K. R. Hill's Blog, page 11

Touched

     I found an old travel article while cleaning out my filing cabinet.  While it did not arouse the same depth of nostalgia that my old passports did, it still touched me.  You see, I still recall the sense of mystery as I walked those ancient, cobbled streets, and pushed through the crowded market stalls, villagers passing with colorful attire, embroidery identifying their village, toughened feet in leather sandals, car tire soles squeaking on the oily concrete.
     At that time in my life I was roaming the world, jetting here and there, dropping into people's lives but never staying, just touching and moving along before things got complicated.  And it was in Yucatan I found a home, in this 'troubled little brother' of Mexico, as one author called it, a place called 'I do not understand.'  For when the Spanish conquistadors landed and asked the Maya, in Spanish, the name of this place, the Maya answered 'I do not understand': Yucatan.
     It is a region apart from the whole of Mexico. A different flavor fills life here, a seasoning of ancient spices and attitudes, a daily routine even further from schedule than the rest of Mexico, an idea very hard to grasp for most Americans and Europeans.  In a country that had once gone to war over pastries, in a region known for being unique, where the Maya move among the Mexicans as though hidden, I found a home, a bond, a place to fit in.  It was here my heart sang, where I awoke from my hammock each morning with a song on my lips, brought with me from some sweet dream into waking life.  It was here I found the courage to go within painful memories and fashion a novel.  Somehow this peninsula, jutting into the Gulf Stream of life, baked in the sun, would always be my home, would always call to me from memory, like the voice of an amazing mistress, so well versed in who I am, a part of me.

