Jon Bilbao - Still the Same Man

They followed the cable guide as they made their ascent. It ended in a buoy, and just next to that was the boat. Their Egyptian guide gave them a hand hoisting themselves onto the platform at the stern .

“Everything OK?”

The professor’s son gave two thumbs up. His partner took off his tank, which the guide then put in the rack set into the side of the vessel. He did the same with the professor’s son’s tank .

“Something to drink now?”

The two men nodded .

They took off their wetsuits, and the guide grabbed a couple of beers from the cooler. He took another for himself and sat down at the helm.

The professor’s son and his partner drank as they recounted the dive. There were other diving boats anchored around the buoy. They ate something and then took a dip in the nude, not caring that they could be seen by the other boats. The professor’s son got out of the water with a cheeky laugh and went into the cabin. His partner followed him. They closed the door.

The guide didn’t pay them any attention. It wasn’t the first time he had a pair of fully-grown men fooling around like kids and having a kiss and a cuddle. What’s more, they’d accepted his boat rental price without any haggling, and his instinct told him they’d probably leave a decent tip, too. He killed time reading the previous day’s paper. Eventually his passengers came out of the cabin and told him they were ready to do another dive.

“The locomotive now?”

They nodded .

At the stern end of the deck, the professor’s son squeezed into his wetsuit. His partner went back into the cabin .

“I’m gonna grab my other goggles,” he said. “These ones pinch my nose.”

From among the various tanks, the guide chose a full one. It had spent all morning in the sun, its contents expanding in the heat. This fact in itself wasn’t enough to cause what happened next. But the tank was old, and it had a crack where the cylinder joined the air valve. When the guide put it down on the deck with a little thump, the bottle exploded .

In the cabin, the explosion threw the professor’s son’s partner against a bulkhead. He got up, stunned. He was bleeding from the forehead, and there was a sharp buzzing in his ears. He staggered out on deck, which was stained red with the guide’s blood. There were pieces of him stuck to the gunwale and others floating in the sea, in pink patches of water. The professor’s son was also in the water, having been propelled outward by the explosion. He wasn’t moving, and was floating facedown.

His partner leaped into the water after him .

Joanes drove leaning into the wheel. The wind and rain lashed against the car. They came off the small lane that led to the hotel, turned onto the Los Tigres road, and followed it away from the town, which disappeared into the distance. They made slow progress due to the almost total invisibility and the branches strewn across the road.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” said Joanes. “The cabin should be on the left.”

In the back seat, the professor’s wife pressed her nose against the window next to her, but she couldn’t see a thing. Her husband passed her the flashlight, and she shone it at the passing roadside.

“See it?”

“Not yet.”

The wind sent a garden chair flying out of nowhere, and it smashed into the side of the car, making all three of them jump. A nightgown, presumably belonging to some lady from Los Tigres, went flying past the headlights, all puffed up in the wind, its sleeves flailing wildly.

“Focus!” the professor told his wife. “It must be around here somewhere.”

“You don’t think we already passed it back there, do you?”

Nobody answered.

A hundred or so yards further along, the woman shouted, “There! There’s something over there!”

Joanes braked suddenly and looked to where the flashlight was shining. He couldn’t see more than a track coming off the main road. The light didn’t reach any further than that.

“Do you think that’s it?” asked the professor’s wife.

“We’re going to have to risk it,” replied Joanes.

He turned onto the side street, which was narrow, riddled with potholes, and almost completely choked with vegetation. They pressed on, crushing branches and praying they wouldn’t get stuck.

“There!” they cried all together.

A one-story building, the windows boarded up. Joanes stopped the car in front of the door, which was closed but rattling inside its frame in the wind.

“Give me the flashlight,” he told the woman.

He jumped out of the car and ran toward the cabin, which was raised above the ground on a platform about a foot and a half high. A couple of steps led up to the entrance. At some point a lock had protected the door, but it had been wrenched off a long time ago. Somebody had passed a piece of rope through the remaining hole and attached it to a hook on the front of the building. Joanes removed the rope, and the wind shot the door open. He gave the place a quick once over and went back to the car.

“We’ll carry your wife in together,” he told the professor. “The chair stays in the trunk.”

They carried the woman to the cabin, splashing through the soaking mush of leaves. They left her on a metal bed base whose one missing leg had been replaced by a few bricks and on top of which lay a grayish mattress smattered with stains. It was the only piece of furniture in the cabin.

Joanes went back one last time to the car for the blankets and the rest of the things that the hotel owner had given them. The next priority was to close the cabin’s door in such a way that it would stay closed. On the inside of the wall there was another hook, and Joanes wound the rope around it. The door banged fiercely against the frame, and it looked like the rope wouldn’t hold out for long. On the floor there were several more boards like those covering the windows. He chose the one that seemed most resistant and used it to buttress the door. All the while, the professor shone the flashlight on Joanes. The door stopped rattling, and the noise of the wind dimmed.

Having done all this, Joanes could finally take a proper look at the place where they were going to spend the night.

It smelled of damp, of stagnant air, of rot, and of something else, which the three of them could only associate with excrement. The biggest room took up almost the entire surface area of the cabin and, given its size, they guessed it was where whomever the construction had been built for had slept, if indeed it had ever been occupied. Another room, tucked away in a corner at one end of the building, was closed off to them by a metal door. Joanes pushed the door, and it gave a little groan as it swung open. There before him was an empty, windowless space, just a few feet long on each side. He guessed that at some point it had been intended as an office or storeroom.

The bathrooms were on the other side of the cabin. There were three showers, another three more stalls for the toilets, and a couple of sinks. The stalls didn’t have doors, and if at some point they’d had toilets, someone had long since done away with them. Only the plumbing pipes were left, jutting out of the wall, along with some holes in the grounds, holes which someone had used not too long ago. Of course, there was no water. In the corner lay the remains — the skin and a muddle of bones — of what might have been a possum. The whole cabin had a polished cement floor.

That was it.

Some rusty cans of food, bottles, and other trash were littered across the floor, signs that other guests sometimes stopped by the cabin. This worried Joanes, who then double-checked that the door and windows were firmly shut. Whoever had blocked the windows had done so with great care. At least they’d be protected from the rain.