Savior (2 page)

Two
—Plymouth Beach

It is 1997 and they are sitting in the kitchen, the two of them, early on an August morning. Through the open window—a slider over the sink—comes the sound of mourning doves in the Virginia oaks across the street. Al has finished setting up the coffee maker at the island. Mary cuts up a grapefruit in a bowl. There is a news show on the television, but neither of them is paying any attention. There are no cars going by on the quiet residential street, two blocks from the town-owned stretch of sand that has resisted the encroachment of hotels and motels that block access to the water everywhere else along the Florida coast. Mary is talking about taking Ricky to the beach. He is sleeping at the moment but will soon wake. Al concurs with the plan. He can make lessons on the laptop. He has the old Dell laptop from his job with Myers Aviatrix. Some of the spreadsheets and contact lists have yet to be deleted. He's still surprised they let him walk away with the laptop in his car when he resigned two years previous. Such a lapse in security would be unthinkable nowadays, with the terrorist threat constantly looming and Clinton fighting to end a slow war in the Balkans, the first rumblings of the millennial clash Al believes is coming.

Why don't you return it, Al?

I don't think they miss it.

It's the principle, though.

You're right. I'll do that today. I can buy myself a new one. The newer models are lighter, more powerful. You can download from the Internet faster.

He knows better than to argue with Mary on a matter of principle. Her light sandy hair and plain features mask a pugnacity that knows no bounds when there is an issue of weighing right versus wrong, no matter how petty. The high road always wins.

Go do it now. I want you to come with us. Ricky loves playing with you. What is that game you play?

Tigers.

Where you pounce on him.

Yeah, I hide in the sand and he runs by and tries not to get pounced on. He's a great little guy.

Do you dream about him winning the state football championship some day?

Of course. He's going to be the next Staubach.

Roger Staubach. Isn't there a Florida equivalent?

There is, but for any boy growing up in the
seventies, Roger Staubach was it. He’s going to be great.

That's funny. I don't care if he plays football or not. I want him to find his own interests. He'll be a birdwatcher.

Oh, that'll be fine, too. As long as he's he best birdwatcher out there.

What if he's just the best birdwatcher he can be, isn't that good enough?

Good enough. I suppose so, Mary.

Al stands and goes off to look for the laptop in the study. He finds it in the bottom drawer of the desk, the big one that takes the boxes of stationery and odds and ends of cables and old floppy discs that no longer have any use,
that they hang onto just in case. He takes the laptop out and listens as Ricky makes a crying noise in his bedroom upstairs. Mary goes up the stairs and brings him down to the kitchen. When Al takes the old laptop back out, the boy is sitting in the high chair in a shaft of sunlight. On the news, Rush Limbaugh is making some inane argument about the welfare state, the numbers of illegal immigrants flooding the country and threatening Our Way of Life.

It is an in-between August day. Al is in his second year teaching. There are times he struggles with his newest career choice and wonders how things would have been different if he'd been a little hungrier starting out after college in the recession years of the mid-eighties. But Mary, with her sandy hair and no-nonsense spare features, is without a doubt reason enough to give thanks to God. And Ricky is the greatest little guy, a square
-built, healthy little bundle of primal energy. Here in the house on the quiet street, Al says a little prayer before he passes into the kitchen, thanks for the good things in his life. He is thirty-seven years old, thirty-five years older than his son. When Ricky graduates from college, he will be fifty-six.

Ten thirty, halfway through the morning. Al divides the day into quadrants so that he can get the most out of his time here. The beach is ahead, across the parking lot. Mary and Ricky are on the path in the sand. He watches their slow progress and then jumps out of the car, grabs the canvas beach bag with snacks and towels
, and starts after them. Mary picks a spot in the sand and applies sunscreen to them before turning attention to herself. In the water, some surfers are catching the little shore break, down by the pier. Al takes Ricky by the hand and leads him down to the water. The boy breaks free and runs ahead. Al chases him, his voice sounding like a freight train.

You can't get away from me.

Ricky laughs.

These are the memories, he thinks, that will carry him in his old age. There are other families on the beach, and he realizes that they all are involved in the common enterprise of shoring up defenses against the tragedy that underlies all of life
: its inevitable end. Not for the first time, Al contemplates his death and wonders what form it will take. He knows that Ricky signifies some continuation of himself, but what trick of the ego, he wonders, allows one to appreciate this as a compensation for one's own demise. It eludes him. Still, he plays dutifully and joyfully. One of the pleasures of fatherhood is this return to the playing forms of childhood and the way the joy is still there, only it's a vicarious joy at seeing the look of terror in Ricky's eyes when he roars, not sure if in fact he is not facing some kind of predatory tiger who will pounce and destroy him.

