by Daniel Braum
Tal had told him that no matter how sweet the smile or sincere the words you can’t trust an outsider. “All they want is a fantasy, a fling with an islander and island life. Sooner or later they go,” she had said.
As the months passed after Marika had left, he had heard word of her through the newspapers and the tourists on his snorkeling boat. He hadn’t realized how famous she was. He hadn’t cared.
San threw his diving knife at a small croc nosing about his boat. It missed and sank into the clear depths.
Marika, I always wanted you back, but what was I gonna do? Go to New York and fight for you? How? With my diving knife and my tackle?
If Marika really had come back then there was a chance. Maybe she’d see that she belonged here, with him. He’d show her. If only there wasn’t so much to do.
****
“He’s a big one,” Tal yelled. “San, come on over and help us carry him out of the bay.”
San stopped his paddling. He desperately wanted to say “no,” and run to Marika, but he could feel Tal’s eyes on him, just waiting for any indication he would refuse.
He rolled out of his dugout into the shallows and waded over to Tal and Charlie, who along with Lynden and Big Rog were leading the snared croc to shore.
“She’s an eight footer,” Lynden said. “You think it’s Gertrude?”
“Can’t be sure till we get her on shore,” said Charlie. “Don’t complain, back on San Raphael I used to see twelve to fourteen footers all the time.”
They wrestled the croc out of the water onto the rocky shore. San didn’t think the four of them needed his help, yet he bound the leathery reptile’s jaws closed with a roll of silver tape.
They finished taping its front arms and the four of them picked it up. Tal prevented its tail from thrashing.
“Come on now, over to the other side of the island to the nice garbage dump where there’s lots of food for you,” Charlie said.
She’d find her way back, San thought. They always did. Took them a couple of days. But it was enough time to let the festival go through.
Charlie groaned playfully. “What’s the point of taking them out of the bay? They just come back anyway.”
“How long you been here, sweetie? The bay is to be kept empty and free of the influence of Harat, at least for one night. The jellyfish enter, with the dark of the new moon as they do year after year. The absence of the moon and the spirit of the migrating jellyfish brings purification. Cleansing. The restart of these cycles brings renewal.”
“I could use some of that renewal,” Charlie said, groping for his wife. “But Harat is just a story.”
“But he’s our story. The real reason, of course, is that the big man at Ruby Shores wants the crocs gone. Thinks they’ll scare the tourists away, and then he’ll have no more money.”
Charlie laughed. “Crocs aren’t a danger unless you’re swimming at night in the garbage dump.”
“I know, dear. I know. What are we gonna tell ’em? It was the crocs’ bay first?”
They approached the path leading up the cliff to the Temple.
They can take it from here, San thought. “I have to go and meet Marika,” he said.
“I thought that was one that would stay gone,” Big Rog said.
“Let the man be,” Charlie said.
“She’s back to suck us dry,” Rog muttered under his breath.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tal said to San. She spoke the words as if they were an order.
San climbed over the rocks to the path. Why did he even bother to help? Now he wouldn’t have time to clean up and still have a chance of catching Marika before dinnertime. He wished things could be like those first idyllic months when he woke with her to the morning sun, came home to her after a day on the boats, dined with her on fresh fish on their grill, and drank and walked the beach till it was time to start over again the next day.
San entered the black cave mouth leading into the Temple. Strings of electric lights lit the passage, illuminating tribal ceremonial markings alongside old and modern graffiti. The handrails for the tourists were pitted and rusting from the salt air.
Within a minute he came upon the main chamber. Two croc-men, like the giant pair outside, sat in silence next to the lone, stone slab of an altar.
A pile of incense ash and a bunch of wilted, yellow flowers lay before the slab. Harat was strong, San thought. His people were always fortunate. With the hotels, tourism was booming. But, with the outsiders came many rules and insidious problems. Loyalties were divided and one had to go farther and farther to get a good catch of fish. Many made a better living by working the tour and dive boats. The island was changing. San himself even ran a snorkel boat on his off day. He didn’t know what kind of gods the outsiders had, but he hoped Harat was strong enough to wrestle with them and prevail.
He turned the corner, hurried down the passage, and pushed open the door that led to the pavilion.
A dozen hotels and twice that many day spas and restaurants lined a square paved with clean sand colored stones. Stalls and carts spread out like a snail shell from the central fountain: four stone crocodiles, modern replicas in the style of the temple, spurted water on a giant jellyfish in the center. At the edge of the strip, hulking iron cranes lifted the girders of next year’s new hotel into place, spewing oily smoke into the clear sky.
A small crowd had gathered around Mr. and Mrs. Henderson’s trinket stand. He could hear the old woman yelling, and something told him to pick up his pace. He broke into a run when he saw Marika.
She was sprawled on the floor, one high heel off, her leg twisted. Mrs. Henderson alternated between yelling at Marika and her husband who was taking pictures with a yellow disposable camera from their shop.
San knocked the camera out of his hand and bent to Marika. “You all right?”
“She break. She pay,” Mrs. Henderson said. “She no wanna pay.”
