Liberty Street (31 page)

Then he heard about Mexico and how you could disappear there. That was more his style, he thought: disappearing. Deserting the country of his citizenship, the place where they had records, where he was
registered
as a person. And when he walked across the border into Mexico and no one asked him anything, not even his name, he knew he could make that happen. And then he met Angela, and they lived on the beach with an endless stream of people coming and going, and sometimes she looked at him the way Basie Moon's daughter had looked at her father that day on the bench in front of the bank, a day when Dooley had not been able to imagine that he could be so lucky. That he would ever feel so free. When he told Angela this—that she made him feel free—she laughed and told him that he had discovered his own soul.

“It's not me,” she said. “You've made yourself free.”

Then she said that Dooley had given her an idea. Because she had been a dancer—she and her skating partner were junior provincial ice dance champions before the accident—she decided she and Dooley should express their gratitude for this life by dancing every day at sunset. You could hardly call what Dooley came up with dance, even Angela said that, but it didn't matter. It was a spiritual act, she said, and whatever Dooley did, as long as it was done honestly, would be good for his soul.

“Think of your soul as a newborn baby,” she said. “You need to nurture it, keep it alive.”

“How did you get to be so enlightened?” he asked her, and at first she thought he was being sarcastic, but he denied that, and she said, “I should have known. You, Dooley Sullivan, do not have a sarcastic bone in your body. You're an innocent. That's why I love you so much.”

He shivered from the pleasure of hearing her say those words, “love” and “you,” in the same breath. And the word “innocent,” which had never been applied to him before.

They danced on the beach every day, Dooley in a pair of surfer shorts he bought at a market and Angela in a bright yellow bikini. Sometimes they had live music—guitars, bongo drums, a harmonica. If not, there was always someone with a battery-operated tape player. They danced to whatever music was available in someone's backpack. Everything from Three Dog Night to classical flute to Dr. John or Memphis Slim. Periodically, a group symbiosis happened and there grew a great crowd of gyrating, swaying bodies on the beach, in bare feet and bikinis and cut-off jeans, sometimes no clothing at all, first one person shedding a wraparound peasant skirt, a
tank top, a pair of surfer shorts, and then the whole line of them naked, stomping and twisting, hair and limbs and handmade jewellery flying, every person in his or her own private world of motion. Once in a while, some young man or woman with a crush on Angela misinterpreted her free spirit as a loose spirit and tried to cut in, but she danced within herself and paid no attention whatsoever while Dooley watched, amused by the futility, still hardly believing that what this hopeful intruder wanted was reserved for him.

And then the sun would suddenly drop, sink into the Pacific so quickly you could see it move, and the sky would go pink and dove grey and then blue-black, and everything would go still without anyone announcing, “That's it for today, I guess.”

When Angela stopped dancing, so did Dooley.

She was the real cock of the walk, he thought, not him.

T
EN MONTHS PASSED
. A year. The magic of the beach began to wear thin. Dooley felt the old restlessness creeping in, irritation with the naivety that he saw around him, the lack of connection between himself and the other expats. He was afraid to tell Angela he was ready to move on in case it gave her the chance to say she was ready to move on too. From him. But when he finally brought it up, she agreed that the squatter's beach was losing its appeal and he was relieved when she suggested that they—
they
—go farther south to where she knew of a couple who owned property, the daughter of one of her parents' friends. Angela said she didn't know this couple very well and didn't really expect to like them. “But let's check it out,” she said, just for a change from communal living. A real shower. A washing machine. Probably maid service.

Maid service? Dooley thought she must be joking, but he retrieved his nest egg from its hiding place and they packed up and caught a ride from the peninsula to the mainland with an American fisherman in a fancy boat. A few people wanted to go with them, but they said no, they were travelling alone. Dooley grinned all the way across the Sea of Cortez over having Angela to himself. On the mainland, they took a series of buses south down the coast until they came to the town they were looking for, situated on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. They found the house and stood looking at the locked gate and the razor wire looped along the top of the fence, until finally they rang the bell and a maid let them in, surprised when Dooley spoke to her in such fluent Spanish.

