Light Action in the Caribbean (15 page)

“Except the Hilfiger windbreaker you got me. And I got some underwear.”

She wished right away she hadn’t said it. He hunched over
and began to imitate a crowing rooster flapping its wings and then broke into an imitation of a matador’s capework, daring the bull to charge.

The restaurant was called Michael’s. He’d gotten them a table near a window so they could see the sun set. She gave him an approving look.

When she reached for her menu, he waved her off. “I’ll order,” he told her. “If you don’t know—I don’t know, maybe you know—but if you don’t know how to order food and wine in a foreign country, you can screw it up. You don’t want that. Besides, in some of these places you have to be able to read
through
the menu, you know, to what they’re actually saying. You gotta put the French aside.”

When the waiter came, David ordered oysters for both of them and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

“A cabernet, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And I’ll go with the marlin and, for her, the grouper. Now this is local, right?”

“Yes sir. We purchased it this afternoon on the dock.”

“But, instead of the rémoulade, the mango and chili deal, we’ll have peas. Fresh peas mixed with carrots. Can you do that?”

“Of course, sir.”

“And with dinner we’ll have a California chardonnay. Let’s see if you’ve got a Chalone here.” He picked up the wine list.

“Would monsieur like to try perhaps a Riesling or a Pinot Gris with the fish?”

“No. This Chalone here will be great.”

They ate in silence. She always found this the hardest part. She felt stupid, that she had nothing to say. She thought about the Bob Marley tape, but she’d forgotten to listen to it. She remembered some guy in the news a while back, maybe in Haiti, but not what that was about. Were they coffee growers on San Carlos? Her job. Boring. David said the place she worked, a psychiatric clinic, was interesting because more and more people were actually crazy, but he said the doctors were all losers—“dogheads,” he called them—because they had no Web sites. “Sooner or later,” he told her, “
everybody
and
everything
is going to be on-line.

“If you want to make yourself some money,” he advised, “look deep into your business—step one. Step two, upgrade. Everywhere. For example, with the Web sites, you’ve already got psychiatric profiles, I’ve read up on them. You can match those profiles to standard kinds of treatment, therapy, whatever, and some people will be able to cure themselves, right off the Net. You laugh, but it’s true. If you have correct information and you apply yourself, you can do anything. Up until now, too much information has been in the hands of too few people.”

She didn’t think it would work, but she hadn’t wanted to get into it with him.

She was watching the sunset and wondering if this was when you saw the green flash.

“Are you married?” she asked him.

“Married. Are you kidding?”

She wanted to try the sorbet with fresh guava for dessert, but he ordered Key lime pie.

“Dairy,” he cautioned her. “Never order dairy in the tropics.”

After the meal he asked for Courvoisier on the deck and ordered amaretto for her.

She thought the stars were beautiful. She wanted to lie in his arms, but he hardly looked at her. He sipped a second Courvoisier and nodded at people who walked past, as though they were all in on the same arrangement. When women with large breasts came by, he stared at them until they passed.

Their room was nonsmoking, but he said that didn’t apply to incense and lit two tapers. She wasn’t sure.

“Nah, nah. Didn’t you ever get in a cab with these people? They all have twenty air fresheners going, they love this stuff. It’s cigarettes. Cigarettes are the problem.”

He was watching her get undressed with a look that made her uncomfortable. She went into the bathroom to change. She had begun to worry a little about sex. In the beginning it had been great, but then he wanted to try things which, even though she had heard of them, seemed strange, even if you were in love. He told her he wanted to tie her to the bed and spank her with a grade-school ruler. And he kept suggesting that she shave her pubic hair off. When they made love and he rolled off and went to sleep and she told him that wasn’t making love, he said it was. “You satisfy me so much,” he explained, “I go straight into dream sleep, right into REM sleep.”

When she came out of the bathroom in her short nightgown, she saw he’d turned out all the lights.

Learning to dive was the big issue, Libby knew, for their trip. She had worked diligently at it, getting the theory down as well as all the skills—buddy breathing, neutral buoyancy, mask clearing. David, who was certified to the level of rescue diver, had chosen her training program, but she went by herself to the classes, and her instructors told her she was one of the best they ever had. And they said they envied her the trip to San Carlos, a little-dived locale that was getting a reputation as the place to go in the eastern Caribbean.

