by Weston Ochse
He held out his hands. “We’re just having dinner. I can handle it. Come on, I heard that there’s a tapas bar that makes great shrimp tacos just down the street.”
As they stood to leave, a boat arrived to pluck the dozen swimmers from the ocean...only there seemed to be less than there was before. Thomas counted ten, then shook his head. Where had the other two gone? He must have missed them, or miscounted, or something.
***
Dinner was fabulous. But that was the end of it. She bade him goodbye before the dessert came and rushed from the restaurant. By the time he’d paid their check and hurried after her, she was nowhere to be found. He went to bed longing for her. The next morning he awoke gasping. Mixed with dreams of a diaphanous mermaid and an undersea behemoth, he'd imagined her weighty gaze holding him down beneath the waves as he struggled to breathe. He showered for an hour, way past the end of the hot water, determined to wash off traces of the dream. By lunch he’d almost forgotten the drowning. By happy hour, he looked forward to seeing her again. June Enright from Spartanburg, South Carolina. He’d decided that the dream was just that, a dream. It meant nothing and was little more than his synapses dealing with alcohol, shrimp and the idea of love.
***
She came in at the same time as the day before. She began to head for her usual seat, but hesitated when she saw him. She stared a moment, then lowering her head in embarrassment, smiled and joined him.
“Where’d you go last night?” he asked.
“I had to be somewhere.”
“Immediately? By the time I paid, you were nowhere to be seen?”
“I was in a hurry.”
He began to say something else, but her sigh stopped him cold. He waited a moment, but could tell by the arch of her back that she didn’t want to get into it. Instead of pressing her, he ordered a margarita for her. She drank, her eyes on the sea. Only occasionally did she look at him. Increasingly her looks at him became fonder. He wasn’t sure if it was because of his silence, or if there was a more real connection between them. Strangely he found himself both accepting and wanting. A far cry from the predator he knew himself to be. He’d given himself to this woman and found himself emotionally dependant on her glances and decisions and it oddly pleased him. And it was his private wistful smile that he hadn't even realized he’d revealed that gave him away.
“What is it?” she asked. “Why are you looking at me that way?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it’s you. Maybe it’s me.” His truth inspired him. “I barely know you and all I can think is that I want to know you better.”
She blushed, hiding any further reaction in her drink.
This encouraged him. They’d talked about the mundane the previous evening, relating disconnected stories of friends and things they’d seen on their travels. Nothing revealing. Nothing personal. Now he wanted to get to know her as a person. He wanted to discover why she’d chosen this backwash Mexican resort as a hang out. He wanted to know about her Army shirt and what it meant to her. He wanted to know why she’d come to him and blushed. Forgotten were some of her first words— You don’t want to be with me. He was so wrapped up in the process of falling in love, his only thought was how she thought of him and what he wanted to be so she could love him too.
By the end of the evening, she’d cast off broad chunks of her armor, revealing a young woman she'd admitted not having seen for a long time. She'd told him her story, and in the catharsis of the telling, wept over the murder of her friends. Ann, Susan and Gretchen had evaporated in an explosion of light and flame when their HUMMER had struck an IED. June had been in the second vehicle and, although she'd left without a scratch, her soul had been shredded by the event.
Eventually they left the restaurant and walked the beach ending up at Fisherman's Square where the locals gathered to pray for divine intervention. The statue rising from the middle of the expanse was so impressive it was out of place in the dusty Mexican port town. One hundred feet tall, it seemed more permanent than the stone upon which it had been built, as if it’d risen through the earth’s crust rather than been built upon it. Cut from a great block of metal, a ten-story fisherman sat upon the back of a giant shrimp, the legs and antenna of the crustacean wrapping about the man’s limbs like tentacles. The detail of the figures was such that they appeared ready to resume life, the monster shrimp returning to the waves to be hunted by the Poseidon-like Mexican fisherman. But it was more than that. Their combative embrace held a sort of serene camaraderie, as if each depended upon the other to survive; more partners than adversaries.
Thomas and June stopped before the statue, looking up and up until they spied the man's Don Quixote head framed by a Milky Way halo in the wide night sky. Several fishermen had gathered nearby. Some prayed silently. Others left fruit at the base of the statue. Still others drank quietly with an eye towards the shrimp. An ancient woman wrapped in layers of a red and orange shawl stood lonely vigil, her weathered face upturned, as if the man would come alive and speak with her if she only waited long enough.
Traveling up the coast from the Chiapas States, he’d been in Puerto Peñasco for a little more than a day before he’d met June. One unifying theme in all the places he'd visited seemed to be the Cult of Catholicism. He'd grown up around churches in America, but Mexicans took it to another level, one that would put even Southern Baptists to shame. They worshiped Mary as if she were a goddess herself. Jesus reigned on every corner. Whitewashed walls, mud-daubed hovels and Spanish mission-style buildings were adorned with evidence of Catholic worship, as if each architectural creation rising above the earth was its own monolithic prayer to Jesus, Mary and Jehovah.
