I walked out on the patio to see what was going on. A few feet away, a thin black man sporting long dreadlocks was whacking away at some palm fronds with his machete. “Looks like you got a ringside seat, mon.”
“It looks that way,” I said. Next to him a younger white man wearing a T-shirt that read BUBBLES ’R US—HOUSTON AND THE WORLD barked into a portable radio. With the other hand, he held a long yellow air hose that ran from a giant air compressor into an enormous cylindrical sheet of plastic.
“That sure as hell ain’t no kiddie pool,” I commented.
The man looked at me and smiled. “Hi, neighbor,” he said with a Texas twang.
I took a seat in one of the chairs on the porch, and in about ten minutes, I saw the object start to take the form of one of those inflatable kid attractions I had seen when the carnival came to Heartache. “That’s a bouncy castle,” I said to the foreman.
“You could call it that.”
I headed back into the bungalow to take a shower. I had been marinating for two days in seawater and felt as if I were turning into a giant pickle.
I don’t know what it is about a hot shower that settles the nerves and wipes the slate clean, but it does. My eyes were shut, and I was completely covered in soapsuds. I was just about to rinse off when I felt a sudden, stabbing pain in the ball of my left foot. “SHHHHHHIIIIITTTT!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. In my soaped-up blindness, I had been nailed by a tarantula or a poisonous viper.
I instantly opened my eyes to a stinging twinge. I was blind and as slippery as an eel as I felt my way along the wall of the shower for the curtain. Then whatever it was hit again, this time on the heel.
“Goddamn!” I yelled. I wanted to dash away from the danger, but I had to go step-by-step from the confines of the shower stall. I had one foot out and one foot in when I heard noises coming from under my feet. It sounded like giggling voices. The giggles turned to loud laughter.
I was pissed. I felt my way to the towel rack, wiped my eyes, and grabbed the .38 revolver I kept in my backpack. I stormed out the door. My vision was slowly returning as I crouched down to look into the crawl space under the bungalow. I moved cautiously toward the rear of the building with my gun pointed in the direction of the laughter. “All right, you little fuckers, come out from under there,” I growled.
The water was still running in the shower above me, and there was no drainpipe. The water just poured into a puddle in the sand. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Don’t shoot.” Two figures ducked, crawling toward me until they could stand up straight. They held their hands high above their heads. It was the two girls from the pool. Like a perfectly placed piece of film scoring, “I Shot the Sheriff” blared from the jukebox at the bar as I held my gun on the girls.
They had looked pretty amazing at a distance, but up close, they were even more gorgeous. To say that they also possessed attitude would be an understatement. One was nearly six feet tall, and the other was just an inch or two shorter. One had short, curly blond hair, and the other’s was straight and dropped almost to her waist. They wore matching cutoff sleeveless T-shirts, and with their hands stretched above their heads, I could see the tan lines between their abdomens and the white skin of their perfectly formed breasts. One shirt read FAKE, the other, REAL. At that distance I couldn’t tell, nor did I really care.
The taller girl had a thin gold chain around her waist that attached to a small pouch. In her hand, she held the smoking gun, or should I say the smoking wire: a stretched-out coat hanger that had been jammed up through the drain and into the bottom of my foot.
“We give,” the taller girl said.
“That wasn’t funny.”
“Yes, it was. I’m Dawn,” she said, and the two of them began laughing.
“Of course you are,” I replied sarcastically.
“And I’m Christmas. We’re cousins,” the other girl chimed in.
“I can’t tell the family resemblance.” I smirked. Christmas was a transmitting antenna with no channels set to receive. Dawn, it seemed, was the listener. Christmas broke the silence of the standoff. “My friends actually call me Noel-Christmas. It sounds like a long name, but it really isn’t. I think it has a ring to it. . . . Get it? It’s like saying Christmas without really saying it, you know?”
“It would be like being born on Easter and being named Bunny, but changing your name to Bonnet. Let’s get back to the point here,” I snapped, still fuming from the invasion of my privacy in the shower.
