Later in the day Leonard and I walked around the ship, bored to death. Finally we holed up in our cabin and read. I read from a good Larry McMurtry book about the size of a cement block. Leonard read from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and laughed out loud a lot.
We had dinner in the buffet room that night. Leonard had made his point and didn’t care if he pissed the doorman off again or not.
The food wasn’t any worse or any better than where we had eaten the night before, just more casual. I couldn’t help but think about that dead guy, maybe in the food locker. Did they have a morgue on board? Maybe. Surely people died on these things now and then. Perhaps more than now and then.
We went to a bad floor show later. I had seen better high school productions. It was a tribute to rock and roll with a Filipino rock and roll band that had probably learned its material that afternoon. Little Richard would have had a heart attack, and I bet Buddy Holly was rolling over in his grave.
The singers were so awful they hurt my feelings and their dancing was a bit more like contained stumbling to music. I noticed however that I kept my eye on one of the female dancers who wore only feathers and had big tits, and I got to thinking about what Leonard had told me, and I had to sit there and do some deep soul searching. I kept my eyes on the tits just the same. I can get over bad dancing.
That night the sea was rough again, but not as rough as the night before. I went up once to check the night seas, and on the landing was the lady and her kids and the teddy bear. The kids seemed to think this was all great fun, but the mother had her back against the wall and she had carried a trash can out with her and she had that in her lap, puking. The teddy bear was hanging tough.
I opened the door, but when a mist of sea washed into my face, I closed it. Wasn’t anything I wanted to see out there. I had taken to carrying a packet of Dramamine in my pocket, and I gave it to the lady and her kids.
“It takes time to work,” I said, “but it does work. It won’t do anything for being scared, however. You know, you’d really be more comfortable in your cabin.”
“No,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. You’re the boss.”
I went downstairs and to bed. About midnight I began to think the woman had the right idea. Perhaps I should get our trash can and go up and join her to be close to the lifeboats. The sea really began to pitch us.
When morning crept up the sea still tossed but the day was bright and things seemed less frightening. About midday we came to the coast of Mexico. It was a thin strip of brown in the distance.
The sea was bad and the ship could not go into shore, as there was no proper place for it to dock. The ship anchored and they sent out from shore what they called a tender – a small boat to haul us tourists in.
While we were waiting on the tender, we saw the snotty doorman from the dining area. He looked at us, then stuck his hand out to Leonard.
“I’m sorry about the other night.”
Leonard nodded, stuck out his hand to accept the apology.
They shook. No one offered to shake my hand. I felt kind of left out.
The guy said, “Going ashore, huh?”
“Oh yeah,” Leonard said. “What time do we need to come back?”
The man paused as if remembering.
“Four-thirty.”
“Okay. Good.”
“Yeah. Well. Have a good time.”
“Sure.”
The guy went down the corridor.
I said, “He’s all right, I guess.”
“No, he’s still an asshole.”
I had been to Mexico many times, but never this spot, so I was reasonably interested in going ashore. Besides, I was ready to do anything to get off the ship, and I thought maybe Leonard and I might get a good meal in a restaurant or cafe. We went to the purser’s desk, signed up for a tour to some Mayan ruins called Tulum, then got in the departure line.
The tender tossed up alongside the ship and we had to walk out to the side of it on a rickety collapsible dock and try to jump on board when it wasn’t leaping too high or too low on the waves. A woman nearly caught her leg between the boat and the ship but pulled it back just in time to the delighted screams and yells of those on our little platform and those who had already boarded the tender.
More screams and sighs came when a kid, eight or nine, tore lose from his parents and leaped when the tender went down and landed on deck with a thud and got up laughing. When his mom and dad got on board the tender they promptly whipped his ass to the delight of us all.
An elderly man vomited over the side and a young woman I had my eye on lost her straw hat to the wind. It hit the ocean, the waves leaped on it, and it was gone. I could have jumped in the water to save it so I could be her knight in shining armor and maybe get laid.
I balanced the idea.
Big waves.
Pussy.
Big waves.
Pussy.
Naw. Waves too big. Pussy uncertain. She might just thank me. And the idea of drowning with a woman’s straw hat in my hand didn’t appeal to me.
One thing, though, she didn’t have big tits. I’d have to tell Leonard that later as an example of my maturity. I wouldn’t mention the dancer from last night and what I had thought about her.
On board, Leonard and I seated ourselves next to Big Bill and his wife. We were then borne by a chugging motor and churning waves toward shore, tailed by black diesel smoke.
There were lots of folks throwing up over the side and one idiot thought a log floating in the water was a whale and started screaming about it. When the log bumped against the boat he shut up and looked straight ahead like maybe he had spotted an important smoke signal in the distance that only he could translate.
Our tender pilot seemed oblivious to it all. Logs. Whales. He didn’t give a shit. He was probably more concerned about capsizing. Two guys with blankets and trinkets wandered about trying to sell them to us. No bites from anyone, but that didn’t stop them from making the rounds several times, the prices dropping dramatically with each tour.
