“But I mean there’s no immediate rush about it. Is there.”
“I think there is, Charlotte.” I was suddenly tired. “As a matter of fact I think it’s imperative that you go very soon.”
“No.” She seemed abruptly agitated. “It is not imperative. At all. He is not dying.”
I sat without speaking awhile.
The tissue around Charlotte’s eyes was reddening but she did not cry.
Tell Charlotte she was wrong.
“I didn’t mean that it’s imperative you go anywhere in particular,” I said finally. “I don’t care where you go. Go to Caracas, go to Managua. Just get out of here.”
She put on her dark glasses and tried to smile.
“Just leave,” I said.
“I don’t believe I can quite manage this display of hospitality.” There was in Charlotte’s voice an inflection of which she seemed entirely unaware, an inflection I had heard before only in the Garden District of New Orleans. “Here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry, seems about the size of it.”
Here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry.
Mrs. Fayard’s been learning West Texas manners.
Tell Charlotte she was wrong.
“Charlotte.” I felt as if I were talking to a child. “I’ve told you before, there is trouble here. There is going to be more trouble here. You are going to find yourself in the middle of this trouble which is not your business.”
“I don’t know anything about any trouble. So how could I possibly be in the middle of it.”
“Because Gerardo is.”
She looked at me as if I had mentioned someone she had met a long time before and did not quite remember.
I think I fucked you one Easter.
I think I did that and forgot it.
I think she did forget it.
“In any case I’m not affected,” she said after a while. “Because I’m simply not interested in any causes or issues.”
“Neither is anyone here.”
Charlotte said nothing.
“Charlotte.” I tried again. “What do you think all those people were doing at your dining-room table?”
Charlotte looked at me.
“You were there too,” she said finally.
That was July.
Boca Grande is.
10
I RECALL IT NOW AS A YEAR WHEN WE ACTUALLY HAD “seasons.”
Definite “changes.”
Changes not in the weather but in the caliber of the harmonic tremor.
I am not sure when everyone else realized that Antonio had diverted enough “secret” support from Victor’s army to be finally immune from Victor but I know when I realized it. I realized it the evening Gerardo and Charlotte came back from Progreso and Charlotte began to cry at dinner.
“What upset her?” I said to Gerardo when Charlotte had left the table.
Gerardo was picking the meat from a crab and did not look at me.
“I suppose she didn’t like Progreso,” he said after a while. “I suppose she got tired. A day’s outing. Very tiring.”
“I said what upset her.”
“I suppose she didn’t find Progreso as peaceful as you claim to.” Gerardo placed the crabmeat as he picked it on Charlotte’s plate. “I suppose it’s a special taste.”
“I want to know what upset her out there.”
“M–3’s,” Charlotte said from the doorway.
She had washed her face clean of makeup and she seemed entirely composed.
“I grew up with shotguns but I can’t stand carbines.” She sat down and picked up her napkin. “Why are you staring at me?”
There was a silence.
“Whose carbines?” I said.
Gerardo avoided my eyes. “Grace hasn’t been out to Progreso lately, Charlotte. Grace hasn’t seen — what did you call it? Did you call it ‘the machinery’?”
“I called it the hardware,” Charlotte said.
“She calls it the hardware,” Gerardo said.
“I don’t have cancer of the ear,” I said. “Whose hardware is it?”
“Antonio’s got some of the army with him. Of course.” Gerardo shrugged. The only clear evidence I have of Gerardo’s intelligence is that he has always known how to cut his losses, yield the position, supply the information. Gerardo differs in that respect from Victor. “Actually it wasn’t the guns that upset Charlotte. It was Antonio. Antonio and Carmen. Antonio gave Carmen an M–3 and let her shoot up the place.”
Charlotte picked up her fork and laid it down again.
“You have a rather bizarre idea of a day’s outing,” I said to Gerardo.
“Carmen wasn’t using an M–3,” Charlotte said. She leaned forward slightly and her face was entirely grave. “Antonio was. Carmen was using an M–16.”
Gerardo looked away.
“And they weren’t shooting up ‘the place,’ Gerardo. I mean what is ‘the place.’ ‘The place’ is some rusted Cats and five flamingoes. They were only shooting the crates.”
Something about Charlotte’s querulous precision seemed extreme, and unnatural.
“What crates?” I said.
Charlotte looked at me.
“The crates of vaccine,” she said. “The Lederle vaccine.”
Charlotte never changed her expression.
“Unopened crates of Lederle vaccine,” she said. “Cholera. It ran on the street when they shot up the crates.”
I looked at her for a long time.
“It ran on the street,” she repeated. “If you call that a street.”
I think I loved Charlotte in that moment as a parent loves the child who has just fallen from a bicycle, met a pervert, lost a prize, come up in any way against the hardness of the world.
I think I was also angry at her, again like a parent, furious that she hadn’t known better, furious that she had been wrong.
Tell Charlotte she was wrong.
What had Charlotte been wrong about exactly.
Who was wrong here.
I looked away from her.
“Why are you doing this with Antonio?” I said to Gerardo.
“I’m not ‘doing’ it, it’s done. It’s in progress. Underway. Its own momentum now.”
“I know that,” I said. “I want to know why you did it.”
“It was something to do,” Gerardo said.
“I happen to know about M–16’s because Marin had one when she went to Utah,” Charlotte said. Charlotte always referred to the day Marin hijacked the L–1011 and burned it on the Bonneville Salt Flats as “when Marin went to Utah,” as if it had been a tour of National Parks. Charlotte was not looking at me any more. “Or so they told me.”
“Get her out before it happens,” I said to Gerardo.
“The M–16 is supposed to be the ‘ideal’ submachine gun,” Charlotte said. “Leonard called it ideal. They didn’t.”
“Tell me when it’s time,” I said to Gerardo.
“You always hear it,” Gerardo said. “Eat that crab, Charlotte. I picked that crab for you.”
I always did hear it.
I heard it because I listened.
Charlotte heard even more than I heard but Charlotte seemed not to listen.
Charlotte seemed not to see.
Charlotte had stood out there in the bamboo at Progreso and let the sun burn her face and heard Antonio call her norteamericana cunt and heard Carmen Arrellano call her la bonne bourgeoise and heard the carbine fire shatter the vials of clear American vaccine and still she did not listen. Charlotte had watched the clear American vaccine shimmer on the boulevards of Progreso and still she did not see.
That was August.
Boca Grande is.
Boca Grande was.