Cece Chapman
Illustration by Cece Chapman
Oscar Eats It (excerpt)
The sun was a big-hot, boiling ball, leering behind Cabanas Lola at 6:30 a.m., a malevolent burnt-orange presence with purple edges, air thick as water, an effort to move through, evidence of evil heat to come. Smeary-eyed surfers checked the flat sea for an instant and flopped back into their hammocks. I saw Oscar returning to his cabana, dropping things, banging, bumping, whispering, coughing, blazing drunk from a three-day, tree-cutting trip, deep in the forest, for his hand-carved wooden sign business. Pigs squealed into position as food delivery trucks left their holes, the kitchen opened, Carmen threw water on the concrete floor sweeping it out in foaming waves. I was across the street waiting at the bus stop to catch a speeding Mexican bus.
Blasting down the coast in a rumble-cloud of music, I saw fishermen pulling boats on shore, cowboys riding horses across the sand, big black birds fighting over dead fish, Ernesto hauling wave-split boards off the tideline, a tiny frame adrift in yesterday's carnage. Overnight the swell had dropped, the frequency lessened, waves rolled slowly within a few meters from shore, reared up and spit on the beach. Bored surfers repaired boards or passed the bus in customized, dusty jeeps, looking for excitement, adventure. The sun raised itself, growing redder, bigger, heavier. All I wanted to do was get back to Cabanas Lola and jump in the sea before noon.
An hour later I hit the government offices. With my visa renewed and stamped, I was back at the bus stand in ten minutes, trapped there, prey to food salesmen for twenty minutes, until the next bus north. A woman thrust a wriggling bag at me, causing me to buy a trussed iguana out of shock and confusion. The angry eyes and bound mouth terrified me while it struggled all the way back to Cabanas Lola.
"Paint it Black" screamed across the mirage-striped, sizzling beach from Cabanas Lola speakers on my return. Five men in black leather lounged at tables, drinking mezcal, playing cards, smoking, talking, one of them with a baby owl on his shoulder, their bikes in the road displacing the furious pigs. I saw Carmen serving platters of seafood and beers jammed with limes. She was angry, pushing through the gaggle of surfless surfers trying to pay a fisherman to take them to a nearby lagoon reef, yelling at the black leather boys to get their hands off her, ignoring the tidy New York surfers, striding through fighting surfer girls, totally not seeing the vacationing city girls waving blood red fingernails, as the lurchingly drunk tattoo-covered Aussie surfers and arrogantly muscle-ripped Brazilians circled them.
Carmen crawled to the city when she was 14, her mother dying in childbirth, leaving her to the newlywed stepfather and his sons to rape her. In the city she managed to buy a dress, get a job as a fruit seller, living with prostitutes near the dump. When all her things were stolen, she took a bus to the coast without intentions. Lola hired her. For six years she had been running the cabanas, waitressing and cooking for tips and living quarters, her own cabana, her first room to herself. On call at all hours, her face was a unreadable, perpetual open stare. Every person who stayed in the Cabanas Lola left Carmen something: red high-top Converse sneakers, Nike wind breakers, fins, addresses, photographs, French jeans, batiks from Bali, maps, books, radios, Brazilian bikinis, bottles of foreign conditioners, shampoos and soaps, her room was a sorting house of international iconic consumer goods. I tried to help her make sense of the world through these objects, but her desperation eventually revealed them as absurd. I agreed.
I quickly changed into trunks, untaped and tied the pissed-off iguana to my cabana wall, gave him water, and headed to the restaurant on my way to the beach to talk to Carmen about iguana food and where I could safely let it go without it being barbecued by a beachboy. She was shaping perfect tortillas, stirring mole, grilling red snapper--making brown rice, baby-smooth refried beans, sauteeing vegetables and baking flan for Oscar's return from the sea. Between exchanging full beers for empty for the leather boys, the conversation veered to her favorite subject, Oscar. Occasionally all Oscar's sign-carving, cutting and painting noises, bumping, banging, dropping, and crashing would stop, and Cabanas Lola was quiet while Carmen stayed the night with him. This, despite mystery trips to the mountains, three-day binges in the forest, and all the cash-heavy giddy gringas rolling their eyes at the Tex-Mex love-body of a surf-god with bronze curls and an always open door. Hell, everyone loved Oscar; even the pigs tried to force their way into the Cabanas Lola every day heading straight for his door.
Ernesto passed me on the road, hauling split and fractured surfboards back to the Cabanas Lola. Living at home, he rented a cabana for business; dragging unclaimed board pieces back, repairing them, renting or selling them, but also drinking with tourists and hanging out with Oscar. They surfed big waves, fought Brazilians, drank, talked, and chased women. I was intrigued, jealous of their relationship.
I slipped into the warm ocean, no relief. Flashes of blue fins, glinting silver scales shot through the back of a crest. Occasionally a two to three foot peak would resurrect from the still sea and lash out, threatening to slap me down into the tepid low-tide shoals. I looked for Oscar, his big, wiry frame immediately recognizable.
When I returned to the Cabanas Lola an hour later, he was dead. I never went into the cabana to see him. Ernesto told me. Fishermen pulled him from the shallow sand-bar; his neck was broken when he hit bottom. A big man, hung-over in small surf, he never really learned how to fall. The sun set in a violent haze. The iguana watched me carefully. Later in the quiet night, Oscar's girlfriend from Canada arrived with her father, unexpectedly. They left almost right away.