I looked back at our ship. A real cruise ship was anchored not far from it. It looked twice as big as the Titanic. Our ship looked like some kind of fishing lure next to it.
I wondered if that poor woman and her children on the landing were coming ashore with their trash can on the next tender. I wondered why I had ever thought this would be fun.
I wondered what Brett was doing right now. I wondered if she wondered what I was doing. I wondered if Tillie was making big bucks pulling the train in Tyler. I wondered about that poor girl in the hospital with her face stomped in.
Hell, I didn’t have it so bad.
10
It was a short rough trip in high seas but we finally edged alongside the dock and got off to the sound of one woman praying.
The two guys with the blankets got off too and walked alongside us. They hadn’t even noticed the pitch of the sea. You would have thought they had been on a rocking horse. The price for their goods, which was in American dollars, continued to drop dramatically as we walked.
Still, no bites from us or anybody. Their wares were damn near free by the time we stepped off the dock onto land. They went away with their stuff, dissolved into the crowd as if they had never been.
Tough way to make a buck.
It felt funny standing on solid land after being at sea for a couple of days. Funny, but good.
Leonard and I walked along looking at people and sights like the tourists we were. We stopped in a cantina and had some food. When we got up to leave, I saw the woman from the boat who had lost her hat. She had her dark hair tied back and was tall and quite lovely in white shorts and a blue halter top, had one of those Audrey Hepburn necks.
On the way out I put on my best smile as we walked by her table, said, “I saw what happened to your hat.”
A string of hair had fallen out of her ’do and across her forehead. She looked up at me with dark sensitive eyes, said in a voice th
at even in Brooklyn would make you wince, “No shit. Who didn’t?”
Guess she wasn’t looking for love.
We went out and along the boardwalk by the sea. I had sort of hoped, foolishly, of course, that Leonard would let it slide.
“Well sir,” he said, “it’s good to see you haven’t lost your touch with women.”
Playa del Carmen is a fishing village on its way to becoming a resort spot, a kind of Mayan Riviera, but not quite. Underneath it all, behind and betwixt the new hotels, is still the small Mexican fishing village that it has always been.
We did the Tulum tour. Went out there by bus. It was about an hour from Playa del Carmen. There was lots of scrubby land and little shacks with tin roofs along the way. All I could think was there wasn’t enough shade. It wasn’t like where I came from, East Texas, wooded and wet. It was like South or West Texas. Bleak. Why had this land become populated? Had someone actually thought: Hell, ain’t this great. Let’s just stop here. To me, it looked like the spot where the devil went to shit.
Far as I’m concerned, any place you can see unobstructed by trees farther than you can throw a rock makes me nervous.
Maybe that was it. It had had trees, then some industrious types had come along, cut down the trees, killed the wildlife, fucked what they couldn’t kill, and stayed because they were too tired to do anything else. Or a wheel came off a cart or something.
We stopped at a couple of places where you could buy straw sombreros and the rare artwork of the area: little carved trinkets that said MEXICO on them. They were turned out in droves for all of Mexico and shipped across country by truck, but when you talked to anyone there, they were, to hear them tell it, the only ones who had these little items and they had of course all been made by hand, their very own hands. Since two or three feet away was another vendor with the same stuff, you had to wonder if they actually thought anyone really believed this.
They had some pretty neat chess sets carved out of obsidian, and I looked at those but didn’t buy. I didn’t need it and didn’t want to carry it. Leonard bought a sombrero. It had a big wide band that read: MEXICO. He insisted on wearing it, even on the bus. He looked like an idiot.
Tulum was neat. It was built by the Mayans on a cliff overlooking the Caribbean. It was a fortress city, and you could certainly see how it served its purpose. A mountain goat would have needed grappling equipment just to start up the side of the cliff next to the sea. Before time took its toll, the city must have been quite snug with this barrier at its back and the great buildings of solid stones all around to protect it.
There was a temple called El Castillo that had two columns depicting serpents, and a real serpent, a large lizard that looked as if he might do close-ups for dinosaur movies, was crouched on the stone floor next to one of the columns. He looked at us in that slow lizard way, seemed to say, Hey Mack, you’re invading my home.
Or maybe, like us, he was just a tourist and thought we were one of the sights.
We spent a couple hours there looking at the ruins, thinking about how the people there must have lived, then we took the bus back.
We still had a couple hours till four-thirty, so we went walking, looking at the sights, such as they were. Leonard needed to go to the local post office to buy a card and stamp so he could mail a little note to John. It was a real chore just getting one of the two workers there, a man and a woman, to come to the desk. They had a private conversation going and appeared in no hurry to stop it. They turned and looked at us like we were intruding, and went on with their conversation.
“How do you say, Hey dickhead, in Spanish?” Leonard asked me.
Finally the guy came over. Leonard made a few gestures, indicating what he wanted. The worker spoke to him in English, grinning as he did it. He then explained how to say dickhead in Spanish.
