As he had first laid eyes on her, so had she—without at the time knowing—laid hands upon his heart. In a phrase, he had fallen, abjectly and completely. And he didn't even know her name.
In his dream, Hennessey again watched the dance, again pushed his way through the crowd, again steeled himself for a very informal self- introduction.
The dream Linda, as she had so many years before, smiled warmly . . . friendly . . . confident as only beautiful young women are confident. The brash gringo had a certain something. She admitted as much to herself.
They walked as in a dream and the walk was a dream. "I am going to marry you someday," Hennessey said. "You and only you."
Linda had scoffed. "You just met me. We haven't even been properly introduced."
"No matter," he answered. "You and only you."
"You are so sure? What makes you think I would marry you? Besides, I am only seventeen."
"No matter. The girl is mother to the woman. I will wait." He seemed very certain.
She laughed, white teeth flashing in the sun. "How long will you wait, brash gringo?"
"Forever . . . if I must," he answered seriously.
"Forever is a very long time," she countered.
"For you, and only you, I would wait 'forever.'"
Young Linda inclined her head to one side. Her eyes narrowed, judging, studying. "Hmm . . . perhaps you would at that."
A face rapt with amusement turned suddenly serious. "Do you smell something?"
Hennessey's nose wrinkled. He sniffed. "Smoke. From where?"
He and Linda looked downward at the same time. "Oh," she said in surprise.
The hem of Linda's green-embroidered pollera was on fire, the fire racing up and out. Hennessey knelt to try to beat the flames out with his hands. The fire raced on, ignoring his efforts. She began to scream as the flames reached her skin. "Please help me," she cried. "Please."
For all Hennessey's thrashing hands, the personal inferno spread. His hands turned red, then began to blister. The blisters broke. His hands began to char. All the time he never stopped trying to put out the flames.
Linda screamed with agony, her cries cutting through Hennessey's heart like a knife.
Hennessey looked up. The girl was a mass of flame. Fire leapt from her hands to her head. Hair crackled. Gold and silver ran like water. The flames began to consume her face.
Ignoring the fire and the pain, Hennessey wrapped his arms around the girl, hands still beating frantically to put out the fire that was eating her alive. The fire must have eaten its way inside her as well, for her eyes—once brown and warm—turned red, hot and then burst like overripe grapes.
Still screaming, Hennessey sat bolt upright in his bed. He wept for a little while, as quietly as he was able. Then, to the sound of
antaniae
outside the house calling "
mnnbt
. . .
mnnbt
. . .
mnnbt
," he walked to the liquor cabinet and grabbed a bottle. He didn't bother taking a glass.
Ciudad
Balboa, 13/7/459 AC
Linda's family had volunteered en masse to drive him to the airport outside Ciudad Balboa so that he could catch the first plane— airships made the run, as well, but were just too slow—to First Landing and, perhaps, push the authorities to find the bodies. Though he'd appreciated the offers, he'd declined. The sympathy of both parents, all twenty-two aunts and uncles—not including those by marriage—and one hundred and four legitimate first cousins had quickly gone from warming to oppressive. They'd meant well, he knew, but seeing every face around him in perpetual tears had come to make things worse, if that were possible.
It had been good to drive, to have to concentrate on something besides his murdered family. Even the mind-diverting task of ducking the larger potholes was welcome. Through the little towns along the highway that led from the San Jose frontier in the east to the Yaviza Gap to the northwest, he drove slowly and carefully. At the larger towns he would stop sometimes, gas here, lunch there. Once he stopped to take in a view of the
Mar Furioso
that he and Linda had once enjoyed together. That had been painful. Finally he came to the great bridge that led over the bay to the city. He almost smiled at a particular memory of the bridge. Almost, not quite.
The city had changed since he had first seen it. It was still clean, remarkably so for a large metropolis in Colombia Central. But the buildings had grown to the sky over the last fifteen years. He looked up at them briefly, then turned his eyes back to the road as unwelcome thoughts invaded his mind.
