Reefdog

by Robert Wintner

  Ravi waits all right, avoiding the nutty guy nearby, even as the disturbed man tremors on aftershock: “Shade, my ass. You can’t say it’s cooler, but it’s not in the sun. It’s like calling an open flame cooler than a blowtorch, but death by fire is still hot.”

  Overhead TV keeps the area up-to-date on the war for democracy. Then comes news of accidents, tragedies, corporate criminals, and insulation from due process. Children balance the news, coping with disease, starving or excelling at sports or studies.

  “They call this air-conditioning,” the troubled traveler bemoans. “Except that there’s no fucking air, and it’s not conditioned.” He has a point, but a bray does not soften the truth. Does he think nobody knows without his saying so?

  Can, anyone quell the blubbering? Maybe a brief response would calm this guy. “You know…” Ravi wades in. “This airport used to be small. It had those stairs on wheels, and you walked across the blacktop. This used to be a peaceful place.”

  “Yeah. Used to be. You should have seen it before you got here.”

  Was that a presumptive you, or did the man mean nineteen years ago? Who cares? He’s a bigmouth—even to a tourism professional with solid haole blood quantum.

  Ha!

  No matter where he’s from, an idiot can make a tough scene worse. Ravi Rockulz is emissary to evolved persons of the world as they visit the tropics. The problem is that nothing stops a diarrhea mouth but insolence—possibly a threat of greater magnitude. But conflict won’t likely salvage a situation, and frankly…

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen…” The voice advises that regular boarding will begin in a few brief minutes… A minute is sixty seconds, not more or less, though they can seem longer, down to heartbeats. “Those who need more time or with small children.”

  “Yeah, a few brief minutes,” the smoldering fellow says. “Like ten or twenty. Like we’re not already a shitload of brief minutes late.”

  “You know,” Ravi wants to ease one man’s burden on everyone, to explain the difference between discomfort and horror, but he stops. He stares… Is that a bird of prey swooping in? Are those wings, or pectoral fins? And the teeth…

  “Yeah, I know. And you’re about to find out.”

  Prey can die on a gulp or require killing prior to eating. Prey can suffer heart failure. Prey can squirm. A predator won’t pause for a brief minute before the jugular. Time stops in nature’s transition. Lightning quick or eternally slow, brief minutes can stretch for matting and framing until normal cadence resumes. A minute can be far from brief.

  So the night passed. Heartbeats, flutters and the crowd below gave consolation in acclimation. Fearful minutes can shift a baseline until fear is the new normal. Which isn’t fearless if you’re still scared shitless. But death becomes familiar: Oh, death. How’s it hanging?

  “Scared shitless” is a figure of speech but feels literal on gut tremor and regret. You can’t go back, so you pull for the lights to the southeast where fine folk savor aperitifs this minute, until a burbling stomach grasps a woeful scene: woofing Jorge’s Chili on the Fly. He wishes he hadn’t, not yesterday or any day, or was that earlier today? Jorge’s Chili, convenient and filling, bubbled lightly on its little gas stove. But Jorge giveth and Jorge taketh away. Heavy cayenne did not balance hygiene, as Jorge added beans, burger, and water as the vat went shallow, as it pumped a head of steam to Jorge’s Cannonball Express screaming round the mountain with the station coming on…

  Good thing, no date tonight…

  A gob of saltwater down the hatch melts the brakes… but wait! A waterman knows, squirming to free the shoulders to peel the sleeves and pull the torso, so the train won’t crash into the station.

  Then he’ll sprint because sharks love shit.

  Then again, a sprint could ring the dinner gong. Then again, drifting may be worse because predators prefer the easy meal, adrift with no movement. So a bone-tired waterman is yet again between a shit and a sweat. But time and tide, chili and saltwater wait on no man. Unable to peel a shoulder without sinking, he vows to buy a new wetsuit with that stretchy material, if only he can… But he can’t. So he sinks while peeling the neoprene off his shoulders. It’s only four feet or six, what else can he do, spew in his wetsuit and draw the toothsome gang to chow? What former sins could warrant such balance? He laughs and cries at the karmic correction upon him and begins the surprisingly easy process of drowning. Only then does the old familiar welcome him home, as the shoulder dislocates and he’s free on a shot, make that a double. Pain is another punch line.

