The Dream Merchant Read Online Free

ocean.
    Are they coming any closer? I asked for the third or fourth time, unable to get my mind off the gunmen in the boats.
    Hard to say, he answered.
    Jim was returning from the jungle and didn’t seem concerned about the boats. I imagined that he was thinking where this experience had left him—whether a man can come all the way back and be normal, live again with his wife in a neat little house in the suburbs as if he never left.
    The plan was for us to keep our vigil, behind the Boston Whaler where the Colombians couldn’t see us if they came back. That way, surprise would be on our side. Jim told me that he was a good shot, and I didn’t doubt it. We would have a fighting chance, if we stayed up the night and remained alert. That was the key. He’d learned about such things in Brazil. He had a plan and I believed him.
    In the morning, when I woke up, I was still clutching the rifle. It was a calm, picture-postcard day in the Bahamas with no Colombian speedboats anywhere that I could see. Jim was sleeping beside me on the deck, snoring like a bull.

 
    2.
    T WENTY YEARS LATER , H OMESTEAD , F LORIDA
    Jim raises his bare thigh a little and Mara, in shorts and T-shirt, settles on him, her body moving smoothly against his dry white skin. The petite, shapely twenty-six-year-old spreads her legs a little and raises herself, rubs her sex back and forth against my friend’s thigh. I am sitting to the side of them in his old La-Z-Boy recliner, moved hastily, two weeks earlier, from his apartment with Phyllis. Jim is grinning, his left eye tearing as it has for the past eight or nine years.
    I’ve just met this girl who now turns back toward me, strikes a pose, and smiles as though to ask, Do you like this? I feel aroused watching them and confused about why she is performing like this on my first visit to their tiny dark house. This pose, this angle, staring at her small raised behind, legs spread, is about the same view as the snapshot Jim had showed me five weeks earlier on my last trip to Florida, before Mara arrived from Israel, where they’d met. In the picture, her head is turned to the side on a pillow after they had had sex. She is spent, entirely pleased. Jim had made a show of snatching the photo from my hand, but first he’d wanted me to relish her youthful ass and bushy dark hair with their wetness spilling onto her inner thigh. And now he is grinning at me. Do you like her? They are both selling me even while they sell each other.
    Jim is now rounding the bend to eighty. He and I have been best friends for twenty years, although it feels like a puff of time since the night vigil alongside Jim’s Boston Whaler. And yet there have been so many lavish dinners with Phyllis in their condominium, fishing trips to the Bahamas, fervent promises and plans for the future, money schemes, so much history flashing past, it is hard for me to take her in, this brand-new leading lady. Or maybe it’s that I can’t quite see where I fit in.
    Jim and Mara are flat broke, but he doesn’t seem worried. Jim has been a moneymaking machine his whole life, but now his boundless energy and ambition have narrowed to this twenty-six-year-old who has been a shock to his family, friends, to a virtual army of customers and salesmen, to everyone who knows him. How could he leave Phyllis, his faithful devoted wife, his home, his business (though it wasn’t doing very well)?
    Here they are in a worn-out bungalow with aged matching appliances. Two children are sleeping in a closet-sized bedroom, her kids. Empty pizza boxes are strewn in a corner—not a trace of gracious living anywhere to be seen. For most of his adult life Jim has lived in gorgeous, spacious homes. This? This would have been a tragic place for my friend, banishment.
    Mara brought a few thousand from Israel, just enough for them to scrape by for eight or ten weeks. Then what? He cannot move back to Canada, where he is