We Eat Our Own (16 page)

Irena does it before her brain tells her not to: she turns her back to the projector beam and climbs on top of Hank. She settles her legs on either side of him and grinds down, so he can feel the hot throb of the veins in her cunt as they press against the center button of his shirt. She puts her tongue in his ear, on the side facing Teo, to make sure he can see.

Teach me now, she says, loud enough for Teo to hear.

She watches the projection of the green flesh, twisting on Teo's face.

She reaches for Hank's belt. They all hear it unlatch, the leather sliding.

• • •

Four minutes later, she's following Teo through the trees.

They still don't have a flashlight, but Teo's walking in long strides, so far ahead of Irena that she can barely see him in the dark. The jungle is a wall of sound, the vibration of a million insect calls falling into a single, pulsing rhythm. Plants rush at her bare calves from nowhere. She jogs straight into them to catch up.

Slow down, coglione!

He doesn't say anything.

She laughs and grabs him by the elbow.

He turns on his heel and shoves her as hard as he can.

In moments like these, when she's reached the climax of her treachery, Irena thinks of airplanes: the feeling of the wheels leaving the ground, the little lift of her diaphragm as her breath catches and she feels her velocity change. Whenever Irena manages to push someone this far, she has this same sensation. They say you can't feel relative motion, that the body cannot experience 950 kilometers per hour, but that's wrong. As the heels of Teo's hands land on her collarbones and her body rockets back, she feels it all: her blood is full of that speed, that wind that can flay you alive. It is twice as good as sex.

This is why she smiles as her shoulder blades slam hard against the trunk of the tree. This is how she gets her footing so quickly, why she walks right back up to Teo and kisses him on the mouth.

He spits the kiss out. What is wrong with you?

She kisses him again, then jerks back away from him and
grins. She bites her lower lip and gazes straight at him through the darkness.

Stop it.

But I want to kiss you.

I don't. You're disgusting. That fucking American is disgusting.

She cocks her head in the dark. Well, I like you better.

He has a wife and kids, you know, Teo says. I heard the Colombians talking in the bar. Four kids. They were probably asleep upstairs all along.

I knew that.

He's twice your age. Three times.

Let's not go back to the hotel. Let's stay out.

He's probably diseased.

Cretino, I've never fucked him. I just teased.

You would have done more than that if I hadn't stormed out.

But you did. She softens the edges around her voice. And I followed you.

A charged pause hangs in the air between them, full of fury, mosquitoes, sex. Her skin is so sticky with the humidity and his must be, too. She backs up in the dark, finds a tree and leans. She lies again: Ugo still might recast you. As my boyfriend. We're probably going to have to do it on set tomorrow, anyway.

Teo hesitates. That's different.

It doesn't have to be, she purrs. It's your first time acting. Trust me, you'll see.

He thumbs his temple, exasperated. You've never worked with Ugo. You're not even supposed to be in this movie.

I am now. I'm your girlfriend.

You don't know that.

I am if you want me. Ugo's letting me choose.

You're lying.

Let me choose you.

You're a crazy bitch.

Say it again.

Jesus. No.

Do it. Call me names.

The third time she kisses him, he shoves her with both hands. The third time, he holds her against a tree with his palm at her neck and rifles in his pants, his breath ragged, his face a full foot from hers. Irena lets herself go limp, but she can see everything in the dark, and she does not close her eyes even for an instant.

Before the shove, the kiss, she had already decided: she would wait until he put himself inside of her.

She would wait until he thought he was in control.

Then she would hold him there. She would tighten. She would breathe the darkness like water. She would be like a constrictor, swallowing. She would use her arms and her legs and her whole mouth.

• • •

The next night, Irena goes to the town alone.

