It felt like we were going a hundred miles an hour as we bounced up and down on the waves of the Caribbean sea. Although it would be a fifty-mile journey through open ocean, we would arrive at our destination in just under an hour. The boat was packed, and if there was lifesaving gear, it wasn't clear where it was. Theoretically a situation like this would require at least five milligrams of Valium for me to deal. But as I basked in the sun on the edge of the boat, my floppy camouflage hat tied snugly to my head, my yellow Sponge Bob shirt billowing in the wind, I felt nothing but relief.
An hour earlier, Darcy, Laura and I were wandering through the meanest streets of downtown Belize City, lost with fifty pounds of gear on each of our backs. One-armed and one-legged homeless men scampered aimlessly like zombies, suddenly animated by our approach.
"Hey mon, got any money? Got any money?" They all looked exactly the same-ripped, stained, white T-shirt, pants that ended in frays at the ankles, bare feet. Some wore twine for a belt. Others held up their trousers with their hands. Their entire lives were on display wherever you went in the slums. Sometimes a figure would emerge from a cardboard box or a pile of trash, defecate a foot away from the sidewalk in full view of nearby pedestrians, then retreat to whatever lowly, stinking wreckage it was that passed for sanctuary.
We tried giving them money, but then four of five more people approached, and if we said no, they started mobbing and grabbing at us. I bought bananas and tried to hand them out, but it was an inept gesture and there were few takers. We learned that it was best to look straight ahead, keep walking and move on.
By the time we found the marine terminal, four or five people had been following us for several blocks. We were sweating and beginning to stagger a little in the tropical humidity. Just before we got to the entrance of the terminal, they caught up with us and blocked our way.
"Got a shilling man? Give me a shilling please!"
"I'm really sorry, we really don't have anything right now," Darcy said. "We're on a tight budget."
"Leave us the hell alone," said Laura. "We already told you no."
"Please ladies please! Just a shilling! Give us a shilling."
I looked around and the men tightened their circle around us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw three more homeless men slowly staggering toward us with their hands out.
"Don't you know what `no' means?" said Laura.
Throughout Central America, we learned that no never means no. It might mean yes. It might mean maybe. It might mean tomorrow, but it certainly doesn't mean no.
I was starting to get nervous. We were being accosted by four or five one-armed, skeletal people, but more were on the way. If something went down, more homeless people were coming, the crowd around us was desperate and getting more belligerent with every passing second. The sentence that began "if anything should happen to us here..." ended with, "...we're on our own." The only cops we saw in this area of Belize City seemed to be trying to get on their way to somewhere else as quickly as possible. We got a strange glance as we passed one cop on the street. Her eyes bulged out when she saw us. Clearly, she thought we were crazy.
One of the men grabbed Darcy's arm while another grasped for Laura's pockets. "Just a shilling m'lady, c'mon?" They continued barraging us with their entreaties as though it was still optional.
I'd thought about what I might have to do in this situation, but I didn't think I would actually do it. "That's enough!" I yelled. "You heard the ladies! Now back off, mate."
They paused for a second, then continued grabbing. "Just one shilling, mon."
I pulled out the six inch bowie knife I had strapped to my olive green shorts and started waving it around. "You fucking heard me! Keep your fucking hands to yourselves and back off."
"But I just have a stump," one man said, in a surreal moment of clarity.
"Well, keep your goddamn stumps to yourself too," I said. I realized I sounded like an asshole or an idiot, but I swore I wouldn't let anything happen to my female companions when we left home. How could I face Darcy and Laura's mothers and tell them that I allowed them to be robbed and raped by a group of one-armed and one-legged men? How would anyone ever believe it? They'd probably think that I sold my companions into white slavery for the grad school money and this was the best excuse I could come up with. Not on my watch.
The knife waving display prompted the mob to take a step back or two, but not much more. They continued begging. They looked past the knife, past my display of verbal aggression. There was nothing left in these men except a reflex to beg. Their humanity was reduced to the point where the possibility of a frightened foreign lunatic jabbing them with a knife barely registered.
"Please mon? Please mon? Please?"
"You fucking heard me, mate. Now back the fuck off or you're gonna get cut!"
His eyes rolled to the right and left. "British?"
"Bloody right."
"Soldier?"
"What do you fucking think, mate?"
The crowd slowly began to amble away. British soldiers train in Belize. If I wanted some respect of the don't-fuck-with-me variety, all I needed to do was wear my floppy camouflage jungle hat-also part of the uniform of British soldiers here. The green shorts, army surplus backpack and military haircut did the rest. Somehow, it never made a difference that I walked around in Tevas, high-priced hippie sandals.