Though much had changed, much was the same. Driving through
Ciudad
Balboa's streets he was cut off, tailgated, honked at and cursed with friendly abandon. Pretty girls walked the sidewalks and the parks. Young men looked, watched, pursued. Food and flowers wafted on the breeze, competing with the sea.
Emerging along the coastal road,
Avenida del Norte,
Hennessey almost managed to enjoy the fresh sea breeze off the high tide- covered beach and mud flats. To his left he passed the
Restaurante Bella Mar
, where Linda had taught him to appreciate sea food for the first time in his life. To his right he smelled the flowers of Parque Prado. He came at length to the Hotel Julio Caesare, arguably the best hotel of any real size in Ciudad Balboa, almost certainly the most ornate.
After a bellhop had unloaded the bags, a red uniformed valet took his car and parked it in the patrolled garage. Hennessey took a receipt in return and, followed the bellhop through marble and gilt and gracefully hanging palm fronds to the front desk to register.
He planned to spend a few days at the hotel, using it as a base while he waited for flights to the Federated States to recommence. Nothing was allowed to fly anywhere near the FSC at the moment and none could say when air traffic would resume. It was possible that airship service would begin before fixed wing did, though most thought this unlikely under the circumstances.
As it turned out, it would be several days.
He spent his evenings, and evening came early this close to the equator, drinking in the bar
cum
disco on the ground floor of the hotel. A wretched dancer—Hennessey described himself as the worst dancer in the entire history of human motion—he still enjoyed looking at pretty girls on the dance floor. He enjoyed it, that is, so long as none of them reminded him too much of his wife. This wasn't a problem, generally, since most of the women in the disco were light skinned. Though of a quite prosperous family, Linda had been very mixed-race and rather dark. Since the Julio Caesare was expensive enough to be only for either the well to do (or less moneyed cosmopolitan progressives, or Kosmos, who slurped lavishly at the public and donative troughs), there were few women of plainly
mestiza
backgrounds. None of these had been quite pretty enough to bring forth painful memories.
His first night at the hotel a few women, either too insensitive to pick up on Hennessey's pain or kind hearted and sympathetic enough to wish to relieve the pain if possible, approached him. It wasn't difficult for Hennessey to tell the difference. The former he sent packing with few words. The latter he spoke to as much as they might care to speak, or as much as he could stand to.
The second night in the city a pair of women, a tall and light one and a slightly shorter dark one, sat down not quite beside him. It was the darker one who broke the ice. She said her name was Edielise. Hennessey didn't catch the last name and didn't really much care to. He answered her questions, asking only enough of his own for politeness' sake. He covered his reticence by taking another drink whenever the girl seemed about to say something that might call for a thoughtful response.
The other girl, who remained silent throughout the conversation, thought,
What a typically arrogant gringo
.
Here Edi is trying her best to be polite and all he can do is nod and grunt. He's hardly even responding at all
. Hennessey and the darker girl had been speaking English the whole time. Pushing her own drink away, the lighter of the two said, in Spanish, although she too spoke excellent English, "Come on Edi, this gringo is too dull and stupid to waste time on."
Hennessey, who also spoke quite good Spanish, answered quickly, "Maybe you're right. I might be dull and I'm probably stupid too. Mostly, though, I'm just tired, drunk, and sad."
A little angry at her comment, and a little drunk as well, Hennessey told her why he was as he was. "You see, my wife and three little children were killed two days ago, in First Landing in the Federated States."
He delivered the words with the kind of apologetic tone that sounds like "it's all my fault" but makes the hearer feel that it is entirely their fault. Then, while the two girls sat dumbfounded, Hennessey excused himself and left for his room. He didn't feel any better. It was cruel, pointlessly so, and worse, he knew it.
When Hennessey reached his room he was already cursing himself for being a boor.
It wasn't their fault
,
he thought.
They were just trying to be civil. Tomorrow maybe I'll go to Cristobal. I'm not fit for civilized company right now.
After Hennessey left, the taller, lighter girl—her name was Lourdes Nuñez-Cordoba—stayed in the disco for a long time feeling very small, very dark, and very ashamed.