Hank is nowhere. The bar is closed, three padlocks hanging off the jamb, no light between the slats of the walls. She goes from building to building, cat-scratching at the doors, saying his name the way a small bell says
come
. No one answers. There's a shack full of stored fruit with one paneless window, an immense smell of sweet rot that fascinates Irena. There's only one shack with a sign on it,
MÉDICO
, and through a crack in the wall she can see one table, one chair, a shelf with nothing on it besides a bottle of white capsules and a roll of half-stripped Ace bandages, trailing its skin like a wounded animal crawling
away. There's a shack with three children in it, sleeping on the floor under a big orange sheet.

But what keeps drawing Irena's attention is the wall of dark behind the town, set like a blackout curtain at the back of a stage. There's a path to Hank's house somewhere, but she doesn't take the time to look for it. She kills her flashlight so the bugs won't find her. She steps high over the bush, past the edge of the clearing, and just walks the straightest line she can.

This is how she finds Hank, finally: fifty meters into the darkness, at a house she'd never seen before. It's a bigger shack than anything in town, hulking in a clearing near the water. Irena had wanted to show up at Hank's bedside, to loom over him and his sleeping wife until he woke and froze, but studying the shape of the building in the distance, she realizes it's even better to find this. It has a new straw-thatch roof that she can smell in the dark and a perimeter of razor grass that looks tended, somehow, coaxed to form a wall between the clearing and the river. At least, that's her best explanation for why there is so little light here, why the house is so hard to see.

That's why she doesn't see the six men standing guard in front of the shack's door, black rifles lolling in the shadows near their hips. That's why she doesn't see Hank, standing outside and smoking a cigarette that he flicks straight to the ground the instant he sees her.

What are you doing here? he mutters.

I came to see you. She pushes a strand of hair behind her ear and smiles. The motion displaces a bug that had settled somewhere in her ponytail; it leaps directly into the hollow of her ear and whirs.

You need to go back to the hotel.

But I don't think I could find the way back.

He looks both ways, toward the jungle and the river, toward
the men with the guns, who chew toothpicks and say nothing. Shit. He lowers his gaze to the ground then back up at her, speaks in a firmer voice than before. Follow your tracks.

But right then a fat man appears in the doorway, a man with rolls of skin on his forehead and under his chin and around the points of his elbows, and he is saying, Hank, Hank, this a lady you're talking this way to?

He says it in English.

Even just from the way he moves into the doorway, Irena can see that this man had an incredible physicality. His hips shift fluidly under the fat. His hands are small and careful in a way that is frightening; when he puts his arm around Hank's shoulders, Hank tightens every muscle in his body so the man won't feel him wince. Hank doesn't answer, so the man keeps talking, straight to Irena, his eyes roving all over her. What is your name, darling? Darling, would you like to come to our party?

Hank pronounces every syllable: She is leaving right now.

The fat man barks a laugh. Come on! Let her decide!

Irena meets the fat man's eye. He is still smiling, back-­patting, but there is something in his look. Hard, masculine, commanding. It's amazing. Irena studies him, jealous. How can you make your eyes disagree with the rest of your face like that?

Irena smiles. The bug in her ear screes louder, like it's warning her of something, but she decides to practice the fat man's trick: she makes her expression innocent and wide, but she gives Hank a look that says, move aside now, and walks past him through the door.

• • •

The fat man's voice is different inside the shack, sweeter and lower: Gentlemen, I think we'll need the good cachaça.

He says it in Portuguese; Irena finds that she can vaguely understand that, too. The room is lit by one bulb and it is full of people. Shirtless men with wide scrapes on their chests and their inner arms. Indian women missing critical teeth. Children in big T-shirts who look tired. They are all speaking different languages, and they are hard to distinguish, all colliding in a blur of voices. She sits on an unlabeled cardboard box with something solid inside it. Hank stands next to her, his body like a wire pulled taut.

Don't be mean, she whispers to him. I just wanted to see you.

Where's your actor friend? Is he coming, too?

She looks at the side of his face, the bones in his temple buckling, like he's chewing something tough.

Relax, she says. You mean Teo? I'm done with him.

Anahi! The fat man sings, Guilherme, Dónde diablos está su hija?

