Jon Bilbao - Still the Same Man

His wife had gotten everything in order. The family’s luggage had been wrapped in the plastic bags provided by the hotel and placed on the highest shelves in the closet. She’d left his clothes for the following day on the bed. Despite his exhaustion, Joanes couldn’t help smiling at the little row of things neatly laid out — a change of underwear, a rain jacket, his passport, a road map, a small first-aid kit, a note giving the address and telephone number of the evacuation hotel, and a backpack to keep it all in.

He dropped the golf clubs in a corner of the room and took a long shower. Afterward, he took one of the suitcases from the closet, removed the sticky tape on its bag, and pulled out some clean clothes.

He ate dinner in the hotel restaurant. A sour-faced waiter in plain clothes served him. Save for Joanes, the place was empty, and with the best part of the furniture stowed away, it was pretty depressing.

He was back in his room, working on his laptop, when the landline rang.

“How are you?” his wife asked.

Joanes threw himself onto the bed to talk. The TV was muted and tuned to a news channel.

“I’m fine. What about you guys?”

“Fine,” she answered wearily.

“Sure?”

“I’m fine now that I’ve finally gotten a moment to myself. The others are eating downstairs. They’ve given us a spot on the fourth canteen shift.”

“You’re not eating?”

“I’d rather talk to you. Tell me what happened.”

He told her about hitting the chimpanzee.

“What was a chimpanzee doing on the highway?”

“I don’t know.”

He told her how he’d looked for the dying animal in the undergrowth, and how he’s stayed with it until it died, and how afterward he’d felt the need to bury it. He didn’t tell her he’d cried.

“That’s why you didn’t get back in time?”

“That’s why, yeah.”

“Nothing else has happened?”

“No, nothing.”

He didn’t see the point, for now, in telling her about the problems with the contract.

She sighed.

“You think I was wrong.”

“What?”

“Spending all that time burying it. Burying her, I should say. She was a female.”

“I don’t know. I suppose it was the right thing to do. But I hope you’ll come soon.”

“Of course I will. You guys are OK, right? You’re with your dad.”

“Yes. And my stepmom. I’m going to share a room with my stepmom. You’ve got to see the nightie she’s brought. I’ve seen windows less transparent.”

Joanes laughed.

“The later it gets, the more I want to get there.”

After a pause she said, “All of this is so weird. The hurricane, the monkey on the highway. .”

He agreed with her.

“What’s the place like?”

She gave a snort. Both the evacuation hotel and the town itself were in absolute chaos. More and more relocated tourists kept showing up, and Mexican people, too. There wasn’t a single bed left in all of Valladolid. In complete contrast to what they’d seen in Cancún, the hotels hadn’t prepared at all for the hurricane. They all trusted that where they were, it wouldn’t do any more harm than a regular storm. The hoteliers were making the most of the situation. Those without a reservation were willing to pay any amount for a room; the hoteliers pocketed the money and put them in the spaces reserved for evacuees. As a result, the tourists coming from the coast wound up sleeping on mats in the common areas.

Joanes heard his wife yawn.

“You should go and eat something and rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“In the morning,” she repeated. “Please be careful.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I love you.”

“Me too.”

“Sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

The silence in the room was unbearable after they hung up. Joanes looked for the remote control and turned up the volume on the TV.

A minute later he muted it again.

He went on working for a few hours. Afterward, he jotted down the changes he’d have to make to his offer in a little notebook. Before going to bed, he put the notebook in the backpack he’d take with him the following day.

He was up and about before sunrise. He put the suitcase he’d opened back up in the closet and sealed the doors with tape. He made sure he had everything his wife had left out for him, as well as water and food for the journey.

The moment he stepped out of the room, a maid and two maintenance men hurtled in. It seemed as if they’d spent the night in the hallway, waiting for him to open the door. They began stripping the bed, removing electrical appliances, and transferring as much furniture as they could from the bedroom to the bathroom.

“Wait a minute, sir.”

The maid had come after him, carrying the golf clubs.

“What about these?”

Joanes shrugged.

“Do whatever you want with them.”

The hotel seemed totally different. Everything had been organized for the hurricane’s arrival. The furniture, lamps, and decorative pieces from the hallways and common areas had been removed. The insides of the windows and glass doors were taped from corner to corner with big crosses. In the courtyard, the trees had had their coconuts cut off and their branches strapped down with metal bands so that the wind wouldn’t rip them off.

Joanes handed in his laptop at reception and took a receipt in exchange.

“Good luck,” said the receptionist, by way of goodbye.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Nothing in the air suggested that the day would be any less sunny and calm than the previous ones. And yet that impression stood in stark relief to the Cancún hotel strip, which looked like a ghost town. Most of the hotels had already relocated their guests.

After merging onto the highway for Valladolid, he realized that the local population had also prepared for the hurricane. The repair shops, car dealers, and spare part depots that flanked the highway outside of Cancún for several miles had their doors and windows boarded up and their signs taken down.

He soon found himself in an increasingly dense flow of vehicles, which, like him, were heading further into the peninsular for shelter. His car joined a motley caravan of passenger cars, buses, motorcycles, and construction and farming vehicles. He spotted pickups carrying various generations of the same family, most of whom were crammed into the back, shielded by awnings made of tube frames covered in plastic sheets or palm leaves. He saw a digger moving along with its bucket raised high and three kids sitting inside it surrounded by backpacks and bundles of clothes. He also saw busses evacuating tourists. He exchanged resigned looks with the passengers inside them.

The traffic slowed to a desperate crawl, not helped by various fender benders or by the two military checkpoints where soldiers with machine guns were halting vehicles and even ordering a few onto the shoulder. Once there, the passengers were forced to get out while a pair of Rottweilers sniffed the vehicle and rummaged around in the mountains of bags and suitcases that made up their luggage.

Try as he might not to, Joanes glanced every few minutes at the clock.

“Are you going to keep us here all day?” he asked aloud to himself after almost an hour spent blocked at the second checkpoint.

The previous afternoon, he’d gone to a store to buy food for the journey. Panic buying had laid the place to waste. In the canned food aisle, he’d found just a few dented cans. He’d grabbed a couple of the most presentable among them and a loaf of sliced bread. The bottles of water were rationed to two per customer.

He started in on his scant provisions out of sheer boredom.

The sky was still clear.

The highway here cut through thicker and taller vegetation than he’d seen on the coast. He found he was able to put his foot down a little along those stretches of road with more lanes, but even so, the average speed along the way was painfully slow.