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By Michael Perry

Sept. 3, 1999 | We can call him Al. It was the name he used in Belize City. I wouldn't presume to improve on it. He was wearing acid-washed jeans and white tennis shoes, and looked to be in his early 50s. Paunchy in his polo shirt, he appeared on the balcony of the Seaside Guest House and let himself into a tiny single room hardly larger than a public restroom stall.

The day before, the guest house had teemed with the usual motley lot of backpackers and day trippers: a dreadlocked Austrian, a clean-scrubbed American Mormon, a Canadian fry cook from Florida, a pair of dusty, beautiful hippie women from the Netherlands. Now they were all gone, off to catch a bus to Guatemala, or water taxis to the Cayes. They had all appeared worldly and roadworthy, but Al I could picture back in the States, wearing slacks and a name tag, selling home appliances in a strip mall.

The others looked like they'd traveled here. Al looked like he'd been caught here.

Whoever christened it the Seaside Guest House was being optimistic. If the wind is right, you can smell the sea from the second floor, and should the palm leaves part to provide a sight line over the tin roofs and down the adjacent alley, you might spy a scintilla of Caribbean glint. But knock your Belikin bottle over the balcony railing and you'll ding a taxi, not a sunbather.

Just off the common area, at the head of the hall, is a bunk room crammed with six beds, one of which is mine. The bunk room and Al's room share a wall.

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Shortly after he entered his tiny room, Al came back out, descended the stairs, let himself out the gate to Prince Street and disappeared down the sidewalk.

It was quiet after Al left. I sat at a table in the common area, composing notes toward a story on Belizian firefighters. When the hot breeze blew, the palms rattled like rain. Across Prince Street, a little old man, his face a wizened pecan, sat under an orange Ovaltine cap on a chair in the sun. Now and then he spoke to a woman ironing in the shade of the great white house that dominated the garden. The woman was built like an oil drum, wrapped in a vast white apron that bulged from her gut like a sail full of wind. Their soft voices floated across Prince Street and up through the screen.

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A local reporter arrived and drove me to a seaside club, where we sat at an open-air table overlooking the water, eating chips and salsa spiked with cilantro and chunks of raw conch. I noticed a man standing alone at the railing, hands in his pockets, faced into the wind. It was Al. At his back, disco lights swabbed the empty dance floor. The reporter and I left shortly. The floor had drawn a few dancers. Al was on the fringe, hanging back.

Back in the guest house at 12:30 a.m., I had the six-bunk dorm room to myself. I made a few notes in my journal, then settled in to sleep.

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I awaken some time later. Someone is fumbling with a door. Al has returned with a friend. A woman is giggling. The wall between us is made of gapped one-inch boards; a few hairline strips of light seep through with the sound. I hear the bunk creak, hear the woman's voice. Switching between Spanish and Creole, she sounds pleasantly, lazily drunk, her voice a slurring purr.

Al begins to petition her for specific favors. She giggles drunkenly, but remains firm on one point: "Condom, condom." He protests, quietly and urgently. She mentions a child and asks for more tequila. I hear her drink. Again, rather loudly this time, she insists that he produce a condom. He shushes her, but soon I hear the rattle of the wrapper. It becomes quiet. I hear weight shifting. Still no words. More sounds of movement.

There is trouble. He makes another request. She demurs -- "It will taste bitter." Again, he shushes her. Soon she is looping from coy to surly. She mumbles about suicide. Then she brightens, asks for the bathroom. Al points her down the hall and hides in his room while she pees noisily.

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