Shim hoisted his glass. “Let me buy you a drink.”
Michael Boni picked up his bag. “Maybe later.” The señora was moving down the corridor, and he started after her, happy to have an excuse to get away.
When they reached his room, the señora opened the door with a bump of her hip. With a few waves of her hand, she revealed the room’s amenities: a shower stall without a curtain, a bureau with one drawer, the switch for the ceiling fan. The only decoration was a ceramic crucifix nailed to the wall.
They were in the bathroom, the señora pantomiming how to use the electric shower, when footsteps paused outside his door. Michael Boni heard the slap of bare feet going up the concrete stairs.
Michael Boni unpacked and washed the dust from his face. When he passed through the restaurant on his way to the street a few minutes later, the dining room was once again empty. The street was empty, too.
A familiar voice called out from above. “Change your mind about that drink?” Propped up on the hammock, Shim once again raised his glass.
“Later,” Michael Boni said.
Shim smiled and set the glass on his chest. “Don’t think I’ll stop asking.”
The beach was a block from the hotel. There Michael Boni saw just how unvisited the village truly was. By the water’s edge, two lone children were playing, forming and crushing mounds of wet sand. Beyond the tide line, their parents were shaking out their belongings and cramming them into a large knit bag.
The beach was at least a mile long, far larger than the village itself. At the top of the dune, a boardwalk stretched a few hundred feet in each direction. Directly in the middle lay a stack of folded wooden beach chairs and a concession stand. Inside, an old woman was closing the shutters. A boy approached carrying more chairs up from the beach. Down by the water, an old man in rolled pants secured the last of the umbrella canopies.
Michael Boni headed north, and when the boardwalk ended, he continued along the dune. Soon the entire village was behind him. He sat in the sand and watched the ocean for a while, hypnotized by the waves. A breeze crept inland. The air had quickly turned cool. He untied his boots. The stain and varnish on the leather assumed a new brilliance against the sand. He dug his feet in, feeling the day’s heat buried like the coals of a dying fire.
The sun was setting into the ocean. Birds were singing in the trees along the shoreline, little black birds with streaks of yellow on their wings. Michael Boni thought of Priscilla, how happy she must be. Now she had the entire house to destroy, all by herself. And for the chicks, there was the garage and the yard and Clementine to watch them and all the garden scraps they could eat.
He wondered if any of them would even notice he was gone.
In the restaurant that night, the patrons were villagers, dressed in well-worn jeans and faded slacks. Shim had left his perch on the balcony. Michael Boni selected for himself an empty table by the sidewalk. No one seemed to notice him.
A loud, boisterous group had gathered in the far corner. In the center sat a heavy-set man in a wide-brimmed straw hat, face and arms a ruddy brown. He looked as though he’d just come in from the fields. The others listened, occasionally laughing, as the man told a story. Michael Boni could make out only some of the words, not enough to follow along.
After a few minutes, Marisol came over and wiped off the tablecloth.
“How are you?” she said in halting English, smiling down at him.
“Okay.”
“You are from the United States?” When Michael Boni didn’t answer, she said, “I have a cousin in the United States.”
Michael Boni nodded, reaching for his water glass.
“I want to go to the United States someday.”
“Is this from a bottle?” he said.
Marisol took the glass and gazed at it a moment.
“I want to go to New York City,” she said. “Or maybe Los Angeles. I want to make clothes.” Still holding the glass, Marisol stepped back from the table and turned to the side. “You see?” she said. “I make this.”
A plain blue dress with a sort of gold brocade sash at the waist.
“It’s nice,” Michael Boni said.
“Are you from New York City?” She extracted a laminated menu from under her arm.
“No.”
“I return.” And she and his water glass disappeared into the kitchen.
He knew enough to be able to make his way through the menu. The names were familiar, but there was no pozole. The specialty here seemed to be fish. He wondered if that was what these people were, these locals—fishermen.
In a minute, Marisol was back, the water glass she set down in front of him identical to the one she’d taken away.
“Yes?” she said.
Michael Boni pointed to the taquitos, the cheapest item on the menu.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Marisol patted his arm and took his menu. “I bring you something better.”
“That’s okay,” he said, trying to stop her before she walked away.
“Okay!” she said happily.
She came back fifteen minutes later with an enormous platter, an entire fish, a red snapper, head and all, buried in mounds of tomatoes and olives and capers and chiles.
“Better?” she said, grinning.
He stared at the melted, milky white eyes of the fish, feeling suddenly nostalgic for vegetable stew.
After a dinner he barely touched, Michael Boni returned to the beach.
From the top of the dune, he looked down to find that the tide had nearly reached the line of umbrellas in the sand. The canvas canopies rustled in the breeze, the moon lighting them from behind, outlining them in pale yellow flames.
Unspoiled. Untouched. No wonder his grandmother had been so miserable in Detroit. How could she be expected to forget what she’d traded in? How could anyone? He wondered what Marisol imagined when she pictured New York. Skyscrapers and window displays and theater marquees. The same fantasy world as Darius.
