One Life. David Lida

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Shepherd out the door by the arm. It’s almost one in the afternoon. Outside the police station in the blistering heat, they light up Marlboros.

      “What do you want for lunch? You want to go to Subway again?” asks the Blob.

      “How about some of those spicy wings at Popeyes?” asks Shepherd. “Or we could go downtown to the Piggly Wiggly and get the stuffed peppers.”

      “Whatever,” says the Blob. “One thing’s for sure. I ain’t eating off of no Mexican taco truck. That greasy shit will give you a heart attack. A Mexican’s hungry enough he’ll eat his own donkey. You think they call them burritos for nothing?”

      Bobby—gray hair side-parted, round shoulders, a loose shirt and a striped tie fraying at the knot—offers Esperanza a weak smile. He would like to say something consoling. If anyone is going to relieve her, it’s him, especially now that they’re alone. They don’t play good cop, bad cop in Plaquegoula Parish. They play bad cop, worse cop. Dirty Harry would be the compassionate one around here. But what can he say? “Everything is going to be all right?” Nothing is going to be all right for this baby doll. Besides, the minute he opens his maw to say something nice to a woman, he gets in trouble. He’s living in the house of one of his exes, paying her a fat rent, while shelling out three mouths’ worth of child support to the other. If it weren’t for his personal payroll he wouldn’t be working for these creepy cops any longer.

      Esperanza shivers. He thinks about getting the jacket out of his locker and putting it over her shoulders. Shepherd and the Blob would never let him live it down.

      The Blob opens the door and finds Esperanza and Bobby sitting in silence. He takes his seat in front of her and stares. She sees the perspiration that has formed on his scalp and brow in pear-shaped droplets. She can hear him wheezing.

      “You look like a princess,” he says finally, adding, “La bonita.”

      He leans toward her with an outstretched arm. She jerks her head away before he caresses her cheek with the back of his hand.

       HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE NESCAFÉ

      I woke up in what may have been the finest three-hundred-peso hotel room in all of Mexico. There was a firmish mattress and a newish bedspread in a repulsive yellow-brown print. The walls were chartreuse stucco, the light fluorescent and buzzing like a mosquito. The room was equipped with telephone and TV, hot and cold water, a ceiling fan and even air-conditioning. The latter seemed like a good idea in Puroaire, a town situated in an area that extended across three states called Tierra Caliente.

      It was given that moniker long ago because of the tropical heat and merciless humidity, but since drug traffickers claimed it as part of their turf a few years ago, the tag had taken on a more sinister connotation. The cooling system turned the room into a meat locker in five minutes. I turned on the fan and lay naked atop the synthetic sheets. After a while I got used to the smell of insecticide fluid, a shield against cockroaches the size of roof rats.

      When I got off the bus in towns like Puroaire, I would ask a cabdriver to point me to the best hotel in town. He’d tell me to hop in, drive around for about ten minutes, and drop me off somewhere in the vicinity of where he picked me up. At $100 an hour I could be a sport about such extortion. The “best” lodgings were mostly along the lines of the Hotel Central, where I was spending the night in Puroaire. A doctor in Mexico City wrote me a script for Xanax for nights in places like this. Three tequilas and half a pill usually took care of me for a few hours.

      I woke a little before seven and pulled on yesterday’s clothes. The hotel was built around an open-air patio with a gnarly Guadalupe palm in the center. At a desk by the door a heavyset man dozed in an office chair, despite a TV on his desk noisily broadcasting a grisly car crash in Mexico City that morning. He had curly salt-and-pepper hair and slept in his black-framed eyeglasses. An unbuttoned guayabera exposed thatches of swirling body hair. His prolonged snore discharged in a continuous dissonant volley.

      Trying not to wake him, I looked around the patio to see if I could find coffee. I was useless before I had caffeine in the morning. Without it, I was on irritated automatic pilot, a day of the living dead.

      Suddenly the honking cascade ceased. “Can I help you?” asked the large man, folding his arms across his chest in an attitude of utter officiousness.

      “Is there any coffee in the hotel?” I asked.

      “Yes,” he said.

      I nodded, waiting for additional enlightenment. None was forthcoming. “Where might it be?” I asked.

      “On top of the table over there,” he said. “Monday through Friday. When the girl comes in to make it.” He smiled and shrugged. “Today’s Saturday. Sorry.” He said the last word in English, trilling the double r.

      “Is there anywhere open this early where I can find a cup?” I asked.

      “The market.”

      I enjoyed crossing the plazas of these little towns so early in the morning, before the heat rose. There was no activity in the church, the town hall, the police station. One or two enterprising women in aprons mopped the sidewalks outside the storefronts with plastic brooms, but the shops and the banks were dead to the world.

      After seven a few of the dreamy-eyed began to set up their stalls in the market. With long wooden poles, they hoisted hangers with made-in-China jeans and blouses, attaching them to the upper rungs of the metal mesh stalls. The market people believed the barely perceptible morning breeze contained harmful toxins, so they wore sweaters and knotted scarves at their necks.

      Around the corner, in a storefront adjacent to the market, I saw her: my patron saint. The woman who arrives earliest and sets a table to serve fresh orange juice; bananas mashed with milk, sugar, and cinnamon in a mixer; or, for the belligerently health-conscious, blended concoctions of weeds, raw beets, and quail eggs. Her wavy hair was colored dark red. She had smooth olive skin and was about my age, maybe a couple of years older. There were laugh lines beside her eyes. She wore a yellow sweater and tight nylon pants.

      “Good morning, señora,” I said, sitting on a square plastic stool.

      “Good morning, joven.” Her smile exposed strong white teeth. She didn’t call me “young man” because of my youthful appearance. Unless she knows us, all of her customers are joven or señorita or caballero. Unless and until we are friends, she is señora and I am joven. I will be joven until I am about seventy, at which point I will graduate to señor.

      “Have you any coffee?” I asked.

      “Of course.” She poured hot water from a huge percolator into a Styrofoam cup and set it before me, along with a barrel-shaped jar of Nescafé Clásico and a white plastic spoon.

      “Cream?” she asked, pointing to a blue plastic bucket full of powder. “Sugar?”

      I opened the jar of pulverized brown particles. I loved the generosity of handing over the whole bottle. If I had started to eat the Nescafé out of the jar, spoonful by spoonful, she probably would have encouraged me, like a mother feeding her baby. I dropped one heaping spoon, and then a level one for good luck, into the polystyrene. I stirred and smelled the bitter blend through the little cap of sand-colored chemical foam that formed at the top, even without the benefit of compressed “cream.” I was in heaven.

      When СКАЧАТЬ