Kook

  Now I had several options, one of which was to lean against the Beast and cry. That’s what I felt like doing. This was a toll road. There was no help out here. No cheerful local farmers rattling by who could take us back to town. No boisterous picnicking families who would feed us, hitch a rope to our bumper, and yank us back over that hill. On the other hand, if we left the van and hoofed it back to Escuinapa, night would fall on a deliciously packed, brim-full gringo RV; no doubt that when we returned she would have been gleefully stripped.

  “Ting,” I said.

  “Ah, yeah?”

  “What does coolant do?”

  She looked at me like I’d gone mad. She whisked a mosquito off her face, bent a knee and scratched an ankle. “It keeps the engine cool?”

  “That sounds right. It doesn’t lube it, right? That’s what oil does. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “We’ve got to try to drive back to that town. It’s only two or three miles. Almost sunset right now. See, the coolant hose is busted. No coolant. But the cylinders should still have oil, right? So if we drive a few minutes and stop, let it cool down, it should run. Right?”

  She stared at me. She has a dead-level, opaque expression that guards the door while she weighs two options; it always reminds me of northern steppes and the merciless choices of warfare: Should I run this guy through with a dagger or kiss him? “Rrrrright,” she said, undecided.

  “Okay, let’s throw this stuff back in. Any old way. And try.”

  We made it three hundred yards on the first go. The temp needle wavered, then flew up like a hand touching a hot stove. The red warning light flashed. I pulled over. We waited five minutes. Started up again. Two hundred yards. Once the light flashed we had to get over right away. So far, no more smoke. We limped back north. Miraculously made it to the outskirts of the town. Now, if we could just get to a hotel, we were cool.

  Got into a line of evening traffic crawling toward the town center, between rows of parked cars. The red temperature light flashed. There was no place to pull over. Oh, shit. Horns honking, line of cars behind us.

  “There!” Kim pointed to an empty curb ahead on the right. I went straight for it. Pulled in behind … a hearse loaded with flowers. Cut the engine. We were in front of a church, in front of the main gate, the wide steps. I looked across the street. A group of ranchers and farmers in pressed snap dress shirts and white palm-leaf cowboy hats stared at me without expression. Black eyes, black and gray mustaches. Very dignified. They were waiting for their buddy to be carried out of the church and we were in the way. I craned around and looked at the tail of the beast. She was pouring smoke.

  The men’s faces were blank.

  “Perdón,” I called across the street. “Hay un hotel cerca?” They wavered.

  “Mi carro está muerto. Finito.”

  It was like a gust of wind hitting the men. I must have looked like such an idiot, in a cloud of smoke. They laughed. Everything dies. Especially VW vans.

  The man at the desk in the lobby of the Hotel IQ was sympathetic. We had barely made the few blocks. He said his brother-in-law was a mechanic. He picked up the hotel phone and called him. “One moment,” he said to us in English. “Please.”

  A guy in grease-blackened clothes showed up ten minutes later on a bike. He carried a screwdriver and a pair of pliers in one hand. Two tools.

  “Mi cuñado,” the desk clerk said with some pride. “El mecánico.”

  I had expected a tow truck; or a pickup with steel toolboxes along the sides. Two Tools leaned down into the engine, pried off the broken hose, got back on his bike, and vanished around the corner. The narrow street was in shadow and cool. At the end of it, where the church was, we could see a honeyed light warming the plaza. Two Tools was back. He carried a length of new black hose. He worked it onto its pipe, screwed tight the clamps, presto. Fixed. He took my funnel and refilled the coolant tank. Twenty dollars U.S. I gave it to him. I climbed in, slid the key into the ignition, cranked her. This time there was a groan, a death rattle, silence. The funeral procession passed us on the street; the older men nodded at us.

  Two Tools licked his lips. “Tal vez,” he said, “el motor.” Yeah, maybe. Good hunch. Before I could agree with him he had pedaled away.

  I went inside “Do you have a room?” I said to the clerk.

  “Por supuesto. Cuantos noches?”

  I looked at Kim. She stared down at her watch as if she had seen a ghost. “What is it?” I asked.

