by David Pierce
There was but one customer sitting in the small outdoors patio bar at the Rocamar, but he sure looked like a Big Jeff to me. He was tall—not as tall as me, naturally, but well up there in the stratosphere—with a full black beard and drooping pirate's mustache; fancy Stetson with a hatband of Mexican silver dollars pulled down over his eyes; high-heeled, hand-tooled boots up on an adjoining stool; buckskin cowboy shirt; and a gold belt buckle featuring a pair of steer's horns almost as big as a real longhorn's. He was smoking a twisted cheroot and sipping from a tall glass of what turned out to be dark rum, soda water, and a dash of lime juice. In case there was any lingering doubt, the words Big Jeff were, embroidered in rope lettering over his shirt pocket.
And, sure enough, just as Benny had recounted, behind the small bamboo-topped bar, Pepe the cook was fanning his charcoal fire with a sheet of cardboard trying to get it started.
Big Jeff peered through the darkness as we drew near the lighted patio, and as soon as he spotted Benny, he shouted "Amigo!" leapt up, and engulfed Benny in a huge embrace. Benny extricated himself finally and introduced me and Sara, by our right names for once. Jeff gave us both hearty embraces and loud kisses on each cheek.
"Pepe!" he bellowed to the diminutive cook, who must have been all of five feet away. "Refreshments pronto!"
"Ahora mismo," said Pepe, meaning "instantly."
"Sooner than mismo, you heathen dog!"
Big Jeff sank back into his seat, the worn leather of which groaned audibly under the impact. He waved us into seats opposite him. Pepe materialized beside us, tray in hand and broad grin on thin mug, obviously well used to and completely unfazed by Big Jeff's decibel count. Sara announced she wanted something with tequila in it, 'cause she hadn't had any yet and after all we were in Mexico, weren't we? So I naturally suggested a margarita, the traditional and most genteel of the tequila libations. And about the only drinkable one.
"Never!" Big Jeff shouted to the heavens. "Pepe, bring her an añejo con sangrita and make it fast and make it a double."
"Beer for me," I said meekly.
"Añejo for me too," Benny said foolheartedly.
"So what's añejo con whatever-it-is when it's at home, Tiny?" Doris asked Jeff, helping herself to one of Jeff's stogies from the pack on the table.
"Añejo is aged tequila, darlin', aged as in old, and it is the color of amber that has been rubbed for weeks on a virgin's thigh, not that pale white vomit they made yesterday afternoon and put into cocktails, especially margaritas, for the gringos," he said, polishing off the last of his drink with one long swallow. "¡Pepe!¡Otro! And sangrita is what you wash it down with, a harmless concoction made from orange juice and chilis."
"I don't see him drinking it," I muttered sotto voce to Benny.
"And if you think that's bad, and it ain't," said Big Jeff, lighting Doris's five-cent special with an old Zippo that had a flame a foot high, "try the local hangover cure some morning—tripe soup." I thought that all in all, I'd prefer the hangover.
Jeff didn't have all that much time before he had to put in his nightly appearance back at his pizza joint, so after Pepe had delivered our various poisons and we had all taken a sip, Benny got right down to it.
"Jeff, do you recall that time you had that small problem up in Guerrero?"
Jeff smiled in fond remembrance, stroking his mustache.
"I believe I might be able to summon up most of the details," he admitted, "if I stretch my failing memory."
"The reason I ask," said Benny, "is because we got the same problem down here." Benny quietly gave him the broad outlines; Big Jeff's flamboyant manner disappeared completely as he listened.
"It doesn't take a great brain to figure out you're down here lookin' for Dan," he said when Benny'd finished.
"Is he around?" I asked.
"He could be," Jeff said doubtfully. "Although I ain't seen him for a couple of weeks, and when he's around, I usually see him. You can always take a run down there tomorrow and find out."
"Where's there?" Sara wanted to know.
"He keeps his boat near Puerto Morelos, that's like a half-hour drive south of Cancún."
"Couldn't we phone?" Benny asked.
"Nope," Jeff said. "Better you take like the nine o'clock ferry tomorrow morning and then hop a cab. Even better if I go with you."
"Thank you," I said. "I appreciate it."
Big Jeff gave me a close look, then sat back and waved one beringed mitt expansively. "We just gotta hope ol' Dan ain't got nothin' on right now."
