked down at the denuded plate before her, nothing left but lettuce, don’t eat the lettuce, never eat the lettuce, not in Mexico. She shrugged. “I guess I could. I guess in a couple hours.”

He lifted the slab of his arm and consulted his watch with a frown of concentration. “Nine o’clock?”

She shrugged again. “Sure.”

“By the way,” he said. “I’m Lester.”

April had been dead two years now. She’d been struck and killed by a car a block from their apartment, and though the driver was a teenage kid frozen behind the wheel of his father’s Suburban, it wasn’t entirely his fault. For one thing, April had stepped out in front of him, twenty feet from the crosswalk, and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was blindfolded at the time. Blindfolded and feeling her way with one of those flexible fiberglass sticks the blind use to register the world at their feet. It was for a psychology course she was taking at San Francisco State—“Strategies of the Physically Challenged.” The professor had asked for two volunteers to remain blindfolded for an entire week, even at night, even in bed, no cheating, and April had been the first to raise her hand. She and Lester had been married for two years at the time — his first, her second — and now she was two years dead.

Lester had always been a drinker, but after April’s death he seemed to enjoy drinking less and need it more. He knew it, and he fought it. Still, when he got back to his room, sailing on the high of his chance meeting with Gina — Gina the Puma — he couldn’t help digging out the bottle of Herradura he’d bought in the duty-free and taking a good long cleansing hit.

There was no TV in the room, but the air conditioner worked just fine, and he stood in front of it a while before stripping off his sodden shirt and stepping into the shower. The water was tepid, but it did him good. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and repositioned himself in front of the air conditioner. When he saw the bottle standing there on the night table, he thought he’d have just one more hit — just one — because he didn’t want to be utterly wasted when he took Gina the Puma out for dinner. But then he looked at his watch and saw that it was only seven-twenty, and figured what the hell, two drinks, three, he just wanted to have a good time. Too wired to sleep, he flung himself down on the bed like a big wet dripping fish and began poking through the yellowed paperback copy of Under the Volcano he’d brought along because he couldn’t resist the symmetry of it. What else was he going to read in Mexico — Proust?

“No se puede vivir sin amar,” he read, “You can’t live without love,” and he saw April stepping out into the street with her puny fiberglass stick and the black velvet sleep mask pulled tight over her eyes. But he didn’t like that picture, not at all, so he took another drink and thought of Gina. He hadn’t had a date in six months, and he was ready. And who knew? Anything could happen. Especially on vacation. Especially down here. He tipped back the bottle, and then he flipped to the end of the book, where the Consul, cored and gutted and beyond all hope, tumbles dead down the ravine and they throw the bloated corpse of a dog down after him.

The first time Lester had read it, he’d thought it was funny, in a grim sort of way. But now he wasn’t so sure.

Gina was waiting for him at the bar when he came down at quarter to nine. The place was lit with paper lanterns strung from the thatched ceiling, there was the hint of a breeze off the ocean, the sound of the surf, a smell of citrus and jasmine. All the tables were full, people leaning into the candlelight over their fish and Margaritas and murmuring to each other in Spanish, French, German. It was good. It was perfect. But as Lester ascended the ten steps from the patio and crossed the room to the bar, his legs felt dead, as if they’d been shot out from under him and then magically re-attached, all in the space of an instant. Food. He needed food. Just a bite, that was all. For equilibrium.

“Hey,” he said, nudging Gina with his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said, flashing a smile. She was wearing shorts and heels and a blue halter top glistening with tiny blue beads.

He was amazed at how small she was — she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. April’s size. April’s size exactly.

He ordered a Herradura and tonic, his forearms laid out like bricks on the bar. “You weren’t kidding before,” he said, turning to her, “about boxing, I mean? Don’t take offense, but you’re so — well, small. I was just wondering, you know?”