We talked for a while, drying off as best we could, and suddenly she reached over and pulled me down on top of her. Make love to me, she said urgently.
I laughed and leaned down to bite her on the breast. She began to groan and jerk me around by the hair, and after a few minutes of this I lifted her onto the clothes so we wouldn’t get full of sand. The smell of her body excited me tremendously and I got a savage grip on her buttocks, pounding her up and down. Suddenly she began to howl: at first I thought I was hurting her, then I realized she was having some sort of extreme orgasm. She had several of them, howling each time, before I felt the slow bursting of my own.
We lay there for several hours, going at it again when we felt rested. All in all I don’t think we said fifty words. She seemed to want nothing but the clutch and howl of the orgasm, the rolling grip of two bodies in the sand.
I was stung at least a thousand times by mimis — tiny bugs with the jolt of a sweat bee. I was covered with horrible bumps when we finally dressed and limped back down the beach to where we had left Sala and his girl.
I was not surprised to find them gone. We walked out to the street and waited for a cab. I dropped her at the Caribe and promised to call the next day.
Three
When I got to work I asked Sala what had happened with his girl. Don’t mention that bitch, he muttered. She got hysterical — I had to leave. He paused. How was yours?
Fine, I said. We went out about a mile, then raced back.
He eyed me curiously, then turned and went to the darkroom.
I spent the rest of the day doing rewrites. Just as I was leaving, Tyrrell called me over and said I had an early assignment at the airport the next morning. The mayor of Miami was coming in on the seven-thirty flight and I had to be there for an interview. Rather than take a cab, I decided to borrow Sala’s car.
At the airport I saw the same sharp-faced little men, sitting by the window, waiting for the plane from Miami.
I bought a Times for forty cents and read about a blizzard in New York: Merritt Parkway closed. . . BMT stalled four hours. . . snowplows in the streets. . . the Man in the News was a snowplow driver with a Staten Island background. . . Mayor Wagner was up in arms. . . everyone late to work. . .
I looked out at the bright Caribbean morning, green and lazy and full of sun, then I put the Times away.
The plane from Miami arrived, but the mayor was not on it. After several inquiries I discovered that his visit had been canceled for reasons of health.
I went to a phone booth and called the news room. Moberg answered. No mayor, I said.
What! Moberg snapped.
Claims to be ill. Not much to write about. What should I do? I asked.
Stay away from the office, he said. There’s a riot going on — two of our scabs got their arms broken last night. He laughed. They’re going to kill us all. Come on in after lunch — it should be safe by then.
I went back to the coffee shop and ate my breakfast: bacon, eggs, pineapple and four cups of coffee. Then, feeling relaxed and stuffed and not particularly caring if the mayor of Miami was dead or alive, I strolled out to the parking lot and decided to visit Yeamon. He had given me a map to his beach house, but I was not prepared for the sand road. It looked like something hacked out of a Philippine jungle. I went the whole way in low gear, the sea on my left, a huge swamp on my right-through miles of coconut palms, past wooden shacks full of silent, staring natives, swerving to avoid chickens and cows in the road, running over land crabs, creeping in first gear through deep stagnant puddles, bumping and jolting in ruts and chuckholes, and feeling for the first time since leaving New York that I had actually come to the Caribbean.