“Good. The hell with her. We won’t speak about her.”
“Please, Tom. You know I think she is very beautiful. She is. Really. Pero no es mujer para ti. But let us not speak against her.”
“Right.”
“Tell me another happy story. It doesn’t even have to have love in it if it makes you happy to tell it.”
“I don’t think I know any happy stories.”
“Don’t be like that. You know thousands. Take another drink and tell me a happy story.”
“Why don’t you do some of the work?”
“What work?”
“The goddamned morale building.”
“Tú tienes la moral muy baja.”
“Sure. I’m well aware of it. But why don’t you tell a few stories to build it up?”
“You have to do it yourself. You know that. I’ll do anything else you want me to. You know that.”
“OK,” Thomas Hudson said. “You really want another happy story?”
“Please. There’s your drink. One more happy story and one more drink and you’ll feel good.”
“You guarantee it?”
“No,” she said and she began to cry again as she looked up at him, crying easily and naturally as water wells up in a spring. “Tom, why can’t you tell me what’s the matter? I’m afraid to ask now. Is that it?”
“That’s it,” Thomas Hudson said. Then she began to cry hard and he had to put his arm around her and try to comfort her with all of the people there at the bar. She was not crying beautifully now. She was crying straight and destructively.
“Oh my poor Tom,” she said. “Oh my poor Tom.”
“Pull yourself together, mujer, and drink a brandy. Now we are going to be cheerful.”
“Oh, I don’t want to be cheerful now. I’ll never be cheerful again.”
“Look,” Thomas Hudson said. “You see how much good it does to tell people things?”
“I’ll be cheerful,” she said. “Just give me a minute. I’ll go out to the ladies and I’ll be all right.”
You damned well better be, Thomas Hudson thought. Because I’m feeling really bad and if you don’t quit crying, or if you talk about it, I’ll pull the hell out of here. And if I pull the hell out of here where the hell else have I got to go? He was aware of the limitations, and no one’s Sin House was the answer.
“Give me another double frozen daiquiri without sugar. No sé lo que pasa con esta mujer.”
“She cries like a sprinkling can,” the barman said. “They ought to have her instead of the aqueduct.”
“How’s the aqueduct coming?” Thomas Hudson asked.
The man next to him on his left at the bar, a short, cheerful-faced man with a broken nose whose face he knew well but whose name and whose politics escaped him said, “Those cabrones. They can always get money for water since water is the one great necessity. Everything else is necessary. But water there is no substitute for and you cannot do without some water. So they can always get money to bring water. So there will never be a proper aqueduct.”
“I’m not sure I follow you completely.”
“Sí, hombre. They can always get money for an aqueduct because an aqueduct is absolutely necessary. Therefore they cannot afford an aqueduct. Would you kill the goose that lays the golden aqueduct?”
“Why not build the aqueduct and make some money out of it and find another truco?”
“There’s no trick like water. You can always get money for the promise to produce water. No politician would destroy a truco like that by building an adequate aqueduct. Aspirant politicians occasionally shoot one another in the lowest levels of politics. But no politician would so strike at the true basis of political economy. Let me propose a toast to the Custom House, a lottery racket, the free numbers racket, the fixed price of sugar, and the eternal lack of an aqueduct.”
“Prosit,” Thomas Hudson said.
“You’re not German, are you?”
“No. American.”
“Then let us drink to Roosevelt, Churchill, Batista, and the lack of an aqueduct.”
“To Stalin.”
“Certainly. To Stalin, Central Hershey, marijuana, and the lack of an aqueduct.”
“To Adolphe Luque.”