'Now, Bobby, remember what we said – you know the deal,' says the mom.
'Yeah, Bobby,' says the dad in back, like a fucken sock puppet. The girl hoists her eyebrows.
'But I don't feel so great,' says Bobby.
'We planned the bay cruise days ago, and it's already paid for,' says the mom.
'Days ago,' says Dad.
The kid just sulks. The ole lady tightens her lips. 'Forget it, Trey, you know what he's like. Let's just hope it doesn't turn out like the other time, after we spent all that money on scuba lessons…'
World-class knifing, I have to say. And just one smug face left, on the girl.
I saunter toward smells of sausage and coffee, looking for a public phone. Outside, I see a huge patio laid out with a buffet. I stupidly pick up a menu. The cheapest thing on it costs more than a fucken helicopter joyride. Then a waiter starts to hover, so I keep walking towards some bathrooms that are in a service area by the pool. I pass a real-life psycho on the way, too; an up-and-coming one. This fat little dork is standing next to another kid in the pool, being a real pal, while his little sister dive-bombs the water around them. Then, out of earshot of his buddy, the fat kid snarls at his sister: 'I told you to jump on him, not near him…' A future senator, guaranteed.
I pass some lounge chairs facing the bay, with boats and parachutes gliding past them, and the squeak of bitty children in the surf nearby. I start fantasizing that some kid starts drowning right in front of me, and I jump in and save him. In my mind, I rehearse what I'd tell the reporters, and I even see the newspaper headlines spinning up. 'Juvenile Hero Pardoned,' and shit. After a minute, it's the fucken president's kid I'm saving. The president weeps with gratitude, and I just shuffle away. See me? All this drags through my head like a fucken rusty chain.
To snap myself out of it, I go find a phone on the street outside the hotel. I punch in Taylor 's number.
'Glassbadanbow?' says a kid. He's handing out flyers by the road.
'Say what?'
'Jew like croose in Glass badan boat?'
'Tayla,' the phone answers. I wave the kid away.
' Mexico calling,' I say.
'Hi, killer.'
Something's wrong, I can tell. I get a pang to curl her up around me, her and her safe, deodorized world, where her biggest problem in life is getting bored, or smelling Glade around the house. Probably her biggest personal secret is eating boogers. She's been bawling just now, you can tell.
'Everything okay?' I ask.
Taylor gives a sniffly laugh. 'I'm just like, what the fuck, you know? This damn guy I was dating…'
The doctor?'
'The so-called doctor, yeah. I just want to run away, God...'
'Know how you feel.'
'Anyway, where are you?' she asks, blowing her nose.
' Acapulco.'
'Dirty dog. Lemme see the map – are you, like, by the beach?'
'Yeah, on the main boulevard.'
'That must be the Costera Miguel Aleman – there's a Western Union agent at a place called Comercial Mexicana.'
'I'll make it up to you, Tay.'
'But listen – it's Sunday tomorrow, and I can't get the cash till Monday. The agent's open till seven Monday night, so if you go at six…'
'No sweat,' I lie, watching the last credits drip off the screen.
'And babe,' she says. Beep. The line goes dead.
The fucken Love Boat is here. I swear to God, from those ole shows my mom watches, with the horny cruise director, and Captain Stupid and all. It has the Wella Balsam kind of logo on the funnel. Star-studded Acapulco, boy.
I pull my head into the cab as the bay falls away behind us. Pelayo's truck bangs over some hills, then heads north along this TV-movie coastline, with coconut trees, whole fields of them. The beach ain't as white as Against All Odds, and the water ain't as blue, but hey. A lagoon runs alongside us for part of the drive, right out of Tarzan or something. We even pass through a military roadblock, with a fucken machine-gun nest, no bullshit. My intestines pump, but they end up just being kids, these soldiers, like cartoon ants, in oversized helmets.
After a few hours, we leave the road and turn down a track toward the sea. The track ends with some logs sunk into the beach, and jungle backed up behind. It's a minuscule town, of slummy wooden houses, with pigs, chickens, and grizzly-looking dogs around. Not even slummy, more like out of National Geographic. Fucken paradise. Pelayo parks behind a store that's held together with Fanta signs, and a porch of dry palm leaves. Two men lay in hammocks there, sucking beer. A flock of kids gather as we pile out of the truck. You can tell Pelayo's the dude around here. He's probably like the Mr Lechuga of town, except human. Now I'm the alien in his world. He takes trouble to make me feel at home, snapping at the kids to get away, and calling up a beer from the store. I just stand quiet, nose up to the breeze, listening to a dictionary full of new bugs. Ungawa wakashinda, I swear. Pelayo opens the beers with his teeth, and proudly walks me to a covered patio on the beach. Two older men sit at a table, and an ole lady leans behind a makeshift bar.
A naked kid suddenly brushes past her, trying to spear a wounded crab on the sandy concrete. He finally stabs it clean through the back, 'Yesssss!' he says, stopping to pull back an imaginary lever with his fist. Pelayo kicks the crab out of my way, and sweeps me to a table by the beach.
A crowd of bottles gathers on the table. Toward evening, a young dude turns up who speaks some English; a lean, smart-looking guy called Victor, with braces on his teeth – something you don't see much down here. He tells me how important it is for him to get ahead in life, so he can bring wealth into the village and all. Makes me feel like the lowest fucken snake. He translates the words painted between the mud-flaps on the truck. 'You see me, and suffer,' they mean. 'Me ves, y sufres.'
When I first show signs of being loaded, the boys offer me oysters as big as burritos, right out of the sea. Fucken forget it. I ate one when I was a kid, and it felt like something I sucked down the back of my nose. They even offer me the oysters at a time when I have a booger-plug ready to suck down my throat. Without thinking, I point at my nose while I suck it down, then pull a face, and point at the oyster. They drop Acapulco-sized loads over that. They can't look me in the face for an hour after, for the fucken loads they drop. Typical of me to introduce slime to paradise.
After a tequila, as lions and tigers stir under this silicon-clear evening, I try to explain the beach-house dream, the mud-flaps, and Fate. I'm a little loaded. Fucken loaded, actually. But as soon as I start to talk about it, Victor and Pelayo take my arm and lead me up the beach, through the palms, where bats now orbit, to a place ten minutes away, where the jungle almost pushes you into the sea. Kids follow us, shining in and out of the surf. Then Victor stops. He points through the fading light, and I squint to follow his finger across the sand. There, all locked up, almost hidden in the jungle, sits an ole white beach-house. My place.
The boys say it's okay to camp here until Monday. Maybe longer. Maybe for fucken ever. After they totter home up the beach, I sit on the balcony of the house, let the evening filter off the sea and through my soul. Suddenly all the different waves inside me alloy into one tune, with feathers of my original dream dancing the edges of this new symphony; my ole lady down here, checking out the neat sanitation, reflecting on how good things got. I may have to change my name, or become Mexican or something. But it's still me, without any trace of slime around. I look out over the garden of this place, onto the beach, and see Taylor there running around in her panties, brown like a native.