It smelled good out there, green, wet. Palm trees and the sounds of tree frogs all around, like this invisible choir. I’d never seen a coquí before so while I puffed I walked around to see if I could spot one. Then I heard a woman talking in a loud voice. I glanced up and saw a silhouette. A woman talking on a cell phone. I couldn’t catch all of it. Something like, How can you do this to me? Then some bad cursing.
I got closer. It was the woman from the table. Framed in the light coming from the reception hall. She had that gift bag with her.
She hung up, saw me standing there. “Estás perdido?” she asked.
“Qué noche bella!” I said.
“Qué noche fea!” she responded and walked past.
“ Frío, you mean,” I said to her back.
I finished my cigarette and considered calling Julie. I had a vision of her tight, freckled body in a bikini. But it wasn’t a good time. So I just went inside.
A band was playing, and my Tía Lidia wanted to know when I would ask her to dance. So I danced with her and then my other aunts and then with every female relative I had. As one salsa finished, another aunt would come up, and so it went. I had a couple more drinks. Then I danced with my cousin Carmen. She was a good egg — a doctor who had just married another doctor.
I asked her who the dark woman was. “Una amiga de co-legio. Se llame Itaba,” she said. “That’s funny, Papo, because she asked me about you.”
My cousin was small, thin-hipped, dark-haired, glowing. She was tiny in my arms. At six-four, I towered over her.
“Oh really? What did you tell her?”
“That you were divorced. That you were trying to find your feet. Not too much.”
I guess that was the nicest way of saying I’d been unemployed and unemployable for almost a year. “Okay,” I said.
“I can’t wait to get to Mexico. This humidity is killing me. Is my hair okay?”
“How’s mine?” I said, and we laughed. “Leave it to you to get married during hurricane season.”
I danced another salsa with Titi Juana. I felt good, energized, buzzed. I figured I’d give that dark lady another shot.
But then I saw my grandmother. She wore a black dress ringed with fluffy edges and sat on the edge of her chair. I could tell she wanted to dance.
“Abuela. Vamos a bailar,” I said. She smiled up at me with shiny false teeth. I took her velvet soft hand and led her to the dance floor. She put her white-haired head against my chest.
When the dance ended, she smiled at me again and said, “Coco Duro,” the nickname she had for me as a kid. Then she smacked me in the arm because she couldn’t reach my head anymore.
When I got back to the table the dark woman was gone.
Maybe she’d left to make a phone call again. I was walking to the door, caught myself in the mirror and put up a hand to fix my hair, when this guy bumped into me. Dark, wraparound shades. I don’t like not being able to see a man’s eyes. You can’t see if you can trust him. He was swarthy. Jet-black hair, combed back. Funny thing was the man’s forehead — it was deformed. Flat from his eyebrows to his hairline. And there were thin scars up and down his dark cheeks. The guy caught me looking, his shades turned toward me, but he said nothing, I said nothing, and that was it.
I went back to my hair, making sure the pointed peak I kept on the top was just right. The gel was holding fine.
Outside there was no sign of the woman. Her loss.
The rest of my night I drank enough to feel good, then drove my aunts back to my aunt’s house, where I was staying. It rained lightly, making the dark road shiny and slick. I saw four more dead dogs. More guts. More tongues. Or maybe they were the same dogs. The women gossiped in the car — what a nice ceremony, the food could’ve been better, et cetera.
Back at my aunt’s house, in the middle of the night, when everyone else was asleep, I got up and went to the living room, found a bottle of dark rum, and filled a glass with it. I tipped my head back, drained it, burped, and went back to bed.
Outside the drizzle had turned into steady rain.
In the morning, I sat at the kitchen counter in front of a plate filled with eggs, plátanos, half a mango, and buttered bread. Café con leche, orange juice. “Come más,” my Tía Lidia said, and before I could answer I got another piece of bread, another fried egg, another mango half. My head was buzzing, my stomach turned, but I kept eating.
“I gotta get ready to go to San Juan,” I told them.
My aunt gave me more bread and told me about a tropical storm warning. She was happy my cousin had flown to Mexico that morning for the honeymoon. The warning could turn into a hurricane. She told me I shouldn’t travel even though the rain had stopped.
“I’m meeting a friend,” I said in English. I was too sour to try Spanish. “And I got to get a little blackjack and poker in while I’m here. Besides, there’s not going to be no hurricane.”
I went to pack my duffel bag. I wanted to get moving before it started to rain. Through the bars on the window, I saw a taxi park in front of the house. A woman got out. It was my cousin’s friend Itaba. Tía Lidia walked out to talk to her.
I was twisting the lid onto my flask when Tía Lidia came in the room. “La amiga de Carmen necesita ir a San Juan.” Since I was going to San Juan today, I could give her a ride, no?
“She can’t take a cab?”
Cabs are very expensive, my aunt said.
I could see I didn’t have a choice.
“Y ella es muy bonita. Parece india.”
“Yeah. Well, I got to get ready first.”
It’s good to make new friends, my aunt said. You need someone to take care of you, she said.
“I have a friend waiting for me in San Juan.”
Not that kind of friend, my aunt said.
I took my sweet time with my hair, getting it just the way I like it, and trimmed my beard to make sure it was the same thinness around my jaw. It’s hard to get it right sometimes. Then I splashed on some cologne and I was good to go.
When I came out, Itaba was sitting in the patio with a big purse and that gift bag.
“Tantas gracias por hacer ésto,” she said, standing up and smiling this big smile at me. I walked past her and went to the car.
When we got into the little vehicle, I noticed that she smelled good, not sweet like perfume, but like trees, like soil, like wood. For some reason it made me hungry.
“Tu huele bien,” I said.
At first she looked at me like I’d said something nasty. Then she smiled and thanked me. So I played it off, stayed quiet.
We drove like that for five minutes before she started talking.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“So you speak English?”
“Of course,” she said. “Look, I promise not to torture you anymore with my Spanish and you do not have to torture me anymore with yours.” She gave me that smile again, full of brilliant white teeth. I wondered if she bleached them.
“Funny lady. Very funny.”
“So what do you do?”
“You mean for a living? This and that.”
“Is that what you tell everybody?”
I could’ve told her I had gotten out of prison awhile ago and couldn’t find anyone who wanted to hire me. Not that I’m ashamed of that. I just didn’t think it was her business. “I do fine. I have money.”
“So why are you going to San Juan? To gamble?”
“I like to play cards, you know what I mean? And I’m meeting a friend.”
“A lady friend?”
“The best kind.”
“I’m sure you’ll have a good time.”
We were quiet for a little bit, then she said, “Listen, negrito, we first have to make a stop in Utuado.”