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Written by Christopher Woods
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He does not know how long he has been sitting there, his feet dangling in the water. The
surface of the marina is a liquid fire to the eyes in the harsh sunlight. But now, as if waking, he
hears someone approach.
He turns but does not see a person so much as a glimmer of someone. The day is white hot,
the sun unmerciful. His eyes are unable to focus on much of anything but the wild gold mirror of
the water. The person who approaches seems in pieces, in wide and narrow slivers of moving
light. He thinks it is a woman, but it depends how the sun discovers her, the rings and bracelets
she wears, how the wind plays with her hair.
The woman’s image shifts across the sand, finally coming to a halt. At last he is certain it is a
woman. He can see her face,
“Excuse me,” she says, “ but are you waiting for Javier?”
Even if his eyes have focused, his thoughts have not. And it comes to him, slowly, that this is
still Mexico. And still morning.
“Is this Javier’s boat?” she asks.
She points to the small skiff bobbing a few yards offshore. Like the other skiffs, it is brightly
painted, used to haul tourists around the bay and back.
He is certain he has never seen this woman before. But he is also thinking how the sun ignites
things, people and objects. This woman, for example, seems on fire.
“It is,” he says. “Javier is late again.”
“Good. I mean, I was sure he had left without me. Breakfast at my hotel was especially slow
this morning.”
Only now does he take his feet from the water. He begins rubbing them slowly. He listens to
the woman distantly, like one hears far off night trains. It is the gold about her that fascinates him.
“Just what does one do all day on Javier’s boat?” she asks, a bit suspiciously.
He stands up, feels his head clear. Looking at her face, he decides she is fiftyish, thirty years
older than he. Fiftyish and not in a bad way, he thinks, but perhaps lonely. Maybe she is on
vacation from someone, from something.
Then there is the matter of the gold. He thinks it ridiculous for a woman to wear so much
jewelry just to float around in a small skiff. He has never seen a woman wear so much jewelry,
in fact. To look at her directly, he finds that he must squint a bit. Her eyes are hidden behind
sunglasses.
He tells her what one does, all day, on Javier’s boat. It begins with a tour of the tiny harbor,
then a brief visit to the coral reef at the end of the island. If she decides to snorkel there, she must
be careful. The coral is beautiful, but it cuts sharper than glass.
After the coral shrine beneath the sea, they will visit the turtle museum. Shelves of turtles, all
of them preserved in bottles of formaldehyde. The turtles are either special or maimed in some
way.
There are turtles with two heads, Siamese twins, even double shells. But he doesn’t elaborate,
preferring to leave something for her imagination. So he doesn’t tell her about the sets of
bleached white shark jaws, or the dusty stuffed island birds, or the ancient, mistaken maps. He
himself does not know why these last items are part of a turtle museum.
He tells her that in the afternoon Javier will dive for conch, and then cook them on the beach
for lunch.
“How do you know all this?” she asks.
The severity of her expression makes him want to laugh. It is as though she had asked him the
secret of life and was awaiting the answer.
“This is my third time out with Javier this week. As you know, there’s little else to do here.”
She nods in agreement. She tells him how she feels about this island paradise. It is the nights
she hates most. Days she spends shopping once she is tired of the beach. She buys small trinkets
and paperback novels, and jewelry.
“ I hate to go back to my hotel room at night. I wonder if I’ve been trying too hard to relax.”
“It could be that,” he tells her. He knew it could be any number of things.
“I get so irritable. I can’t understand it. I don’t know what the answer is. There aren’t answers
for everything, you know.”
He sits down on the rickety dock. She sits down beside him. He puts his feet back in the water.
She rummages in her tote bag. Out comes make-up, several paperbacks, a hairbrush and another
pair of sunglasses.
“My name is Frank,” he tells her. “I’m staying at Zazil-Ha, in a beach cabana.” He has
volunteered this information and he doesn’t know why. It makes him feel uncomfortable.
“A cabana? That sounds seductive. Is it?”
“Not yet. Hardly anyone around, really.”
From her bag she has now removed a large tube of tanning oil. She opens it and smells the
contents. She then removes her shroud and begins rubbing oil on her shoulders.
“That damned Posada del Mar is suffocating,” she announces. “It reminds me of a Holiday Inn
in Natchez, a long time ago.”
He doesn’t ask her about Natchez. Maybe it is better not to know. He thinks she looks quite
good for her age. He watches her as she rubs the oil on her body while complaining about the
hotel staff.
“The hotel maids wear uniforms that make them look like Prussian nurses. To top it all, no one
understands me. Imagine, an entire month of Berlitz down the drain.”
He tells her about the coconut man at Zazil-Ha. An island native, his only apparent job is to
gather fallen coconuts. He thinks that man’s life is idyllic, and wonders if she agrees. But she has
been rummaging in her bag again and has not heard about the coconut man.
“Did I tell you, my name is Liz Winters?”
Thinking he can’t very well leave her hand extended in the air between them, he takes it
reluctantly. When he tries to withdraw it, she does not want to let go. But her hand is slippery
with oil and her grip slips. She looks away.
“Where is that boatman?” she asks.
“I have discovered a secret about Javier. His promptness, or lack of it, depends very much if he
was drinking the night before. It’s anyone’s guess, when we’ll see him. If we see him.”
“In that case,” Liz announces, “I don’t think I can wait much longer.”
“It’s up to you. You might miss the turtles.”
“I know. Do you think we’ll meet again? I mean, would you like to have drinks?’
