Troubled Sea (3 page)

They slid into the water and paddled fifty yards to a reef fronting the hotel. Hetta pried open a rock scallop with her dive knife and, within minutes, they were surrounded by darting, jewel toned fish. Some shy types, like the blue and pink stareye parrotfish, hovered on the fringes, while the less glamorous triggers and bullseye puffers grew bold. Hetta made sure they all got a bite of scallop, and not of her.

An hour later, Jenks was back on deck fiddling with the newly found GPS while Hetta made tuna salad sandwiches on their own homemade sourdough bread.

“Someone must have dropped that GPS overboard during the norther,” Jenks speculated as they ate.

Hetta nodded. “Probably. We’ll listen to the Happy Hour Net on ham radio tonight. Maybe someone will report it missing.”

“Oh, yeah. If one of our fellow cruisers lost it they’ll be crying in their piña coladas. If no one whines, I guess we’ve got ourselves a spare.”

“Amazing, Jenks. My old boat was loaded with stuff like GPS's, sat dishes and the like, but in our reduced circumstances, we're down to a handheld. Not that these new ones aren't pretty danged sophisticated.”

“Thanks to the Gulf War. So many Global Positioning Satellite units were manufactured for the American military that the unit price plummeted.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” Hetta quipped, throwing a bread crust overboard for the black and yellow sergeant majors that had taken up residence under the boat. She watched the feeding frenzy, then added, “I wonder who lost it? As far as I know, we’re the only cruisers this far north on this side of the Sea right now. Almost everyone’s either in La Paz getting ready to cross to Mazatlan or Puerto Vallarta for the winter, or holed up in Puerto Escondido.”

“They can have the so-called Mexican Riviera. I like it here. In the Sea.”

“Speaking of which,” Hetta said, “do you think we can get over to San Carlos, be hauled out, paint
HiJenks
’s bottom and be back over here on the Baja by Thanksgiving?”

“Shouldn't be a problem. But first we gotta get to San Carlos. We should cross tomorrow night,” Jenks said, glancing at the diminished swells outside the placid anchorage. “Looks like we’ve got a weather window, so we'd better make tracks.”

“I know. I’ll listen to the weather report on the Chubasco Net in the morning, make sure there’s nothing nasty coming our way. I just wish we had a big old moon.”

“I know you don’t like night crossings without a full moon, but the water’s usually smoother after dark. I mean, we could give it a go tomorrow morning, but if we do, there's a good chance things'll get rough on the other side."

“Jeez, get all logical on me, why don't you? But you’re right, it’ll most likely be smoother at night.”

Chapter 4

And pines with thirst amidst a sea of waves.

—Homer, The Odyssey

Dark red.

That was all Pedro saw when he awoke. He felt the sun’s warmth on his skin, recognized it, knew he was awake, but he couldn’t open his eyes. As he’d slept, the unrelenting Baja sun baked him in a thick crust of salt that glued his eyes shut. Each eyelash and every hair on his head was white and stiff.

He knew, from other times when he’d been sprayed and wind dried, that he looked like a photograph of an aboriginal tribesmen, their faces painted white, he’d seen in those yellow picture magazines that
Gringos
donated to the Mahatma Gandhi Library in Santa Rosalia.

Squinching his eyelids tightly, then raising his eyebrows, he managed to open a small slit in one eye, but at a price; salt grit burned his eyeball like fire. With the help of those tears, he slowly and painfully concentrated on opening that eye.

While he slept he'd dreamed of his mother's tortillas, and drinking icy cold
aguas frescas
, like the ones from a small store in Santa Rosalia. His favorite flavor was watermelon. Now awake, he cursed the fresh drinking water in the panga, only inches away from his head. His line, net and hook shroud allowed him to shift slightly, and he could, like a marionette on a string, manipulate one arm. But not far enough to reach that gallon of water he hoped was still in the aft cockpit. The bottle might as well have been in Mexico City.

Scuffing, scraping noises overhead caught his attention. He gingerly cocked his head and, still struggling like a young kitten to open its eyes, felt his eyelashes finally release. He could see! A brown pelican sat on the motor shaft above his head, studying  Pedro like the fish he occasionally stole from fishermen’s nets.

The boy almost laughed, but a sob caught in his throat as he spotted, silhouetted by the afternoon sun, the Three Virgins. The trio of inactive volcanoes, the largest soaring to eighteen hundred meters, loomed like dark sentinels on the horizon, just as they did from his village. And at sunset, even on a hazy day, their outlines could be seen all the way from the mainland, serving as a maritime navigational tool for the middle gulf. The way home.