That's it, Ricky, run hard boy.

Daddy, come and get me.

I will. I'll get you.

Then he's driving on the Plymouth Causeway and getting on Route 5 down to the Circuit City outlet to look at laptops. He has the teacher ID that might get him a discount. In the parking lot, there is an Asian father and teenage son wearing thick eyeglasses. Al follows them in; he thinks he recognizes the boy from his ninth grade World Civilizations class, a good student. He doesn't remember his name. The way the boy is walking ahead, distancing himself from his father, reminds Al of his own teenage rebellions and the need life seems to have for discontinuity as well as continuity, the way both are contained within themselves and held together by a fragile cord. The father's job is to sacrifice himself for the sake of the growing man. It is a lesson it will take Al a long time to learn. One of the problems he has with teaching is the selflessness it requires. Al knows that he still burns with ambition, the need to perfect himself for some unknown, distant and important purpose. Another odd pleasure that comes with greater years, he thinks: the view of the carrousel as it turns. You're still on it, riding, wanting that horse to buck faster, but you can see that everyone is pretty much going at the same pace and in the same eternal, circuitous direction.

And then the strangest thing, the oddest picture to flash through his brain: he is back at the beach's public parking lot. Waiting for a black SUV with flashing red taillights to pull out so he can take the spot. He rolls down the window to smell the peculiar August smell of salt and ozone mixed with suntan oil and car exhaust and the cries of gulls and small children and the crash of the waves, when the sight catches him out of the corner of his eye
s. He glances quickly upwards, squinting to see the airplane towing a banner. It reads
Mama Grande Get Your Future Today 1-800 656-9972
. The numbers match his Social Security which is 656 05 9972. He thinks he will call Mama Grande and have his fortune told.

Later at home
, he cannot find the listing in the phone book and there is no answer—the number has been disconnected—when he dials the toll free number. Just an oddity, but even stranger to have the memory here in the blackness of his imprisonment at the hands of the evil one, Samael Chagnon. Did he imagine it, and is he imagining this now? The thought he might one day suddenly awaken pleases him with a bittersweet gnawing knowledge of its foolishness. There is no mistaking the evidence of his senses. There is none. He walks six steps to the North and places his hand against the metal wall.

Three
—The Ladder

A year and some months after Mary's death, August 2010, Al and Ricky boarded a Miami flight to Guatemala. The flight was crowded with Central Americans and Venezuelans going to their newly built vacation homes in Antigua and Puerto Limón. Al watched their teenage children, and the way Ricky looked off to the side when they came around the curve in the ticketing line, trying to avoid eye contact this early in the morning with anyone who shared the generational anxiety, the identity malaise that was the American experiment. A scar marked Ricky's right cheek, a burn mark from an accident when, as a three year old, he'd done a face plant onto the fire poker lying on the ground in his Uncle Tony's Vermont ski chalet. He naturally tended to shield his right side from people. It would take someone who really knew him well to notice.

As they flew
in over the mountaintops, black rain clouds gathered on the ridges of the Continental Divide. Guatemala City had a busy, prosperous feel in the rainy season. They stayed in the city for the night and the next day caught a taxi to the bus terminal. There they bought two tickets for the Pacific coast town of Monterico. The bus ride took five hours, the last thirty miles down a rutted dirt track crossed by three rivers, and let them off by the surf shop in the center of the sleepy little hamlet.

Ricky stepped off the bus and stretched. His long legs and arms were still catching up with the growth spurt they had recently put on, and his mind seemed to be saving itself for some later exertions. Also, he was undergoing video game withdrawal.

Here we are, bud.

Uh
-huh.

Your Mom loved this place.

Look at the sign above the surf shop, Dad.

They crossed the street, lugging their duffel bags. The sign was a neon
-colored, painted barrel-curve wave and a Keith Haring graffiti surfer shooting out the end, crouching.

It's cool
, Dad.

Coconut Juan upgraded since the last time we were here.

That was five years ago.

Coconut Juan himself was sitting at the counter, his feet up on the glass, chatting in Spanish with an American girl. He was a little portlier than last time, but his dyed blond hair and brown, leathery skin w
ere the same. He smiled, seemingly in recognition, when he saw them. The American girl looked at them and went back to reading a newspaper.

