“Is he—?” somebody said, and now somebody else, a boxy officious-looking man with a pencil mustache Sten could have sworn he’d never seen before in his life, was bending over the body checking for vital signs, ear to chest, finger to wrist. This man—certainly he’d been on the bus—looked up and announced, “I’m a paramedic,” and began alternately kneading the supine man’s chest and blowing into his mouth.
This was something new, something the guidebook hadn’t advertised, a curiosity under the sun that beat down steadily on the ochre mud of the lot, and everybody just stood there taking it in, minutes slipping away, the heat exacting its price in sweat, the fat woman emerging from her stall and the bus driver stepping tentatively down from the bus as if the ground were rolling under him like a treadmill. The main attraction, the man on his back on the ground, never stirred. Oh, there was movement, but it was only the resistance of the inanimate to a moving force, the paramedic thanklessly riding the compression of his two stacked palms, then breaking off to pinch the nostrils and force his own breath past the dry lips, the ruptured trachea and down into the deflated lungs. This was a man, this paramedic, who didn’t give up easily. His mustache glistened with saliva and the crown of his head humped up and down as if at the climax of some insistent sexual act. He kept at it, kept at it, kept at it.
Carolee’s voice was very soft and at first he didn’t know if she was speaking to him or the paramedic. What she said was, “Is he going to make it?”
He didn’t know about that—he didn’t even know what he’d done. The only man he’d ever killed in his life, or might have killed, nothing confirmed, was a dink two hundred yards away on a moonless night when the flares strobed out over the world and he was in something very much like a panic, his rifle on full automatic.
“We should get him to a hospital,” Bill said, still holding on to the gun—a revolver, Sten saw that now, .357 Magnum, six shots—as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “I mean, is there a hospital here? In Limón, I mean?”
“There must be,” somebody said.
“But where is it?” Bill wondered. “And if we—I mean, should we move him? Maybe there’s damage there, a neck injury”—and here he raised his eyes to Sten’s—“like in football, you know? Where they bring out the stretcher?”
Up and down the paramedic went, up and down, and now the fat woman was there, peering over Sheila’s shoulder as if to make some sort of positive identification of the body on the ground—and it was a body, a corpse, not a living thing, not anymore, Sten was sure of it—and here was the driver too, his eyes masked behind the sunglasses, the lower portion of his face locked up like a strongbox.
“Driver,” Bill said, and he seemed to be panting, like a dog that had run a long way up a steep hill, “we need to take this man to the hospital. Where—dónde—is the hospital?”
The paramedic, without breaking his rhythm, looked up and said something in Spanish to the driver, something that had the cognate os-pee-tal in it, but the driver just shook his head and turned away to spit in the dirt. “You don’t want,” he said finally, shaking his head very slowly. “You want el córoner.”
“Os-pee-tal,” the paramedic insisted, and Bill joined him, aping his pronunciation: “Os-pee-tal.”
The fat woman emitted a pinched labial noise as if she were unstoppering a bottle, then turned—fat ankles, splayed feet in a pair of huaraches that sank into the ochre mud as if it were dough—and started back across the lot. Sten could still feel the blood thudding in his ears, though he was calming now, what was done was done, already thinking of the repercussions. Certainly he’d acted in self-defense, and here were the witnesses to prove it, but who knew what the laws were like in this country, what kind of flaming hoops they’d make him jump through—and lawyers, would he need a lawyer? He scanned the group—they were still milling there, clueless—but no one would look him in the eye. He wasn’t one of them, not anymore—he was something else now.
Sheila came up to him then, to where he was standing with his arm around Carolee still, and pressed his hand. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re a hero, a real hero.” Then she bent to the tangle of things scattered on the blanket to reclaim her purse and passport—her precious passport—and as if a spell had been broken, they all came forward now, one after another, to sift through the pile and take back what belonged to them.
2.