  “The Beast, Ting. She died at exactly four forty-four.” The Chinese death number. “During a funeral.”

  Did seem odd. The clerk watched me, waiting for an answer. How many nights here?

  That seemed like an existential question. Escuinapa, the Crossroads. The funeral. The surreal scene that had just taken place. The shimmering, slippery time of day, not afternoon, not dusk, the gold light on the plaza. I actually shivered. I looked at the man. Was there anything behind the polite, guileless smile? Was the Hotel IQ kind of like the Hotel California, the one in the song? Where the hell were we?

  “One moment.” I reached through the driver’s-side door to the folded road map between the front seats, opened it, found Mazatlán, Tepic, Sayulita. Escuinapa was not on the map. Goose bumps covered my arms. I had this crazy thought that we might have had a fatal accident out on the highway, not just a breakdown, and that now we were in some sort of limbo town, halfway to heaven, where we could slowly get used to our new predicament. Listen, it’s not that crazy. If it were such a stretch, Stephen King wouldn’t scare you.

  “What is it?” Kim said.

  “Nothing.” I turned to the clerk. “How about we say two nights? Dos noches, okay?”

  He held my eyes, tipped his head.

  I found a man to help us tow the Beast away from the hotel, out to an engine shop. He had thick strong hands, a bulge of muscle and fat on the back of his neck, ox shoulders, a proud gut. His short ginger hair was combed and oiled, his lips were fleshy, and his blue eyes bulged. It looked like his top front teeth had been filed flat across. Sergio. He ran the large junkyard on the outskirts of town, but for all we could tell he may have run the town as well. Everywhere we went in his Chevy pickup, people waved.

  “Responsibilidad,” he said, patting his chest. Rapid Spanish, the gist of which was, “We don’t want a borracho to fix it and then she blows up again. Someone needs to be responsible.”

  This would take some days. In the meantime, Sergio picked us up at the Hotel IQ twice a day and took us to different places to eat. For Sergio the landscape was culinary.

  On the first morning, bumping up a quiet dirt street of low concrete houses with barred windows and wrought-iron gates, Sergio coughed into a fist and said, “Pe-TER.” He said it with great seriousness and gravity. He was about to ask a question that would determine the course of events.

  “Sí?”

  “Escuche.” Listen.

  “Sí.”

  “A ustedes les gustan tamales?”

  I loved tamales. He was relieved. “Unnh,” he growled, nodding to himself. “Bueno.” Another block and he turned full in the seat and pointed out my window, cocking his wrist, straight finger, like an umpire calling a strike.

  “Tamales de puerco,” he said, pointing at a curtained window. He said it as if he were showing me a site of great historical significance. His bulging eyes widened with pleasure. His heavy face lit with joy.

  “Wow,” I said.

  Two blocks later he pointed out his side at a green-painted house with a long table in the street. “Tamales de pollo,” he said.

  After a week, the notion of actually getting to a beach and surfing seemed impossibly remote. Every day Sergio took us to the brick-walled yard where the Beast was being worked on. We were waiting now for a delivery of carburetor seals. And every day I went down to the Hotel IQ desk and paid the clerk for another night. Stranded. I liked the early mornings. I walked alone across the plaza and had café con leche at the s
ame table, made by the same old woman, and watched the square and the town come alive, the caciques and blackbirds raising their ruckus in the old trees, and every morning I brought Kim back a cup to have in bed. We had given up trying to find out if the Crossroads actually existed. It seemed to exist. If this was some limbo between earth and wherever else, it could have been worse.

  In the long evenings I sometimes accompanied Sergio on his rounds, picking up the junks of Escuinapa. Up a muddy lane, a terribly poor family sat all together in front of some single-room cinder-block shack. How had they gotten a hold of a car? Even one that didn’t run? They sat on the step in the warm twilight and waited for the junk man, and they signed the paperwork and accepted the check from Sergio as if he were a god. He expertly backed the flatbed trailer up the hill, his crew jumped out of the truck, and, with help from half a dozen neighbors, they ran and rolled the defunct sedan up into the trailer for its last ride. I enjoyed these sorties. There was an esprit de corps among the junk men, a sense of some sort of nobility, as if they, in their noblesse, helped families survive, and helped others keep their sorry junkers running. Which was true. Definitely a prestige profession.

