Sugarland

it. Strobe lights pounded on a packed dance floor inside. Packed, I saw, mostly with young women. The room had forty or fifty tables. Young women filled many of those, too, and still more stood lined up along the walls. They wore dresses, or skirts or slacks. They might have been nurses and secretaries out for the evening, trying to look smart.

     I didn't catch on right away. Because they really were young, a lot of them just teenagers. Because they really did look winsome and not at all wanton. In this case the local usage was apt; by their age and freshness they were not so much women as girls.

     A hand took my elbow and a female voice said with false delight, “You're a newcomer.”

     She was in her forties. Her hair was dyed the color of dark copper, and she had a beauty mark painted on her chin. By the time she gave me a second aggressive glance, I knew that I had been typed and appraised.

     Chan is my name, she said. Floor manager. The girls call me Mommy Chan.

     “You want a girl?” she said. “I'll get you a table, I'll find a nice girl to sit with you, good English. There's no charge for sitting and talking.”

     Then I understood why Collins hadn't left the hotel that first night.

     “If you want to go with the girl,” she said, “the fee is three hundred for a short time, six hundred until morning.”

     I thought, perfect. The best hotel in Bacolod is a brothel. Perfect.

     It shouldn't have surprised me. It definitely shouldn't have shocked me: me, eighteen years a cop. But somehow it snuck through and scratched me deep. That, on top of all the rest. Dozens of them, their youth and expectation available for the price of a steak dinner—perfect.

     Nonoy Paloma called my name before I could say anything

commando society. You give a command, you have to do it yourself.”

     “Most foreigners aren't comfortable on the haciendas,” Correon said. “They see just the surface. It bothers them. They don't understand. You must have context.”

     “Things are expensive over there,” Ferrar said. “In Las Vegas I met a prosty who wanted three hundred dollars to spend the night.”

     I thought that Correon had been trying to make a point with me, but he seemed to give up.

     “No bitch is worth that much,” he said.

     “She was blond. Her tits were huge. I never saw tits like that except in the magazines.”

     “She probably knew that,” Baby said.

     “You're right. She probably knew there wasn't a girl like her within three thousand miles of where I live.”

     “Did you enjoy yourself?” Correon said.

     “I tried to. But I kept thinking of all I could buy here for that money. Three hundred dollars, six thousand pesos. I pay my brigadier general six thousand a month. All the time I was pumping away I kept thinking, a blond bitch for one night, or a brigadier for a month. That spoiled it for me. It didn't seem right.”

     “Your brigadier general,” Correon said, “that's another waste of money.”

     “You pay him too.”

     “Not like that. It's nice to have friends in the military. But not for six thousand a month.”

     “What am I going to do? I need what he's got.”

     “That's your mistake,” Correon said. “You put yourself in a position where you need something from the bastard.”

     Baby said to me, “Julio keeps a platoon of private infantry on his hacienda.”

     Tossing it off like a cartoon caption in The New Yorker.

     “Almost two now,” Ferrar said. “Fifty more or less.”

     Penney broke in: “In my opinion this kind of sensationalism

     “A very great while,” Correon said. “In fact I don't remember the last time I saw an AK.”

     Correon let the bottle drip dry into his glass. He said a few words, and Nonoy got up and went away.

     Correon motioned to the girls on the dance floor, and said to me, “Do you see one you like?”

     “Naturally he does,” said Ferrar.

     “It's been a long hard day,” I said.

     “Christ. Another straight-backed pain in the ass. What is it with you Americans? Don't you know how to have fun? You visit my farm, I don't want you to give me any shit afterward.”

     “That's not what I'm here for,” I said.

     “I'm looking at you,” he said. “I see the way you're sitting, you've got your back up straight, like you want to keep your nose out of the garbage. You don't approve.”

     “Let yourself go,” Ferrar said. “You're not at home now. Nobody cares.”

