Read Online Dead of Night by Randy Wayne White - Free Book Online Page B

village—all they talked about was sex and baseball. Solaris felt very strange when he did what she asked him to do, yet it was impossible to refuse her.
    As their helicopter lifted over the mountains, he’d gargled with rum, hacked, and spit into the sand. But he still loved the thought of her body, the way her pale skin burned beneath his hands.
     
     
    During a recent visit, she’d held up a rubber balloon shaped like a plantain.
    “If he learns how to control himself,” she told him, “waits until I’m ready, I’ll let him use this one day. But don’t expect it every time.”
    Solaris had tried to hold back. God he’d tried. He’d thought about baseball, then about old women stirring beans, even imagined dogs farting. Nothing could dull the voltage of her fingers on his skin.
    She was livid. Went looking for a towel and didn’t come back.
    His last performance, a month ago, was worse. When he bragged to his friends in the village about what the blond Russian did to him in the tobacco barn, they’d spit and whistled in scorn. Called him a crazy liar. To prove himself, he’d borrowed a camera from an old man who’d once been the village Party captain. Solaris had wedged the camera into the barn rafters, lens pointed downward, a long piece of fishing line tied to the shutter release.
    Just being in the barn, the way it smelled, imagining being with her, made it difficult to breathe.
    Their small helicopter landed five days later.
    When Solaris was naked, and she had her bra off, he tried to position her in a way so that her face and body would be visible to the camera, all the while feeling blindly for the fishing line that his stupid fingers could not locate.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Doing?”
    “Yes, doing?”
    “Trying to find a more comfortable position against this wall.”
    “No, I meant him. What’s wrong with him ?”
    “Wrong?”
    “Are you blind? Idiot!”
    Solaris looked. “Oh.” The pressure of making a photograph had affected him in a way that imagining old women stirring beans, and farting dogs, could not. “I think ... he’s learning control.”
    The woman slapped his flaccid member, then slapped it again. “If this is what he calls control, I have no use for him. Or you.”
    There was something vicious in her voice, a deeper pitch as if there were an angry man hidden inside.
    Solaris had called after her, “Maybe he wants to listen to your lips, not your hands—”
    Too late. She was dressing, already on her way.
     
     
    The last time Solaris looked into Snake Woman’s face was in the final minutes of his life, hearing the man-voice inside her, seeing the revulsion that she felt for him—for men —as his eyesight and his hearing faded, recognizing both and wondering why those frightening qualities hadn’t alerted him before.
    It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, dry season, when coffee bushes were blooming white as snow on hillsides above the village baseball diamond, near the vegetable fields where he’d once plowed behind oxen.
    The streets of Vinales were decorated with ribbons and candles that were lit each night. They hadn’t celebrated the holiday while the Bearded One lived, so the decorations seemed more colorful because they were unfamiliar.
    This trip, three of them arrived in the helicopter. Dasha, dressed in black blouse and slacks; Mr. Sweet; plus the lardish-looking Russian man who sometimes accompanied them, black hair growing on the backs of his hands, and out of his ears like a wolf.
    Mr. Sweet slid into the back of the waiting Volvo, never said a word, as usual, adjusting the paper mask on his face, not touching the door handles even though he wore gloves, his eyes sweeping the area but nothing registering.
    He’d speak with the Chinaman, no one else.
    The big Russian gave Solaris the familiar stare—contemptuous, aggressive. Solaris returned it: If you had the chance, cabrón, you wouldn’t risk it.
    Didn’t matter. When Dasha wagged her