From a block away, he could make out the vague thump of some kind of music. All that was left after the breeze were the bass notes, thick and indistinct. They could have been coming from anywhere. But where else was there other than the hotel? And somehow he knew that Shim was responsible.
The moment he reached the patio, Michael Boni saw him, swaying among the tables with a plastic rose between his teeth. Mariachi burst from a small tape deck lying next to a bottle of tequila on the bar. Shim was performing as if the entire village were his audience, but he was alone. The dining room was empty.
“Hey!” Shim shouted, reaching for Michael Boni’s arm.
In the kitchen, Marisol and the señora were pretending not to watch.
“Come on,” Shim said. “You’re on vacation. Dancing is good for you.”
Michael Boni pulled away.
“Let me buy you a drink.” Shim dipped his invisible partner. “You need a drink. You need to loosen up. I thought you came here to relax.”
Michael Boni went over to the bar and snapped off the tape deck.
Shim threw up his hands in disgust. “No wonder nobody comes here.”
Through the window, Michael Boni saw Marisol and the señora return to the dirty dishes.
“Don’t forget that drink!” Shim shouted as Michael Boni hurried away.
The sky the next morning was an unimaginative shade of blue, as monochromatic and depthless as if sprayed by machine.
Coming down the hillside on the final bus the day before, Michael Boni had caught his first glimpses of the ocean—the first ocean he’d ever seen. Even then, from that distance, the water hadn’t seemed quite real. People were always talking about the sight, but once he arrived, he realized how much more there was to it than that. There was the way the salt air gathered in his head and lingered there like alcohol. There was the ripe, living smell. He remembered once as a child going to the shore up near Port Huron with his family, but the sand there was gray and rocky, like standing on gravel. He’d never cared for the
idea of things floating around down there that he couldn’t see.
All that day, there was no sign of Shim at the hotel. Not once had Michael Boni seen him on the beach.
Was it too much to hope that Shim was already gone for good?
That night in the restaurant, Marisol was gone, too. She must have been given the day off. Michael Boni took the same table as on the night before. Eventually the señora came over and nodded wordlessly that it was time for him to order. When he pointed to the taquitos, she grunted and turned back toward the kitchen.
Michael Boni glanced around the restaurant. The heavy-set, sunburned man from the night before was back. It appeared he had a regular table, too. And much of the same crowd was once again surrounding him.
While he ate, Michael Boni observed the lighted doorways along the street, where shadows came and went. A couple of old men had set up folding chairs on the sidewalk. There was a café of sorts at the corner, where a half-dozen people sat in a circle, talking. When the breeze died down, he could faintly hear their voices.
He wished he had the language to ask the señora about the village. She reminded him a bit of his grandmother, the skeptical way she had of looking at him. He wished he could ask her what it was like to call a place like this home.
That night Michael Boni went for another walk along the beach. Perhaps a quarter-mile south of the boardwalk, he came across a pavilion set back in the trees beyond the dune. As he passed, he saw a band setting up inside. The dance floor was flooded with light, and perhaps two dozen teenagers sat at the tables along the walls. Outside in the shadows, several couples clung to one another on concrete benches. One of the young women sat facing him, her eyes closed as a young man in red pants pressed his mouth to hers. Michael Boni recognized Marisol’s blue dress, the dark braid draped over one shoulder.
He was glad to see her in someone’s arms, glad she might still have reason to stay.
§
Past the plaza where the bus had dropped him off, the road turned north. It was the morning of his third day, and this was the only direction, the only road, Michael Boni hadn’t already explored.
He had only just begun down the road when the paving stones changed to gravel. He guessed he’d reached the edge of the village. But then he noticed the narrow street twisted a short distance farther, and up ahead he saw some sort of structure—he couldn’t tell what it was—sitting atop a low hill.
Coming closer, Michael Boni saw several more such structures. A half-dozen concrete foundations filled with sand lined both sides of the unfinished road. It looked as if someone had planned some sort of development here and then changed his mind. Where the gravel ended, two hundred feet farther, there was a shell of what looked like a home. No doors or windows, just walls with holes where the doors and windows should have been.
On the edge of one of the foundations, in the shade of a large canopied tree, sat Shim, a camera and a notebook in his lap. At first Michael Boni thought he was drawing something, perhaps the grass growing upon the dune. But Shim wasn’t looking at any one particular spot, and he quickly went through page after page in his notebook. Occasionally he would get up and snap a picture of something Michael Boni found not particularly interesting: a patch of ground, a tree. Several minutes passed before he noticed the surveyor’s level Shim had set up on a tripod.
That evening, as Michael Boni lay on his bed, absorbing the faint breeze of his ceiling fan, there was a knock on the door.
“I’m buying you dinner,” Shim said, smiling in the corridor.
Michael Boni found himself unprepared to think of a single excuse.
There was a crowd in the restaurant. The heavy-set, sunburned man and his circle of friends appeared to be celebrating. There were toasts and cheers. Michael Boni was grateful for the noise. Maybe now he and Shim could sit through a meal without having to talk.
