After the Plague: And Other Stories Read online

  “There’s a place up the beach,” she said, “in town. I hear it’s pretty good—Los Crotos? Want to try it?”

  “Sure,” he said, but the deadness crept back into his legs. Up the beach? In town? It was dark out there, and he didn’t speak the language.

  She was watching him. “If you don’t want to, it’s no big deal,” she said, finishing off her drink and setting the glass down with a rattle of ice that sounded like nothing so much as loose teeth spat into a cup. “We can just eat here. The thing is, I’ve been here two days now and I’m a little bored with the menu—you know, fish, fish, and more fish. I was thinking maybe a steak would be nice.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, no problem.”

  And then they were out on the beach, Gina barefoot at his side, her heels swinging from one hand, purse from the other. The night was dense and sustaining, the lights muted, palms working slowly in the breeze, empty palapas lined up along the high-water mark like the abandoned cities of a forgotten race. Lester shuffled through the deep sand, his outsized feet as awkward as snowshoes, while children and dogs chased each other up and down the beach in a blur of shadow against the white frill of the surf and knots of people stood in the deeper shadows of the palms, laughing and talking till the murmur of conversation was lost in the next sequence of breakers pounding the shore. He wanted to say something, anything, but his brain was impacted and he couldn’t seem to think, so they walked in silence, taking it all in.

  When they got to the restaurant—an open-air place set just off a shallow lagoon that smelled powerfully of sea-wrack and decay—he began to loosen up. There were tables draped in white cloth, the waiter was solicitous and grave, and he accepted Lester’s mangled Spanish with equanimity. Drinks appeared. Lester was in his element again. “So,” he said, leaning into the table and trying to sound as casual as he could while Gina squeezed a wedge of lime into her drink and let her shoe dangle from one smooth slim foot, “you’re not married, are you? I mean, I don’t see a ring or anything… .”

  Gina hunched her shoulders, took a sip of her drink—they were both having top-shelf Margaritas, blended—and gazed out on the dark beach. “I used to be married to a total idiot,” she said, “but that was a long time ago. My manager, Gerry O’Connell—he’s Irish, you know?—him and me had a thing for a while, but I don’t know anymore. I really don’t.” She focussed on him. “What about you?”

  He told her he was a widower and watched her eyes snap to attention. Women loved to hear that—it got all their little wheels and ratchets turning—because it meant he wasn’t damaged goods like all the other hairy-chested cretins out there, but tragic, just tragic. She asked how it had happened, a sink of sympathy and morbid female curiosity, and he told her the story of the kid in the Suburban and the wet pavement and how the student volunteers were supposed to have a monitor with them at all times, but not April, because she just shrugged it off—she wanted an authentic experience, and that was what she got, all right. His throat seemed to thicken when he got to that part, the irony of it, and what with the cumulative weight of the cocktails, the reek of the lagoon, and the strangeness of the place—Mexico, his first day in Mexico—he nearly broke down. “I wasn’t there for her,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. I wasn’t there.”

  Gina was squeezing his hand. “You must have really loved her.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I did.” And he had loved her, he was sure of it, though he had trouble picturing her now, her image drifting through his consciousness as if blown by a steady wind.

  Another drink came. They ordered dinner, a respite from the intensity of what he was trying to convey, and then Gina told him her own tale of woe, the alcoholic mother, the brother shot in the face when he was mistaken for a gang member, how she’d excelled in high-school sports and had nowhere to go with it, two years at the community college and a succession of mind-numbing jobs till Gerry O’Connell plucked her from anonymity and made her into a fighter. “I want to be the best,” she said. “Number One—and I won’t settle for anything less.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  She looked at him. Her drink was half gone. “I know,” she said.

  By the time they were finished with dinner and they’d had a couple of after-dinner drinks, he was feeling unbeatable again. It was quarter past eleven and the solicitous waiter wanted to go home. Lester wanted to go home too—he wanted to take Gina up to his room and discover everything there was to know about her. He lurched suddenly to his feet and threw a fistful of money at the table. “Want to go?” he said, the words sticking to the roof of his mouth.