“I didn’t break anything. I broke my heel, then he started flashing that thing at me.”
San helped her to her feet. Marika kicked off her other heel and leaned against him.
“You fall and break glass,” Mrs. Henderson said, pointing at a few broken jars of expensive skin crème made from the bay water and jellyfish that was popular with the tourists.
“Old lady,” San said indignantly, “you should be ashamed. This is my girl. And you let her lay there and don’t help?”
Mr. Henderson rummaged through stacks of t-shirts looking for the camera.
“This is my business,” Mrs. Henderson said. “I don’t go and break your swim masks.”
“I tell you what. I pay you for your crème, on payday. I’m good for it. But, I don’t want to see none of those pictures nowhere, ya hear?”
“Deal,” the old woman said. She waved to her husband to clean up the crème.
San slid his arm around Marika’s waist and led her to the hotel. His arm against her back and his hand on her pelvis bone made him shiver.
“You okay?” he asked.
“It’s gonna be fine,” she said.
A uniformed teenager opened the security gate to the grounds of the Ruby Shores hotel. The palms were cleaned, and the flowering shrubs manicured. Small beach-rock fountains gurgled, surrounded by oceans of thick emerald grass.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“You’d only yell,” she said. “It’s better this way.”
Beneath her heavy eye makeup were dark circles from lack of sleep. She’d lost weight. In her fancy sundress she looked like one of the too-skinny girls from the magazines the tourist women read on the beach. Her face was the same. The most beautiful he had ever seen. Her eyes were alert jewels, which despite their striking beauty somehow spoke of sadness.
Marika smiled to the staff who greeted her as they walked through the spacious lobby. When she looked away, San noticed their disapproving frowns. It felt like a long time until the elevator dinged and arrived to take them.
When the doors closed, he smelled the vanilla and spice of Marika’s perfume and beneath a hint of her sweat. The smell of her.
“I saw picture of you and some man in the paper. What is it? You coming here to make sure it’s me, not him that’s right for you?”
“Something like that. It’s complicated.”
San looked at her. “You’re tired of the big world life again and you’ve come home to me. I can see it in your eyes.”
She pulled on a strand of her thin, sandy hair like she did when she was nervous. “Am I that transparent?”
“No, I know you.” San wanted to kiss her and push her away all at the same time. The magnetic pull between them had not diminished with time, but there was something more. Sex wasn’t why she returned.
“I know a lot has happened, but you and the island were always in my heart,” she whispered.
She was so close and feeling her skin on his as he supported her was like a dream he had wished for, for so long. But he remembered he had also felt the same dreamy sense with her, right up until she surprised him and disappeared.
“They say you come down here to have one last fling with me, then you go back to New York?”
“San, not now. What do you want me to tell you? All I know is I’m here now. Isn’t that enough?”
Maybe it was. Maybe it was too much.
The elevator halted, and the doors opened to her suite at the top of the hotel.
A cool breeze moved through the simple, elegant quarters. Thin, sand-colored drapes flapped at the big windows, giving a panoramic view of the bay.
Marika traipsed past the sitting area and flopped down on the big bed. The gesture reminded him of the old days. Of the Marika he knew. He yearned to lay next to her. To answer the words left hanging in the elevator by saying, yes you are here, that is enough. But he thought of Tal telling him that outsiders only wanted an island fling. But this was different. It had to be.
Marika pulled the pillows out from beneath the soft aqua bedspread, cozied into them, and lit up a cigarette.
“It’s good to be back,” she said, and took a long pull, causing the orange head to glow strong and bright.
She exhaled a stream of smoke. One of the first things she had done after meeting him last year was quit.
“Why did you come back?” San asked. The soft, carpeted floor seemed so strange to him. Yet Marika looked perfectly at ease with the plush surroundings, an inhabitant of an impossible dream world. He wondered if this was what it felt like to be a rich outsider, a big man. The notion both repulsed and excited him.
She took another disturbingly long pull before answering. “For renewal,” she said, her voice wavering. “For some island peace. Yeah, some island peace. But this time to take it back with me.”
“What if I want you to stay?”
He bent down next to the bed and kissed her. Her body stiffened at his touch. She pulled away at first, but then relaxed and met his lips with the openness and ferociousness he remembered.
Marika’s arms found his back, his shoulders, his arms. She turned sideways and pulled him onto the bed. With the soft swell of her breast against him and her leg around his San forgot where he was. He tasted the cigarette smoke on her and for a second he could have been down at the shore with her a year ago. She pressed herself as close as could be to him before forcing herself away with a gasp. The cigarette had burned an ugly hole in the spread. Marika swatted it out and settled back into the pillows in silence.
The strangeness of the soft-around-the-edges place had lost its charm, and San yearned for his place by the sea.
“Come back to the house with me tonight,” he said.
“San, I can’t.”
Her eyes said otherwise.
“It was a long flight. A long day. I need to sleep.” She groped the night table for the pack of cigarettes. “And I won’t if I’m with you.”
San knew she could not be forced. His easygoing way was the heart of their attraction and what she wanted—what she needed right now.
“But I’ll be up at dawn,” she said. “You can take me out on the boat.”