  Sergio and I had fallen into an easy way with each other. We laughed a lot. He continued to feed us, fattening us up like Hansel and Gretel. I stopped counting the days and began measuring our time in town in approximate weight gain. He liked to host us for picnics out at the junkyard. It was sweet eating tamales among the dismembered cars, under a heavy, rising moon. If he bought me a meal, I bought the next one. I insisted. It was clear that he adored Kim. She made fun of him, calling his office “Restaurante Casa del Yonke.” House of Junkyard Restaurant. He loved it. I don’t think anyone in his life made fun of him. We had become friends. I had stopped wondering why he spent so much time feeding us, and rarely brought his son, Sergito, and never brought his wife. I figured it was kind of a vacation for the man.

  I had never met anyone like Sergio. Here was a guy completely at home with himself, in command of his small country, a guy who gave his son a piñata a day. At pound nine, which was about day ten, the motor rebuilder told us the Beast was ready; it was time for us to go. I was sad. Sergio had been a prince. I had been expecting that somehow we would never be able to leave this place we never did find on a map. But it wasn’t like that. We drove away, got on the big toll road, passed the spot where we’d broken down, and continued toward Tepic.

  We hadn’t been driving two hours when I was overcome with fever. My vision blurred. A terrible fatigue submerged me. I pulled over into a field and asked Kim to drive. Just follow this down to the coast, I said, and fell asleep.

  I dreamed of waves. Cold black waves that exploded like ordnance and shuddered the beach. Ranks, tiers, out to the horizon, one giant looking over the next. They thundered in. An angry wind poured down off the cliffs to meet them like an opposing army and ripped the tops back in plumes of spray almost as long and bloody as the waves were high. But it was not liquid water, it was snow. The wind was shredding the waves into an ocean-borne blizzard. I stood on the beach, barefoot, holding a short surfboard. I was wearing nothing but shorts and was shivering. My teeth clattered. Those waves. They were the only thing I had left to do in my life. That was all I knew, standing there, while my ears sifted from the chaos the sound of boulders rolling on the seabed beneath the charging water.

  I woke up crying out, started up in the front seat. The van’s AC was blowing into my neck and chest. Cold.

  “Where are we?”

  “Just passed Morelia. We’re in the mountains. See, pine trees.”

  Kim was sitting up straight, driving with hands eleven and one o’clock on the wheel the way they teach you in driver’s ed. “How do you feel?”

  “Did you take driver’s ed literally?”

  “They showed us those horrible crash movies. After that I did everything they said except obey the speed limit.” I looked at her. The things we never knew about our wife.

  “I had a dream. Scary. Sort of. Can’t remember much. I feel like shit.”

  We came out of the mountains onto a coastal plain of small farms. We had decided to skip Sayulita, go south of there where it would be less crowded. One more precipitous coastal range in front of us in a high humping wall. A bright orange steel bridge over a low-flowing river. Horses stood in the current. Palms and bright green cane along the banks, low fields of maize. We busted through the Sierra and hit the coast at Manzanillo. Skirted the town and found the coastal road north. Kim drove. I just wanted to curl up somewhere and sleep for a week. A narrow ribbon of broken pavement wound through the lovely hills of Michoacán. I remembered the tall cacti coming down to the beaches, the blue-water coves, the bocote trees flowering white, and the tiny hamlets. I had been here with Leonel Pérez a few years before, just after learning to surf from the Saint that first time. I had come to do a magazine story about the Mexican Masters champion and left even more determined to meet surfing one day on its own terms. Now I lay back in the front seat, closed my eyes, and let images of that trip roll in like waves.

  RIDING WITH THE KING

  Kim drove and in my fever I remembered.

  “Almost ready?” Leon had asked me that every morning. Since I was standing beside his two-door Chevy completely transfixed by the waves and hadn’t taken off my shirt or waxed my board—and since it was still dark, and we hadn’t had breakfast or coffee—I took it as a metaphysical question, like, Are you ready to believe in a force much bigger than you?

