I got up and stretched and wandered into the head, where Barbara was in the giant shower, singing. She has a nice voice but absolutely no sense of pitch or rhythm. Consequently whatever she sings sounds like “Home on the Range.”
“Good swim?” I called.
“Just beautiful! Say, did you turn off the oven at the right time like I told you?”
“Of course.”
“Who was that on the phone? The woman from yesterday?”
“Same one.”
“I don’t think I like her calling you. Her voice is too pretty. Is she as pretty as her voice?”
“She is in Hawaii, Bobs.”
“Then okay. She can be pretty if she wants.”
She had the shower turned high. I kicked off my sandals, dropped my shorts, peered cautiously around the curtain, then slid in behind her and grabbed her around the middle. She squealed and fought in a very satisfying way. So we had some good old scrubbing and soaping fun, and then some good old rinsing fun, and then outside the shower some great big towel fun before I picked her up and carried her off to bed, giving her head a slight thump on the doorframe in passing.
And once again, after love, I had the marvelous pleasure of burying my snout in the soft and fragrant texture of the side of her throat. In dusty tan tint and in taste and fragrance it reminded me of something, always had, ever since that night when in her apartment at La Vista del Caribe, my great shuddering and gasping and chattering of teeth had awakened her and she had come in from her bed nest on the couch to put more blankets on me. She called it a little jungle fever. I do not ever want to have a big jungle fever. When all other warming efforts failed, she had slipped in there with me, under all the blankets, to hold me tightly until all that kind of fever went away and an entirely different one began, over her dwindling objections. I did not mind when, later, after her breath had caught several times during one long audible inhalation, she cried “Weeeeleee.” I did not mind being his surrogate that night, or having called him back to life for her for that one instant on the edge of release. But it never happened again. She never called his name again.
So suddenly I knew what was at the back of memory as I snuffed at her throat, eyes open to see the odd dusky-dark coloring.
“Cinnamon!” I said.
“What?”
“You smell like cinnamon and you have the right color. Cinnamon skin.”
“My God, McGee, can’t you come up with something more original?”
“I thought it was.”
She laughed. “It’s a song, you idiot. Piel Canela: Cinnamon Skin. They sing it all over Mexico. A love ballad, quite tender. You can ask any group of mariachis, and they will play it and sing it for you. Like this.”
She sang it softly to me, but it sounded like “Home on the Range.”
She dropped off to sleep and came awake with a start. “Oh!” she said. “I dreamed about that man again.”
“Bad?”
“Not too bad this time. All that dirt and stone that came falling down, it made a pyramid, a perfect little pyramid, with him under it. Which makes sense.”
“Sense?”
“Of course, McGee. That pyramid we climbed at Coba? It is all a big tomb. There is somebody buried in there, maybe more than one. But they may never get to excavating, to looking inside.”
“Why not?”
“For the same reason the Spanish left us all alone in Yucatan, why they didn’t care to conquer us and civilize us and turn us into little brown Christians.”
“Which is?”
“McGee, lovemaking must dim your wits. Because the Maya had no gold!”
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Travis McGee #20 Cinnamon SkinJohn D. MacDonald Dedicated to our special group of Kiwis, with loveCINNAMON SKIN