Horse Latitudes by Morris Collins

Author:Morris Collins [Collins, Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited

IT WAS TEN in the morning. They sat and drank water and the lizards peered at them from behind glasses and stacked plates. After several years without seeing Doyle, Ethan had thought that it would be awkward to meet his friend again, this man who was now a fugitive, who lived some strange approximation of whatever life he had originally intended, who volitionally filled his kitchen with lizards. They sat and did not speak and it’s fine thought Ethan, it’s not awkward at all, this silence or anything else. He had imagined that Doyle would have changed irreparably, would be a man beyond recognition. He remembered, then, the incident at Yolanda’s sink. I’ve got it wrong, he thought. It’s not that I still recognize Doyle, it’s that I don’t recognize myself anymore. That last morning in New York when Samantha stood at the door, headed off to work and everything that followed, he said goodbye to someone who by then appeared as much a glyph as Doyle’s postcard. It’s that I don’t recognize anyone anymore.

“Can we put on the fan?” Ethan said.

“I broke it.”

“Why would you do that?”

“It was an accident. My machete was aflame.”

“Your machete was aflame?”

“I was burning cockroaches.”

In the low light of the kitchen, Doyle looked older than he had on the verandah. Already the first webs of sun wrinkles spread from his eyes, his pale blue eyes which seemed paler now, bluer as well, and hard, like bathroom tiles bleaching with age. In college there had been something restless about Doyle’s gaze, something impatient. He’d look from thing to thing, person to person, his eyes moving around a room like he was constantly hoping that here, here would be whatever it was he wanted—and then moving on, always disappointed. Now, though, he stared at the table, his water glass, looked back up to Ethan, held his gaze there. His hair, which he kept short—cut himself, Ethan was sure—receded in a wide V. No doubt if he wore aviator sunglasses he’d look just like a mercenary, one of those gringos who always hid his eyes, even inside and in the dark, for fear that someone might see the heat-stunted synapses misfiring there.

“So you ended up with a villa in the hills after all,” Ethan said.

Doyle nodded, played with the tassel of a sheathed machete.

“Of course, you’re a fugitive.”

“I am,” Doyle said. “I am a fugitive.”

“That must undermine the whole tropical paradise experience. Then again, this is hardly a paradise.”

“But it is tropical.”

“Sure,” Ethan said. “Just look at all the lizards.”

Doyle brought their water glasses to the sink and turned back to Ethan.

He said, “Ethan, good as it is to see you, don’t you think you ought to tell me why the fuck you’re here?”

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