  She rose unsteadily from her seat and leaned into him while she adjusted the strap of her right heel. “Think we should take a cab?” she said.

  “A cab? We’re just at the other end of the beach.”

  She was staring up at him, small as a child, her head thrown back to take in the spread and bulk of him. “Didn’t you see that notice in your room—on the bathroom door? I mean, it sounds almost funny, the way they worded it, but still, I wonder.”

  “Notice? What notice?”

  She fished around in her purse until she came up with a folded slip of paper. “Here,” she said. “I wrote it down because it was so bizarre: ‘The management regrets to inform you that the beach area is unsafe after dark because of certain criminal elements the local authorities are sadly unable to suppress and advises that all guests should take a taxi when returning from town.’ “

  “Are you kidding? Criminal elements? This place is a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere—they ought to try the Tenderloin if they want to see criminal elements. And besides, besides”—he was losing his train of thought—“besides …”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s nobody in the whole country taller than five-four, as far as I can see.” He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Criminal elements!” And he was still shaking his head as they stepped out into the night.

  Call it hubris.

  They hadn’t gone two hundred yards, the night deepening, dogs howling in the hills, and every star set firmly in its track, when they were jumped. It was nothing like the way Lester had visualized it while stalking home after the bars closed on Twenty-fourth Street, half hoping some sorry shithead would come up to him so he could break him in two. There were no words, no warning, no “Give me your wallet” or “I’ve got a gun” or “This is a stickup.” One minute he was trudging through the sand, a drunken arm draped hopefully over Gina’s shoulder, and the next he was on the ground, two pairs of booted feet lashing diligently at his face and ribs while a whole fluttering rush of activity washed round him, as if a flock of birds had burst up off the ground in a panic. He heard a grunt, a curse, the unmistakable crack of bone and cartilage rearranging itself, and it was Gina, Gina the Puma, whaling away at the shadows with both fists as he shoved himself up out of the sand and the boots suddenly stopped kicking and fled.

  “You all right?” she said, and he could hear her hard steady breathing over the hammering of the waves.

  He was cursing into the night—“Sons of bitches! Motherfuckers! I’ll kill you!”—but it was all bluster, and he knew it. Worse, so did she.

  “Yeah,” he said finally, his chest heaving, the booze and adrenaline pulsing in his temples till the blood vessels there felt like big green garden hoses crawling up both sides of his head. “Yeah, I’m okay… . I took a few kicks in the face maybe … and I think—I think they got my wallet… .”

  “Here,” she said, her voice oddly calm, “are you sure?” And then she was crouching, feeling around in the sand with spread fingers.

  He joined her, glad to be down on his hands and knees and relieved of the effort of holding himself up. His wallet? He didn’t give a shit about any wallet. The sand was cool, and the regular thump of the waves conveyed itself to him in the most immediate and prescient way.

  “Les?” She was standing now, obscuring the stars. He couldn’t make out her
face. “You sure you’re all right?”

  From a great reeling distance he heard himself say, “Yeah, I’m fine.” Her voice was insistent, the voice of an intimate, a wife, a lover.

  “Come on, Les, get up. You can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Sure. Just give me a minute.”

  Then there was a brightness, a burning-hot soldered light fused to the cracks of the blinds, and he woke to find himself in his bed—his Mexican bed, in his Mexican hotel, in Mexico. Alone. Without Gina, that is. The first thing he did was check his watch. There it was, clinging like a manacle to his wrist, dividing his naked forearm from his meaty pale hand and indifferently announcing the time: two thirty-two. All right. He heaved himself up to a sitting position, drained the plastic water bottle he discovered behind the tequila on the night table, and took a minute to assess the situation.

  There was a rumor of pain between his ribs, where, he began to recall, two pairs of sharp-toed boots had repeatedly inserted themselves in the waning hours of the previous night, but that was nothing compared with his face. It seemed to ache all over, from his hairline to his jaw. He reached a hand to his cheek and felt a tenderness there, and then he worked his jaw till the pain became too much for him. His right eye was swollen closed, there was a drumming in his head and a vague nauseous feeling creeping up the back of his throat. To top it off, his wallet was missing.