Leonard paid him, got pesos in change.
The guy said, “Someone give you the hat?”
“Bought it.”
“With your own money, senor?”
Leonard didn’t respond to that. He went over and wrote a short note to John using a windowsill as a desk. He gave it to the guy behind the desk and the guy dropped it in an out box and smiled at Leonard’s hat some more. We left.
“It’s a good hat,” Leonard said.
“For what?”
“Keeping the sun off.”
“It’s more like an eclipse, Leonard. It looks like something goes on a stick over a table by poolside.”
“You wanted one.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead in something like that.”
“It’s just that I’ve got the balls to do what I want and you don’t, that’s what’s got you irritated.”
“I’m not irritated.”
“Are.”
“Are not.”
It was just one of our usual goofed-up days. We might as well have been home in the States. We were unpopular and pissed off wherever we went.
About four we went down to the dock to catch the tender back to the ship. The tender was there with our original pilot standing on the deck, helping people on board, but out in the bay, no ship. Least not our ship.
We talked to the pilot. Our Spanish sucked. His English was good. He told us the Sea Pleasure had left at three-thirty. For a moment I thought we hadn’t changed our watches, crossed a zone or something, had lost an hour. But we had the right time.
Leonard said to the pilot, “You’re sure?”
The guy, who was short and gold-toothed, said, “You see the ship you want, senor?”
Leonard took a theatrical look out at the water.
“Nope.”
The pilot shrugged.
“Could it have sunk?” Leonard asked.
“Funny, you are, senor. I got to take people out to the real cruise ship now. And whatever you pay for that hat, it is too much.”
We walked back up the dock, stunned.
“That lying little ferret,” Leonard said. “I gave him an opening and he took it and told me the wrong time. I see him again, I’m gonna beat him until he has flashbacks.”
“Of what?”
“Me beatin’ him.”
“Can I hit him a couple of times?”
“If there’s anything left, of course. You are my best friend.”
11
We decided we might as well plan on being in Playa del Carmen for a day or two, so we ended up at a little pink stucco hotel where we rented a double. The room smelled of damp carpet and the bathroom smelled of urine beneath the warped linoleum.
Upstairs we sat on one of the beds and sorted our money. Most of what I had gotten for my heroic deed was back home in the bank, but I had more in traveler’s checks in my luggage on the ship, right next to my clean underwear and socks. I had some bucks in my wallet, two hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, and a charge card with a low limit on it. Leonard had a hundred dollars in assorted bills and a very ugly hat.
“Okay, we got enough for a couple nights, maybe three we need to spend them,” I said. “That also includes food, phone calls we need to make, and maybe some clean underwear.”
“I didn’t know you changed yours,” Leonard said.
I ignored that, said, “Okay, so what’s first?”
“I vote on the underwear for you, but I suppose the thing to do is call John, get him to arrange some plane flights, nearest airport and all that, then we find a way to get to the airport, fly to New Orleans, get a cab to where the ship will dock, get our luggage, cripple the asshole who lied to us about the departure time, break his dick in three spots, cover his balls in peanut butter, pack his asshole with a pound of pure cane sugar, and hold him down in an ant bed.”
“Might I point out this is all your fault.”
“That so?”
“If you hadn’t fucked with him in the first place this wouldn’t have happened. All you had to do was put on a jacket or go to the buffet.”
“I d
idn’t want the buffet, and I didn’t want to wear a jacket.”
“And you see the results.”
“That pompous motherfucker just thinks he got off scot-free with me. Besides, you said you wanted to hit him some.”
“I want to hit you some too. But we’ll make a phone call instead.”
We looked around the room. No phone. Downstairs they wouldn’t let us use the one in the office and there wasn’t a pay phone. Suddenly there was a language barrier. The desk clerk indicated he had no idea where we might find a phone.
I asked him if there was a Holiday Inn anywhere near. He just grinned at me. Now I was the Ugly American.
We went outside and around the corner and started walking in the direction of the post office. Had we seen a pay phone in the post office? We were uncertain. As we walked, Leonard’s hat provided me with a lot of shade. Which I needed. I was pretty warm. Not as humid as East Texas, but still warm, and by this time it was late afternoon.
The post office was closed.
“What the hell?” I said.
“They keep their own hours,” Leonard said.
We walked along the littered beach a ways and actually found an old-fashioned phone booth. But the phone was missing. Someone had torn it out. Some of the phone-book was there, though, just in case it was needed.
“Maybe we could just put a message in a bottle,” I said. “Toss it in the ocean.”
“I’m game,” Leonard said.
The beach was nice, and we decided for no good reason at all to just keep walking along it. I think, subconsciously, we were trying to get away from town, as if that would take us away from our miseries. There was a long wooden dock, and we walked on the sand next to that and watched the boats, some with sails, some without, bobbing in the slate-colored water like tops. Above us seabirds soared, made noises like insane laughter.
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