The Coup - 4

By Peter Schoenau

He looked out onto multi-story apartment blocks on the other side of the street. A woman hung laundry to dry on a roof terrace. Her husband, perhaps a carpenter by profession, glued broken chairs. One floor down, a tall, haggard woman sitting on a balcony worked a crossword puzzle. He noticed she was wore the same dress, white with a dark flowered print.

It was hot. No one had closed the windows or lowered the blinds. With the rifle's scope he watched a couple inside the third house from the street corner as they lay naked on the sofa. His penis against her butt, they moved rhythmically. It was getting dark fast, and the dark bodies merged into the night.

The other side of the street was usually quiet in the mornings, especially on weekends. At some point, the kids appeared. Mama followed, cautioning them to be quiet. Papa appeared last, was greeted with enthusiasm, kids clinging to him like nettles.

The weather forecast had predicted heat, increasingly cloudy afternoon skies and thunderstorms. Now thick grey clouds covered the horizon, merging with the ocean so that no clear line separated the sea from the sky.

Lightning flashed, then the thunder and large drops of rain splashed against the window pane, a curtain obscuring everything.

The woman in the middle building tore her wash from the line spanning her balcony. The carpenter pulled a piece of tarp over the chairs and tables set up for repair on the roof terrace. His two kids, dressed only in shorts, bounded through the rain, turning and twisting and wiping their wet hair from their faces. His wife cleaned her legs and feet with a bar of soap.

The following morning was sunny. The air was clean, as if someone had cleaned the dirty window pane with a sponge overnight. The deluge had relieved the overworked street cleaners since, for a short while at least, the streets looked clean, all the dilapidated buildings charming.

In the first house across the street, at the corner of Calle N, an older man did his morning exercises on the third floor. He ran small circles inside the room. His white undershirt and the white crown of hair gleamed green through the tinted glass of his patio.

Night fell. The sun disappeared behind the high-rise with its uncounted apartments. A woman in a blue dress cut a man's hair on the roof terrace. At the entrance to the corner building a group of domino players had gathered and sat around a small table lit by a single lamp suspended from above.

The phone had rung once in all this time, but it had only been reception. They wanted to know how long he intended to stay. He replied that he wanted to stay at least another week, and the girl at reception had made a note of it without saying anything.

Blood had seeped through his bandage. He smelled of blood and for the first time also of pus. The right sleeve of his shirt showed an irregular red stain and stuck to the bandage. He desperately needed a new bandage, iodine and antibiotics. He pulled on a fresh shirt and walked to Farmacia Johnson on Calle Obispo. He purchased a new bandage and bottle of iodine. There was another, better equipped pharmacy along the same street where he bought medication for an infected foot. He said he got it from walking on a coral reef. The pharmacist took a small bottle off a dusty shelf. He recognized the color and inscription. When he opened the package in his hotel room, he read the list of indications and dosage suggestions. The suppositories contained a large dose of cortisone. He preferred penicillin. Maybe he was partial to it, but a good shot of penicillin at 1.2 million units would've done the trick. But that was not available and the pharmacist would never have sold him a syringe.

When the cleaning girl found him the next morning, the rifle with its scope still pointed at the top floor of the Habana Libre.

© Peter Schoenau 2008

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