by Evans, Jon
We spent most of the next afternoon and night and day on the patio at Café Rasta Pasta, a pleasant place with a cool ocean breeze and good food, relaxing as best we could, reading and drinking beer and chatting with various other backpackers, mostly European but a few Americans and Canadians. We bought bathing suits and went swimming a few times. The water was warm and buoyant but the shallows were thick with seaweed. Talena and I were amused, and Saskia a bit scandalized, by the envious looks I got from male backpackers who did not have the good fortune to be escorted by two pretty bikini-clad women.
The evening we arrived, Saskia, overcome by too much Belikin, retreated back to Popeye’s to sleep, and Talena and I stayed to chat with a Norwegian dive instructor named Torsten, a man built like a barrel, with a constant infectious grin plastered on his face.
“Tomorrow’s dive is the Blue Hole,” Torsten said. “The most famous dive site in North America. One of the most famous dive sites in the whole world.” His grin widened. “Of course it helps that every dive country has its own famous dive site called the Blue Hole. Australia, Egypt, Thailand, everywhere. Sometimes, when I dive a Blue Hole, I ascend and it takes me a minute to think, what country am I in? Where is this Blue Hole?”
“Have you worked in all those places?” Talena asked.
Torsten nodded and began ticking names off on his fingers. “Australia. Thailand. Malaysia. Mauritius. Egypt, for almost six months, that was where I qualified to teach new instructors. They called me Torsten the Torturer.” He chuckled. “Greece, but only for a week, a bad company. The Andaman Islands. Papua New Guinea. Micronesia, Truk Lagoon, the greatest dive site in the world, I worked there for only one month, not long enough. Then the Galapagos, then Costa Rica, and then here.” His grin stretched even further, its corners reaching towards his skull earrings. “And three years ago, only three years, I was an accountant in Trondheim. An accountant!” He raised his black bottle of Belikin high into the air. “To the death of accounting! Skaal!”
We drank. He drained his bottle, called for another, and lit up a Colonial cigarette, cheap local filth but Marlboros and Camels were nearly impossible to find, as with all former British colonies. I wanted to bum a smoke but remembered Talena’s presence and refrained.
You hear stories like Torsten’s at all the world’s diving meccas. Scuba diving grows more popular every year and the demand for instructors always outstrips supply. Qualified dive instructors can show up in any of a wide variety of exotic tropical places and easily find work for cash under the table; the laid-back counterculture types you find running dive shops in backpacker havens such as Caye Caulker, Dahab, Krabi, even Cairns, are rarely interested in immigration paperwork. A dive instructor can travel around the world, living a frugal but decadent existence, for however long he or she wants. It’s the next best thing to being paid to travel, that oft-cited ultimate goal of the backpacker set.
“Doesn’t it bother you not having a home?” Talena asked.
“Home?” Torsten asked. “What is a home? People tell me Norway is my home. I say, yes, maybe it was, but not is. Do you know what we say about our country? It is a place where a man gets on an empty bus, he sits in the back left corner. Another man gets on, and he sits on the front right corner, as far away from the first man as possible. Another man gets on, and he sits in the middle, as far away from all the others as possible. Norwegians are cold people in a cold country. I am a warm person, I belong in a warm country. So I ask you, how is Norway my home?”
“You’ve never thought of basing yourself somewhere? Buying a home here on Caye Caulker or something?”
“Why would I do that? I ask you, in all seriousness, who needs homes? A serious question. For what kind of person do homes exist?” He paused dramatically. “I will tell you. Homes are for children. If you have a child, yes, absolutely, they must have a home, they must grow up in a home. But for me? I am not a child, not for a long time. And no children for me, not for Torsten Klug, not ever if I have a choice. There are too many people on this little ball of dirt already, any fool can see that. Why should I need a home? A good money investment? No, money is a drug, worse than heroin, and I am not addicted, not yet, I hope never. For staying in one place with one group of friends? All my friends today, they do the same thing I do, they move and move and move, we know where each other are from email, if I made a home somewhere most of them I would see less not more. I ask you in all seriousness, what good is a home for Torsten Klug?”
We had no answer for him.
“My home is anywhere, everywhere. Wherever I may roam, wherever I lay my head is home.” He chuckled. “Just like Metallica sings. To Metallica. Skaal!”
“Do you think he was right about homes?” Talena asked, after he left.
I thought about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “These days I feel pretty homeless. I guess, you know, I have for years. Never really felt rooted. I used to be like him, you know, I never used to care, but these days…I think I’d like a home. Maybe I’m getting old.”
“You’ve felt pretty homeless for years? I kind of thought you lived in my apartment.”
“Exactly. Your apartment.”
“What – what are you saying? Are you saying you feel like you haven’t been welcome?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. I’m just saying that it’s always been your apartment and it’s never felt the slightest like my place. Also – let me finish – also I lived there during the most miserable period of my life, which has nothing to do with you or your apartment, it would have been a lot worse without you.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m sorry my home never felt like your home. I never knew that.”
We stared at one another.
“Maybe we should go have a nap,” Talena said.
