The Scared Stiff Read Online Free PDF

this.
    The servant woman came out again, with one big bowl nested among three little bowls. She put the little bowls around on our plates and ladled guacamole for us from the big bowl, then left the big bowl in the middle of the table and waddled away again.
    We didn't stand on ceremony here. Cousin Carlos leaned his head over the table, tilted the bowl up with one hand, grabbed his tablespoon with the other hand, and started shoveling. Arturo did a modified version of the same thing — that is, a bit more civilized — and I did a modified version of what Arturo was doing.
    The servant woman came back with a plate of tortillas; we ate them. She came back with more beer; we drank it. She came back with a big platter of fried chicken legs; we ate them. Meanwhile, she was taking away the empties, and now she brought more beer; we all sat back and belched and considered the river. Life seemed good. I wasn't even very much worried about the missing Maria's dealer.
    After a few minutes, Cousin Carlos roused himself a little, like a cloud changing shape, and I saw that he was thinking about his responsibilities as a host. He frowned at me and said, "You want coffee?"
    I looked at him. "For what?"
    He considered that. "Clean your teeth," he decided.
    I pondered that concept: coffee as a tooth-cleaning agent. It almost seemed to make sense. "Nah," I said. "But thanks anyway."
    "De nada,
" he said, which was perfectly true.
    We spent some more time contemplating the day. I was reaching the stage where the low flat green movement of the river was becoming a metaphor for life itself — I was becoming stunned into philosophy, in other words — when Cousin Carlos, looking at the river, said, "You comin' here soon?"
    "Oh, yeah," I said, and roused myself. I sat up more straight in my chair, became businesslike. "By the weekend," I said. "At least I hope so. It depends on a lot of things."
    "
De nada
," Cousin Carlos said.
    Arturo said, "I'll phone you when."
    "De nada,"
Cousin Carlos said, and the servant woman came out, looking faintly worried or aggravated or upset. She stood next to Cousin Carlos's chair, bent forward as though she were in church, and muttered some things to him.
    Cousin Carlos at first looked startled, then irritated, then fatalistic. He shrugged and grumbled something, and the servant woman bowed even more deeply and went away, rubbing her hands in a fretful manner, as though she'd been told to go get the doctor.
    Cousin Carlos looked over at me. "You get to practice," he said, and touched his finger to his lips.
    Oh, good: a dress rehearsal, completely unexpected, and me half zonked from beer and sun and heat. But what the hell, I was going to have to do this eventually, so why not start now?
    The plan was, I intended to stay at this house of Cousin Carlos for any length of time from one week to three, depending how things progressed in the outer world and how my mustache was coming along. During that time, I would have to pretend to be Guerreran, because I couldn't exactly be hidden, in a small town like this, even behind Cousin Carlos's fine privacy wall, and I certainly couldn't present myself as the mysterious American. Which meant I had to be a Guerreran who, somehow, didn't speak fluent Guerreran Spanish.
    Okay. The story was that I was Ernesto Lopez (chosen because I could both pronounce it and remember it), an old friend of Cousin Carlos from his days in Ecuador, managing the Coca-Cola plant, and that now I was a deaf mute as an after-effect of syphilis. The syphilis was cured now and I was getting back on my feet and would only be staying with my old friend —
compadre
— Carlos until I got a job and my own place.
    The syphilis part wasn't my idea, it was Arturo's. He said it gave the story believability, that anybody in Guerrera would understand a person might have some lingering problems after syphilis. I think the real reason for that detail was that Arturo is a smart aleck, but what was I going to