Flame Angels

by Robert Wintner

  “I am an animal.” They laugh. They drink beer. They get high and tell jokes. It’s easy.

  Romance can be easy too. At times it’s insensitive, selfish and seemingly mean-spirited. Like when Cosima comes around out of the blue, lolling casual as Ma’o from a hundred feet out. Cosima is different in her way, her casual cruise more of a pose than a reprieve from hunger or fear. She seems hungry for more of something undetermined and fearful of losing it — maybe it’s her power over those under her spell, more or less.

  Her slink and saunter is a natural thing for two men to watch, though not a bonding event in this application. Moeava laid claim a few days ago; Ravid acquiesced, because he had to, because he really needed a job. But now he wants this childish woman, Cosima, in the worst way, with an ache in his chest and groin. This short-circuit in spiritual development affects his self-esteem. Because he had a woman, and what a woman, and can never have her again. He’s no wiser than the dog with the juicy bone, who saw his reflection in the stream below and dropped his bone in the water, because the dog in the stream had a bigger bone, which every dog wants.

  Not only that, he has a woman, a spicy beauty with seasoning and a zest for life, minimal bitterness and zero inhibition, yet here he is salivating at the mere hint of a new dish nearby.

  Well, Ravid still wants a few bones, no argument there. And he can dive into the stream for the old bone if he drops it, down to eighty feet free in a pinch, two-eighty with a tank on a bounce. Or three-twenty with a rebreather on mixed gasses, though that seems like way too much equipment and technical stuff just to fetch a bone. Besides, why bother in the first place when you can just chew on the bone you got?

  Which brings us back to self-image and esteem. Cosima may be the juiciest bone a man or dog could want — maybe as juicy as a bone gets; any juicier and she’d be a cartoon, which she is in a way, and she lays herself right in his lap. Not much a man can do about that, except decline the offer, which is easier said than done. But what can he do, risk everything? Hurt a friend? Not that the friend needs to know, though everyone does sooner or later on every island. Not that getting in on the ground floor of a dive business in French Polynesia is everything, but it’s solid footing instead of treading water. So you want to risk it? For some parsley?

  Well, maybe not. Let’s face it: parsley, like so many things, is more appetizing on the plate, maybe sitting in the butter oozing off the baby red potatoes. Then you eat some, and it’s bitter and chewy. So Ravid Rockulz needs to see this garnish for what it is, more decorative and fun than edible.

  So he ignores Cosima. He will not double take at her sheer gauze blouse and what it fails to conceal. Moeava grew up with women going topless, and here he is bug-eyed.

  Ravid ignores her, so she strolls between them. Moeava squints like an astronomer at a little man on the moon. Ravid mumbles over the tedium of cleaning rental regulators.

  Returning Moeava’s gaze, Cosima says, “Have you been swimming lately?” She casually scratches an itch on a breast, making it jiggle.

  Moeava is paralyzed.

  She tells Ravid, “Not you. You don’t have to swim. Just him, because he can’t.”

  Ravid will not look up but asks, “And why is that? Do you want him to drown trying?”

  She thinks it over and says, “He can drown in water, or I can drown in blubber. He will have a better chance than me. No?”

  “So what? I get a freebie?” She giggles. “I thought it was a magic spell, and you are the prize. You start giving it away with no long swim; that leaves only second prize to the big winner. You know?”

  No longer humored, she walks away, huffy as a waterspout and just as ephemeral. Stuck on a shrinking view, Moeava concedes, “That’s no good. Second prize.”

  “Wouldn’t be so bad,” Ravid says. “She’s plenty prize to go around, you know. But she might be crazy. You don’t want to be number one if she’s crazy.”

