Peter smiled. "No more of a mouthful than Chil-pancingo, Guerrero!" he retorted, naming a city to the north of Acapulco. "It all depends on which mouthful you're used to!"
"I guess so," Tony agreed. "What is it like—Indianapolis?" he added curiously.
"Well, I don't really know much about it," Peter answered. "I was bom there but we moved to Detroit,
Michigan, when I was five, and then to Chicago, Illinois, after my mother died, and then—"
"Caramha!" Tony looked at his blond friend with astonishment. "Why did you move around so much? Were the police after your father?"
Peter laughed. "Not that I know of," he said, still grinning, "but I'll ask him when I get home! Seriously, I guess he was always looking for something, Tony— maybe a job he liked better. He's always been in some kind of newspaper work but he never really Uked it. He isn't the type. He should have been a college professor, or in research. Newspapermen live under pressure and Dad finally got stomach ulcers from it. He's been happier in Mexico, writing this book, than he's been ever since my mother died."
"What kind of a book is he writing?"
"A historical novel—a real long one. I don't know if he'll ever sell it, or if he'll ever finish it, but it doesn't matter much, as long as he's happy."
Peter's voice was gently affectionate, as though he were talking about a child, and Tony looked at him curiously. At times, he thought, Pedro seemed very young, younger than fifteen, but at other times he sounded like an old man.
"Wasn't it hard on you—moving around so much?" Tony asked, getting the conversation back on his own level. "How would you know who you really were, in all those new places? And how would you ever have any friends?" He couldn't imagine such a life, himself.
"I didn't think much about it," Peter said. "People in
the United States do move around a lot, Tony. Maybe they're more restless than Mexicans, in general. And Chicago wasn't so very difiFerent from Detroit, or even from Indianapolis, except in size. The schools were about the same, and the kids were about the same, too. It didn't take very long to make new friends."
"Detroit is where they make all the cars, isn't it?"
"Not all of them. But it does have a lot of automobile factories."
"Well, tell me about it," Tony said. "Does it look like Mexico City?"
"Like some parts of Mexico City, I guess—some of the residential parts and the shopping districts," Peter said slowly. "But Detroit and Chicago are a lot different from Mexico in most ways. There aren't any mountains around them, for example, but there are a lot of big lakes. And there aren't any real old buildings like some of those in Mexico City. You don't get the feeling of a long history, hke you do in Mexico."
"The history of the United States is short, compared to ours," Tony nodded. He knew that much from school.
But he wasn't interested in history. He wanted concrete facts about Peter's life in the States and he had his mouth open to ask another question when he saw that Julio had returned, bringing two plates with small pieces of meat swimming in rich, savory-smelling brown sauce. He also brought a small bowl of chopped avocados and tomatoes, a larger bowl of black beans and a stack of tortillas wrapped in a white napkin.
"Atjee! A feast!" Tony looked at Julio, his black eyes gleaming. "This is no cheap meal, amigo!"
"This time you are my guests. Next time I charge you double!"
"You see what I mean?" Tony said to Peter. "Always cultivate friends who are in the restaurant business! This was going to be my birthday present to you. Now it's Julio's, instead."
"Today is your cumpleanos?" Julio asked Peter, surprised.
The blond boy nodded shyly.
"You should have told me, Tony," Julio reproached. "I'd have made it a little more festive."
"It's perfect," Peter assured him, beginning to eat hungrily.
"Well, at least we can have the mananitasr JuHo let out a piercing whistle to call the trio of musicians who strolled among the tables, offering their songs to tOLirists.
"Oh, please—no," Peter protested, turning red.
"But why not? You can't have a birthday dinner, however poor, without mananitas. Especially since they cost nothing! The musicos are my friends."
He turned to the approaching trio. "Las mananitas, amigos! For the blond Acapulqueiio!"
