Take It Off (14 page)

“Yeah, easy, how you say, no sweat? The Western Union is on Calle Aragon in the center of town. Every time I lose my wallet on Mallorca,
Mama wires me some money there. They're always open until eight during holiday. I'll call right now, and you should be able to pick it up before they close.”

I looked at my wrist, then remembered that my watch wasn't there anymore. But then, as though someone up there might actually be looking out for me, the cathedral rung quarter past seven.

“Thanks, man. I mean, I really appreciate it,” I said, although in my head it was,
Flan would never like a sleazy bastard like you!

“Jon-a-tin, it is nothing. We are brothers.”

A voice came on, telling me I was out of minutes. I must have wasted them all trying my mother four thousand times.

“Yeah, well. This is super nice of you.”
You backstabbing piece of shit!

“No sweat. Ha ha!”
You already said that, you imbecile.

When we hung up, I went back into the lobby. Suki was sitting exactly as before. When I walked in, she said, “Jonathan, let's just get a room here for the night. I'm going to turn cranky real soon.”

“No way. We've got so much cash coming to us. We're sleeping in style tonight.”

Suki rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”

“Listen, I've got to get to the Western Union before they close. You stay here, okay? The Savage is going to drop something for me. Give him this”—I handed her the passport—“and take whatever he has for you. And then wait for me.”

She let out one of those grunts of disgust that only girls can do effectively.

“Trust me,” I said for the second time that evening.

“Fine. I mean, what are my options?”

I nodded in agreement with her. She had no options.

“Whatever you do, don't leave this place,” I called as I ran down the street.

It took me a while, but I found the Western Union. There was a line, of course, but I got there just in time. It was five after eight when a lovely, dark-eyed Spanish girl counted fifteen hundred in crisp euros for me and placed them on the counter.

“You are Rob Santana's brother?” she asked, obviously impressed.

I shrugged. “I guess you could say our families merged, yeah.”

“He is one of the wildest visitors,” she said in her sweet, accented English. “Whenever he
comes to town, crazy stories start going around. He's with a different girl every season. You'll tell him to call me next time he visits, won't you?”

Not what I wanted to hear. Why couldn't she see Rob the way I did, as a slimy guy who was really, really short on class? Flan would, right? I smiled weakly and promised to give Rob her number, and ran down the street back to the hostel. I fought the image of Rob as a romantic party boy the whole way. But if the lovely girl in the Mallorca Westen Union fell for the act, how would little Flan Flood hold up?

I almost managed to put it out of my mind. After all, everything was about to work out. I had fifteen hundred euros in my hand, and I was about to get three thousand more. By the time I huffed into the hostel lobby, I had psyched myself up again.

My rally died when I saw Suki.

She looked up at me furiously and didn't say a word.

“Did the Savage come?” I asked.

“
Oh
, yeah.”

“Did he bring me an envelope or a package or something?”

“Yup. He had an envelope. He took it out, and
he showed me all this money inside, and he said, ‘Here you go, little lady. You give this to Jonathan, and now why don't you and I go for a dance.' Well, I told him, ‘I am
not
that kind of lady.'”

“What happened to the envelope?” My voice was very small.

“I threw that passport at him and told him to go shove it. Which is what I'd like to tell
you
to do! I can't believe you think a fancy hotel room justifies pimping me out!”

“Where'd the Savage go …?”

“Gone to hell I hope. You go, too, for all I care!”

I put my face into my hands and tried not to cry. I took several deep breaths, and then looked up expecting to see a very confrontational Suki.

I was wrong. Her mouth was frozen in a small, diminutive O shape and her face had gone white. We looked at each other for a long, frightened moment.

“Wait, pimping a girl out, that wouldn't really occur to you, would it?”

I shook my head, 'cause no, it really wouldn't.