I expected my companions to upbraid me for pulling the knife. When they didn't, I nervously tried to stammer out an explanation. "You know, I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know how far they'd go."
Laura and Darcy shot me weary, accepting glances that emoted: we're too tired, too strung out, too relieved to judge. "It's okay buddy," Laura said.
As we dragged ourselves to the entrance of the marine terminal, a taxi driver came out. He'd been watching the scene unfold. "Those guys botherin' you?"
"We're okay," Darcy said. "They're leaving." The cabby's face puffed out and looked like a ripe tomato. Without warning he sprinted across the street and caught up with the last straggler of the bunch. He kicked a one-armed man to the ground. It seemed that our temporary moment of distress was the excuse to kick some ass he'd waited for all day. We could hear yelling but conversational Creole is hard enough to understand, let alone pissed-off Creole. The one-armed man held up his stump to defend himself, but it was only a stump. He yelped like a dog with each blow. The cab driver kicked the homeless man a few more times before walking back to the terminal with a shit-eating grin on his fat fucking face.
"No more trouble for you guys!" he said, like a good dog.
The inside of the Belize City marine terminal was like a refugee camp for white tourists. Hundreds of moms with straw hats, scuba freaks, baseball-hat-clad jocks on spring break, lovey-dovey couples, old men with white shoes, and grubby, slum-exploring backpackers like us were crammed like cattle into a space about half the size of an elementary school gymnasium. Several monster-truck-tire-sized metal fans suspended from the ceiling kept the collective sweat and perfume and unwashed hippie ass stench from lingering in the syrupy air. A haggard-looking old woman sat on a chair in one corner of the place collecting two shillings from any travelers desiring to relieve themselves in one of the cracked, seatless toilets. Behind us, a Pakistani vendor sold sunscreen, pop, disposable cameras and shirts that said "I Love Belize City". I got up from the floor momentarily and purchased another pack of Colonials, the tobacco being cheaper, smoother and less brutal than Conquistadors. Chain-smoking Belizean cigarettes was better than sitting on the floor and listening to myself perspire.
After half an hour we lined up to get on the boat. Wanting to keep well practiced to maintain the British soldier façade, I said, "shall we queue up?"
"Oh shut up," Laura said with a half smile.
When we got underway, the ocean looked so blue and pretty. The deafening roar of the powerful engines kept conversation to a minimum and the tip of the boat out of the water. Suddenly my mind was disconnected from thoughts of what just happened. We were escaping fast. In just forty minutes we would find ourselves on the relaxed, tropical island of Caye Caulker, and Belize City would be a bad memory. We were bound for a place where big knives and booming voices were not needed, where one-armed men did not tread. We would drink Belikins and eat conch-with the exception of Laura, a vegetarian. We would rent bicycles and carry beach towels to the edge of the aquamarine sea and bond with bottlenose dolphins and save the sea turtles. We would collect coconuts and ripe papayas and lounge naked on some remote beach in sand as fine as silk, and we would think that we had been reborn in the Garden of Eden.
The whine of the engines began to fade as the island came in to view. The ladies let out an excited giggle. We had no idea where we were going to stay or how to get there on the three-mile-long, French bread-shaped island. It didn't matter. It was early in the day, and everyone we met in Belize with Caulker stories told us that lodging was always accessible and cheap and availability was never a problem. After the boat was pulled in and moored to a long dock, we off-loaded ourselves and looked around for our bags. A middle-aged lady pulled up in a golf cart. She had frazzled, dreadlocked hair that exploded in every direction, wild green eyes and lines in her face so deep they looked like crevices. The tank top shirt she wore revealed biceps more well defined than Popeye's, armpits so hirsute that the strands were forming dreadlocks, and big, floppy, barely covered knockers with what appeared to a homemade tattoo high up on one. In short, she was a sea hag.
"G'day folks," she deadpanned with an Australian accent. "I'm Nora. You guys American? Got place t'stay yet?"
We gave each other the sheep-in-the-pasture look. We discovered that it was no coincidence that the money changers, hoteliers, three-day-old fried chicken vendors, hammock dealers, hookers and tour guides hit you right when you got off the boat, bus or taxi. It's when the frazzled tourist brain is most vulnerable and least able to make rational decisions. It becomes second nature to go anywhere and do anything in Central America without even being sure where you're headed or what you're doing until you already have your seat on the bus. It's mordida, the small bite. Everybody takes a small bite and nobody gets rich, but they get by. Wherever you go, everybody finds a way to get a little piece of what you have whether you consent or not. Itineraries, reservations and schedules are only for the jet-setters that stay in the few upper-echelon private resorts. For the remaining 99%, it's I-Don't-Know-And-Go-With-The-Flow.
