It would be foolish to walk along the highway. He went back into the parking lot, acutely aware of the absurdity of the situation. He didn’t want to be there, but there was no escape. He looked around. About ten cars stood in the lot, and there was no departing driver he could ask for a ride out of there. The cowboy had gotten up from the plastic-covered barstool by the door and was peering at him. Manuel gave up and went back to the entrance, wishing for the first time in his life that he was a smoker. At least that would have given him an excuse to hang around outside. He pretended to search his pockets. “Thought I’d lost my phone.”
The man went back to his stool with a dismissive gesture that showed he accepted that explanation for the odd behavior. Manuel completed his little pantomime by taking out his phone. The pale flower that came out of his pocket at the same time fell to the mud like a dead butterfly. Manuel squatted, astonished, and reached for the flower. He completely forgot the cowboy and his own awkward little pantomime. Even in the glare of neon the gardenia proclaimed the perfection of beauty, despite a smear of mud across one petal. Gently he wiped it clean with one finger and marveled at the firm delicacy of the flower. He raised it to his face, closed his eyes, and inhaled its heavy sweet scent.
The roadhouse door opened and released a blast of music, heat, and rank odor from the interior. The client who came out for a smoke got into a lively conversation with the cowboy bouncer. Manuel jabbed at his phone pretending to write a text, withdrew along the covered porch, and turned the corner of the building. He found a covered niche and took shelter there for a while. He gazed blindly at the unreal world of the parking lot and the neon reflections in its puddles. He held his phone up and kept the screen lit to maintain the fiction. He had no desire to attract the cowboy’s attention. He kept his other hand in the interior pocket of his jacket and slowly stroked the smooth surface of the soft petals. Their aroma would linger on his skin for many hours.
Nogueira burst from the entrance and took out a cigarette. The cowboy quickly gave him a light. The policeman looked around until he found Manuel. “What the fuck are you doing there? I thought you’d left!”
Manuel didn’t reply. He put his phone back in his pocket and walked past the bouncer and out into the rain on his way to the car.
Nogueira stood watching for a moment, then muttered a curse as he tossed his newly lit cigarette into a puddle. He unlocked the car and they got in, but Nogueira didn’t start the engine. He fumed silently and then smashed a fist against the steering wheel. “I warned you. I told you it could happen. All kinds of dirty business could come to light, I said. I warned you.” His repetitions sounded like an effort to divest himself of blame.
“You did warn me.”
Nogueira exhaled a great gust of air. “I talked with the girl. She said—”
“I don’t want to know.”
The retired cop looked at him in frustration.
“I appreciate what you’re doing, and yes, you warned me, but I don’t want to know. Because I already do, don’t I? You can spare me the details.”
Nogueira started the car. “Whatever. All I’ll say is that she confirmed it.”
“That’s just great.”
Nogueira shook his head. He pulled away from the bar but then braked to a halt, as if he’d suddenly remembered something. He pushed himself up against the seat belt and twisted enough to get a hand into his pants pocket. He took out a gold ring and slipped it back on his finger. The neon sign of the brothel reflected off the matte finish of his wedding ring.
Neither said a word during the drive back. Nogueira had already given him guidance about what to do the next day, and Manuel was too disheartened for conversation. His thoughts flitted between the opposing poles of the gardenia in his pocket and the funereal gleam of Nogueira’s wedding ring. He couldn’t imagine that a man like this could have someone waiting for him anywhere. Manuel found something profoundly perverted in the man’s act of returning to his finger the wedding ring he’d taken off to visit the roadhouse. He thought back and couldn’t remember if the policeman had worn that ring when they’d visited Ophelia. He’d certainly taken an affectionate farewell of her. Manuel wondered if álvaro had practiced the same deception; that might explain why the ring was missing. Maybe that was the custom here among men who frequented prostitutes.
Nogueira must have read his mind. The man glanced at his ring at least twice. He rubbed it with his thumb as if suddenly noticing it and feeling an insistent itch.
Manuel looked down at the wedding ring on his own hand. Why hadn’t he taken it off? A sudden heavy sigh broke from him under the weight of shame and hopelessness.
At the inn his only words were “Good night.”
Nogueira courteously wished him the same.
For the first time.
The energy-saving bulbs of the small lamp fixtures came on with a dim glow that would grow stronger and brighter as the minutes passed. He stood in the open doorway to his room. The single bed, narrow as that of a monk, revived memories of the sleepless nights of his childhood. He went to the desk, pulled out the uncomfortable desk chair, and seated himself.
He opened a packet of paper and sniffed it without taking out any of the sheets, following the little ritual that had become his custom prior to starting a novel. He caught the subtle whiff of bleached paper, that indecisive perfume that achieved its full bloom only when blended with the distinctive aroma of ink. As if conjured by that odor, the memory of clutching four hundred sheets of his printed work rushed back. The Sun of Tebas, the novel he’d almost finished when they told him of álvaro’s death, lay three hundred miles away, untouched since then. A couple of short chapters remained to be written, maybe as few as twenty-five pages. His readers would adore it. It was good, but not as good as all that. I can’t write another novel like The Man Who Refused, he’d told álvaro. This is all the truth that I want and can bear.
He took out a fistful of blank sheets and placed them before him on the desk. He pushed the rest to one side. He took one of the ballpoint pens from the package and wrote the title across the top of the first page.
OF EVERYTHING HE REFUSED
The knock at the door was loud and insistent. Eight decisive blows, one after another, warning that someone expected to be admitted immediately. The sort of insistence you’d never hear from an invited guest, a worker, or a delivery driver. He would remember it later with the bleak reflection, typical behavior of police demanding to be let in.
He stared for a couple of seconds at the cursor blinking at the end of the last sentence. That had been a good morning for work, the best of the last three weeks. Though he hated to admit it to himself, he especially enjoyed writing when he was alone at home with nothing else to do, free of the usual interruptions, so he could go with the flow. That’s what happened when he got to this point in a novel. He was expecting to finish The Sun of Tebas in a couple of weeks. Maybe earlier if all went well. And until then the story would take over and obsess him every minute of the day. He’d have no time for anything else. Each of his novels had brought him to this intense pitch and this sensation, at once intimate and destructive. He loved it and feared it. He knew it made him hard to live with.
He glanced toward the hall that led to the apartment’s front door. The blinking cursor seemed about to burst with the pressure of all the words still behind it. In the moment of deceptive stillness he began to hope the untimely visitor had given up. But no; he sensed the silent presence out there of the intruder’s demanding energy.
SMOKE