Kook

by Peter Heller

  The wonder of this lovely person, I thought, as I watched the navigation light play with the delicate shadows of her eyelashes, was that she expected the best of everybody, and that she could love me at all with such a sparse upbringing. Much less this steady, warm current. Where did she learn it?

  I met her in a coffee shop near my house in Denver. I had just been through a terrible breakup. When I finally got up off the floor, I borrowed my buddy Sascha’s electric clippers, popped on an eighth-inch jig, and shaved my head.

  Some guys look fine bald. Not me. I’ve hit my head too many times. It was midwinter and I swore I would never date again, and I almost guaranteed it with my lumpy scalp. When summer came, I felt a little more like myself, and began to write in the local café. One August Sunday morning I was there early working on a magazine story. I was unshaven, in an old T-shirt, had a cap pulled down over my eyes, and was not paying attention to anything but the screen on my laptop. I was at a small table facing the front door with my back tucked up against the counter where people lined up to get their drinks. In my reverie I heard the little bell on the front door jingle and the hinges yaw and I glanced up.

  She was standing tall just inside the café looking over the tables. It was as if there were lights playing around her. She had this energy, sort of wholesome and pure. Happy. Clear. Her black hair fell softly around her neck as she turned to scan the room. She saw her girlfriend at a table by the front windows and smiled. Wow. It was like turning a bulb to the highest wattage. And she was so pretty, too. Her lovely, deep, gorgeous eyes. They were knowing and calm and terrifically sexy all at once. Her shapely legs. I felt a stab of pain and desire. More than that, I felt a sudden kinship, I’m not sure why. I knew right then that more than anything in the world I wanted to take this woman on a date.

  I am not smooth. I have never been able to pick up a girl. My girlfriends always got to know me because they were forced to be in close proximity over long periods, like in college seminars or extended field trips when my great charm and wit would slowly become evident, sort of surprising like the sprouting of potatoes in the fridge.

  Now, after nine months of not even talking to a woman, I knew that I was way beyond not-smooth. I knew that if I walked up to her table and tried to introduce myself in some suave way I would twitch, look at my feet, say some gratuitously stupid thing, and go home and weep.

  I thought, Get it together, Pedro. Do what you do best.

  I pulled the clean napkin from under my cup, dug a pen out of my pocket, and wrote:

  Hi,

  I’m an adventure writer. I write for a lot of top magazines. I have a lot of great stories, but I’m kind of shy though. I would love to take you to dinner. If you think that’s a good idea, you can just give me a thumbs up.

  Peter

  It’s true, I wrote that. I folded up the napkin, and when she got up and passed me on the way to the counter to order her coffee, I said in what was barely a whisper:

  “Excuse me, I have a note for you.”

  She paused, cocked her lovely oval face, looked down at me, smiled. “Oh, my very own note.”

  I was gone. I fell in love with her right then. She was so good-natured and gracious. She didn’t recoil in suspicion, or appraise my clothes, she didn’t shoot any angles at all, she took the thing at face value with a positive sweetness.

  She got her coffee and returned to her table and opened the napkin. She leaned over it. Then I saw a furrow form in her brow. She frowned. She passed the note to her friend, who read it, glanced at me, read it again with an equally puzzled look, and passed it back. Oh, man. My heart hammered, head flushed, and I shrank down below the laptop screen. But I couldn’t help peering over. They passed my note back and forth.

  In a flash I realized that they couldn’t read the thing! I write like a doctor, in a fast careless scrawl, and they couldn’t read it.

  There was still a chance. Don’t blow this. Now or never. You don’t act fast, she’s gone forever. Crisis made me bold. There was another square napkin on my table. I slid it to me. I looked at her again. So beautiful. Clearly Asian. Okay, okay. Asian genre, Asian motif. For once in my life I did not ponder. I wrote:

  Extended Haiku

  Sudden Sunday invitation

  How should I answer?

  Beauty caught breathless

  like a blossom blown off a limb.

  I wrote it in all caps, the kind architects use, and I stood and brought it to her table and set it down in front of her. The two women, startled now, watched me as if it were some kind of weird pageant. I went back to my table and sat down, tall and straight. She picked up the note in her long, tapered fingers and read, and then turned to me and smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

  What woke us up beneath the lighthouse on the windy night must have been the sound of motors, of boats. We came awake and instantly the canvas sides of the pop-top were rinsed in red light. A flare. Then another.

