Guillermo Rosales - Leapfrog and Other Stories

For the first time in a long time, Alipio thought again about his son. He would have been forty-eight years old, and with the gift he’d had for numbers, he would perhaps now be an excellent economist or a brilliant accountant. That was what he was studying at the University when they killed him. Accounting.

“Do you want to sit down?” Alipio asked. “There’s another barber, but he gets here at ten.”

“I just came for a shave.” The man said in a raspy voice that matched his looks.

“Then sit down. I’ll be with you right away.”

The man sat down in Alipio’s chair and closed his eyes as if he were about to sleep.

“Do you want a very close shave?”

“Yes.”

Alipio took his razor and began to sweep it along his leather apron. He had spent many years looking for this man who he now had in his hands. He had gone to Jacksonville because they told him he lived there. Later, they told him he was in New Jersey, but there, they told him he had gone to Kansas to be a nightclub security guard. He ran around Kansas with a gun and a long sharp Sevillana knife. He visited every bar, pool hall, and seedy den, asking about that damned Ovidio Samá who in 1957 had killed his son during a university protest. Later, he stopped looking for him, since the latest reports said he was drug trafficking in Venezuela.

But now, fate placed Samá in his hands. A son. His only child. What he had most loved in his life. And this abominable man had emptied a machine gun into his son’s body, leaving him almost unrecognizable.

“Do you want me to clear out your blackheads?”

“Don’t worry about that. I just want a shave.”

“Has it been a long time since you came over?”

“Almost thirty years,” he replied. “I was one of the first ones to leave. How about you?”

“I came later.” Alipio said. “I believed in it at the beginning, but later became disillusioned.”

“That happened to a lot of people.”

They didn’t talk anymore. Alipio applied the shaving cream, brushed it on, and with his razor in hand began to outline the right side burn. This would be the right time. A little bit of pressure in his arm and that head would fall lifeless over the white sheet. But, then what? No one would believe it was an accident. No one would understand that revenge that had lasted for thirty years. Alipio swept the razor clean across the man’s right cheek, then he noticed a cyst on his chin and it took all his self-control to avoid it.

The man remained silent, with his eyes closed, as if intensely enjoying the coolness of the cream and the pleasant cutting of the razor. From now on, any moment was right for Alipio. Thirty years. Thirty years. He moved to the other cheek and shaved him in three precise motions.

“Your mustache, do you want it like that or shorter?”

“It’s fine like that,” the man said. “I’ve always worn my mustache like Clark Gable.”

Nonetheless, Alipio took the scissors and cut some hairs from the mustache and the nose, in addition to trimming the customers’ bushy eyebrows. He couldn’t. Now he realized that he couldn’t. No one would understand his story. He would spend the rest of his life in jail and, worse still, he would see the blood run, albeit the blood of a thug, but blood that would be weighed just the same when the time came in Heaven for a final account of his life.

Alipio finished. He dried the man’s face with a clean towel and removed the sheet from his chest. Then he held out a mirror and the man looked at himself for a few seconds.

“Satisfied?”

“More or less,” the thug said.

“That’s three dollars.”

The man took out a wallet and removed a five dollar bill.

“Keep the change,” he said.

“Thank you,” Alipio mumbled, a shadow falling over his face.

The man went over to the barbershop’s big mirror and adjusted his shirt collar and tie. Then he said: “I came here because they told me you wanted to find me and kill me. But now you realize it’s not so easy to kill.”

If you ever pass through Citrus Park, I recommend that you not enter Miss Roberta Donovan’s bar. Keep going, at full speed, and try not to listen to the siren’s song of the women tattooed on that enormous madam. I had the bad luck of stopping in Citrus because my car broke down there. The radiator, the spark plugs, who knows what went wrong with my old ’69 Mazda. Today it’s gone forever in the sands of that ghost town.

Because, gentlemen, Citrus Park is a ghostly town. There are no garages, no markets, no pharmacies, no cafés: nothing. One glance is enough to understand that it’s completely uninhabited, perhaps due to those hurricanes in the early part of the century that beat the Florida coast with unusual fury. The houses are in ruins, the streets are made of white sand, and millions of giant red ants crawl over everything in search of scarce shrubs found around the periphery. They’re enormous ants, perhaps the world’s largest, and they attack humans, leaving enormous terribly itchy welts.

But that’s where I ended up. Woodland, the closest town, is eighteen miles away, and I was too tired to make the journey by foot. So I decided to spend the night there, in Citrus Park, and to leave for Woodland first thing in the morning. The heat made me take off my shirt, and curiosity led me to wander the streets of that sad town, in search of a human face. I called out among the uninhabited houses, and then I pissed in the middle of the street, but no one showed up to reprimand me. All I saw was a red lightbulb go on. A solitary red lightbulb in the door of a crumbling bar, whose window announced Coors beer.

I wish I had never entered. I’ve gone through some difficult moments in my life, but none like that adventure in Donovan’s bar. I pushed the door open and went inside. There, the sand from the hurricanes covered the counter and the tables, and the giant ants sought out ivy and purslane to satiate their hunger. There also was the very fat Roberta Donovan, bending over the counter near the cash register that didn’t seem to have worked since the 1930s.

Behind the counter was a round stage with a microphone in the center, and on a corner of the curtain hung a sign that read: “Sex at Six.” I asked for a Budweiser.

“Hot or cold?” the fat woman asked me in a languorous voice.

“Cold, of course.”

“It’s a matter of taste. Some people prefer it hot because it has a different effect.”

“Give it to me cold.”

The fat woman opened the fridge and rummaged around amid bottles and cans, and after much searching placed a beer right in front of me.

“Are you thinking of staying around here long?” she asked.

“Until tomorrow. First thing, I’m on my way to Miami.”

“Then you’ll have time to see the show.”

“What kind of show?”

“Ladies. The most exciting and most shapely ladies of any bar in the country.”

“Where are they?” I wanted to know.

“Here, with me. You’ll see them soon.”

We didn’t talk anymore. I drank a Miller, a Coors, and another Budweiser. It was a quarter to six when fat Donovan served me a last beer. Then she disappeared behind the red curtains.

Citrus Park. How is it possible for someone to live in such a place? That fat woman Donovan had to be either crazy or completely antisocial. How did she feed herself? What food did she eat to maintain that 300-pound body?

I pondered this mystery, until she reappeared before me dressed in a sequin-covered pink cape.

“You want to know what I eat, right?” she said, leaning over the counter again: “well, this.”