Paraíso

  “I think her flight yesterday was canceled. There was a big storm in La Paz. They weren’t sure when the service would be resumed.”

  “Oh my God,” the woman whispered, and the line went dead.

  Incriminating Evidence

  It was still raining hard Friday morning after the storm, taco palms clattering in a hot and heavy south wind. She selected another shift, a purple one, from Isabel’s bureau and stood at the mirror on the bathroom door holding it up in front of her. Her hair seemed thicker and had grown past her shoulders, making her face look sharper and more wary. She watched herself for a few more beats, then let the purple shift fall. A sight she’d been avoiding.

  Her body looked like another woman’s. Lush and rounded like a calendar girl from the fifties, that famous shot of Marilyn Monroe. But tighter. Her skin looked as tight as it felt, stretched to pale satin on the sides of her breasts and her undeniable bump. Undeniable, no question. How had it gotten that way without her noticing?

  She turned sideways, put her hands on her hips, arched her back, and pushed out her belly. God! Forcing herself to hold the pose for a count of five. The image’s expression was comically shocked, and she tried a smile.

  The smile, tentative and questioning, was more comical still. She snickered like a voyeuristic high schooler, turned frontward, and shot a hip with a burlesque bounce of bosoms. Suddenly, she was laughing, head back, eyes closed. Laughing her thoughts away.

  How long had someone been knocking? She pulled the purple shift over her head, dragged a comb through her tangled hair, and peered out the window beside the locked front door to see Clamato standing there in shorts and a soaked yellow tee shirt, water dripping from the tip of his nose.

  “Did I interrupt something?” he asked when she opened the door and handed him a towel.

  “Not at all. I was just thinking of you.”

  “Haw. Am I that amusing?”

  “What? Oh … that was a whole different thing. Lemme see if I can find you something dry.” She rummaged in Isabel’s bureau and came out of the bedroom with a pink sweatshirt. When he pulled off his wet tee shirt and put it on, the word “PUSSYCAT” appeared in purple letters across the front. She patted the letters abstractedly. “Perfect!”

  “Yeah?” Clamato sounded a little worried. “So how’d you get through the storm?”

  “Okay. I just stayed inside mostly and ate up all of Isabel’s supplies.”

  He wandered around the room, stopping in front of Wendy’s portrait of Isabel, sitting nude at a table. “So when’s she supposed to be getting back?”

  “Today.”

  “Scratch that. Roads are washed out south and north. It happens every few years.”

  She couldn’t stop a yawn. “And how long will it take to fix them?”

  “Quien sabe. Could be a day or two. Could be a week. Could be two weeks. They say it’s pretty bad this time.”

  No surprise. When the storm closed in, it had been pretty obvious she’d misread the signs. How strange. She’d been so sure to begin with. Well … not entirely. Another yawn engulfed her.

  He stared out the window into the rain. “Want to come over and stay at my place? You can have the bedroom.” Raising his right hand. “I solemnly reaffirm my vow of chastity.”

  “Why, Pancho!” She tried a smile. “Are you worried about me?”

  “Well, maybe I would be if you’d gotten those shots.” He grinned back. “But you’re only pregnant.”

  “Wow. It’s that obvious? When did you know?”

  “As soon as I saw you in the park.”

  “I guess everybody in town knows, huh?”

  “Well, not everybody. I heard Felipe Reyes defending your honor on my way over here.”

  She touched her belly. “Sorry, Felipe. A fallen woman. I finally made it. And do you know what? It feels kind of good.”

  Clamato laughed. “Now you’re talking like a surfer. So you’re going through with it, hey? Even if it’s Marco’s?”

  “So it seems.” She didn’t feel like going into the missed flight, the appointment in LA.

  “I say again. I think you should stay at my place until you can get out of here. Then you and Isabel can go to Mexico City or something.”

  “And get rid of it? It’s too late.”

  “Not get rid of it. Just get out of town.”

  Shaking her head slowly. “I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t leave without my Mercedes. Especially not to leave her with him.”

