Unspoiled. Untouched. No wonder his grandmother had been so miserable in Detroit. How could she be expected to forget what she’d traded in? How could anyone? He wondered what Marisol imagined when she pictured New York. Skyscrapers and window displays and theater marquees. The same fantasy world as Darius.
From a block away, he could make out the vague thump of some kind of music. All that was left after the breeze were the bass notes, thick and indistinct. They could have been coming from anywhere. But where else was there other than the hotel? And somehow he knew that Shim was responsible.
The moment he reached the patio, Michael Boni saw him, swaying among the tables with a plastic rose between his teeth. Mariachi burst from a small tape deck lying next to a bottle of tequila on the bar. Shim was performing as if the entire village were his audience, but he was alone. The dining room was empty.
“Hey!” Shim shouted, reaching for Michael Boni’s arm.
In the kitchen, Marisol and the señora were pretending not to watch.
“Come on,” Shim said. “You’re on vacation. Dancing is good for you.”
Michael Boni pulled away.
“Let me buy you a drink.” Shim dipped his invisible partner. “You need a drink. You need to loosen up. I thought you came here to relax.”
Michael Boni went over to the bar and snapped off the tape deck.
Shim threw up his hands in disgust. “No wonder nobody comes here.”
Through the window, Michael Boni saw Marisol and the señora return to the dirty dishes.
“Don’t forget that drink!” Shim shouted as Michael Boni hurried away.
The sky the next morning was an unimaginative shade of blue, as monochromatic and depthless as if sprayed by machine.
Coming down the hillside on the final bus the day before, Michael Boni had caught his first glimpses of the ocean — the first ocean he’d ever seen. Even then, from that distance, the water hadn’t seemed quite real. People were always talking about the sight, but once he arrived, he realized how much more there was to it than that. There was the way the salt air gathered in his head and lingered there like alcohol. There was the ripe, living smell. He remembered once as a child going to the shore up near Port Huron with his family, but the sand there was gray and rocky, like standing on gravel. He’d never cared for the idea of things floating around down there that he couldn’t see.
All that day, there was no sign of Shim at the hotel. Not once had Michael Boni seen him on the beach.
Was it too much to hope that Shim was already gone for good?
That night in the restaurant, Marisol was gone, too. She must have been given the day off. Michael Boni took the same table as on the night before. Eventually the señora came over and nodded wordlessly that it was time for him to order. When he pointed to the taquitos, she grunted and turned back toward the kitchen.
Michael Boni glanced around the restaurant. The heavy-set, sunburned man from the night before was back. It appeared he had a regular table, too. And much of the same crowd was once again surrounding him.
While he ate, Michael Boni observed the lighted doorways along the street, where shadows came and went. A couple of old men had set up folding chairs on the sidewalk. There was a café of sorts at the corner, where a half-dozen people sat in a circle, talking. When the breeze died down, he could faintly hear their voices.
He wished he had the language to ask the señora about the village. She reminded him a bit of his grandmother, the skeptical way she had of looking at him. He wished he could ask her what it was like to call a place like this home.
That night Michael Boni went for another walk along the beach. Perhaps a quarter-mile south of the boardwalk, he came across a pavilion set back in the trees beyond the dune. As he passed, he saw a band setting up inside. The dance floor was flooded with light, and perhaps two dozen teenagers sat at the tables along the walls. Outside in the shadows, several couples clung to one another on concrete benches. One of the young women sat facing him, her eyes closed as a young man in red pants pressed his mouth to hers. Michael Boni recognized Marisol’s blue dress, the dark braid draped over one shoulder.
He was glad to see her in someone’s arms, glad she might still have reason to stay.
§
Past the plaza where the bus had dropped him off, the road turned north. It was the morning of his third day, and this was the only direction, the only road, Michael Boni hadn’t already explored.
He had only just begun down the road when the paving stones changed to gravel. He guessed he’d reached the edge of the village. But then he noticed the narrow street twisted a short distance farther, and up ahead he saw some sort of structure — he couldn’t tell what it was — sitting atop a low hill.
Coming closer, Michael Boni saw several more such structures. A half-dozen concrete foundations filled with sand lined both sides of the unfinished road. It looked as if someone had planned some sort of development here and then changed his mind. Where the gravel ended, two hundred feet farther, there was a shell of what looked like a home. No doors or windows, just walls with holes where the doors and windows should have been.
On the edge of one of the foundations, in the shade of a large canopied tree, sat Shim, a camera and a notebook in his lap. At first Michael Boni thought he was drawing something, perhaps the grass growing upon the dune. But Shim wasn’t looking at any one particular spot, and he quickly went through page after page in his notebook. Occasionally he would get up and snap a picture of something Michael Boni found not particularly interesting: a patch of ground, a tree. Several minutes passed before he noticed the surveyor’s level Shim had set up on a tripod.
That evening, as Michael Boni lay on his bed, absorbing the faint breeze of his ceiling fan, there was a knock on the door.
“I’m buying you dinner,” Shim said, smiling in the corridor.
Michael Boni found himself unprepared to think of a single excuse.
There was a crowd in the restaurant. The heavy-set, sunburned man and his circle of friends appeared to be celebrating. There were toasts and cheers. Michael Boni was grateful for the noise. Maybe now he and Shim could sit through a meal without having to talk.
Shim chose a table directly in the middle of the dining room. Before sitting down, he walked from table to table greeting the other diners. He seemed to know them all by name, and they seemed glad to see him.
After Shim was finally seated, Marisol approached with the menus.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Shim said as she walked away.
Michael Boni didn’t like the way Shim looked at her. “She’s a nice girl.” Young enough to be Shim’s daughter.
While they waited for their food, Shim took Michael Boni along on a guided tour of his Mexican escapades: the scuba diving in hidden reefs, the illegal deep-sea fishing, the most obscure tequila, the cleanest beaches, the most beautiful women. He’d catalogued it all. Every last cliché.
The nice thing about Shim was that once he started talking, he never stopped. Michael Boni could simply sit and let it wash over him. It didn’t matter that he contributed nothing.
By the time Marisol brought their food, there was almost no one left in the restaurant.
Shim had ordered the snapper, and he eyed the plate in much the same way he’d eyed the girl.
“Do you know what it is?” he said, lifting his first forkful of rice.
Michael Boni turned away from the opaque, buttery eyes.
“The stuff you saw me photographing,” Shim said. “Do you know what it is?”