The Day It Rained Forever

The Manager arose and walked unhappily to the door and stood by the chair, touching Webb’s coat which was draped over it.

‘What’s the job?’ asked Webb.

‘In the kitchen,’ said the Manager, and looked away.

John Webb sat on the bed and said nothing. His wife did not move.

Señor Esposa said. ‘It is the best I can do. What more can you ask of me? Last night, those others down in the plaza wanted both of you. Did you see the machetes? I bargained with them. You were lucky. I told them you would be employed in my hotel for the next twenty years, that you were my employees and deserve my protection!’

‘You said that !’

‘Señor, señor, be thankful! Consider! Where will you go? The jungle? You will be dead in two hours from the snakes. Then can you walk five hundred miles to a capital which will not welcome you? No – you must face the reality.’ señor Esposa opened the door. ‘I offer you an honest job and you will be paid the standard wages of two pesos a day, plus meals. Would you rather be with me, or out in the plaza at noon with our friends? Consider.’

The door was shut. señor Esposa was gone.

Webb stood looking at the door for a long while.

Then he walked to the chair and fumbled with the holster under the draped white shirt. The holster was empty. He held it in his hands and blinked at its emptiness and looked again at the door through which Señor Esposa had just passed. He went over and sat down on the bed beside his wife. He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms and kissed her, and they lay there, watching the room get brighter with the new day.

At eleven o’clock in the morning, with the great doors on the windows of their room flung back, they began to dress. There were soap, towels, shaving equipment, even perfume in the bathroom, provided by Mr Esposa.

John Webb shaved and dressed carefully.

At eleven-thirty he turned on the small radio near their bed. You could usually get New York or Cleveland, or Houston on such a radio. But the air was silent. John Webb turned the radio off.

‘There’s nothing to go back to – nothing to go back for-nothing.’

His wife sat on a chair near the door, looking at the wall.

‘We could stay here and work,’ he said.

She stirred at last. ‘No. We couldn’t do that, not really. Could we?’

‘No, I guess not.’

‘There’s no way we could do that. We’re being consistent, anyway; spoiled, but consistent.’

He thought a moment. ‘We could make for the jungle.’

‘I don’t think we can move from the hotel without being seen. We don’t want to try to escape and be caught. It would be far worse that way.’

He nodded.

They both sat a moment.

‘It might not be too bad, working here,’ he said.

‘What would we be living for? Everyone’s dead – your father, mine, your mother, mine, your brothers, mine, all our friends, everything gone, everything we understood.’

He nodded.

‘Or if we took the job, one day soon one of the men would touch me and you’d go after him, you know you would. Or someone would do something to you, and I’d do something.’

He nodded again.

They sat for fifteen minutes, talking quietly. Then, at last, he picked up the telephone and ticked the cradle with his finger.

‘Bueno,’ said a voice on the other end.