Daniel Galera - Blood-drenched Beard

You’ve got a car?

Yep. Let’s go. Get Altair.

They discover that Altair has passed out holding the video game controller. He is half-sitting, half-lying between the wall and the brown-tiled floor with the game stuck on a screen saying Continue? They try to rouse him without success. They pour a glass of water over his head, and Bonobo slaps him about the face a few times. Altair doesn’t show any sign of waking up. They decide to leave him in the apartment, lying on his side on the rug in the bedroom, with the spare key placed conspicuously on the table in the living room. He changes his T-shirt and locks the windows while Bonobo tries to contact people on his cell phone. Some girls I know said they were going, he says. The girls aren’t answering the phone, but another acquaintance picks up and says that people are arriving. The party is starting to heat up. He lets Beta out and locks the door from the outside. They head quickly down the footpath and over the sand. This time the gulls standing around skitter toward the water, and some take flight. Bonobo glances over his shoulder.

Did you see that your dog got out? She’s following us.

No fucking way am I leaving her locked in there with Altair.

It is already past midnight, and the streets are deserted. They walk along the central reservation down the middle of the avenue to what is left of Altair’s kiosk. Bonobo crosses the property, kicking empty beer cans aside and hopping about.

What are you doing, you retard? Where’s your car?

Bonobo goes over to the old VW Beetle carcass and starts jiggling the door handle.

No way.

What?

Is that your car?

Yep. Meet Lockjaw.

That thing there? I thought it was scrap metal.

She’s a mean machine. Just be careful getting in.

Bonobo manages to open the door on the driver’s side and climbs in. He walks around to the other side and tries to open the door on the passenger’s side in the narrow space between the car and the wall. The corroded door handle needs to be pressed in a very specific way for the mechanism to work. The car is covered in fractal rust patterns and peeling beige paint. It has a large roof rack capable of holding a small boat. There are holes and jagged edges everywhere. The tires are crooked, bald, and half flat. He climbs in carefully, trying not to cut himself. All that is left of the passenger seat is a frame of iron rods covered with old cushions and a piece of folded cardboard. The back support of soft foam is relatively intact. On the dashboard is a gilded sitting Buddha with a smile at the corner of its mouth and enormous earlobes dangling over its shoulders. He whistles to Beta. She comes around the car and jumps onto his lap. He strokes her, praises her for being a good girl, and settles her on the backseat, which is covered with a Grêmio Football Club sarong. He sees the car battery sitting behind the driver’s seat amid a baroque tangle of electrical wires. Bonobo turns the key in the ignition. The engine laughs.

It takes a while to start, but once it does, it doesn’t die, says Bonobo.

On the fourth try, the engine starts. Bonobo steps on the accelerator and revs it scandalously until he hears a couple of explosions in the exhaust pipe.

Can you get me my eye patch from the glove box?

Your what ?

My eye patch.

He opens the glove box and fishes an eye patch made of cloth and black elastic out of a jumble of used tissues, business cards, bars of wax, condoms, a filthy rag, and a pair of broken sunglasses. Bonobo takes the eye patch and adjusts it over his right eye.

It’s to stop me seeing double.

Only then does he put the car in first gear. It moves forward. The grass and debris from the kiosk scrape its undercarriage. He feels as if he is riding inside the engine itself. They take the state highway out of Garopaba. A car passes them going in the opposite direction, and the lit-up tarmac looms beneath his feet through a hole in the floor. Bonobo zigzags a little, but considering his degree of intoxication and the state of the vehicle, his driving is actually quite comforting, focused, at a moderate speed, his sight limited by the absurd eye patch. He is hunched so far over the small steering wheel that his simian nose almost touches the windshield. Figures such as cows or cyclists come to life in a flash and go back to being specters in almost the same instant. They turn left onto the road to Rosa Beach. The Beetle needs to halt almost completely before he can drive it over speed bumps. The stone-paved streets give way to steep dirt roads. The car’s clutch doesn’t disengage automatically. To deal with the problem, Bonobo has tied a length of blue clothesline between the pedal and the door handle. The operation to take his left hand off the steering wheel and tug on the clothesline at the exact moment after each gear change is complicated and requires a certain amount of skill and timing. In more complex maneuvers, Bonobo looks like a puppeteer manipulating a prop car.

The party is on the deck of the sushi bar, and there is hardly anyone there. A hip-hop duo is rapping in the corner of a veranda that has been made into a dance floor. The music is really bad, and there are eight men and two women dancing and talking on the veranda. He takes a look out back and finds a meticulously designed Japanese garden with rock arrangements, a fountain, a lake inhabited by a small gang of carp, and a stream. Three girls are drinking in silence at a table in the garden. That’s the extent of the party. He orders a beer and is given a warm can. He is hungry, but there is no sign of food. Bonobo orders a mojito and goes to talk to someone on the dance floor.

He goes back to the Beetle parked near the entrance and lets Beta out. He returns with her to the restaurant and sits in an armchair on the front veranda. Dirty glasses and empty cans left on the tables indicate that a lot of people have already been there and gone. Beta sits next to the armchair, and he stares into the surrounding vegetation to forget the monotonous vocals of the rappers, who don’t seem to have the energy to keep up with their rhymes. His cell phone rings. It is Laila, a former student from Porto Alegre who is now his friend. He doesn’t find out why she is calling so late because the roaming charges gobble up his credit in seconds.

In his mind he starts putting together the training session he is going to give his students in the pool tomorrow. Meanwhile two men walk onto the veranda talking in low voices, with furtive gestures, their heads hunched down between their shoulders, and it is a while before they notice he is there. They stop talking when they realize they have company. One of them has peroxide-blond hair, and he is almost certain it is the guy who was with Dália at the Pico do Surf the night they met. Peroxide-blond hair is common around here, but the guy gives him a long stare. He begins to feel threatened.

Do we know each other?

The blond guy just stares at him and doesn’t answer. He is younger than him, twenty-something, and has obviously been snorting all night. He looks for some other feature to help identify him in the future. He has a shark tattoo covering one whole side of his left calf. The two friends abort whatever they have gone there to do and go back into the restaurant.

He waits a few minutes and goes to look for Bonobo. There is no sign of him. There is no sign of almost anyone. The three girls in the garden have disappeared. The rappers have stopped singing and are talking to the few survivors gathered around the deejay. He leaves the restaurant and sees Lockjaw still parked in the same spot. He puts Beta in the car, closes the door, and goes to the bathroom. When he walks out, he bumps into Bonobo in the corridor. He is accompanied by two girls.