Settlement

He stayed the night with a friend in Port of Spain. They went to a club and looked at girls. They drank vodka in a roped area. Some kind of birthday party. People promising to learn Kung Fu. Tomorrow, they said. I’ll start learning it tomorrow. 

Tourists swelled the room. His friend disappeared with a British girl, six foot tall, wild titted, her face streaked with mascara, slurring marriage talk, adoration. Sherwin pushed his way out the front door into the street. It had rained and the cobblestones glowed in the lights from construction barricades stacked at the mouth of an open trench. A group of thieves waited for drunks along the banks of a canal. He walked the other way to a diner full of cops and prostitutes. He ate a plate of dobles and watched the whores smile. In the morning he hired a van to take him south to the Caroni Swamp. Protestors were marching on the federal banks and they were an hour getting out of the city. Tellers and guards locked in behind great steel gates. Militants in masks howled and beat the bars, rolled barrels of burning trash. Old women sat in the road with their eyes closed.