Floating Like the Dead by Yasuko Thanh

Author:Yasuko Thanh [Thanh, Yasuko]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-8431-7
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2012-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

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Tiphaine had bought El Principe at Chato’s insistence. After a two-week vacation, he’d serpent-tongued her into spending her life savings to buy the resort. He’d whispered into her neck – making her hair stand on end – that he would never leave her side so long as she laid her heart at his feet. He said things like that, making her feel as though her life was romantically scripted. In Paris, working as a secretary, Tiphaine had been hopeful, if not happy. But she had not been extraordinary. Though she had only known Chato a few weeks, she had returned to Paris, sold her apartment, and doubled back to Honduras to marry him.

Mostly, she didn’t regret her choices.

The resort, which was nothing more than a thatch hut that tilted in the sand, was cool and shady, with bikinis and beach towels drying on the bamboo fence that encircled it. A waist-high counter set the kitchen apart from the restaurant, which was filled with wooden tables stained with candle wax and covered with oyster-shell ashtrays. Hammocks for rent overnight swung along both sides of the building. Through the lifeless remains of almond trees, you could see a corner of the ocean that resembled a white sheet tied on all four sides to docks and cays. In the distance, pelicans dove for fish in a bay as smooth as a pane of glass while local children pushed each other off a trestle bridge.

The tourists who stayed in Cayo Bonaire came to sneak from life more than it had to give. It was a town of hot sky and listless dories, green crabs scurrying across the road, pizzerias painted yellow and red guarded by men holding semi-automatic rifles. It was a town where the fronds of palm trees waving in lazy breezes were sometimes the fastest moving things around. Still, it tempted all comers, like a woman who lets her hair down at dusk.

The beach shared with the town both its grit and its wild beauty, and on Tiphaine’s days off, she would sit on one of the logs scattered along the beach and gaze down the far-reaching length of it. Today, the wind was blowing sand onto her legs, pelting her skin, reminding Tiphaine of the sting of fire ants. Beside her Chato rolled a joint, turning his back to the wind to protect the marijuana as he broke up the buds into the brown curl of a dried banana leaf.

Earlier that day, while balancing the accounts after breakfast, Tiphaine and Chato had had another one of their fights.

“You can’t put three extra nights on his tab,” Chato said.

“Why not?” Tiphaine answered. “Three nights. Five. What difference does it make? The tourists are all too busy being on vacation to notice. Besides, you make enough money selling them drugs. What do you care if I have a piece?”

Tiphaine tried to block the memory of the argument the same way she tried to ignore the silver bodies of dead fish glinting on the sand.

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