Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  She throws her beach towel on the floor. “By the way, how were sales?”

  The woman’s laugh sounds like a freight train screeching to a halt. “You es-speak Spanish good,” she says in English, loudly, slowly, as though speaking to the deaf.

  “Mi amor,” Chinchu says, stretching open his arms, his eyes glazed. “You want to relax with us a little? Come smoke a joint with us.”

  She turns her back to them, retrieves her opium from the dresser, and spreads the nail clippers, the plastic wrap, and the sewing thread out on the table. Chinchu starts to tell a familiar joke, how the American tourist walks into a restaurant …

  “Only some Americans are funny,” the güera says. “You can’t make jokes about all of them.” From the corner of her eye, she watches as the woman hits Chinchu on the shoulder and rolls onto her side, laughing.

  Even after the woman leaves, she refuses to speak to Chinchu.

  “I can’t help you,” he says, “if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”

  Chinchu spends the next several nights with her in their single bed, until one night she tells him, “The bed’s too small for both of us. I can’t sleep.” When he doesn’t come home, she drinks until she can no longer stand and then tips onto the bed, unaware of her limbs, the bamboo shack diminished to one spinning corner, one bare light bulb, the remnants of her focus. In her drunken aggression she annexes every square inch of space, spreading like a bloodstain.

  Sometimes she wakes up on the floor, or crying out in her sleep. Sometimes she goes to La Puesta and doesn’t make it home, passing out in the courtyard instead. When she kicks and attacks in her stupor, it’s all Chinchu can do to remove the money and opium from her bra so she will not get robbed.

  She wakes one night to find him sitting ten feet away in the sand, his back against the trunk of a coconut tree, keeping watch.

  “I don’t need you to keep an eye on me,” she hisses.

  On the nights she does not fight him, he picks her up and carries her over his shoulder back inside.

  Sometimes she tries to imagine a life with someone who has captured her heart. What that would be like – soapy palms touching as they wash the dishes, swinging side by side in a hammock, bickering then making up, buying plantain together at the Cinco de Mayo market – all the tedious elements of domesticity charged by real love. She pretends those arms can hold her. She wishes on it, the way someone who is dying might suddenly believe in God.

  By the time the güera has finished packing up the opium she will smuggle down to the beach, it is dusk, thick and heavy. Beside her, Juana sighs, squats on her haunches, and blows a strand of black hair out of her eyes. As Dashon’s daughter stares up at the stars, she wonders if the girl too is remembering how the sky looked on her last visit, burnished with moonlight, the mountain air so cold.

  Dashon’s wife makes hot chocolate, stirring the water in an iron pot over an open flame fed with corn husks. A breeze blows across the courtyard and the flames rise a little higher.

  The güera takes a breath as if to speak. She wants to tell Dashon she’s sorry for the way she acted on her last visit, but she can’t. All day, as they sliced poppy heads open with razor blades so the opium could flow out, their exchanges were strained. When she cut her finger, she had tried to hide the bleeding. Then, without meeting her eyes, Dashon had grabbed her hand and wrapped her finger in a rag.

  Dashon drinks from a tin cup; when he’s done, he sets the cup down next to Juana’s Barbie doll, on the stump of a dead tree, and picks up his backpack. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he tells everyone.

  “Where are you going?” the güera asks.

  “I’m going hunting,” he says. He’s never gone hunting during any of her previous visits.

  “I’ll come hunting with you,” she says, knowing full well that in their culture women don’t hunt deer with the men. But she’s not Mazatec, so why play by their rules?

  “No, I’ll walk you to where the bus leaves.”

  Dashon’s wife asks a question, and as Dashon responds to her in Mazatec, the stresses of his words sound like a plea. Dashon’s wife doesn’t look at the güera, but shrugs in an exasperated way.

  “I’m Canadian,” she hears herself explain to Dashon’s wife, cringing at how silly it sounds even though she knows the woman speaks no Spanish. “I used to bushwhack for an environmental group,” she continues, making the motion of cutting through brush with a machete. “I worked building trails. We went up and down mountains. The hills were so steep we needed climbing ropes.” She turns to Dashon. “I can keep up with you.”

