The Sunbittern

There were two old gringos at the bar with two young Costa Rican women in short dresses, and the bartender was pouring shots of Jack Daniel's for five, thinking, I suppose, he was in on the action. The taller gringo stood between the barstools where the women sat. He was lanky and tan, his gray hair in a ponytail, and he wore a blue flowered Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals. The other was balding, paunchy, and had on a tan safari shirt. The bartender was young, also American, though now and then he threw in Spanish words when he made jokes to the women.

I had gone into Quepos to buy groceries, and on the way back the bus had broken down. It was mid-October, eight o'clock at night, and raining hard. The rain had started about noon, and it was like no other rain I'd ever seen, even in Tacoma—warm rain, more from the air than from clouds. I had my backpack with the three plastic bags in it—bread, dorado, pollo, bananas, and Orangina. I'd ducked into the bar out of the deluge, already wet to the skin, while the others on the bus walked home.

Except for the gringos and the women and me, the bar was deserted. It was called Billy's and was connected to the Hotel Mirador del Pacifico higher up on the hill. It was open-air, with tables under a metal roof covered with palm fronds. A metal roll-shutter was pulled down over the liquor at night.

In the States these gringos would have been living in a trailer court, but in Costa Rica they lived the pura vida. They brought down their gas-guzzler cars, bought cheap beach property, and threw their money around. That's what the women were assuming anyway. Why else be with them? I ordered an Imperial and sat at a table off to one side. The rain roared on the roof.

Normally I'd have paid no attention to any of them. I'd have read my book or studied my thesis notes, but because of the rain I hadn't brought my notes, and my book, an archaeological history of Central America called Empire of Light, was in a plastic bag under the groceries at the bottom of my pack. Besides in a few minutes, rain or no rain, I had to walk up to the Mono Azul because exactly at nine Gwen was calling.

Something struck me about the taller gringo. He reminded me of someone I knew—a professor in college, maybe, or an aging movie actor. And the women were worth watching in their own right. They were dark-haired, in their twenties, with figures they were proud of, or at least displayed to advantage. One had a round face with short hair crimped with silver clips. She wore a thin red and white sundress. The other had a more angular face, long hair loose down her back; she wore a white blouse over a short black skirt. She was flirtier with both the gringos and the bartender, and a few times she even looked at me sitting off in the shadows.

I was a dweeb, a nerd, a geek, though my personality wasn't visible to anyone in a foreign country. I'd grown up sheltered by my mother, who taught junior high school in Gig Harbor, and by my father, a geek himself, who worked for the Gates conglomerate. I'd graduated a year early from high school, finished a bio degree at the University of Washington, and was now in graduate school in ornithology at Cornell. I did word games in my head—I, in, pin, pine, opine, opined—timed myself on the New York Times daily and Sunday puzzles (my record for Sunday was 18:10), and answered the chess and bridge challenges. I'd spent the last two weeks at the natural history museum in San José, then moved down to Quepos because a friend was letting me use his house to write in.

The women and the gringos talked about nothing...