Hola amigos.

Coconut Juan. You remember us?

You had taking lessons.
Few years ago. Coconut Juan, he never forget the
cara
. Where is the
mama
?

She's dead
, Juan. Cancer took her.

I am very sorry, my friend.

We want to rent a couple of boards and go surfing for a few days. How's the surf?

Very good.

They went out the main glass door and into the board shed, and Juan took care of them with two boards that he set aside to wax later. Ricky wanted a seven-foot trick board and Al chose an eight-foot hybrid, not quite a long board, short enough to get through the surf and long enough to provide some stability for his 185 pounds. He was no expert, but still spry enough to at least pop to his feet once in a while on a gentler wave. Al asked Juan about the town, about his business.

Very much busy all the time now. Estrange people.

How strange?

They not surfing.
They not enjoying the beach. They only fly in and say
adios
. Two, three days. Very estrange.

Well, who knows? Maybe they've discovered oil or something.

Yes, banana oil.

They had a laugh together. Ricky was getting bored and looking discomfited by the American girl reading the newspaper. He strayed over to the far wall display with the baseball hats and tee shirts while Al paid with the credit card
. As he wandered checking out the paraphernalia, he approached a narrow wooden door, strange, almost ancient, out of place in the cinder block, utilitarian building. He tried the handle. It opened into a dark space, bare except for a louvered window high on the exterior wall and in one corner a trunk that had been left open. When he looked inside the trunk, Ricky was struck by the beauty of a stone tablet lying inside. He lifted it and held it up to the light coming from the window above, which revealed a reclining Mayan in a headdress and mysterious hieroglyphs running up and down in rows. This was it. Exactly what he'd been hoping to find. Something to remind him of his mother. He felt she'd been guiding him here.

Ricky.

It was Al standing in the door of the room.

Dad.

What are you doing?

Look at this.

Ricky handed the tablet to Al. It was a cheap reproduction, something Juan had picked up at Chichen Itza and kept in the shop to be used as decoration, Al thought.

Cool, Ricky.

Yeah. It was in that trunk. I want it. For Mom.

They looked at it together and Al handed it back to Ricky as Coconut Juan approached. His face had changed
, no longer smiling or easy-going. A grey, ashen fear had come across it. He took the tablet forcefully out of Ricky's hands.

No for sale, my friends.

It's nice, said Ricky.

Al was getting anxious to sit down and have something to eat. The sun was getting low in the sky.

Come on, Ricky. Let's check in and get some dinner.

But Mom would love that.

You're right. She would have.

She
would
love that.

Sometimes Ricky freaked him out with his insistence that they treat Mary in their conversations as if she were still with them. But it was true that she had, on their last trip to Guatemala, fallen in love with everything to do with Mayan lore and iconography and had been teaching herself to do basic hieroglyphic inscriptions using what was known of the Mayan alphabet. She planned on doing presentations in the school district in her retirement after completing her last year in the library. Unfortunately, life had cut short her plans. Al was still sort of bitter about it. They left the surf shop with the understanding that they would be back early the next morning for the boards.

The Hotel Costasol rented out cabanas that were linked around a small kidney-shaped swimming pool and restaurant-bar underneath a palm-thatched roof. The office was on the corner of the road, air-conditioned. A young Guatemalan girl in shorts and flip-flops had her feet up on the desk, and a boy about twenty leaned against the wall. They both slowly straightened as Ricky and Al came in the glass door and approached. After the paperwork, the girl walked them down to their cabana, Casa Coleman. The carved wood paneling of the door showed dolphins and palm trees. Apparently, it was the vacation home of Jonathan Coleman, a Colorado Springs orthodontic surgeon, who rented out the cabana when he was not using it. Coleman’s name was on the magazines on the bookshelf along with the address of his dental practice. Ricky thumbed through the books and magazines and the guest register, while Al walked around the apartment and checked drawers below the sink and chatted about what he saw.

Okay, we're in business. Spatula, forks. There's a, what must be a juice press. Hey Ricky, this is nice.

Yes, it is.

You ready to do some surfing?

Sure am.

This isn't going to be anything like Plymouth Beach, you know that.

I've been here before, Dad. Don't you remember?

Yeah, but you were too young to surf.

I remember the waves, though.

Let's take a walk down the beach. There's still some light in the sky.

Okay.

