“Catch anything?”
“No. That is sometimes what I do. Catch nothing.”
The lights of the shore grew closer. I started to say something about having a room rented in Playa del Carmen, but then decided to hell with it. It didn’t matter.
As we neared the lights, Beatrice came up the ladder. Other than the fighting chair where Ferdinand sat, there were a couple of deck chairs up there. Beatrice took one of them, and I took the other.
She said, “Your friend is sleeping good. I believe he will be okay.”
“Thanks to you two.”
She made a kind of grunting noise. “My father, he is always helping someone. He gets no help from anyone else, but he is always helping someone.”
“That is what it is about, Beatrice,” the old man said. “Is that not the way of God?”
“If it is, let him do it.”
“Beatrice!” Ferdinand said.
She sat quietly for a while. She said, “I’m sorry.” Then to me: “I fear for my father. The police, they are very corrupt here in Mexico. If they know what he did, he could be imprisoned. Hurt. Here, the police, they do as they please.”
We cruised the water for what seemed like a long time, and though the lights came closer, they did not come close enough fast enough. It seemed as if we were perched on the lip of forever, unable to move forward.
Finally we arrived at the dock in Playa del Carmen. A young, shaggy-haired boy, maybe twelve, in blue jeans and a dirty Disney T-shirt with Mickey’s head faded into nothing, ran out to the boat and climbed on board. He started when he saw me, but Beatrice spoke to him and Ferdinand laughed.
“He has been taught that all Americans are dangerous,” said Ferdinand. “His name is José and he works a little for me. He waits for the boat to come in and helps me carry the fish and do little chores. Tonight, I have no fish. Just you two. You are my fish. Go ashore. I will lock up the boat. José and his brothers will stay with the boat.”
“What brothers?” I asked.
“They will be along. You best look after your friend. Beatrice will help you.”
Beatrice and I went inside the cabin and stirred Leonard. He groaned when we woke him. We helped him up. He tried not to act like someone in pain, but he couldn’t help it. I said, “Maybe he needs a doctor.”
“That could be,” Beatrice said. “I have some antibiotics. I can give him those. It will be a while before we are where I can get them.”
I considered this. I asked Leonard what he thought.
“Well,” he said. “I’ve felt better. But I’ve had a lot worse. I think if I get some antibiotics, some rest, I’ll be all right.”
Beatrice helped me take Leonard off the boat and onto the dock. I had no idea what was going to happen from there. Neither she nor her father owed us anything. They could have just turned us loose in the night. Fact was, they had put themselves in considerable jeopardy to aid us. But I was relieved when Beatrice said, “We’ll take your friend to our home for tonight. I want you and him to leave tomorrow. Do you understand that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I am sorry for your friend, but we do not need enemies. My father makes enemies often.”
“I bet he makes friends often too,” I said.
“Enemies seem a little more determined than friends,” she said. “Friends have a way of going away when you need them.”
“That isn’t my experience,” I said. “It depends on who you call friend.”
She had one of Leonard’s arms draped over her shoulder, and I had the other. He was groaning as we walked along.
I followed Beatrice’s lead. We ended up out back of a stucco building where there were cars sitting in a dark lot near a sign painted on the side of the building. The sign was for some kind of Mexican pastry and the moon made it shiny and white and surreal there in the night.
Beatrice unlocked an old white van and we got inside. The interior was well worn, seats ripped up, patches of cloth hanging from the ceiling. The van had no back seat and was empty of possessions, except for some tow sacks in the back. We placed Leonard on those. I made as comfortable a pillow as I could for him out of a spare sack. He said, “I lost my goddamn hat.”
“Just goes to show,” I said, “the day hasn’t been a total loss. But we’ve discussed what happened to the hat.”
“We have?”
“You weren’t feeling too good at the time, but yes, we discussed it. One of our muggers stepped through it.”
“Oh yeah. I remember.”
I climbed in the passenger’s seat and Beatrice started the van. I said, “What about Ferdinand? He said he was coming.”
“He always says that, but he does not come. He stays with the boat with José and his brothers. I think he likes it that way. He loves that boat. If he were coming, he would have come.”
The van coughed and sputtered and rolled forward with a protesting lurch, banged into a couple of potholes, crunched gravel, and off we went.
We drove along bad roads for an hour or so. It had grown very dark because clouds had bagged the moon. There was just the van’s headlights on the road, and a little glow from the dash light that shone against Beatrice’s face and gave it a ghostly appearance and made her little silver earrings float about her ears like spectral fish swimming in the ether.
We talked a little, but nothing to take note of. We just rode on into the night until we came to some sparsely wooded hills that swelled on either side of the road, and we were swallowed by them. Somewhere along there, without meaning to, due to the rocking of the van, the kind of day I had had, I drifted off to sleep, and it was the dying of the motor that brought me awake.
It was a simple house, part adobe, part thatch, just like you see in the movies about Mexico. There were scrubby trees in the yard and an old white Ford without tires or wheels sitting out to the side of the house. Prickly pear had grown up all around it and the moon was out from behind the clouds again and I could see the car was stuffed with all manner of junk.