"No, not really," we replied, our wide, innocent eyes popping out of our sunburned faces.
"Well I got this place called Stella's," said Nora the sea hag. She turned to the left and pressed one finger against a nostril and blew a long line of snot out of the other. "Sorry, been a bit out of the tucker lately. Anyway, dorm beds are $1.00 U.S. a night and private rooms are $4.00 a night. That's the cheapest rates on the island. Ask anyone. Everything else is fifty or sixty a night. I got one room open that looks out over the ocean. I can drive you guys there right now if you want-no charge." She studied our reactions and brought the bottle of Belikin she was holding to her lips. After taking a few hearty gulps of the diarrhea-colored national lager she belched and nodded thoughtfully. "Stella-that's Greek for star."
"Can we have a minute to think about it?" Darcy said.
"Sure, but don't take too long. I gotta pick up a big shipment of baby food in ten minutes."
"Oh, you have kids?" I said.
"No, it's for the island."
We stepped back a few feet and conferred. "It's really hot out and after this morning I don't feel like walking around with my backpack on looking for a place to stay," I said.
"Yeah, but what if it's a shithole?" Laura said.
"Who cares? We only have to stay tonight."
"-Uh, actually there's a two night minimum," Nora chimed in.
"Who cares? We only have to stay two nights," I amended. "We're here for a week."
"I just want to throw my stuff down and get a beer," Darcy said. "$4 a night. That's more money for fresh lobster. What have we got to lose?"
"Maybe for you guys," said Laura. "I'm not going to be killing any lobsters."
"It'll be fine," Darcy said, sounding spaced out and mildly irritated. She waved her arms through the air slowly, demonstrating what "fine" looked like. "I'm sure it's really nice. Let's just go." She smiled and clapped her hands, as though this would generate the motivation and enthusiasm needed to get on the golf cart with the sea hag.
"Okay I guess," Laura said. "But if it's crappy, we should look for something better."
We heard another belch. "Made up your minds yet?"
Thirty seconds later we were hanging off the sides of the golf cart zooming down the narrow, sandy roads of Caye Caulker. Hordes of slow-moving, elderly couples carrying beach towels and shirtless men with long hair and shell-bead hemp necklaces jumped out of the way as Nora barreled through them at top speed. As we veered away from the main road and headed toward the other side of the island, each passing block looked more dilapidated than the previous. Kitschy tourist bars were replaced by houses on bow legged stilts. Houses on bow-legged-stilts were replaced by pregnant, three-legged dogs with cow-sized udders and scruffy, weatherbeaten one-eyed cats. Finally, we reached a nameless strip club, identified only by a sign depicting a silhouette of a woman's form wrapped around a pole. A large, toothless local woman peered down at us from a second-story balcony. She let out a belly laugh and pointed at me. "Too earl-lee, mon! Too earl-lee! You gots to wait fo'night to see pussy in here!" I smiled back and offered a weak thumbs-up.
Nora shook her head. "They got that sign because people here is ignorant. Lot of `em don't read. Oh..." she added as an afterthought. "I always forget to mention the strip club. It's the only one on the island. Not many people know that. And if you say I sent you, you get 5% off a lap dance. That's just for you though," she said, looking at me. She started laughing and coughing at the same time. "Your lady friends probably won't go will they? Ha, ha, ha!" I began to wonder what other fringe benefits we stood to take advantage of by staying at Stella's. "Listen guys, everything is really laid back here. The only rule is no sex outside-and that means blowjobs too. And I don't want to see a bunch of used condoms outside your door. I'm just too old for that shit, okay?"
Dwarfed by the huge strip joint just ten feet away was a smaller, more run-down looking building with ripped screen doors hanging off of every wall. "Hurricane did that ten years ago. Haven't had a chance to rebuild everything yet. We're getting there." Then Nora violently depressed the horn on the steering wheel of the golf cart as though she were giving CPR to a long lost child. "Mena! Get the fuck out here now! Take care of these people!" After a moment a short, stout, dark-complexioned elderly woman began hobbling down the stairs. "Stupid bitch," Nora muttered. "She can't help it I guess. She's Mayan. If she didn't have a baby I toss her out on her ass."
