Via Dolorosa Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the good weather, had manned a small wicker hut out on the beach and had contented himself with vending drift jewelry to small children with fistfuls of coin, had, on the persistence of the storm, moved his wares indoors; he stood now in the hallway, swaddled in the cool summer gray of a lightless morning, the shadows of the raindrops falling out beyond the foyer windows dimpling his dark skin, his face, the wide, tented expanse of his shoulders. He was a good-looking, tall, red-skinned man, vaguely European in some respects, whose hair was a black mat of tight curls cropped close to the scalp, but slightly longish at the back. He stood now behind his improvised dais, fronted with layered latticework and rosary ivy hung in looped smiles. A display of hemp-strung seashells and statuary conchs, each glossy and shellacked, was spread out like the honed tackle of a skilled surgeon on a felt coverlet atop the dais. There, too, were necklaces of sharks’ teeth and pale green twists of palm for sale; were the ruddy, barren shells of oysters adorned with faux jewels; were the fossilized indications of starfish and horseshoe crabs impressed upon the stone; were wreaths of magnolia blossoms strung together on lengths of wire.
    “Sir,” the Palauan said.
    “Good morning.”
    “Where is the lovely young woman today, sir?”
    “Still asleep,” Nick lied.
    “Would she like another conch? I have new, beautiful conch shells. She would fall in love with these new ones.”
    “I’ll let her know.”
    “You should surprise her, sir,” the Palauan said. “For you, and because of her, I will make the special deal. Pick two that you most like.”
    “Not right now,” Nick said.
    “It will be the good, special deal.”
    “I’m sure.”
    “A woman, she likes to feel she is always in the mind.”
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Perhaps after you’ve eaten,” the Palauan said.
    “Perhaps.”
    Nick walked quickly by, powerless to keep his eyes from the handsome man’s, and their gaze seemed to lock and remain for an uncomfortable length of time. Turning away, Nick slipped down the narrow corridor and paused momentarily to glance at the sketched mural on the blank wall before going into the hotel restaurant. The past two weeks there had been a panel of sun from the lobby working its way down the narrow corridor, which would fall on his back, warming him as he stood in this very position, sketching. But there was no sun today; like everything else, it had been eradicated by the storm.
    Nothing to see here, he thought, his eyes still stuck on the incomplete mural while he walked away. Move along, please. Move along.
    The restaurant was very busy, as many of the hotel’s patrons did not feel safe leaving the hotel grounds in the middle of such a storm. Nick did not see an available table. The bar, too, was full, and he did not feel like standing around waiting for a seat to open up. Nearest him, seated at the bar, a middle-aged, dark-skinned, muscular man with tight, wiry-pressed hair and wearing a black satin patch over his left eye, sat sipping a dark liquor in a tall, narrow glass. The man turned his head just slightly, and Nick watched the deep, thick creases form in the back and side of the man’s neck. It was a thick, reddened neck, heavily-pored and sprouting sparse black hairs. Nick looked at the man’s single glittering eye. It was an eye, Nick saw, that had spent much of the early morning (and, doubtless, much of the night before) befriending various liquors. The sloppy, drunk eye lingered on him. Again, Nick could not look away.
    “What do you know?” the man said. Sedated with alcohol and corrupt with some heavy South Pacific dialect, the man’s question was almost too difficult for Nick to comprehend; indeed, he thought he’d misheard the man.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “What do you know?” the man said again, his tone and tempo unchanged. But there was no mistaking him this time.
    “Nothing,” Nick said. “I’m sorry.