“Exactly!” Noel squealed. “You get it. See? Older guys are, like, so deep.”
“Yeah, but deep down where it counts, I am still very shallow,” I answered.
“We were just trying to have a little fun,” Dawn said seductively. I was staring into her eyes mainly to avoid staring directly at her breasts—but then I saw her gaze move down my body.
“I was trying to take a shower,” I said, suddenly nervous.
“Listen, Captain Testosterone, you better cool your jets,” she hissed in a newly threatening tone. “The rain is trying to spoil our party, and then you showed up, threatening us. I suggest you put that thing back wherever it came from, because all we have to do is scream ‘Rape’ and those construction workers on the other side of your bungalow will come running, and I don’t think they could help but figure out who’s bothering who here.”
“Nice tan,” Noel-Christmas chimed in. That was when I realized that I was standing on a resort beach, butt naked, pointing a revolver and a hard-on at two gorgeous women. This was not what I would call keeping a low profile. I attempted in vain to cover myself with the gun and retreated to the porch.
“You can put the gun down, Tully. We are not here to rob you, and we are not going to run away.”
“How did you know my name?” I asked.
“It’s a small island.”
I backed down the porch, and they followed in my footsteps.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To wait for you. Clean yourself up. We’ll be out here.”
Dawn and Noel-Christmas dropped into the patio furniture. I put the gun away, dashed back into the shower, and rinsed off.
“I believe in karma!” I yelled from the bathroom. “There is a payback in your future for this kind of behavior.”
“I believe in karma too,” Dawn called out.
As I was drying off, I could see through the small bathroom window that the work crew was in full swing, and a virtual plastic village now stood next to my bungalow. Along with the bouncy castle, there was a giant pool and a huge inflatable plastic “love doll.” I slipped into a pair of dry shorts and a T-shirt. As I rounded the corner out onto the patio, I caught a whiff of very strong pot smoke. Of course it was coming from the direction of my porch.
I stood there, looking into the small dressing mirror tacked to the wall. I tried to warn myself away from these women and ask them to leave my patio and never come back, but that just wasn’t working. I had never run into women like this in Wyoming. I hadn’t laid eyes on a college campus since attending a Wyoming Cowboys homecoming two decades past, and I had been living on a boat and in a jungle hut for some time.
“That’s enough solitude!” the imaginary devil on my left shoulder shouted in my ear.
“You’re old enough to be their father!” the angel on my right shoulder yelled. Were they just using me for their spoiled amusement, or were they really interested?
“It doesn’t matter” came the answer from the dark side.
“You don’t have any protection,” Obi-Wan warned.
Nothing was working. It is simply not in the genes of a heterosexual man in the tropics during spring break to throw two beautiful, barely dressed, very forward women in the possession of a joint of killer weed out of his life.
“You got anything to drink in there, Tully?” came the real and recognizable voice of Dawn from the porch. Without hesitating, I reached for the complimentary bottle of wine on the table and headed out the
door. I had guests.
Noel-Christmas was lying in the hammock, rocking herself, and Dawn was draped across the wicker chair with her long, tan legs resting on the arm. She had a large cone-shaped spliff in one hand. I uncorked the wine with my Swiss Army knife and poured.
“Merci,” she said with a smile.
“So how did you girls decide on Belize for your break?”
“It’s like where everybody from UT comes,” Noel-Christmas answered. “We go to school in Austin, but we are originally from LA—actually Beverly Hills.”
“And what is your major?” I asked.
“Like, boys.” Noel-Christmas let out a loud giggle.
“And you?” I asked, looking at Dawn.
“Geology. I like older things. What are you doing here, Tully?”
“I am, like, a victim of the weather,” I answered.
It was obvious that Dawn picked up on my mocking valley phrase. Noel-Christmas did not.
“Like, we are all victims in this world, aren’t we?” Noel-Christmas added.
“Ships in a storm,” Dawn said philosophically. “So what do you do?”
