As we walked, no phone booth materialized but we saw three men coming toward us. They were stocky guys. One of them wore a coat, which seemed odd for the weather. We veered left around them and they turned and spread out and said something in Spanish.
One of them, a guy with a thick mustache, showed us a knife and a big grin. He said something in Spanish we didn’t understand, but the big knife was speaking loud and clear and needed no translation.
It was at that moment that I remembered some of the literature I had read on the boat: Don’t wander off from the main areas. Play del Carmen is a beautiful, quaint little town with the amazing ruins of Tulum nearby. But off the beaten path, thieves often rob tourists at knifepoint on the outskirts.
“Bad day for this,” Leonard said to the trio, but they just smiled at us. I watched carefully. The other two didn’t pull knives, but one of them did pull a machete from under his coat. I had sort of thought that coat was suspicious.
I didn’t feel up to fighting a machete, but I didn’t feel all that inclined to give them my money.
“Dinero,” one of them said.
“We’ve already eaten,” Leonard said.
“He means money,” I said. “Not dinner. Dinero.”
“I know that.”
“I think we should give it to them.”
They were circling us, waiting on us to make some kind of decision.
“What if we give it to them and they cut us anyway?” Leonard said.
“It’s still going to work out the same, they’re going to end up with the money. We give them the loot, we got a chance.”
“That what you want to do?”
I watched the guy with the machete ease around in front of me. Leonard and I had now ended up back to back, sort of rotating with the guys as they went around us.
All three were speaking Spanish, and shaking their hands at us like we should fill them.
“What I want,” I said, “is to stick that machete up his ass, crank it around like I’m trying to start a prop plane.”
“Stop moving, and let them make their move,” Leonard said.
“It’s the machete worries me,” I said.
“What, the knife don’t bother you?”
The guy with the machete grunted and his arm went up, brandishing the weapon. I went to him, got under his arm before it dropped, got a hand on his elbow, one on his wrist. I had tried to move to his outside, but couldn’t, so I was inside. I held the wrist with one hand and shot my elbow into his face, flicked his wrist, and the machete went away and we went down, him on top. He tried to choke me, but I rolled out from under him and pushed him aside. He came up and had both hands on my shoulders. I kicked at his balls, but he moved his leg in the way, so I kicked to the inside of his legs a couple of times, real quick, and the second shot made him go down. I kneed at his face, but he grabbed my leg and we were rolling on the ground again. I flipped him over, landed on top, bit a chunk out of his ear and pounded him a couple times and got up.
I caught a glimpse of Leonard out of the corner of my eye. He had lost his hat and the mugger with the knife was standing in the middle of it. Leonard knocked the guy with the knife down, but the man still had the knife. The other guy grabbed Leonard’s arms from behind, and Leonard stomped his feet and shins, and the guy was letting go as the man with the knife leaped forward and the blade went into Leonard’s stomach. I let out a scream, then the guy I had been fighting was on me again.
I flicked my fingers against his eyes and he groaned and got out of my way.
Leonard was down and the guy with the knife was stabbing him again. I got there just in time to slide behind the guy, reach around, and rake both hands across his face, gouging one eye deeply.
The guy shrieked like a rat with a boot heel on its back. He turned, lunged. I went sideways and he went past. I hit him with everything I had, right behind the head with a hammer fist. He went down and didn’t move. The guy who had been holding Leonard had him down now and was punching. Leonard brought a leg up and over the guy’s head, swept him off, got up holding his stomach. He said, “Watch out!”
When I turned, the machete man had recovered his weapon. He was coming toward me. The other guy came at Leonard. Leonard scooped sand, threw it in his eyes, sidestepped, and shot out a sideways kick that took the guy’s knee out. It cracked as loud as a bullwhip. He yelled even louder as he went down.
The machete man charged me.
He was so wild, all I had to do was move and he went stumbling past me. When I turned, Leonard had gone down from his wounds, was lying in the sand, bleeding, unconscious. Maybe worse.