  Clamato blew out his cheeks. “Wendy, you have no idea what you’re getting into. You’ve ditched this guy and taken up with a woman. You’re pregnant with his kid. People are starting to notice, it’s not just talk anymore. You’re making him a laughingstock. His macho’s at stake, dig it? He’s a Mexican. This is Mexico. You know they have a saying here? ‘La mujer, como el vidrio, siempre está en peligro.’”

  “A woman is like glass, always in danger? Well, he said he’d be finished with my car in a week or so.”

  “Yeah, and elephants can fly. He wants to keep you here. You’re his property. If he can’t have you, you’re gone. He’s a killer, you’ve seen that for yourself.”

  It was Wendy’s turn to contemplate the self-portrait of Isabel. “Not only did I see it, Pancho, I got it all on film. I got every damn detail at 500mm, one exposure every quarter second. Practically a whole thirty-six-exposure roll.”

  Clamato looked more worried than she’d thought possible. “Holy shit. And nobody knows?”

  “Well, I told the kids I missed it, of course. But Marco saw me with the camera when he came out of the water. That was a pretty strange flash.”

  “What do you mean, strange flash?”

  “I don’t know…. The way we looked at each other.”

  “Fuck.” Clamato slapped his forehead. “Okay. Here’s what we do. You give me the photos. I tell our friend that if you don’t get your car in a week they go right to my buddy at The Surfer’s Journal. You get your car, and you drive on out of here, then when you tell me you’re where you want to be, I’ll let him have them. It could work.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got to give them to the father.”

  “Wendy, this is Mexico. The photos wouldn’t help him. He’d lose the case anyway. But this just might be your ticket out of here. You and your car both.”

  She thought for a minute. “Why would you have to give Marco the photos after I called? Why couldn’t you just get them to the father?”

  Clamato shrugged and showed his piano key teeth. “Elementary, my dear Wendy. He’d kill me.”

  He was probably right. He was right: the photos could get her clear. But for once there was no question in her mind about what she should do. Her last sight of the father’s face took care of that. She had made some mistakes in her life, that was for sure. But she was not going to make one here.

  The bathroom door was open, mirror showing, and she moved in front of it for the second time. The shape of things to come was obvious.

  A decision had been made. She should get clear to honor it, but paradoxically, the condition she was in made that impossible. Her feeling for the father, her absolute need to help him, seemed to flow directly from her condition. Maybe, just maybe, she hadn’t been a very good person before.

  “The father’s still here, isn’t he?”

  “He’s camping out at the break. Even during the storm he’s walking the beach. They still haven’t found the body.”

  “I’m taking the roll out to him. It’s his. Hopefully he’ll give it back to me when he’s finished.”

  “Wendy, for Christ’s sake, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Oh, but I do. I finally figured it out. Is Marco going to kill me for doing what I have to do?”

  “He could. His stepfather will protect him. He could do anything he wants. That’s what you don’t fucking understand. They’re going to find you out on the beach someday, and they won’t even be able to tell it’s you. You think he cares about the
kid? You’re wrong. What he cares about is himself.”

  He stood there panting in the pink sweatshirt. Pussycat! He’d made her see it, that image, a little pile of clothes and flesh turning into a skeleton on the vast beach, alongside the bones of whales, dolphins, pelicans, seagulls, and parts of wrecked ships.

  In midafternoon, after the rain had stopped, she walked down the mile-long sandy two-track from the Barrio San Ignacio to the beach. Someone was beautifully whistling a tune that she knew she should recognize, but couldn’t quite. She was wearing her jeans, tee shirt out to cover the fact that the top two buttons were undone. The film canister was in her left-hand pocket.

  From the high dunes the ocean looked almost black, punctuated with whitecaps by the strong south wind. Curlicues of dry sand streamed in front of it, mixed with rolling strands of dried seaweed. The beach ran north unbroken for a hundred miles to Magdalena Bay. Clamato was sure there were secret breaks along the way and thought it could be driven with the right vehicle.

  Carrying her Adidas, she walked down onto the hard damp sand near the water and began the three-mile hike to the break. Better to avoid the road, and whoever might be on it.