“I surf,” I said as I took the joint from her outstretched hand and sat down in the vacant chair. Two puffs later, I caught myself thinking that if I ever got the chance to experience an opium den in some back alley of an exotic seaport like Shanghai, Singapore, or Hong Kong, then Dawn would be the person I would most likely want to invite to join me. She looked like a young Catherine Deneuve as she took a long sip from the glass and made a circle on her lips with her tongue, took a toke on the joint, held her breath for a minute, then exhaled.
“Well, you look like a man of experience, Tully. What do your experiences tell you about being stranded in a storm?”
I rarely smoked pot, but these girls were in possession of what Chino and my island friends called da kine. I took the joint again. It had lipstick stains on the end and a slight scent of very nice perfume. I wasn’t able to contain the large cloud of smoke in my lungs and convulsed into a short coughing fit.
“Careful there, kahuna. Better pace yourself,” Dawn said.
I don’t know if it was from the coughing or the pot, but my head certainly was lighter. “What was the question?” I asked.
Dawn laughed, lifted her long blond hair, and tied it quickly and efficiently into a knot on the back of her head. “I said, what do your experiences tell you about being stranded in a storm?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering. “You keep the bow of the boat headed into the waves and try not to panic.”
“Do you think you are in a bad situation, sitting here in this storm with us?”
“I wouldn’t call it bad. I would call it interesting and almost prophetic.”
“Heavy,” Noel-Christmas said.
“In what way?” Dawn asked.
“Ix-Nay, that’s my friend who is with me—he is a shaman and said we should reacquaint ourselves with our respective cultures.”
“That’s, like, a serious observation,” Noel-Christmas said and sighed.
“If he is the little Indian guy I saw driving through town in a golf cart with one of the pretty local chicks, it sounds like he’s trying to get laid to me,” Dawn interjected. “I have it on good authority that when a man looks at a woman, he can’t go more than five seconds without thinking about fucking her. Are you trying to fuck me, Tully?”
Well, those words detonated like an atomic bomb. I had never been asked that question by any woman that directly, and I was dumbfounded. It was the voice of Noel-Christmas counting that helped me gather my wits: “One thousand one . . . one thousand two . . .”
What came out of my mouth were the words “Are you?”
“Am I what?” Dawn shot back at me like a line drive.
“Trying to fuck me?” I asked.
“Not right now,” Dawn said matter-of-factly. “We have plans this evening and have to go, but tomorrow is a new day, and you never know what the new day will bring.” She stood up and stretched her whole body in a slow, wavy motion like a cat getting up from a nap. “Can we make up for our little attack and buy you dinner in town tomorrow night?” Dawn asked.
“I think I’m available.”
“Belly of the Beast at eight, and don’t be late,” Dawn said. With that, the two of them strolled off, counting aloud: “One thousand one . . . one thousand two . . .”
28
A Little Family Fun
Sitting alone that night in Consuelo’s aunt’s restaurant, I replayed the afternoon again and again in my mind. Needless to say, after the pot party, I had quite an appetite and feasted on local paella with chunks of tuna, grouper, hot peppers, garlic, and roasted crab. I kept the fire on my tongue under control with several Belikins and the pineapple flan that Consuelo had recommended. Her aunt told me that Ix-Nay and her niece had been in earlier and had gone to see some ruins.
Though it was Friday night and San Pedro was shaking like a live wire, I’d had about as much fun as I could possibly have for one day. And then there were Dawn’s closing comments to me about what lay ahead. I figured I might need the rest and steered clear of the loud music and jam-packed bars.
I was walking along the street when the Clemsons almost ran me down in a stretch golf cart.
“Tully, you got to try one of these cigars!” Big C exclaimed. “Hey, I chartered a seaplane to take us out to the Blue Hole tomorrow. You know, the one Jacques Cousteau took the Calypso to? We’re going to land right in the middle of the sucker and snorkel around. Why don’t you and Billy Fish join us?”
Big C had been confused by Archie’s nickname for Ix-Nay and had called him Billy on the whole plane ride. “It’s just me,” I said. “Billy’s off exploring.”