I had done all right the first couple of times, but a machete is a machete, and all it took was for him to make one correct move and for me to make one mistake.
Somehow I was aware of the sun turning red, dying somewhere behind the city. A gull shrieked loudly overhead, cheering us on. Then the guy with the machete began to stalk me, slow and steady, the machete cocked at his side.
I glimpsed something in my peripheral vision. Another man. He wore a blue baseball cap and also carried a machete.
I was about to reach for my wallet, throw it to the guy, hope for the best, when the second machete bearer ran past me. I ducked, but he didn’t swing. He just kept going, right to the other man with the machete.
Machetes clanged together. The man who had joined the fray on our side was good. He was not swinging wildly like the other guy. He was warding off the man’s strikes with the flat of the blade, using his free hand to slap and grab. Pretty soon he had the other man by the arm and was pulling him down. Using the flat of the blade, he knocked our attacker unconscious.
Our rescuer promptly marched over to the two downed men. One of them was out, the other was clasping his knee with one hand, holding the other hand up as if to push our savior away.
Our fella said something in Spanish and the man on the ground began to crawl away, leaving his unconscious buddies.
The man turned toward me, the machete held by his side. I wondered if I were his next victim. He might have merely been eliminating competition. I eyed the machete lying on the ground, judged if I could reach it quickly.
Nope. Too far away.
The man grinned at me. He had a gold tooth and the sun caught the tooth and made it sparkle. He had on a thick white cotton shirt and pants, and sandals. Although he had moved well and looked younger while in motion, I could see now that he was seventy if he was a day. The hair under his baseball cap was gray, nearly white, and he had gray stubble on his face.
He turned to Leonard, knelt beside him.
I rushed over. Leonard was bleeding. He opened his eyes.
“Have they gone home?” he asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said.
The man said something in Spanish, and neither Leonard nor I responded. He came back in English.
“Policia. Not good.”
“They’re police?” I said.
He nodded. “Off duty.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s good, Leonard. They’re off duty.”
“Oh good,” Leonard said. “You know, this hurts. Bad.”
“They are corrupt,” said the man.
“No shit,” Leonard said.
“They are from Cozumel. They come here to make extra money.”
“Nice,” Leonard said. “A part-time job… Look, I’m gettin’ kind of queasy here.”
“Come,” the man said. “We must go. My boat.”
We got on either side of Leonard, helped him up, carried him toward a fishing boat tied at the dock.
“What about my hat?” Leonard asked.
“Well,” I said, “if you want it with a hole in the crown. One of those fuckers’ feet went through it. If you had ears like a mule, you might want it.”
“Typical,” Leonard said.
We climbed on board the boat with some difficulty, stretched Leonard out on the deck and opened his shirt.
“Not so bad,” the man
said. “Had worse.”
“Yeah, but it’s me that’s got this one,” Leonard said.
“I will fix it. Beatrice!”
A very attractive, slightly heavy, thirtyish woman with shoulder-length hair dark as a miner’s dream came onto the deck. She looked miffed. She wore a black short-sleeve sweatshirt, earrings with silver dangles, blue jeans, and black canvas shoes. She smelled like fresh soap and had a look on her face made me think she could have beaten puppies to death and enjoyed it. I noticed that the tip of her right pinkie was missing and the skin was puckered there and visible was the faint shine of yellow bone.
The man said something in Spanish. The woman looked at us, sighed, went back inside the cabin, reappeared with first-aid gear in a plastic box. She squatted beside Leonard, opened the kit.
The man took out some alcohol, some other disinfectants, and went to work. As he worked, he said something to the woman. She went away. A moment later the anchor was up and the motor was humming. We were moving out into the ocean.
The man turned to me suddenly, smiled, said, “Ferdinand.” He stuck out his hand. I shook it.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Oh, he is good. Got good skin.”
“Haven’t I always said I have good skin, Hap?”
“Always,” I said.