The road to the beach led past
building lots where squat, bare-chested workers cleaned tools and chatted in low voices, and streams of silty water oozed onto the road from piles of sand and recently busy concrete mixers. Stray dogs watched Ricky and Al from the empty lots lined with scrub and acacia trees from which birds lifted in flocks into the salmon-streaked sky. Already, they could hear the pounding waves. Two surfers, wet haired and barefoot, carried their boards and made their way back to their lodgings. Ricky and Al listened to them chat in English about the break and the swells as they went by. At the edge of the road, dozens of harlequin land crabs scuttled away from them and into the mangroves. Puddles of rainwater from the most recent deluge still filled the potholes. Ricky and Al picked their way around them.

Over the rise of dunes was the pounding Pacific, a series of white, spilling, irregular lines approaching from the setting sun and, at the back, walls of dark water rising, lifting three or four surfers at a time. Their boards carved out unpredictable tracks across the face of the waves before spinning back over the top in a controlled dismount, or careening through the air in a final spinning tumble into the wash. Ricky and Al walked along the sand and down to the edge of the high tide. The beach stretched in a crescent two or three miles and ended in green headlands in either direction. Father and son made their way slowly south along the water's edge in the dusk.

What should we talk about, Dad?

Ricky surprised Al with the outcroppings of his budding maturity and adult judgment.
Just as he'd been sinking into thoughts about Mary and how different their lives were without her. She'd been the pivot of the family, the spark plug. Everything had run through her. Without her presence, there just didn’t seem to be much of a life. Except Ricky sometimes could read his mind and with an expert touch lift him out of despondency.

I don't know. Are you watching the waves?

Yeah.

What's the pattern? Got to catch the pattern, Ricky.

I am, Dad. Let's go in.

I'm not wearing my bathing suit.

Who cares? Come on. I'll race you.             

They swam and had showers, leaving puddles of water all over the tiled floor of the rental. As they walked down to the restaurant, both of them were silent. After Mary's death they spoke rarely, just catching each other up on the bare essentials, numbed by their shared pain.
The tiki lamps around the pool let off a smell of sandalwood. Two French Canadian couples in their late twenties laughed and splashed in the water. Ricky and Al took a table near the bar. The waiter, a teenaged boy about Ricky's age, brought out the menus. Al ordered a Bohemia Negra beer.

What do you want, Ricky.

I don't know, Coke?

¿
Una Coca-Cola
? asked the waiter.

How old are you, fifteen?

Yeah.

You're not old enough for beer, are you?

Yeah? You sure? asked Ricky.

Yeah. Your Mom would roll in her grave.

Don't say that, Dad. She's not in the grave. Remember?

You're right.

They studied the menus, both of them with the strange feeling that they were not alone. Ricky thought about the stone tablet that he'd seen in Coconut Juan's shop and how strongly it had conjured in him the thought of his mother's presence. On the television above the bar, the news came on. The bartender was about to change the channel when a man at the bar stopped him. American, large, wearing Bermuda shorts and a guayabera, something about the man's appearance and interest piqued Al's curiosity. He watched the television also, trying to understand the story. The Guatemalan Ministry of Security was welcoming a delegation of smartly dressed Americans in suits and sunglasses, professional tough guys. They were high-level bureaucrats, from
Seguridad Nacional
, Homeland Security, something about the cartels and a growing level of criminal behavior in the capital and increased cooperation. Then they cut to another story about the indigenous people of the southern highland region who still conserved knowledge of the antique culture, particularly the mathematical theories of the ancients. The Mayans in particular, who extended their rule over the tribes of the lowland regions, kept astronomical records based on their observations, and then something about the cultural center that had recently been unearthed in Obero. Then the new Minister of Culture, a pretty, charming blonde in a long, frilly skirt, spoke to the cameras about the importance of the new government's programs to improve the conditions of the indigenous, etc., etc. Al felt a great admiration for the idealism of the Guatemalan Minister, even though he knew it was baloney. Poor people everywhere were being stuffed into museums and it didn't help them. He supposed some day somebody would want to take his life and memorialize it for its particular style of ineffective and incoherent adaptation.

Dad?

What?

What are you going to have? What's on the television that's so important?

Oh, nothing. Some kind of delegation in town from the States. Meeting with the President.

Wow. You understand a lot.

Well, you've got to listen, Ricky. There's a pattern, like in everything.

Dad?

What?

I'm having a Tex-Mex burger.