“We’re leaving from the airport at eight. If you want to come, the invitation is there.” And with that, Big C mashed the accelerator, beeped his horn, and rejoined the traffic procession.
The bar at Renaldo’s was a zoo, and the pool was even wilder. The construction was illuminated like a Mardi Gras float with strings of lights. None of it bothered me. I fell asleep watching The Magnificent Seven on TV via satellite.
The next morning, I was up with the seagulls and feeling pretty good about having dodged the bullet of self-abuse. I noticed that Ix-Nay had not returned that evening. I went out to the beach for a swim, then had breakfast at a storefront café.
The airport was quiet, and I spotted the seaplane near a hangar at the east side of the field. It was different from Sammy Raye’s plane; it was an amphibian, which was a regular airplane strapped to a pair of floats that raised it high above the taxiway. The pilot, Gerald, explained the advantage of being able to get to the Blue Hole long before any of the daily charter boats arrived. The Clemsons pulled up in their stretch golf cart a few minutes later.
The trip out over the pastel patterns of coral and sand was spectacular enough, but the Blue Hole, from a thousand feet, said it all. In the deep-blue water below us, a perfectly round, moonlike crater sat in the middle of a large shallow shelf. “Where are we landing?” Big C asked.
“In there,” Gerald said. We spiraled down over the Blue Hole. Gerald expertly glided the floats a few feet over the exposed, antlerlike appendages of elkhorn coral and kissed the surface of the water. He carefully brought the plane to a halt halfway across the Hole.
“Sumbitch!” Big C hooted as we taxied to a mooring. “Now that’s what I call sightseein’.”
The Blue Hole was the first of several stops we made that day as Gerald guided us through the beauty of the offshore atolls. We dove for lobster, collected shells, explored an ancient Mayan fishing port, and swam at several postcard-perfect small islands. As we were returning to San Pedro, we flew along a sandy beach toward a lighthouse at the end of a small island. “That’s Half Moon Cay,” Gerald said.
The name instantly rang a bell, and as I was trying to figure out why I recognized the name, Gerald banked the plane sharply to the right. Directly below me was an
old lighthouse. Several figures stood on scaffolding and waved up to the plane.
Now I knew where I’d heard of Half Moon Cay. I was thinking about Cleopatra when we buzzed over a stand of coconut trees and there was the Lucretia, sitting at anchor in the middle of the crescent-shaped harbor.
“Now that’s what I call a big-ass sailboat!” Big C exclaimed. “I’d give a million bucks to ride on that baby.”
I smiled to myself and remembered the ride I’d taken on her for free.
“Time to head home, folks,” Gerald said and pointed the plane back to San Pedro.
I just sat quietly for a moment, thinking about the strangeness of what had just happened. I didn’t have the shaman powers of Ix-Nay, but I could see that things in my life were trying to connect; the sudden appearance of the Lucretia was a sign.
The sight of the boat set me wondering if I had made the right decision not to go with Cleopatra. Then, as we flew over the waves, I saw that the whole Clemson family had nodded out. They slept with smiles on their faces, wrapped in the invisible protection and comfort of family bonds. I probably would always be just an observer of such contentment; in truth, what I really wanted was to get back on that boat. I would finish my job of delivering the Fishmobile back to Lost Boys with Ix-Nay, make arrangements for Mr. Twain’s retirement, and then somehow make my way back to the Lucretia.
Then I remembered the previous afternoon. This newly plotted course for my life could certainly wait until after I had dinner with Dawn.
The note pinned to the door of the bungalow just had the number “8” written on it. The paper was covered with a seashell print and smelled like marijuana and perfume. I was going on a date.
Two days earlier, I could not have imagined that I would be splashing on aftershave and heading out to dinner with a woman who was drop-dead gorgeous and who had indicated that we would probably be having sex at some point later in the evening if I behaved myself.
I didn’t quite know what that meant. Back in Heartache, they have a name for that horrible moment when you have a willing partner yet your equipment is not responding. They call it “mean, sexy, and harmless.” I did not want to be there.