Shim chose a table directly in the middle of the dining room. Before sitting down, he walked from table to table greeting the other diners. He seemed to know them all by name, and they seemed glad to see him.
After Shim was finally seated, Marisol approached with the menus.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Shim said as she walked away.
Michael Boni didn’t like the way Shim looked at her. “She’s a nice girl.” Young enough to be Shim’s daughter.
While they waited for their food, Shim took Michael Boni along on a guided tour of his Mexican escapades: the scuba diving in hidden reefs, the illegal deep-sea fishing, the most obscure tequila, the cleanest beaches, the most beautiful women. He’d catalogued it all. Every last cliché.
The nice thing about Shim was that once he started talking, he never stopped. Michael Boni could simply sit and let it wash over him. It didn’t matter that he contributed nothing.
By the time Marisol brought their food, there was almost no one left in the restaurant.
Shim had ordered the snapper, and he eyed the plate in much the same way he’d eyed the girl.
“Do you know what it is?” he said, lifting his first forkful of rice.
Michael Boni turned away from the opaque, buttery eyes.
“The stuff you saw me photographing,” Shim said. “Do you know what it is?”
Michael Boni took a bite of his taquito.
“They were supposed to be rentals.” Shim leaned back in his chair. “But the company that built them didn’t have the capital. They didn’t take any of the necessary precautions. Not to mention they were careless about the people they hired. They ran out of money, they lost support. But where one man fails,” he said cheerfully, “another succeeds. I mean, think of the possibilities: real hotels, real restaurants. A real resort. Pure. Pristine.”
“Just what the world needs,” Michael Boni said.
Shim shook the last drops of beer from the bottle. “I don’t know about the world,” he said, “but it’s what they want.” He nodded toward the window into the kitchen.
Michael Boni saw the heavy-set, sunburned man in there talking to the señora.
“Have you met the mayor?” Shim asked. “The hotel’s his. The señora’s his wife. He’s the one that invited me here. I was skeptical at first, but he convinced me. The entire town wants it. This place is just wasting away.”
“I like it the way it is,” Michael Boni said.
“I think they might know a little more about it than you do.”
Michael Boni set down his fork. “What do you know about me?”
“Amigo,” Shim said, rising from the table, “it’s time for that drink I promised you.”
He went to the bar and came back with two glasses of tequila.
“To the village,” he said. “To prosperity.”
Shim drained his glass and went back to get the bottle. Michael Boni left his drink on the table, untouched. Then he heard music, the same music from two nights before, picking up precisely where it had left off.
Shim stood beside the tape deck wearing an immense smile.
Marisol came out of the kitchen and approached the table. Leaning against the bar, tapping his fingers against the side of his glass, Shim watched her clear away the plates and utensils, loading up her arms.
To get back to the kitchen, Marisol had to pass him again, and as she did so, Shim reached out and grabbed her.
“Dance with me,” he said.
Marisol pulled her arm away, but Shim didn’t let go. She pulled harder and broke free, but she lost her balance, and one of the plates fell and shattered.
“I don’t understand why everyone is so uptight,” Shim said as she hurried into the kitchen. “In a place like this. The ocean, the sun, peace and quiet, and no one will relax.”
Michael Boni heard the señora yelling, and Marisol returned with a broom. He stooped down to help with some of the bigger pieces. She didn’t seem to notice him. Then the song ended, and Michael Boni realized Shim had left.
Sitting alone at the table, Michael Boni tried to figure out what he should do. In
planning his escape, he’d been thinking he’d need to go somewhere no one ever went—a town no one had ever heard of. But now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe in a place like this he was too exposed. There’d be nowhere to hide if they ever came looking for him. And would they? It was impossible to say. He could trust McGee’s silence. He wanted to believe the same of Darius, but he’d seen all too well how weak Darius could be.
A car was coming up the street from the square. Michael Boni could hear it from a long way off, the roar of the engine so loud it caused rings to form on the surface of his glass.
The car wasn’t at all what Michael Boni had expected. Not a souped-up roadster but a weathered compact with anemic tires, window tint bubbled and curled around the edges. The car rolled to a stop, just as Marisol emerged from the kitchen. A boy got out of the driver’s side, red jeans and shiny black shoes. The boy from the pavilion.
Marisol and her boyfriend got into the car and thundered off, leaving the dining room trembling in their wake.
A breeze traveled up the street from the water, stirring sand along the cobblestones and passing just as freely through the restaurant. And then the breeze moved on, carrying Michael Boni with it.
He wandered through the vacant village, to the square, then found himself following the road north. A few minutes later, he was at the spot where he’d found Shim earlier in the day. In the moonlight, the concrete shell of the bungalow beyond the gravel road looked like the tower of a sunken castle. The door and window holes had once been boarded over, but enough planks were missing that Michael Boni could climb through.
From inside, the place appeared relatively new, walls and foundation still solid. The windows offered a good view, the kind of view a person could spend the rest of his days and nights watching without feeling the passage of time. He wondered how long it would be before Shim would tear this place down, how long until the entire village would be demolished to make room for the resort?
Angels of Detroit Page 38