“I just hate to see anyone bullied.”
“I promise you, this whole business she’s telling you, it’s got a light coating of slime on it. Maybe she doesn’t intend for you to get involved. Maybe she knows the whole thing sucks the big old donkey dick. I don’t know. But it’s not our business. So let’s just walk away.”
I stood quiet for a moment. I looked at Leonard leaning against the tree. He wouldn’t be much help anyway. Not by tomorrow. Did I really need to run off and help Beatrice and her father pay a debt that wasn’t mine? She wasn’t even my woman. Not really. She had said so herself.
“You know what, Leonard? I’m gonna fool you. I’m gonna do just what you say. For once. You’re right. This isn’t our problem.”
15
Early next morning it was very humid and I awoke sweaty. I had been given a pallet on the floor in the room where Leonard slept in the bed. Beatrice had slept on a pallet in the kitchen, and the old man had slept in her bed.
In the middle of the night I awoke to see her standing at the open doorway of the room where Leonard and I slept. She wore a thin white thigh-high nightgown. Her legs were dark and sexy in the shadows. She smiled when she realized I was looking at her. I could smell her perfume from where I lay. It smelled dry and earthy.
I got up, she took my hand. We went to her pallet in the kitchen. Beatrice was soft and sweet and I only thought of Brett a little.
Before daylight, I returned to the room where Leonard lay wide awake.
“You’re so bad,” he said.
“You said it,” I said, and lay down on my pallet and went to sleep.
It wasn’t a good sleep. When I awoke I was exhausted and my bones felt as if they had been sawed up, put in a blender, then poured back into my body. I was sweaty. I rose and wrapped up my blankets and pillow and put them on the bed next to Leonard. Who, of course, was snoring like a man who had just won the lottery.
I slowly moved my body, heard my knees and ankles and hips pop. I got up and limped about. I didn’t find Beatrice.
The old man was in the kitchen. He was on his crutches by the stove. The kitchen smelled of coffee and something baking. The aroma filled my head and made my stomach growl.
“I am baking some bread for breakfast,” Ferdinand said. “I have some butter. We can eat it together. Maybe your friend will be hungry then. Is he doing better?”
“Much better, thanks to you. He ought to be up and around today.”
“It was not too bad a wound. He lost some blood. That was the most of it. The blood. I wish I had a steak to feed him. Steak is good when you lose blood. I know a man down the road who owes me a goat. Perhaps later we can get him to give me the goat and we can butcher it and cook it. It is not a steak, but it is meat.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “Where is Beatrice?”
“She has gone into the town,” Ferdinand said. Like Beatrice, I loved hearing him talk. It was musical even when he spoke English. He spoke nearly perfect English. But the way he emphasized or accented certain words made it sound so unique. I liked the way he looked too. The way I would have thought Hemingway’s Santiago must have looked in The Old Man and the Sea.
“She said she will come back for you,” Ferdinand said.
I was thinking about the boat gig she told me about. What had happened to that? I couldn’t help myself, I said, “Not to meddle, but didn’t she tell me she had an important job that the two of you were to do today?”
“You are right. We are supposed to do a job. I have told her I cannot. Even though we must and it is important. We cannot. She has gone to tell the men we cannot and that we must delay the job if they will delay. Otherwise, no job. Did she tell you the job?”
“Very little,” I said.
“I would like to do the job. It pays well, but I cannot. This is the first time in twenty-five years I have been injured that I do not fix it myself. Like I fix your friend.”
“You did a good job.”
“I am too old. I cannot fix myself. I cannot deal with it the way I once did.”
“No reason to.”
“I do a lot of things, allow a lot of things now that I would not allow before. I am nowhere the man I once was.”
The old man’s gaze took a position over my shoulder. I turned and saw Leonard shuffling in. He found a chair and sat.
Leonard said, “I don’t know if I thanked you properly or not, sir. But thank you. You did us both a great favor. You’re good with that machete.”
“The machete was part of my life growing up. For work, for play, and for fighting.”
“Play?” Leonard asked.
“Play fighting. We fought using the flat of the blade. The art of machete fighting is nearly lost, my friend.”
“I can see that,” Leonard said.
The old man smiled.
When the bread was done it came out flat and blackened in spots. We put some real butter on it and had coffee. It wasn’t a gourmet meal, but it wasn’t bad either.
We sat around the table and talked about this and that, the weather, life, women. I didn’t mention Beatrice, of course, but from the way the old man looked at me, it was obvious he knew what his daughter and I had been doing. Once he stared at me long enough and hard enough I added too much sugar to my coffee.
When we finished all of that coffee, he brewed us more and we drank that, and by noon he had found a bottle of wine and was drinking heavily from that.
Neither Leonard nor I touched the wine.
About two o’clock Ferdinand passed out in his chair and Leonard and I put him in his bed, took off his shoes, and propped a pillow under his head.
“I like the old bastard,” Leonard said. “He tells good stories.”
“He’s worried,” I said. “He’s trying to put his mind on other things.”
“There you go worrying about other people’s problems again.”
“You said you like him.”
“I said I like him. I didn’t say I wanted to raise him. We get home, I’ll buy you your own old man. Better yet, you can take care of me. Hold my balls up while I wash.”
“That’ll be the day.”
We went back to the kitchen and got the last of the coffee. We had already gone through two pots, and now, with another cup of coffee poured up, I felt as if I might be able to levitate, in an agitated sort of way, of course.
There were a couple of chairs on the front porch, so we went out there and sipped our coffee. It was hot outside and the coffee made us sweat twice as bad.
We hadn’t been out there long when we saw a dust cloud coming from the south, a red clay swirl against a bright hot sky. Pretty soon, out of the cloud, came Beatrice in the van. When she braked to a stop, the dust continued on, as if it had disgorged her. It passed over the house and made us duck our heads and cough. When I looked up there was a coating of it over what remained of my coffee. I leaned out of my chair, past the edge of the porch, and poured it in the dirt.
Beatrice practically leaped from the car. Her hair was up. She wore jeans and an oversized red shirt with white deck shoes. There was a sweat line around her neck and sweat blooms under her arms. She saw us on the porch, sauntered over a little too casually.
“How are you this morning?” she asked.
We both answered in the affirmative.
