Ice cubes too, now. Don’t forget the ice cubes.
“Sí. Hielo purificado.” Lyria is not a fool. She knows what a fat whore with the shits looks like.
Lyria does not know what a bail-out is but senses that some things can and should move forward without her comprehension. She knows the place to go, six blocks over and three blocks up, and so they head out again, still in step but at a slower pace with two hours to kill. They breathe easier, as if progress is theirs and the Sword of Damocles is stayed for now. Lyria leads but follows the tenor of the situation. It changes with Mrs. M waxing lyrically over the lovely town, its prolific flora, and sensational views.
Lyria imagines the concrete miasma comprising the land of wealth and power.
Mrs. Mayfair chortles over the quaint houses and charming landscapes. “To think, you can have all this with no, you know, gated communities. It would never work at home.”
Lyria neither nods nor shakes but stares obliquely at the harsh opposite of all things quaint and charming, which is jail in Mexico. She sees moreover what Mrs. Mayfair does not see. She wants to broach the subject of jail in its innate difference from one country to the next, not so much in the violence and homosexuality common to all jails, but in the foregone torture common to Mexican jails.
“Do you know,” she begins, only to be interrupted.
“This is so nice. I like getting to know you. I have so few friends. You wouldn’t think that. I mean, I would think you wouldn’t think that. Tell me, dear, what kind of menu does this restaurant have?”
“What kind of menu? It has things to eat. What other kind of menu does a restaurant have?”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean, well, is it.… Well, of course it is. Mexican, I mean. But is it … well, don’t worry. I understand. It has things to eat, which is very good, because I, for one, am famished. Seems the liquor makes me hungry the next day. I think it’s the toxins screaming for the antidote, which is good nutrition. How about you? Are you famished?”
“Sí. I have hungry.”
“That’s so cute. You mean, dear, you are hungry. Listen to me, correcting you. I can’t speak a word of Spanish. Well, I can. I can say simple things like gracias and mañana. Hola. Uno, dos, tres. But I could never carry on like you do. I thought about private lessons and actually planned to fit them in. But I swear I don’t know where the time goes. Then I get home and hardly have occasion to speak Spanish, except to the … you know. So I forget what I know, which is nothing, but you understand.”
Lyria nods with a half smile, understanding very little of what makes Mrs. Mayfair speak so thoroughly around a subject without getting to the point, if in fact a point exists for getting to.
“We’ll do lunch,” Mrs. Mayfair warbles. “I think I’ll like that. I want to get to know you. You might think that strange or at least unusual. But I would. You know.”
Lyria’s response is again tentative, and she wonders if Mrs. Mayfair understands the true nature of the situation. But the M demonstrates her understanding by merely daring to cross those boundaries society sets between two women on either side of the same man. “Antonio speaks of you,” she says, then shamelessly coos over Antonio’s wonnnderful skills as an entertainer.
Lyria’s hunger quickly fades. Why is she prattling on like this, and what does she want? Does she think that I will sing her praises and tell her that Antonio speaks of her tambien? What good is a girlie talk on life, love, money, and murder with this strange woman, who warbles like a canary simply because the sun is out? I would rather the old sow could ape Toucan, keeping it sparse and low.
She imagines Antonio this very minute and hopes he’s alone in a cell, however grim, and not under the naked bulb that shines on contusion, laceration, bruises, broken ribs, and spirit and can as well endanger a man’s essential legacy. She drifts briefly to Baldo, wondering what he thinks this moment and, moreover, if he thinks anything this moment. Does he understand the fix his brother is in on his behalf? Is he more concerned for buckets of baby turtles? Does he know how a woman feels in the night when a man—and he is a man, this she has seen—curls up like a baby in her lap as if with a baby’s needs? Imagine, at his age, taller than his older brother and for all we know more dramatically endowed, but still so young and wanting such contact from a woman.
VIII
Quincy Makes a Call
Baldo does not stay busy from a self-conscious need to look busy like so many who fear that idleness may lend the wrong impression and lead to dismissal. He stays busy to ventilate his drive and to give that which he came to give.