  Peeling to below his butt, he floats like a dead man. Another swallow of seawater wrenches the gut with a presence, neither threatening nor loving but compelling. With fear at Mach IX, he sputters: Yea, though I swim through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil because they’re nature’s creatures in their task. I won’t rise from under a tree to the green shimmer. I’ll shimmer in blue until my guide also weakens and—unnggmmph…

  He seeks grace, parting ways from a former self. The burbles persist. Pressure rebuilds, and he remembers a tale first told long ago, about a guy with a stutter who couldn’t get a date because he got stuck on: “Wwoo… woouulld yyou…”

  The guy finally met a woman who presented well but twitched like spit on a skiddle, especially when she got excited. They dated, and it felt like love, so they wed. She wore white and got excited, wedding night and all. So his pals tied her to the bed and rigged the ropes with slipknots and led the ends to the next room, for privacy. Then the guy with the stutter told her, “I luuuu… luuu… lluuvvv…”

  “Come on,” she said.

  So he got her clothes off—what a dish—and eased aboard, and it still felt like love, straining at the braces, so the guy yells, “Okay! Cccc… cccuu… cccuuuuut her loose!”

  What a laugh. Ravi drifts, wishing the guys could see his perfect delivery. But open mike night is brief. Nature hones on stink. So a man swims quickly from a shit slick, trailing his wetsuit till he smells nothing more to lose. Feeling good as dead, blinded by salt and darkness, he feels the approach and squints for a dorsal fin—but a shark seen is never so frightening as the one unseen…

  There! He anticipates the bump and hit. He drifts…

  •

  “Please have your passport open. You must have your passport open along with your boarding pass.”

  “Now you’re fucked,” ventures the slovenly fool, who likely judges by accent that Ravi is Israeli and not French. “It’s the whole wide world, and then the Jews. Am I right?”

  The derelict got it right, so the intrepid Jew smiles and so does Skinny, who slides over for Basha Rivka, glum at her misbegotten son fleeing the Land of Bondage. He will fly to Tahiti in spite of ignoring the special visa when it was easy in Yisroel. He’d refused because he refuses her, his only mother, but she still knows best. He reasoned that Hawaii is not Tahiti, and he would not chase a wrong visa because a man draws the line. But look: married to a shiksa! And not a generally goyisha shiksa either, but a real shiksa chilarium! Now tell me again, what are the children supposed to be?

  The goat bleats as Mano hovers in the murk. So what?

  “We will proceed at this time with boarding Zone Two.”

  “Two, schmoo. They ought to proceed with the Twilight Zone. You remember the Twilight Zone?”

  A man of sultry nights and mosquitoes in his ear ignores the buzz. He rolls to Minna, who drove him to the airport twice, with devotion, who would have driven him home in the parking lot, as if…

  As if what?

  As if she’s very horny is what. What the woman from San Francisco called “bonkers horny,” an ugly phrase perhaps suited to Minna Somayan. Not a bad girl, except for her unscratchable itch—the same itch that made her perfect not so long ago. She had baggage and worse. How could a woman open herself to a beer-bellied macho idiot? Hateful to boot, with his beady eyes, swarthy face, faint moustache, and chin stubble. His grubby hands.

 
Oh, that side are not her people but interlopers by marriage. They claim originality in postures of machismo—and she could only love me. What is that? You did what with that guy?

  Nothing! She revised her story with happiness and light: No! Not like I did with you! What difference does it make? He made me do it. You didn’t. Did you like it? Do you think I’m good? Did you think that was my first time? Did you think, gee, she’s a natural, first time and all? No. You thought: Oh, God. Because you think only of yourself. You were the one, and I’ll tell you something else: I loved how you felt. That should make you happy, but it doesn’t because you have to bang your stupid question: Compared to what feeling? Do you have a problem imagining a man who isn’t you? Would you feel better if it were a little white guy with tan lines on his ankles?

