Читать книгу Sunsets of Tulum - Mr Raymond Avery Bartlett - Страница 16

An Orange from Paradise

The Cancún transit terminal was incongruously modern compared with the surrounding houses and one-story collections of little Internet cafés, pawnshops, and tortilla stands. The air smelled of chili and exhaust and flowers and roasting corn. Two nondescript dogs were trotting around in the traffic, noses to each other’s rears, oblivious to the honks of the battered automobiles that were barely avoiding them. Reed winced as one taxi took a turn too quickly and clipped one of the dogs with its bumper. The animal yelped, rolled, then limped off around the corner, wiser but unharmed.

“You looking for a hostel, man?” a scrawny blond hawker asked in an Australian accent. “I got a great place, perfect for you—just ten bucks. You’ll love it.”

“Sorry, not looking.”

“Come on, just let me show you. You need a place to stay, right?”

Reed pushed past him and into the terminal. A bus had just pulled up and people were disembarking, a stream of families with two, three, or even five children, all with dark skin and bright, sparkling eyes, wearing bright colors. A group of backpackers, their hair in dreadlocks and wearing Guatemalan print clothes, pressed by in a cloud of patchouli and body odor. Two women in their mid-thirties had matching bright-red roller suitcases, each with a big Canadian flag sewn onto the outside. They seemed at a loss as to where to go next. As they walked outside Reed heard the Australian start in at them with his need-a-place-to-stay harangue.

“Yes?” the girl at the counter said, from behind a Plexiglass shield. Small openings were cut at head level and at the desk where the money was exchanged. She was wearing a dark blue pinstriped uniform and had her ebony hair in a tight bun.

“Tulum.”

“Ciento veinte pesos, por favor.”

“Are dollars okay?”

“Sixteen dollars.”

He counted out a ten, a five, and a one and placed them at the semicircle cut into the thick Plexiglass. A draft sucked them through the opening, as if on cue. She counted them primly and smiled, then handed him his ticket.

“Gate number twelve, Sir. Next bus leaves in five minutes. You can board anytime.”

Reed chose a window seat on the passenger’s side, about two-thirds of the way back. He eased himself into the plush velour, surprised at how nice the vehicle was. The hotel clerk’s description had made him expect something with chickens in the overhead bins, guys carrying goats, mothers with unwashed children. Instead, there was a bathroom in the back, three televisions spaced throughout playing a thriller with Alan Rickman, who was, of course, a deliciously nasty bad guy. No one did it better, Reed thought. Rickman’s scorn was just as pleasing in the heavy Mexican dubbing, but it sounded so close to the actor’s real voice that it seemed as if Rickman was speaking Spanish from the start. Reed reclined his seat, settled back in the soft foam, and smiled.

Laurel should be here, he thought. If she could see me now. Then he abruptly changed his mind. She would hate it. She’d be worried about getting some infectious disease from the seat cushions. And that’s if she’d even allow herself to come on the bus at all. Which she wouldn’t. If Laurel were here they’d still be there at the pool, fighting and frustrated.

Almost as soon as he’d thought that, he missed her. What if the bus crashed, what if something happened? Maybe she’d never know why he was on the bus or what he was heading off to do. It would be a weird final punctuation mark in their pages together. He should call her.

And then he remembered: his cellphone was still at the hotel, charging.

“Damn it,” he hissed, standing up suddenly. “Excuse me. Pardon…”

As he pushed his way down the aisle, the driver climbed in, shut the doors, and there was a hiss of air from the brakes.

“Wait!” he said.

Everyone was staring at him. An old lady motioned with her hand for him to move to the front, that it was okay to get off. But he stayed in the aisle, stood there, his heart pounding. It was only a couple of hours. He could live without the cellphone. Just return the book and that would be that.

As the bus kicked up dust and backed out of the parking space, Reed found his seat and again sat down. It was out of his control now. Laurel or Dan or anyone could call, and if they did, they’d have to leave a message, that was all.

The reception here’s just terrible. I’m only on one bar even now, yeah, just now, talking to you.

He could smooth it out, unruffle the feathers.

Just relax and enjoy the ride.