As soon as Mickey saw the fish, he knew it was his. The water had gone tranquil and turquoise in the afternoon, and from the surface you could see nearly to the bottom. Mickey was on one of the rocky outcroppings that had ejected them from their boat earlier in the day. He stepped to the edge, let out a war whoop, and dove headfirst through the water and toward the fish. Of course, once he was a good ways under water he realized that the fish was not only much larger than it had originally appeared, but that it was a shark. A very small shark—only a foot and a half or so—but it still had frightening teeth inside its little mouth.

Well, Mickey thought, now's as good a time to go as any, and he threw his arms around the shark and began kicking his way back up to the surface. The shark squirmed mightily in his arms, but once Mickey had gotten some air in his lungs, he put an end to the wrestling match by hitting the shark on the nose with his forehead. This was what his third-grade teacher had
told him to do if he ever came face-to-face with a shark, and, absurdly, it worked. Mickey grabbed the stunned creature by its tail and swung it so that its head struck the rock with a fatal
thwap!
Then he tossed the lifeless fish into the dinghy and rowed back to shore.

He found the camping spot they had chosen earlier. It was on a high, dry space above the beach, with a good view of their ship. The sun was going down, and all along the rocky face of the island little fires were being lit with dry matches by other Ocean Term students. Greta had collected a bunch of palm fronds and sticks, and had managed to make a sort of tent out of them. She was kneeling on the ground and bending over to make sure the sticks she used for poles were secure. There was dirt on her tank top and cutoff jeans and she looked very wild and capable and like she would be down for pretty much anything. She looked primitive, in fact. Looking at her made Mickey feel all randy.

Meanwhile, Arno had collected rocks in a fireplace formation and had formed a burnable pyramid of twigs and kindling. He was blowing on their matches, which had of course been ruined when they all fell out of the boat earlier. He looked really out of his element, and Mickey imagined how much fun it would be to stomp on his head. Then he could carry Greta up to the highest point on the island and they could offer themselves
to the gods, or something else very Aztec.

“Guess what's for dinner,” Mickey called. Arno looked up at him with a seriously pissed expression. When Mickey threw the shark down in front of him, Arno stared at it, and then turned his face up to Mickey bitterly.

“How exactly are we going to cook that, genius?”

“Dude, I don't know but I don't think
blowing
on the matches is going to dry them out.”

“You got a better idea?”

“Actually, yeah.”

“Oh, my God, how did you catch that thing?” Greta came over to them, dusting off her hands. Her hair was a mess, and her face was a little sunburned. But her skin had faded over the night so that she mostly looked like she had a decent tan.

“Well, I …”

“The real question, and what I said in the first place, is how are we going to
cook
it.”

Mickey snorted, then went over to the fire pit. He took a flattened stick and another round stick and rubbed it up and down with a little bit of dried grass until a tiny flame emerged. He pressed the flaming grass carefully into the pyramid, and slowly but surely the whole thing caught on. Mickey fanned it with his wife-beater, which he'd torn off hours
ago to let it dry in the sun.

Mickey smiled at Greta like a kid who'd just busted open the piñata. “A little trick my granddad learned during the Cuban Revolution, when he and Che were hiding from Batista's army in the Sierra Maestra.”

“That is such a lie.” Arno sneered.

“Maybe, but it's fun, which is more than I can say for you, you stuck-up little bitch. Now shut up and cook this thing.”

So they set about hacking up the fish with the knife from their survival kit. While they were waiting for the fish to cook, Greta excused herself to pee. Mickey and Arno watched her disappear into the bushes, and then Arno hissed, “Look, out of respect for you I decided to stop going after Suki. Why are you always chasing the girl I'm after?”

“What? You only stopped going after her once she disappeared! Are you insane?”

“I might ask you that question.”

They both stood instinctively and stared at each other. Mickey could feel the fury building inside of him, and even though he'd never been in a fistfight—at least, not with one of the guys in his crew—he felt like he might be about to be in one now.