"You said it," I said. "Otherwise, I don't know what the hell we're going to do. I think we can spring my friend from the can OK, but then our real problems start. If you don't mind me asking, how did you manage it? Benny started telling me about it but he only got as far as when you signed up those two marines out of Pendleton."
Jeff put away half his new drink, wiped his beard, winked at Doris, and said, "We had a pilot in the organizing committee who owned a four-seater Cessna—the two ten, I think it was—and someone else in the committee got a-hold of three of those Israeli submachine guns somehow—"
"Uzis," I said. "They are called Uzis."
"Whatever," said Big Jeff, frowning at the interruption. "Probably out of some Texan's glove compartment. So after me and the kid's pop reconnoitered the whole deal around the prison and in Acapulco—just another couple of tourists; we said we were lookin' to buy some real estate in those parts—we got out of the way and left it to the marines, like they say.
"The plan we came up with mostly depended on the kid, Willy, or a lot of it anyway, and he was only a kid, I think he was like just nineteen, it all depended on him getting so sick that they would have to move him to the hospital in Acapulco where they had operating facilities and all that. But that meant sick, darlin', as in deathly ill, not simply coming down with the sniffles from a summer cold or maybe getting a spot of collar rash."
We all smiled at that. He did have a certain style, ol' Jeff.
"So," he said, uncrossing his long legs and then laboriously crossing them again the other way around, "one way to make yourself sick, a doc told us—and it makes me sick just to think about it—is, pardon the vulgarity, darlin', to actually eat shit, and I don't mean take a little abuse from the mother-in-law over your drinking problem, I mean eat shit. Which, somehow, Willy managed to do."
"Probably a welcome break from Mexican prison food," I remarked, always seeking the mot juste.
Jeff ignored me.
"So Willy gets sick. The leathernecks, using a one and a half ton they'd rented in San Diego and driven down in, hijack the ambulance taking Willy to the hospital in a narrow back street by cutting it off suddenly. One marine sprays the engine and rad of the ambulance from the front so it won't be going anywhere, while the other one shoots out the lock on the back door, then shoots off the chain attaching Willy to his bed, which is also attached to another poor sick mother and his bed. This second guy takes one look at the ferocious madman with a face painted in black, red, and green stripes who is shooting bullets everywhere and screaming and hollering, and he promptly passes out."
"Holy cow, who wouldn't?" said Doris.
"Holy cow is right, darlin'," said Jeff, pinching her cheek in a friendly fashion. "So. They grab Willy, and all pile in the truck and take off for out of town where the Cessna is waiting, warmed up, in the middle of a field somewhere. They climb aboard, chuck a grenade at the truck—because why leave a useful thing like that behind for the greaseballs?—their term, not mine, darlin'—and after one stop for refueling somewhere along the line—where, they never told me—they made it back to a ranch outside San Diego. And that's all she wrote.
"Well, almost all," said Big Jeff. "I had a card from Willy the other day saying hello, and he's now living in a cave near El Paso with a girl, her two kids, four cats, two dogs, eight, at last count, rabbits, a burro named Jane Fonda, and a hand loom."
For once no mot juste came to me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
By the time I did finally come up with le mot juste, Jeff, having devoured everything on Pepe's snack platter except the design, was long gone, and Sara, after three of those añejo doubles, was well on her way. I must confess that I too, after eight or so Mexican beers, which are somewhere between half and twice as strong as ours, was beginning to feel the first hint of that old familiar glow back behind the peepers.
After our pleasant interlude on the Rocamar's patio, we strolled down the hill toward the center of things, pausing briefly to watch two of the local basketball teams in action at one end of the large town square. In another corner hordes of kids who should have been long in bed by our stuffy standards were disporting themselves at a row of tabletop soccer games. As we were wandering by, Benny and I somehow got challenged into a game by this urchin who must have been all of seven and who had one arm immobilized in a full plaster cast that was covered with the usual scribblings penned by his pals. Benny and I protested vigorously that it would be too cruel even to contemplate such a mismatch, but to make the cheeky little devil happy, we finally inserted our five pesos in the slot that released the ten balls, and a small but noisy crowd of ragamuffins began to gather around us. Me and Ben agreed in a whisper to take it easy on the poor kid, because after all, we didn't want to completely humiliate him in front of his gang, so we'd let him score a goal or two accidentally on purpose.
