Captains Outrageous (7 page)

12

T
IME FLIES
when you’re having a big time.

I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep, but I awoke lying on the cabin floor by the bunk where Leonard lay. The woman was asleep on the bunk across the way. I barely remembered us going inside the cabin. Nothing like a good fight and a knifing of your best friend before dinner.

’Course, we might not get any dinner.

I got up, went out of the cabin, onto the deck. It was dark and the moon was up. The sea was a giant basin filled with ink. The boat lifted up and down like a carnival ride. I had never been so sick of water in all my life.

The old man was up top at the controls. I climbed up there and he turned and grinned at me.

“You sleep a little?” he said.

“Yes sir,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

I could see a string of lights out in the distance, along the shoreline. They looked like lightning bugs pinned to a display board coated with black velvet.

“I didn’t even know I was sleepy,” I said.

“It is fear, my friend. I do not say you are a coward. But we all have fear. It exhausts.”

“Been there before,” I said. “How bad is he really cut?”

“Not so bad. Not good. Not bad. No cut is good. It did not go deep.”

“I appreciate your help. Can I ask why you helped?”

“Why not? I do not like many men on two. Though, you two do pretty good. I think they not have the machete, the knife, you might have been all right.”

“You saw it all?”

“From my boat. I was coming in, I saw it. I pulled to the dock. I’ve seen them do that before. Take money from tourists. They try and rob me once.”

“How’d that work out?”

“They did not have a knife. I did not have a knife. But I am strong.”

“They’re really police?”

“I recognized them. Cozumel. They come here, do what they like, go back across the water.”

“Won’t they know who you are?”

“I do not think so.”

“Well, I hope not. Are you out here to hide from them? I mean, out this late. It must have been some hours now.”

“It has been a few hours. I went out to sea some. To fish.”

“You went fishing?”

“It is what I do.”

“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, waking 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?”