Head Games, page 20
“Maybe you’re on to something,” Jim said.
“It takes a special kind of man to work that magic,” she said. She stood close and peered into Jim’s eyes, studying him – gauging his suitability as a worker of magic? “There is something there. Dreams. But dreams aren’t good enough. You should ask Santos for help. He’ll get Lisa back for you.”
She ran her hands down Jim’s arms and stopped at his watch. “I tell you what,” she said, closing her fingers over his wrist. “Leave me your watch. Santos needs something that has been in contact with Lisa, or at any rate in her presence.”
Jim was put off by the crudeness of her attempt to get more out of him than the money he had paid her. “You can have the watch if you want it,” he said negligently and took it off.
“It’s a good magnet,” she said, setting the watch down on the table, “but he’ll need something more personal. Hair from your crotch maybe.” She stepped back. “Take your pants off.”
Was he getting an extra treat in return for the watch? Jim lowered his pants and stood by the bed like a Victorian schoolboy waiting for a spanking. She rummaged in a cloth bag and came up with a pair of nail scissors. She sat down on the bed in front of Jim, made him stand close to her, and started cutting the hair in a square around his penis. A nervous current ran through Jim. He felt endangered under the knife. What if Asu’s ironic smile had a tinge of sadism, what if cutting and maiming was a trivial pastime of hers? But Asu snipped with earnest concentration and put the hair away in a plastic bag.
“Don’t move,” she said when she was done with the clipping. She got up and returned with a shaver, one of those pink plastic ones for women, and began running it over the clipped area. The blade was dull. Jim could feel it tugging on his skin.
“Put soap on it,” Jim said to her.
“No, no soap. No aftershave. You’ll have to suffer a bit for your Lisa,” she said, holding his penis upright, gripping it firmly. “Looks like you want it a second time.” Jim doubled over and came into her hand.
She stoically wiped off and put away the shaver and the plastic bag containing the flocks of his pubic hair. Jim would have liked to lie down on the bed and recover, but she wouldn’t allow it. “Time’s up,” she said and smacked him with the flat of her hand. “I’ll give
Santos the stuff. We’ll see what he can do for you.”
WHEN MAUREEN CAME TO CATAMARCA for the winding-up operation, there were no polite kisses on the cheek. They shook hands and acted collegial. They pretended they had never seen each other naked. During the drive out to the site, they kept to business talk, discussed handing over the project to the Argentine authorities, the signing-off ceremony, Jim’s return to Toronto in two weeks.
“I read the announcement,” Maureen said. “You’ll be in charge of Foreign Projects. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” Jim said in the same hearty tone. Cheerful certainty was a must among people connected on the company flow chart. In his new job at Head Office, Maureen would be reporting to him. “I think I’m ready to get out of Argentina. Preferably before Maggie Thatcher declares war. You heard about the incident on Georgia Island?”
“It was on the news,” Maureen said. “You really think they’ll fight over a couple of remote islands with sheep farms? It’s absurd.”
Three days earlier a band of hired thugs had raised the Argentine flag on one of the Falkland Islands. Jim’s colleagues were cynical. Galtieri, the new head of the junta, wanted action to distract people from the economic crisis and get the protest marches off the front page news. In Catamarca Jim had seen a truckful of young men in army fatigues, waving Argentine flags and chanting: Las Malvinas son Argentinas. It was considered a provocation now to refer to the islands by their English name as Falklands. The government rag made a great deal of an incident, in which someone had pulled an English atlas from a bin in a secondhand bookstore, crossed out “Falkland Islands” and scrawled “Malvinas” over it. At the hotel, the ex-pats tried to speak Spanish only. At the sound of English, heads turned. An end-of-era feeling had overtaken Jim’s nostalgia.
The conversation in the car died. Maureen clammed up. There was nothing more to say about the Falkland crisis. It was a two-hour drive to site, and already they were in danger of running out of casual talk.
“Where are you going to live when you are back in Toronto?” Maureen said, starting up again, moving into the semi-private sphere. “Have you made arrangements yet?”