     Chan came to the table. She leaned over the table while Correon and Baby and Ferrar made their choices. It took several minutes and much back-and-forth in Ilonggo. Then she left. She stopped at three tables, and twice more on the dance floor. Each time she said a few words, each time a girl went straight across the room and out a side door. Five of them.

     “Don't you like to dick around?” Ferrar said.

     “That's between me and the staff at the V.D. clinic,” I said.

     Correon's laugh began as a belch and ended in a startling roar.

     “Fair enough,” he said. “Just remember, when you're on my farm, bear in mind that dominion is a natural state. That's all I ask. You're an American. You should know that.”

     He pushed away from the table, and they got up and left me with Penney.

     He said, “Well done.”

· 12 ·

For once the telephone connection was clear. I could hear someone call Padilla's name in the Third Precinct house, a set of footsteps approaching across the floor, a low exchange in which I caught the word “Americano.”

     It was Sunday morning. Bembo sat beside me in the room and knit his forehead. His friend the police lieutenant had known of Padilla. A hard man, was the report. A career cop whose brother, Ramon, equally hard, was in the P.C.; or had been; both with a knack for pointed interrogation, specializing in subversives, that had landed them together on the Sparrows' hit list. Together no longer, though—it was Ramon who'd been shot down in the city plaza just a few days before.

     “Padilla,” said a voice on the telephone.

     “My name is Hart.”

     He gave a noncommittal grunt.

     “I want to meet you,” I said. “We need to talk.”

     “What do you want to talk about?”

     I guessed: “Lito Sanchez.”

     “What the hell do you mean?” he said, like someone who really didn't know.

     In my head I scrambled and reached.

     “Or the dead American,” I said.

     I heard long silence.

     “You should talk to Orlando,” he said finally. “It was Orlando's operation.”

     I reached some more: “You sure you want me talking to Orlando?”

     A silence even longer.

     He said, “Eight o'clock. Dee Tasty. Across the street from here. Dee Tasty.”

     I had never met Padilla, but when he came toward me I recognized a hard man. He was squarish, a short thick neck. He crossed the street with shoulders hunched, hands stuck in his pockets, eyes narrowed and lips clamped thin: like someone headed into a biting wind.

     I stood up at the table. Bembo had told me I shouldn't be here; Bacolod, he'd said, is no place to trust your fate to anonymous notes that arrive in the night. But he had come because I did. I walked a few feet to the counter in front of the barbecue grills, enough to show Padilla that he was dealing with me alone.

     The counter had five stools, all empty. I sat in the middle, facing Padilla as he came to me, with the street and the precinct house behind him.

     He stopped beside me and stood watching a cook turn halves of chicken over the coals. He looked once at Bembo, but one look seemed to be enough. He wasn't interested anymore.

     He picked up the way he had left it. “This was supposed to be fixed,” he said. This time he sounded defensive. He wore a sport shirt, loose. Below the bottom of the shirt, at the hip closest to me, I could see the end of a pistol barrel in a holster.

     “There are still a lot of questions,” I said. “An American gets killed, there's going to be questions.”

     “Orlando didn't expect an American. He was surprised that anyone else was there. The priest was in a chair, sleeping. We got him tied up and everything was okay. Then the American came out of the other room.”

     His voice became urgent.

     “Mon and I were in favor of getting out. Orlando said no, we had to have the priest. The American got pissed off, and Orlando hit him over the head and then, shit, what were we going to do? We didn't want to harm an American, you know that.”

     The chicken sizzled. Moths danced at the lights and drove berserk shadows.

     “For somebody who knows a lot, you don't know very much.”

     “I mean right now,” I said. Trying to recover; I had stubbed my toe, or worse. “We've been trying to get to Orlando this afternoon, we haven't been able to reach him.”

     “You're not with Socorro,” he said. He drew back, as if I might contaminate him. “I thought you were with Socorro, but Socorro knows how to find Orlando. Who are you?”

