After the Plague (16 page)

Her eyebrows lifted. “Really? Is that like making potatoes that walk around the kitchen and peel themselves? Cloning sheep? Two-headed dogs?”

Lester laughed. He was feeling good. Better than good. “Not exactly.”

“My name's Gina,” she said, reaching out her hand, “but you might know me as the Puma. Gina (the Puma) Caramella.”

He took her hand, which was dry and small and nearly lost in his own. He was drunk, gloriously drunk, and so far he hadn't been ripped off by the Federales or assailed by the screaming shits or leached dry by malarial mosquitoes and vampire bats or any of
the other myriad horrors he'd been warned against, and that made him feel pretty near invulnerable. “What do you mean? You're an actress?”

She gave a little laugh. “I wish.” Ducking her head, she chased the remnants of the fish around the plate with her fork and the plane of her left index finger. “No,” she said. “I'm a boxer.”

The alcohol percolated through him. He wanted to laugh, but he fought down the urge. “A boxer? You don't mean like
boxing,
do you? Fisticuffs? Pugilism?”

“Twenty-three, two, and one,” she said. She took a sip of her drink. Her eyes were bright. “What I'm doing right now is agonizing over my defeat two weeks ago at the Shrine by one of the queen bitches in the game, DeeDee DeCarlo, and my manager thought it would be nice for me to just get away for a bit, you know what I mean?”

He was electrified. He'd never met a female boxer before—didn't even know there was such a thing. Mud-wrestling he could see—in fact, since his wife had died, he'd become a big fan, Tuesday nights and sometimes on Fridays—but boxing? That wasn't a woman's sport. Drunkenly, he scrutinized her face, and it was a good face, a pretty face, but for the bridge of her nose, a telltale depression there, just the faintest misalignment—and sure, sure, how had he missed it? “But doesn't it hurt? I mean, when you get punched in the … body punches, I mean?”

“In the tits?”

He just nodded.

“Sure it hurts, what do you think? But I wear a padded bra, wrap 'em up, pull 'em flat across the ribcage so my opponent won't have a clear target, but really, it's the abdominal blows that take it out of you,” and she was demonstrating with her hands now, the naked slope of her belly and the slit of her navel, abs of steel, but nothing like those freakish female bodybuilders they threw at you on ESPN, nice abs, nice navel, nice, nice, nice.

“You doing anything for dinner tonight?” he heard himself say.

She looked down at the denuded plate before her, nothing left
but lettuce, don't eat the lettuce, never eat the lettuce, not in Mexico. She shrugged. “I guess I could. I guess in a couple hours.”

He lifted the slab of his arm and consulted his watch with a frown of concentration. “Nine o'clock?”

She shrugged again. “Sure.”

“By the way,” he said. “I'm Lester.”

April had been dead two years now. She'd been struck and killed by a car a block from their apartment, and though the driver was a teenage kid frozen behind the wheel of his father's Suburban, it wasn't entirely his fault. For one thing, April had stepped out in front of him, twenty feet from the crosswalk, and, as if that wasn't bad enough, she was blindfolded at the time. Blindfolded and feeling her way with one of those flexible fiberglass sticks the blind use to register the world at their feet. It was for a psychology course she was taking at San Francisco State—“Strategies of the Physically Challenged.” The professor had asked for two volunteers to remain blindfolded for an entire week, even at night, even in bed, no cheating, and April had been the first to raise her hand. She and Lester had been married for two years at the time—his first, her second—and now she was two years dead.

Lester had always been a drinker, but after April's death he seemed to enjoy drinking less and need it more. He knew it, and he fought it. Still, when he got back to his room, sailing on the high of his chance meeting with Gina—Gina the Puma—he couldn't help digging out the bottle of Herradura he'd bought in the duty-free and taking a good long cleansing hit.

There was no TV in the room, but the air conditioner worked just fine, and he stood in front of it a while before stripping off his sodden shirt and stepping into the shower. The water was tepid, but it did him good. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and repositioned himself in front of the air conditioner. When he saw the bottle standing there on the night table, he thought he'd have just one more hit—just one—because he didn't want to be utterly wasted when he took Gina the Puma out for dinner. But then he
looked at his watch and saw that it was only seven-twenty, and figured what the hell, two drinks, three, he just wanted to have a good time. Too wired to sleep, he flung himself down on the bed like a big wet dripping fish and began poking through the yellowed paperback copy of
Under the Volcano
he'd brought along because he couldn't resist the symmetry of it. What else was he going to read in Mexico—Proust?

“No se puede vivir sin amar,”
he read, “You can't live without love,” and he saw April stepping out into the street with her puny fiberglass stick and the black velvet sleep mask pulled tight over her eyes. But he didn't like that picture, not at all, so he took another drink and thought of Gina. He hadn't had a date in six months, and he was ready. And who knew? Anything could happen. Especially on vacation. Especially down here. He tipped back the bottle, and then he flipped to the end of the book, where the Consul, cored and gutted and beyond all hope, tumbles dead down the ravine and they throw the bloated corpse of a dog down after him.

The first time Lester had read it, he'd thought it was funny, in a grim sort of way. But now he wasn't so sure.

Gina was waiting for him at the bar when he came down at quarter to nine. The place was lit with paper lanterns strung from the thatched ceiling, there was the hint of a breeze off the ocean, the sound of the surf, a smell of citrus and jasmine. All the tables were full, people leaning into the candlelight over their fish and Margaritas and murmuring to each other in Spanish, French, German. It was good. It was perfect. But as Lester ascended the ten steps from the patio and crossed the room to the bar, his legs felt dead, as if they'd been shot out from under him and then magically re-attached, all in the space of an instant. Food. He needed food. Just a bite, that was all. For equilibrium.

“Hey,” he said, nudging Gina with his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said, flashing a smile. She was wearing shorts and heels and a blue halter top glistening with tiny blue beads.

He was amazed at how small she was—she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. April's size. April's size exactly.

He ordered a Herradura and tonic, his forearms laid out like bricks on the bar. “You weren't kidding before,” he said, turning to her, “about boxing, I mean? Don't take offense, but you're so—well, small. I was just wondering, you know?”

She looked at him a long moment, as if debating with herself. “I'm a flyweight, Les,” she said finally. “I fight other flyweights, just like in the men's division, you know? This is how big God made me, but you come watch me some night and you'll see it's plenty big enough.”

She wasn't smiling, and somewhere on the free-floating periphery of his mind he realized he'd made a blunder. “Yeah,” he said, “of course. Of course you are. Listen, I didn't mean to—but why boxing? Of all the things a woman could do.”

“What? You think men have a patent on aggression? Or excellence?” She let her eyes sail out over the room, hard eyes, angry eyes, and then she came back to him. “Look, you hungry or what?”

Lester swirled the ice in his drink. It was time to defuse the situation, but quick. “Hey,” he said, smiling for all he was worth, “I'd like to tell you I'm on a diet, but I like eating too much for that—and plus, I haven't had a thing since that crap they gave us on the plane, dehydrated chicken and rice that tasted like some sort of by-product of the vulcanizing process. So yeah, let's go for it.”

“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 …”