Hija, figlia, daughter? Irena tries with half her brain to translate. And where has she heard the name Anahi? But she can't focus, can't stop looking at the line of Hank's profile, his skin colored whiskey-orange in the light. Hank; daughter. She can't keep the two thoughts in her head at once.

In the corner of her eye, a teenager in jean shorts walks anxiously into the room, carrying a bottle as big around as her own waist. Irena thinks she recognizes her—yes, she was a maid from the hotel, shit, maybe
the
maid that she's seen Teo following around—but she can't get a good look at her face to be sure. Anahi keeps her eyes on the floor, avoiding the room so intently Irena wonders if it is an effort of superstition. And does the room smell like blood? Irena considers. Meat, at least. Slaughter. There's a slaughterhouse smell about this place, something soaked into the dirt floor so deep it can't be scrubbed out.

Tazas! the fat man yells, jubiliant, and Irena thinks, Cups.

No tenemos suficientes, the girl murmurs. We don't have enough.

The fat man turns around to face the girl. Something in his face twitches, once, like a machine activating.

What happens next happens fast, the mood of the room changing like a gearshift thrown back. The fat man grabs the girl by the hair, the part at the back of the head where the roots are thickest. Everyone stops talking at once. He pulls the girl's head back so far that her neck bends, so far that her tracheal vertebrae crane and her eyes roll toward the ceiling, searching for someone to help her. Irena can see the undersides of Anahi's eyeballs, wet and white and roving. The girl whimpers once—Pa—but she knows not to finish the word.

No one moves at all. The girl's hands stay clenched around the girth of the bottle, to keep it from dropping and breaking.

The fat man's face keeps changing: vicious and then smiling, like he's dipping his bride at their wedding. Irena feels something like hunger start to swell in her chest as she looks at him. She thinks:
How could I move like
that
?

Encontrarás algunas. His voice is soft and reassuring. Eres una niña lista.

Irena can't translate it.

He lets the girl go. She falls back for an instant and then rights herself, hands the fat man the bottle, wipes her face with her hands as she hurries out of the room.

Friends! The man says in Portuguese, then, and Irena realizes that she can't tell what his native language is: his command of every accent is perfect. He has an aristocratic tilt to his nose that signals no nationality. His lips curl up at the edges in a permanent smile.

Friends, he says again, we have a guest tonight that I should introduce, someone who has just arrived in our town.

Something starts clicking underneath Irena's sternum and begins to speed.

Juan Carlos, the fat man says, Preséntete.

She deflates. A man sitting on the other side of Hank leans forward, clearing his throat. He's around her age, maybe twenty or twenty-one, with an overgrown beard and a green bandanna tied around his temples, filth soaked into his clothes. Juan Carlos tightens his jaw to look serious and nods around the room. But when his gaze lands on Hank, he stills.

The fat man continues, his voice teasing. I'm told that Juan Carlos is part of a new regime in this organization, and that he may be able to help us understand our little miscommunication about the last shipment. He coughs. Excuse me. About our last shipment
weight.

Hank does not lean forward, but his voice does: We don't do this now.

The fat man wheels around. And why not?

It's not the time, he says, his voice leaning toward Irena, now, though again his body makes no signal.

I think we should get to know our friends in the M-19. Don't we all want to know our friends in the M-19?

Some of the men and the children clap uncertainly. Hank's eyes are full of words Irena can tell he's not allowed to say. She can tell he wants to tell the fat man to shut up.

Juan Carlos, you must know, just because we're requesting reparations doesn't mean we blame
you
for what your last comandante did. Maybe it was an error in measurement. We all make—

Hank stands.

You're worried about your girlfriend? The fat man laughs. Look at her, she's tough! She knows what men do!

The fat man walks slowly over to Irena and extends his
hand. The fingernails are clipped small and strangely cute, like little eyes opening.

Hermosa, he says, Cómo te llamas?

Irena can feel the skin over her own face, tight, tight, so tight it will show all her thoughts moving underneath it if she's not careful. She relaxes the way her acting teacher showed her: jaw muscles, scalp muscles, tongue. She shakes her head and smiles.