     The thick fingers of his right hand made scratching motions below the holster. I was suddenly aware of movement behind him, and movement at my own back, too. Things were happening. But Padilla stood close and I couldn't take my eyes off the hand and the scratching motions it made near his gun.

     “Who are you?” he said.

     Behind him a compact young man, maybe twenty, was taking big strides toward the counter. His eyes were locked on the back of Padilla's head.

     Bembo shouted, “Behind you.”

     He meant me.

     I swiveled to see another young man, gaunt-faced, taller than the first, coming my way.

     His right hand was under the bottom of his T-shirt.

     He strode, he pulled out a semiauto pistol. I felt the sickening dread of a bad dream made real.

     Two steps away he was slowing and straightening his arm and raising the gun. I watched. I watched.

     Bembo was back in my vision now. He was moving toward us. His right hand made a quick tipping motion, as if he were throwing back the last mouthful of beer from a mug. Something bright flashed. He was holding a knife.

     The gaunt-faced one noticed too late. He turned in a graceless pirouette as Bembo's blade made a brief, flat arc and slashed through his T-shirt, leaving torn flesh behind

· 13 ·

“Don't get the idea that I saved your life,” Bembo said. “They only wanted the second Padilla.”

     We were in my room at the Green Fields, so soon after the shooting that my ears still rang. The police had relieved me of the pistol. They had taken statements for a couple of minutes and let us leave.

     “I thought I was going to save your life,” he said. “Then it occurred to me that he probably wasn't going for you at all, that they were both trying to kill Padilla. But by then I already had the knife out, so I cut the son of a bitch anyway. Once again my body moved faster than my mind. It's lamentable, especially at my age.”

     I stank of a sweat that seemed to have the odor of gunfire and adrenaline and blood. Grease from pig ribs still coated my fingers, and I still wanted to wash it off.

     “At any rate, you shouldn't take this personally. You were only a bystander. Maybe their employers are not interested in you at all. Or maybe they are interested, but they did not expect you to be there.”

     Their employers. I had already told Bembo what Padilla had said. The cops had picked up a .45 shell from near the body. I had recognized the pistol that the gaunt-faced gunman thrust toward me. A Browning Hi-Power; a nine-millimeter. One of the cops had laughed out loud when I mentioned ballistics tests. But I could guess that Ramon's killers had killed Benito, too. And Benito had said that Ramon hadn't been killed by Sparrows. Who does that leave?

     “Now Padilla,” Bembo said, “Padilla could take it personally.”

     Bembo was serene and unruffled. No more than five

nights like this one. My appetite for answers seemed pathetic.

     “Look what we've got so far,” I said. “I came here to find out about Lito and Collins. Collins, we've just about figured out what happened to him. Renegade cops killed him. A hit got mixed up, people are hit over here every day for all kinds of reasons, Collins was just unlucky. Like me tonight. Wrong place at the wrong time.”

     Bembo said, “In Negros it is easy to find oneself in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

     I said, “We've got no reason to believe that Lito is alive, except that once upon a time he was a little prick. Nothing else fits. People that knew him, they all believe he's dead. I mean, they really do believe it. They can't all be great actors. If he's alive, he's not just fooling us, he's fooling everybody else, too.”

     “What else do you need?” Bembo said.

     “Not a thing,” I said. “We'll go up to Lanao tomorrow, take a few pictures of the fire site, not that I doubt there was a fire, but I do have a boss.”

     “Will he believe you?”

     “He'll have to. 'Cause that's the way it happened.”

     “You'll be going, then.”

     “Not right away. I want to stick around a few more days.” I knew I could finesse another week out of Gilsa.

     “Ah. Vangie.”

     “I'd hate to bug out just when things are going pretty well. I'm not saying she's mad about me. Another week, though, then I go home, I write her some letters, call her—you never know.”

     “Our work is finished, however.”

     “After Lanao. Finished.”

     He didn't try to hide his relief.

     “Bembo,” I said, “you wanted to sign on for this.”

     “I had hoped to keep you out of trouble. Not help you make it.”

