T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Several piss-warm beers later, he began to feel like himself again — and so what if he’d lost his shirt somewhere in the surf and the slope of his gut was as orange as a kumquat? He was in Mexico and he was drunk and he was going to go back to the hotel and find Gina and make it up to her, ask her to dinner, take a cab — a whole fleet of cabs — and buy her all the steak and lobster she could hold. It was past six by the time he got back to the hotel, and he went directly to the bar. She wasn’t there, so he figured he’d just station himself at a table that commanded a view of the walkway to the rooms, and wait till she came back from wherever she was.

They served him even though he wasn’t wearing a shirt — nobody in Mexico cared whether you had a shirt or not; you didn’t need shoes either, just feet and flesh and money. He drank tequila with wedges of lime and some true cold beers, and when the shadows began to lengthen he made the mistake of removing his sunglasses and frightening the waitress with his eye. By now, the place had begun to fill up, burned noses and seared shoulders, women in various states of deshabille, but still no Gina. He decided to make another foray up the beach to see if she’d maybe taken one of the water taxis over to Puerto Angel or Carizalillo and was only now coming back.

The sun was hanging on a string just over the horizon, pink and lurid, and the tourists were busy packing up their sunblock and towels and paperback novels while the dark people, the ones who lived here year-round and didn’t know what a vacation was, began to drift out of the trees with their children and their dogs to reclaim their turf. He smelled crushed flowers, the immitigable salt of the sea, fish fried in oil, shit. He kept walking, intent on the way his toes grabbed and released the sand, and he’d got halfway to the boats before he realized he’d left his sunglasses back on the table at the bar. No matter. He never even broke stride. They were nothing to him, one more possession, one more thing he could slough off like so much dead skin, like April’s desk and her clothes and the straw baskets and pottery she’d decorated the apartment with. Besides, there was hardly any glare off the water now and these people, these coppery dark little grimacing Indians who seemed to sprout up all over the beach once the sun began to close down, they needed to see him, with his flaming belly and his crusted cheekbone and savage eye, because this was what their criminal elements had done to him and he was wearing the evidence of it like a badge. Fuck you , he was muttering under his breath, fuck you all.

At some point, Lester looked up to orient himself and saw that he was just opposite the restaurant from last night. There it sat, squat amid the trees, its lights reflected on the surface of the lagoon. A soft glow lit the bar, which he could just make out, figures there, movement, cocktail hour. He had a sudden intimation that Gina was in there, her dark head bent over a table in back, a drunken intimation that counted absolutely for nothing, but he acted on it, slashing through the fetid lagoon in his sandals and shorts, mounting the three steps from the beach and drifting across the creaking floorboards to the bar.

It wasn’t Gina seated at the table but a local woman, the proprietress no doubt, totting up figures in a ledger; she raised her head when he walked in, but looked right through him. There were three men at the bar, some sort of police, in black shirts and trousers, one of them wearing dark glasses though there was no practical reason for them at this hour. They were smoking and talking quietly, in soft rasping voices. A plastic half-gallon jug of tequila stood before them on the bar, amid a litter of plates and three water glasses half-full of silvery liquid. They ignored Lester. He didn’t exist, despite the evidence of his bulging eye and cracked face, the swell of his sunburned belly and the salt-encrusted hair that stood straight out from his head like a fright wig. Lester addressed the bartender. “Margarita rocks,” he said. “With hielo.”

He sipped his drink, profoundly drunk now, but drunk for a reason — two reasons. Or three. For one thing, he had pain to kill, physical pain, and for another he was on vacation, and if you can’t be legitimately wasted on your vacation, then when can you be? The third reason was Gina. He’d come so close, and then he’d blown it. Criminal elements. He glanced up at the cops with an idle curiosity that turned sour almost immediately: where had they been when he needed them? Why weren’t they out on the beach at night, making the town safe for overweight gringos and their quick-fisted little gringa companions?

And then he noticed something that made his heart skip a beat: the boots. These guys were wearing boots, sharp-toed boots with silver toe-caps, the only boots in town. Nobody in Puerto Escondido wore boots. They could barely afford sandals, fishermen who earned their living with a hook and thirty feet of line wrapped around an empty two-liter Pepsi bottle, maids and itinerant merchants, dirt farmers from the hills. Boots? They were as likely to have Armani blazers, silk shirts, and monogrammed boxer shorts. Understanding came down like a hammer. He had to find Gina, had to tell her.

Dusk now, children everywhere, dogs, fishermen up to their chests in the rolling water, bats swooping, sand fleas leaping away from the blind advance of his feet. The steady flow of alcohol had invigorated him — he was feeling no pain, none at all — though he realized he’d have to eat something soon, and clean himself up, especially if he was going to see Gina, because his whole body was seething and rushing, and everything, from the palms to the palapas to the rocks scattered along the shore, seemed to have grown fur. Or fuzz. Peach fuzz. Peach fuzz on everything.

That really got to him, the peach fuzz — the conceit of it — and though he was angry and upset and had a big revelation to lay on Gina, he couldn’t help chuckling to himself and shaking his head in a wide rueful arc. That was when he stepped in the hole and went down awkwardly on his right side, his face plowing a furrow in the loose sand, and the bad eye, wet with fluid, picking up a fine coating of sharp white granules. But it was no problem, no problem at all. He rolled over and lay on his back awhile, laughing softly to himself. Criminal elements , he thought, and he was speaking the thought aloud as people stepped around him in the sand, sure, sure. And I’m the Pope in Rome.

When he finally got back to the hotel, to the palm-fringed courtyard with the reception desk and the bar/restaurant off to his right and the pool and guest rooms to his left, he hesitated. Just stood there glistening in the muted light like a statue erected in honor of the befuddled tourist. On the one hand, he was struck by the impulse to go back to his room, wash the grit from his body, do something with his hair and fish another shirt out of his bag; on the other, he felt an equally strong urge to poke his head in the bar for a minute — just a minute — to see if Gina was there. Ultimately, it was no contest. Up the stairs he went, feet thundering on the planks, the sand sparkling all over him as if he’d been dipped in sugar.

There. There was the waitress, giving him an odd look — a blend of hopefulness and horror — and the thicket of heads bent over plates and glasses, the air heavy as water, the bartender looking up sharply. Ever hopeful, Lester lurched out onto the floor.

This time he got lucky: Gina was sitting at a table just around the corner of the bar, the farthest table out on the veranda, her legs crossed at the knee, one shoe dangling from her toes. There was music playing somewhere, a faint hum of it leaking in out of the night, Mexican music, shot full of saccharine trumpets and weeping violins. It was a romantic moment, or it could have been. But Gina didn’t see him coming — she was turned the other way, in profile, the sea crashing behind her, her hair hanging limp to her shoulders — and it wasn’t till he’d rounded the end of the bar that he saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man sitting across from her, a drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Lester saw a dangle of red hair, muscles under a Lollapalooza T-shirt, the narrow face of an insect.