“The company is going to put me up in a hotel for a couple of weeks. I’ll probably rent an apartment. Ultimately I’d like to buy a house.”
“Right,” Maureen said approvingly. “The thing is to invest in real estate. I’ve done really well with the house I bought from Don.”
“Maybe I should phone him up when I get to Toronto and see what’s on the market,” Jim said.
“Don?” Maureen said. Something caught in her voice, a breath of embarrassment. “Don passed away last month,” she said. “He never recovered from the stroke last year. I thought you knew.”
Her words entered Jim’s brain like a homing pigeon. He realized that he’d kept a niche for the news of Don’s death ever since Asu had declared him dead.
“No, I didn’t know,” he said. “We weren’t that close.”
“Stan Harrison – a colleague of Don’s, got in touch with me after he had the stroke. He said he was looking after Don’s clients, temporarily. As it turned out, permanently. I should give you Stan’s business card.”
Jim’s mind was free-ranging. He had slowed down. Cars were passing him. He forced his eyes back to the tarmac. Keep your eyes on the road, he told himself. He replayed Maureen’s words: something about a real estate friend, Stan somebody, whose business card she was offering him.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll give him a call,” and switched back to the news of Don’s death. “I wonder how his girlfriend is taking it.” He was afraid of saying Lisa’s name in case it induced craziness and made him veer off the road.
“Lisa you mean? They got married. Don was in a nursing home by that time. Stan asked me to go with him to the so-called wedding. He was the best man. It was pathetic. A wedding in a nursing home, can you imagine?”
Imagine? Jim had visions of Gothic darkness, the smell of carbolic acid. Don lying on a bed, sheets pulled up to his chin, only his face is visible, his wasted forehead, his waxy cheeks.
“Not that there was anything wrong with the nursing home,” Maureen was saying. “In fact, the lobby looked like a Holiday Inn, soothing pastel art on cream-coloured walls, that sort of thing. But the room was what you’d expect in a nursing home: institutional furniture, medical equipment. Depressing. And Don was a vegetable. The whole ceremony was a farce.”
Enter Lisa, wearing a hip-hugging mini and hot pink top, Lisa occupying Jim’s brain. She still had the same effect on him, still managed to break through the carapace of his rational mind with her sexy smile and her come-on look. It happened every time Lisa’s name came up. Jesus, was he still in love with her? He had no time to answer the question. Maureen broke into the scene playing in his head.
“Apparently they signed all the papers and made all the arrangements before Don had the stroke,” Maureen said, and Lisa jumped right back on Jim’s stage, in a bridal gown. “Lisa was pregnant, you know, and so they went through with the marriage. She had a baby girl last July.”
The scene in Jim’s head fractured and broke into a thousand tiny pieces. He had no courage to pick them up. He had nothing to model the new Lisa on. He had no mock-up for a pregnant Lisa, for a Lisa mother. For a moment he thought, is it possible that the child, that I – ? But no, that didn’t work out timewise. He couldn’t have fathered the child. Lisa came into view again, Lisa the Widow. Funereal images swamped Jim’s mind. A funeral scene was shaping up over Maureen’s chatter, superimposing black crepe over bridal bouquets. Curtain. Bring down the curtain on the Lisa scenes!
Jim turned off the highway. The winding road to the dam required his full attention.
“I suppose it was a blessing that he died,” Maureen said. “Can you imagine being married to a vegetable? Don was in a coma for months, a year, in fact. Stan and I went to the funeral. There was a service before the cremation. You should have seen Don’s wife. Widow, I mean. Lisa. She was wearing this black knit dress, a mini, so tight it left nothing to the imagination. Alright, she’s got the figure for it, but at a funeral! And the way she carried on, restless as if she couldn’t wait to get out, tossing her hair, looking around. She didn’t look grief stricken to me. I guess she’ll be on the dating scene in no time. There was this flower arrangement on top of the casket and a black and white photo of a girl in school uniform. Don’s daughter, Stan said. She died in an accident when she was seventeen. Apparently Don never got over it. The photo was his prize possession. At the end of the service we all watched the casket roll into the furnace, the retort I mean – the casket including the flower arrangement and the photo of the girl. Rather sinister, like father and daughter going to hell.”
