McSweeney's Issue 46 by Dave Eggers

Author:Dave Eggers [Eggers, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940450414
Publisher: McSweeney's

Duque sat staring at his feet for a long while. The damp patch on the instep of his right foot was bigger than the one on his left. Fair enough, it had been a long day: pine trees, airport, taxi, airport, palm trees, but even so Duque couldn’t understand why one of his feet sweated more than the other. He hated tea, hot mornings, weeping old folk, and many other things, but above all he hated having to come back to this city and see his feet sweat. After what had happened, he had avoided Miami time and again, despite the huge amount of work that had appeared there since the eighties. Instead he had done jobs in Colón, in Lima, on a couple of Caribbean islands; he had even agreed to go to Budapest to take care of a loose cannon, someone who had wanted to strike out on his own. But now Ramiro had insisted he go back to Miami. Duque thought that in his old age Ramiro must be giving in to his whims, to bad smells, to the start of madness.

The boss had been put in jail at age fifty. He had gone in with one of those huge, square bodies that made even the most everyday things difficult, from sharing an elevator to sitting on a toilet. Now, ten years later, Ramiro looked as if he were made of green pap. He had spent his last month inside prison filling three pages with unfinished business. He’d shown the list to Duque the first night they’d met up at the mountain retreat, one of the few properties that hadn’t been taken from him. “To start afresh we have to clear the path,” he’d said, holding a cigarette and a glass of cold milk in his hand. The first name on the list was Jairo’s.

Duque could understand the old man’s hygienic impulse, but he didn’t comprehend why they had to go after Jairo after all these years. When he’d come back alone from Miami, he had often had the same conversation with his boss. “He vanished. I didn’t find him in his room, and he never reached the airport. That’s all I can tell you.” Ramiro had believed every word, but he’d also made it clear that it had been Duque’s responsibility to keep track of his partner, and that therefore it would be up to him to close the circle someday. Ramiro liked circles. He liked the full moon, liked the shapes traced by the blades of a fan. Duque liked parallel lines, married couples who slept in separate beds, freeways.

He searched for a pair of clean socks in his case, put them on, and lay down again on the bed cluttered with pillows. The room cost three hundred dollars a night. Duque had administered Ramiro’s money carefully, so that there was enough left for them both to enjoy a comfortable retirement. He couldn’t get it into his head why on earth the old man was

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