Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“I’ll never forget the horror within that car, Mr. Rose. After the death of my mother, that was the saddest and most desperate moment of my life, Empera crying while driving and me crying while huddled under those blankets, waiting for the car to stop where I would get out on who knows what corner of what town or what stretch of road, again no better than a stray dog, cast off by fate and unprotected. In the days that followed, I did nothing but mourn, terribly missing both your son and the dogs, especially the baby, Skunko, what a loving little dog. You should have seen how we hit it off because he reminded me a lot of Hero. Sometimes I even forgot that he wasn’t Hero and was surprised to see him run off without his cart. I called Skunko Hero and he kind of got used to that name, because he came running when I called him.

“I even missed you, Mr. Rose; although you may not believe it, I had grown fond of you even though you had never even met me. I watched you out the window when you went down to the garden to play with the dogs, or take them out for a walk, and it inspired me tenderly. I saw this and I thought, a man who cares for his dogs so much has to be a good man. How I wished I had a father like that. Now once again, Mr. Rose, the time of parting again, so goes life, one good-bye then another. What can we do?”

“For now, there will be no good-byes, María Paz. You can’t go,” Rose told her, the ring of command in his voice. “Don’t go before you take out the clamp. Then you have to help me find Cleve’s murderer. Tell me who killed Cleve.”

“Nobody killed him, sir.” Surprised at the undesirable twist that the conversation had begun to take, María Paz took a few steps backward, away from Rose. “Cleve was killed in an accident, sir. His bike killed him… Good-bye, Mr. Rose. Maybe someday we’ll see each other again.”

“You need some money?” Rose asked as a last attempt to keep her from leaving. “I can give you money, if you need…”

“No, Mr. Rose, thank you very much, I don’t need anything,” she started to say, moving farther away, but still facing him and holding his gaze.

Just at that moment, the air seemed to crackle in the mall and people moved to one side, sensing an approaching commotion ahead.

At first, it was just a rough perception without details: it filled the place with the acrid smell of stampede and violence in the making, still undefined. Seconds later, María Paz saw several policemen rushing toward her in a flash, pushing their way through. Were they coming for her? It unleashed a mad drumming in her chest. Yes, they were coming after her and this time she was trapped. How many times in recent months had she experienced the same feeling of having reached the end of the road? After so much forced immobility while locked up in Manninpox, she had not stopped running ever since she was released. Now the police were on top of her. Fear paralyzed her, and for a moment, the image of Violeta crossed her mind. She would not get to see her sister, Violeta. Things had to go to shit with only a few days to go. But were they really coming for her? María Paz was not going to wait around to find out. She overcame the momentary panic and set her mind to not surrender. Her survival mechanisms kicked into gear and within seconds her body became a type of getaway vehicle, strengthening its cardiac capacity, increasing blood pressure, intensifying metabolism, accelerating her mental activity, and increasing the blood glucose, which flows into the large muscles, particularly the legs, fueled and ready to run. María Paz was about to do it when something stopped her, a hand that grabbed her forcefully by the arm, like a vice that immobilized her.

“Do not run. That’s the last thing you should do,” she heard Rose telling her, his body pressed against hers. In that fashion, holding her, protecting her, Rose led her to a spot in the front row among the crowd that gathered to witness the police action as if it were live television, a little Sunday show for a mob thirsty for some excitement, everyone looking around trying to figure out who the cops were after — a shoplifter? a child molester? a credit card thief? — who would soon be smacked with a club across the head, or shot in the leg to be brought down, then handcuffed and humiliated before the eyes of all, with cell phones and security cameras catching every second of the shame. In the first row, as if part of an audience, Rose and María Paz stood with the rest of the spectators ready to enjoy the show. It hadn’t been since Greg, or Cleve, that she had felt protected in the arms of a white man, arms that lifted her from the risk zone and put her on the safe side of society.

“Take off that hat,” Rose whispered, without loosening his grip on her, “it’s too showy.”

As soon as she obeyed, he regretted having asked: from under the cap sprung her untamed mane of hair, even more eye-catching than the motley cap.

“You’ll have to cut it,” Rose whispered in her ear. “Or dye it.”

“Never,” she said. “Over my dead body.”

The policemen ran past and soon were out of sight. With the show disrupted, the crowd dispersed. After realizing that the cops had not been after her, María Paz suffered from a crash of adrenaline that left her limp and docile as a rag doll, and Rose took advantage of this to guide her toward the parking lot.

“From now on you’ll be better off with me,” he told her once they were in his Ford Fiesta.

“I was scared shitless when I saw the cops running toward us,” Rose admits to me. “But I found the courage somewhere to take María Paz into my arms to protect her, knowing that in the eyes of the law this gesture could send me to die. Not that she was very grateful later, hardly said anything about it, but things changed after that. From that moment on, she accepted me as an ally. I just had to show her what I was willing to do for her.”

As they fled Garden City, María Paz said she was starving and they stopped in a nondescript, out-of-the-way restaurant in Deer Park, one of those “all you can eat” places, where Rose only had a coffee, because he had eaten lunch shortly before, and she had a plate of fried eggs with bacon, a green salad, and potatoes with melted cheese, plus a slice of obscenely rich chocolate cake, with two Diet Cokes.

“Jesus Christ, girl, you were famished,” Rose told her as they cleared the table.

“You have to take advantage when it’s offered; you never know when the next big meal will come.”

“Are you full?”

“About to burst.”

“So let’s talk seriously. You have to understand. They left a clamp inside you, that’s the cause of the bleeding.”

“Don’t worry about the bleeding; it’s gone down a lot. Maybe because there is no more blood inside. I’ll put the clamp thing on hold until Seville.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Rose pulled out a pen and drew on the paper tablecloth — a drawing similar to the one Dummy had sketched on the table in the conference hall, back in Manninpox. “There you go. This is your uterus, and this is the clamp. Look at it. It’s metallic, and it can be very dangerous.”

“But it’s soooo tiny,” María Paz said. “A little shit clamp. The truth is, Mr. Rose, of all the problems that I have, those little tweezers seem like the least of them.”

“But it’s not, and we’ll remove it. Don’t worry about anything, I’ve got it all planned out. You’ll need a week to recover. Your cyber-coyote can wait; call his Blackberry from the pay phone here and tell him things need to be postponed. Did you pay him all the money?”

“Only half.”

“Then no problem. Money makes the dog dance.”

María Paz went to the pay phone by the bathrooms, and from the table, Rose watched her call and then talk and gesticulate wildly.