A bright light shone on them just then, like they were in an episode of
Cops
or something, and then they
heard Stephanie calling “Good work, sailors!” into her bullhorn. A few moments later, she appeared in their campground. She was wearing a very warm-looking jacket and leggings, and the guy who had been driving the boat earlier came along behind her holding a ridiculously powerful flashlight.

“This is quite a setup!” Stephanie exclaimed, going over to Greta's palm tent and examining it. Mickey and Arno sat down on the log by the fire. She took little notes on a clipboard she carried. She looked over the fire, and the remains of the shark, and made little exaggerated
mmmm-hmmmm
noises.

Greta came back from the bushes and sat between Mickey and Arno as Stephanie finished her report. She strained her neck to see over the other faculty guy, and if there were anybody else in the group. When Stephanie was done, she looked at them cheerily.

“I can't tell you how many points you got, but I can tell you your score is very impressive. All right, sailors, good luck getting through the night!”

When she was gone, Mickey leaned across Greta and shoved Arno off the log.

There was only one thing that was going to make me feel better about the loss of my watch and my general, utter stupidity. That thing was luxury. I took Suki to the Hotel Miramar and I got us a room. The same officious little twit was behind the counter, and he opened his mouth in protest when he saw me coming through the door. I silenced him with something better than a perfect Spanish accent. I put three hundred euro notes on the counter in front of him.

“Habitación para dos,”
I said. My accent was awful. It felt great.

The concierge smiled a little smile to himself, and then said something in his very fast Spanish.

“Cómo?”
I asked him.

“The
habitaciones baratas
are all full, señor.”

He was obviously relishing this, but I was ready for him. “What
do
you have available?”

The concierge flipped through his reservation
book. “It seems we have the Miro Suite available. Although, I suppose it will be a little
caro
for you.”

“We'll take it,” I said.

“Five hundred euros, please.”

I laid down the bills like they were nothing to me.

Suki, at my shoulder, was strangely quiet and supportive through all of this, probably because she still felt bad about my watch. Which would, you know, make sense.

When I had filled out the guest card, and the concierge had stopped glaring at me, the bellboy appeared. He took us up the rickety, old-fashioned elevator to the fourth floor, unlocked our suite, and let us into just about the most perfect place in the whole world.

There is nothing I love like a good hotel. Your towels and sheets are changed daily, and of course, they allow you to, for a short while, be completely untethered from your life and your personality and whatever awful stuff has been going on with you. Now, you may think, hotel rooms are where thousands of different unkempt people do gross things to themselves and others, so what's clean about that? And that's exactly the
sort of thing I think
constantly
when I'm in a hotel like, say, La Cucaracha. When I'm in a good hotel, that never enters my mind. So you can imagine how freaking psyched I was to be out of the one and into the other.

When the bellboy was gone, Suki did what pretty much all girls do when they go into a fancy hotel room. She kicked off her shoes and started jumping on the bed, which was very large and soft-looking and covered in a tasteful cream brocade coverlet. The room was expansive, and it had a chandelier and soft carpeting and big French doors that led out onto a terrace. I checked in the bathroom. There were a lot of mirrors and gold detail, and the tub was gigantic and heart-shaped. There were a lot of expensive-looking products, too: soaps and lotions and hair stuff. And there were two impossibly soft white robes, wrapped in plastic, hanging from the door.

“First bath!” I called. I took my time making myself feel human again, and used one of the pomades to get my hair back into the shape it had been in yesterday morning. The very thought of putting my sweaty clothes back on bummed me out, especially when I noticed that my white cords and T-shirt had taken on a gray tinge. So I
put on one of the robes and decided I might never take it off. When I came back into the room, Suki was lying on her back looking very relaxed and staring at the ceiling. Without looking up at me, she said, “What have you been doing, I'm
starving
…”

“I know, when did we last eat?”

“I can't remember. I'm gonna take a bath, and then let's order lots of food.”