They didn't last long at Angela's not-exactly-friends' house. The community was new, and the people who lived in it were all wealthy Canadians or Americans. They reminded Dooley of his grandfather, pretending to be people they weren't. They were shallow, Angela said, too much like her parents, and they didn't approve of Dooley, didn't approve of his drinking (even though you rarely saw one of
them
without a margarita in hand, no matter what the time of day), so Angela and Dooley made plans to leave again, but not before getting roaring drunk one day and dancing crazily on the pool deck. Dooley lost his balance on his bad leg and fell into the pool, and then Angela jumped in after him, both of them in their clothes, while the friends (by this time, decidedly
not
friends) sat in lounge chairs on the tiled deck and glowered at them over the tops of their Ray-Ban sunglasses. When Angela took off her T-shirt and threw it up on the deck, and then stripped Dooley down and threw his wet shorts out of the pool, their hosts had
a hushed conversation and then went into the house. Angela said she could just imagine the report that would get back to her parents, but she didn't care. In fact, she overheard a phone conversation that night in which it sounded as though her father might be flying down, so she and Dooley quickly left without even saying thank you; they didn't even wait for the bus but rather hitchhiked to Mexico City, where Angela replenished her money supply—Dooley didn't have to replenish his because it was all in his backpack—and they found a hostel and stayed for a month, awed by the size of the city and the cultural wonders it held. When they began to crave the ocean again, they caught a bus as far south as they could go, moving from beach to beach, staying in each new place until they grew tired of it or until Angela suspected that someone hired by her father was following them. Dooley was never convinced of the truth of her suspicions, but he went along.

“Is your father in the Mafia?” he asked once, thinking it was a joke.

“Of course not,” Angela said, sounding, he thought, defensive. “He's just rich. Too rich.”

“If he found you, would he try to take you back?”

“I don't know. I suppose not. He would have snatched me by now if that was it.”

“What about your mother?” Dooley asked, barely knowing the meaning of the word himself.

“Why are you asking so many questions?”

He didn't ask any more.

Sometimes they went inland, to the old colonial towns in the mountains, or to the cities, Guadalajara or San Miguel de Allende, where they stayed for over a year. They spent another year in Belize and Guatemala, having managed
to cross the borders even though Dooley had no passport. They travelled from one end of Mexico to the other several times over until their nomadic life began to grow tiresome, although neither of them was quite ready to admit to feeling dissatisfied. They talked about settling somewhere, but then another town would beckon and they would yield to the promise of a place to which they had not yet been.

On Dooley's thirtieth birthday, in a hot hotel room overlooking the
plaza de la ciudad
in a town in the Yucatán, Angela finally said, “I'm sick of being an itinerant. Are you?”

Dooley was relieved to hear it. He felt the same way, he said. It was wearing him out. Angela teased him then, said he was getting to be an old dog and needed a porch to lie on.

They settled down in the state of Quintana Roo on a beach so white Dooley thought it looked like snow. From an American who called himself Don Orlando, they rented a hut on stilts with a
palapa
roof and hammocks for beds, just the two of them. Dooley met a local fisherman named Eduardo who was happy to have a partner, and some days Dooley went with him in his boat, beyond the reef. He learned about fish. He met a
vaquero
, a cowboy, who taught him a bit about horses. He liked the way the horses watched him, quietly. He watched them back. Angela, who knew about massage from her days as an ice dancer, bought a portable table and set up on the beach every morning. She led yoga classes at sunset. They paid their rent and bought food and beer and tequila without having to use either Dooley's nest egg or Angela's bank account. They became a part of a community of mostly Canadian and American writers and artists and jewellery makers. Angela called herself a masseuse. When asked, Dooley said he was a fisherman. He was drinking a lot now,
and smoking pot all day long, every day, but he told himself it was for the headaches he'd begun having again. He couldn't stand the pain without drugs and alcohol. Sometimes Eduardo worried that Dooley was going to fall out of the boat and drown, especially beyond the reef, where the sea was rough and threw the boat around. Eduardo had an old life vest that he tried to get Dooley to wear, but Dooley declined. Even had he agreed, the vest looked as though its days of saving anyone's life were long over.