Pedro wondered whether his mother, most likely  standing at her cooking barrel while preparing the evening meal for his little brother, also watched the sun fall behind the Virgenes. Maybe saying a little prayer for her absent sons? The sons she thought safe in a fish camp. Weeping in frustration, his tears melted even more salt from his gummy eyelids, stinging his eyes more, which brought more tearing and water loss he could ill afford. If he could just reach his water bottle....

The pelican grunted and flew as both he and Pedro heard a splash and saw the fleeting outline of a dark fin. The boy’s heart skipped a beat. Cold fear swept through him. Struggling against his barbed bindings he moaned as the hooks dug deeper, then forced himself to be still and listen. Another splash, then a bottlenose dolphin surfaced three feet away, chattering and squeaking as if asking Pedro how he had gotten into such a fix.

The dolphin circled
La Reina
several times, took a few leaps, and then, with a flip of his powerful tail, disappeared. Pedro waited, hoping the bottlenose would return, but soon gave up hope, not only for the dolphin’s return, but for his own salvation. For the first time since he fell overboard, he despaired he would die in his own nets.

Chapter 5

Pray devoutly, but hammer stoutly.

—W.G. Benham

Pedro’s mother, Lourdes, mixed masa flour with water and kneaded the dough into a large ball. Plucking off small bits, she rolled and slapped the rounds flat between her tiny, callused palms with a bit more force than necessary. Only a slight puckering of the weathered furrows around her mouth, and the overzealous clapping of tortillas, betrayed her building unease. Her face otherwise rivaled the serene visage of the Madonna painted on a boulder above the village.

She flopped the thin tortillas onto a griddle sizzling over a fifty-five gallon fire drum in her outdoor kitchen, then scrambled eggs with chiles and garlicky manta ray
machaca
for her five-year-old’s dinner, his favorite. As she sprinkled the dried, salted and shredded fish into the eggs, she longed to be cooking for two more: Pedro and Gabriel.

She did not, of course, express her worries to her neighbors.

They would think her foolish. After all, men from her village came and went like the schools of fish and squid they sought.

“
Hijo
, come eat,” she called to the house. A small boy, still sleepy from his late afternoon siesta, pushed aside a blanket over the door and settled into a homemade chair. A skinny dog slunk up next to him and watched hopefully as Lourdes handed the boy a tortilla wrapped around the egg mixture.

Lourdes smiled as she watched her son eat. How she loved his watery gray eyes. Silver, they were, like those of his silver-eyed, silver-tongued father who had temporarily sweet-talked his way back into her affections six years before. Of course the boys’ father was long since gone again, but at least she had this small package of joy to comfort her when Pedro and Gabriel were at the fish camp.

And,
milagro—
a miracle—the fishing had suddenly gotten much better for her sons, although others in the village still groused of small catches. In the past year, Gabriel bought a new outboard for his panga, shoes for the whole family—not that she wore hers except to church—a rebuilt engine for his pickup, and a new dress for her made of real polyester. And a house. She smiled about the house.

Last month a truck arrived, loaded with gray concrete blocks, bags of cement, and sheets of galvanized metal. The entire village, all twenty inhabitants, turned out to watch in amazement as two men from the truck, along with Gabriel and Pedro, began work on a structure right next to Lourdes’s home. For two days they mixed cement and sand, stacked blocks and then fixed the tin roof to the two room house. Then, wonder of wonders, topped the whole thing with a large black plastic water
pila
. The truck left and Gabriel organized a bucket brigade to fill the plastic cistern from the village well.

“Now, Mama,” Gabriel then asked, “which room do you want?”

Lourdes entered the chilly gray rooms, made a great fuss of looking out the windows and opening the tap Gabriel and Pedro piped down from the
pila
, then allowed the boys to move in her bed and chair. But that night the north wind picked up, rattling the corrugated metal roof and howling through the as yet unshuttered windows.

The next morning Lourdes, who was awake all night, sleepily made tortillas with chorizo for her older sons. As soon as they left for their fishing camp, she moved back into her old telegraph pole and palm frond house, and asked a neighbor to remove the tin roof next door. That night she slept soundly as her palapa roof swished in the wind instead of rattling and banging like Gabriel’s old Chevy truck.

Now the cistern was a community water supply and the cement block structure served just fine as a dog house/chicken coop/goat corral.

Lourdes absently threw a tortilla to the dog, crossed herself, gazed wistfully towards The Virgins, and then at the rutted lane leading to the boys’ fish camp thirty miles away. If her sons were not home by tomorrow, she would walk to the camp and check on them.
If people think me foolish, let them
.