     “You could have quit any time.”

and a car. I said no to the car, yes to Nonoy. The hotel kitchen packed our lunches, and when Nonoy arrived we started up, he and I, Bembo and Franklin.

     It had the feel of a lark, pressure off. Bembo had called Manila, and his nephew the travel agent had booked my return. I was leaving for home in ten days. With the date set, I was suddenly aware of my dwindling time in the place. Negros probably would never be on the itinerary of any package tour, but it was foreign and far away, and I felt obliged to soak up what I could of it while I had the chance.

     I watched the scenery with a hit-and-run tourist's dutiful appetite for detail. Between Palo and Hermosa the lowlands gave way to rolling swells that lapped to the horizon. Coco palms rocketed into clear sky and flared exuberantly against the blue. Streams ran hard and cut deep; from an ancient steel bridge, I watched women squat at the edge of a gleaming stream, beating laundry against a stone. A water buffalo—Bembo called it a carabao— churned through mud like melted chocolate. Banana trees grew down in gullies, a deeper green than the cane, and the sun jumped off their shiny wide leaves.

     We didn't see anything of war. There were settlements, but they seemed small and sparse against the breadth of the land. Mostly there was the brown earth and the green cane and the blue sky, undiluted color.

     Beyond Hermosa the land buckled and rose, and we began to climb. The road got narrower. The pavement was broken. The world up here was darker, and more motley; trees grew thicker, papayas and mangoes and whole stands of bananas. The fields were still packed with high cane, draped over the hills, but it all seemed wilder than the flatlands below.

     Ten or fifteen minutes, we passed a sign that said we were entering Hacienda Paz. A couple of minutes later an unpaved spur jutted off the road. Nonoy pointed us down the twin ruts.

he'd grown up here. He and Vangie, too; I tried to imagine them crawling in the dirt. The gulf across the courtyard suddenly seemed an ocean wide, but Nonoy crossed it with a few deep strides, as a dog nipped at the heels of his loafers.

     He took the woman's right hand and bent and pressed the hand to his forehead. Then he hugged her. My auntie, he said when we followed him over; youngest sister of my mother. Children came out of nearby huts and took his hand the way he had taken his aunt's. Second cousins, he said, third cousins, cousins once and twice removed. For the first time since I'd met him, he looked happy and loose.

     I asked him about his parents.

     People don't usually stumble over that question, but it tripped Nonoy up, just enough that I noticed.

     “Both gone,” he said after a beat.

     “Brothers and sisters?”

     “One sister,” he said. “Living in Manila.”

     He had brought a brown paper sack to the hotel, held it beside him in the car, carried it across the courtyard. Now he opened it. It held ten or twelve smaller plastic bags of baked rolls and cookies. He gave one bag to his aunt and passed out the others.

     We drew a crowd. Most of them, when they weren't greeting Nonoy, were sneaking uncertain glances at me. Most were women and children and old people—the men were in the fields. They were all small, all thin. They wore rags, or what soon would be rags. Their shy smiles showed crooked and rotten teeth. I tried again to imagine Vangie here, and couldn't. So polished, so healthy.

     Nonoy disengaged himself from a couple of kids. Time for business, he said, and we followed him as he walked down narrow pathways between dwellings. We came out toward the barrio's back side, where the huts were fifteen or twenty feet apart.

     One space, between two coco trees, was wider than the

places have a door, three or four windows, you're not more than ten feet away from a quick escape. I can see how they'd catch fire, anything would do it, but I don't understand how somebody could get trapped inside.”

     Meldy must have followed it all, because she answered right away, emphatically.

     “Lito was extremely drunk,” Bembo said after her. “He came to visit Lanao around noon. It was Sunday. All the men were idle. Lito brought a number of bottles of rum, and he began to drink with quite a few of the men, his friends and acquaintances. They drank rum with coconut water all afternoon.”

     The ends of his mouth turned up. His brows rose.

     “Quite a tasty concoction,” he said, “rum with coconut water.”

