The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [2]
“How neo-romantic, and how right for today. These planes seat, what, forty?”
“Oh, more,” I said.
“How many more?”
“Just more.”
“And we are listed where?”
“Five and six.”
“Beyond the more than forty.”
“Plenty of no-shows,” I said. “The jungle swallows them up.”
“Nonsense. Look at these people. They’re still arriving.”
“Some are seeing the others off.”
“If he believes that, God, I don’t want him on my side. The fact is they shouldn’t be here at all. It’s off-season.”
“Some of them live here.”
“And we know which ones, don’t we?”
The plane arrived, from Trinidad, and the sound and sight of it caused people near the counter to push in more closely. I went around to the side and approached from behind the adjacent counter, where several others stood. The reconfirmed passengers began filing toward the immigration booth.
Voices. A British woman said the late-afternoon flight had been canceled. We all pushed in closer. Two West Indian men up front waved their tickets at the clerk. There were more voices. I jumped up several times in order to look over the heads of the assembled people to the dirt road outside. Rupert was still there.
Things were rapidly taking shape. Freight and luggage out one door, passengers out the other. I realized we were down to standbys. The people leaving the counter seemed propelled by some deep saving force. A primitive baptism might have been in progress. The rest of us crowded around the clerk. He was putting checks next to some names, crossing out others.
“The flight is full,” he said. “The flight is full.”
There were eight or ten faces left, bland in their traveler’s woe. Various kinds of English were being spoken. Someone suggested we all get together and charter a plane. It was fairly common practice here. Someone else said something about a nine-seater. The first person took names, then went out with several others to find the charter office. I asked the clerk about the late-afternoon flight. He didn’t know why it had been canceled. I asked him to book Jill and me on the first flight out next day. The passenger list wasn’t available, he said. All he could do was put us on standby. We would all know more in the morning.
Using only feet, Jill and I pushed our luggage to the door. One of the charter prospects came back to tell us a plane might be available later in the day—a six-seater, only. This seemed to leave us out. I gestured to Rupert and we started taking things out to the car. Rupert had a long face and a gap between his front teeth and wore a silver medal over his breast pocket—an elaborate oval decoration attached to a multicolored strip of cloth.
Jill sat in back, reading. Out by the trunk, Rupert was saying he knew a hotel not far from the harbor. His gaze kept straying to the right. A woman was standing five feet away, very still, waiting for us to finish talking. I thought I recalled having seen her at the edge of the crowd inside the terminal. She wore a gray dress and carried a handbag. There was a small suitcase at her feet.
“Please, my taxi went back,” she said to me.
She was pale, with a soft plain face, a full mouth and cropped brown hair. She held her right hand up near her forehead to keep the sun out of her eyes. It was agreed we would share the taxi fare to the hotel