Ava walked out of Cheddi Jagan airport into an atmosphere that even in the morning was fetid. She looked for a sign with her name on it. She noticed the person holding it before she actually saw the sign: a lone white man with blond hair, towering above a sea of black and brown faces.
She waved at him and he burst through the waiting group. He was wearing a red polo shirt with PHOENIX sewn over the heart, brown cargo shorts, and white socks pulled up to his knees. He walked awkwardly, with his knees almost locked, and his upper body was also stiff, biceps pushing out his sleeves, broad chest, thick neck. Weightlifter, she thought. Steroids.
“Welcome to Guyana,” he said, reaching for her bags. He had a big, loopy smile on his face, and bright blue eyes that were nothing but friendly.
He led her through the crowd with his elbows stuck out to help clear her path. He threw the bags into the rear seat of a black Jeep with a gold phoenix stencilled on all four doors. Ava guessed she was expected to ride up front.
The car was running and the air conditioning was going full throttle. She shivered and sneezed. Some of the worst colds she’d had in her life had been the result of going from heat and humidity into freezers posing as retail stores. When she asked him to turn the air conditioning down, he looked at her as if she were demented but did what she asked anyway.
“I’m Jeff,” he said.
“Hi, Jeff. How far is it to the hotel?”
“About forty-five kilometres,” he said.
“Half an hour?”
“You haven’t been here before, have you?” he said. She detected a New England accent.
“No.”
“Didn’t think so. We’ll be an hour, maybe longer.”
“That much traffic?”
He laughed. “Yeah, sort of.”
They hadn’t travelled more than a kilometre when they ran into a line of cars slowly bobbing and weaving from one side of the two-lane road to the other. Jeff joined the conga line. “They’re trying to avoid the potholes,” he said. “There are a few stretches of road between here and Georgetown that aren’t riddled with them, but not many. So we’re going to go as fast as the slowest car ahead of us. That’s the way it is. Sorry.”
“I’m glad you have a Jeep.”
“There are some potholes even the Jeep couldn’t get out of, especially in town.”
Some of the holes cut across both lanes, and that caused extra delays as the incoming and outgoing traffic sorted out who had the right of way. Ava tried not to feel nauseated, focusing her attention on the scenery. It was mainly country, low-lying land dotted here and there with what looked like rice paddies. In the distance was the familiar sight of a sugarcane field. Sugar and rice — the agricultural staples of the poorest countries in the world.
The monotony of the landscape was punctuated every couple of kilometres by a village or, more often, a group of ten to twelve shacks. They were built almost right up against the edge of the road. There wasn’t a brick in any of them. Most of them had some kind of wooden frame, the walls an interlaced mixture of planks of different woods, tarpaper, and corrugated tin. The windows were covered with strips of cloth.
Some residents stood leaning against the houses, watching the cars slalom past. Others sat outside on stools, goats tied to pegs bumping against them, children and chickens running around freely. Ava jumped a few times when she saw a child come too close to the road, but Jeff didn’t flinch or slow down his twenty- to thirty-kilometre-an-hour crawl.
The area reminded Ava of parts of the rural Philippines where no one worked and each day was spent watching life drive by. She wondered how many of the people living in these shacks had travelled more than ten kilometres from where they lived.
The road began to improve a little after an hour, and Ava guessed they were getting close to Georgetown. Jeff had been quiet and intense during the drive, and Ava hadn’t wanted to disturb his concentration. Now she said, “I don’t mean to be nosy, but I thought I detected a bit of a New England accent.”
He didn’t take his eyes from the road. “That’s smart of you.”
“I went to school in Massachusetts for two years.”
“I’m from Gloucester.”
“How did someone from Gloucester find their way down here?”
Now he looked towards her, hesitated, then said, “I’m — I was — a fisherman. I came down here on a shrimper out of Florida. We were buying our catch at sea, paying cash to Guyanese boats. What the skipper didn’t tell us was that those boats were financed by local gangsters, and they weren’t too thrilled about our little black market, about us stealing from them. We were in the middle of a deal when two speedboats came out of nowhere and put us out of business.”
