Pacazo by Roy Kesey Read Free Book Online Page B

reservation, and you can tell me anything you want.
    I stop by the kitchen to thank Ms. Alina, ignore the men in the plastic chairs, step to the street. The night, hotter, more humid. Will do penance tomorrow, yes, the worst of the search.
    I walk and Atahualpa, Atahualpa in his cell. Still the women come. A cloak made from the wings of vampire bats, the softest cloak ever known and now a tiny owl in the air in front of me. Piercing call. Flies ahead, one block at a time, always one block ahead.
    The sight of my street surprises me. I stop on the sidewalk, look at my house, the strangeness of it, swaying. Up the steps to my door. Push it open, and the streetlight glow flows past me, illuminates a swath of the floor, the polished stone gone liquid, bottomless, still and then roiling before me.
    I could throw rocks at the light until luck does its work, but the last time I did this my neighbors called the police. Tonight I try something new: I stand as tall as I am able in the doorway, block the light with my bulk, jump at an angle toward shadow but one foot catches on the frame and I twist as I fall, land hard on my hip.
    Something about owls—Chavín or maybe Moche. Casualidad surely heard the noise and will come. I wait. No one comes. I work to my feet, limp forward, my shirt stuck wet to my chest. Quietly through the dark to Mariángel’s bedroom, find her stretched tight along the side of her crib, tugging on her ear in her sleep. I lean down to kiss her and she turns, reaches for me, rolls away from my smell.
    To the kitchen, dark here too but Casualidad awake and sitting at the table. I ask why she didn’t come, and she asks what I mean. I say it doesn’t matter. She nods, asks if I want her to boil water for the morning. I say yes, then no, that I will do it myself.
    Casualidad lets herself out. I limp to the window, open it, sniff around the stove. Propane leaks are common, my lights are badly wired, and I have seen disconcerting pictures of blackened remains. I turn on the light. Gnats and mosquitoes flit around the naked bulb. I stand perfectly still, try to remember what comes next.
    A gecko moves onto the ceiling. Its skin is nearly transparent. I don’t know where this one goes during the day, but at night it appears here whenever the light comes on. There are other geckos too, many others. At times there is one in each room.
    I watch the gecko, and at first its movements are too slow to see. Do the mosquitoes notice it at all? How good is their vision? Now the gecko is close enough and its movements are too quick to see. A mosquito is gone, swallowed, dead. There is so much to learn in this world.
     
     

4.
    THE BUS PULLS ONTO THE FOURTH BRIDGE, and beneath us the causeway, thirty feet deep and fifty yards wide, almost empty because it is spring: the river is now a sordid thread. Clustered in the riverbed tight against the far bank are half a dozen shanties. Gaunt chickens skitter through scattered trash. The only green of any kind is a line of points in the loam, melons or maybe gourds.
    My head and hip ache and my stomach roils and farther down the bank something moves along the top edge. It is long and black or dark gray, too thick for a snake and now out of sight, the bus jolting off the bridge onto the roadway. Mariángel climbs into my lap, points out the window at a speck in the sky. It is either a hawk or litter lifted by wind.
    In two or three months the summer rains will start. The shanty owners will harvest their crops, move up onto the banks as the causeway fills. For a time it will be beautiful here along the river. People will come to the edge to watch the water move and to be calmed.
    Then I remember the physicist and his prediction. I was not here in 1983 when El Niño last came, have heard that calm was no part of it, that instead of calm there was dengue and drownings, that flooding destroyed highways in all directions, that there were shortages, no kerosene or gasoline for sale, no bread,