I took a deep breath. My heart was pounding. I felt like I was about to jump out of an airplane without knowing whether the backpack I wore was a parachute or a load of bricks. “No,” I said, looking straight into her electric blue eyes. “I think we should talk.”
“I don’t know if now is the –”
“I think we should talk.”
We looked at one another silently for a little while, both of us breathing hard.
“Okay,” Talena said. ” Okay. Um, anything you want to say, or…?”
“Yeah. You wanna break up or what?”
She looked at me. I swallowed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I know that’s, like, the worst possible answer, and I’m sorry, but I still don’t know.”
“It’s not the worst possible answer,” I said.
“No?”
“Definitely not. Definitely not.”
“Things have been so fucked between us for so long,” she said. “I don’t even know how long, that’s how long. I don’t know if we can fix that. Maybe I want to try, but… but not if it’s impossible, you know? If it’s inevitable we may as well get it over with, right? I know that sounds, I don’t know, cruel, but, God, Paul, I don’t want to go through it all again. It hurt too much the first time.”
“Aw,” I said. “Jesus. Talena. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I think sometimes you did,” she said very quietly. She was trembling. So was I. I wanted to reach out and take her in my arms but I didn’t dare move. “You treated me so badly, Paul. You have been such a total shit. I have tried so fucking hard, so many times, and for the last year you have been such a self-obsessed, self-torturing, fucked-up asshole, lashing out at me so many times for such no good reasons… I’m sorry but I get livid just thinking about how you treated me. For a year, Paul, for a whole fucking year. I didn’t even realize, you know, it was so, like, just accepted that that was how you were, until I got back from Bosnia and you weren’t there and I started to think. You behaved so badly for so long I don’t know if I can forgive you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I guess that’s not how you see it, huh?” she asked. “Well, that’s how
I see it.”
I closed my eyes for a moment.
“All right,” I said when I opened them. I was angry. Not with her. Not at myself, not exactly. Angry at the universe, I guess. Maybe I just needed to be angry right then even if there was nothing or no one to be angry at. “Okay. Yes, I was a shit. You know how it feels to me? It feels like I fell into…I don’t even know what to call it. A pit. A fucking abyss, whatever. And this last couple of months I fell out of it again. I guess you can see that much. And I will not be going back in. There is nothing I am more sure of in all this world. And I am sorry, I am so sorry, I am…I’m as sorry as the ocean is deep, I really am, for however much I hurt you when I was there. I love you, Talena, it rips my guts up to think that I hurt you at all, ever. I love you. But here we are. And, and, and you know what? I’m not even going to ask you to stay. I hope you do. And if you do I will try so hard to be the man you deserve. And I will never, ever, ever, do anything to hurt you again. But I’m not even going to ask. Do what you need to do. That’s all I have to say. I mean it. That’s what I want for you, that’s what I want for both of us, that’s all. Do what you need to do. But don’t say it’s inevitable. Please don’t say that. Nothing is inevitable.”
I realized my speech was finished and fell back in my chair, panting like I had just sparred five full-contact rounds with Zoltan.
Talena stared at me wide-eyed.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay. I hear you. Okay.”
Chapter 16
Night Flight
“One more night,” I said. “We’ll give them one more night and then try our luck ourselves.” Cain and Abel were more than half an hour late.
“Maybe we should call Sinisa?” Saskia suggested.
I shook my head. “If these guys don’t work out, I don’t know. He’s new around here too. I don’t think he knows anybody else.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Talena said. “I’m supposed to work on Monday. If I don’t show up at least on Tuesday they’re going to start asking some seriously pointed questions about how exactly I got so sick.”
Not for the first time I considered abandoning Sinisa’s plan and going overland as Talena had suggested. We could rent a car in Belize City, hide Saskia in the trunk, and just drive into Mexico. What were the odds of them searching a car driven by two wealthy gringos?
Unfortunately the more I thought about that question the higher those odds seemed. Belize, like Bosnia, was more placid than it had been ten years ago, but was still a classic smuggling nexus; loose borders, lax and/or corrupt government, a scofflaw culture. I didn’t need Sinisa to tell me that. His security concerns, while overblown, had not been entirely delusional. You could see it in the wild-eyed crackheads who roamed the grimy streets of Belize City, the rusted grids of iron bars from behind which many shopkeepers sold their wares, the lengthy “Dangers And Annoyances” section of the local Lonely Planet, the lost-generation lamentations of the local newspapers. The Mexican border guards wouldn’t expect to find a battered Bosnian refugee in the trunk of our car, but they just might look for a hidden stash of coke or pot or heroin. Talena and I fit the Big Score gringo-drug-mule profile to the proverbial T. Being Sinisa’s guinea pigs was risky, but less risky than simultaneously braving the border ourselves and earning Sinisa’s undying enmity.
“They are here,” Saskia said.
Indeed they were. Cain and Abel, big and small, crew cut and dreadlocks. They walked up to our table and surveyed us for a moment. I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘Hello’ seemed too trivial for what we were about to do.
“Let’s go,” Abel said. “Time be a-wasting.”