DEATH OF A FISHERMAN

DEATH OF A FISHERMANcopyright 2012 kevin r. hill


Yesterday a Norte blew through town.  The Caribbean breeze that always picked up around mid-morning, coming off the sweet ocean and cooling Puerto, had swung around 180* to signal a storm, and came at us from the swamp, carrying with it every mosquito in the world.  When I felt the wind shift I checked the radio for hurricane warnings, and walked to the shed to make sure my window coverings were ready to be installed should a big one surprise me.For three days I’d been waiting to get in the boat and head to Punta Brava with all my shiny new lures and a virgin CalStar fishing pole.  I needed that thrill, that elation brought about by feeling the line go tight and hearing the drag singing the instant a fish felt the hook dig into its jaw. But instead I stayed inside with Marina and played games in the hammock with olive oil and a bottle of Cuban rum. With her it was pure sex, free and simple, just tourist sex with no strings.  She was number two to my woman back home, and that made the games more focused.  I was living large in the Caribbean, shorts all day long and flip flops, sand clinging to my ankles.When the Norte blew itself out at four in the morning I woke with the silence and moved Marina’s sweaty arm from my chest.  The stillness meant the Caribe, as the locals called the ocean, would lay down flat and allow us gringos to sneak out and fish.  So I picked up my shorts from the floor, checked for scorpions, and pulled them on as I dialed the number of my Mayan boat captain.  “Fill the tank, Poncho. I’ll fill the ice chest and grab the bait and meet ya on the pier.”
On the way to the pier I stopped at a new telephone pole where TeleMex, the Mexican telephone company, was installing new lines.  Dangling from the big, thick cable on the pole was a rainbow of tiny wires, just what we needed to secure the bill of our ballyhoo to the leader.  I told Marina to keep the engine running and jumped out.  The sun was just coming up and no one was around, and she looked so sexy with only a bikini bottoms and her nipples pressing against the white tank top she wore, that I thought about playing right there in the road, but that wouldn’t get me on the water.  “What are you doing, Yankee?” she called with a sleepy voice as I ran around to the bed of the truck and found the machete.   With a few frantic hacks I chopped off a big horse’s tail of the wire and tossed it into the back.  “Are you crazy? You know what they will do to you if they catch you?” I shoved the truck into gear and lurched forward.  “This is Mexico,” I said.  “I’ll pay a hundred bucks and have a drink with the cop, and be on my way.”“Cabrone,” she laughed.
On the water, bouncing over the current, the wind in my sun-bleached hair, Marina walking topless around the deck, my Mayan Captain trying to to stare at her too much, I wondered if life could ever get better, wondered what I had done to be so lucky and feel life so fully as now. For hours we trolled with the baitfish, escribano, as the Mexicans call it, tied to the lines courtesy of TeleMex. I tried everything to get a bite: I spit on the bait, tied my new transparent leader, even chopped some fish into bits of chum and threw it over board to attract fish.  But nothing was biting so I pulled in the lines and got my new pole with light 20 pound test line on it. If they weren’t biting on bait, then I’d try something different.  From my tackle box I took a small golden Rapala lure and secured with their own knot. If a sailfish hit the light line I’d be in for a half hour fight, complete with aerial gymnastics. “Are you trying to make the fish laugh, or scare them away?” shouted Poncho when he saw the lure I was dropping over the side.  Before I let out enough line to get the lure past our wake, the fish hit.  My pole jumped in my hand and I shoved the reel into gear and set the hook.  I know most guys get pissed when you put on the ratchet sound, but I love that sound of line being pulled out by a strong fish and the alarm ringing as though a bomb were about to explode.  After a minute I clicked off the alarm. Keeping the tip up so the flex of the pole would act as a spring, cushioning the pull of the fish, I let him run until his strength faded, and was surprised to see how much line he took off the reel.  That meant he was big.  It had to be a sailfish.Now it was just him and I, connected by a thread, one animal fighting for its life, the other fighting to take his life, to deny his freedom.  And when he stopped in the water I started working him, pulling him closer with the pole, raising it and then lowering it while reeling in the slack.  Then suddenly he was gone! My heart raced and pounded. I looked at Marina and wanted to hold her. In a split second it occurred to me he was charging, and I reeled like a madman, as though my life depended on it.  I called for tequila, and Poncho held it to my lips as I drank, the fire water burning my throat and taking my breath as I exhaled. Within a minute I felt him again on the line.  Suddenly he jumped and violently shook his head, looking so long and magnificent in the sun, that long sword slicing through the air, searching for the connection that held him, searching for my line, trying to sever our bond.  I don’t know how long I fought him.  He ran, and I pulled him back close enough for him to see the boat hull, and then he’d run again, each time less as his energy faded, as hope slowly wore away.  And in some strange way I felt him, felt his heart pounding with fear, and I wondered at the glories he had seen in the ocean Caribbean, wonders never seen by man, and I wished I could somehow download his memories and relive them to honor him.  And connected to that fish like that, I realized that for a man it was the ultimate sport, with life in the balance, as close as a man can come to sex without the feminine.  That was the thrill, the elation for one, and death for another.The first time I saw his color, when he got close enough, Poncho was pulling on his gloves so he could grab his bill, and he shouted: “There’s something down there!  Something is following him.”“Is it a shark?” “No.  It’s crisscrossing in front of him, back and forth.”  He stood up straight and scratched his black hair.  “I’ve never seen that before.”  And he opened the tequila bottle and drank.When we finally got him in the boat we high fived and raved a bit, and we all got fresh cold beers.  The beer washed away the numbness of the tequila, and the cold condensation dripped on my chest.  And then I caught the look in that fish’s black eye as it stared at me with one question: why?  I watched as those rainbow colors vibrated and began to fade.  Around me I heard Poncho and Marina laugh as they hugged.  A different type of numbness was growing in me.As soon as I dropped the lure over the side another sail hit it before I had let out 20 feet of line.  It was as though it was there waiting, calling to us to drop it, begging us to catch it. I handed the pole to Marina and watched as Poncho helped her and coached her.  Within 15 minutes we had another sail in the boat, laying side by side, the one still alive staring at the first, flapping its tail and touching the other.With all the force of hearing my woman speaking to a lover on the phone, a voice within me said: They are mates.  One is saying to the other, ‘I’ll follow you anywhere.’  I turned and watched Marina and Poncho laughing with arms around each other. 