Most of the places along the coast were little more than replicas of themselves, but this town had a different feel. The same Catholic cultism was everywhere, but added to that was an older feel, as if it had been rooted in the earth since creation. He hadn't been able to put his finger on it until just now, but looking at the statue made him realize that the people in this town were older, much older. The old woman in the shawl marked her age with a deeply creviced face and eyes like sunken marbles. He'd read that the town had been a fishing village even before the Spanish came to the land. Somehow that age translated to reality. The age of the place, the way the sun fell into the sea every night, and this monolithic statue, separated this town from all the rest.
"I wonder how long that's been there," he said.
June squeezed his hand. "You'll be moving on soon. When's the last time you saw your mother? She sounds like a wonderful woman."
"Hold on. No need to rush me out of here. I thought I'd stay awhile."
"There's a hard line between living here and visiting. If you're visiting, then there's a time to leave. Maybe now is that time."
"What's the hurry?” He grinned, hoping it would be contagious. “Besides, I kind of like it here."
"You're staying because of me, aren't you?"
He hesitated but a moment. "Of course I am. You're the best thing to happen to me in months. Years,” he hurriedly added. “I thought I'd hang out, but if you don't want me, hell."
She stared at him, her eyes wide pools of fear, but then something happened and she looked away. The soft liquid pools hardened to stone. Her lips made a thin line. "Then leave. I don't want you here."
He'd only been testing her, but her response cut him. It cut him deep. His face began to burn. "I can leave tomorrow," he said.
***
The tepid temperature of the water surprised him. South towards the entrance of the Bay of California where the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean meet, the water was cool and refreshing. He'd surfed there six weeks ago and would go back in a heartbeat. Yet here, only a few hundred miles north, the water here was almost bathtub warm, and not at all comfortable.
But then the water was the least of his worries. The rope attached from his ankle to the statue far beneath the waves was what had spooked him the most. He hadn’t seen the statue, but when o
ne of the others had asked what they were to be tethered to, the quick Spanish answer of the old man who drove the truck said something about it being like the statue in the town only larger. Looking around at the eleven other swimmers, he wondered which one would die this day. He knew it could be him, but the whole thing didn't seem real.
What had she said?
"I did it three times. I wanted to die the first two and was pissed when the boat came to take me away. After all, why was I still alive? Why was I the one to carry on the memory of the living? I didn't want it. I didn't deserve it."
"But you went back? Why'd you do that?"
"The third time was soothing. I didn't care at that point. I'd met twenty men and been fucked eleven times. I'd written letters to my mother that I'd never mail. I'd even made a video on my cell phone that was my last will, testament and fuck you to the world. I think I survived because I wanted to die."
She'd seen his face which had puckered in surprise and had caressed it as she straddled him once more. She took him in and moved, her eyes seeking a land between reminiscence and heaven. "No. That's not really true. I think I survived because I finally understood that I didn't have to pay for it."
"Pay for what?"
"Living," she sighed as yet another orgasm shook her. “Living other people’s lives.”
After a time when she'd cleaned up and they lay together in the bed, he'd thought about what she’d said and about what she'd gone through and what he hadn't and couldn't help but voice the words on his mind. "It’s easy to forget the living have their own weight to carry.”
She nodded in a way that reminded him of John Wayne in They Were Expendable, as if the knowledge had its own weight and brought his head low so he couldn’t look someone directly in the eye. The image was helped by her imitation of the actor as he said in his patented slow drawl, "Don't discount dumb luck. We've all seen assholes walking around that should have been killed at birth."
He tried to smile at the remark, but found it difficult, wary that she might have been talking about him.
Seeing her mistake she smiled sheepishly and retracted some of what she'd said. "I mean that those who should have died are alive and vice versa. Not everyone is meant to live."
"So you don't believe in a higher power?"
"When it comes to living, maybe, but not when it comes to dying. I saw too many friends die." Then she'd told him the story of Jill and her other friends and the IED and how her best friend's foot had landed in her lap.
Looking towards the shore, he tried to spot the Black Dolphin where he'd sat just three days ago when he'd first seen the swimmers. He polled his thoughts. Was it all because of her? He'd been drifting in Mexico for months, looking for what he did not know. Yet look he did, moving and flitting like an ash caught on the winds. Was it she he'd been looking for? Or perhaps was it a reason for it all to be.
The shirt she'd worn that first day had drawn him to her more than her looks. He'd come to find out that she'd spent the previous two years off and on in various suburbs of Baghdad, trying to quell dissident factions and stay alive as a sergeant in the U.S. Army. On her last trip home to Spartanburg, she'd decided she wasn't going back to the war and had fled to Mexico. That had been nine months ago, six of which she'd spent in Puerto Peñasco.
After they'd seen the statue in the square, they'd found a coffee shop. She’d apologized for saying what she’d said, then had grabbed his hand and held it. Neither of them wanted to end the evening, so the warmth of the strong Mexican coffee was the perfect defense against the cold onshore breeze and the sleep that waited to ensnare them.
"Why is it you didn't go back?" he’d asked after she'd told him the story.
June shrugged, pausing only to blow on the surface of her coffee and push a few strands of her straw-colored hair behind her ear.