  As I watched the tiers of surf near the Pacific resort town of Ixtapa, I realized that there were three things I now appreciated about surfing as a near-beginner: the raw beauty of waves; the anticipation of getting repeatedly thrashed; the possibility of one good ride, a kind of fleeting touch of grace. Also, my coach. I couldn’t believe he was even standing up after last night’s party.

  Leon rubbed wax briskly over the deck of a board propped against his thigh. He was in training for the nationals in Baja’s Ensenada in two months, and he couldn’t bear to miss a wave. He was honing himself like a weapon. He didn’t wear a rash guard or sunscreen. His baggy shorts came below his knees. He was forty-six years old, short (about five-foot-six), broad-shouldered, and wiry. His ears were small. His nose, broken years ago, was slightly flattened. Even his buzzed hair was thinning, as if obliging a lifelong imperative toward sleekness. It occurred to me, watching him, that he was a man completely shaped by the sea.

  Only four hours ago, Leon had been working on his second bottle of tequila blanco. Café tables had been shoved together outside his surf shop, Catcha L’Ola (“Catch the Wave”), behind the row of tall hotels lining Ixtapa’s shore. A bunch of local surfers, four Texas longboarders, a pair of tourist police with shotguns, brothers and sisters of Leon, and two young women on holiday from Brooklyn were annihilating cases of Corona. The mother of Leon’s two-year-old daughter was warily grilling redfish. Leon worshipped his daughter, whom he named Auramar—Aura of the Sea—but only tolerated the mother, who, he said, tricked him into having a child and once threw stones at his girlfriend. The fiesta was in honor of his forty-sixth birthday. Today would be another party.

  “The waves look bigger today,” I suggested.

  “There is a swell coming. You are ready.”

  “I guess I am.”

  I was going to try a shorter 7–6 board for the first time, a personal threshold. I was Leon’s age, and most guys who start surfing late stick with the more stable, less responsive longboards. To hell with that: I was having a midlife crisis. This was my party and I could cry if I wanted to.

  “You don’t even look hungover,” I said to Leon.

  Now he looked up. He smiled—I could tell because the left side of his mouth lifted just a little.

  “Practice.” He tossed the wax to me over the hood of the car and nodded at the local kids carrying boards who were beginning to trickle in from the road. They had walked the last mile from the end of the bus route from Zihuatane
jo, eight miles down the coast. They regarded Leon with specific awe: he would catch many more waves than any of them today, and have better rides, which was unnatural, since some of the younger boys had grandfathers Leon’s age. Yet Leon was nonchalant about his status as the old master. “I just surf every day,” he said simply.

  I looked behind us. Out of the mountains, unbending slowly from dense groves of coconut palms, pushed the sweet water of the Río La Laja. The sun had not yet risen over the Sierra Madre del Sur, so the dark water reflected only a rose wash of dawn and the light of a single fisherman’s fire burning on the sand. The river cut the beach and emptied into the sea where the surf broke over the sandbar. Even in the half-light I could see that the sets were easily head-high.

  Leon straightened and turned toward the beach. And then, since he taught with the minimalism of a Zen master, he gave me the lesson of the morning. He was not at all like the Saint.

  “Paddle toward the peaks. On that board, you have to be at the peak.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lock the car door.”

  “Okay.”

  Then he jogged toward the water.

  It wasn’t surprising that Leon didn’t believe in holding a student’s hand: all his life, his only teacher had been the thumping waves. As a small boy, living in a tiny village called Chutla, up the rugged Guerrero coast, he saw a neighbor who had been to California as a migrant worker wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a surfer shooting a tube. Six-year-old Leon kept thinking about that barrel. A few years later he began to see vans of American hippies with boards on the roofs passing on the narrow, potholed coastal road. “I was thinking,” Leon said, pointing to his sun-burnished head, “I want to do that.”

  When his father, a traveling electric-appliance salesman, moved the family to Zihuatanejo—then a small beach town with one dirt road out to the highway—Leon stole a scrap of plywood from a wood shop and began boogie-boarding. When he was twelve he heard that an American friend of Jacques Cousteau’s who lived across the bay had a longboard. Leon and a dozen other local kids asked to borrow it and took turns, and a local surf culture was born.