Foreigners (29 page)

El Rio Pequeño de Magdalena was not a river at all. Nor was it the enchanting lagoon that the agent in Puerto Vallarta had described. Rather it fell somewhere between a modest inlet and a vast salt marsh.

There were two other properties on the lagoon, both vacant. Each had rather humble plantation-style houses, like Franklin's. But whereas the other two had peeling facades, their columns looking like grey snakes shedding their skin in the sun, the weatherboard walls of La Casa de Mavis— Franklin had named the house after his mother—were painted bright canary yellow. The realtor, an American who ran the Coldwell Banker office in Puerto Vallarta that specialized in holiday homes, had arranged, in a moment of generosity or pity, Franklin wasn't sure, to have the house painted. He also arranged the hiring of a part-time cleaning woman and a part-time gardener, who saw to the upkeep of La Casa de Mavis for the cost of twenty American dollars a week each. Franklin wondered if he might not be able to find even cheaper help, but decided it would be impolite to refuse the man's assistance.

Seen from the far shore of the lagoon, the estate, which was how Franklin liked to refer to it, looked a lovely sight: the bright yellow house standing out like a tropical bloom against the green forest behind, the closely cropped lawn, with newly tilled beds awaiting the planting of multicoloured local flowers, sloping gently toward the water's edge. Close up, though, the lurid paint and shorn grass weren't nearly as
convincing; it all looked inconsistent and slapdash. But Franklin didn't mind; it was cheap, it was his, and it didn't overlook Bickford Park.

His mother had managed to pay off the mortgage to the house on Montrose Avenue when Franklin was still in elementary school. She saved the documents that the bank gave her until Victoria Day, then she took her young son out into the backyard where they filled a steel bucket with dirt. She rolled the documents into a tight tube and planted them in the bucket, so that to Franklin they looked like the beginnings of a little paper tree. Then she took him by the hand and led him to the picnic table, which she decided would be a safe distance. After she sat him down, she smiled sweetly and said, “This will be our own private fireworks.”

She went back to the bucket, where she removed a pack of wooden matches from the pocket of her housedress and having lit one, touched its flame to the mortgage papers. Then she stood back and watched them burn.

There was smoke, but very little flame. It was, to say the least, anticlimactic. And Franklin hoped that because of this his mother would relent and take him above Bloor Street to Christie Pits where, after the sun went down, there would be real fireworks. But after the bank papers had smouldered away into a fine grey ash, she took him by the hand again and brought him back into the house. They sat together in the living room and watched
Mannix
with the volume raised to drown out the sound of the Catherine wheels and Roman candles and aerial repeaters that drifted through the night air.

His mother loved
Mannix
. Every week they watched the show, and she'd often told him how Mike Connors was the spitting image of his father. But Franklin had found photographs in his mother's room of her and his father from before he was born, and some from after, of the three of them in hospital when Franklin looked like nothing more than a bundle of blankets. There was no resemblance. Mike Connors had a big chest and thick dark hair and a jaw that was square and strong; his father's hair was patchy and his face mean and pinched. And he ran away before Franklin came home from the hospital.

Franklin could not find the photographs after she died, though in truth he didn't search very carefully for them. He didn't pay much attention to anything when he boxed up her belongings for the Goodwill. He dumped the contents of drawers into cardboard packing crates, then he folded her dresses and laid them on top—so things didn't shift around— before he taped the lids shut. She had only a few books and very little jewellery, so he put those into packing crates, too. It took a day to erase her existence from the house on Montrose Avenue, though it took two months after her death for him to bring himself to do it.

It took far less time to actually sell the place. Franklin accepted the first offer, even though the real estate agent advised him against it. The house on Montrose Avenue had appreciated more than tenfold, and with that money, along with the small stipend from his mother's insurance policy, Franklin had little need to worry, and even less need to work. Which is what he told the principal at St Jude's when he informed him that he would not be returning for the autumn
semester. And when the principal asked him what he planned to do, Franklin had replied, “Nothing. Maybe write a book.” The thought had never occurred to him before that moment, but he liked it. The only thing he took from the classroom where he had spent every working day for the past eighteen years was a plaster bust of William Shakespeare. When he picked it up, he found that someone had forced chewed wads of paper into the shallow cavities of the Bard's nostrils.

The statue sat now on a table in his study alongside a leather-covered writing tablet and a Mont Blanc fountain pen, and stared blankly out over the sweeping, close-trimmed lawn toward the briny waters of the fraudulent El Rio Pequeño de Magdalena.

“What d'you say to the cockfights?”