Immediately the musicians launched into the best known and most loved tune of Mexico, and at once all the Mexicans within earshot looked around, smiling, to see whose birthday it was. Many of them even joined in the chorus and Peter sat, his face fiery with embarrassment, while the people at their end of the bench serenaded him and then heartily applauded him at the end, as was the custom.
Peter half rose to his feet and ducked his head in bash-
ful acknowledgment; then sat down, relieved, as the musicians drifted away and attention was no longer focused on their table.
"Okay, now you can eat." Julio grinned at him. "And if it is cold, tell me and I'll warm it up."
"I guess I never had so much fuss made over my birthday," Peter murmured.
"Never?" Tony looked at him wonderingly. "Not in Indianapolis or Detroit or Chicago? Well, you'll get used to it, Pedro, if you stay in Mexico. Birthdays are big days here."
"This was nothing," JuHo added. "The best we could do on short notice." He straddled a chair. "Now tell me about your job, Tony. What boat are you going to be working on?"
"The Pelicano." Tony's voice was muffled by a mouthful of tortilla. "Captain Garcia. He seems a decent sort."
Juho frowned but the other two boys were too busy eating to notice.
"How did you happen to get the job? There have been two boys working that boat."
Peter explained about the accident.
"Was it a short boy with curly hair who was hurt, or the tall one?" Juho's voice was tense and Tony looked at him.
"He was a short boy," Peter answered.
Tony stopped eating. "What's the matter, Julio?"
"Nothing." Julio jumped up. "Excuse me a moment. I go to see about things in the kitchen. Eat well, muchachos."
They were finishing the last of the tortillas and the beans when Julio came back.
"Was it all right?" he asked. "Did it fill the cavity?"
"A meal for kings," Tony answered gratefully. "I am full up to here." He put his hand just under his chin. "Muchas gracias, amigo. And now tell me why you are so gloomy about the Pelicano. I could tell from your face there's something wrong."
"It's nothing, really." Julio's voice was reluctant. "It's only that the tall boy you'll have to work with, Tony, is Lencho Ramirez."
Tony drew in his breath. "Yes, of course I've heard of him," he said. "He has a bad reputation, hasn't he?"
Julio nodded. "He's a troublemaker. Just don't let him get under your skin, that's the main thing."
"I'll handle him," Tony boasted, with more assurance than he felt. He had heard a good deal about Lencho. "Well, we must be getting back now, eh, Pedro?"
"Yes. Many thanks for the birthday party," Peter said to Julio. "And I'm glad to know you."
"Equally, Pedro." Julio smiled at him and then turned seriously to Tony. "Promise me you'll be careful in your dealings with Lencho, Tony. He's a tough customer!"
The Glass-Bottomed Boat
Tony brought the launch up near the western end of Roqueta Island, over rock caverns that lay about twelve feet below the surface, and killed the motor.
"We're going to stop here," he announced in English to the cargo of tourists who were leaning expectantly over the glass-bottomed well of the boat. "Our diver Lencho will go down and see what he can find for you. Lencho is one of the best skin divers in Acapulco. He can hold his breath under water for almost three minutes."
The words, although they were quite true, stuck in his throat. They were part of an act—and Tony hated acting. Lencho said the same thing about him when he, Tony, was diving. People liked to feel that they were being entertained by the best talent.
There were appropriate murmurs of appreciation from the passengers, most of whom were middle-aged and quite content to admire the exploits of youth from a comfortable, spectator position.
Tony avoided looking at the one young passenger: a trim, auburn-haired girl in white blouse and shorts who sat in the middle of the boat. She made him uneasy. This
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was her second ride on the Pelicano. On the first trip, yesterday, she had followed his every movement with something sUghtly more than the curious, impersonal interest of the average tourist, and it had embarrassed him. Also, he knew that it had annoyed Lencho, who considered himself irresistible to girls. Tony wanted to avoid trouble.