  Now he’d have to call up and cancel his credit cards, and he was a fool and an idiot and he cursed himself twice over, but it wasn’t the end of the world—he had ten thin crisp hundreds hidden away in his carry-on bag, or his shaving kit, actually, where no one would think to look for them. It could have been worse, he was thinking, but he couldn’t get much beyond that. How had he managed to get himself back last night? Or had Gina managed it? The thought made him burn with shame.

  He took a shower, clapped on a pair of coruscating silver-lensed sunglasses to mask the desecration of his eye, and limped down to the restaurant. She wasn’t there, and that was all right for the moment—he needed time to pull himself together before he could face her. The waitress was there, though, eternally responsive to his needs, wearing another down-to-the-toes peasant dress, this time in a shade of blue so pale it barely registered. She smiled and chirped at him and he ordered two tall Smirnoff-and- naranja with soda cloob and three fried eggs with tortillas and a fiery serrano salsa that cleared his airways, no doubt about it. He ate and drank steadily, and when he looked up idly at the sea stretching beyond the veranda, he saw nothing but a desert of water. He had a third cocktail for equilibrium, then went down to the front desk and asked the attendant there if she knew which room Gina was staying in.

  “Gina?” the woman echoed, giving him a blank look. “What family name, please?”

  He had no idea. She’d told him, but it was gone now, obliterated by vodka, tequila, and half a dozen kicks to the head. All he could think of was her professional name. “The Puma,” he tried. “Gina the Puma.”

  The woman’s hair was pulled back in a bun, her blouse buttoned up to her throat. She studied him a long moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

  “Gina,” he repeated, and his voice got away from him a bit. “How many Ginas could there be in this place, for Christ’s sake?”

  When she answered this time, she spoke in Spanish, and then she turned away.

  He began a methodical search of the place, from pool to bar and back again, suddenly desperate. He had to explain last night to Gina, joke it away, rationalize, apologize, spin shit into gold; she had to understand that he was drunk and his judgment was impaired, and if the circumstances had been different he would have wiped the beach with those scumbags, he would have. Startled faces gaped up at him from the recliners round the pool, maids in pale-green uniforms flattened themselves to the walls. Then he was in the blast of the midday sun, searching through the palapas on the beach, hundreds of palapas, and practically every one with a sunburned tourist lounging beneath it. Soon he was sunburned himself, sweating rivulets and breathing hard, so he stripped off his shirt, threw himself into the waves, and came up dripping to the nearest unoccupied palapa and sent a skinny little girl scurrying away to provide him with a piss-warm beer.

  Several piss-warm beers later, he began to feel like himself again—and so what if he’d lost his shirt somewhere in the surf? He was in Mexico and he was drunk and he was going to find Gina and make it up to her, ask her to dinner, take a cab—a whole fleet of cabs—and buy her all the steak and lobster she could hold. He drank a tequila with wedges of lime and some true, cold beers at a tourist bar, and when the shadows began to lengthen, he decided to continue up the beach to see if she’d maybe taken one of the water taxis over to Puerto Ángel or Carrizalillo and was only now coming back.

  The sun was hanging on a string just over the horizon, pink and lurid, and the tourists were busy packing up their sunblock and towels and paperback novels while the dark people, the ones who lived here year-round and didn’t know what a vacation was, began to drift out of the trees with their children and their dogs to reclaim their turf. He kept walking, intent on the way his toes grabbed and released the sand, and he’d got halfway to the boats before he realized he’d left his sunglasses somewhere. No matter. He never even broke stride. They were nothing to him, one more possession, one more thing he could slough off like so much dead skin, like April’s desk and her clothes and the straw baskets and pottery she’d decorated the apartment with. Besides, there was hardly any glare off the water now, and these people, these coppery little grimacing Indians who seemed to sprout up all over the beach once the sun began to close down, they needed to see him, with his flaming belly and his crusted cheekbone and savage eye, because this was what their criminal elements had done to him and he was wearing the evidence of it like a badge. “Fuck you,” he was muttering under his breath. “Fuck you all.”