“One wound pretty good in the stomach,” said Ferdinand. “But it is not so deep.” He pulled a large needle and thick thread from the box.
“Oh shit,” Leonard said.
“Hold his head,” Ferdinand said.
“You don’t have to do that,” Leonard said. “Just sew.”
Ferdinand started right in. After the first pass, Leonard said, “Hold my goddamn head, Hap. Hold my legs. Sit on me. Do something.”
I held him as best I could, and Ferdinand made eight stitches.
12
Time flies when you’re having a big time.
I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep, but I awoke lying on the cabin floor by the bunk where Leonard lay. The woman was asleep on the bunk across the way. I barely remembered us going inside the cabin. Nothing like a good fight and a knifing of your best friend before dinner.
’Course, we might not get any dinner.
I got up, went out of the cabin, onto the deck. It was dark and the moon was up. The sea was a giant basin filled with ink. The boat lifted up and down like a carnival ride. I had never been so sick of water in all my life.
The old man was up top at the controls. I climbed up there and he turned and grinned at me.
“You sleep a little?” he said.
“Yes sir,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
I could see a string of lights out in the distance, along the shoreline. They looked like lightning bugs pinned to a display board coated with black velvet.
“I didn’t even know I was sleepy,” I said.
“It is fear, my friend. I do not say you are a coward. But we all have fear. It exhausts.”
“Been there before,” I said. “How bad is he really cut?”
“Not so bad. Not good. Not bad. No cut is good. It did not go deep.”
“I appreciate your help. Can I ask why you helped?”
“Why not? I do not like many men on two. Though, you two do pretty good. I think they not have the machete, the knife, you might have been all right.”
“You saw it all?”
“From my boat. I was coming in, I saw it. I pulled to the dock. I’ve seen them do that before. Take money from tourists. They try and rob me once.”
“How’d that work out?”
“They did not have a knife. I did not have a knife. But I am strong.”
“They’re really police?”
“I recognized them. Cozumel. They come here, do what they like, go back across the water.”
“Won’t they know who you are?”
“I do not think so.”
“Well, I hope not. Are you out here to hide from them? I mean, out this late. It must have been some hours now.”
“It has been a few hours. I went out to sea some. To fish.”
“You went fishing?”
“It is what I do.”
“Catch anything?”
“No. That is sometimes what I do. Catch nothing.”
The lights of the shore grew closer. I started to say something about having a room rented in Playa del Carmen, but then decided to hell with it. It didn’t matter.
As we neared the lights, Beatrice came up the ladder. Other than the fighting chair where Ferdinand sat, there were a couple of deck chairs up there. Beatrice took one of them, and I took the other.
She said, “Your friend is sleeping good. I believe he will be okay.”
“Thanks to you two.”
She made a kind of grunting noise. “My father, he is always helping someone. He gets no help from anyone else, but he is always helping someone.”
“That is what it is about, Beatrice,” the old man said. “Is that not the way of God?”
“If it is, let him do it.”
“Beatrice!” Ferdinand said.
She sat quietly for a while. She said, “I’m sorry.” Then to me: “I fear for my father. The police, they are very corrupt here in Mexico. If they know what he did, he could be imprisoned. Hurt. Here, the police, they do as they please.”
We cruised the water for what seemed like a long time, and though the lights came closer, they did not come close enough fast enough. It seemed as if we were perched on the lip of forever, unable to move forward.
Finally we arrived at the dock in Playa del Carmen. A young, shaggy-haired boy, maybe twelve, in blue jeans and a dirty Disney T-shirt with Mickey’s head faded into nothing, ran out to the boat and climbed on board. He started when he saw me, but Beatrice spoke to him and Ferdinand laughed.
“He has been taught that all Americans are dangerous,” said Ferdinand. “His name is Jose and he works a little for me. He waits for the boat to come in and helps me carry the fish and do little chores. Tonight, I have no fish. Just you two. You are my fish. Go ashore. I will lock up the boat. Jose and his brothers will stay with the boat.”
