The heat and the screeching monkeys haven’t improved my mood. I pull my hand out of Brazuca’s grip and slap his face good and hard. The resulting thwack is loud. Obnoxious in exactly the way I intended.

There’s dead silence from the men at the bar.

I raise my hand to hit him again, letting it hover in the air a moment. Brazuca doesn’t flinch. My hand falls. “You smell like pussy,” I hiss instead. Also quite loud.

Securing my wide-brimmed sun hat on my head, I walk out of the bar, leaving Brazuca staring after me with a look of absolute amazement on his face and a big red mark stamped across his cheek.

34

Several minutes have passed, and Brazuca still feels the sting. Unconsciously, his hand goes to his cheek, reddened beneath a day’s worth of stubble by her slap and the onset of a mild sunburn. He finishes the mango juice Nora left behind and picks up the newspaper on the table.

Then there’s a hand on his shoulder and one of the beefed-up guys from the bar puts a beer down in front of him. “Alright, mate?” the guy asks.

“Fuck,” says Brazuca.

The guy laughs. “Tough luck.”

“Guess everyone saw that.”

“Heard it, too. Good arm on that woman.”

Brazuca nods. “She has violent tendencies.” An understatement. They have no idea what Nora’s capable of if she’s properly threatened. He’s never met a more aggressive woman in his life.

“I’m Max,” says the guy. “Come join us.”

Brazuca follows him to the bar, where a ragtag group of ex-military types are grinning at him over the tops of their beers. They stand out. They’re all white, and Brazuca has already noted their accents range from British to Australian to South African. He thinks there is a Canadian among them, skulking near the back.

Max, clearly a Brit, looks at the others. “He smell like pussy to you?”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” says one. The Canadian, maybe.

“Sit down, mate,” the man behind the bar says, in a thick Australian accent. “These guys are just giving you a rough time.”

“I’m in the shit now,” says Brazuca, reaching into his shirt pocket for a cigarette and discovering his shirt has been buttoned up wrong. And he’s out of cigarettes. He curses soundly.

This gets him a fresh round of ribbing. Max finishes his beer in one gulp and calls for another. “Boyo, you were in the shit the minute you walked in here. Your lady was just waiting for an opportunity to lay into you.”

“You could tell she sat here just working up to it,” says one of Brazuca’s new friends. “Got madder by the minute. I thought it was that damn monkey noise, but it turned out to be a whole different kind of monkey business that got her riled up.”