Lencho glanced at the girl now as he made his preparations in the bow of the boat, fitting rubber fins on his feet, molding the face mask over his eyes and nose, and picking up his spear. He stood for a moment, his bronze body clad only in black swim trunks, outlined against the turquoise sky. Then he sat down, swung his feet over the side of the boat and dropped into the water quietly, in order not to disturb whatever fish might be in the vicinity.
He's a bom showman, Tony thought. Whether he's talking to them or whether he's diving, he's always showing off. He loves it—and they love it. And I hate it!
For five weeks now, he had been a partner to this performance several times a day and they had been the longest five weeks of his life. He loved to dive but he despised making a show of it. Even worse than that was the antagonism that had built up between Lencho and himself—a hatred so implacable and unremitting that Tony wondered if their passengers couldn't feel it simmering around them in the small boat!
A dozen times he had been on the point of quitting— and a dozen times he had looked apprehensively at the calendar, counted his slim savings and decided to try it
a while longer. Even though each day seemed endless, time was slipping away from him much too fast. November business had not been as good as usual. There had been days when the Pelicano had not gone out at all. Now it was almost the middle of December and he had saved less than four hundred pesos. There were only seven short weeks to accumulate the balance of the two thousand that Uncle Juan had set as the minimum toward a first payment on a fishing boat. And if he didn't make it-He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand as though to rub away the impossible alternative, and he suddenly realized that some of the passengers were looking at him curiously. He dragged his mind from his problems to the present business.
"Now watch through the glass bottom," he said briskly, mechanically repeating the spiel that Lencho had taught him five weeks ago. "Our boy will be coming under the boat to say hello to you before he goes down to say hello to the fish."
His audience of eleven smiled dutifully, their eyes glued again on the glass as Lencho swam under the launch, grinning and waving his spear. Then he finned on down toward the rock caverns. A few brilliantly colored fish moved lazily out of his path.
"How exotic looking those yellow and black things are!" exclaimed one of the American women. "Those are mariposas, madam—butterfly fish." "They don't seem to pay any attention at all to the diver!"
"We have them trained," Tony said, using one of Lencho's thin jokes. "They think we're just a new and unusually ugly kind of big fish."
His eyes flickered toward the auburn-haired girl as he wondered uncomfortably if she had heard this same thing from Lencho yesterday when he, Tony, was diving. There was a little smile on her lips but her gray eyes remained fixed on the glass below.
Lencho was out of sight behind a huge boulder. There was nothing to see but the mariposas and a few parrot fish, moving languidly among the rocks carpeted with seaweed. A small sea bass hurried by, as though on some important errand.
Tony tried to think of something to tell his passengers during the wait. There were a great many things that he knew about the sea which might interest them. Since people always seemed to be fascinated by sea monsters, he could tell them of his own encounter with a moray eel, a couple of years ago. He had angled into an underwater cave, trying to hook a lobster, and had come within half an inch of having his hand snapped off by the razor teeth of a large brownish-green moray. After that episode, he had decided not to poke around in rock crevasses barehanded! Or he could tell them about the hammerhead shark he had seen while diving with Pedro, a few weeks ago. Or the needlefish which were not intentionally aggressive but were an accidental hazard to the night fishermen; skimming the surface with amazing speed, they sometimes leaped so far out of water that their long, sharp snouts were capable of stabbing
straight into the chests of the unwary. Or the awe-inspiring sight of a giant manta ray, its eighteen-foot wingspread outHned by the phosphorescence in the water, rising near a tiny canoa in the darkness of the ocean at night, the enormous fins moving slowly like the wings of a mammoth bird of the sea. Although the manta rays had no teeth and ate only plankton, they had their element of danger, too, since one of their nocturnal sports was to leap out of the sea and come down on it again with the resounding crash of a ton of flesh on water—the waves from which could easily swamp the small craft of the night fishermen.