  Moeava does not appreciate the suggestion that he be anything but number one, so he fetches another beer. “You girlfriend or wife or whatever she is got used up by a...malade, before you met her. You don’t mind? Why you here?” He lumbers up the dock, away from what could go sour very quickly. Ravid stares at the gizmo in his hands. Did Hereata tell him everything? Moeava has no doubt that Cosima could be the juiciest morsel a man ever tasted. Does he doubt that Ravid could pluck and eat her in a heartbeat with no regrets? Loyalty goes so far, Mr. Moe. You pay an honest wage for an honest day’s work — and I throw an honest lifetime of dive experience into the bargain. Minimum wage at my age with my know-how, and it’s not only mechanical and nautical, Mr. Moe; it’s social and touristical too. I throw in a little loyalty because that’s the kind of guy I am, to a point. I think I have a sore spot on my tuchas, and I think it’s that point we have reached.

  Well, Moeava thinks himself a loser who doesn’t stand a chance. Moeava can’t swim the bay, night or day, so what’s he straining over? Why doesn’t he ask her for some leg, just a little bit to calm him down? Does he really think he should taunt me?

  Except that it wasn’t a taunt but self-defense. Ravid knows this and that he would regret eating the peach Moeava most favors. Well, he would enjoy the peach but would regret the sticky aftermath. It doesn’t matter, because she’s not stable. Not that many women actually show symptoms otherwise, at least not consistently. Even Basha Rivka is a bit off center, with her chronic anxieties. Still, it’s no harm in wondering what a skittish little woman might do — not Basha Rivka but Cosima, Vahineura, whatever her name is. Ravid wonders if she’s eighteen or thirty, or if the frogs have laws about that stuff, which doesn’t seem likely. They’ll eat anything.

  Them and the Japanese. Except that the Japanese eat jellyfish and puffers, and the frogs like pussy and oysters, which are better, less hateful and more appetizing.

  He blows out the regulator, screws the case back on, shags another beer and sits on the cooler. Day is done. Not a bad day as these things go, and not so different from the old days, except for missing the old crowd and late afternoons, with options forming up. Well, weathering the slow time during a transition in life is all part of settling in, getting connected, learning to enjoy less as a means of achieving more.

  He’s not looking death in the face and is well-fed and secure in his own room, with a sixty-watt bulb near enough the bed that he can read till his back hurts or he nods off. Or he could read if he had a decent book. Well, he can walk up the road in the dark, keeping an eye out for careening cars so he doesn’t get run over. He tried it once and won the walk-up-the-road-in-the-dark lottery. So maybe he should cop another ticket.

  Or maybe he should redeem his first ticket once more, since it’s certainly still valid. Or maybe he should let it freshen for another day or two.

  Or he can have a nice tin of sardines with some saltines and mustard — he’s already had the beer — then walk across the street to Taverua for another beer. Maybe he’ll meet a recent divorcée in reasonably good condition.

  Or maybe he’ll sit right where he is on into the night and following day, patiently waiting for the future of substance to begin, with its wonders fulfilled as promised. Well, those things are promised only by himself, but who else should he trust to deliver days of artistic endeavor rather than manual labor, followed by nights of love instead of boredom?

  He remembers a similar funk, sitting in his old beater Tercel — of course that funk was worse, with the girlfriend, make that wife, revealing her instability and insanity — and look what that funk led to, a night and day sizzled onto his memory like a scar. This, on the other hand, is nothing but a slow time in the middle of slow times. Things are working out, shaping up.

  He perks to the scent of reefer and rises to see a group of boys under the big tree over the picnic table, laughing it up and passing spliffs, smoking like a small factory to celebrate the end of another beautiful day. He moves more slowly than only a few years ago — well, maybe it’s been twelve years or fourteen. S
till he’s spry and game for a hit or two. That should let a few hours pass warm and fuzzy as a padded cell, in slow motion, if the marijuana is any good. Moeava had good bud, and this is likely the same issue.

  The boys are game too, passing the spliff to the new guy — the old guy — who steps into the circle like it’s the wheel of life, surrounded by kindred spirits speaking a universal language of no words, with meaning facilitated by this stuff that is smoked and passed. The padded cell is soft as cashmere, and the metronome slows to forty beats to the minute...