The hotel that Don Orlando owned began to offer wedding packages. One night when he and Dooley were drinking together, he offered to marry Dooley and Angela for free. The more Dooley thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. A week later, he drank himself into a state of courage and told Angela about the offer.

“Why would we want to get married by a hustler like Don Orlando?” she asked. “It would be like getting married in Las Vegas.”

“That's true,” Dooley said, hiding his disappointment. “Anyway, Don Orlando was so drunk he wouldn't remember. It's not like him to do anything for free.”

He tried not to sulk or act like his feelings were hurt. He never brought up marriage again, but he didn't forget either how quickly Angela had dismissed the idea.

They lived in this place for five years. Angela forgot about men hired by her father. They moved up the beach into a bigger cabaña, which Angela decorated: a blue glass vase by the door, a ceramic fruit bowl for the table, woven blankets used as curtains for the open windows. Most days, Dooley's head felt as if it might explode. He and Angela began to argue. She said she was concerned about his headaches and wanted
him to see a doctor, but he refused, accused her of plotting to have a doctor tell him to quit drinking. Once, he snapped back at her that she looked pale, maybe
she
should be seeing a doctor. It wasn't normal for a person to be as thin as she was, he said; he could see her ribs. She turned away, and later he thought he could hear her crying.

Then one day Dooley found himself sitting on a rock with a bottle of tequila watching Angela dance on the beach at sunset instead of dancing with her, and he realized that they had stopped sleeping together. A few days later Angela told him that she was going away without him. She offered no explanation. He drank himself to sleep that night as usual and woke up alone the next morning. He stayed in his hammock all day and tried not to think about what Angela had told him when they first met—that she didn't believe in exclusivity, that sex and love were different things. Where was she? he wondered. He imagined that she'd gone inland to a city where there was more action or headed up the coast with a man she'd met on the beach—Bill from Chicago or Gunnar from Sweden. He'd been lucky, he thought, to have her to himself for as long as he had. Who was he to think he could hold on to a woman like Angela forever? He convinced himself that she wasn't coming back.

But she did, three days later, and she told him that she'd had to go away on her own to think because she was going to be thirty years old on her next birthday. She'd taken a ferry to an island and stayed at a meditation centre and fasted the whole time, thinking about her future. “Thirty!” she said, as though she couldn't believe that she'd lived this long. Later, they sat on the beach with a pitcher of beer and a plate of tortilla chips on the table between them (Dooley trying to keep
his drinking in check), and Angela confessed that she had decided the feud with her father had reached its statute of limitations. She had called him from a payphone and spoken with him. He'd agreed, she said, that he couldn't force her to return home, but he had reminded her of her approaching birthday, a milestone. He said that she could no longer pretend to be a gypsy child.

“He was only saying what I had already decided myself,” she said.

They sat on the beach until it was dark, the sun dropping into the mangroves behind them, and Angela said she missed watching the red ball sink over the water the way it did on the Pacific side. She thought they should consider returning to the west coast; she wanted to dance the sun into the ocean again.

We should think about it, she'd said. Still using the word “we.”

The decision to leave was made for them when a tropical storm slammed into their beach. Everyone evacuated inland, but when they went back, they found all of Don Orlando's cabañas destroyed and the beach littered with debris. Angela's massage table was missing; Eduardo's boat was gone. All Angela and Dooley had left was what they'd carried inland in their backpacks.

They got on a bus and headed west again.