He kissed her gently on the forehead, turned, and went into the elevator.
He thought of his favorite spot out on the ocean as he descended. A shallow sandbar where they first kissed. First touched.
The perfect place for our new beginning, he thought.
****
San checked that no one was around and placed the extra gas can, two snorkel masks, a lunch of fresh fruits, and a six-pack of Crystal Reef, Marika’s favorite beer, in his small motorboat at the dock. He’d take it around to the other side of the island, then walk back to the hotel to retrieve Marika, without anyone seeing.
“Where you going wit’ ’dat boat?” Tal said. She stood in the shade of the dock house, holding a plastic bucket full of jellies.
She knew where he was going, there was no use pretending.
“Lynden and Big Rog got da nets for me. They both gonna check ’em today.”
“They are not,” Tal said, punctuating each word. “Get your butt in your boat and go do your job.”
The jellies sparkled orange and green in the shadow, creating a glimmering outline of her on the wall behind. She stared fiercely, not just with the authority of an older sister, but with the stern wisdom of an elder, of the community leader she was certain to be.
“I do what I gotta do,” San said.
“That’s what Charlie used to say, and look what happened to his home, San Raphael.”
San thought of the nearby island, full of paved roads, high rises, and smoky cars. It was miserable.
“If everyone did as you do, we’d be another San Raphael in no time. As it is, we are holding onto the heart of our island by just a thread.”
The image of the Temple filled his mind. A gossamer net strung between the giant statues scintillated in front of the black cave mouth. He felt as if he were passing through it as he walked past his sister.
“You count,” Tal called after him. “Every one of us does. We are different. Our world is not their world. Even though they come together here, we have to remember that. If we lose even one of us to the siren call, soon we all be falling down like dominos.”
San started on the rocky path, then stopped and turned toward the way to the pavilion. No sense in hiding or taking the long way now, he thought.
Twenty minutes later he was back, helping Marika into the boat, Tal nowhere to be seen.
The sun had just lifted from the horizon and cast an orange sheen on the rippling cells of early morning waves.
Lynden and Rog were paddling to the nets. They stopped to look as San started the engine and moved away from the dock. Marika smiled and rummaged through her straw bag for sunglasses and lotion.
San cut the engine just before the nets, flipped it up and let the boat coast so as not to get snared. He dropped it back in and veered the boat to the open ocean. Marika lifted her head to the clean breeze, closed her eyes beneath her big rose sunglasses, and untied her hair.
Their wake was full of little jellies propelling themselves toward the bay. San had never given the creatures much thought. He knew there was something special about the water—the temperature, high salinity, and mineral content that drew the jellies as well as the tourists and rich spa-goers to the island. The salt-water crocs were more mysterious. A British research team he had once taken diving had yammered on that they were attracted to the pulsing rainbow patterns the jellyfish made at the festival, but he didn’t know exactly how, nor did it really explain anything. Crocodiles and Harat, who wore their reptilian form, embodied the spirit of the island. Leave us to our sleepy, mysterious ways and we don’t bite.
Marika interrupted his train of thought by sliding her arm around his waist.
“The world always looks better after a good night’s sleep,” she said.
“The world always looks good here.”
San gave the engine more gas and they sped into
the blue. Just as the island was almost out of sight, he stopped the boat and eased it onto a green area of shallow ocean, which gave way to a pristine strip of sand.
Marika smiled. “Our place,” she said. “I can’t wait to go in.”
San noticed the thick, gelatinous mass of a man-o-war dipping and bobbing a few yards off the boat. Before he could warn Marika to be careful of its tentacles, a dark shape rose from the depths, a big, old croc. It snatched the three-foot jellyfish in its jaws, and for a few seconds swam with it just beneath the surface, only its back ridges visible. More crocs rose from the depths and fought for chunks of the huge jelly with splashes and thrashes.
Back again, San thought. Season after season.
He jumped over the side onto the sand bar then helped Marika out of the boat.
“Don’t worry,” San said. “They like it better at the mangroves during the day.”
She stood in the foot and a half of water, then sloshed away from the edge. “I’m not worried.”
San unpacked the sun umbrella and planted it for her. Then he produced the six of Crystal Reef and plopped it in the water under its shade.
“Shame on me,” Marika said. “I’ve forgotten how good life can be.”
San watched curious silver fish approach the bottles. Lazy black and yellow striped barbs picked at the sea grass.
“You can have this every day you know,” he said solemnly.
“Relax, honey,” Marika said. She kissed his cheek. “Forget about tomorrow. We have this day.” She kissed his other cheek. “We have this moment. Everything is perfect. A completely perfect moment.”
As her lips touched his, San recognized the words as his own. The very concepts he had taught to her, when she had first met him—a stressed out tourist unable to unwind. But he desperately wanted a string of these moments, a series of never ending islands continuing into the future.
He took a deep breath and sat with her in the shallow water. They spent the afternoon eating fruit, watching sea birds, and talking intently about nothing. As the day grew late, a cluster of the small jellies floated past, massaging them with their tiny harmless tentacles and gelatinous bodies.