     Meldy spoke some more, and I heard her disapproval. Bembo said, “After the rum was exhausted they obtained some tuba. That is a kind of coconut beer, fermented coco sap, the poor man's San Miguel. They drank until the tuba ran out, approximately at midnight. Everyone went to bed. Meldy's husband—Rafael—invited Lito to sleep at their hut, but Lito declined. He knew that Meldy was quite upset. Ran fetched him a sleeping mat and a mosquito net, and Lito went into the vacant hut. According to Rafi, Lito was so intoxicated that he was barely able to climb the three steps up to the hut.”

     “Drunk,” Meldy said firmly. Then she went back to Ilonggo.

     “When she saw the fire, she tried to rouse her husband, but he was slow to awaken. She yelled out the window, and some other neighbors awakened. Nobody could get close, however. The fire was too large. She hoped Lito had managed to escape, but when they called for him, there was no answer. In the morning the ashes were cool. The men went through them and found the body.”

     “In net,” a woman said from the crowd. Another said a few words of Ilonggo.

Bembo whispered in my ear. They edged closer and began to ask me questions. How tall are you? Are those your real teeth? What is your salary? Americans eat bananas? Americans eat rice?

     I was in the middle of an answer when a long wail rose from somewhere among the huts. The naked grief in the voice made me stop. The keening dropped and immediately rose again, even more wrenching. Nobody moved, nobody spoke, until it fell silent.

     When it did I said, “What is that?”

     Meldy spoke, and Bembo said: “A mother is mourning her son. He died last night.”

     Meldy said, “Vigilantes,” laboring over each syllable.

     “You have vigilantes here?”

     Nonoy said, “Sometimes they come.”

     “S.D.,” Meldy said. She spoke in Ilonggo, and I waited for Bembo to translate. But Bembo was mute.

     “She says they came in the middle of the night.” It was Nonoy speaking. He sounded almost bland. “The vigilantes were angry, and they shot up the family's hut. One of the bullets struck their only son. He was killed.”

     Meldy finished with a short phrase, and Nonoy said, “He was seven years old.”

     I said, “That's awful,” and Nonoy, offhandedly, said, “Do you want to see?”

     I didn't, but I heard myself say yes. The crowd shifted and began to move toward where the wailing had come, and we were up off the steps, following.

     They took us around the periphery of the barrio, almost to the other side. I heard a hammering, and then the people in front of me stopped and parted and revealed a man nailing the top of a small plywood coffin; I could make out the stencil marks of a packing crate under a coat of whitewash.

     The coffin was on a table between two huts. The man drove the nail with slight, careful taps. A woman stood beside him, wringing a handkerchief, absorbed in the

     I tried to fathom his terseness. He seemed detached, but I didn't believe it could be. Something lay beneath it: anger, I guessed. At what, at whom, I couldn't say.

     I heard a muffled jingling behind us, and a boy's voice said, “Hey Joe.”

     He was ten or twelve. His T-shirt was more holes than fabric, his bare feet were filthy. The jingling came from one of the plastic bags that had held Nonoy's baked goods. Now it was full of empty brass cartridge cases.

     The boy held up two of the shells and said “One peso, Joe. Souvenir.”

     I got a good look at them. I gave him twenty and took the bag.

     “From last night,” I said. He lifted his eyebrows. Yes.

     Some things you know on sight, when you've been around guns for a while. But I dug into the bag and pulled a casing out, just to be sure. I turned it upside down to look at the base.

     Stamped into the brass were several Oriental characters that had to be Chinese, and the numbers 7.62-39.

     “That is not from an Armalite,” Bembo said.

     “No, M-16 cases are longer than this, and the caliber's smaller, they're narrower in the neck.” I pointed to show him. “This one, this is from an AK-47.”

     I kept the one shell and gave the others to the boy. He scampered.

     The Cortina took us down the spur, toward the highway. None of us had anything to say. I felt myself detach from the barrio, the rawness and the misery receding. I was glad to be leaving, ashamed to be glad.

