Theodore Wheeler: Bad Faith

Later in the night, Emily would apologize for making fun of Aaron wanting to take that picture of her. All the other people in the bar laughed long and hard at how she’d put him down. She was sorry for that, even though Aaron kept smiling the whole time. He never let on what he was thinking. The way anger seethed inside his heart. How all he could want then was to make her regret laughing at him.

They were driving the brick roads around town when she apologized. They circled the town square and the courthouse, its moss-covered spires. There was the slumping old lumberyard, the ghostly Co-Op silo gray in the darkness. She suggested they stop. “I live around here. You can take that picture if you want.”

She had a small white house close to the school. Aaron parked in the driveway and they went inside.

Harry was still in the mudroom, his eyes closed.

It was almost morning. Mist gathered on the windshield as Aaron pulled off the road. He left the car door open when he stopped. It dinged to tell him this, the dome light spreading over the yard.

Aaron stood outside the storm door to watch his dad sleep, the lit-up car behind him. The flap of his messenger bag was open, resting on the small of his back.

Harry’s favorite memory was watching Aaron sleep when he was a baby. Aaron thought of this, a story Harry told all the time when Aaron was growing up. “It made me realize my luck,” Harry would say. “You breathing in fits. My hand on your chest just to make sure. You really did look like me. The ears. The cowlick. Your eyes.”

Harry’s eyes twitched open at the noise when it happened. Then his jaw dropped, the blanket fell from his knees. One of his eyes wouldn’t close and stared past Aaron.

The storm door latched, Aaron’s hand on the handle as he looked back at his dad in the mudroom one last time. He told himself that he should leave, and again, that he needed to go. There was a cold whispering mist, so fine in its composition, that unless you were standing in it with him, you wouldn’t even know it was there.

He noticed how she watched him circle the plaza fountain. Her head tilted skyward, as if she wanted him to think she didn’t notice. He was aware of her glances. She sipped cola when she looked. She peeked beyond the curve of a plastic bottle.

He circled twice, hesitating when he was on her side of the fountain to bring the stub of a cigarette to his lips, his head raised over chattering students on their way to class. Smoke drifted from his mouth as he peered dumb at the names stamped on distant buildings. He shook his head then circled the fountain again, patted the pockets of his jean jacket like he’d lost something. A green messenger bag hung off his shoulder.

She watched breathlessly the third time he circled toward her, when he was holding it out in front of himself. She leaned forward on her bench to look, forgetting to be inconspicuous because he’d been swallowed in a crowd. He stepped clumsily in front of bicycles and edged between groups of women in conversation. Then he bent to look at it. It was a ring. He lifted it in the sunlight when he knew she was watching, a wedding band that would look familiar to anyone, in the thickness of the metal, in the way the silver glinted in the light.

He made his way to her and grinned pathetically, searching the faces of others before picking her out — her, of course. She looked stunned when he smiled at her. The ring was between his fingers but he slid it into his jeans before speaking. Her eyes followed somewhat desperately as the band disappeared into his fob pocket.

“Excuse me,” he said. He pulled a digital camera from his messenger bag. “Do you mind if I take your picture?”

This is how it started with Jessica Harding.

He told her to call him Aaron.

Worthy told Steve to come visit San Sal for a few days. Why San Sal? Because I live in San Sal, Worthy told him.

Worthy told Steve what airline to fly. United. And where to connect. Houston. Worthy told him to forget his Delta miles, forget Atlanta. Take United. Go through Houston.

Worthy told Steve wild stories about El Salvador. Bus rides up chuckholed alleys into ghettos where even police were afraid to go because gangs controlled that territory; that San Salvador was the murder capital of the world, no matter what claims were made by Kabul or Baghdad or Tegucigalpa. Worthy talked about getting drunk on something called coco loco. And girls dancing in clubs where the Salvadoran Geddy Lee played bass with one hand and keys with the other. And girls dancing in clubs who were on the hunt for American men, for the green card, but were often left behind in San Salvador if pregnant, and there was little recourse for a woman of that kind. Over the phone Worthy told him about girls dancing in a nudie bar called Lips that had a taco bar next door that was also called Lips. Worthy was persuasive. Even the plastic bags filled with soft, slimy cheese called queso fresco that Worthy bought on the street, even that sounded attractive when Worthy talked about it. Even when the Mrs. grabbed the phone and told Worthy that if anything bad happened to Steve she’d know who to hold responsible.

Do you understand? the Mrs. told Worthy. If he doesn’t come back, I will come down there and fuck you up.

The Mrs. told Steve about all the reasons why it was stupid to go. He had a family to think about. I’m six months pregnant, the Mrs. told him.

You’ll do what you want anyway, the Mrs. told him, but at least try and be smart about it. What’s it prove going there for a long weekend? Isn’t there enough to worry about here?

You don’t belong in El Salvador, the Mrs. told him.

That’s why Steve had to go.

Worthy told him to look for a Subaru Outback at the airport after he cleared customs. He was supposed to tell customs that he was staying at the apartment complex where Worthy lived with other doctors, where foreign diplomats lived. But the customs agent at the airport had never heard of Dr. Worthy. The customs agent wanted to be told an address. The name of a hotel. Steve had nothing to tell the customs agent. Worthy hadn’t passed on this information. All Steve could do was hand over his passport and shrug. He didn’t speak Spanish and was in the wrong line because the gringo line was backed up with missionaries from Evansville and Dallas — Fort Worth. The customs agent’s supervisor came over. She wore a yellow blazer that was big on her.

My friend Worthy is coming to pick me up, Steve told the supervisor. I’m going to stay at his apartment. In San Sal.

The customs agent and the supervisor discussed between themselves and agreed it was fine for Steve to enter. This is you, they told him, pointing to his passport, to the photo he’d taken nine years before, when his skin was smoother, his hair thicker, his chin more distinctly there. He had ten dollars American to buy a visa. That was good enough.

That’s how it goes, Worthy told him once he was outside the airport and buckled up in Worthy’s Subaru Outback and the air conditioning was blowing.

Sometimes they don’t ask where you’re going, Worthy told him. They just want the ten.

Once they got to the apartment, Worthy told Steve they’d go to the mountains the next day.

In the morning they drove out into the country.

They burn their garbage, Worthy said to explain the smell, thumbing out the window at smoggy fires shack-dwelling locals tended near the road.

It did smell bad. Steve thought it smelled like the trash can he put dirty diapers in at home. Like the shit of an eight-month-old.

Worthy drove to the mountains. They went to Ataco because there was a shrine there on top of a mountain, a mountain you could hike up, up a shady path where men wielding machetes moved in the leaves, where men worked a coffee plantation with machetes and canteens filled with yerba maté. In the cobblestone alleys of Ataco a nightclub called Portland served Cuban club sandwiches and Suprema beer for lunch. Steve had visited Worthy a few times in Portland, the one in Oregon, where Worthy did a surgical residency years before. They’d gone to Tube and to Shanghai Tunnel, where fresh citrus was squeezed for whiskey cocktails. Maybe there was more to the real Portland than Cuban sandwiches and Salvadoran beer and “Gangnam Style” on the PA, like was played twice during lunch in the nightclub Portland, but Steve didn’t care.