I guess we took it a little too easy because he beat us in the first game 8–2. Then Benny and I withdrew slightly for a strategy conference; what we decided was to prohibit the little hustler from using his broken arm to help. See, although he of course couldn't grip any of the handles with his broken arm, the cheater was using it to nudge a row of men over from time to time. Having straightened that out, we really bore down during the rematch, the final score of which was 9–1, and the one goal we did score he scored on himself trying a flashy back pass.
"Well, you can't win 'em all," Doris said unnecessarily as we slunk ignominiously away into the night in the general direction of the pizzeria. "Some guys can't even come close."
"Win, lose," I said witheringly. "Is that all you can think about? Is that how you see life, an eternal contest between weak and strong, hunter and hunted, the fleet and the lame, the predator and the victim? You disappoint me, Doris, you really do."
She grinned and hopped up a hopscotch layout some kid had chalked on the cement path. I was so glad to see the twerp happy for once that, what the hell, I hopped up it too. So did Benny, behind me.
The pizzas were surprisingly good at Jeff's, not so the vino, an over-chilled, over-fruity California burgundy type. When we were replete and had decided when and where to meet the following morning, Benny and Sara traipsed off to a disco recommended by Jeff that was down near the dock, and V. Daniel wended—or is it wove?—his lonely way through the balmy tropical evening to the Hotel Caribe, subtitled The Pearl of the Caribbean, and lights out.
. . .
The ferry chugged its way clear of the end of the dock and shifted into high. It was crowded, but we all had managed to find seats up on the second deck, near the stern, which is a politer way of saying rear. Off on our left was a long line of assorted crafts in assorted stages of disrepair, ranging from a slight list to visibly sinking before our eyes. Big Jeff informed us they had all been confiscated by the Mexican navy, with the help of the U.S. Coast Guard, for running contraband up the Yucatán Channel. He also mentioned that the most luxurious of the sailing craft so confiscated were kept sea-shape to be used by various government officials on which to entertain their lady friends. I scoffed at the very idea.
After disembarking at Puerto Juarez, Jeff made a deal with a cabby he knew who was unloading some passengers for the boat's return trip. He hopped in front with the driver leaving Benny, me, and Sara to squeeze in the back, and off we went. Both Sara and Benny were looking a little worse for wear that A.M., I was not unpleased to observe; served them right, dancing to all hours. Maybe we could make a quick pit stop on the way for some tripe consommé. Big Jeff was bright eyed and bushy tailed and as full of energy as a five-year-old at bedtime. He was dressed that sunny morning in long khaki shorts, a safari shirt, and a battered straw hat with one side curled all the way up. Doris was in yet another new outfit, I was pained to see, although come to ponder upon it, any price was worth the forking over that got her out of her punk phase when, if she ever donned one article of clothing that didn't have at least one jagged hole in it, it was by mistake. I was trying to get used to a new pair of prescription sunglasses I was wearing for only the second time, but otherwise was feeling fit.
Past the airport turnoff we went, and into the teeming jungle we sped, south, ever southward. Some twenty minutes later the cabby took a left and headed back in toward the coast and Puerto Morelos. The once sleepy fishing village was undergoing a building boom at that time, and probably still is, and probably always will be, so it did not present a particularly attractive vista to the discerning eye, even if said eye hadn't been plagued with grit, cement flakes, and brick dust thrown up by all the construction.
I thought we'd head directly to the port area because that is where one generally finds boats parked, but no, Jeff directed the driver to the new and exclusive-looking Ceiba Hotel, which was out a dirt road on the northern side of town, where we pulled up under the welcoming shade of a canopy of palm fronds. Jeff hopped out, said he'd be right back, and took off down a sandy path toward a thatched hut that had a large sign in front of it: Diving Shop. He disappeared inside. All of us except the driver got out to stretch and walk around a bit. Jeff returned a few minutes later accompanied by a short, muscular Mexican in a skimpy yellow bathing suit; when he drew closer, I noticed his legs were even more scarred than mine. Jeff introduced him to us as Alfredo, and we shook hands all round. He said something to Benny I didn't catch, and Benny said something to him I didn't catch. Then Big Jeff said something to Alfredo that I didn't catch either, but Benny did because he said something to Alfredo again. Just to get into the act, I then said something to Doris.