He guards against intruders, marauders, and predators as his title suggests he should. Even now, with the morning feed secure and the late feed yet to begin, his eyes dart in four directions, up and down. The future is at his feet for his safekeeping. He needs no uniform to underscore his calling but he doesn’t mind one either, and feels better than he has in his baggy jams and T-shirt. The babies are fed and changed. They flip their little flippers and keep their tiny noses at the surface, sniffing freedom, as anyone will who senses a calling.
They seem driven to the depths, though for now the depths are imaginary. How else can a thing be to those who have never been? Baldo suspects a certain bubble rising from the dark and groaning fantasy in which a billion tons of water seek languorous repose, and in that bubble is a thought, round and perfect as these little turtles daydreaming of the depths. For the depths reside within and without, and we rise and sink according to buoyancy or density of our vision. We fantasize and become that which we dream.
¿Sí? ¿No?
Baldo watches the babies with their flippers flipping through their dream within his dream. How can a being imagine what it has never seen, as surely these small turtles do now?
Well, that’s easy to know, and it’s easy to feel a smile spread across his young face for the simple truth, which is that the ages connect from then to now through the imagination. What has not been known is easily imagined because it has always been a part of a turtle’s heritage; part and parcel of the way a turtle will approach life and knowing.
A woman in a chaise lounge turns ostensibly to face the sun, but secretly she observes the long lanky fellow who smiles. She smiles back. She moves her molten thighs against each other and opens them to the warmth overhead. She closes her eyes and waits.
Baldo looks left and right and then out to the horizon.
He leans over a tub with a piece of fish clamped in his teeth, teaching his babies to eat. The chaise-lounged woman with more oil on her legs than the spill field around a gusher removes her sunglasses and sits up.
Who is this man? And what is he doing?
In eighty-eight days the hotel will make much ado of what has come to pass, because travelers from el norte love a celebration and may factor the high times in contemplation of repeat business. Helping these turtles through their struggle for survival is good management after all.
Management will invite each guest to take a young turtle in hand and escort it to the water’s edge. With casual pomp and beachfront ceremony, each guest will gain access to glory and grace. As liberators and saviors and citizens of the redeemable world, they will liberate, save, and redeem.
And have fun, sí?
Well, you can’t blame the guests for playing out a silly charade while on vacation. It’s part of the entertainment package. Nor can you complain. Are these babies not marked for survival?
Baldo doesn’t mind and won’t complain. The dramatic promenade on the day of release will outshine any walk a boy or man could take on this beach, too often littered with dying puffers and so-called bait-stealers left to suffer, as if one hunger was less viable than another.
He thinks nighttime would be best for delivering freedom to the turtle babies, since a bite of any size is protected by darkness. He might want to escort these babies to the depths himself, since any child leaving home wants its mother’s company for the first leg of life’s journey. Perhaps he will pic
k a turtle on the night before the release. Perhaps two turtles, one for each hand, so they might swim together for a while, if they want to. He can easily short the tub-count by one or two, and in the safety of the dying light he can not only deliver his young wards to the sea, he can join them in the depths of the fluid dream.
Now that is a lovely prospect indeed.
Beyond the break and sloped bottom of the most active feeding zone, they can make the beautiful swim. If the big bite comes, so be it. Baldo feels an encroachment that he knows is merely fear, and he smiles, faithful that the food chain defers to spirit, hopeful in his connection to the powers that be, of whom he is one. Confidence derives from neither arrogance nor indifference. He simply knows that a boy or a man can’t measure his niche in the natural mystery without walking in the dark or swimming there. He can only have a feeling. Baldo feels the animal angels as well. He has seen them on occasion. His smile grows like a flower effusing in springtime with delicate form and brilliant color.
Meanwhile, for eighty-eight more days he must bear up to the ineffably brown Milo in matching brown swim trunks, who sets up for bingo as if nothing is required but the cards, the beans, the numbered balls, and the spinning cage. Oh, and he’ll need a great big tub of lard for a gut hanging over his swim trunks too, which he happens to keep on hand for such occasions. Look, he also brought his pocked, splotchy skin and a nub of a pinga pointing straight out.