  Good and stoned for better or worse, Ravid thanks his benefactors who may become new friends, too, in the near future, when they’re all restored to more verbal communication. For the moment, he drifts back to finish securing the cooler and equipment. He looks up as if at a peripheral vision as the metronome picks up to double time, and sure enough, the waterspout woman is back, calmer now, with her colorful pareo in hand and her sweet, soft explanation: no dance show tonight means she will work the late shift in the gift shop. On that note she removes the see-through blouse he has chosen to ignore, along with her skirt. She stands more thoroughly and achingly revealed in her panties, which he can’t help but watch and ponder, but they will not be removed, in keeping with modesty and tabu. After all, breasts are acceptable, normal, de rigueur, even in nubile effusions of succulence and daring.

  She cups and releases them a few times like a boxer punching his own face against the pain just ahead. She watches them blush and bounce then smiles up at him. He watches them as intended, realizing the trick nature and Cosima play, stealing the better sense of mankind over these globs of dough. She picks up the pareo and wraps herself, tying off to maximum advantage. Stepping toward him she lays hands on him to tell him that her gift shop job is menial and pays a pittance.

  He says he too is waiting for more, that he hopes to develop the dive business with Moeava and engage his cameras very soon. So they exchange the material rudiments of who they are, what they know and what they seek, like urban professionals in a chic bistro, laying the foundation for meaningless sex that may be the only uplift of the day or week or life.

  But this is different, tropical and removed. She repeats her special dispensation that he need not swim the bay, because she knows he can, and the whole point of the swim is the proof. He looks perplexed, dumbfounded and dazed, as in very stoned, and uncertain of what comes next. He would like to duck into somewhere for quick sexual relations and then pretend it never happened, except of course in solitude, when the imagery would be so refreshing to remember.

  Instead, he reminds her that giving herself to him without the swim across the bay would undermine the spell she lives under and has cast upon many men. She responds that she did not mean to excuse him from the swim but rather that he is welcome to have her whenever he wants, as long as he knows that he’ll need to make the swim afterward.

  How about having some right now?

  But he still can’t ask the easy question, even as she answers yes, because it’s not so easy, because he doesn’t know where they could go for horizontal privacy for ten minutes. Besides that, ten minutes or twenty seems like a terrible waste of a golden opportunity that should run three hours minimum, so make that an hour and ten minutes in an emergency. Besides that, she’s nuts, make no mistake, and that puts him in the crosshairs yet again and may help remove him from temptation, even as he ponders a harmless grasp of the lovely chichis and perhaps a tender suckle, which she might deem worthy of a return suckle, and so Jack in the box peers over the rim and out the lid to see if he’s on deck for action — but no.

  No, even though this time his nemesis won’t be a psychopath cousin from the east side but a harmless blala who may soon be like a brother, who can’t get along without him and may be his salvation. Front and center is the devilish rack ready to poke his eyes out with sheer, raw beauty — along with the guilt of casting that blala into despair and love sickness...

  “How about right now?”

  “Not now! I have to work! I already told you. Maybe after that. I get off ten thirty. All finish by eleven. Okay?” She accepts his dumbstruck silence as affirmation and meanders into the waning light as time itself winds back down to forty beats...

  Just so comes the clop, clop, clop of high heels on decking from the opposite direction. Their timing is a bit uneven since the step is adjusted to avoid the cracks. Hereata rounds the corner with a familiar smile now transformed from radiant morning to satisfied sunset. She steps up, takes his hand and says, “Come with me. Smoking that stuff will make you stupid. I want to feed you. Then I want to show you something.”

  So he sighs over the quarter inch to spare on the sideswipe. And he goes, glancing sideways at Moeava watching out the window. How long has he been watching? Not to worry — Moeava’s half smile and matching half nod affirm nature’s correct course and assure that his fantasy of the future will remain intact for a few more hours.

