With his mother gone, Dub was scarcely to be seen at the Bougainvillea in the evenings. At first, America sent me out nightly to fetch him, but more often than not when I arrived at the garage it was locked, the windows dark. If Earl was still about, he’d profess ignorance even as he frowned up at the building opposite. At those times, I looked up at the balcony of BabyLu’s flat and usually the doors were open, a light on, sometimes music floating out into the evening.
Dub brought back more of her books for me, his eyes eager as he dropped them onto the kitchen table in the mornings before he left for work, waiting till America was out of the room. He told me how BabyLu put them aside in a pile near the door so she wouldn’t forget, as if he wanted me to think well of her even though we both knew she was Eddie Casama’s mistress. I was flattered by the books, by the knowledge that she thought of me at all, though I also knew they meant he always had an excuse to return to her.
With better claims upon his time, Dub’s bike grew dusty and even America remarked on the dulled chrome, the encrusted paintwork. She grew weary of worrying about him. She left it later and later before asking me to look for him, and then after a while she didn’t ask at all. The last time she sent me down to the garage neither of us expected I would actually find him, but when I arrived he was on the forecourt cleaning down the bike. It looked like its old self again. He smiled when he saw me and shot a glance across the road and up to BabyLu’s balcony. I followed his gaze to where she stood, watering her plants. ‘She wants me to take her out on it,’ he said. ‘She wants to feel what it might be like to leave town, even if it’s just to come back again later.’
I watched him work. He was careful with the machine, as he was with his guitar. I thought about how often Aunt Mary scolded him for shoving aside the antique figurines she’d brought back from Europe to make room for his drink, his keys, his helmet. I wondered how he was with BabyLu, whether he treated her as if she were fragile, irreplaceable.
We watched as BabyLu’s balcony doors closed and her curtains were drawn. A minute later she emerged from her apartment building and slipped quietly across the street. She had on jeans and a light jacket and her headscarf. She looked like an American movie starlet. Dub laughed when he saw her and reached out to pull at the knot of her scarf. I was startled by the familiarity, as was she. She jerked her head away and reproached him with her eyes, glancing along the street. But she was smiling as she removed her scarf and pushed it into her pocket to grasp the helmet he held out to her. She fiddled with the straps for a while and then, giving up, winked at me as she lifted her chin to let Dub fasten them, his fingertips as delicate as if he were picking out splinters. ‘Bye-bye, Jo-Jo,’ she trilled as she climbed on behind him, her voice cloying and comical, childish. I watched them ride away, waiting till they’d disappeared from sight before I started back to the boarding house.
The following day, Dub recounted how their evening had unfolded. He had taken her along the coast road as far as Little Laguna. She’d pulled faces at him in the rear-view mirrors all the way. At Little Laguna they’d taken a rowboat out to a floating bar to sip cocktails while the sun set over the water. When they returned to shore, they’d continued down the coast before cutting through the backwaters to ride through the villages back to Puerto. They’d stopped a few times for a cold drink at a roadside shack or for her to take a picture or disappear into the bushes to relieve herself. Afterwards they’d sat together for a while on the wall of a bridge to watch carabao carts laden with sugar cane or bamboo roll by and, in the distance, people walking across rice fields towards narrow plumes of smoke that rose from behind the treeline. I wondered if he’d glimpsed BabyLu the village girl then, however fleetingly, but of course it was too tender a question to voice. Dub’s first account of their evening stopped there and I thought he was simply being discreet. What he didn’t say then was that when they returned, as the bike cruised into Prosperidad, they saw Eddie’s Mercedes waiting in front of her building.