“How did they do that?”
He glanced at her again. “They shot the captain and the other two men on the Guyanese boat and threw their bodies into the sea. They took our boat, scuttled it, and set us adrift in a lifeboat.”
“Shit.”
“Big-time shit. We somehow found our way to Georgetown. The skipper went to the cops and they acted as if what had happened was the most natural thing in the world. They told us we were fucking lucky to have made it to shore and maybe we ought to let it go at that. The skipper and the rest of the crew flew back to Miami, but I decided to stay here a while. That was five years ago. It ain’t Miami but the work is steady, the beer is cheap, and the women are slutty.”
“Those sound like great reasons to stay.”
Jeff shrugged. “I didn’t mean to sound like an asshole. It’s just the way it is here.”
“I didn’t take any offence,” Ava said. She noticed they were driving through larger concentrations of housing.
“Georgetown,” he said.
The driving began to occupy him again as the potholes expanded in number and size. As they manoeuvred their way into the city, Ava was immediately taken by the fact that nearly every building was made of wood. A lot of the houses were ramshackle affairs two or three storeys high, with three or four apparently boxed together and some on stilts. Most of the wood was grey, bleached, weather-beaten, not unlike houses she’d seen on Cape Cod, except the houses on Cape Cod had glass windows, not wooden shutters or strips of cloth. In New England there had been flashes of colour as well, something Georgetown was almost devoid of, aside from a
wall that had been painted in red with GOD IS IN CHARGE. ALL IS WELL.
The storefronts were a bit more colourful, their wooden exteriors decorated with hand-painted signs advertising a variety of wares and services. Their windows and doors were protected by thick metal screens, and inside it looked as if the service counters and cash registers were separated from customers by a metal fence that extended from countertop to ceiling. People were passing money through one slot in the screen and getting goods back through another.
“If they didn’t do that,” Jeff said, motioning to a string of storefronts, “they would be getting robbed every other day.”
They were driving through the middle of the city now. Large white edifices began to appear, and they passed a building that housed various courts of law. From afar it looked elegant, but as they came closer Ava saw that paint was peeling off its exterior and some of the window shutters were broken and hanging at odd angles. There was a patch of dry, cracked earth between the sidewalk and the building, with a statue of Queen Victoria sitting on it. Both of the hands had been cut off and the torso was covered in graffiti. Ava looked away. There was something particularly depressing about public institutions — symbols of a nation — that were allowed to fall into such disrepair. It said as much about the people they represented as the structures themselves.
Ava next saw a wooden church spire soaring above the city’s skyline.
“St. George’s Anglican,” said Jeff. “It’s forty metres high at the peak of the spire, the tallest wooden cathedral in the world.”
“And what is that?” she asked, her attention now caught by a clock tower in the other direction.
“Stabroek Market, the bizarre bazaar. You name it, you can buy it there — everything from pineapple to shoes to furniture, jewellery, and even a whole pig.”
“The clock tower, what is it made of?”
“Corrugated iron. The whole building is made of iron, some corrugated, some cast. What would you expect when it was designed by an engineer and built by an iron company?”
“Interesting,” Ava said.
“Interest wears off soon enough.”
They reached the end of High Street. Jeff turned right and then did a quick left. “The hotel is straight ahead,” he said.
The Phoenix Hotel was framed on either side by nothing but sky. It was a big white wooden box, six storeys high and four times as wide. A line of palm trees dotted the front of the property and marched around the outer edge of the circular driveway. A water fountain stood in the middle of the driveway: six dolphins spewing a cloudy-looking liquid.
Jeff pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of the hotel. The front doors had been thrown open and Ava could see directly into the cavernous lobby, which had a second set of open doors at the far end that offered an impressive view of the Atlantic Ocean.