Seated around him was a mix of construction workers, women carrying produce in plastic grocery bags, and a few grubby tourists, mostly younger twenty-somethings with cameras and dusty carry-ons. Reed had grown up thinking you had to watch your stuff in these places, but no one seemed particularly concerned about theft. In fact, shortly after the bus engine rumbled to life, a girl’s wallet slipped out of her loose linen pants and was immediately returned by the Mexican sitting behind her after he politely tapped her on the shoulder. Reed wondered how much of the “dangerous Mexico” he’d imagined up to now was all a creation of the American media, of stupid stereotypes ingrained into him from xenophobic sensationalists. Instead of feeling stressed, he realized that even in the busy bus station he’d felt more at peace than he had in a long, long time. It was already better than the hotel or the pool.

And fuck the cellphone: didn’t every study show that people should unplug once in a while?

Reed pushed the seat back, wriggled into the cushion, and stared out the window as the bus rolled through the Cancún he would never have gotten to see. A flock of bright-green birds exploded out of a cluster of bushes like fluff-covered emeralds. The palms trees rustled, their fronds bending like a hula dancer’s skirt in the breeze. Construction workers manhandled jackhammers, kicking up clouds of dust, which caught the morning rays as if the sun had trained a spotlight on them. A feral black cat, long and graceful, darted across the road. There could be big cats out there too, he remembered overhearing: jaguars, panthers, ocelots. Somewhere off to the west a lagoon held real crocodiles. He’d seen television programs about places like Yucatán, on public television, flipping through the channels at two in the morning after his wife was gone. All of it seemed like a haze. Was this the place where those giant lizards were? Komodo dragons, he thought they were called. Or was that Indonesia?

The vehicle slowed for a speed bump and was instantly surrounded by Maya ladies in their white embroidered dresses holding peeled oranges up for sale through the open windows. Two seats in front of him a woman bought a bag from a stunning girl, beautiful but barely five feet tall, whose long black hair reached down to the small of her back like rich molasses spilling from her shoulders. She saw him through the window and smiled.

“¡Señor! ¡Diez pesos! ¡Diez pesos, por favor! “

He shook his head, keeping the dusty window up. The girl put her hands together quickly in a “please.”

“Okay,” he said, and reached to open the window, but the bus had already started to move. It pulled away and the girl stared at him, smiling and shaking her head.

Too late, he thought. Damn.

The matron in the seat two rows in front of him sucked an orange. She turned back and offered him one over a young pair of construction workers wearing dusty jeans and flannel shirts.

“Es bueno,” she said. “¡Muchas vitaminas! “

“Gracias,” he said, nodding his head and taking the ice-cold fruit. It had been precut into six segments; juice was already running down his wrist. “Muchas gracias.”

The construction workers were chuckling, making some comment to themselves that he didn’t understand. Would the fruit make him sick? Should he worry?

He slipped one of the six pieces into his mouth. The orange was crisp, cold, sweet, and yet still tangy, nothing like any orange he’d ever tasted before. He offered a coin to the old woman who’d given it to him, but she shook her head. “No es necesario. Es un regalo para Usted. “

How many years since his two years of college Spanish? And why the hell hadn’t he studied it a little more? He would take Spanish lessons when he went back. Going back made him think about Laurel, and he stared out the window, suddenly regretting, again, that she wasn’t part of this adventure somehow.

As the bus bumped southward, Reed again pulled out her picture in his wallet. Looking at it brought him back to that period in his life. He could look at it and remember all kinds of things that had happened. The cruise in Alaska they’d taken on their honeymoon. How they’d danced around their rented studio apartment like kids on Christmas morning when she quietly announced she was pregnant. He’d lifted her up in his arms and smothered her with kisses. They’d been so happy together at times. They really had. It was unfair, cruel almost, how happy they’d been then only to end up like this.

The bus slowed for another speed bump and Reed snapped back into the present. He craned forward, hoping to see another group of orange vendors. He was going to buy an orange and give it to the old woman this time, but this speed bump had nothing but a curled up, brown and tawny mutt, which only raised its head as the bus rumbled by. No orange sellers. In hesitating too long he had missed his chance forever. The bus picked up speed as it headed south, and on the left side of the bus Reed could see they were passing the other side of the giant lagoon. It was a mesmerizing blue—the same blue-green that swimming pools try to imitate, only this was real water and the bottom was real sand. Easy to see why this part of Mexico had become such a mega-resort overnight. But he wondered what it must have been like to come through the jungle for days and find it occupied by only a few fishermen. An unknown paradise.