BLEEDING SOUL

Bleeding Soul
     It took place behind the restaurant with banana trees dancing in the Caribbean breeze. Friends arrived with bottles of tequila.       Women and men arrived with tear-filled eyes, memories of Francisco still so fresh they didn’t know how their life could go on without his singing and laughing, his love of life. We sat at plastic tables and ate as if afraid to speak, as though the food had no taste, as if we would be punished for any enjoyment when a loved one could not be there.      I remember Dona Maria getting up in the middle of her meal and walking to the alter of photos and flowers and candles with the Virgin Mary on them, tears flowing down her wrinkled cheeks as she picked up the biggest photo of her Grandson, held it to her chest as though cuddling a child, and danced around the terrace.  All eyes were on her as she cried and said proudly, “Francisco promised me a dance.”      I bit my lip and couldn’t look at the boy’s mother beside me, my dream of moving to Yucatan rising above me like the spirit of the boy we had just buried, getting further away.  I remembered having to pull his mother, Lisbet, from the coffin of her son as she tried to raise him from the dead.  With her thin body she would not allow him to lay there with the dead. And I remembered  laying beside her the night before as she told me that Francisco was coming over the next day, and how she was getting friends and family together to drive South of Tulum and dive in some remote cenote.  I remembered reaching into the air above our bed and trying to grab onto her mind as it floated like smoke above us, but my words could not penetrate her castle walls of pain and suffering.  And when I touched her, so hoping for a nurturing response, a word, a touch showing there was still a bond between us, I felt her pull away like a cat trying to escape.      After the dinner one of Francisco’s friends grabbed a bottle of tequila and stood up.  After a long pull on the bottle, he told everyone about his last day with Francisco, tears bursting into his words and making him pause.  One by one we drank, stood up and shared with everyone around us what the boy, the young man, had meant to us, how he had touched our lives, how having him with us had brought love and laugher , helped us forget life.  When it was my turn I took two hits and let my memory take me back twenty years to the shirtless little boy who brought me a photo of a beautiful woman cut from a magazine.  At the time I was living in an abandoned little house with a frog named Ralph in my toilet tank, and Francisco thought it a shame I lived without a woman, so he cut one from a magazine and said that I should call her.       As I stood there with palm leaf roofs around me, people watching my tears, I thought how strange it was that my life would be entwined with that of the boy from memory, his passing driving a wedge between my plans and reality. As I sat down I saw Francisco’s sister stand up, and the sight of her made me think of something she would never know.     Early that morning, Lisbet woke me with the sun, while her daughter slept upstairs, and led me outside.  Birds had just started singing in the jungle as the sun chased night into the shadows. On the ground lay Francisco’s crash helmet and leathers.  Lisbet asked if I could wash the blood from inside the helmet so her daughter would not see it.  It sounds like a simple task.  Wearing only shorts, my feet scrapping the rough limestone soil, I turned on the spigot and watched Francisco’s blood color the water as it flowed over my feet, memories of the tanned, shirtless boy with sun-bleached hair running along the street and calling ‘basura’ to me as I carried home some reef fish I had shot.  Each time I reached into the helmet and touched his blood, I watched another bit of him enter the stream and wash over my feet, flow so gently into the limestone, and vanish without his laughter, without a shake of his hand, just gone as jungle birds filled the air with song, another day in Yucatan.  
      So like his blood did my dreams of opening a café disappear. 

Sunglasses

Cultural Sunglasses
It was another day in the home improvement center. Half of the people I asked if I could help them said no because they were embarrassed they could not speak English. I met Tan in the Hardwood flooring aisle.  He was with two other short Cambodians, and each smiled a lot and seemed to be always tugging at their shirt front, a habit fat people often developed so their clothes didn’t become tucked into belly creases. One of Tan’s friends pushed a cart, and they spoke a lot and buzzed around the cart, hurrying here and there.  Tan asked for me by name, and said the manager sent him over.  Right away he started telling me about a tile project he was undertaking, and handed me a sheet of paper with all his measurements on it.  Like all my Latino customers, he expected me to calculate how much tile he would need.  Tan and his friends shared such enthusiasm for the work that I too got caught up in the excitement.  I would tell him something, and he would translate to Cambodian and the three men would discuss it, each shooting back some quick words as the shuffled around the cart in plastic sandals, looking at this and that tile. As I went through my calculations I began forming an idea of what I thought Tan’s house must look like, and what the tile job would look like.  All total I guess I spent over an hour helping them, pulling down another pallet of tile with the forklift, and then having the communal discussion about what type of thinset he should use for the job.  At times I felt I was back in Cambodia dealing with village elders, and not in a busy Home Improvement Center in the U.S.A.Finally he had two carts loaded with the supplies I helped him with, and he turned and shook my hand.  From his notes he took a photo of his house to show me.“Your tile make my house very good,” he said.I looked at the photo and was shocked.  I had imagined a California bungalow, something I knew, a house I felt a bond with, a house from my culture, like so many I had worked on during my contractor days.  But the house he showed me was a direct transplant from Cambodia, with multiple little pagoda towers, totally foreign to anything I knew.After Tan left, I continued to think about our interaction, thinking about how different we were, each coming from countries so different and strange to the other, meeting in a home improvement center in the U.S.A.  But no matter where we met, each retained our culture, a pair of sunglasses through which we see the world and measure everything by, calculate right and wrong, even our idea of what a house should look like, what is eaten in that house, the relationship between the man and woman there.  Then I realized that Tan carried all that with him because he had been raised in Cambodia.  But his children who are born here would have a different pair of sunglasses, a different culture.  Before I started my closing chores, I wondered how difficult that must be as a parent, to see your own children with foreign values, foreign likes and language.