Hurry up and wait. Not my favourite game. We shouldered our bags, I hefted Sinisa’s briefcase, and we followed them out of Popeye’s and onto Front Street.
It was dark out, the moon had not yet risen, and when we got to Back Street there were few lights and we had to follow Cain’s flashlight down the sandy streets. He led us around a ramshackle clapboard house, we had to push our way past the encroaching palm trees, and suddenly the ocean was before us. Not much of it. The thin western passage between Caye Caulker and mainland Belize was maybe five miles wide. We could see lights on the mainland shore. Their boat was attached to a rotting wooden dock that jutted into the water behind the house. It was only a little bigger than the aluminum boats I had spent much of my teenage summers on, bombing around the lakes of northern Ontario. But it didn’t need to be big. We were going to spend our whole journey behind Belize’s mighty barrier reef, second largest in the world after Australia’s, and the ocean behind that protective shield didn’t get any rougher than the windy lakes of my youth unless a hurricane paid a visit.
“Go on, get in,” Cain said, illuminating the front of the boat with his light.
I felt perfectly calm and collected until I actually stepped into the boat. It bobbed in response to my weight transfer, and though I righted myself automatically something about the motion made me uneasy. My gut tautened with anxiety. I sat down on the bench, put the briefcase on my lap, and tried not to think about the fact that we were trusting these two men we had met only days ago to carry us illegally from Belize into Mexico, us and the mysterious cargo in my briefcase, on nothing more than Sinisa’s inexperienced say-so. Even if Cain and Abel were reliable we still might be intercepted by the police. A boat engine carried a long way over water at night.
The night air was warm and damp and full of mosquitos. The smell of the sea was pungent, the ocean here was unusually briny, maybe something to do with the reef. There was a slight offshore breeze. Talena sat beside me, and Saskia beside her. The disc of light cast by Cain’s flashlight illuminated a pair of fishing rods and an ancient tackle box made of cracked green plastic. Our cover story. I doubted the police would believe it for a minute. Maybe they were bribable. I hoped so. At least I could throw the briefcase overboard if we were intercepted on the open sea.
Cain and Abel sat on the back, on the other side of the boat, equalizing the weight. Abel took the flashlight and Cain started the engine. He had to yank the starter six times before the engine caught. I noticed there were no paddles and no life jackets. Abel jumped out, untied the boat from the dock, and stepped back in just before Cain switched off the flashlight and gunned the engine. The boat leapt out into the Caribbean.
It was so dark that without the electric lights on Caye Caulker, Ambergris Caye, and the mainland, I wouldn’t have known that there was any land at all nearby. The howl of the engine sounded unhealthy. Between that, the wind shrieking past my ears, and the rapid-fire thumping of bow against waves, I would have had to scream for anyone to hear me. I wondered how Cain could possibly navigate in this darkness. I envisioned him taking a wrong turn and driving straight into the dense mangrove swamps that fringed all the undeveloped land here, hurtling the three of us face-first into the jungle. I reached out and took Talena’s hand. Her heart was pulsing almost as fast as mine. I tried to focus on breathing deeply and not thinking at all, rather than imagining everything that might go wrong.
We moved north. The lights of Caye Caulker dwindled and vanished. We passed Ambergris Caye and then its lights too began to dissipate. There were no lights on the water. I began to suspect my fears of the Belizean border police had been unfounded. Belize didn’t even have enough money to keep order in its capital city. Patrolling the ocean at night was off the bottom of the country’s priority list. Mexico had more resources, but its Coast Guard probably wasn’t in a position to mount a 24-hour watch on its coastline either. If Mexico even had a Coast Guard.
About twenty minutes after leaving Caye Caulker, the engine noise dwindled to a low grumble. For a moment I was afraid that it had broken down or we were out of gas. I looked towards the back of the boat. My eyes had adjusted enough to the starlight to have an idea that Cain was looking to our left. I couldn’t tell if we were near land or not, but then I saw a flash of light to our left, and another, and the boat yawed over to head straight fo
r that light. As we neared shore Abel switched on our flashlight.
A little inlet led between many-branched mangrove trees, their leafy limbs reaching ten feet out from where land met sea. Cain threaded our boat through the narrow passage. It veered a little to the right and led us up to a clearing hacked roughly out of the swamp, mangrove stumps still visible amid the dirt. Big furrows that led from the clearing down into the sea told me that this place had been used for launching and unlaunching boats, at least one of them considerably bigger than Cain’s. A Toyota Land Cruiser was parked in the clearing, by the mouth of a trail maybe six feet wide and overgrown with waist-high grass. Two men sat crosslegged on its hood, smoking and playing flashlights over our boat. Shielding my eyes against their bright halogen beams, I looked back and saw that the inlet trail had curved enough that the Land Cruiser was invisible from the open sea. I wondered how much cocaine had passed through this makeshift landing. My best guess was ‘a whole lot.’
Cain drove the boat right up onto land until four feet of it protruded onto the muddy shore of the clearing. We had to hold on tightly to avoid falling off as it rolled to the left and came to a stop. Cain switched off the engine, and Talena and Saskia and I stepped out into wet mud.