The Mask of Minos, Bruno's Inferno

Chapter 9 - Old Friends

She looked at the view from the patio. "Is this all yours Harry?"

"That is God's," he said pointing to the valley. "This I borrow from a little man called Mike." He took a deep breath and leaned over the railing with her and looked at the view. The moon shone over the valley and against the mountain. In a few minutes, it would be sinking behind the tall peak to the west.

"That is why I come here," he said.

"I was told it was for the fishing," she said and rather coyly.

"That too." He walked to the bar to make a drink. "How 'bout you? Yes? Good. I can't trust a man who doesn't drink." He came back with only one and handed it to her. "I've had my limit, but you got some catching up to do I think."

She held the drink close to her and stirred it with her finger and licked it.

"It tastes better if you just drink it. You don't know where that finger has been."

"I'm sorry I broke in on your date. Do you love her?"

"Now you're being ignorant, just plain wrong."

She smiled. "Still, I apologize. She's cute."

"Of course she is. Did you see the girls down there? Mike doesn't let just anybody work here. You know, like Skinny."

"I should throw this drink in your face," she said and smiled. "CJ was a doll."

That made Harry think about old wounds. He had gotten over that whole experience. He rubbed his hand where Skinny had shot him at close range. "Wyoming was a long time ago. Ah, it was nearly two years ago."

"Twenty months."

He looked at her with feigned surprise.

"Does it still hurt?"

"Only when I think about it. But when you fall off a horse, aren't you supposed to hop back on?"

"I was talking about your hand, not prostitutes. Does it hurt still?" Harry's left hand had a large scar - neatly stitched - where Skinny the pimp, the smuggler shot him at close range to extract a confession of the Inca gems he had and Skinny wanted back.

"I know what you meant. I was just trying to deflect the conversation."

"You started it." She saw the pain in his eyes, no matter how distant, how dilute. She reached over and held his hand.

"Just in case you hadn't noticed, Mike is not into smuggling. His brother's the captain of the police force here. He's one of the good guys."

"I'm beginning to think there aren't any good guys or bad guys anymore." She turned to look out into the forest. Harry stood next to her.

"For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," Harry said. "Hamlet."

"But Hamlet was talking about his life in Denmark. It is a prison, he said, and he blamed bad dreams."

"Do you have bad dreams?"

"I feel trapped sometimes. This job has been my life for the past six years. Is that a dream?"

"No. That is reality."

"One reality."

"But reality is not the truth, there is a difference between the two. What we perceive to be the truth isn't always reality. One in which you are in control. You have a destiny, I think."

Sara looked at the drink in her hand and said, "Whew, I better stop. This is getting serious. Where were we before Hamlet came in?"

They were standing close to the railing and he pinned her to it with both hands on the banister and her in between. "About to make love."

She didn't blanch and allowed him to press the space between them. "Conner warned me about you. He called you Ernest." She sipped from her drink forcing some distance between them. Harry backed away.

"He's the writer. We once came here to Costa Rica for the Blue Marlin fishing, and I brought him to the Hacienda. He left with a new purpose, probably fancied himself another Williams."

"He said he was working on a new play," she said. A description always follows the announcement of one of Conner's plays. He could no more tell someone the title of his play without a brief synopsis than he could say peanut butter without saying, and jelly.

"It's called Both Ends," she said, " and is about a man who suddenly wakes up one morning and realizes he had spent his entire adult life working menial jobs with no satisfactory show of it, and now that it's too late he has no money and no future and his wife leaves him. His life is shit and he owes it all to himself."

"Sounds splendid. Conner is such an existentialist. Man's inhumanity to himself. Conner must be bi-polar. Why are you here? It certainly isn't to talk about old times. You have nothing better to do?"

She pushed him away against his naked chest, his shirt was open. Harry had the trim muscular build of a swimmer. His thick brown hair was pushed back and she blushed when he looked into her eyes.

He took the opportunity to look her over closely. Her skin was flawless, like that of a teenager, her nose was small and slightly upturned, and she had full lips. "Your eyes change color in the firelight," he said.

"Harry," she said stammering a bit. She walked over to the bar and fussed with the bottles. "Do you want another drink?"

She had a stupid look on her face and he could see he pushed her too much. But he wondered what it would take to entice her. "You interrupted Connie and me as we were... Do you know how frustrating that is?"

"Oh, I saw it."

"Yes you did, and now I think you should make up for it."

"Oh no you don't Harry. I'm not really in that business, remember? Besides, I'm not touching that." She pointed to his lower half.

He had a bulge growing in his pants and her eyes drew to it. "You had better put that on ice for a while," she said. "You are something else Harry Thursday. You really, really are."

Harry had played a lot of poker in college when he and his buddies would spend the night playing five-card stud until the sun came up and then only after someone had won the till. But he remembered how to bluff and certainly knew when someone else was bluffing.

"Okay," he said with an air of relinquishment, your hand."