  The children look at each other and laugh – loudly at first, then more hesitantly, waiting to see what the other will do next. The children translate what the güera has said to their mother. After a terrible pause, Dashon laughs, too.

  Dashon’s wife interrupts the laughter and says something to Dashon, who shakes his head. The sound of their language is soft, not like Spanish, and reminds her of the way the Mazatecs shake hands, not grasping, but palms kissing, slipping past each other, like silk.

  Then Dashon’s wife turns around and disappears into the shack. As soon as his wife is out of sight, Dashon stares disapprovingly at the güera’s sheer, flowing skirt. She grabs the front of her skirt and knots it, so that when she is done the hem hangs above her knees. “Better?”

  When Dashon’s wife reemerges from the shack, she is holding a pair of Dashon’s wool pants and smiling at her for the first time. This unexpected gesture from a woman whose name the güera has never known makes her throat constrict with pride, her eyes grow wet. “Gracias.” Moonlight paints a shadow picture of their hands touching as the pants are exchanged.

  She puts the pants on underneath her skirt. The wool scratches her skin, and she has to roll the pants down at the waist to stop them from slipping over her hips. “Well? How do I look?”

  Dashon eyes her up and down.

  Miguel shoots the stars with an air rifle. “Pow-pow, pow-pow. So I can come hunting too, now?” He grins at his father, who tsks sharply and says, “Go help your sister.”

  Dashon and the güera stare each other down until the children return.

  “Fried eggs and rolls, some meat …” The children list off the food they’ve packed in the cloth bundle. Then, as soon as Dashon has tossed her the sack, he starts off toward the trees.

  Dashon tells her that flashlights will scare the deer, so for the first half hour, although he is often too far ahead for her to see, she keeps pace by following the sound of his footfalls in the dark. He’s trying to lose her. It’s not until she falls again that she hears him breathing hard. He, too, is exhausted.

  By the time they come to a savannah where the brush is knee-deep, he has slowed his pace enough that she is walking behind him. “I wonder what the tourists at the beach would pay for a guided tour of these mountains,” she says. Dashon’s machete makes a clean sound as it slices through spiny bushes and brushwood, peeling back the forest’s protective skin with one clean swipe.

  “What do you think?” she continues. “You could take them on hikes. I could find a lot of people who’d want to see this side of Mexico.”

  She imagines living in the mountains among the red earth and corn fields with Juana two weeks of the month. She could rent a little place in Huautla de Jiménez. When she wasn’t guiding tourists through the lawless mountain passes, maybe she and Juana could wander through the market in Huautla, examining bolts of cloth and draping the fabric over their shoulders, envisioning the dresses they would sew. Maybe she could buy a truck to convert into a tour bus and find groups of travellers wearing designer sandals who would pay her in American dollars for nature hikes through Oaxaca. With the profits she earns she could buy blankets for Juana’s family, one for every room in their house, a new propane stove, a year’s supply of light bulbs, and crates full of the mangoes that only grow wild on the tropical coast. Though the thought of Juana’s mountains infiltrated by bug-repellent-scented tou
rists leaving cross-trainer tread marks in the dirt makes her uneasy, it would be her chance to invent a new life for herself.

  “If I brought the tourists up,” she says to Dashon again, “you could take them on hikes. What do you think?”

  Dashon removes his hat and scratches his head as she waits for his response, his face masking any clue about how he really feels. Then, in the moonlight, she sees him smile to himself, and with the tone of a man accustomed to authority he says, “This is a good idea.”

  She follows Dashon in the dark, trotting behind him as quietly as possible, struggling to keep up with him as he ducks around fallen branches and over the stumps of dead oaks. Suddenly, he throws his hand palm out, brakes the rushing ground.

  The trees are gripped in shadows. She imagines she sees something, registering movement in every rustling pine. Then the moon untangles itself from the branches and clouds above them and illuminates the earth. At once shifting shapes are pinned down. Even the air, inert and insubstantial, seems to crystallize in her nostrils.