“Bizarre,” Jim said. Especially the bit about burning Asu in effigy. Was that necessary? He didn’t know Lisa had a macabre vein.
The conversation lapsed, and he focused on the road again.
“If you decide to buy a house in Toronto,” Maureen said, “you should definitely give Stan a call.”
Stan’s name was coming up rather frequently in their conversation.
“Are you going out with him?” Jim said, and immediately corrected his lapse into familiarity. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s none of my business.”
A blush appeared on Maureen’s ivory skin. “That’s alright,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make a secret of it. But I’m not recommending Stan to you because I’m going out with him. Stan is good at what he is doing. He has his finger on the pulse of real estate. He’s made me a bundle selling the house.”
What did I ever see in Maureen? Jim thought. She’s all facts and figures. She has no sparkle, except for the reflection of her jewellery. Maureen was framed in gold: precious metal around her neck and dripping from her ears.
“By the way,” Jim said, “if the site manager suggests going out tonight, my advice is: leave the jewellery at home. There’s only one drinking hole, and it’s a dive. Maybe he won’t suggest it. It’s a rough place.”
“I can imagine. I’ve been told there is no hotel near the site. They are setting me up in a trailer for the night.”
After the meeting, Brian did suggest going out for a celebratory drink. Maureen heeded Jim’s warning, but the Disco Embalse had changed. It was a family restaurant now. The new owner had cut windows into the concrete, put in a patio and renamed the place El Pyramido. He was hoping to attract tourists.
“Nice place,” Maureen said to Brian at the end of the evening. They were in the parking lot. Brian was holding the car door for her.
“Glad you liked it,” he said.
“Jim told me it was a dive,” she said and looked at Jim accusingly as if she had caught him in a lie.
“It was at one point,” Brian said, “but it’s all a matter of supply and demand.”
He shut the door after Maureen and came around to Jim’s side, grinning. “The whores have moved on to the next construction site,” he said. “Love pitches his mansion in the place of excrement.”
JIM WANTED TO GO BACK to Asu and tell her: Santos was right after all. Don is dead. Or maybe he had another motive when he strolled through the aisles of the market, looking for her. He wanted to see Asu one more time before leaving Argentina. Just a chat, he told himself. Just a farewell. But the stall with the wooden statues was gone. In its place stood a table piled with jeans and ponchos. He asked the vendor about the wooden statues. She shrugged. No lo sé, señor.
Jim returned to the hotel, feeling cheated. He was restless, his brain addled by the heat of indeterminate longing. Snap out of it, he told himself. What do you want with Asu? There is no need to see her, to tell her about Don. She already knows that he is dead. But his mind did a dance of sideways dodging and came back to the main idea: he had to see Asu. No, he wanted to see Lisa, but Asu was the nearest thing to her. And at the drop of Lisa’s name, his mind went into a fantasy loop. The confusion spread, the desire hardened. He decided to look for Asu at her cousin’s house.
He got into his car and drove through the rainslicked streets glistening in the light of the streetlamps. The outskirts of the city were sodden and dead. There was no getting away from the damp, from the exhalations of desire. He could feel the rain on the back of his hands even inside the car. The moist air stuck to his skin.
At last, Asu’s casita appeared in the comet of the car’s headlights. He parked around the corner and picked his way across the yard, unsure of the welcome, ready to retreat if Asu was not alone. He saw the yellow gleam of a kerosene lamp through the strips of the plastic curtain. The main house was dark, shuttered as it had been during his first visit, but he had an uneasy feeling that someone was watching him from behind the slats. His footsteps sounded hollow on the wet, trampled grass. As he came up to the shed, he heard the voices of two men arguing, the rapid-fire exchange of angry words.
“No te vas a joder.”
“No te calentés, che.”