  “Put on something,” I said. “Get down.”

  I had heard a rumor just before we left about a couple along the Baja coast who had witnessed a drug deal and been killed and buried in their car. I didn’t know if it was true and I didn’t know if Kim had heard it. Either way, I didn’t want to be that couple. We clambered down fast, slid open the sliding door quietly, and stepped out barefoot onto the cold dust of the ground. Gingerly, we tiptoed over broken shells and peered around the front of the van. Another flare. It arced from the high dune on the south side of the arroyo that ran right down into the water. That’s where the friendly, clean-cut couple from San Diego was camped.

  It must have been late, because the wind had backed around and was coming from the land. We stood close to the Beast and peered across. A crimson streak arced over the water and crumbled into the darkness. A moment later a halogen spotlight cut down to the arroyo and swiveled south in jerks. From the top of the dune. Our little yuppie friends were having a serious rendezvous party. Respondez-vous, s’il vous plaît. Whoever was RSVPing was doing it on the other side of the hill and the point, beyond our sight. The light dropped down to that side, to where a long beach curved away. I was glad. You can’t be a witness if you don’t see anything.

  The next morning I was pulling my board out from under the lean-to tarp on the back side of the Beast, when lo and behold, Barbie and Ken swung up from the arroyo in their fancy pickup. They rolled down the window, grinned, said they were going to Cabo for a few days for some R&R. I thought this was R&R, but I didn’t say anything. They looked wholesome and happy, expectant, like a couple off on their honeymoon. I guess the prospect of stacks of crisp greenbacks might do that to a couple. He told me to take off at a hard angle on waves like these. He said, “You’re doing great. I saw you catch a couple of honkers yesterday.” He smiled his white even teeth and I wished them well. I did wish them well. I can never separate my personal warmth for someone—the guy had been really encouraging to me out on the wave—with my indignation at this same person’s politics or career choice or moral deficiencies.

  An hour later Kim squatted with our breakfast dishes down on the barnacle-covered rocks in the little flushing tidal pool at water’s edge, when I heard the throb of a diesel engine. An armored amphibious boat charged around the point. Must have been doing thirty knots. It was army-green, heavily plated, shaped like an angular beetle. Two fifty-caliber machine guns were mounted forward and aft, and helmeted, very serious soldiers trained them on the shore. The boat went past us, north, until it was in line with the fishermen’s shacks, made a tight turn, threw up a wave, then chopped back across its own wake as it skimmed just off the beach and the rocks. They seemed to be aiming their guns at Kim. I yelled to her, “Come up here! Hey, get up here, now!” I was doing a lot of urgent yelling lately. She was wearing her big straw hat, which made her look more Southeast Asian. I was from that sad era, and I couldn’t help an unwanted association with Vietnam and her villagers. She gathered up the pans and hustled up to the light tower and the van. The
patrol made one more pass. What could they be looking for that hadn’t already vanished in the night? I could see the mother ship offshore, a large gunboat, just a shadow, about five miles out.

  We left. Enough of rabbits and remittance men. Kim couldn’t surf here anyway. We packed up in half an hour. We left the van untended and walked down to say good-bye to Jamie. (He said he would stay another two weeks, he was stuck to this spot like a limpet.) We were gone from the Beast for five minutes. We rattled up the road. It wasn’t until we got to La Paz a couple of hours later that we realized that in that time someone had stolen my fancy altimeter watch (hanging from the metal push-up bar of the pop-top), a Leatherman multitool, and a nice folding knife (kitchen drawer), Kim’s sunglasses (between front seats). Where we had parked, our open side door faced the shacks. Every afternoon I had taken off my watch and hung it up on the bar. I had opened the drawer, taken out the tool and the knife. Whoever had robbed us—either one of the fishermen, who had just passed with a sack of mussels, or Victor, who was lingering around up there—must have had binoculars. Must have been watching us. That was unsettling, more than the theft.

  After half an hour of washboard road we turned the Beast back onto the smooth central highway and aimed for La Paz. A city of soft-spoken, almost unreal beauty. I was relieved and happy.

