Bandit Read Online Free Page A

logistics, and on the other end, the darker end, there is purposeful isolation.
    During the day he would leave me. I’d wake up and find a key and a note atop some money:
Have fun! Wear sunscreen!
I’d put on my nubby yellow bathing suit and take myself to the beach or the small intensely chlorinated pool and try hard to have a fun vacation as instructed.
    What was he doing? Was there somewhere nearby to gamble? There must have been. Or was there a woman he met? He’d return in the evening and take me to eat somewhere nearby. He always ordered a hamburger and a Coke for me without looking at the menu, even though I hated hamburgers and Coke. Mom wouldn’t let me drink soda, and it seemed important to him to break her rules.
    “Hahmm-borrr-gaysa,”
he’d say to the waiter, childishly drawing out the words and gesturing coarsely as if the waiter were near-blind and deaf, “and
Coca-Colé
!” he’d finish, pronouncing the “cola” part with a silly “Olé!” paired with an insulting bottle-drinking mime. He was condescending to waiters everywhere like big shots often are, but especially here. “This is the only word you need to know,” he told me from across the dark booth.
“Hamburguesa.”
I tamped down my disgust with obliging laughs, since clearly this show was for me. I did not recognize his gold chain and ring. I watchedhim carefully, waiting for a time when we’d say real things to each other.
    I didn’t tell him that I liked my days there, on the beach, alone like a grown-up. But anxious. I knew the untethered feeling I liked was not right for me yet. If he asked, I would have told him about my days lying on a blue towel, just lying there for hours, burning pink in the sun, listening while two Mexican teenage girls talked next to me, oblivious to my eavesdropping, alternating between Spanish and English. They talked about how wonderful it would be to be born a
gringa,
the kind of house they’d live in, what their boyfriends would look like, and how their daddies would spoil them with cars and clothes and fantastic birthday parties.
    One of the days he didn’t leave, he waited for me to wake up and took me to a Mayan ruin site. Before the tour we foreigners drew in automatically to giant steep steps of a pyramid and began to climb. It was so soaking hot, and I felt so young and small. The other tourists seemed to have such trouble climbing. I bounded up the old blocks, turning to the wide mush of treetops below and smiling. Dad down below. I waved to him but he wasn’t looking.
    We were herded up for the tour and kids my age and even older were already whining. I couldn’t imagine complaining even half as much as my peers did. It frightened me, the way they said what they wanted.
Hungry
and
tired
and
thirsty
and
bored
and
ugh, Dad, can we go
? At the edge of the cenote nearby a tour guide described how the Mayans would sacrifice young women here by tossing them in; “girls about your age,”he said and pointed at me. The group of tourists around us chuckled uncomfortably but I straightened up.
    I rested on a boulder carved into a snake’s head, wearing the only hat I owned as a child, a black-and-neon tropical-print baseball hat I am certain came from a Wendy’s Kids’ Meal. I feel there was a photograph taken of this that I remember seeing, and I wonder if it still exists somewhere. I remember resting on the snake’s head and I remember the photograph of myself resting on it equally. I liked this day, seeing these things that seemed so important, Dad mostly hanging back in the wet shade of the jungle edge, not climbing things. He had brought me here and I loved it. I felt the secret urge children have to become lost and stay overnight somewhere good, like a museum or mall, as a way of being there privately, directly. I circled the pyramid hoping to find a cave where I could curl up, so I could sleep and stay inside this old magic, like a good sacrifice, just right for something serious. But it