     At the highway we turned east, and after a few seconds Nonoy said, “The bungalow is close by. Let me show you.”

     “I'd rather get back to Bacolod,” I said.

     “It's very close. Right up the road. At least let me introduce you to the caretakers. That way, you'll have a place to stay if you come up here again.”

seen a power pole since we climbed out of Hermosa. There was a generator in the basement, Nonoy said; Luis likes his lights bright and his drinks cold. A few minutes later it cut in, thrumming somewhere under the house.

     After we ate I went to the edge of the patio. Nonoy and Bembo joined me. From there you could see the carpet of cane that lay between the knoll and Lanao. You could see the barrio itself, absurd little figures fretting among toothpick huts, quaint as a museum diorama.

     Some people seemed to be gathering. They were. They were gathering behind a white chip of a coffin set on four sets of shoulders, and the coffin was moving toward the spur road, in and out of view as it traveled between huts. The mother was right behind it, reaching up to touch it, her head thrown back.

     Up here it was a silent procession. The wailing of the mother didn't carry this far. It seemed so soon. Dead twelve hours and buried. But I realized, no undertaker, no embalming. Luis Correon hadn't even had time to buy a coffin.

     I fingered the brass hull in my pocket.

     “The S.D.,” I said, “the way I heard it, they were choppers. They were armed with machetes.”

     “That is correct,” Bembo said.

     “It used to be,” said Nonoy.

     That evening Vangie made me describe the man and the woman whose boy had been murdered. She wanted to know exactly where the hut was.

     “It could be the Estero family,” she said. “Or the Pacitas.”

     “I didn't hear any names. I could call Nonoy. He'd know.”

     “It doesn't matter. I'll be there tomorrow.”

     “What about school?”

     “I cleaned out my desk today. The term ended on Friday

     “What I want,” I said, “I won't get into that tonight. What I'll settle for, you let Bembo and me give you a ride home tomorrow.”

     I watched her catch a no on the lips. She held it and didn't say anything.

     “How else will you get there?” I said.

     “Jeepney.”

     “Jeepney,” I said. “You're going to have clothes, am I right? Clothes, personal items, a few books—what are you going to do, put everything in boxes and suitcases, tie 'em on top of the roof?”

     “One box, two suitcases.”

     “The jeepney stops out on the highway, you have to drag your stuff down the road to the village?”

     “Once in a while a jeepney comes direct. Otherwise, yes, that's how we do it. We manage.”

     “But tomorrow you don't have to. Tomorrow, just once, you can have it easy.” Before she could answer I said, “You don't have to show boundless enthusiasm. A simple yes will do.”

     I thought I saw some pleasure seep through around the edges of her eyes.

     She said “Thank you,” and “Yes.”

     The front desk clerk at the Green Fields caught me before I reached the stairs.

     “Sir, for you,” she said.

     She held out an envelope, plain white with J. HART in block letters.

     “When did this come?” I said.

     “Ah, sir, that is delivered, perhaps, one hour after you left this evening.”

     “Who brought it, do you remember?”

     “It was a boy from around here. He comes around trying to sell shoe shines, unauthorized. We're constantly throwing him out.”

evening, we'll have a couple of cold ones, we can shoot the shit then if you want.”

     “Now,” he said, more a plea than a demand.

     I said, “Where, here?” and got out of the way as he lurched into the room.

     He stopped and stood. For a few moments he looked around and paused at my clothes, shoes, luggage. I could almost see him adding me up.

     “Busy, huh?” he said.

     “They don't pay me to sit.”

     “Top-Siders,” he said, pointing to the shoes beside the bed. He pointed to his own and said, “Bally. Swiss.” Once again I got the sense of him racking himself into focus. “What have you been up to?” he said. The question didn't sound entirely casual, but I thought that might be the alcohol.

     “I went to the hacienda today.”

     “Looking for Lito,” he said dully. “Lito is dead.”