Franklin had been looking at his chest. His shirt was pulled open and he was pressing his finger into the skin there, and watching as the pale circle of flesh appeared momentarily, then was swallowed up again by the deep tan surrounding it. He tanned quite well, which surprised him. When he decided on Mexico after having seen a travel documentary on one of the new cable stations, his chief worry was that he would suffer constantly from sunburn. He'd always had a pallid complexion, as had his mother. It seemed such a silly worry now.

“Beg you pardon?” he said to Willy.

“The cockfights. I've got some that want to see the cockfights. Thought you might like to tag along.”

“Which ones?

“Which ones, which ones?” parroted Willy, shaking his head. “The proper ones, of course. Outside Punta Minta on the PV road.”

Willy Booth, Franklin knew, had a bit of a mean streak in him. It usually showed itself after he'd been drinking. It wasn't so much that he could be cruel as mischievous—or at least mischievous with a touch of malice. He liked to frighten his guests. And the cockfights on the PV road would serve him well if he was in the mood. Unlike the fights that were organized by the franchised resorts in Nuevo Vallarta, the Punta Minta fights were real. The birds wore razors, the pit was bloodstained, and the locals wagered their hard-earned pay. And it wasn't so uncommon for fights to break out among the spectators after they had finished up in the pit.

“What time?” asked Franklin.

“Say half-eight.” Willy smiled. “We'll meet up in the bar and have a few drinks before we head out.”

Franklin liked Hemingway. And he thought, after he told the people he worked with at St Jude's that he was moving to Mexico to write a book, that he might try something along the lines of
To Have and Have Not
rather than, say,
The Sun Also Rises
or
The Old Man and the Sea
, each of which he'd had to teach ad nauseam to his bored pupils. It was the adventure of the former that drew him: the idea of Harry Morgan sitting in the Perla eating black bean soup and looking out the new window that replaced the one that had been shot out, all the while waiting to meet the smugglers he'd been forced by necessity to work with. He liked to imagine himself as Harry,
a good man driven to desperate measures. And that was how he saw himself as he sat at his table in La Bodequita, the Hotel Vivo's little bar. He was drinking Dos Equis—he liked its black bottle—while Willy waited in the lobby to collect the guests who wanted to go to the cockfights.

Unlike the Hotel Vivo's beach, La Bodequita was open to locals. It managed to avoid any unpleasantness by imposing a two-drink minimum for non-guests and selling its liquor at exorbitant prices. This, along with the other customary bar rules, was enforced by the same guards who looked after the beach, though in La Bodequita they exchanged their warden uniforms for dark trousers and white golf shirts with the hotel's logo stitched over the breast. Still, Franklin liked to imagine that among the bar's patrons there might be smugglers and gangsters and women of ill repute. And sipping his beer he glanced about with a wary eye, trying to spot the dangerous characters.

“Mr Sing show up yet?”

It was Willy; he'd come in from the lobby and stood behind Franklin's chair. He had a grin on his face, and by the angle of it, it was clear that he already had a few drinks in him.

“Still waiting,” said Franklin.

“Any
gallegos
I should be worried about?” Willy asked as he motioned for Miguel at the bar to bring him a whisky.

“I think you're all right for tonight,” replied Franklin, pushing out a chair for him.

“Good,” said Willy, and he sat down. “The last thing I need is to have my windows shot out again.”

This banter had become their private joke. Six months earlier, and two months after he had moved into La Casa de Mavis, Franklin, after a long night in the bar, had told Willy
about his bookish ideas and the little fantasy game he played with himself in La Bodequita. It was, he had realized, probably a mistake. But the next morning, Willy drove into Puerto Vallarta and found a copy of
To Have and Have Not
and read it the same afternoon. He hadn't thought much of the book, but agreed with Franklin that there was something appealing about Harry Morgan. “The way he gives it to that tourist cow in Freddy's,” he said the next time they were drinking, “I liked that bit.”

At first Franklin was uncomfortable about Willy's having read the book; it almost felt to Franklin as if something had been taken away from him. And he thought that Willy'd done it just so he could poke fun. But then Franklin found that he didn't mind the gag so much, especially when he noted the few occasions when their little exchange caught the attention of those sitting at the nearer tables; he enjoyed the thought that it might lend him a slightly mysterious quality.

“Well,” said Willy, using his forefinger to stir the ice in his glass before taking a drink, “I think we might make a good showing tonight.”

Franklin knew that this meant one of two things: either Willy had his eye on one of the female guests, or, failing that, he had decided to amuse himself at the expense of his clientele. Either way, it made Franklin a touch uneasy.

Willy swallowed the rest of his whisky and offered Franklin a crooked smile: “It's time, Fowler.
Tengamos una aventura.”

“Sorry?”

“For God's sake, man,” Willy said, his voice booming through the bar. “An adventure.”

He stood up and clapped his hands on Franklin's shoulders.

“Let's see if we can't shake your life up a little.”