  A deer quivers, its white tail beating back and forth, steady as a pendulum.

  She takes aim. Curls her finger around the cold trigger. There is a moment of exhilaration as the rifle butt kicks her shoulder backward and she has to fight to keep her footing. Then the deer falls.

  Her body alone understands what she has done: her shoulder is throbbing; her feet, numb as she walks with Dashon to where the deer has collapsed on its side. It opens and closes its mouth.

  Dashon, shocked and pleased, chatters about a way for them to haul the deer home. “Hazme un favor? Can you hold one of the legs for me?”

  She cannot pull her eyes away from the mouth. The hike must have taken more out of her than she realized because she can’t catch her breath.

  Dashon empties his pack and looks up at her as she holds an arm out against an oak tree to steady herself. He’s waiting for her to help him field dress the carcass, and suddenly she wonders what the deer’s ankle might feel like in her hand – slender, dying – but she can’t do it. She can’t move. Her body is frozen against the tree’s trunk and her hands are clenched into fists. She begins shaking.

  Dashon will have to dress the carcass himself and by the way his eyes crinkle she can tell that he’s annoyed with her. He ropes one of the deer’s back legs to a tree, exposing its belly. Then he grasps the buck’s genitals and cuts the skin open, pulling the penis away from its body.

  When the deer is splayed open, he hits it between its hind legs with a mallet until the bones crack. In the moonlight, the blood on his hands is not red at all, but the colour of ash. The blood steams as Dashon zippers open the deer’s belly to its throat.

  In Dashon’s eyes she knows she must seem fickle. She had insisted on accompanying him on this hunt, and now she’s recoiling at the animal’s death. But when the deer inhaled his last breath, the sudden silence of the forest stole her breath away as well.

  Dashon stops to sharpen his knife on the wet stone. Everything is a matter of staying sharp, dexterous, adaptable.

  When the body cavity of the deer is fully open, he reaches in and grasps the stomach. It slides out easily through the opening in the belly. He lifts the deer by its hind legs to drain the body of blood. A rush of excitement causes his voice to tremor.

  “My wife loves the heart,” he says.

  Semana Santa, as Chinchu predicted, has brought travellers to Zipolite from as far away as Veracruz, Chihuahua, Chula Vista, Orange County, and even New York. Two days into it and the restaurants have been opening early. When she walks to the beach for her swim, she tries to ignore the fools who are already drunk though it’s only ten in the morning, and shouting at one another with loudspeaker voices from table to table. After she makes her deliveries in the afternoon, she returns to the beach and scrambles after shadows down to the water’s edge where the sand is cooler. Today she has to hike through coconut husks, cigarette butts, the corn wrappers of half-eaten tamales, used condoms, abandoned towels, sun-bleached magazines, even human excrement; when she gazes out over the beach, all she can see are masses of sun-burned bodies scuttling toward the waves, dotting the shore like flies.

  When she gets back to their cabaña, she tries to tell Chinchu the beach is so crowded she doesn’t recognize it; tries to say maybe they should leave and rent a place in Puerto Angel for the week. Instead she says, “I’ve never really liked this place. Why do we live here again?”

  “I’ll take you to Veracruz if you like, it has the best seafood in Mexico.”

  “Today?”

  “No, not today. I have rehearsal in an hour.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Be reasonable. We’ll make more money this week than any other. Then we’ll go to Veracruz. Or Puebla. Or Monterrey, anywhere you want.”

  Just this once, she wishes he would stay with her, not leave her alone while he rehearses, on this strange beach populated by unrecognizable crowds. She compels him to stay with a beloved subject, “Tell me again the story of the Aztec warriors. Please, before you go?”

  He kisses her on the forehead and gathers her up in his arms. She leans her head back against his chest, nestling into him, and as he tells her about the tribal resistance to Cortes, she can smell the salt on his skin. Then he tells her about the cockfights he’s seen in Chacalapa, about dances he attended as a child with his mother, in the mountains, where the wind tortured everyone’s Sunday clothes and steam rose from black enamel pots against a backdrop of jagged peaks.