  No! Ravi doesn’t care. He can’t say it because she won’t understand. It was not other guys—it was Darryl. Not that any other guy would be okay; just that Darryl is disgusting. Romance? With Darryl? Like with kissing and everything?

  I’ll tell you something else. I never got intimate with Darryl…

  You never got intimate with him? You just told me you did. Now you say you didn’t. What, he didn’t want to get intimate?

  Oh, no. He wanted it. They all want it. I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t—not any more than you could do it. It was… ugly. Never.

  But you just said…

  So the replay obsesses on sharing and denying and the distinction between flesh and love—till the bedraggled man says: “Listen: The difference won’t go away. She’s practical; you’re irrational, down to your passion for reefs and a cat and women you hate to lose. She knows you but can’t defend casual sex, so you distrust her.” Ravi senses insight and fate, whimsical and unavoidable.

  Life will be easy down south, away from a love mugging and casual bad judgment. The stranger says, “You look like a shmata from the washtub. Did your mother not teach you to look like a mensch? Don’t worry; you fit in. But look at you. Would a little effort be so much to ask? Do you care what people think?”

  Patting the wrinkles on his shirt, Ravi feels less reasonable than last week. What he wouldn’t give for a quiet seat somewhere else, but it’s a terminally crowded world, so he turns away.

  Tell me: Would your mind rest easier on a man in a tweed suit? Or stripes with a vest? Or seersucker, so to speak? No, it would be no easier—that’s what you’re blind to. But a woman’s experience is the same as anyone’s. Men are stronger but weaker. Self-abuse is not necessary but compulsive.

  But what did she expect, hearts and flowers? A night of humiliating fear and attempted murder at the hands of her inbred cousins should lead to what? Lime on the corpse is what, down to nitrogen, potassium and the other. Calcium? No, the other, not calcium. Never mind. It’s none of your business anyway. I’m not sure why I’m even talking to you. So shut up. Bug off. Okay?

  “Whatever you say, brother. I don’t know why it came up. We’re at the airport, Tahiti coming on. Let it go, wouldja? What the fuck?”

  Yeah. Whatever.

  Except for the stink. He survived. He crawled from the sea and up through the Valley of the Shadow of Bureaucracy, which begs the question: Integrity has what in common with detainment/deportation? Neither is adrift at night. Get it? Deportation, shmeportation; I’m outa here. José, can you see? He nods off and jerks awake, laughing at love’s delusion and the road not taken. Let’s peek around the bend to twenty years married and forty pounds gained, with drinking and denial—or maybe just drinking and kids, four or six because they couldn’t stop. Her smile twists on a litany of demand and regret.

  The future could have recalled the fork again and again, each time wishing on every star in the firmament, first or fallen, that the fork had done its job. And so it has.

  “Thank you.” He’s headed out. She lacked depth; he was over his head. How else could it play except to play out, as fleshy passion will? But something lingers, a vestige of fear. Or is it love?

  Aka Leialoha called it spirit and said it could displace fear with the other. Fear shows lack of faith—you’re on the menu. One man’s angel of death is another man’s spirit guide. Sharks feel comfort. They smell fear. Prey is afraid. Love is a phantom. Like Mano, it must move all the time.

  Why? It doesn’t feel like love, leaving home with some camera gear, a laptop, and clothes in two duffels with some dive gear. Nobody travels with tanks. Or weights.

  I got my weights because they’re expensive and my cross to bear, though we don’t use that phrase because of the burden—too bad for Yushke and us. And him a Jew, too… Some sandwiches and sardines. Some crackers. Why not? You drop forty clams on a few snacks. Money falling off for hotels and meals. No job… No cat. She must wonder who will scratch her neck just so.

  Mano shimmies past and comes around, like Skinny in her way. “So be it,” he says.

  “Be what?” asks the hobo.

  Minna is home, commiserating with her nosy in-laws and judging him—him, who has forgotten more about their near shore than they’ll ever know. She likely ponders tonight, heading out with the girls to get loaded for relief and to see if something new and slick might come along. She’d do anything for him.