Chapter 6

When men come to like sea life they are not fit to live on land.—Samuel Johnson

Freshly showered and shampooed, her pixie cut blown dry, and a dab of lipstick applied, Hetta took a sip of her drink. “One of these days,” she grumbled, “these damned dominoes are going overboard.” Adding  numbers to an already outrageous IOU, she increased her four-day losing streak to several million pesos.

Cocktail hour and dinner, their timetables changeable as governed by the seasons, were a social ritual scheduled to coincide in winter with the early twilight. Two drinks on deck—rum and coke with lime for Hetta, bourbon on the rocks for Jenks—where they either played dominoes or just drank in the scenery and wildlife until the sun set.

They ate dinner after dark, then Hetta washed dishes, Jenks dried, and they read or settled in to watch a movie from their huge DVD collection.

Even when in port, Hetta and Jenks, content with each other’s company, rarely fraternized in the watering holes and tourist eateries that had proved the bane of many a boater in Mexico. They could neither afford it, nor were they interested.

Hetta’s chagrin with tonight’s domino game escalated to the point where she refused to play another minute. Jenks watched her warily as she began snatching up cubes.

“Uh, you’re not gonna toss those dominoes overboard like you did in Mazatlan, are you?”

“It was only the double trey. And I've matured. I’m gonna throw you overboard instead. It was a pain playing all those weeks without that three. You? You'll dry out.”

Settling back into her deck chair she gazed at the distant mountains. With their darkening valleys and purple highlighted peaks, they resembled tissue paper cutouts glued to the colorful sky. She sighed. “I never tire of the beauty. I know I tell people that it’s like boating on the moon here, but I love it. Some might call it too desolate, but not
moi
. Even when the mean ole wind howls for days.”

“Beats the howling commuters, traffic, and jobs we have to go back to.”

“Maybe I’ll throw you overboard on general principle. How dare you mention the unmentionable in the presence of a Southern Belle,” Hetta drawled, pronouncing southern suth-er-un. She kept her voice light and teasing in hopes of avoiding a prickly subject.

“You know we have to talk about it soon, Hetta. Our days of leisure are numbered.” Jenks was aware he was treading on dangerous ground.

Hetta looked away, an avoidance technique Jenks knew well. He waited.

Taking a deep breath, she brushed off her annoyance and pleaded, “Let’s talk about it later. Much later. I promise to give up my daily allotment of caviar as a concession to the dwindling budget, okay?”

“Hetta, it’s the main course we’ll have to forgo. And soon,” Jenks persisted. Then he smiled and added, “But, in the name of a dead norther to celebrate, no talk of impending starvation tonight.” Rewarded with a dazzling smile from his wife, Jenks was glad he chose not to push the touchy, but looming subject of their return to the real world.

“Deal. Let them eat cake. And speaking of, are you ready for a big old juicy steak?”

Jenks nodded.

“And, after dinner, we’ll test the running lights and radar for tomorrow night’s crossing, okay?” asked Hetta, the self-appointed safety officer on
HiJenks
. She mentally checked off her GETTING UNDERWAY list and added, “Oh, and since we’re doing a night crossing, don’t you think that tomorrow we should take off the outboard and stow
Jenkzy
on the swim platform?”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Jenks barked and saluted, “if you say so.” He followed Hetta into the cabin to fetch steaks for the grill.

Sitting out on deck, basking in starlight and the afterglow of their dinner wine, Hetta murmured, “Until we came down here I thought a Milky Way was something I ate when no one was looking.”

Jenks chuckled and they sat quietly until the dull hum of a generator intruded on their tranquil evening. Hetta scowled towards the beach, trying to identify the culprit. Most of the homes on the beach were dark, except, she noted, Bud’s place. “I see someone is giving Bud’s new fifteen KW genset a good workout. Looks like every light in the house is on.” Turning seaward she added, “But it sure is dark out there.”

Jenks recognized the disquiet in Hetta’s tone and knew she was worrying about the crossing. He pulled her close.

“Everything’ll be just fine, Hetta. We’ll leave whenever you're ready and turn back if it’s too rough. And you know there’s hardly any other boat traffic between here and San Carlos. What can go wrong when we have a new radar, two GPS’s, and an able-bodied sea wench aboard?”

“Thanks, Skipper, for not saying ample-bodied sea wench.” Hetta kissed Jenks on the nose and felt better. But later, as she lay awake staring at stars through the screened hatch above their bed, she couldn't help dreading the next night’s crossing to San Carlos.

Fish splashed around the boat and a ghostly coyote chorus echoed off the moonscape above the beach. Hetta scooted closer to Jenks, unable to dismiss her uneasiness. By this time tomorrow night they would be cocooned inside
HiJenks
, ploughing along at seven knots, unable to see a damned thing outside.