Cece Chapman

I was hitch-hiking down the Mexican coast in torrential rain with a very blond and vain Italian I couldn't shake. Forced to flag rides to the main road, we then continued south together. He was headed to a new hotel looking for a job, I was scouting beaches before hotels ate them up. Six humid hours, three rides later, a side road led on to a hasty camp bathed in sunset. Muffled explosions of waves lulled me through the sleepless night, to primeval smoky shorebreak at dawn, which I bodysurfed, watching a couple approach on the endless curve of pink sand. Shambling along arguing, drunk, bags bulging with oysters, waving machetes, knife strapped thighs in ripped jockey shorts. One of them, with flaming magenta hair (rubbed with raw shellfish) and black crossed eyes, flicked oysters open for me while chatting in a language I'd never heard. The other spoke Spanish, sending us to a farmer who knew about rented houses, and asking if we were married and why we were there. Finishing breakfast in a coconut gully, we saw the farmer's open concrete house nearby. Yams, coconuts and sugar cane were stacked against rebar columns, through which smoke drifted, as if it escaped the lagoon. The farmer's wife scorched thick tortillas for us on hot rocks and gave us directions to the sheriff who rented houses. She asked if we were married and why we were there. A little after noon we found Sheriff Primitivo Velasquez sitting in his net-covered veranda, a jaguar skin stretched behind him, studded with parrots and knives. His one arm held a machete, which he put down to pick up a mezcal bottle, alternating with tortillas to eat his beans. His daughter brought him more. Her son brought me a beer. Primitivo wanted to know if we were married and why were there. Eventually he rented us half a partitioned ranchhouse, just across the street. It was engulfed in plants, clotheslines, buckets, and piles of rocks. We shared it with the schoolteacher's family. I set up to draw, look for food. The Italian spent the rest of the day drinking beer with the transvestite bar-owner from Acapulco who later confided he'd returned home to wait for his long-estranged twin to claim their inheritance together. Primitivo, and the son I did not like, told me about their lives, their lagoon where they had always lived. Once a fisherman, Primitivo lost his left arm netting fish with dynamite. But that did not stop him from hunting down and killing the previous sheriff, taking his badge in revenge for shooting his eldest son. He wanted me to fix this son's photograph. In the back room surrounded by gilt-frames, religious icons, burning candles, and voluptuous flowers I explained my water-based paints might not work on the old, glossy photo paper. The son insisted. I took the photograph that had been shot at, sat upon, water-marked, one eye lost to mold. I kept to myself in the village, moving quickly, going to bed early at night. My daily rhythm of cooking, bodysurfing and painting depended on wave conditions in that long beach. One afternoon found me forced out to sea in a growing swell. From there I could see the top of the hill, where four men were climbing down the cliff path, one was blond. Fast and furious shorebreak forced my focus on the catch, drop and slide out the back of the wave before I hit sand.

The Italian and I never got along, going our separate ways. He had hung a stylish shirt between our rooms and told me to move it if I wanted him. At night he kept company with the bartender, drinking heavily, sleeping a lot, disappearing for chunks of time, reappearing hungover, smelling of old, wet dirt. I felt things building around me I didn't understand. Primitivo invited us to his veranda often, to drink, to eat flame-blackened fish embedded with chili, to talk about the way things used to be, with friends, to me, to himself, to the night. He said he chanced on a jaguar paddling in the lagoon, watching him for a long time. He wanted to kill them all and sell their pelts for a lot of money. His silky-haired daughter took us on a picnic deep into the lagoon, where her newest suitor roasted fish caught by her children, clutching knives, nets, and broken goggles. Her husband left her, she told me, terrified of her family, her third son was her brother's. The bartender, she continued, always waited for his twin and no one knew if he was alive. Only together could they claim their gold-mine inheritance, the maps were in a bank box down the coast. In the moonlight the night was a negative of itself, shadows white, pooling like mercury. The Italian and I walked to the bar as I described returning the re-touched photographs. Enraged, the son stormed out, claiming I ruined his brother's image, calling me a loca gringa bruja. I explained again to Primitivo, yes, in daylight it was an awkward job. In candlelight, though, the image looked startlingly real, especially the new eye. Primitivo, being slightly deaf and blind, did not hear me, did not care, placed it in it's frame, weeping, crossing himself, gulping mezcal. The son scared me. The bartender warned me. The Italian laughed at me. He said I deserved it leading them on. After a beer I went home. Trying to sleep, feeling hunted outside in the moon's glare, trapped inside in the windless night, I decided to leave at dawn. Jaguar dreams were scattered by the two fisherman, who having crept into the house, were waiting for the Italian. I got rid of them, never went back to sleep, leaving on the first transport out of town. I saw the Italian later that year, I snarled at him.