“Sure,” he says, not believing his own voice.
Quite simply, it is the gold about her that fascinates him. He needs to know if there is
something else, something more, beneath the ornamental surface.
“Come to my room at the Posada del Mar tonight. Not for dinner, not with that chef. Come for
drinks. We can talk.”
At sunset he walks along the beach toward her hotel. The sand looks much different at night.
It is dark, not glittering with broken shells as it does in the fierce sunlight. The horizon is now
empty of skiffs. Music from a waterfront cantina rides the night wind down the beach.
Once inside her room, he realizes that she has been drinking heavily. The air is thick with
cigarette smoke. He sits on the bed while she pours shots of gold tequila. When she sits down
beside him, she rests a hand on his thigh. He leaves it there. He can already sense how unhappy
she is. He wants to know more about her, but at the same time he thinks he already knows
enough. He decides to stay, to drink, to see where the conversation will take them.
She tells him about her husband of forty years, Harry, a stroke victim who also suffers from
Alzheimer’s. Harry lives in a small apartment that was once their garage. He has a tendency to
wander, she explains. An older black man named Willis cares for Harry, which leaves Liz free to
come and go, and to travel, as she pleases. Harry doesn’t do much but putter about, and fill up
one coloring book after another. As Liz explains all this, she does not remove her hand from
Frank’s leg. Then she asks Frank about his life.
He tells her he is recently divorced. For a time he suspected that his wife was seeing his best
friend. After some investigation, he discovered otherwise. She was seeing his best friend’s wife.
Maybe, he says, he could have lived with that situation. But then his wife walked out on him.
“I suppose that clenched things,” he says.
“When these things start,” Liz says, “you can never imagine how far they will go. Like with
Harry. All I know is that I needed to get away for awhile. Just wait it out, I told myself. I’m on
the road a lot. Mexico is good for that. For waiting. When you are away and waiting, you see
things differently.”
Frank watches as Liz gets up to fix them another drink. She staggers a bit as she walks. He is
getting a bit drunk himself, not as much as Liz, but he is getting there.
“Is that what you’re doing here?” she calls from the bar. “Are you waiting too?”
He hears the terror in her voice. Watching her, he suspects that he is better at waiting than
Liz. Maybe not. She has been waiting a lot longer. After all, this is a new concept for him. Is he
waiting for something to happen with his life? Something new and fresh and good? He realizes it
will have to come out of the blue, a surprise of one kind or another. He is waiting because he
hasn’t yet recovered from the divorce. He has made no plans other than to watch time pass, and
hopefully to find some self-esteem again.
“I think so,” he tells her. “Yes, I am.”
He realizes that she has not heard him. She is looking for something, probably another
cigarette. In the dark and smoky room, he thinks she looks weary, perhaps beaten down. He
thinks about her gold. He believes she wears all the jewelry to hide that weary part of herself.
Then, when she returns with fresh shots, or perhaps it is a few rounds later, he sees two of her.
Not that it matters how drunk they become. Neither of them, for now, have anywhere to go.
He thinks about the strangeness of this room in the Posada del Mar, about all odd couplings in
hotel rooms, in Mexico and not. The air in some of them, this room certainly, is desperate and
thin. That, and overpowering. He breathes it in deeply and closes his eyes.
He is thinking and breathing when she is beside him again. He does not stir when she
unbuttons his shirt and runs her fingers across his chest. He does not resist when she pushes him
back on the bed, kisses his stomach and fumbles with his belt.
“Does this mean dinner is off?” he asks.
“I don’t think either one of us is in any condition to go anyplace.”
“Okay.”
“Isn’t this what you wanted, why you came?”
“What do you mean?”
Suddenly, she sits up in bed. Her blouse is open and her breasts fall free. There is fire in her
eyes.
“You came here to get laid.”
“You invited me. That’s why I came.”
“Listen to me, pretty boy. You aren’t so young that you don’t know about mercy lays. Older
women all over the world do this for younger men. But let me tell you something. Mercy is a
two- way street. You would have come here on your own. I can see it in your eyes. Oh yes.”
“You’re crazy. I don’t need you.”
“We need each other. Now. Believe it because it’s true. Our kind, we’re easy to recognize.
Sometimes, I think we even have our own scent.”
Frank says nothing. He is quiet as she continues to undress him, and then herself. He wonders
if her version of the truth is the right one. He watches as she goes for another drink. This time,
she brings the bottle back with her. She also brings a tube of oil. She pours a good amount of oil
into her hand, then passes the tube to him. He follows suit. Soon they begin to rub the oil all over
each other. He rubs her shoulders, her breasts, her stomach.
“Lower,” she says. “That’s it. Yes.”
“Better?”
“Oh, yes.”
When he has finished with the oil, he bends over and buries his face in the small of her back.
He begins to cry in a silent way and she does not hear him.
“That’s it. Show me you’ve learned how to keep a woman from straying.”
His tears mix with the oil, until after awhile he doesn’t know where one ends and the other
begins.
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Christopher Woods is the author of UNDER A RIVERBED SKY, prose poems and brief fictions from PANTHER CREEK PRESS (panthercreekpress.com), and HEART SPEAK, stage monologues for actors and actresses from STONE RIVER PRESS (stoneriverpress.com). His play, MOONBIRDS, about doomed census takers at work in an unpopulated desert country, received its New York City premiere by PERSONAL SPACE THEATRICS. He lives in Houston, and in Chappell Hill, Texas.
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