Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 34

The air was heavy and hot, and my heart swelled with plea­sure over being back in the tropics. Before I'd met Timmy in untropical Albany, two of my best love affairs had been with men in cities well south of the tropic of Cancer. The first was with sweet and exuberant Mike Akenjemi in Lagos, during a summer work-study program after my junior year at Rutgers. Two years later it was Ted Metzger, in that period when my government an­nounced that it needed me and I concluded that two dangerous years in Saigon were preferable to any kind of a lifetime in Win­nipeg.

I later heard from a decent and conscience-stricken friend who went there that summers on the Canadian plains were fiercely hot, too. But for me a hot climate was not a cultural ad­vantage, just a circumstance under which I had twice somehow found romance and sweaty erotic joy.

None of that was about to be repeated, I was sure. For Jim Suter, despite his famous physical allure, sounded to me like a deeply problematical piece of work. Also, I had long since ceased sexual meandering, much to Timmy's relief. Both of our rare ex-tramonogamous erotic adventures consisted of two-or-three-times-a-year, joint visits to far-from-home gay bathhouses—in Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco—for some no-exchange-of-fluids, happy carnal comingling with others that was as harmful as a couple of farm boys in 1927 attending the hootchie-kootchie show at the Nebraska state agricultural fair, and far more whole­some. Those excursions pretty much satisfied the urges in both of us for sexual variety. So, the Yucatecan jungle heat notwith­standing, I expected that in the department of erotic temptation, my meeting with the allegedly irresistible Jim Suter would be— in the words of a droll Mexican I'd once met who liked to imi­tate the speech of gringo tourists—noproblemo.

About halfway between Playa del Carmen and Tulum, just north of the resort complex at Akumal, I saw the road sign for Los Pa-jaros. It directed me off Route 307, the two-lane blacktop that ran the length of the coast from Cancun down to Chetumal on the border with Belize.

A third of a mile off the highway, behind a strip of jungle thicket, Los Pajaros consisted of an assortment of perhaps a hun­dred small houses along a scraggly network of muddy streets. Most of the houses were cement, but there were a couple of tra­ditional Mayan palapas, too, made of sticks and palmetto thatch, and it w/as the palapas that looked the most inviting in the midafternoon wet heat. Few people were out and about, just some kids kicking a soccer ball around the grassy town square and a woman in a white Mayan huipil toting what I guessed was a bucket of cornmeal down the main street. A cow was tethered under a shady scrub oak in front of one house, and a skinny dog that looked as if it might have been the source of the term hang­dog expression sniffed at some trash in a front yard.

The few remaining older towns on the coast had Mayan name—Muchi, Pamul, Chemuyil—and I figured that the newer Los Pajaros had been built to house workers at the same time the nearby beachfront resorts went up. The central plaza had noth­ing identifiable as a Catholic church, just a one-story community center with a ramshackle arcade and some faded endorsements by the PRI, the forever-dominant Mexican political party, of for­mer presidents who now were dead, fled, or under indictment somewhere.

Away from the highway, the only sounds in Los Pajaros were of the soccer-playing kids exclaiming in an unfamiliar lan­guage I took to be Mayan, and the recorded hymns, in Spanish, coming out of the front of the Seventh-Day Adventist meeting­house. I recognized "Onward, Christian Soldiers," although on this torpid Wednesday afternoon no one in Los Pajaros was marching as to anything.

I had a hard time envisioning the scintillating Jim Suter in this place and wondered if maybe Timmy hadn't been misin­formed by a wily Betty Krumfutz. I found a small tienda that was open, and using my combination of phrase-book and hazily re­membered high school Spanish, I asked the elderly proprietress where I might find the norteamericano Jim Suter. "Laplaya," the old woman replied.

I asked her if she was acquainted with Senor Suter, and she gestured vaguely in an easterly direction and repeated, "En la playa." I took this to mean that she did not know Suter person­ally but that all the North Americans in Los Pajaros lived over by the beach and not here in the village. She explained to me where to find the beach road. I bought a two-liter bottle of aguapu-rificada and swigged from it as I drove another mile down the main highway and then turned onto a road marked by a small sign that read Playa.

So as not to damage my Outtie's tender underbelly, I drove slowly and carefully down a potholed muddy road with thick, low jungle on either side of it for half a mile. Then the thicket ended and the road swung sharply left and ran parallel to the beach. The first house I came to was a big, two-story, L-shaped, white stucco job, between me and the sea, with terraces on ei­ther side of it, a terra-cotta-tile roof, and lots of big, louvered win­dows thrown open. A small satellite dish pointed skyward from the roof, although I saw no electrical lines and I wondered what the house's power source was.

A chest-high stucco wall crawling with vermilion bougainvil-lea wound around the house on three sides. It was interrupted by a gravel driveway that led up to a two-car garage and a smaller outbuilding. The only vehicle visible was a blue Chevy Suburban with muddy fenders. From my vantage point, some flowering trees obscured the front door, so I pulled my tiny Chevy up alongside the big one and climbed out into the bright heat. As I shut the car door, a couple of grass-green parrots shot out of the flame tree next to the garage and careened into the jungle squawking. So here were some actual pajaros.

Then the afternoon air was quiet again except for the sound of the light surf beyond the house. Off to my left the beach road continued on northward with other similar large, nicely designed stucco houses along it every twenty-five yards or so. I meant to ask at this house where Jim Suter was staying. But that wasn't necessary, for when I walked around the trees and approached the front door, it was already open and a man in cream-colored running shorts and a powder-blue tank top was standing just in­side the doorframe grinning out at me.

"Don Strachey?"

"I am he."

"God, where have you been all my life?"

"That's an awfully tired line, Suter."

"It sounds as fresh to me as it did the first time I uttered it more than twenty years ago. It must be you who's jaded, Stra­chey. "

"Not jaded, just well informed—about you and your habit of seducing and abandoning men."

"Oh, and you're too frail for that?"

"Not frail, just not interested." He was radiant, and now I saw why otherwise rational men had lost their senses in Suter's presence. Trying hard to keep my voice steady, I said, "Anyway, we've got more urgent matters to discuss, no?"

Suter gazed at me, his mouth open slightly, for a long mo­ment, before indicating with a little toss of his golden locks that I should follow him into the house. He turned then and shut the door behind us. He said, "I take it you came alone. There are people who want me out of the way, as I know you know."

"I know that that's what you said in your letter to Maynard."

"Right. God, I am so, so sorry about what happened to May­nard. I hope you can believe that."

"He's lucky to be alive. And you're lucky he's alive, Suter."

"I know. You're right. Poor Manes. He was just in the wrongest possible place at the wrongest possible time. That poor guy has been to Beirut and back, and what does he do but get shot in the gut on E Street. Talk about unfair."