Joe Lansdale - Captains Outrageous

More screams and sighs came when a kid, eight or nine, tore lose from his parents and leaped when the tender went down and landed on deck with a thud and got up laughing. When his mom and dad got on board the tender they promptly whipped his ass to the delight of us all.

An elderly man vomited over the side and a young woman I had my eye on lost her straw hat to the wind. It hit the ocean, the waves leaped on it, and it was gone. I could have jumped in the water to save it so I could be her knight in shining armor and maybe get laid.

I balanced the idea.

Big waves.

Pussy.

Big waves.

Pussy.

Naw. Waves too big. Pussy uncertain. She might just thank me. And the idea of drowning with a woman’s straw hat in my hand didn’t appeal to me.

One thing, though, she didn’t have big tits. I’d have to tell Leonard that later as an example of my maturity. I wouldn’t mention the dancer from last night and what I had thought about her.

On board, Leonard and I seated ourselves next to Big Bill and his wife. We were then borne by a chugging motor and churning waves toward shore, tailed by black diesel smoke.

There were lots of folks throwing up over the side and one idiot thought a log floating in the water was a whale and started screaming about it. When the log bumped against the boat he shut up and looked straight ahead like maybe he had spotted an important smoke signal in the distance that only he could translate.

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.

It 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 MEXICO 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.