Now her sons were all around her and she was pregnant again.
“Who did she breed with?” Thomas Hudson asked the chauffeur.
“I don’t know.”
Mario, who came out with the sweater and gave it to the chauffeur, who took off his frayed uniform coat to put it on, said, “The father is the fighting dog in the village.”
“Well, goodbye, dogs,” Thomas Hudson said. “So long, Boy,” he said to the cat who came bounding down through the dogs to the car. Thomas Hudson, sitting in the car now, holding the cork-wrapped drink, leaned out of the window and touched the cat who rose on his hind legs to push his head against his fingers. “Don’t worry, Boy. I’ll be back.”
“Poor Boise,” Mario said. He picked him up and held him in his arms and the cat looked after the car as it turned, circling the flower bed, and went down the uneven gully-washed driveway until it was hidden by the hill slope and the tall mango trees. Then Mario took the cat into the house and put him down and the cat jumped up onto the window sill and continued to look out at where the driveway disappeared under the hill.
Mario stroked him but the cat did not relax.
“Poor Boise,” the tall Negro boy said. “Poor, poor Boise.”
In the car Thomas Hudson and the chauffeur went down the driveway and the chauffeur jumped out and unchained the gate and then climbed back in and drove the car through. A Negro boy was coming up the street and he called to him to close the gate and the boy grinned and nodded his head.
“He is a younger brother of Mario.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson said.
They rolled through the squalor of the village side street and turned onto the central highway. They passed the houses of the village, the two grocery stores open onto the street with their bars and rows of bottles flanked by shelves of canned goods, and then were past the last bar and the huge Spanish laurel tree whose branches spread all the way across the road and were rolling downhill on the old stone highway. The highway ran downhill for three miles with big old trees on either side. There were nurseries, small farms, large farms with their decrepit Spanish colonial houses that were being cut up into subdivisions, their old hilly pastures being cut by streets that ended at grassy hillsides, the grass brown from the drought. The only green now on the land, in this country of so many greens, was along the watercourses where the royal palms grew tall and gray, their green tops slanted by the wind. This was a dry norther, dry, hard, and cold. The Straits of Florida had been chilled by the other northers that had come before it and there was no fog and no rain with this wind.
Thomas Hudson took a sip of the ice-cold drink that tasted of the fresh green lime juice mixed with the tasteless coconut water that was still so much more full-bodied than any charged water, strong with the real Gordon’s gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow, and all of it tautened by the bitters that gave it color. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink.
The cork glass-holder kept the ice from melting and weakening the drink and he held it fondly in his hand and looked at the country as they drove into town.
“Why don’t you coast down here and save gas?”
“I will if you say,” the chauffeur answered. “But this is government gas.”
“Coast for the practice,” Thomas Hudson said. “Then you will know how to do it when it is our gas and not the government’s.”
They were down on the flat now where flower-growers’ fields ran off the left and on the right were the houses of the basket-weavers.
“I must get a basket-weaver to come up and mend the big mat in the living room where it is worn.”
“Sí, señor.”
“Do you know one?”
“Sí, señor.”
The chauffeur, whom Thomas Hudson disliked very much for his general misinformation and stupidity, his conceit, his lack of understanding of motors, and his atrocious care of the cars and general laziness, was being very short and formal because of the reprimand about coasting. With all his faults he was a splendid driver, that is, he was an excellent car handler with beautiful reflexes in the illogical and neurotic Cuban traffic. Also he knew too much about their operations to be fired.