After breakfast, after they’d gotten all their gear down to the dock, David found he’d left his gold ear stud in the room. He asked her to go back for it. He was fanatical, she’d learned, about his ear studs. He tried to explain to her one time what the different occasions were, for the silver one with the miniature rose, the turquoise one, the one with the diamond out of his grandmother’s engagement ring, and the plain gold one. He said he wouldn’t dive without the gold one, but she couldn’t keep it all straight. It was like the time he tried to explain to her why some baseball player had to eat some combination of Kentucky Fried Chicken exactly two hours before every game.

When she got back with the stud, David was arguing with the boatman. It was an open twenty-foot skiff, a Boston Whaler with two big engines that looked brand-new and eight dive tanks mounted in a wooden rack like wine bottles. David was leaning against the steering console with his lime-green wraparound sunglasses and holding his chest out, she noticed, more than he usually did.

“You gotta know some places, man, places nobody’s been before. I mean, that’s the deal here, right, with a private boat?”

“Everyting be good, mon. It be good. You gon like everyting.”

She felt drawn immediately to the boatman’s lean body, like one of the jacaranda trees in full bloom. She had never seen blacker skin, a more compact yet muscular torso. Every muscle, every sinew, was tight under his tight skin. His lips were full, the veins in his hands prominent, his bare shoulders square. But for a missing tooth, his broken and discolored fingernails and callused feet, she thought him the handsomest man she’d ever seen. She hoped he’d be nice. And maybe give David a little grief.

“So, Esteban,” David was saying while they were preparing to cast off, “let me get you around on this, man. We’ve got to go to at least a couple of undived places in the next few days. All right? I’ve got to be able to tell people we were the first on a couple of these places, you know what I’m saying?” David had taken a fifty out of the envelope with the $5,000. Holding it up, he said, “Am I getting through here, Esteban? Do we have a deal?”

She was embarrassed when he did this, his De Niro imitation.

“Okay, mon,” said Esteban. “We hit some places. But I be pickin dem, because some places, de are no good to go. You know?”

“Yeah, I get it. Currents.”

“It ain no currents, ma frien.”

“Drop ’em and light ’em, Esteban, and let’s get out of here.”

His Kevin Costner, she thought, as David swung around by the steering console, folded his arms and gazed out toward the channel.

“Why did you show him all that money?” she whispered later. “Don’t you think that was really risky, letting him see, and people all around?”

“What he knows now is, there’s the possibility of a big tip if we see some cool stuff. The money’s totally safe. He’s just a chained dog at the resort. He’s going to try something?”

The boat idled out of the small harbor and into the channel between San Carlos and Itesea to the south. When Esteban brought the throttles up full, the boat got up on plane and began cracking the flat swell at twenty-four knots, headed southeast for an area Esteban said was called Los Pachucos, because of the sharks. The morning sun lit the water dark blue over the deep channel and then a paler blue and turquoise as they came back to the shallower water. With her polarized glasses Libby could see the reefs flashing by under the boat and swarms of fish bolting. David leaned over to reassure her, to say the sharks would be no problem.

Esteban cut the throttles and shifted into neutral but didn’t drop his anchor. He told them anchors damage the coral. Instead, he said, he’d follow their bubbles, and the most important thing for them to remember was to surface away from the boat, alongside him if they could, but never near the engines. It was very important.

While they were pulling on their dive gear, she asked Esteban about the other island, Itesea.

“Dat da military, miss. You don’ wan mess wid dem. We don’ go over dat way, that is what I am telling your mon here. Plenty good places to dive, but not over dat way.”

Plunging through the surface of the water made her euphoric, feeling the powerful, effervescent stroke of her body, the weightlessness of astronauts. She was so happy entering that transparent world she reached out to high-five David. When their hands collided awkwardly, she had the momentary sensation she could have done this alone, that she did not need him. The passing streamers of brightly colored damselfish, of French grunts and sergeant majors, huge stingrays rising slowly, regally, from camouflage on the sand flats, the way tiny nudibranchs glistened like flower buds on the coral heads all made her light-headed with satisfaction, a sense of having chosen right. Brad, she remembered, hadn’t even thought to get them certified, and then he’d been too cheap to pay for the resort course. He wanted to surf.