The bus passed the airport, leaving the lagoon and the hotels behind. The jungle rose up around them, the trees and vines lush and heavy. Mangrove swamps became hardwood forests, thick and impenetrable. The kind of jungle that swallows people, makes them disappear.

Reed breathed in deeply, as if the air he were breathing inside the bus were piped right from the pores of the jungle vines. At least this was something different from yesterday. It felt as if his vacation was starting. He kept staring out the window until the bus pulled into the dusty Tulum station. As it swung around into the parking space he checked his pockets quickly, surreptitiously, making sure his money and hotel key were still there, and was relieved to feel their familiar weight pushing through the fabric of his pants.

The bus station had only enough room for four buses to park and a few rows of plastic chairs, the kind that were meant to be stackable, but they’d been pushed into wet cement and then left there. Now they were permanently uneven, some tilted slightly back, others forward or side to side, a miniature Stonehenge made of plastic and chrome. Above them sheets of green corrugated fiberglass provided scant protection from the elements except in the calmest of downpours.

Reed waited his turn as people filed off the bus, and smiled for the last time at the señora who’d given him the orange. The juice lingered on his lips like the taste of a kiss.

Gripping the book gently so it wouldn’t fall apart, he stepped off the air-conditioned bus and into the heat of the midmorning sun, so intense that it felt as if he’d opened an oven and inhaled the hot air. He looked at his watch. It was only eleven and already the tar was sticky. Even the dogs didn’t walk on it.

There was only one exit, two open gateposts with only hinges, no door. Beyond it was Avenida Tulum, a wide street made up of a central corridor and median, where the through traffic rushed on its way south, toward Felipe Carillo Puerto and Chetumal, or north back toward Cancún. On either side were smaller parallel streets, cobbled, that had parking spaces and sidewalks. A bunch of T-shirt-and-jeans-clad teens were clustered around a boy at an Internet café playing a video game, blasting away digital bad guys to his companions’ cheers.

Reed walked back into the bus station and asked a mustached man with bright gold dental work if he knew the way to the Welcome Wanderer.

“Turn right,” he said. “Just one block down. Can’t meese it.”

“Muchas gracias,” Reed said, grateful that the man had answered in English.

The hostel was right where the man said it would be. A humble, almost shabby peach-colored facade with a big black sign over the doorway done up to look as if it were a school blackboard, the writing in fake chalk: The Welcome Wanderer! The door was propped open with a five-gallon water jug filled up halfway, but the place looked deserted from the outside.

Reed stayed on the corner for almost fifteen minutes, finally moving from the sunlight into the shade. Nobody came in or out. He shifted his weight from left foot to right, the book feeling heavy in his hands. Finally he turned around and walked back toward the bus station. When he got there he plopped the book into the rusty fifty-five-gallon drum at the entry way. It settled down among empty soda bottles and crumpled, oily papers.

“When’s the next bus to Cancún?” Reed asked.

“You just missed one,” the attendant answered. He was young, no older than twenty, with perfectly coiffed hair and a loud purple shirt. “Next one leaves in an hour.”

“And the one after that?”

“Three thirty.”

Reed nodded and sat down in the nearest plastic chair. After five minutes, he stood up and pulled the Murakami book out of the trash. Then he sat down again, flipping absently through it from back to front until he was again looking at that page with the names. He stared at them, unblinking, long enough for them to hover in green on his eyelids when he finally closed his eyes. Leaning back, he looked up at the green fiberglass, stretched, and stood up and went back out onto the street.

For a second time, Reed could not bring himself to enter the hostel. Instead, he ducked into a small coffee shop run by a girl who looked no older than fifteen. She had her hair up in a loose bun, with long eyelashes accented by turquoise eye shadow that reminded Reed of the lagoon they’d passed on the drive down here. The coffee was embarrassingly bland for a country that exported some of the richest, most flavorful beans in the world. He added milk and three packages of sugar, and sat at a table, sipping it until most of it was gone. Then he ordered another one. This time he finished it entirely, and he waited for a long time before crushing the paper cup, then put it carefully into the trash. After pressing a few coins into the girl’s warm palm, Reed slowly crossed the street and went inside, his knees aching from the adrenaline and caffeine.