  At some point, Lester looked up to orient himself and saw that he was just opposite the restaurant from last night. There it sat, squat among the trees, its lights reflected on the surface of the lagoon. A soft glow lit the bar, which he could just make out, figures there, movement, cocktail hour. He had a sudden intimation that Gina was in there, her dark head bent over a table in back, a drunken intimation that counted absolutely for nothing, but he acted on it, sloshing through the fetid lagoon in his sandals and shorts, mounting the three steps from the beach and drifting across the creaking floorboards to the bar.

  It wasn’t Gina seated at the table but a local woman, the proprietress no doubt, totting up figures in a ledger; she raised her head when he walked in, but looked right through him. There were three men at the bar, some sort of police, in black shirts and trousers, one of them wearing dark glasses though there was no practical reason to at this hour. They ignored him and went on smoking and talking quietly, in soft rapping voices. A plastic half-gallon jug of tequila stood before them on the bar, amid a litter of plates and three water glasses half-full of silvery liquid. Lester addressed the bartender. “Margarita rocks,” he said. “With hielo.”

  He sipped his drink, profoundly drunk now, but drunk for a reason. Two reasons. Or three. For one thing, he had pain to kill, physical pain, and for another he was on vacation, and if you can’t be legitimately wasted on your vacation, then when can you be? The third reason was Gina. He’d come so close, and then he’d blown it. Criminal elements. He glanced up at the cops with an idle curiosity that turned sour almost immediately: Where were they when he’d needed them?

  And then he noticed something that made his heart skip a beat: the boots. These guys were wearing boots, sharp-toed boots with silver toe-caps, the only boots in town. Nobody in Puerto Escon-dido wore boots. They could barely afford sandals, fishermen who earned their living with a hook and thirty feet of line wrapped round an empty two-liter Pepsi bottle, maids and itinerant merchants, dirt farmers from the hills. Boots? They were as likely to have Armani blazers, silk shirts, and
monogrammed boxer shorts. Understanding came down like a hammer. He had to find Gina.

  Dusk now, children everywhere, dogs, fishermen up to their chests in the rolling water, bats swooping, sand fleas leaping away from the blind advance of his feet. The steady flow of alcohol had invigorated him—he was feeling no pain, none at all—though he realized he’d have to eat something soon, and clean himself up, especially if he was going to see Gina, because his whole body was seething and rushing, and everything, from the palms to the palapas to the rocks scattered along the shore, seemed to have grown fur. Or fuzz. Peach fuzz.

  That was when he stepped in the hole and went down awkwardly on his right side, his face plowing a furrow in the loose sand, and the bad eye, wet with fluid, picking up a fine coating of sharp white granules. But it was no problem, no problem at all. He rolled over and lay on his back a while, laughing softly to himself. Criminal elements, he thought, and he was speaking the thought aloud as people stepped round him in the sand. “Sure, sure. And I’m the Pope in Rome.”

  When he finally got back to the hotel courtyard, he hesitated. Just stood there glistening in the muted light like a statue erected in honor of the befuddled tourist. On the one hand, he was struck by the impulse to go back to his room, wash the grit from his body, do something with his hair and fish another shirt out of his bag; on the other, he felt an equally strong urge to poke his head in the bar for a minute—just a minute—to see if Gina was there. Ultimately, it was no contest. There he went, feet thundering on the planks, the sand sparkling all over him as if he’d been dipped in sugar.

  There. There was the waitress, giving him an odd look—a blend of hopefulness and horror—and the thicket of heads bent over plates and glasses, the air heavy as water, the bartender looking up sharply. Ever hopeful, Lester lurched out onto the floor.

  This time he got lucky: Gina was sitting at a table just round the corner of the bar, the farthest table out on the veranda, her legs crossed at the knee, one shoe dangling from her toes. There was music playing somewhere, a faint hum of it leaking in out of the night, Mexican music, shot full of saccharine trumpets and weeping violins. It was a romantic moment, or it could have been. But Gina didn’t see him coming—she was turned the other way, in profile, the sea crashing behind her, her hair hanging limp to her shoulders—and it wasn’t till he’d rounded the end of the bar that he saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man sitting across from her, a drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Lester saw a dangle of red hair, muscles under a Lollapalooza T-shirt, the narrow face of an insect.