You bastard, Sala muttered. That girl hasn’t been here a day and you’re already talking about having whores crawl on you. He nodded wisely. You’ll get the syphilis — you keep on whoring and stomping around and pretty soon you’ll stomp in shit.
Yeamon grinned. Okay, Robert. You’ve warned me.
Sala looked up. Is she still asleep? How long before I can go back to my own apartment?
Soon as we leave here, Yeamon replied. I’ll take her on out to the house. He nodded. Of course I’ll have to borrow your car — too much luggage for the scooter.
Jesus, Sala muttered. You’re a plague, Yeamon — you’ll suck me dry.
Yeamon laughed. You’re a fine Christian, Robert. You’ll get your reward. He ignored Sala’s snort and turned to me. Did you come in on the morning plane?
Yeah, I said.
He smiled. Chenault said there was some young guy beating up an old man on the plane with her — was that you?
I groaned, feeling the web of sin and circumstance close down on the table. Sala eyed me suspiciously.
I explained that I’d been sitting next to an aged lunatic who kept trying to crawl over me.
Yeamon laughed. Chenault thought you were the lunatic — claimed you kept staring at her, then ran amok on the old man — you were still beating him when she got off the plane.
Jesus Christ! Sala exclaimed, giving me a disgusted look.
I shook my head and tried to laugh it off. The implications were ugly — a crazed masher and a slugger of old men — not the kind of introduction a man wants to make for himself on a new job.
Yeamon seemed amused, but Sala was plainly leery. I called for more drinks and quickly changed the subject.
We sat there for several hours, talking, drinking lazily, killing the time while a sad piano tinkled away inside. The notes floated out to the patio, giving the night a hopeless, melancholy tone that was almost pleasant.
Sala was sure the paper was going to fold. I’ll ride it out, he assured us. Give it another month. He had two more big photo assignments and then he was off, probably to Mexico City. Yeah, he said, figure about a month, then we start packing.
Yeamon shook his head. Robert wants the paper to fold so he’ll have an excuse to leave. He smiled. It’ll last a while. All I need is about three months –enough money to take off down the islands.
Where? I asked.
He shrugged. Anywhere — find a good island, someplace cheap.
Sala hissed. You talk like a caveman, Yeamon. What you need is a good job in Chicago.
Yeamon laughed. You’ll feel better when you get humped, Robert.
Sala grumbled and drank his beer. I liked him, in spite of his bitching. I guessed he was a few years older than I was, maybe thirty-two or -three, but there was something about him that made me feel like I’d known him a long time.
Yeamon was familiar too, but not quite as close — more like a memory of somebody I’d known in some other place and then lost track of. He was probably twenty-four or -five and he reminded me vaguely of myself at that age — not exactly the way I was, but the way I might have seen myself if I’d stopped to think about it. Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I’d felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion.
I hadn’t felt that way in a long time. Perhaps, in the ambush of those years, the idea that I was a champion had been shot out from under me. But I remembered it now and it made me feel old and slightly nervous that I had done so little in so long a time.
I leaned back in the chair and sipped my drink. The cook was banging around in the kitchen and for some reason the piano had stopped. From inside came a babble of Spanish, an incoherent background for my scrambled thoughts. For the first time I felt the foreignness of the place, the real distance I had put between me and my last foothold. There was no reason to feel pressure, but I felt it anyway — the pressure of hot air and passing time, an idle tension that builds up in places where men sweat twenty-four hours a day.