The kid's shoulders were starting to hurt. "Can I put my hands down?"
Amaro motioned that he could.
Eddie thought hard, said, "I heard a song that went round and round. Ya know, like a ride, maybe, at a carnival."
"Carnival," Amaro said.
"Coulda been," said Eddie. "Or maybe, like, a ice cream truck."
"This melanzan is fuckin' useless," said the thick man.
"An ice-cream truck," said Paul Amaro. It was April. He didn't think the ice cream trucks had started going around in April. "My brother, he sound scared?"
"He sounded 'bout like normal."
Paul Amaro rubbed a thick hand all over his face, pulled hard at the rubbery jowls. "You told his wife maybe there were people who wouldn't let him call. Why'd you say that, Eddie?"
The kid wiped his nose with his hand. " 'Cause she was crying."
Paul Amaro sighed, began to pace. For the first time, he looked past the marred gray counter to the erector-set shelves with their dusty cardboard boxes. "This place is a fuckin' dump," he said. He paced some more, then said, "It makes no sense. My schmuck brother, he's got family that can help him, and he wastes time talkin' to you."
Eddie heard himself say, "Maybe he don't want no help."
"Shut up, you cross-eyed idiot," said the man in the raincoat.
Paul Amaro looked down at the floor. Then, without another word, he walked to the door and let himself out. The man in the raincoat followed.
Eddie heard their car start, waited till they pulled away; waited an extra minute to be safe. Then he opened the cash register and reached into his pocket. He replaced the cash he'd taken as his wages, removed his IOU and tore it into little pieces. Then he locked up and walked away, and he knew that he was never going back.
19
Angelina woke up from her nap around eleven.
The air was very still, fragrant with the rueful smell of spent flowers, and she was quite confused. Gradually she remembered where she was, she recalled the mood and musings of the afternoon. But the tequila had worn off, those fantasies were now tainted by the thousand anxieties of the actual, and she was sorely tempted to slip back into sleep. To go prowling at midnight—earlier, the idea had seemed excitingly risque, sophisticated; now it just felt bizarre. To track her lover like a hunting lioness— earlier, the notion had titillated by its boldness; now it just seemed brassy.
But that, she told herself, was fear talking, the old bafflement and reluctance that had kept her fallow for so long. She would rise; she would go. She just needed a pep talk.
She pulled on her sarong, went downstairs to Michael's. His room was dark, she tapped on the door. He wasn't there; of course he wasn't there. He'd found his lover; he'd met a possibility and seized it. Angelina pouted. Why was everyone in the world more facile and blithe than she? Why was she hemmed in by qualms and hesitations that no one else seemed bothered by?
In her frustration and in the oddness of the hour, she came dangerously close to asking the question underpinning all those questions: Why, after all this time, was she crazy in love with a man who, for every reason, she should not, could not, have?
That question loomed, Angelina dimly sensed its menace the way a person somehow knows when a speeding unseen car is just about to careen around a corner; her mind stepped back.
On reluctant feet she went upstairs to her room, resolved now, with more bravery than joy, to dress in something pretty, and to do her hair, and paint her lips, and dab perfume behind her ears, and to see what happened when she sat across the bar from Sal and told him they really had to talk.
* * *
"Hi, Sal," she said, when she had climbed onto her bar stool and placed her purse on the bar and neatly squared her hands in front of her.
His eyes flicking left and right at regulars and tourists, his shirt damp and mostly open, he moved close to her, leaned across the slab of teak. Very softly, he said, "That's not my name."
"It's the only name I know you by," said Angelina.
"So I guess you don't know me very well."
"I never said I did. Can I have a drink, please?"
He didn't answer right away. Suddenly he felt caged in by the bar, squeezed between the thick wood and the pitiless mirror, oppressed by strangers' voices, choked by cigarettes and vines. He should have bolted. He'd already caught a whiff of Angelina's scent, his eyes had already tumbled into the chute between her breasts, and he realized he should have been far away by now, drunk in a hammock somewhere they didn't speak English.
Angelina went on, "One of those ones where you layer up the different colors and the cherry pulls the red down with it."
The bartender frowned. "Christ. A Virgin Heat?"