  On calm days there would be a few mackerel fishermen swinging their lures around their heads like bolos, letting them fly, then pulling them in with the complicated sign language of hand-lining. Now there was no one. Broken, irregular waves occasionally frothed up around her legs, and she thought about removing her jeans but decided against it.

  One bare foot advanced and then the other. The usual song danced its way into her head.

  Grab your coat and get your hat

  Leave your worries on the doorstep

  Life can be so sweet

  On the sunny side of the street.

  Her brother would love this beach; it was all perspective, sea on one side, land on the other almost as far as you could see. And at the beginning of the perspective where the lines faded into the mist, wasn’t that a figure?

  It was a man, not a woman. You could tell, even though the figure was just taking shape.

  The father! She waved eagerly and picked up her pace. She wouldn’t have to do the whole three miles after all.

  The figure didn’t wave back. It seemed to be just standing there in the haze, looking in her direction. Waiting for her.

  She slowed down and finally stopped. The beach was noisy and confusing with wind and waves. How far had she come? If she turned around and started running back, could she make it? The last time she’d tried running, she’d felt a cramp like an ice pick in her belly and hadn’t tried again. Swim back? Not against the wind. Inland, except for the two-track, there was nothing but empty desert all the way to Garth Murphy’s ranch. But surprisingly, walking over the dunes from that desert, was another figure—a familiar one in loose white clothes and a straw cowboy hat. “Aquí estoy,” said Felipe Reyes when he got close enough to be heard. In Spanish, it sounded exactly right. Here I am.

  She nodded and smiled and couldn’t think of a word to say in return. The figure up ahead hadn’t moved.

  Felipe’s eyes were shadowed by the hat, and his sad smile was nowhere in evidence. He looked where she was looking, and his hands hung loosely at his sides. “Do you want me to walk with you?”

  “Please.”

  “I will walk with you then.”

  They continued down the wind. Blowing sand made her feet and ankles sting, and conversation was impossible. Felipe was holding his hat on with one hand, his loose clothes flapping like flags, hair over his face. The figure was no longer visible, if it had been there at all. She resisted an urge to take Felipe’s arm, but could feel the warmth of his body anyway. He was between her and the ocean and beyond him the whitecaps rolled by.

  The break was deserted, no tents, no campers, no one out. She and Felipe sheltered from the wind behind a small dune and Wendy suddenly felt weak and dizzy. She sank down on the sand, legs folded underneath her like a fifties college girl at a faculty tea. Looking up at Felipe and trying a smile. They hadn’t said a word to each other since the beginning of the walk.

  “Are you tired?”

  She just nodded and lowered her eyes.

  “Of course. You need to rest a little.”

  “Yes. Just a little. Thank you for walking with me. And how did you ever find me?”

  “It was no problem. I always know where you are.”

  She could see only his sad smile. “Felipe,” she said softly. “Please will you take off your hat? I’d like to see your eyes.”

  Where There’s a Will

  My fate these days apparently was to be given bad news in airports. Sure, I could rent a car, the girl at the counter told me in La Paz, but I couldn’t get to Paraíso in it. The roads had been washed out in the chubasco three days earlier.

  “When will they be fixed?” I watched as she drew in her breath and started to smile.

  “That’s all right. Forget it.” I took a taxi into town and at the driver’s advice got a room in a rustic set of bungalows off the malecón: Las Cabanas de los Arcos. The big Los Arcos Hotel was just up the street, and I headed there to try to pick up news.

  In the lobby, a burly gringo in a Hawaiian shirt, hair down to his shoulders, and a Pancho Villa mustache was addressing a group of tourists, telling them how to find their bus, where they were going, what to expect when they got there. It was a kayaking trip; they’d spend the next week paddling and camping in the lagoons of Magdalena Bay. The roads up there were okay.

  I stood around waiting until the burly gringo was free. Apart from the basic details, the man rarely responded directly to the kayakers’ questions. He answered with jokes, sometimes off-color. The kayakers were thrown off-balance, and they ended up forgetting their concerns. He looked a little like Slim Pickens, but with more of an edge. They called him Timo.