The next question was a minefield, so instead of asking, he spun it into a truism. "I know I'd be scared if I went back. There's so much death. So much random death. I don't know if I could take not being able to see it coming."
"Some people like that about death. They like it to be a surprise. They say the waiting and the knowing is worse than the actual event itself."
He looked at her and blinked. "Would you rather it was a surprise?"
"I'd rather not die at all." She smiled briefly. "But that's not your question, is it? There are those who are so worried that they want to control everything around them. You know the types. They even want to control death, as if such a force could be controlled. Me? I like to know what I'm getting into. Once I understand things, I can accept what fate deals me. Bottom line: do I care if I die? Yes. Am I going to spend all day thinking about it? No.”"
"So you believe in fate?"
“The word is too inadequate.” She shook her head. "It's not that simple. I believe in signs. I don't know if that's fate, or God, or what. You wanted to know why I didn't go back? I'll tell you. We were driving through Haditha District in our HUMMER, coming back from delivering medicine to a family who'd lost their father to a police station bombing when it happened. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?"
"Uh... I'm not sure."
"Signs. Like when you want to place a bet and you look up and see a number you've never noticed before. Or like when a deer zips across the road making you slow down, only to discover that had you taken the next curve at your original speed, you would have plowed into the car that had already overturned. Signs."
"Yeah. I get it. Signs."
"So we were coming back when I just happened to look over and watch as a man leaned back and fired his RPG directly at us. I was close enough to see the fervor in his eyes. I was close enough to see the grin of satisfaction as our gazes met across the trail of the rocket heading right for me. I was close enough to see a birthmark near his temple.” She closed her eyes as if reliving the moment. “I was close enough to know that I'd been murdered," she whispered.
He stared at her for a time, then shook his head. "Jesus. What happened?"
"Nothing," she shrugged and opened her eyes. "The rocket-propelled grenade bounced off the Hummer. It never exploded. I don't know who was more surprised, me or the guy who tried to kill me."
"And you took this as a sign?"
"Most definitely. This was a warning shot across my bow. It told me to get the hell out. A week later I came home on mid-tour leave, and well, I'm here, instead of there."
Now that her tale was done, she fixed him with a steady gaze, her blue eyes daring recrimination. But he had none. His tale was worse than hers. At least she'd left for a reason. Thomas was a deserter too, and he realized that he had no reason other than his own fear.
***
Something tugged on his leg. Something soft, yet firm, tentative yet insistent. Then it was gone. He counted to twenty and had begun to believe that he’d imagined it, but there it was again. He felt a series of gentle tugs against his naked ankles. Momentary panic flooded his system until he realized it was the current. Floating like a bobber on a fishing line, he knew that if something down there wanted him, he'd be jerked below the surface so fast he'd be lucky to catch a breath.
He treaded water with his hands, pushing across the waves in a gentle doggy paddle. Occasionally a wave would crest and explode across his face, leaving him gasping. Each time he’d wonder why he’d put himself in such a position. He was too afraid to return to Iraq, but not afraid to tempt a god to eat him. Perhaps it was because he’d seen the death Iraq represented. He’d seen the body parts of his friends. He’d watched as the light had fled from their eyes. But the god beneath the waves, the old thing that ruled this solitary sea, he’d never seen, unless the statue had something to do with it. Did he have to see death to be afraid of it? Was that the lesson here?
Early this morning as he was preparing for his sacrifice, June had admitted to having talked to no less than twenty men over the last six months. Six she’d convinced to bob and each one was eventually taken by what was beneath the waves.
She’d given him one last chance to leave, but he’d foolishly remained firm in his desire to prove his love and banish his fear.
“They have a tradition here that goes back a thousand years,” she’d whispered while they lay in bed the previous night awash in the sweat of their sex. “Their god must be fed. There once was a time when they’d feed those captured from other tribes, so they had wars, and captured victims to be sacrifices. But the 20th Century came and peace overwhelmed them, as it eventually does when cultures become more civil. So to appease the god, they began a tradition. Three times a man could tie himself to the statue. And three times he must survive. And if this man survives, he gains a power over his own fear greater than any other man, because fear, more than anything else, controls and makes us a slave. This process, this thing they do here on the Sea of Cortez, is a crucible of heroes.”
She’d been one of the only women to tempt the god. She’d said that at first they wouldn’t let her. She'd had to convince them. She'd had to beg them to let her be a part of the sacrifice so she could banish her own fear. In the end they’d relented.
Pain like a pin piercing his leg made him yelp. This was followed by another and then another as something with teeth attacked his ankle. He thrashed in the water, his legs kicking, one free, the other attached to the rope that held him to the undersea god. The man beside him thrashed as well. Their eyes met momentarily and he recognized his own terror in the bulging orbs of the other.
A scream erupted from farther down the line. Thomas turned in time to see a man disappear beneath the water, but had no time to contemplate the other’s fate. Something hard moved against his own leg.
Then he was jerked beneath the water.
He’d managed to take a breath and now held it as hard as he’d ever held anything. Like a rope to freedom, the oxygen in his lungs was the only thing that kept him safe from drowning or... Panic electrified him as he finally saw the beast moving beneath him.