The Surf Guru by Doug Dorst Page B

holding him back—fat, panting Vargas. I am so tired. I need to stop and I do not care what is behind me. Then I wonder, Am I no better than Ayala, on his knees and begging to have his neck wrung? Oh, but this is different, so different. It is one thing to seek death; it is another simply to accept the inevitable, to embrace the fate that snaps at your heels. Everyone will be able to see how different it was. And even if they cannot, I know San Humberto will. He will understand.
    At the moment I let go of Vargas and try to plant my feet, I feel a prickly heat surge throughout my body. Just as quickly the warmth turns to ice. I think I feel myself dying.
    Vargas clamps his soft hand around my arm and pulls, hard. He turns his head, and I can see by his eyes that the hyenas are close, closer than they have ever been to him before. “Run!” he yells, his high voice sharp, commanding. Without thinking I take his hand again, but I do not know how much longer I can run.
    Just ahead is my stand. My stand. Where I have sold the fruit for every breakfast, every pie, every jar of jelly in this town for thirty years. In this town where people laugh at Lars’s jokes and forget where their berries come from. In this town where people come to do business with me after doing business with Lars. In this town where men pay to defile my daughter and then haggle with me over the price of figs.
    I feel a sharp pain in my side, and I imagine a scene as strange and vivid as one of my nightmares: Lars has shot me, and he is standing on the terrace, lowering his rifle and laughing as that damned monkey blows away the curl of smoke. “I am shot,” I say, without meaning to.
    â€œYou have a cramp,” Vargas says. “Breathe!”
    Yes. Breathe, Manolo. Breathe. I close my eyes, shutting out the shaking city, and I concentrate on breathing—breathing in everything that is in the air, the good and the bad, the forgiveness and the dust and the stench and the ghosts of the dead, the love and the fear. We pass the stand and now I think about Ysela going there to tell me her good news, Ysela, my daughter who corrected her mother’s stone, my daughter who will be a schoolteacher, my daughter who somehow captured El Gris. The pain still burns my side, but I pass Vargas and now I am pulling him along with me.
    And we pass the cobbler’s and the cooper’s and the saddle maker’s stores, and I see in my mind how it happened: El Gris heard about the most beautiful woman in the land and knew he had to see her, so he came to our town—perhaps with his hair tucked under his hat—and found his way to Lars’s bar, and he told Lars he would pay many times the usual rate; he simply had to be with this beautiful Ysela, this angel of whom the whole island speaks. And Lars took the money, of course he took the money, and he sent my daughter off with this criminal, and maybe she was scared at first but she knew what she had to do for everyone else, for the larger good, so she set aside her fear, and she whispered to one of the other girls to run and get the police, and she took El Gris into her room and kept him there—he thought he was taking her, but she was taking him —until the police knocked down the door. Of course Lars claimed credit but that was a lie; it was only Ysela who thought of something more important than money, Ysela, who has changed, repented, who now wants to surround herself with good people and to do good things, who wants to teach children to be moral and thoughtful. And while all of this may be a story I am making up, it is my story and she is my daughter and my legs are pumping and my body is strong and the bar and the cathedral flash past and then from four directions everyone converges in the square and heads for the ladders, and Vargas and I go up the side of the hotel, and we are all safe, away from the beasts below, our chests heaving as we catch our breath.
    The hyenas