"Baby?" I said
"Yeah, she's 38."
Mena hobbled up to the cart and stared blankly toward Nora, a servant preparing to take orders from her master. "Which room?"
"Get them the key for number two. Go! ...Well, she's slow but she'll take good care of you. If you have any problems with her, let me know when I get back. I have to go get that baby food. Make yourself comfortable. We have magazines in Spanish and English. The communal kitchen is downstairs. I used to let people take the boat out but it has a few holes in it now, so it's unsafe." Before we could thank her for the information, we were inhaling a cloud of sand as the golf cart peeled out at full speed. When the dust settled we were looking at the short, meek, Mayan woman holding our towels and smiling at us through a mouth full of steel teeth. "I show you the room."
The room was the size of a utility closet. It had two sets of handmade bunk beds with driftwood frames and particle board platforms. Thin, yellow stained mattresses adorned each plank. A tiny, ancient, oscillating fan sat perched on a rickety, one-foot-wide nightstand. It had buttons for three speeds, but only one worked-the slowest. The bathroom was partitioned from the bedroom by a ripped, plastic sheet draped like a pirate flag from a rusty metal, horizontal pole. Although it was safe to drink tap water on the rest of the island, Mena informed us, "No drink here, town waste pit very close." Along with a spacious shower, half-decent vanity, and thousands of biting ants that patrolled the walls, there was a cute, cross-framed window. Mena warned us, "Keep closed at night or crabs come in."
After paying upstairs and signing some forms, we were asked to turn over our passports for the duration of the stay. Then, Mena asked if we had any other valuables we wanted to leave with her. "Don't worry," she said. "People no steal here anymore once in awhile."
"This place blows," I told my companions after taking care of business. "Why did you guys decide to stay here?"
"Its finnnnnnne," Darcy said. "We'll have fuuuuuun."
"Yeah, why did I want to stay here?" Laura said, putting emphasis on the "I".
Outside our front door, we noticed a pile of several garbage bags with flies buzzing around it. Although there were two chairs, I supposed that we wouldn't do much hanging out here. I walked around the side of the building. The ocean was just twenty or thirty feet away, but the view was obscured by upturned boats with gaping holes in them, overgrown trees and rusted children's toys missing wheels and handlebars. I found the dock, and walked between missing boards until I got to the end. There were two boats.
A small fiberglass motorboat sat half full of water. It had numerous small holes that splintered out from the inside, and metal shell casings were scattered fore and aft on the bow and the engine platform. They looked like 9 mm or .45s. There was a blood splatter on the bow, but strangely I didn't see any nets, rods or other fishing gear. The other boat was longer, open but with higher gunwales and sturdier-looking. I climbed inside and noticed a flap sticking up from the carpeted interior. I pulled on it, and a door came open to a wide, dark, empty compartment whose full dimensions I couldn't ascertain without a flashlight. I decided it was time to go back and find the girls so we could go have some fun in the sun. Just then I heard frantic footsteps approach me from behind on the dock. Suddenly Mena was grabbing my arm like a child as I stepped out of the boat. "No, no, no! Is private, is very private. Nora come back soon! You never walk here again. Dock is old and very dangerous. Big trouble."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I was just curious."
Mena kept shaking her head. "Very private, very private."
"I'll never come out here again. I didn't know. I'm really sorry."
"Okay," she said, calming down a little.
That afternoon we walked to the only beach on the island. It seemed a bit disappointing to me that an island of this size should only have one beach. The "beach" consisted of a sandy spit on the edge of a channel, just a bit west of an ugly concrete barrier that held the sea at bay. The hundred foot wide channel separated the north end of Caulker from a tiny, wilderness sister island full of caymans, mud and dengue fever. Although there were technically other places to swim and snorkel, this looked like the safest. After walking around the side of a rowdy bar playing loud calypso music and holding a limbo contest, we found a place that contained more sand than broken beer bottles and spread out our towels. Darcy put on her headphones and stared at the tanned six packs of the island hippies passing through while Laura and I relaxed. I told Laura about the boats and the dock behind Stella's.
"That's really weird," she said. "Nora must be some kind of dealer."
"Naw, if she was, why would she be running that dump? Why would she look like such a hag? She'd have the money to get the plastic surgery she needs. She'd live in a mansion with body guards and be some kind of pirate queen with gigolos and eunuchs giving her foot massages. Haven't you ever seen Scarface?"
"Oh, sorry. I forgot how much you knew about drug dealing. Wasn't Al Pacino in Scarface?"