They moved to a new area of Los Pachucos and dove again and then had lunch. She was disappointed when Esteban confirmed that he had no picture guides aboard for the underwater life.

“Any fish you tell me, I know dat,” he said, laughing. “But people, de don’ eat dat other. Gotta eat, you know.” He waited. He chucked his chin at her and winked. “I get de guides for you tomorrow,” he said.

David had come up from his second dive with two large conchs, thinking they would bring them back to the hotel and have someone prepare them for dinner, but Esteban made him drop them overboard.

“It’s illegal, mon. De never let you anywhere near de hotel wid it. Put it over.”

“Don’t you have a few pals,” challenged David, “people who know how to do this? I mean, we don’t have to take them to the hotel, you could take them somewhere else, and we could come by and eat, at your place maybe. It’d make a good story, you know what I mean?”

“Put dem over, mon. Drop dem in.”

“You’re not a get-ahead guy, Esteban,” complained David. He let the conchs slip over the side, where they fell quickly through the water, rocking toward the bottom like leaves from a tree. “But I like you.” He gave Esteban his De Niro smile.

Lunch was fried fillets of Atlantic cod on stale white rolls with organic chips, a banana each, and Blue Sky cream sodas. David winked knowingly at Libby, as if to say, You have to expect some breakdown in quality somewhere along the way. Still, she couldn’t believe it. Salt cod?

While they digested the meal, she and David stretched out on lounge mats in the bow and held hands. She had to flick his other hand away a few times, with Esteban there. He got up and got his biography of Robert Moses out of his dive bag and finished the last twenty pages.

“Handle a spliff, Esteban?”

“Not today, mon.”

“You’re cool, Esteban, you know?” He inhaled the joint and gazed at the passing water. “That’s good, about the conchs, no toking while you’re navigating. But you know, man, I’m gonna tell you something. You need to evolve—you
know what I mean?—evolve to get ahead here. You own this boat?”

“It’s ma boat.”

“Ever think about owning maybe two or three boats? Getting some of your buddies to work for you, booking pax yourself in the States, not through the hotel? You into the Net? You could get a Web site. I could set it up. You could pull in a lot of money.”

“I’m okay like dis. Ma boat, it’s all paid up. I’m good.”

“Well you gotta get better, Esteban, or what are you here for? Right?”

“I be tinkin about it, den.”

They cruised on, watching white pelicans skimming inches above the water and the reef pattern quivering below sheets of broken light on the surface.

“Ma fatha, he own dis boat,” Esteban began. “He fish, all true here, all di wata here, and out der, way out der, for marlin, for swordfish. De all gone now. Just de little ones lef. He was de fishermon, you know, and I am de divin mon. So we be makin de changes, mon, we be gettin on. Evolvin.”

Esteban turned around to gaze astern. On the northwest horizon he saw the glitter of a boat moving fast toward Itesea. He shook his head with a wry smile and idled on.

“This looks good, Esteban my man. Let’s jump in here,” said David.

“We go on a little bit. It be betta. We comin a place call Zanja de Bacalao.”

Esteban turned to look for the boat again. As he watched, it peeled away from the horizon and headed toward them. Esteban swung his boat all the way around to the north and
brought the engines up to full throttle. The Whaler came up on plane and Libby sat up and looked around. David took a tight grip on the steering console.

“What’s up here, dude?”

“I takin a precaution, mon. You see dot? Dot’s what I tellin you. You never know out here anymore.”

The other boat was driving toward them on a line to intercept. Esteban could tell it was fast, a cigarette boat. “Could be de military,” he said. “Tings always changin.”

They could see the low coast of San Carlos looming beyond the bow and hear the smack of the skiff on the dazzling water.

“You may haf to buy us outta dis one, mon.”

David kept his eyes on the boat, closing fast, but said nothing.