Playboy Played

Playboy Played (Again, I'll call this fiction)
Sandals all day long, beach sand warm on my ankles, the tassels of cut off Levis ticking my legs, a tank top for the tropical heat, and as I walked down the sandy street I could hear the same song playing on the one radio station coming from house after house. New, concrete buildings and Mayan palapas, the music drifted from one after the other.  There wasn’t really anywhere to go, but the trick was to go there slowly, Caribepace, and to look important going there. As long as I avoided the bloated dog that no one wanted to deal with, then walking was good.  Until it rained, of course, because then the sketchy Mexican power lines started popping and arching over head, and that always worried me.  I guess that was my biggest worry of the day.  I was a professional beach bum on the Caribbean, and I did it well.  That day fucking a’ Joe and I were cleaning the hull of his boat, masks pulled over our heads and laying in the eighty degree water while holding onto the side of his panga, scrapping away with putty knifes.  I was there because I loved that boat. It was the perfect way to charm women. I’d meet them in town and offer a snorkeling trip around reef, and fucking a’ Joe would fill up the ice chest with wine and beer, and way we’d go.  With the water, the booze, and a gentle chatting up of women on vacation who wanted to have a good time, and pretty soon their names all blurred together.  It was working like a charm.  Spanish women, German, Gringas, hell, we had ‘em all.  It was a sport, a challenge, and I was working it like a skilled athlete. I mean what more could a man ask for? Here on the Caribbean coast of Mexico there was an endless supply of chickies wanting to hookup, and all I had to do was tie the hook.  Yep, I was Moses in the land of mild and honey, and my seed was flowing.I don’t know why I climbed out of the water when I did, but I stood up, cut-offs sagging low, water dripping from my sun-bleached curls.  And the three of them were walking toward me along the beach; all decked out in new vacation bikinis.  The blonde one carried a sun parasol that caught the wind and folded up at that moment.  It was fate, and I was off toward them, never wanting to let an opportunity slip by.  I trotted toward them and made a joke about the sun parasol.  We laughed and talked for a bit, and pretty soon I had all three of the college girls in the boat.  Fucking a’ Joe had a shit eating grin on his face as he helped each one climb in.  I stood on the bow pulling us out to the anchor so I could pull it up. When I climbed over the girls they giggled as they spread sun screen over their legs and arms.  When I got back to Joe I whispered: “The ugly one is yours.” At the town pier we tied off and carried the ice chest to the tin roof market in our bare feet, the asphalt hot and making us hop and run.  Byron, the fat owner of the market saw us shoving six packs and wine into the chest, and hurried to the saloon door and looked at the pier. “You have more women? Cabrone!” he said in Spanish. As he moved close he hit me on the shoulder and whispered: “Your pecker is going to fall off.”“Duty calls, Byron. Someone has to do it.”Yeah, I was free and young and having so much fun.  We spent the day laughing with the girls, snorkeling around coral heads, showing them turtles and rays buried in the sand, and a little nurse shark sleeping in a cave.  It felt so good to be out on the water in the open air, covered with salt and the sun warming my shoulders. We didn’t try to chat them up.  No, we were just having fun, letting this hand of cards play itself out as it would, letting the day put us together, eye contact while helping them into the boat, or handing one another beer. It was easy and good.When we got back to shore we all agreed to meet in Mike Black’s restaurant up the road in an hour.  Joe and I tied up the boat, and I swam back to visually check the anchor, making sure it was set securely in the sand.  After that we each hurried home to shower so we could hurry back and see where the night would take us with the girls.  “Dude, there’s three of them, so one of us might hit two!  I like my chances,” laughed Joe.“I told you,” I answered as I hurried up the road.  “The ugly one is yours.  The other two want me bad.” I heard him laugh.The mariachis were strolling around the restaurant when I got there, and the girls were clapping and happy.  Joe had not gotten there yet, but I wasn’t complaining.  The scent of the Caribbean came in from the terrace, carrying magic with it, possibility.  There was the thrill of the moment in the air.  We ordered shots of anejo tequila, and sat there telling jokes and recalling things that had happened on their trip.By the time our food was eaten Joe still had not appeared.  And right out of the blue one of the girls invited me back to their room at a near by resort.  I tried to look as though I had to consider my options.  I mean three women were inviting me back to their room, so I had to play it cool; I mean, I was a busy man, you know.  At the bar in their resort we bought a bottle of rum and took it up to their room where we did some acrobatics on their bed, each of us taking turns and the other rating our effort.  But after that one of them put on some music, and I felt the mood change.  We sat on the floor and a couple of them sang along with the music.  Inside I was cracking up, thinking of all the possibilities with three women, who would be where, and even better I thought that surely my friends would give me a metal.  I would be an elite player for a while, The Dude.But as I poured everyone another drink, dropping ice cubes into our plastic glasses, I noticed that two of the girls were getting closer to each other, and the other certainly wasn’t getting closer to me.  And then it came to me through the haze of rum and my own ego: The girls were together, and didn’t need a man for what they had going.With that realization I laughed, just threw my head back and roared.  The player had been played, and that just cracked me up.  Had I been 5 years younger I never would have believed it, that these women would not be better off with the services of …me.  But you know, it was all good.  I was happy for them.  If that made them happy and gave them pleasure, then I hope they rock they shake the world with passion.  Of course I’d still love to be in the middle of it, but hey, I’m a dog.On the way home me and my bottle of rum laughed and thought over what I would tell my friends.  After all, the art of the story is all about what you leave in, and what you leave out.