Chapter 13 - Sweet Haven

IT FELT like they had lingered by the seaside for hours, Joel and JP Torres. Joel smoking as casually as he could manage in the driver’s seat of the jeep, and JP leaning his weight on the motocross bike as though passing the time of day.

Most of that span of time had been spent on a ritual of reacquaintance that the lawyer found surreal. JP had taken him through a roster of aunts and cousins he had wished to forget. Lola Mimay was not well, confined to her bed by arthritis, her heart broken because Manolo, her favorite nephew, had burgled her jewelry box. Tia Clara was very happy, happy to be leaving for the States next month, as Beatriz, her eldest, had petitioned for her at last. And as for JP, he thought he might try his hand at flying Cessnas down at the airstrip. There was a new school, populated with Pakistanis and Indians looking for cheap flying lessons. “Terrorists,” chuckled JP.

Joel wanted to wallop him. Instead, he laughed expansively and said, “ ‘Tang ina mo, I’ve always wanted to do that myself,” noting that JP wasn’t short of money then.

“It takes balls,” JP said.

“Like it takes balls to do that to a high school girl.”

JP shrugged. “I have no idea where that Sweethaven girl came from. Ask Harrison. I never knew her. Maybe I saw her at some parade, but she wasn’t my type.”

“How many were you?”

JP ignored this. “So don’t be a hypocrite, Tito. Fifteen is a grown woman. My own grandmother was married at fourteen.”

“Those were the 1930s. It was a different time.”

“Do you know how young a girl can be before they charge you with raping her? Come on, Tito, which of us is the lawyer?”

“Twelve,” Joel said unwillingly. “Twelve years old in this country.”

“You see?” JP gave a snort of a laugh.

And then he mounted the bike, kicking it into life and surging forth in the manner of someone used to calling the shots. He looked back only once, an easy, amused tilting of the head. Joel, fuming at the game, started his own engine and sped after him, heart in mouth, vision focused on the red taillight that grew smaller and smaller in the darkness. There were no streetlights on this rutted stretch, flanked by brackish swamp and nipa palms that led away from the beach. By the time Joel had gained the highway, the motorcycle had disappeared. Taking a chance, Joel swung the jeep in the direction of Donostia. Just within the city limits he found the motorcycle waiting by the roadside. JP put up an arm in a lazy wave and led him for a couple of intersections, turning at last along a two-lane road, past sari-sari stores and walls of whitewashed hollow block, then what had once been farms, parceled up in Joel’s childhood into residential subdivisions, interspersed with stretches of land planted with coconuts. JP shot forth again, as though playing a game. Soon enough, though, the jeep’s headlights picked out the motorcycle, pulled up beside a rusting iron gate and leaning on its kickstand.

Joel peered through the darkness beyond the grilles. He knew where he was. To the denizens of this Donostia barrio, this compound of four or so bungalows was Villa Milagros, named after JP’s mother, the long-suffering wife who had brought the Fortun inheritance into her marriage. At some point Joel remembered that the individual houses had been rented out to young marrieds—bank tellers, low-level highways engineers—“nice people,” as the clan liked to repeat.

He cut the motor, noting, in the second before he killed his lights, how decrepit the gate now looked. In the silence, he realized that the compound beyond was completely dark. Something had happened in the years since he had divorced himself from the Fortuns.

A shadow sauntered across the road. JP Torres had been waiting under the thatch overhang of a variety store. He thumped the hood of the jeep as he drew abreast. Joel swung himself down with a grunt.

“Where are all the tenants?”

“Hard times. They left owing us rent, the bastards, every last one of them. My father refused to repair the plumbing or the roofs until they paid us what they owed. But they packed up and left anyway.”

They stood beneath the streetlamp, a white fluorescent bar beset by wriggling winged insects. Its light turned their faces into skulls. Each examined the other’s morbid visage; each challenged the other to speak.

“Who lives here now?” Joel said at last.

“I do. I did. I had one of the bungalows to myself. Since my name got dragged into this mess, I’ve been sleeping on a couch at my mother’s.”

The youth was struggling with the rusty padlock, cursing, dropping the keys. The padlock yielded at last, and he shoved the gate open just wide enough for the two of them to pass.

“So you’ve been the caretaker.”

“My father decided I needed a place of my own. One of the units had been promised to me from the start, so we evicted the people living there, and I moved in.”

Joel decided that caretaking had been the least of the young man’s concerns. He wondered how long the lodgers had had to endure JP as neighbor: intoxicated strangers weaving between puddles, caroming into doorways; the whine and explosion of motorcycle engines all hours of the night. And in the morning, JP the haciendero himself, pockets empty, sweet-talking the lodgers for a couple of pesos to buy a cigarette.

“All right,” Joel sighed. “Which bungalow was yours?”

But JP cast a glance into the compound. “You go in, Tito,” he mumbled. “I can’t bear to. It feels like it might be haunted.”

Joel shot the young man a look.

“It’s the scene of the crime,” JP said, the phrase spoken a shade too jauntily.

In disgust, Joel entered that dark space, moving gingerly over the packed earth, noting a gleam of reflected light that indicated a large rain puddle. The first two structures were locked, their windows boarded up. Against the third, some scaffolding had been erected, fortifying JP’s tale of repairs his father refused to carry out until it was too late. A fourth structure was intact.

“That was my place,” the youth said. “It’s still filled with my things.”

The fifth and smallest house was a single-level bungalow with a terrace.

“For lady lodgers,” said JP.

Joel ignored the joke. He glanced up at the roof, which was peaked, with space enough, he supposed, to accommodate a man.

“This Chinese boy you worked with—he sampled the girls, too?”

JP laughed out loud. “Harrison? No way. He was in charge of distribution, that’s all. His family owned a big video rental shop for years. The pirates put them out of business, but they were smart: they started selling pirated videos themselves. He knows a few syndicates in the industry. He gets around.”

“How many others were there?”

The youth was grinning nervously, shaking his head. “I’ve already given you the Chinese.”

“I don’t see a fellow like Co crouching up in a ceiling for hours watching you hump a girl.”

JP looked away, into the darkness, avoiding the weight of Joel’s stare. “Tito,” he said. “The family believes me to be a good boy. And I want to spare them the truth. It’s one thing to confess to the act and beg forgiveness. It’s another to rub their noses in the proof.”

“What do you mean?”

“Out there is a mass of footage of me, some of which I haven’t even seen, doing things to women that no mother could stand to watch. Footage with my face in it; I know that for a fact. If you crack down on the cameraman, Tito, if you make just one move, one inquiry in his direction, that footage could go straight to the Internet. I can’t inflict that on my family.”

He had been holding the keys, jouncing them tensely in his fist, and now he dropped them squarely into Joel’s palm. “Here, Tito, they’re yours.”