Baldo can’t look directly at Milo because of the awful disturbance the squat man causes in the eyes of the beholder. Never mind. The guests by the pool will fervently embrace their true maestro on his rightful return to power, especially the gringas. Of this we can be certain.
“Hokay!” Milo grumbles like a man wakened from death. “It is time for you to have some fun!”
Well, vamos arando, decía un mosquito al buey. Let’s get plowing, said the mosquito to the ox. Just so, the guests glance sleepily at this fat, gruff man exhorting them. The men smile benignly. The women grimace. It’s not the same.
Baldo observes with less tolerance. He will never enjoy the same attention from the women that his big brother enjoys. He doesn’t mind. Antonio needs the women, and he, Baldo, does not. Such longings may grow, but that bone can be chewed as necessary when the time comes along.
Yet his smile broadens as he recalls the continuing love between himself and Lyria. He doesn’t mind helping her out. He wonders why Antonio refuses her the first smidgen. What could it hurt? She may not razzle dazzle like the shameless ones with their shaved centers and glittering gems, but familiarity and sweetness and certain love make her worthy of a concession. Not that such assistance would be a concession, and you couldn’t call it drudgery, because it can be fun, like last night, sleeping in her lap, nuzzling her chichis and making them shrink and point while she pretended to sleep, pretending as well to gasp in her dream. Baldo wanted to lift her shirt and suckle, which must run in the family. He wonders if his late father suckled his late mother and hopes it was so. Lyria’s shirt wouldn’t come up because it was actually a dress, but he thinks she wished it a shirt also just to have her swelling naranjas suckled, even if only to moan, Oh, Antonio …
Baldo would not have minded that either, because sometimes a brother needs help if he can’t see something, and a sister too, which is what she is, although he would not actually want to suckle his sister, even if he had one. But then again, who can know? He’s never had one except for Lyria, and he wanted to suckle her, but then that was only for fun. But what other reason could you have, unless you were a little baby yearning to feed the hunger? But that’s not exactly how he felt.
Hola, little babies, he thinks, eyeing his plentiful charge.
Baldo also minds the minions now gathering to the south at the scene of the crime. He has constrained himself all morning from going hence to inspect the clues. With a crowd gathering, he could look more suspicious holding back. But a man should stay on the job and not leave his post. Still, he goes to see. It’s only a few hundred yards down. The skies are clear, and the only birds working are far south.
He approaches and takes note for future reference that the night will fool you every time when it comes to the true appearance of a car or a woman or a murder scene. Perhaps he has resisted the truth since sunrise, when the birds, all the birds of all the species, continued to feed. Well, he thought, the birds feed, and it’s so common for one segment of beach to be the focal point of the feeding. Undertow and side currents can push small fish and detritus to the surface in certain sections of the break. But the birds and fish feed for hours from above and below on the horn of plenty risen and strewn across the sand. Now they rest, the birds, fat as ticks and belching on their rocky ledges in the shade.
Close up, he sees that the carnage is more than a smudge. Big chunks sun dry above the water line, ghastly in sunlight but fading to gray from their ghastlier blues and reds. Bone fragments punctuate the sand. Straggler birds work the beach and dive beyond the break. Among the onlookers Baldo hears the murmured consensus. Quincy was here to fetch the body away.
The body? What body? You couldn’t call it a body. It was more like clumps of sand with lumps of dough in them. It was very ugly.
Now he’s back, Quincy, with these men in their masks and snorkels, to see why the birds still work this space. To see if something else is just there, beyond the break, attracting the birds.
Baldo drifts from the close end of the crowd to the far end and from the back to the front. He feels calm enough. He tests himself for conviction or remorse and is pleased to come up neutral on all fronts. He doesn’t like how the fisherman made him feel any more than he could tolerate the fisherman’s behavior. He would kill the fisherman again, given the circumstance, but he wouldn’t like that either. Perhaps the kill would be easier next time, just as worries ease their strain after meeting the fisherman’s wife and seeing his issue. Plenty more of them to go around without wasting the innocent and disappearing fishes. If truth be told, he likes this fisherman being gone for good.