“What brothers?” I asked.
“They will be along. You best look after your friend. Beatrice will help you.”
Beatrice and I went inside the cabin and stirred Leonard. He groaned when we woke him. We helped him up. He tried not to act like someone in pain, but he couldn’t help it. I said, “Maybe he needs a doctor.”
“That could be,” Beatrice said. “I have some antibiotics. I can give him those. It will be a while before we are where I can get them.”
I considered this. I asked Leonard what he thought.
“Well,” he said. “I’ve felt better. But I’ve had a lot worse. I think if I get some antibiotics, some rest, I’ll be all right.”
Beatrice helped me take Leonard off the boat and onto the dock. I had no idea what was going to happen from there. Neither she nor her father owed us anything. They could have just turned us loose in the night. Fact was, they had put themselves in considerable jeopardy to aid us. But I was relieved when Beatrice said, “We’ll take your friend to our home for tonight. I want you and him to leave tomorrow. Do you understand that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I am sorry for your friend, but we do not need enemies. My father makes enemies often.”
“I bet he makes friends often too,” I said.
“Enemies seem a little more determined than friends,” she said. “Friends have a way of going away when you need them.”
“That isn’t my experience,” I said. “It depends on who you call friend.”
She had one of Leonard’s arms draped over her shoulder, and I had the other. He was groaning as we walked along.
I followed Beatrice’s lead. We ended up out back of a stucco building where there were cars sitting in a dark lot near a sign painted on the side of the building. The sign was for some kind of Mexican pastry and the moon made it
shiny and white and surreal there in the night.
Beatrice unlocked an old white van and we got inside. The interior was well worn, seats ripped up, patches of cloth hanging from the ceiling. The van had no back seat and was empty of possessions, except for some tow sacks in the back. We placed Leonard on those. I made as comfortable a pillow as I could for him out of a spare sack. He said, “I lost my goddamn hat.”
“Just goes to show,” I said, “the day hasn’t been a total loss. But we’ve discussed what happened to the hat.”
“We have?”
“You weren’t feeling too good at the time, but yes, we discussed it. One of our muggers stepped through it.”
“Oh yeah. I remember.”
I climbed in the passenger’s seat and Beatrice started the van. I said, “What about Ferdinand? He said he was coming.”
“He always says that, but he does not come. He stays with the boat with Jose and his brothers. I think he likes it that way. He loves that boat. If he were coming, he would have come.”
The van coughed and sputtered and rolled forward with a protesting lurch, banged into a couple of potholes, crunched gravel, and off we went.
We drove along bad roads for an hour or so. It had grown very dark because clouds had bagged the moon. There was just the van’s headlights on the road, and a little glow from the dash light that shone against Beatrice’s face and gave it a ghostly appearance and made her little silver earrings float about her ears like spectral fish swimming in the ether.
We talked a little, but nothing to take note of. We just rode on into the night until we came to some sparsely wooded hills that swelled on either side of the road, and we were swallowed by them. Somewhere along there, without meaning to, due to the rocking of the van, the kind of day I had had, I drifted off to sleep, and it was the dying of the motor that brought me awake.
It was a simple house, part adobe, part thatch, just like you see in the movies about Mexico. There were scrubby trees in the yard and an old white Ford without tires or wheels sitting out to the side of the house. Prickly pear had grown up all around it and the moon was out from behind the clouds again and I could see the car was stuffed with all manner of junk.
Beatrice helped me wake Leonard and get him into the house. I held Leonard up while she lit lamps. I didn’t see an electric light or refrigerator. The house was very small. Three rooms. Two of the rooms were bedrooms, the other was a kitchen of sorts with an old wooden stove. After we got Leonard stretched out on a bed in one of the bedrooms, slipped off his shoes, she took me outside and showed me where the outdoor convenience was. It was a leaning rectangle of graying slats with a tin roof and it smelled just like what was under it. Beatrice seemed a little embarrassed by it all.
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