Robert Butler - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Stories

They didn’t yet know about one another what I already knew about them. They were scattered about and I floated near them in turn and I played a little game for myself, trying to figure out which type of show each had been on. One woman was wearing a black two-piece suit and she still had on jewelry, a pair of hammered silver and turquoise earrings and a heavy matching necklace, and even the bra of her suit was held together by a metal brooch. She was maybe fifty and hoping to look in her thirties and her hair was bleached a blond so shiny and light that in the glint of the sun it seemed almost the color of her hammered silver. She seemed easy for me to place on one of the puzzle-solving shows, not just because she was working a crossword puzzle in a tightly folded newspaper but because of the smugness of her smile as she did it and the fact that she was doing it in ink.

The next was a young couple, and this was the woman who jiggled up and down about the drink and she flashed blinding smiles all over the pool. But when she lay back on her lounge chair and I floated past the wrinkled bottoms of her feet, I knew they’d logged many hundreds of miles in shopping malls and I figured she was from one of the price-guessing shows.

I paddled around to the other side of the pool, which was quite big, and I passed an American man playing with great patience with a little Mexican girl wearing water wings. The child’s father was standing a few meters away in the water and the little girl would swim from her father to the American and back again with great glee. The American was very loud and very gentle in his encouraging the girl and the father was pleased but a little nervous, as well. The American was bald with a big laugh and a big blond mustache and he was wearing dog tags. His hair was too shaggy for a current military man and he was perhaps in his early forties, and I knew from his age and the dog tags that he was a Vietnam veteran, one of those who was either unable or reluctant to forget where he had been. But it was his wife who I realized was the game-show woman. She was sitting on her lounge chair and she was reading a book and I know she was the veteran’s wife because of the looks she gave him now and then as he grew particularly loud. His voice bellowed, “Swim, little darling, swim over there to your daddy now,” and the wife lowered her book and her head angled slightly to the side and there was something around her eyes and her mouth that was very hard to read. Like she loved this man and was distressed by him in such equal parts that there was only something very small and placid that she could ever show about him. Or maybe even feel.

I looked toward Vinh and he was still floating on his inner tube, though his stomach was not visible, like he was slowly sinking through the hole. I wondered if this was comfortable for him, if I should go over and try to help him adjust himself on the tube. If I just let him float and slowly sink, he might finally decide to slip into the water and feel refreshed and then comfortably readjust himself and he would like this place even more. But he might sink farther until he felt stuck and it would irritate him and make his business mind reawaken and criticize these people for offering inner tubes instead of inflatable mattresses and this would be the final little irritation that prevented him from having a moment’s real enjoyment for the rest of the trip. It could go either way. So I watched his tube slowly turning and he was very still and I looked back to the wife with the book and I decided she’d appeared on a question-answering show.

As it turned out, however, I was wrong about two of the three. The one with the jewelry turned out to be from the pricing game and the young one who jiggled was a puzzle expert. I know this because after a while the three women, each in her own time, ended up in the hot tub at the side of the pool. As each arrived, there were little hello-to-a-stranger nods and I didn’t want to miss any of their talk, so I pulled myself from the pool and plucked the bodice of my one-piece up into place-I am happy to be very slim but I am small-chested — and I approached the hot tub. A beautiful dark-skinned Mexican woman was ahead of me going up the steps of the hot tub. She was wearing a skimpy two-piece suit and was in the process of making it skimpier, twirling and tucking the cloth of the panties of it into the separation of her own very lovely bottom so that it was now like a string bikini, and the eyes of the three American women rose and then whirled like the steam from the water. The Mexican I settled into the water and the three others moved just a little bit closer to one another in the shared put-down they’d felt from the flamboyant sexiness of this woman.

They hardly gave me a glance as I eased into the hot water in the space between them and the Mexican, who had thrown her head back and closed her eyes as if the most handsome lover in the world had asked her if he could kiss her throat. The Americans could hardly say what they had on their minds, for fear that this woman spoke English, but at least her presence broke the ice between them.

The bouncy one that I had pegged as a shopper spoke first. She looked at the other two and said, “Well, y’all look like you’re from the same side of the border as this little old girl.”

I looked at the Mexican woman and she did not move; she kept receiving the kisses of Valentino’s ghost or whoever and I myself felt downright invisible. This wasn’t a bad feeling, but I did glance out into the pool, and at moments like these a sense of Vinh’s no-nonsense business eye was something of a comfort to me. He could always see through anything, it seemed to me, and I could imagine myself standing beside him on a hill above it all.

This all happened in a brief moment and when I looked back to the others, they were chuckling at the remark, though the woman with the veteran for a husband was covering up the laugh with her hand, like she was a little guilty about it. The woman wearing the jewelry said, “You don’t sound like you’re too far over the border. Texas?”

“Louisiana,” the bouncy one said, and I sank lower into the hot tub, some sort of reflex. Then she said, “Not New Orleans either. I’m from up north, where the real Southerners are.”

The one with the jewelry said, “So you don’t do Mardi Gras?”

“No way, honey. That’s for the people with no shame whatsoever.” And her eyes moved to the Mexican woman and the eyes of the other two followed, though the woman from the question-answering show was the last one over and the first one to look away again. When she did, she saw me and it seemed to be with a little shock, like she hadn’t noticed me before. Maybe she hadn’t. Or since I was submerged now to my chin, maybe it looked like I was just this disembodied head floating on the surface of the hot tub. I smiled at her like she was the red light on the camera.

“I bet you’re from California,” Northern Louisiana said to the woman with the jewelry.

“Minnesota,” said the other. “Not Minneapolis either. I’m from up north, where the real Northerners are.”

Everybody laughed and I wanted to sink a little deeper, but I’d run out of submergible parts. I thought about getting out of the tub, but I still wanted to hear them discover the game-show connection, and fortunately that happened very quickly, Northern Louisiana asked Minnesota what it was that brought her to Mexico, no doubt eager to let these women know that she was a winner on a show. But Minnesota got the first chance. She declared that she’d won on “The Price Is Right” and Northern Louisiana jiggled up and down in excitement and proclaimed her own triumph on “Wheel of Fortune.” I pouted briefly at getting these two wrong, and the third woman finally spoke and said she’d won on “Tic, Tac, Dough” and then I nearly drowned in the hot tub because they all three began to jump up and down in the excitement of this revelation and the waves of hot water rushed over my face, splashing up my nose and into my mouth and eyes.