J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

In an hour they were above Guyamón, circling what appeared to be a volcano. Smoke was issuing from it in long windless streaks. The air was hot as hell, even in here. Brant was pitting out big time. It was evening. They landed on a cracked strip of concrete, the pilot swearing all the way in. Brant shuddered in his seat and conked his head on the roof.

“Hey, man,” he asked the pilot as he got out. “That thing’s inactive, right?” Meaning the volcano.

The pilot laughed good and long.

There was a car here, a jeep actually, US Army issue as far as Brant could tell, repainted with what looked like yellow latex house-paint. The driver was a fat white man wearing a spotless white shirt and a gigantic straw hat.

“You gonna need a hat for that bald patch,” he said.

“I don’t have a bald patch,” said Brant. “Do I?”

The drive took half an hour. They traveled a mudded and pot-holed road to the base of the volcano, then turned right and edged around it. There were a lot of trees and ferns, except in the places where fresh lava had mowed them down. In places the lava covered the road and the jeep bumped jauntily over it. At last they arrived somewhere — a small stretch of paved cement before which stood a long row of cinder-block huts, about fifteen in all. They’d been built twenty or so years ago, and since then had been treated variously, some clearly abandoned and the windows and doors removed, some dolled up like vacation cottages. The jeep stopped in front of a middling one, its terra-cotta roof cracked and mossed, its walls in need of paint. The driver didn’t bother turning off the engine. He handed Brant the key. Brant took it, then waited for instructions.

“You’re supposed to get out,” the driver said.

“What then?”

“Then I leave.”

When the jeep was gone, Brant stood before the door, sweating. He put the key in the lock and turned it. The door creaked open.

The place had been ransacked. The mattress was slashed, stains that appeared to be red wine covered the walls. A dresser that stood at the foot of the bed seemed to have been urinated in. And in the middle of the floor sat a small pile of human feces, holding in place a handwritten note that read:

ENJOY THE TROPICS, WHORE!

A few days later, though, Brant was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. The cottage was equipped with a telephone, a computer, a fast internet connection, and satellite TV. He had spent most of his time so far watching baseball games, talking to friends in America, and enjoying pornography. He’d never liked pornography before, he hated to cave in to such base desires, but there didn’t seem to be any girls here, and nobody he knew was likely to burst in on him, and so, from the computer’s tiny speakers could be heard, at all hours of the day, the quiet moans of nude actresses as they masturbated before the masturbating him. Three times daily a little truck came clanking by, and the denizens of the cottage row — six in all — would amble out of their dens and eat the food their respective companies had paid for. There were burgers and french fries and imported beers. There were omelettes and apples — apples! in the Bahamas! — and Dove bars and club sandwiches. The six men were always in, because they all had to answer the phone if it rang, although the phones never rang. After the truck left, they would stand around and talk, clutching their brown paper bags of loot. They didn’t introduce themselves to Brant, but included him in their conversation as if he’d been there for a hundred years.

“See the Yanks?”

“Nah. Drooling over Nudie Village.”

“Ya see the chick with the giant thatch?”

“Hell yeah!”

“What’d’ya get today?”

“Ham.”

“Everybody got ham.”

“I got yesterday’s Molson if anybody wants it. I hate Molson.”

“Hell yeah I want it.”

“What’ll you give me then?”

It took Brant a couple of days to find the courage to jump in, but once he did he was one of the guys. He caught a few names — Ron, Kevin, Pete. Pete was a cheerful man of thirty, thick around the middle, with dark eye bags that seemed genetic, rather than circumstantial. He held down the fort for an agribusiness conglomerate. One afternoon Brant was left alone with him after the others had gone home. He said, “So, does anybody go to the beach? Like, on breaks?” For he was allowed breaks, one hour out of every eight, and he had Sundays off. Sunday was tomorrow, his first here.

“There’s a path out back. But it isn’t much of a beach. Like ten feet, the rest is rocks.”

“Is there a bar or something? In town?”

“No town. But there is a bar.”

“Wanna go sometime?”

The question seemed to send shooting pains into Pete’s head. He winced. “Ah, it’s kinda far, and there are no girls.”

“Oh.”

So on Sunday Brant went to the beach, and Pete was right, it sucked. The rocks were sharp, and everything stank of fish. He went home, dejected. It had only been four days, and he could feel himself, his personality, shrinking to more or less nothing. He was Friendly Brant! He needed to greet passersby, to shake their hands! He wished there were some leaves to rake, some weatherproofing to do. But there wasn’t any weather here. A little rain, a little sun. A little rain, a little sun. By noon he had already jerked off twice and played forty games of Donkey Kong. He decided to go visiting. He washed his hands and walked down to Kevin’s place. Kevin had seemed okay to Brant, he told a joke once after Breakfast Truck, he had a nineties beard.

He knocked. “Yo, Kev!” he said.

From behind the door came sort of a muffled mumble that Brant thought was an invitation to enter, but when he opened the door Kevin was busy covering his and another man’s (Brant hadn’t gotten his name) naked sweating bodies with a sheet.

“Buzz off, asshole!”

“Sorry, dude!”

So much for dropping by. He had begun to prepare himself mentally for another encounter with his girl of the hour, Mandy Mounds, when he heard an unfamiliar noise coming from inside his cottage. What the hell was it? He opened the door and found that the noise, a kind of urgent, grating buzz, was the sound the phone made when it rang. The phone! It was ringing! Brant cracked his knuckles. Showtime!

“Hello?”

“I got a surprise for you!” The voice, though drunk, was recognizable as Cynthia’s. It was coming to him through a haze of crackling interference.

“Hon bun!”

“I am having something delivered to your door,” she said. Something about her tone seemed almost sinister, like the duplicitous sexpots in James Bond movies. He had to admit he liked it.

He said, “Where are you? You sound so far away.” Duh!

“I’m on my cell. In a — whoop! — car.”

“Isn’t it illegal to talk on the phone while driving?”

“It’s illegal to drive drunk, too, dummy. But I’m not driving.”

“So what are you sending me?”

“Sposeta be a surprise.”

“Is it delicious?”

“Yyyyes!”

“So you eat it?”

She snorted. “No, dipshit. You do.” And with that she hung up.

Well. That was unproductive. He figured if she was sending the present now, he’d get it in what, two weeks? He opened up his browser and a couple minutes later Mandy Mounds filled the room with her delighted squeaking. He’d just got his shorts off when his door flew open and Cynthia came roaring in, hiking her sundress up to her waist. “You got yourself all ready!” she said, climbing on, and for ten or so minutes it was difficult to distinguish the sounds she made from the ones coming out of the speakers. Then they were finished and lay on the bed, unable to stop perspiring. At the computer desk, Mandy Mounds said, “More! More! More! More!”