saja.” I didn’t know any Balinese, but knew she would understand the Bahasa.
She stepped back behind the small counter and sat, pulling out her cell phone.
Along the walls textiles hung on wooden rods that stuck out like tree limbs, haphazard and bristling. Piles of new textiles sorted by the island of production filled the center table. Batiks from Java, natural-colored ikats from Timor and Flores, and the ikats of Sawu and Roti, with their greater concentrations of blues and reds. I stared at a Roti sarong, so similar to one thrown over the back of Flip’s couch that they could have been woven by the same hand. Red the color of dried blood. Shaking myself, I looked up to the old textiles hanging on the wall.
“Do you have other examples of old tapis?” I asked, turning from Roti and Flip and blood to a fine Sumatran piece framed and hanging above the others on the wall. I had always wanted one of these skirts, with its combination of ikat ground—the pattern dyed into the thread before weaving—and the entire field embellished with embroidery.
“Yes, we do,” she said, but made no move to go to get the other tapis. I riffled a pile of cloths on the table, thinking she was just finishing a text, a game. The seconds became a minute, two. I had lost any interest, feigned or otherwise, in the textiles in the pile, and irritation bubbled up. “Can you show them to me?”
“No, madam. I am not able.” She kept looking at her screen.
I waited for her to explain and when she didn’t I said edgily, “And why is that?”
She looked up, but her fingers continued to move over her phone. “They are locked in the back and only my boss has the key. She is not here today.”
I asked as calmly as I could, “When will she return?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, I think. Can you come back then?” She poked at the keys.
“Yes. Do you have a business card?”
“Yes, sorry, Bu.” She handed me the card. She was addressing me as an older woman, though she didn’t look any younger than me.
Outside on the step, woolly-headed from jet lag, disoriented by death, I determined not to make any more stops. Murder had made me angry.
A hundred yards down the road my determination dissolved. I was drawn by the familiar. Row upon row of bicycles, and at the back, a Giant ATX Pro, red and just my size. An entry-level mountain bike that couldn’t compare to my bike at home, but it would work. I entered the shop. A young man, dressed in biking clothes, came around the counter to greet me. “Sorry, are you about to go out?” I asked.
He looked puzzled. “Out?”
I realized he wore his biking clothes around the shop. His prerogative. “I want to rent this bike.” Together we walked outside, where I pointed at the Giant that I wanted.
“Sorry, we use that bike for our tours. You can rent any of those.” He pointed to a row of inferior bikes.
“No. I want that bike. How much is it?” All the emotion that I’d felt, the distress at the murder, the anger at Flip for dying in that macabre fashion, my disgust at myself for taking the silk sack, welled up. For an instant, irritation surged at Ubud—at the Westernized cafés, the curio shops, men who wore their biking gear when they weren’t biking, shopgirls who texted rather than paying attention to their customers.
“I can’t rent you that one.” He pointed at another one. “This is a very good bike. I think you will like it.”
He didn’t know me, so he didn’t see me switch from irritation to determination, my jaw set, my feet become grounded. “Where’s your boss?”
“He’s out in the shop repairing a bike for a tour.” He waved his arm in the direction of a building behind the small curio shop next door. “He does not want to be disturbed.”
I felt the need for control, for something to happen as I wanted it to happen, and I headed in the direction he’d indicated. I needed a single transaction, a single event, to occur in a manner I understood. Not a murder. Not a dead man at my feet. I needed the security of having a bike I would enjoy riding, a touchstone that related to my life at home.
“Excuse me, Bu, I am afraid you cannot go out there.” He tried to keep up, but I pointed to two people who were looking at the row of bikes nearest the road. He hesitated, and I put some distance between us.
Three men, hands on hips, consternation on brows, stood around an inverted bike. One was shaking his head. I stopped. They were just guys trying to fix a bike. None held a spear in his hand, or for that matter a phone. They were neither threatening nor dead. They had nothing to do with what had just happened in my life. They were familiar, bikers focused on the one thing that mattered, that bike.
The shopkeeper I’d been talking with caught up with me. He apologized to the one not wearing biking clothes, the boss, in Balinese, said something about the Giant ATX. All four of them scowled.
I took a deep breath. “Excuse me. You have a bike out here that I want to rent.”
“I’m sorry, Bu,” said the boss. “We need that bike for a tour that we are taking out tomorrow.”
I spun the front wheel of the bike they were repairing, picked up a wrench, and fiddled with it until it was fixed. It wasn’t a complicated repair, but they looked impressed, so I pushed my advantage. “It’s nowhere near as good as my Safire Pro, but it would do.”
I hated myself for bragging, but I had three brothers and I rode with men, so I knew that bikers respected one of their own. They looked stunned. I guessed they knew the stats for every bike in the world, even though the best ride they had here in Bali couldn’t compare to what was available in the West. “So how much is the rental on the Giant for two weeks?”
“I’ll be happy to help you,” the boss said as he accompanied me back to the storefront. “What did you do?”
I explained, then asked him about his favorite rides on the island. By the time I left, he and the men who had been repairing the bike had given me a list of rides and invited me to accompany them on a lengthy one they’d been planning. We exchanged numbers.
As I walked away, the bike at my side, I had the sensation of someone watching. I looked around for Tyo. Tourists sheathed in sarongs, hats, and sunscreen busied the sidewalk. Tyo was nowhere in sight. I stumbled and caught myself, the bike’s handlebars a strong horizontal keeping me upright. Crazy to think Tyo would follow to take care of me, then only watch from a distance. But he might follow unseen if he suspected me of murder. I couldn’t think why he would. My interrogation had been relatively brief.
I climbed on the bike and headed back to my bungalow and a nap. As I rode, I thought of calling Alam. Talking with him would be calming. But it was the middle of the night in California, and we had decided to use this trip to consider our relationship. I had told him I needed to spend some time apart. He wanted a commitment, and I needed to think about that.
4
Loud splashing and hollering from the pool awakened me from my afternoon drowse. My first thought was that maybe I should have taken that quiet bungalow at the far end of the compound. My second contradicted the first, as any more sleep and I’d be awake all night. My third was of blood