  When I asked about Paraíso, Timo just looked at me and raised his chin. He had small, very clear violet eyes.

  “They tell me you can’t get through,” I said.

  “What do you want to go there for?”

  “To visit my sister. It’s kind of an emergency.”

  “Huh.” Timo fluttered his lips thoughtfully. “Your sister drive an old Mercedes?”

  “An old Mercedes?” My head whirled. “She just might.”

  “Weeell …” Flapping his lips. “Got something you might be interested in, if you want to take a little ride.”

  Timo drove an old Toyota Land Cruiser decorated with beach debris. The windows were nonfunctional, and the back was filled with ancient dolls: “People who’ve done me wrong. I stick pins in ’em every once in a while. That one there ran off with my wife.” We turned off the main road into an alley, bumped over a high curb, and stopped in front of a wooden gate.

  He tossed me a key and drove inside after I’d opened the gate. The big, overgrown lot was a graveyard of boats, trucks, and machinery. Timo pointed with his chin. At the far end, under a tar-paper lean-to, I could see an engine hung in a frame between two huge, inwardly cambered tires, like something out of Donald Duck. Closer up, I saw it was an old Volkswagen with the engine exposed, the fenders gone, the body stripped down, and rear tires maybe from an airplane. Timo called it a Bug.

  It made my heart beat faster. “How does it run?”

  “Cool.”

  “Would it get me to Paraíso?”

  “If you go by the beach.”

  “How much do you want for it?”

  “Shit. Just go ahead and borrow it.” He sucked the ends of his mustache. “I didn’t pay anything for it. In fact, it’s not even mine.”

  “Well, thanks. Very generous of you. Mind if I ask why you’re doing this?”

  Timo shot me a straight, hard look. “If your sister’s the one I’ve heard about, I think she’ll be glad to see you.”

  “Christ. What have you heard?”

  “Aw, just grapevine stuff. Something about a mechanic she got in wrong with, trying to fix her car.”

&n
bsp; “Really? How did she get in wrong with him?”

  “Good mechanic. Bad guy.” Timo had to hurry to catch the bus with his kayakers. The Bug started right up with a blast of straight pipes, and he backed it out from under the lean-to. “Tell you what,” he said, climbing from the cockpit. “If it breaks down this trip, you take it off my hands, okay?”

  “I guess. Do I have any choice? How much?”

  Timo unfurled a crocodile smile. “Three thousand US should cover it.”

  I breakfasted on huevos rancheros just after dawn at an open-air restaurant on the malecón and blasted my way out of the city, catching more than a few eyeballs. Timo had told me to take a left on the first dirt road to the west twelve miles north of La Paz, then straight on to the beach. The Bug ate up the rough road beautifully as thick, green, aromatic scrub closed in around me, and after a few miles I stopped to take a pee.

  The desert had seemed about as far away from my beloved Costa Rican jungles as you could get, but in its own way it was a place of plenty. Flowers were out on all the cacti. Even the huge cardons had blossoms the size of old phonograph horns, and the buzzing of bees slowly filled the vacuum left by the silence of the engine. Between the cacti, a floor of talcum-fine red dusty soil patterned with the prints of what looked like cattle, coyotes, snakes, lizards, foxes, raccoons, badgers, roadrunners, quail, and deer.

  A big eagle-like hawk with a white head and bright red legs inspected me from the top of a cardon, and a glowing black wasp as big as my thumb wandered along the sand flipping its red wings. I recognized it from National Geographic: a female Pompilidus with the habit after mating of stalking and overcoming a tarantula with a series of nonfatal but paralyzing stings and gluing a fertilized, opalescent egg onto its hairy helpless belly. It then carefully buries the immobile but quite conscious tarantula, and after a while the egg hatches and the grub begins to feed.

  The wasp spread its wings and disappeared. What was my sister planning? What was she thinking? For all I knew she loved her mechanic.

  She might not laugh when I rolled up in this comical contraption. Maybe she’d call the policía? Like before.