Beatrice helped me wake Leonard and get him into the house. I held Leonard up while she lit lamps. I didn’t see an electric light or refrigerator. The house was very small. Three rooms. Two of the rooms were bedrooms, the other was a kitchen of sorts with an old wooden stove. After we got Leonard stretched out on a bed in one of the bedrooms, slipped off his shoes, she took me outside and showed me where the outdoor convenience was. It was a leaning rectangle of graying slats with a tin roof and it smelled just like what was under it. Beatrice seemed a little embarrassed by it all.
We went back inside and she got a large jar of pills and brought them out. “Antibiotics,” she said.
“Jesus, that’s certainly the economy version,” I said.
“You can buy them like that here. Not like in the States.”
“Do you go to the States often?”
“Not anymore,” she said. “I lived there once. I studied archaeology at the University of Texas. Austin.”
“I’ve always been interested in archaeology.”
She gave me a curious eyeballing.
“Seriously,” I said, and told her about having done some digs here and there when I was young, Caddo Indian stuff in East Texas mostly. I had been the shovel boy for a nice amateur archaeologist named Sam Whiteside. She talked about going to the University of Texas, then the University of Mexico, and how she had graduated with a degree in anthropology and archaeology.
She got some water and the pills and took them to Leonard. He was sweating slightly and had a fever. He was only partially awake.
“These,” she said, shaking the jar of pills, “should get the infection down. He has not lost much blood. Tomorrow, he rests some, eats, then you go.”
“Okay,” I said, trying not to think too far ahead.
“We’ll give him the pills now,” she said.
“But not all of them?”
She smiled. “Not all of them. Just a few.”
“Leonard,” I said, wak
ing him. “Time to take your medicine.”
I supported his head on my arm while Beatrice gave him the pills and held the glass so he could sip water. When that was finished, I lowered Leonard back onto the bed and he went to sleep immediately. Beatrice blew out the light and we went out of there.
In the kitchen she lit the lamps and poured some water from a pitcher into a basin, gave me a bar of lye soap. I used it to wash my face and hands. When I was finished, she handed me a towel.
“We do not have many conveniences,” she said. “I had nice things in the States, but here my father is very poor and he lives as he has always lived.”
“That’s quite all right,” I said. “I thank you for helping us.”
She opened a metal box on a shelf and took out a loaf of long, brown, home-baked bread. She split it down the middle, made slices from that. She removed a big cake of flaking cheese from the storage box, cut slabs from it, put them on the bread. She poured wine from a bottle into two fruit jars and gave me one of the jars. I don’t really like wine, but I wasn’t about to be rude. Not after all she and her father had done for us.
We sat in some old but comfortable chairs at a cheap table supported by wobbly aluminum legs and ate our bread and cheese and drank our wine.
The bread was full of flavor, and the cheese was sharp. I even found I liked the wine. At that point, however, having not eaten in some hours, I think I might have enjoyed a steaming slice of dog shit on a roof shingle.
As we ate, we talked. “I earned my degree,” she said, “but I never used it. I came back here when my mother died to take care of my father. I have been here ever since.”
“Your father looks like a capable man to me,” I said.
“In many ways he is, but he cannot take care of himself at home.”
“Maybe he can,” I said.
She smiled at me. It was a lovely smile. “You don’t understand what’s expected of me.”
“By your father?”
“By my past. I have been raised to do the woman’s work.”
“You went to the university. That’s certainly a modern enough approach. Does your father expect it of you? Staying home, I mean?”
“No. But I expect it. I feel I’m failing if I do not do it. I know I do not have to, yet I do.”
“Maybe you should change your thinking.”
“My thinking is changed, but my doing is the same.”
I smiled at her. “That’s one way to put it. Do you work on the fishing boat?”
She nodded. “And do other things. I go on the boat to keep from staying here. No one lives near here. There is nothing to do. I do not like the boat, but I have my father there, and I can keep busy with the baiting, the cleaning of the fish.”
“I assume you sell the fish.”
“Yes. What do you do? Are you on vacation?”
“I’m a security guard at a chicken plant.”
She grinned wide, and she looked very beautiful when she did that. It gave her deep dimples. Her eyes were bright in the lamplight. I loved the way she spoke English, the way her accent curled around the words and made them sexy.
We talked for a long time. She poured more wine. I meant not to drink it, but I was geared up and nervous. By the time I finished the second jar of wine, I was beginning to feel a little sleepy.
She told me about her life and her disappointments, and they were all tied to tradition and how her mother had lived and how she had tried to break away from it, but couldn’t. It had stayed with her like a disease. She loved her mother and what she had done, but didn’t feel it was for her—and yet, here she was, in many ways taking her mother’s place. A woman over thirty and not getting younger and feeling she was missing out on the world.
“There is never any money,” she said. “My father cares little for money. He works. He makes enough to feed us, to get oil for his lamps, a few items here and there. He wants nothing else. He sells his fish too cheap. He does not have money, he does without. It does not bother him.”
“But it bothers you.”