"Yeah."
"Well, was he a pirate queen?"
"Maybe."
"Righhhhht."
"I'm gonna take a swim."
"Good, maybe that will give you time to think of something else intelligent to say." I got up and Laura smiled and slapped my ass, which was clearly inappropriate, but I tolerated it.
The sea looked calm, and even though nobody else was swimming in the channel, I figured they all must be stupid. Why swim on the other side of the rocky, trash strewn, concrete barrier just a few dozen feet away, when the beach was over here? Well, I wasn't a follow-the-crowd-conformist. I swam to the current of my own channel. The water was so warm it almost tingled. After lazily floating about twenty feet out I recalled that sharks often like to hang out on shallow channels, and eat off the legs of tourists. I decided to get my head wet, swim a few laps and head back. Then I realized how easy it was to float out this far; I hadn't even moved my arms. Then I noticed that both islands were getting smaller and smaller. I was drifting. Oh well, time to head back. I paddled and kicked and breathed like I was training to be an Olympic channel racer, but I still kept getting pulled away from the island. If there weren't sharks in the channel, they were probably waiting just beyond it, with their friends the barracuda, the box jellyfish and the giant squid. I'd only been in the ocean for ten minutes and suddenly it dawned on me that I was fucked-already. I just wanted to get my head wet and forget about sea hags and pirate queens and now I was going to die. I started yelling hysterically but Darcy had her headphones on and Laura probably couldn't hear me over the din of the calypso party at the bar.
Just as I was leaving the channel and being pulled out to open water I noticed a floating navigation buoy. I wrapped my arms around it and the current was so strong that I felt my legs pulled straight out behind me. Finally, I managed to shimmy up the side of the buoy until all my shark-snack parts were out of the water. I tried yelling to the ladies but no one could hear me from this far away, so I just sat there, legs and arms wrapped around a bouncy, floating navigation marker for what seemed like an hour or two. At some point a guy in a sea kayak paddled up. He had dreadlocks and a beaded necklace.
"Hey dude, what are you doing up on that buoy?"
"Floating," I said, feeling shocked and severely sunburned.
"Don't let the coast guard see you. You're not supposed to tamper with navigation signals."
"Thanks for the tip."
"Hey...you want to smoke a doobie with me? I got one rolled up."
"Actually, I'd like to get back to shore but the current is too strong."
"Oh, yeah. Riptide!" he said, smiling and nodding emphatically. "Bum-er man! Whoa, you should see your face dude. You look kind of fucked up. ...Hey dude, what are you doing on that buoy again?"
After waiting for the guy to smoke his doobie by himself, I leapt back into the water and held on to the kayak as he paddled us back to shore. I wanted to kick him for making me wait, but if someone's going to save your life then I guess you have to be saved only when they're stoned enough to do it. We pulled up to the beach amidst a crowd of frantic onlookers, Darcy and Laura chief among them. "Wow, hero's welcome dude!" said my friend. "We're pop-u-lar! Sweet!"
Someone was talking to Darcy and Laura. "Is that him? Okay, call off the search boats."
"Why the hell didn't you call out for help?" asked Laura, delirious with panic and relief. "Are you some kind of idiot? We thought you were dead!"
"Calm down. He's finnnnnnne," Darcy said, and waved her arms around slowly.
After sleeping the rest of the afternoon, vomiting and spontaneously exfoliating seven layers of skin through a slimy shellac of aloe vera gel that covered my body, we all went to a bar and had dinner and downed some Belikins. "We should check out the strip club later," Darcy suggested.
"Why?" I said. "The place looks skankier than a dirty needle tainted with AIDS blood."
"I don't know...just to see what happens."
"Well, count me out. I need to rest."
Laura mentioned what I discovered at the dock earlier that day. "I think we should get out of here tomorrow morning. Who cares about tomorrow night. We're only out $4."
I nodded. Darcy sighed. "Do we really want to move? It's probably nothing. These people are just laid back. You guys really need to learn how to relax."
"Well I don't care," said Laura. "I'm leaving here tomorrow."
After sundown, we could hear dance music blaring from the nameless strip joint ten feet away from us. A gusty breeze wafted some air into our room from the outside and suddenly the place smelled so strongly of fish and feces that we could almost taste some of both. After we fell asleep, we awoke to the sound of rain. "Ah," I thought, "this will clear out the stench and prevent me from having to fight my gag reflex." I opened the door, and saw a man with his pants around his ankles, staggering to and fro, peeing next to our window and generously wetting his trousers at the same time. He let out a giggle when he saw me. "Blowjob?" he said. I closed the door and walked back inside to sleep fitfully for another hour or so.
