Captains Outrageous (6 page)

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

I
T 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 that 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 M
EXICO
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, señor?”

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, señor?”

Leonard took a theatrical look out at the water.

“Nope.”

The pilot shrugged.

“Could it have sunk?” Leonard asked.

“Funny, you are, señor. 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

W
E 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 didn’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 phonebook 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.

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.

“Policía. 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.