     “I think you're right.”

     “What does that mean? You're going home?”

     “In a few days.”

     “Lito is dead, what else?”

     “Is there supposed to be anything else?”

     He spread his arms: “Just asking.”

     Neither of us spoke. I wondered what he wanted, but I didn't wonder too hard. It's easy to get lost in the turns of boozy logic.

     “I'd kind of like to get back to sleep,” I said. “You want to get together tomorrow evening or the day after, any evening you want, I'll make plans.”

     He didn't seem interested. He almost didn't hear me, I think.

     “You don't have something against me, it isn't that?”

     “Absolutely not. I'm beat, that's all.”

     “Don't work yourself to death.” He said this as he wallowed toward the door. He got it open and went out and looked back in. “There's a lot of it going around.”

slab sides of a coco log. I carried the baggage in, stooping as I came through the door but banging my head just the same.

     The hut was like all the other huts I had seen in Lanao, which is to say, small and mean. Two rooms with bamboo floors, together about the size of my living room. I kept thinking to myself, Vangie grew up here. Trying to make it seem real. Grass mats, two stools and a bench, a small corner table where a chipped plaster Santo Niño stood. A lithographed Virgin with a gilt halo, Christ with a flaming heart, potted vines in the unscreened windows, some glass jars, a few cups and pots and plates, an earthenware water crock. Not much else. This was what made me uneasy about the barrio, the way existence was stripped to its rude elementals, laid open like a cadaver on an autopsy table, its feebleness exposed.

     “My mother,” Vangie said. “Rosita Flores.”

     She was a tiny, withered woman. I took the parched skin of her hand, gently, as if a heavy touch might crumble it. She wouldn't look straight at me, but nibbled with the corner of an eye, diffident, abashed, then turned away and went into the other room to pour me a glass of water from the crock.

     Vangie asked me to sit, and I hunkered on a stool. The thin bamboo slats of the floor bent under my weight. Through the gaps in the slats I could see hens pecking the earth below. Like the door, windows, and ceilings, the seat seemed about seven-eighths scale to me. Vangie looked at me spilling off the stool, and she smiled, and the smile rolled over into a grin that she couldn't contain. She put her hand up and laughed, the way she had the first time we met.

     “You,” she said with bemused wonderment. “Here.”

     When they knew I was there, friends and relations drifted through the hut most of the early afternoon, Vangie and I didn't get much chance to talk. For a while she sat across from me, while kids dashed between us, creaking

her. It's really who she is. Then she seems that much farther away. The distance is what bothers me.”

     “The distance doesn't seem to have gotten in your way. In fact you've vaulted all obstacles so far.”

     “You think so?”

     “If you only knew. She spent the day with you, didn't she? And rode in a car with you, too? Ah! To have come so far with a girl like that, in such a short time. Ah! A girl like that.”

     He closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the seat, and took on a look of happy admiration. He held it for a few seconds. Then the ends of his mouth turned down slightly, and the skin gathered above his brow, and he said, “How did she afford it, I wonder? The education.”

     “I understand the local college isn't expensive.”

     “Not by your standards, maybe, four or five hundred dollars a year. But for a family in the barrio—that's immense.”

     “A scholarship, maybe.”

     “There are a few scholarships available. Very few. The competition …” He shrugged. “She must have been one of the lucky ones. What good fortune. And then she finds you—yes, yes, she's definitely one of the lucky ones.”

     We drove into the city. They dropped me at the front of the hotel and he said, “You are all alone again.”

     “I'm used to it.”

     “We will have dinner tonight. We will imbibe and carouse. We will be two carefree bachelors out on the town.”

     “I thought you had plans.”

     “Plans can be changed.”

     “Not on my account. I'm fine, don't you worry.”

     His face took on sour angles.

     “Constant solitude is bad for body and soul,” he said. “You must get that girl.”

     “I'm trying.”

     “Tomorrow night we will have dinner, yes? We will