  “Want to take a few days off?” I said over the glad roar of the Beast.

  “Yes!”

  “We could go snorkeling. That place I told you about, with the sea lions.”

  “Yes!”

  She was in a Yes frame of mind.

  “We could get married.”

  “Yes!”

  I beamed. She beamed. La Paz doesn’t have any surf waves and I wasn’t sure if she was so pleased by the prospect of a few days without the labor of surfing or a lifetime of marriage to me. I figured both.

  “Tomorrow is the full lunar eclipse,” she said. “I think that’s auspicious. Let’s get married tomorrow.”

  I was happy. The Chinese are always concerned about being auspicious. Better, I thought, to have an auspicious bride than a—an inauspicious one. I knew that Kim would get online tonight at the hotel and check the astrology of the eclipse and the numerology of the date. If the numbers added up to four, eclipse or no, I knew we would not get married tomorrow. In Chinese, four is the number owned by death.

  LUNA DE MIEL

  The Hotel Los Arcos looks out over the promenade of the Malecón and the bay of La Paz. Across the shallow inner bite scattered with sailboats at their moorings, to the long sand spit of El Mogote, and beyond it to the Sea of Cortez. El Mogote is edged with rich mangroves, some of the last in the bay. Something about the evaporative breath of the sea and the clarity of the desert around it combines to make the softest, most dramatic sunsets I have ever seen. Like an Impressionist painting a massacre. If there are clouds in the sky they are flayed, bloodied, bruised in a spectacular, celebratory nubicide that is lovingly muted by marine haze. The water-clear bowl of sky above remains an unperturbed luminous blue. The highest blues pulse the hardest just before dying into night and a rich blackness that is alive to stars. There are desert nights and then there are nights on the Sea of Cortez. This is not hyperbole. Couples come here just for this spectacle.

  Reflecting back the firmament is the liquid desert of the sea herself, sparking with phosphorescence. It’s the bioluminescent plankton that glow when agitated. Once I sailed in here with friends on a small sloop. Every night, at anchor, I hung over the rail and watched the light show like submerged fireworks. In a black sea slick as a lake, big fish chasing little fish painted branching trees of panic and fire. There were flaming arrows of light, big enough to give a swimmer pause. Playful darts. There were calligraphies of what may have been love. Large rays flew through the water and trailed wakes of luminescence like divine starships. When they leapt into air and crashed down, soft explosions of light preceded the percussion.

  The Sea of Cortez is one of the richest marine zones in the world. A third of the world’s whale and dolphin species hang out here. Sea lions breed and bark on the skirts of the numerous rock islands. Blue whales, our largest cousins, swim up into the Sea and breed. At least scientists think they do. So little is known about the biggest mammal. Most of what they do and where they go, even how many actually exist, is a mystery. Most recent estimates put their numbers between five thousand and twelve thousand, but it’s a hazard and a guess. Common and Pacific white-sided dolphins are also here. Fin whales, second in size to the blue, critically endangered. Humpbacks, gray whales, sperm whales. Whale sharks, which aren’t a whale at all. Elephant seals and harbor seals. Even orcas.

  There is an island off of La Paz, just to the north, called Espiritu Santo. Big, about the size of Manhattan. Except for a small fishing camp on the channel that separates the island’s two halves, the place is completely wild. On that trip on the sloop a few years ago a couple of buddies and I sailed up the shore of Espiritu Santo to a rock islet on its northern end. There’s a voluble sea lion rookery here beneath black cliffs painted with the guano of blue-footed boobies. We could hear the barking two miles out. We anchored close, put on snorkels and masks, and dove. I’d heard that the lions were used to snorkelers, would swim by but would never let you touch them. You weren’t supposed to get too close anyway, that was harassment.

  I swam around in wonder. The sleek females jetted by, spun as they passed, and held me with their dark eyes. I could almost feel their whiskers. Hulking black bulls with heads like cannonballs glided past, bit down on fish in an explosion of flesh. I felt very aware that I was a tolerated guest, that this was their house. Then I saw two youngsters roughhousing. They must have been adolescents. They were playing tug-of-war and tag with a shock cord dropped from some boat. I wanted to play, too.

