Mule by Tony D'Souza

Author:Tony D'Souza [D'Souza, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Kate, Romana, and I flew to Rome the next day. It was hot there. Everywhere we went, I saw statues and paintings, and all of the statues and paintings were dead bodies. Kate kept asking me, "What the hell's the matter with you?" and I kept saying, "Nothing" or "I don't feel good, Kate." "Well," she kept saying back, "you're ruining my fucking trip." Kate bought a lot of clothes with the money we'd brought with us in Romana's diaper, and in Milan Kate shopped all day for leather boots, trying on dozens of them in a dozen different stores before buying three pairs. "Why do you need three pairs?" I asked. She said, "It's my trip, isn't it? Mind your own business."

I expected men to come up to me with guns drawn, to knock on the door of our hotel room and arrest me. But nobody came up to me and nobody knocked on our door. After Milan, Kate made me drive us to the Alps, and then to Lake Como. The mountains were beautiful, the lake was beautiful, and for the three days and two nights we had there, I calmed down. As we walked along the lake, Kate asked again and again, "Do you love me?" I answered her every time, "Of course I love you."

I didn't want to go back, and I couldn't go back, and I knew I could not tell Kate. At passport control in D.C., I knew they'd surround me, take me into custody, but the bored immigration officer stamped my passport and said, "Welcome home." When the taxi dropped us off at Siesta Key, our house was waiting for us like we had never left.

I turned on the news. I'd been checking the news every day, many times a day. There was never any news. When I called Mason, he said, "Nothing's happened. Nobody knows. I'm fucking sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. It's all my fault. You didn't have anything to do with it. I shouldn't have made you come. I'm the one who's crazy. I'm the one who has to live with it. Did you tell Kate? Tell me you didn't tell Kate."

I did not want to do this anymore. I e-mailed all the editors I had ever worked with and asked them if they could use any travel articles about Italy. Most of the e-mails bounced back, because those editors had lost their jobs by now. The only one I received read, "Not in the budget. Good luck, sorry."

Five days later, I was parked in the lot outside Mason's apartment building with a duffel bag full of weed. I sat there for a long time. I did not want to go up there, and I did not want to go up there, and I did not want to go up there. And then I went up there. We had a cigarette together on his porch, and he said, "Everyone thinks they ran away together. We weren't the only people they owed money.

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