From knee-deep water in front of the crowd, watching the police divers half-heartedly try to learn why the birds frenzy, Baldo knows why. The birds rejoice. It’s that simple. The evil man will harm no one else but will end his time on earth as guest of honor at this fiesta for the birds and fishes. Baldo smiles at nature’s way, which is no mystery to some and renders others speechless, though they too may rejoice. What difference does the loss of a man make anyway, if he can’t see or hear what the fish and the birds are trying to tell him?
Baldo is looking up when a voice from above asks, “Did you lose something here?” Or maybe the voice is behind. He doesn’t turn around but remembers the fisherman standing in this very spot, poised between life and death where only God should stand. The fisherman too did not turn. Baldo shakes his head.
“Well, then. What are you doing?”
He turns quickly now with the practiced grin of the bona fide idiot, pointing to the divers and diving into his own charade, the one dramatizing his skill as a diver and his certain knowledge of the bottom along this stretch. He doesn’t miss a beat or show the least hesitation, for he speaks to Quincy himself. Shaped like Milo’s littermate, Quincy is squat and round, with a difference as sharp as a bone shard in the sand separating Quincy from the vast majority of stumpy gordos. The keen edge of danger surrounds this one’s simple stance and spurious smile. Maybe it’s the hemispherical bumps covering his face and neck. Like a cobblestone street, Quincy’s visage slows you down.
Unlike most people, Baldo isn’t afraid to gaze upon this face and wonder how it got so bumpy. These bumps are not red or blotchy, and they’re not pimples or pustules. Or boils.
Baldo reaches out but doesn’t touch, so Quincy cocks his head and leans toward the stupefied boy, so the boy can feel one. Baldo laughs and smiles like a boy and retreats, shaking his head. So Quincy eases back as well and feels one himself and says, “Cysts. They’re cysts. I could have them removed.”
; Baldo stares.
Quincy shrugs. “Do you think they’re ugly?”
Baldo stares, then looks back up the beach at the plastic tubs.
Quincy nods slowly and asks, “What do you do?”
Only now does Baldo realize that he stands knee-deep in his security guard uniform, never mind, the pants will dry, but not before he is seen, wet and wrinkled, by those who might wish him less than well, like Milo. But never mind Milo; let him come. Baldo points north and pantomimes the surface struggle of a baby turtle with such precision that Quincy laughs. Baldo knows that a laughing man is a man of easy reason, so he volunteers to go get his mask and snorkel and see what is to be seen.
Quincy slowly turns away and slowly nods.
So Baldo runs back up to the hotel and runs through the lobby, which burdens him with the risk of further untoward observance. But what else can be done, except to move with most deliberate speed? He runs out front and catches the bus homeward for his mask and snorkel, and for the pillowcase that the rough-hewn face of Quincy brought to mind. He hopes he won’t be gone too long, but after all, he’s on assignment from Quincy, himself.
As if the pillowcase full of a fisherman’s clothing connects the thoughts of those revolved around it, so too does it materialize in Antonio’s third eye. Ay, he thinks, too distraught for worry or hope. All is surely lost in a pillowcase. So what’s the point of further worry? He continues his pointless worry because a shred of hope survives, that the sharp wits of his beloved or the uncertain wits of his brother will allow for remembering and proper action.
Interrogation wasn’t so bad. A few slaps and pokes with a nightstick will not likely leave bruises. More importantly, Antonio can tell when a lesser man holds back for fear of reprisal. How hard could it be to break a rib? Not hard at all, no, the pollo hombre held back. And what kind of man beats another whose hands are cuffed behind his chair? The bulb was naked but didn’t dangle; it flickered florescence. The questions were easy. Who are you? What do you do? When, where, how much, and why? Filling a gap of twenty minutes in the last fifteen hours was easy as walking for the cake, if you’re a maestro and live intimately with the walk. A man with the power of improvisation also knows the value of critical timing on the change of pace, the decompression, the soft touch on the matter-of-fact, and the simple anxiety of an innocent man.
Toucan Whisper, Toucan Sing Page 12