  I dove down and performed a double somersault, triple lutz, as I went to the bottom. Very awkward in the flippers. It caught their attention. What the hell was that? They looked incredulous. They whizzed over and around me, and as they did they executed streamlined barrel rolls and loop de loops. Oh, yeah? Watch this! I took the biggest breath I could and went to the bottom performing every turn and twist I could think of, then added a kind of Peggy Fleming flourish with my hands. They were floored, if a teenage sea lion can be floored. They went nuts. They roared around me like the Blue Angels. Then suddenly I felt a tugging on my right flipper. I looked back and the littler one had the fin firmly in her teeth, pulling and pulling. Okay, two can play this game. If you can dish it out … I arched slowly around and pinched her two rubbery back flippers in my two hands. She didn’t give up. We circled in an antic donut. Then she broke away and described a fluid arc and came straight at me. I held my hand, my fist, straight out and she glided up and took it in her needle teeth. She had grabbed the flipper hard, but she knew the difference. Ever so gently she mouthed my hand and stared at me, straight into me with her large liquid eyes. I thought I could see humor there, something like the delight I was feeling. She broke again, and again circled back. We played and played. I held her torso and she pulled me through the water. We hung upside down a few feet apart and just looked at each other. I forgot my name. I forgot to breathe and came to the surface gasping. When finally I was blue with cold and the crew was calling me and I swam back toward the boat, she swam around and around me in fast figure eights. It was the most euphoric moment of my life. I had been an invited guest in a wild place.

  Marriage is an act of faith and of great hope. I wanted to take Kim to this place on the day we promised each other our lives.

  After over a month living inside the Beast, the Hotel Los Arcos was paradise. All the sweeter because we knew that after two nights we’d be on the road surfing again. The polished Saltillo tiles of the lobby were so glossy they reflected the slow-turning ceiling fans. The breeze from the fans ruffled the potted palms and were barely heard over the bubbling of a central fountain. I could have wept. We were dirty, we carried one baby-blue and one pink gym b
ag, all stained with dirt and grease. And four longboards off the roof rack. In the States, the staff would have been snotty. Not here. They treated us as if we were arriving Ambassadors of Adventure. The surfboards were whisked away by young men in uniform tunics with brass buttons. We declined a porter for our little bags. In the room, overlooking the bay, we fell on the king-sized bed in an ecstasy of creature comfort. We were just as thrilled with the crisp ironed sheets as we were with each other. We laughed. We were getting married! A sense of deliverance and relief overtook us. Part of it was all this—the little sign above the sink that said the water was potable, the hot gush from the shower head, the cold Cokes in the bar fridge. I didn’t really realize how much we had been on full alert over the past two weeks—for the safety of our stuff in the camps, for our lives on the highway and in the surf. Always keeping track of who was coming in and out of the rough access roads, what the tide and the waves were doing, how we were fixed for water, gas. Now we dropped our guard with a sigh of relief. But part of it was this sense of deliverance into each other’s care.

  We strolled down the Malecón. Bronze statues of dolphins, throngs of travelers. We ate homemade gelato under palm trees whose trunks had been painted playfully with polka dots. The sun lowered and turned us ruddy. We stopped in at a store with a folding sign on the sidewalk that advertised boat tours and booked an Espiritu Santo sea lion trip for the next morning. We ate Chinese food, Kim’s favorite, and she spoke Cantonese to the staff, and they gave us extra plates of vegetables. We slept. Free of wind and worry, with visions of eggs and bacon in our heads.

  The Jeep picked us up outside the Los Arcos at seven-thirty. Drove out to the headland north of town. The cactus hills, Balandra. A protected cove on our left thick with mangroves and a beach at the head of it. Some of the last mangroves around La Paz, and a consortium of developers planned to yank out the mangroves and construct a resort. The city, the local people, the fishermen, were fed up, though. One after another they had watched their local beaches get overrun by fancy developments that cater to gringos and rich Mexicans. All the favorite spots for swimming and weekend family picnics had been placed out of reach. Tecolote and Pichilingue. They no longer felt welcome there. This was one of the last, a green paradise of littoral richness in the tawny desert, a breeding ground and hatchery for countless marine animals. The locals had drawn a line in the sand. Last night as we walked the streets, all over town, posted on doorways and in the grillwork of windows, were posters that read BALANDRA NUESTRA. Our Beach.