The second voice sounded familiar. The plastic strips were dancing and turning in the wind. Jim caught a glimpse of a wiry body. Santos. He ducked around the corner, flattened his back against the wall of the shed, and listened to the timbre of the men’s voices. The low rasp, that was Santos. The other man’s voice was loud and brash: “She was no good, I tell you. A crazy bitch. You tried to palm off a crazy bitch on me. Then your sister comes back with a gringo and insults me in front of everyone. Put on your helmet, she says, or you’ll lose your head. I don’t want your whore of a sister. Puta. Hija de puta.”
“Andate a la mierda!” Santos said breathlessly. “Asu is too good for you.” His voice was full of boiling, incommunicable pain, cracking with anger. Jim heard a scraping of chairs, the smack of flesh against flesh. The curtain swished. The ends of the plastic strips whipped the corner of the shed as the two men came plunging through the door, grappling each other like passionate lovers. Jim caught sight of their flushed faces, their ferocious bare-toothed grins inviting violence. They fell to the ground wrestling, Santos on top, holding a curly-haired man in a headlock, pinning his shoulder, pounding his body into the dirt. His opponent kicked back, scrambled up, grunted, and burrowed into Santos with a frenzy of flailing limbs.
There was a moment of breathless poise, then Santos fell back and collapsed on the grass. Jim saw a glint of steel – a knife, he realized as it hit the ground with a dull ring. The curly-haired man sprinted across the yard, vaulted the fence and was lost in the darkness of the field beyond. A motorbike roared into action and clattered down the street with an infernal blast. The noise faded to a tunnelling sound, an echoing beat, which Jim traced to his chest and recognized as his own pulse. It was a powerful drum beat that seemed to travel across the yard, reach Santos’ body, and wake in him an inarticulate groan. In the light coming from the shed, Jim saw him clutch his stomach and blood pushing up between his fingers, a dark unstaunchable flow. He saw him twist and shift into a different dimension, the cosmos of near-death. A wave of pity ambushed Jim and washed away all caution. He stepped out of the shadows and crouched down beside Santos, but his arms were too stiff to comfort the dying man, and his lips too frozen to call for help. Only his eyes were capable of movement, taking in minute details, the matted and trampled blades of grass beside Santos’ body, the curve of his parted lips, the tapering ends of his fingers grasping at his shirt as if to tug it off and expose the knife wound, the russet pattern of the blood stains on the fabric of his shirt, the sleeve pushed back from his wrists, revealing a watch. His own watch, Jim realized, the magic token he had given to Asu.
A rattling sound came from Santos’ throat, a venting of inner voices. His eyes fastened on Jim, glazed over, and melted into the darkness of non-existence. Jim kept kneeling beside the body, bent over as if in prayer, in meditation, but it was fear that arched his back, a sense of unspeakable peril. He had never witnessed death before. He wanted to take the watch off Santos’ wrist, remove any connection between himself and the dead man, but the thought of touching the body filled him with dread, took root in his veins, made his skin contract and his pores slam shut.
A long time passed, it seemed to Jim, before he was able to move again, to draw a level breath and look back at the shed. The plastic curtain had hung up on the rod and gave him an unobstructed view of the empty room with the grotesque funereal cross on the back wall. He turned and scanned the main house, hoping that Asu would appear at the door and explain the scene away, but the house remained shuttered. He got up on one knee at first, then jerked his body upright with a great effort, and walked stiffly across the yard, making himself walk to his car without looking back, step by step like a mechanical man. He drove to the hotel in a haze that admitted no coherent thought, only an unvaried sequence of images, a replay of the wrestling match and Santos on the ground with the lifeblood draining from his body, seeping into the earth.
Back in his hotel room, Jim checked his hands and his clothes for telltale signs of blood, the stigmata of the death he had witnessed, but the violence had left no mark on him, nothing to confirm that what he had seen was real. He washed up carefully nevertheless. He even scrubbed the soles of his shoes. He took off his clothes and soaked them in the bathtub in case they had been contaminated by the air in the yard where Santos had drawn his last breath.
The next morning and the day after, Jim checked the newspapers, studied the local news, read them line by line. Nothing about a murder. Perhaps a knifing in that dusty part of town was not worth a line in print.