These and many other things he would gladly have shared with the curious tourists. But, for one thing, he didn't want to scare them away from the beaches. Actually, there were comparatively few hazards to swimmers in Acapulco waters. Moray eels were a rarity and never attacked unless you invaded their homes in the rocks. Sharks never seemed to molest the bathers; and unless the tourists went night fishing in a canoa, which was unlikely, they'd never see a leaping needlefish or a manta ray. But the main reason he didn't tell them was because he usually found himself tongue-tied when confronted by an audience—and even more so today, with the gray eyes of the red-haired girl glancing in his direction from time to time, as though she sensed his embarrassment and was amused by it.
He just wasn't good at this talking business, and he knew it. Most of the time since he had worked on the Pelicano, he had done the diving while Lencho talked.
and he liked it much better that way. A week ago, however, Lencho had announced abruptly that they would take turns, as most of the other boys on the glass-bottomed boats did.
"I don't see how he can hold his breath that long!" breathed an elderly man with gray hair. "Seems as though he's been under at least ten minutes!"
Tony had made a bet with himself that someone would say that, every trip. So far he had won all the bets.
"It always seems longer than it actually is," he said gently. "Here he comes now."
Lencho appeared through the glass, holding a sea urchin in one hand and a sea cucumber in the other. Pretty poor pickings to start with, Tony thought, from a whole ocean. Lencho surfaced beside the boat, handed the trophies to Tony, looked at the auburn-haired girl, pumped his lungs with air and went down again.
"This is the short-spined, purple sea urchin—one of several different varieties we have around Acapulco," Tony recited. "You must be careful not to step on them when you are swimming around rocks because their spines are difficult to get out, once they enter your skin, and they're Hkely to cause an infection."
"And yet you handle it!" cried one of the lady tourists.
They always said that, too.
"We know how," Tony told her modestly.
"Always make the tourist think you know everything and can do things he can't do," Lencho had counseled. "That's one way to get their interest."
"The insides of these urchins are considered a delicacy like caviar in some parts of the world," Tony continued
his recital, "but here we use it chiefly for bait. I will show you how the fish love it."
He cut out the inside of the squirming, spiny mass, dropped it into the water close to the boat and instantly, through the glass bottom, they could see a shimmering cloud of small silvery fish, fighting for a nibble.
The tourists hung over the glass, entranced. Only the girl was sitting
upright, her eyes on Tony. So far, on the trip, she had not said a single word. She made him distinctly uncomfortable.
"This must be very dull for you, Senorita," he said abruptly. "You have seen and heard it all before—perhaps many times before."
"I never get tired of it," she answered quietly. "I find everything about the sea interesting. The fish, the boats —and the people who work on the water."
Tony felt his ears reddening. "Now the sea cucumber—" he began hurriedly, picking up the small, flabby, animal-like fish.
On and on, forever and ever, he thought, as the lecture continued. He was aware that his voice sounded dry from repetition and distaste. He talked for only twenty minutes, as Lencho periodically deHvered souvenirs, but it seemed to him that he had been explaining elementary sea lore for at least an hour, by the time the other boy climbed back into the boat and was greeted with a spatter of applause.
The red-haired girl did not applaud but she gave Lencho a fittle smile which he acknowledged with a rather insolent grin.
The other passengers were absorbed in the harvest of
sea life that Lencho had finally captured: sea spiders, starfish, coral formations, fans, limpets, snails, a giant rock scallop and a porcupine fish, which the Acapulco boys called blowfish because they gulped water and swelled up like balloons when molested or captured.
Tony started the boat while Lencho set to work, industriously cleaning the coral and scraping the shells of various kinds to make souvenirs for the tourists. He talked volubly all the time he was doing it and his audience obviously enjoyed his chatter. He did not speak English as well as Tony but the tourists seemed to Hke that, too, and Tony privately thought that Lencho occasionally mispronounced words for effect.
DeHberately, he closed his eyes and ears to his immediate surroundings and looked at the glittering open sea beyond the bay, wishing with all his heart that he were out there—all alone—in a boat of his own. The longing was so intense that it was almost like a physical pain.
Treasure of Acapulco Page 4