“I do not ask to be rich, but I would like to have nice clothes. Some things. Is that so bad?”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t. Fact is, I haven’t had all that much myself. It’s my fault. You can want too much, but you can want too little as well. I think I’ve wanted too little. Your father, he seems content, and that’s fine. But it’s all right you want something more. I think he could do without you, he had to. He seems independent.”
She smiled at me, reached to take my glass, touched my hand. She leaned forward, stared at me. “Would you kiss me?”
It didn’t seem like a chore. “Yes I would,” I said, and did. I liked it so much, I did it again. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but the next moment she was out of her chair and in my lap, and we were kissing deeply. She smelled good, her hair was soft, and her lips were sweet.
Still, part of me felt bad about the whole thing. Sort of like I was cheating on Brett. But Brett had gone her own way. I had no reason to feel guilt. No reason at all.
Another part of me felt as if I were taking advantage of a lonely woman who had had too much wine, but that part wasn’t speaking too loudly. Hell, I had had too much wine.
I kissed her deeply. She ran her hand between my legs and took hold of me and squeezed, and soon I had her in my arms and was carrying her to the empty bedroom. I laid her on the bed and helped her undress, pulling her shoes off, her jeans, her sweatshirt over her head, unfastening her bra and removing her panties.
I stood by the bed and removed my clothes and removed my wallet and took out a prophylactic and gave it to her. She laid it beside her. I climbed onto the bed. She stroked me and finally took the rubber from the package and slipped it over me, then she spread her legs and took hold of her knees and pulled them up so that they were damn near touching her ears.
I entered into her, and in spite of the prophylactic, it felt so good, and it had been so long, I almost came on the spot. It was tempting to just go ahead and let it go, but I fought being selfish. I did the times tables for a while, till they got beyond me, then I tried to remember how to cook a couple of Mexican dishes and thought about the theme songs from favorite TV shows, finally got hold of myself. Then I was relaxed, making love, keeping control on my needs, administering to hers. She knew just how to coax me along, knew what to whisper in my ear, where to put her fingers, how to touch me.
We did it in that position for a while, then she rolled over and I took her from the rear.
Finally, to both our satisfaction, we finished in the traditional position, her letting go first, then me.
It wasn’t as wild as it was with Brett, who could do more tricks with a six-inch dick than a monkey could with a hundred feet of grapevine, but Beatrice’s love-making was slyer than Brett’s, calculated as if by script.
She was certainly a woman of experience, and it was exactly what I needed, and from all observation, what she needed as well. As that ol’ Merle Haggard song goes, “It ain’t love, but it ain’t bad.”
We lay together and I thought about the day. I had been on a cruise, off a cruise, seen famous ruins, been in a fight. My best friend had been knifed, we had been saved by a wild old Mexican with a machete who turned out to be very nice and had a lovely daughter, and Leonard’s awful hat had been destroyed. The lovely daughter had fed me and fucked me, and now I lay me down to sleep.
I wondered what Brett was doing.
Maybe what I had been doing.
Wrong approach.
I closed my eyes.
I pulled Beatrice close.
And wondered again what Brett was doing.
No future in that.
Finally, I slept.
13
NEXT MORNING I ROSE while Beatrice slept, dressed, went in to check on Leonard. He opened his eyes when I walked into the room.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning. My, you look happy. Been poundin’ the possum, ain’t you?”
/>
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
“I can always tell. You have that smug look and the eyes get hooded, like Robert Mitchum.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. I said, “Now what?”
“Well, now that you’ve had what you need, have taken advantage of a poor peasant girl—”
“Hah.”
“—I don’t think we want to stay here.”
“Very good. But that isn’t exactly a plan. How’re you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been wiped, flushed, and I’m on my way out to sea. I’m bored enough to collect farts and name them, yet I don’t feel like I could do much. I’m lucky I had good stomach muscles, or I’d be dead.”
“You’re lucky he had a short knife,” I said. “Your stomach muscles aren’t that good.”
“And yours aren’t good at all.”
“What I have are table muscles. They’re more subtle. Look, I’ll see if Beatrice will take us into town. Maybe we can make a phone call there.”
“How would we get out of here? Get back to the U.S. Pontoon boat?”
“I haven’t a clue. Question is, are you up to it?”
Leonard tried to rise, said, “You know what? I’m not up to it.”
“Then we better not arrange a way out yet. You don’t need to travel, you feel that bad.”
“You don’t hear me fighting with you.”
“Then you are hurt,” I said. “I’ve never known you to give in to me that easy.”
“You got a point, bucko.”
“Lie down. I’ll see I can rustle you up some breakfast.”
I left out of there, discovered Beatrice was up and moving toward the kitchen. I followed. She smiled at me.
“Last night was very good,” she said.
“Yes it was.”
“It meant something to me, but I do not want you to think it meant everything. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“Good. Are you hungry?”
“I am. And so is Leonard.”
“How is he?”
“Better, but not up to snuff. I know you want us to leave out, Beatrice. And we will. But maybe another day or two for Leonard to rest.”
Suddenly she became very hard. “One more day. No more than that.”