Though I only came partially awake to the sound of other people purging the contents of their stomachs, testicles and bladders, or stumbling blindly into the sides of the building, it was the gunshots that got all of us out of bed again. First there was the sound of a boat engine roaring up to the dock, then hushed voices. "Get the shit out of here, now!" I could make out Nora's voice say, "shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up!" Then there were four loud shots, one after the other followed by silence. Laura, Darcy and I sat up wide-eyed in our underwear, wondering what to do. I unsheathed my knife and held it aloft in my trembling hand, sitting on the floor with my back against the door. Finally we heard a muffled, intoxicated laugh. "Didn't know safety was off."
The next morning we packed up our stuff at six o'clock and I ascended the stairs to the office to get our passports. "You have to ask Nora," Mena said. "I am not allowed."
"Where is she?"
"Outside, in front."
At the bottom of the stairs, a stark naked, filthy toddler blocked my path. He had a wide grin and mop-top hair. He was chewing on something that he had in his hand. He held it out to show me, the way children do when they're proud of some little treasure they find. "See?" he said. His tiny fingers were clutching a spent condom.
"You should put that down," I said, fighting the urge to vomit. "Yucky!" Temporarily forgetting that I was speaking to a child I said, "that's fucking nasty." Oh well, the kid had probably seen and heard far worse. The child shook his head mischievously, uttered something in Mayan and ambled away. I thought of chasing him down and taking it away, but then I realized I'd probably have to peel it out of his fingers while he screamed and howled.
I ran around to the front, and there Nora was engaged in an intense argument with three men. They were cursing and gesticulating wildly. The sea hag had her arms up in the air, and her shirt was pulled up far above her midriff. A sagging, bra-less bazonga could be seen flopping like a dying fish against her ample belly with every movement she made. A young girl with them was sobbing uncontrollably. "How did we lose forty goddamn keys last night?" the sea hag bellowed. A man said, "we find `des bas-tards. We kill dem!"
I probably should've slipped quietly away, but sunburned, exhausted, shocked and freaked out, I wanted only to get rid of our room keys, collect our passports and go. The girls were waiting in the room with my knife on the table, and they were probably already wondering what the hell was taking so long. How would I tell them I was sidetracked by a naked baby chewing on a used condom and a drug deal gone bad? Finally, I interrupted. "Uh...speaking of keys, I'd like to turn ours in, if you don't mind. Mena said to give them to you."
The sea hag turned to me with hellstone eyes. "You're staying for two nights, remember?"
"Well, that's the thing. We uh, have a family emergency back home. Laura's sister's baby got bit by a dingo and..uh..."
"I told you it's a two night minimum. There's no way in hell you're getting a refund."
"That's fine. I just want to turn in our keys and get our passports and we'll be going. Thanks for everything by the way. It was really, really great."
There was a pause while she stared at me. "We're having a little problem here. You're going to have to wait."
"Uh, how long?"
"I have no fucking idea."
"Okay, thanks."
I ran around the building and as I passed our room, I heard a loud whisper. "What the hell is taking so long? What are you doing?"
"Sorry," I said. "I'll explain later."
As I turned to ascend the stairs to the office again, I could see the toddler chasing after me. And he had a present he eagerly wanted to give me-the condom. He thought we were playing a game. "Mine!" he said. "Mine!"
"That's right little fella, YOURS. YOURS." I ran up the stairs, leaving the toddler in the dust. I could hear him crying. I found Mena and demanded the passports.
"I can't," Mena said. "Only Nora." I felt a lot of sympathy for Mena's virtual slavery to the sea hag, but the time for playing games was over. I could no longer hesitate to be a hardass if that's what it took to get our precious passports and get out of here.
I looked her in the eye. "No," I said. "Now."
On our way out, Darcy asked if there was time to see the strip club before we rushed back to the water taxi to get off the island forever. "I just want to see what happens," she said.
I didn't feel safe enough to tell the girls what happened until we were on the boat, three miles from shore. I leaned back and slathered more aloe vera gel on my mutant face and pulled my camouflage hat over my eyes. It was back to Belize City and pretending to be a British soldier, back to the welcoming stumps of the one-armed, delirious homeless men. I was looking forward to it. "I wonder why they didn't freak out when I pulled my knife before?" I mused to Laura.
"They don't have anything left that you could cut off," she said.
© 2007 by Justin Teerlinck.