“There’s a woman here who runs on the beach every night,” Hand said.
Pilar waited for something else from Hand about the woman, or the running — some point to the story. Nothing came. He looked at her, then down.
“There are some rocks near shore that you have to watch for when you swim,” he said. “You want to swim now?”
Pilar didn’t. She wanted to eat.
The dirt road was barnacled with small rocks, and huge rocks, and where it was not it was dusty and uneven. It was not a long walk to the beach, but it was too long. After thousands of miles of travel to reach water, even this, a five-minute stroll, felt cruel. The beach, once they ducked under a tangle of trees, was wide and flat; the tide was out. A woman jogged by the shore as her dog ran near her, jumping suddenly, as if jerked upward like a dog-marionette. But otherwise the place was empty, which was good.
“Is that the woman?” Pilar asked.
“I think so,” Hand said.
“Are there other women who run on the beach at night?”
“I don’t know. But it’s dark.”
Pilar wanted to cut stomachs open with glass.
Hand was tall enough, and built well, with flat strong pectorals and arms that were toned and brown. He’d been a swimmer in high school. But he also had a look of country madness that everyone who knew him noted. It wasn’t there all the time — just when a subject had grabbed hold of his mind and he was trying but failing, like Lassie and the well, to communicate its urgency. His was a nimble mind, sleeping shallowly when sleeping at all — but there was a raggedness to his brain that contrasted strongly with his attention to what he thought were facts and numbers of great import. Handsome in a way that sometimes looked bland, but there was character there— a faint cleft in his chin, earlobes that drooped though had never been pierced, some gray lines in his blond hair — that gave him advantages and he knew it. The sideburns had come and gone and now were back, and this was a mistake.
He had traveled widely in the past few years, since a trip with a mutual friend of theirs, now dead, had brought him halfway around the world in a week.
They shuffled down the main strip looking for dinner. There was a tiny bodega selling Miami Heralds from the previous Friday. Some small homes. A shop offering only towels, most featuring birds and monkeys. They found a restaurant with Christmas lights strung from the roof, full of American teenagers, all of them large, the boys bigger than the girls, huge T-shirts draped over their fleshy chests. Pilar and Hand sat down and in response a cat, gray with luxuriant hair, scooted from their feet and onto the tin roof.
The waitress came. She said Buenos nochas. They said Buenos nochas back. Hand said something in Spanish that made the waitress laugh loudly. As she was laughing, Hand spoke again, in Spanish, and the waitress laughed more. She leaned against the table for a second with her hand. She looked at Pilar; she was having a great time. Pilar had no idea what was happening. What had Hand said? Hand was a riot.
“What did you say to her?” Pilar asked, after she left.
“Who?”
“The waitress. What was so funny?”
“Nothing, really.”
“You were killing her. What did you say?”
Hand wouldn’t explain.
They ate dinner, chicken and rice, and wiped their mouths with the tiny triangular blue napkins provided. The cat returned and rubbed against Hand’s shin, back and forth and again, in a way that began to seem inappropriate.
UNSUNG SONG TO HAND: There are things about you / Like your wide waist, which repel / me, but your lips, smiling / shake me, and your brown shoulders / pick me a few inches off the ground / I want to slap you across the face in the loudest way. CHORUS: I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule. SECOND VERSE: You’re someone who would lead almost any small nation / if you wanted to, but you don’t / because half of you is odd / but still you have the charm of a leading / man, of an actor who was first a carpenter / someone who still plays lacrosse on the weekends / with the friends he’s always had / I think your lips are too thin / your eyes too closely set / our children might be ugly / but you are a man, and there are so few men in the world. CHORUS: I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule / I want to jump on your back and ride you like a mule.
After they’d eaten but before they left the table, Hand said, “I think I want to make sausages.”
Pilar pretended to be watching the cat on the tin roof.
“There are small machines you can buy that make sausage,” he continued. “You buy the casings and then you stick the meats you want in there. Beef, pork, fat, spices. You ever made a sausage?”
Pilar shook her head. Hand fixed her with his look, brilliant and insane and grabbing.
“There are a lot of things like that, things you can just learn how to make. Like pretzels. Or doors. Regular people can learn how to make those things. Pillows. My mom started making pillows last year. She’s made about eighty so far.”
They walked back through the strip. Americans and Canadians and Swiss crisscrossed the street; some stood and watched the TVs positioned above the open-air bars, fuzzy college basketball happening, though soundlessly. Sunburned couples in white cotton fondled baskets in the souvenir shops. Surfers waited on benches for one of the two pay phones. Twelve-year-old locals sped by on ATVs, three on each bike, huge white smiles.
She counted the reasons she should sleep with Hand: because she was curious about sleeping with him, curious to see him naked; because she loved him; because sleeping with him would be a natural and good extension of her filial love for him; because there existed the possibility that it would be so good that they would change their ideas of each other and then think of themselves as a pair; because to deny one’s curiosity about things like this was small and timid, and she was neither and didn’t ever want to be either; because he had really wonderful arms, triceps that made her jangly in her ribs and tightened her chest; because she was not very attracted to him when away from him — she’d never thought of him while in the tub or flat on her bed — but in his presence she didn’t want to walk or eat, she wanted to be nude with him, under a dirty sheet in a borrowed house. She wanted to hold his shoulders; she wanted to go snowshoeing with him; she wanted to go to funerals with him; she wanted him to be the father of her children, and also her own father, and brother; she wanted all this while also to be free; she wanted to sleep with other men and come home and tell Hand about them. She wanted to live one life with Hand while living three others concurrently.
At the hotel, the horses: two were sitting in the grass, as if they’d been waiting, patiently but with pressing business, the white one glowing faintly, like a star on the ceiling of a child’s bedroom. The third and fourth were standing on the road, by the hedge, their dark hair shining.
HORSES: It’s never like we planned.
HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: I wish I could do more.
HORSES: We want violence, so we can kick and tear the world in thirds.
HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: I’m helpless to help you.
HORSES: All we need is the spark.
HORSES’ SHADOWS ON DIRT ROAD: When it happens, tell me what to do.
“Jesus,” said Pilar.