  Thanks, really, you’ve done enough.

  Is Mano smiling? Or is it indigestion or impatience?

  Ravi sings like Bob Dylan to those nearby: When you got nothing you got nothing to lose… Is he worthless? Is she perfect? She eats and belches, laughs at the wrong time and speaks poorly. Yet he exceeds her. Does he love her? Is a new car less worrisome on a first ding?

  Or am I only tired? Should I not stay and let us season in our love? She’s sleek as a mermaid, and I want to…

  “We’re now ready for boarding all zones.”

  “About fucking time,” the grumbler grumbles.

  “I’m not going,” Ravi replies.

  “What? Not going? You’re here. You’ll get nailed on the ticket!”

  “I already got nailed. I don’t got to go. I got a beauty in love with me, and I didn’t look back. I hate this shit.” He grunts, hoisting his bags. “I’m not going.” He turns to the wino to say so long because the easy way out is the way back in—he can hole up at her place, so to speak, till INS gets it straight: A married man can join the struggle to keep America free. They’ll lose interest by their first coffee break, and things should cool off elsewhere too. Any man can get another job—are you kidding? A reefdog of renown, on a boat, in Hawaii?

  Announcing his decision to thin air, he turns to face Mano. She yawns, like it might be time for snacks and nappy poo. Except that a shark has yet to visit a boarding gate, and the obtrusive fellow butts in with advice. “You can’t go back. Not now. Not ever. Face facts. Get a life. Get some balls, man.”

  “I hope I never get like you,” Ravi mumbles, shuffling forward with the line, boarding at last. He’ll make distance from that guy. What’s it any of his business? Why can’t I turn back?

  He inches along, timorously wondering: What’s the chance of him sitting next to me? Given the odds on recent events, a grumbler one seat over may be a five to one… But the grumbler is gone, defying the space-time continuum, not to mention the thought-speech interface or the eccentricity-insanity high wire. He inventories faculties, brain synthesis, and fundamentality, facing a challenge that any dive might come upon, but… I will not react, even as eyeballs roll back. I will think and act. I will breathe slow, deep and steady. I will surface slowly as my slowest bubbles. I’ll hang out, fifteen feet, three minutes… No, ten minutes… No. Three is plenty.

  Stabilized at a socially acceptable level, he scans to see who’s watching the loony-tune in blithe functionality. He restates his position and context, hoping he doesn’t look like a mumbler. He wishes a nice day all around and wonders if it’s technically over. The day. And it’s night.

  Where is that nutty guy? Did he occur? Time can disappear in a gulp… so he scans systems once again because a man so jolted can suffer a fig
ment or two and may press the boundaries of appropriateness in his attempt to function and/or reboot. He often scorns common values as seen on TV but needs to sort fantasy from real… ity. He thinks, perhaps, that the voice was his, so he asks the lady behind him if… there was a… you know… a man, an unkempt fellow who looked—he chuckles in good humor—who looked hosed down and dried out. “Like we say in the boat business—like he was shot at and missed and shit at and hit… Did you see him? Here?”

  A whimper escapes through the woman’s compressed lips. Ravi shakes his head, and she does too. But it couldn’t have been him. He doesn’t talk like that. He laughs again to sustain goodwill, but the woman steps around and marches to the gate. Not to worry—he’s too happy to be that other guy, but where did that guy go? And why do so many eyebrows bunch up on a holiday traveler headed south? Well, this is no weekend outing, and he might look a tad unhinged, so he strolls into the approach tunnel, squinting for stability in the eddies that indicate movement of a large being just below the surface.

  Oceania

  Arrival at the Papeete airport is after ten, closer to eleven—way past ferry service, and a man shuffling into a hotel with two duffels gets a rack rate of a hundred and fifty dollars for the few hours of night remaining, for a crummy little bed and a toilet.

  Or he can shuffle three blocks to a grassy area for more frugal digs on a bench at more popular prices. Arranging his nest, he walks off to squat and laugh again, this time at two dumps under the stars in short order—till the waves mount, and he topples against the tree alongside. He stays buoyant; never mind the uncouth character of getting by.