Whatever it was all about it worked because as soon as we were all back in the car Jeff said to me over one shoulder, "He'll meet us," and then told the driver to head back into town please.
"Is he always this hard to meet?" I said.
"Yep," Jeff said.
"I wonder why," I said. "Fear of crowds mayhap?"
"Probably fear of fuzz," Sara said.
"Perhaps he's merely a man who values his privacy," Benny said. "Much like you, Vic."
"Oh really?" I said, surprised. I didn't know I valued my privacy all that much, maybe ten bucks' worth, but that's all.
Jeff kept his silence on the subject, but he rattled on about everything else under the sun, including girls, boats, Costa Rica, and how to avoid the runs in hot climates. Wash your hands a lot is what he said. His monologue continued until the cabby deposited us at the port. Jeff asked him if he could find something to do for an hour or so, then he could take us back to Cancún. The driver said there was not the slightest problem and see you later. He took off one way, we took off the other, down to the narrow beach, where I washed my hands thoroughly, and then out a wooden pier past a few old-timers and some kids who were fishing. At the far end some enterprising local had erected a bamboo hut out of which he sold drinks and last week's tortillas and rented fishing rods; he also had a couple of leaky-looking rowboats for hire.
So we sat on a bench on the seaward side of the hut and waited. The crescent-shaped port area looked busy, at least to a landlubber's eyes. Two commercial vessels of a fairly good size were unloading at the pier next to ours, and sailboats were doing what sailboats do, and down at the public beach a handsome stripling was giving a windsurfing lesson to a plump lady who'd had too much sun the day before. Every once in a while a motor boat pulling a water-skier arced across the bay in front of us. Jeff pointed out a fiberglass-hulled boat off to our left that he said was something like his, only on his the cabin was fart
her aft and that his wasn't a stern-dragger.
"Nor is Sara's," I said.
Time passed.
More time passed.
Finally I said, "Jeff, being hard to meet is one thing, but this is ridiculous. Are you sure he's coming, or should I just forget about him and work on my tan?"
"Relaxez-vous," said Jeff. "He's comin'." So I immediately relaxé'd and got up to buy soda pops all round, spying, as I did so, someone who looked suspiciously like Alfredo flimsily disguised as a fisherman, back near the beginning of the pier. I regained my seat on the bench beside Benny without saying anything.
A few minutes after that, one of those boats that look like they are made out of rubber tires, and probably are, with an engine stuck on the back (or stern), and which had been meandering lazily back and forth in the bay changed directions and began heading straight for us, but not before I'd detected or thought I'd detected sunlight reflecting from some brightly polished surface such as the lenses of a pair of highly powered navy binoculars. I suppose it could have been from a sardine tin.
The boat pulled up smartly at the foot of the pier right below us; the pilot cut the motor, lashed his craft securely to one of the wooden supports, then speedily climbed the few rungs of a small ladder I hadn't noticed, doffed the worn captain's cap that was the only other garment he was wearing aside from a bleached-out set of once-blue denim cutoffs, took a beautiful conical seashell out of a pocket, and presented it to Sara with a mock bow.
"Foah the ladah," he said. "A Conus delessertii, moah commonly known as Sozon's cone." (My attempt to try and reproduce his "honey-chile" accent stops here.)
"Muchas gracias," said Sara.
"Cap'n Dan, I presume," I said.
"The one and only," he said, with a brief but wide grin of whiter than white teeth. "Howdy, Jeff." Jeff gave him one of his rib-crushing embraces.
"V. (for Victor) Daniel," I said. "My associates B. (for Benny) and S. (for Sara)." We took a minute to size each other up. What I saw was a man pretty much Jeff's physical opposite, as Dan was short, wiry, and almost completely hairless except for a quarter of an inch of blond crewcut. His eyes were small and blue; his ears tucked in neatly close to his head. He was sunburned almost black except for the tattooed bits—mermaids on each upper arm, and crossed anchors and skull and crossbones below. And, not least, strap hinges tattooed on the inside of both arms right where they bent. I made a mental note to remind myself to ask him who his tattoo artist was. Wouldn't Evonne be surprised when she got her first sight of them as I disrobed to slip into something more comfortable. I might get the back of my knees done as well.