Lourdes was only twenty-four, slender and pretty enough, too. She looked even younger; she had lived a somewhat sheltered life. She'd never known anyone who had so much real hurt in his voice as that gringo had.
What a bitch I am, what a pure bitch. That poor man's lost everything and I had to insult him. I didn't even have a chance to apologize. Damn
.
Turning to her friend she asked what the gringo's name was.
"I don't know his last name. It was a funny one. His first name was Pat, he said."
Gesturing at the door with her head, Lourdes said to her friend, "Let's go home. I'll come back myself tomorrow, early, and see if I can catch him before he leaves. I hope he'll accept an apology. I feel so terrible."
When Hennessey awoke the next morning, hung-over and needing a shave, he cursed to see the time. "Dammit, almost eleven. I wanted to get out of here no later than nine."
He went to the shower to scrape off the previous day's accumulations. Normally he liked to sing in the shower, old ballads of war, revenge, and rebellion that he had learned at his grandfather's knee. This morning, the idea of singing was enough to make him want to puke. Instead, as he soaped off, Hennessey's mind wandered to the events of the night before. He felt genuinely guilty at having lashed out at the poor girl who'd called him dull. He didn't blame her a bit; he
had
been pretty dull. Realistically, he did not blame himself too much, either. He resolved to try to be a little kinder in the future. Wrapped in a towel, he left the shower and picked out the clothes he would wear for the day; a short-sleeved green shirt, blue jeans and running shoes. The rest he began to stuff into suitcases in no particular order.
By noon Hennessey had finished packing. He rang for a bellhop, "
el butones
," to come and carry his bags to the lobby of the hotel. At the front desk he tried, and generally succeeded, in being pleasant to the obligatorily polite receptionist. He was about to turn to leave when he heard a very sweet voice behind him hesitantly ask, "Pat?" He turned then to see who belonged to the voice he didn't recognize.
"Oh, it's the girl from last night." Hennessey forced a welcoming tone into his voice. He took one of her hands in both of his. "Look, I'm
really
sorry for having left the way I did. I really haven't been quite right for a few days now."
However, as soon as she had recognized him, Lourdes had immediately begun a lengthy and heartfelt apology of her own. Talking at cross purposes, and simultaneously, the two continued for half a minute before the realization that neither had heard a word the other had spoken stopped them both completely. Twice more they began to speak at the same time only to stop cold again. Finally Hennessey decided to be a gentleman and let Lourdes speak first.
Almost taken aback by being allowed to speak after three false starts, Lourdes said, in English, "I'm so sorry for saying those terrible things about you last night. I feel like such a horrible person. No wonder you didn't want to talk after losing your family like that. Will you please, please forgive me?" Her enormous brown eyes were eloquent with sincerity.
Hennessey shook his head as if he didn't understand why she should feel repentant. "There's nothing to forgive. Your friend was doing her best to cheer me up. I wasn't in the mood to be cheered, I guess. You were perfectly right to call me stupid. But I don't know any other way to be right now. I should be apologizing to you. As a matter of fact," he added with a sad but ironic grin, "I
was
apologizing to you."
A sudden rumbling in his stomach told Hennessey that it had been almost a full day since he'd taken any sustenance beyond a heavy dose of alcohol. He asked the girl at the front desk if he could leave his bags there over lunch. Of course an establishment as thoroughly accommodating as the Julio Caesare would have no problem guarding a few bags. On an impulse Hennessey asked Lourdes if she would care to join him.
"Are you sure you want company?" she asked.
"Please. I promise to be civil. And I've never cared to eat alone."
Nodding assent, Lourdes joined Hennessey on the way to one of the Hotel's four restaurants. Before leaving the lobby Hennessey tipped the bellhop who had moved his bags. Despite the receptionist's assurances that they would be safe it couldn't hurt to keep the help on his side.
The young woman was fine company, perhaps because she was trying her best to cheer the sad man accompanying her. Over a meal of prawns on rice, her conversation kept up a light mood. Hennessey was surprised to find himself sometimes honestly smiling.