She climbed out of the car and faced the hotel. To the left she could see a muddy brown river moving sluggishly towards the ocean.
“That’s the mouth of the Demerara,” Jeff said.
“Like the rum?”
“One and the same. The distillery is upriver.”
She looked again at the colour of the river and made a note to avoid the rum. Near the river and slightly back towards town, she saw some familiar flags flying. “And over there?” she asked, pointing.
“Foreign embassies.”
The American embassy was closest to the hotel and the Canadian was next in line.
Jeff carried her bags into the lobby. There was a breeze flowing from the ocean side, and huge fans churned overhead. Ava still felt hot, and she could only imagine how sticky it would get if the breeze subsided.
To her left was a cafe and a registration desk that was nine metres long and had one clerk standing behind it. To her right was a large sitting area filled with wicker furniture, the cushions rumpled and faded. Farther down was a bar with bamboo chairs and tables that were in better, if not pristine, condition.
As they crossed the lobby towards Registration, a large cockroach scurried across the hardwood floor almost directly in front of her. It startled her and she jumped. “Did you see that?” she said.
“No, I didn’t see anything,” Jeff said.
“It was a cockroach.”
“We don’t have cockroaches,” he said.
“It had to be three inches long, with a gold body, black spots, and a black head.”
“Son of a gun, that does sound like a cockroach,” he said as he dropped her bags at the front desk.
She tipped him twenty dollars. He looked uncertainly at the bill in his hand. “This is way more than the normal rate around here.”
“I insist. I appreciated the way you drove.”
“Thanks.”
“Jeff, tell me, do you ever make yourself and the Jeep available to guests for non-airport runs?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Nothing too far out of the way, I would imagine. I may need a ride to a place called Malvern Gardens. Heard of it?”
“Yeah, I know it.”
“And I may need you to wait with me a while when I’m there.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think that’s much of a problem. The usual rate is ten dollars an hour.”
“For you and the Jeep?”
“Yeah, but you have to pay for any gas I use, and I have to tell you, gas is expensive.”
“What are we talking about?”
“Five dollars a gallon.”
“No problem.”
“Do you have any idea when you might need me? I’ve got another airport run to make today and I’ve actually got to get going.”
“There’s no rush. How about I let the doorman know after I figure things out? Check in with him when you get back.”
“That’ll work.”
Ava turned to the registration clerk and gave her name. For almost two hundred dollars a night — almost the same as the Grand Hyatt in Bangkok — she got an ocean view, a single bed, and a television, but no cable. There was Internet access in the business centre on the ground floor, but none in the room. If she wanted to make a long-distance call she would have to let the switchboard know so they could activate the service for her. There was no mini-bar or fridge in her room, and if she wanted ice she had to call down to the bar. She did get coffee and toast in the morning. When she asked about mobile phone service, she was told that if she had Bluetooth she could use her phone in Georgetown.
Ava rode the elevator to the fourth floor, unhappy with the hotel’s concept of “three star.” Anywhere in Asia, every service she’d asked about at the registration desk would have been provided. When she opened the door to her room, the Phoenix’s rating tumbled to one star.
There were two single beds covered in pink chenille spreads, and the floor was covered with white tile. It reminded Ava of a hospital. The dresser and bedside table were tattooed with cigarette burns, and the bedside lampshade was slightly frayed, as was the shade on the single overhead light.
Ava went into the bathroom. No bathrobe, no slippers. Two thin towels and one facecloth. There was one bar of soap, wrapped in paper, and no shampoo. She checked the shower. No mould. She flushed the toilet. It worked.
Back in the room she gazed resignedly at the room’s only feature that she liked: a rattan chair by the window. She sat in it and looked out at the Atlantic Ocean. The water was choppy, crashing against a seawall that extended over to the Demerara on the left and as far as she could see on the right.
It could be worse, she thought. At least it was clean, and she wasn’t there for the hotel anyway. Somewhere out there Jackson Seto was waiting to be found.