  She pictures Dashon’s wife squatting in front of the cooking fire or chasing a pig from the kitchen. She recalls how when she spoke to her husband in Mazatec, their soft-sounding words formed a veil between them and the world. Who would Dashon and his wife be in another city, in a different country, speaking a different language? She’s still hunting for the right words in Spanish, searching for a way to express what she feels. But sometimes, when she can’t make sense of her own feelings, she wonders if her lack of words has nothing to do with language at all.

  “Chinchu, are we just going to continue … like this?” she asks.

  “Until we’re caught or the party moves elsewhere, why not?” he says, putting his guitar into his case.

  Whatever she’s been thinking turns into a fist in her stomach. Suddenly all she wants is a strong hand tossing her weight, digging into her thighs.

  “I have to get out of here,” she says.

  Chinchu shrugs and picks up the guitar case. “It’s all the same party.”

  In that moment she comprehends just how little they understand each other. What would he say if she told him she’d hoped the trip to the mountains would provide her with something solid to hold on to? That when she shot the deer, she had felt nothing inside at all? What would he say if she told him that her luck never did stand up to close examination? But somehow she doesn’t have the words.

  Instead she blurts out, “Are you coming home tonight?”

  Chinchu frowns and pretends she hasn’t spoken so that she can salvage what’s left of her pride. She watches him from the bed as he gathers the rest of the things he needs – guitar picks, patch cords, and extra strings – and walks out the door without giving her the satisfaction of a backward glance. He slams the door behind him and kicks his feet in the sand, the grit of pink shells crunching under his heels.

  She flicks hungrily across the still crowded beach, a bougainvillea flower tucked behind her ear, her red sarong beckoning like a tongue. It’s still early, only seven in the evening. Around her the local children play in the sand or chase dogs spotted with cuts. The dogs chase each other down the beach, rolling coconut husks along the sand with their noses, stealing kicked-off sandals, running after horses.

  Alone, without Chinchu by her side, she is a chameleon, moving swiftly and confidently, becoming her surroundings. Even now, she is sure she will continue to think of Chinchu as she searches the restaurants, the tables of travellers, waiting for someone to announce himself wi
th an open mouth or the tilt of a head. At San Cristobal restaurant, a tourist trap, she presses her way to the bar, past bikini-clad women, visitors with pocket cameras, European men with their wives, whose freshly braided cornrows made them look like plucked birds.

  She orders a drink and as she reaches for a handful of pesos, a man with a sunburned face offers to pay instead. She nods in thanks.

  “My name’s Bill. Our whole gang’s here, from Wal-Mart, Guadalajara. Will you do me the pleasure?”

  She lets him sit down next to her at the bar and bore her with his talk of career and family matters. She has always disliked men with red faces, loud men who make people stare and wear their testosterone like a gold chain. It is the men who challenge and taunt her, make her feel slightly uncomfortable, who excite her – the way Chinchu did in the beginning. She has always sought out the men at the vile, calm eye of a hurricane. Finally, she leaves the red-faced man behind crowing about his job and his soon-to-be ex, because his identity hinges on angle and footing, and she knows this is only half the story.

  Then she hears a laugh amid the shadows of the tourists overflowing the restaurant, a laugh so sure of itself it pierces the dull sound of the waves like ice splinters.

  Though the man’s face is unremarkable, blending in with its setting like a snake in a mangrove swamp, it exudes a quiet magnetism. He wears a crisp linen shirt and pressed white pants. He has liquid grey eyes, sun-creased lids, and the skin of a man who has spent a lifetime in the tropics. His feet are callused, strapped into worn brown huaraches. Above interlocked hands, he rhythmically massages one thumb against the other. She brings her fingers to her throat. He has arms that can hold her tight.

  “Una Negra Modelo por favor, mi cielo. And when you have a minute, bring me a paper also, my dear. You know how the gossip pleases me.” Though the man speaks Spanish fluently, he exaggerates the American drawl, mocking his own foreignness. She sits down at his table without asking. He narrows his eyes in amusement.