  Ravid shrugs. Well, most men know what they’ll do, which is what they’ve done since forever, which is follow their nose to the scent of what urges them in life. The multifaceted scene with its convoluted dilemma and singular drive reminds him of the one about Whodaguy and his best girl, Fayreeva, a month before their marriage. Whodaguy can’t take it anymore, waiting for their wedding night. Never mind. No time for joking, this.

  Because a man knows what became of himself surely as his hand is grasped on the way to the older woman’s lair, with its soft comfort and exhilarations. No, this is not the future a boy or young man foresees, nor is Hereata a likely candidate to claim the waterman with the notable Speedos. He will come to learn, either by chance or because Moeava leaves documentation where he will surely see it, that Hereata is fifty-three, which is not so old, not even fifty-five and a relief, considering the average age of most grandmothers with grandsons aged twenty-six.

  But her age is incidental on the way to feeding, and seeing what she has to show, though he can guess what’s on the menu, even with a few new courses, some hot and steamy, some grimly exotic. What’s good is the honeymoon bungalow over the reef that stabs at his heart for a brief moment, imagining the insensitive frogs who cleared and dredged this reef in order to build this bungalow, then dragged a few coral heads back over in hopes they would grow again to generate top dollar year-round from your most discriminating travelers.

  The bungalow itself is a dream come true, with a rack rate of a grand a night with tax, meals included, which Hereata and her man will take as room service for absolutely free, which fits the dream nicely, along with the six hundred count sheets, the fluffy towels, marble bath and beautiful little fishies swimming just below the floor, with a viewing window and spotlight, so cute.

  What’s grim is minimal but consistent, like Hereata’s inflamed, swollen gum that won’t stop hurting till she removes her top right incisor and the bridge along with it and sets it in a glass by the bed. Or the top third of her hair, which she removes to a lamp shade on the escritoire. Or the sound of her nail clippers hacking away at a stubborn overhang, big toe, left side, thick as laminate with a crusty brown underlayment.

  But all that stuff, both the good and bad, are manini in the moment of knowing that we have a pattern — that given a choice, a man will choose sex and room service over patiently awaiting a sublime future every time, no matter what. Are you kidding? He could be dead tomorrow. Or the next day. Or surely some day. Then he’ll wish he’d taken the opportunity granted.

  That this woman is nearly fifteen years his elder and presumably past her prime becomes incidental to her most generous presence; she still has a bevy of moves to share, along with the aforementioned soft comforts and a mini-fridge. This scene trumps the can of sardines and two beers waiting up the dark road — and the sleepy book and whatever else might be available there. Better to jump like a green and bumpy pond dweller into princedom, given the right mix of rhubarb rhubarb mumbo jumbo, which this appears to be.

  You want to swim the bay in the dar
k? Have at it. I’m hunkering down with a hostess from the pro circuits. That is, what we have here is a pattern that fits. This is not like the other night, with the thrilling adventure of getting laid by a new woman with splendid tits. Nor is this a game second go, which of course it is, but the point is that it’s so much more, a groove or a rut or a little of both, which all romance requires any way you slice it, establishing a routine that will not easily be broken.

  But why the hell must anything be broken? She rides like seasoned foredeck crew, her truly extraordinary melons flopping delectably to the ocean swell...

  A long time later, but not too long, after the aftermath and quick fall to deep sleep, he wakens as if by instinct to see the clock says 10:30 — time for Cosima. He watches it parse minutes, pondering how different minutes can be, or could be. Having two women in one day could make a young man proud. Viewed in that dim light the aging process feels like a blessing. Besides, sexual relations with Cosima will be much better in a day or two, when they’re fresh. As it is, he feels liberated from the drive for a cock-a-doodle-two and all that silly, immature, macho stuff.

  He feels honest and sincere that this fundamental session of tits and ass is world class, plain and simple. Oh, he could rise and excuse himself to go for something or other — not beer, because it’s in the mini-fridge, and so are the snacks. He could go for a walk — that’s it, a walk in the dark. Then he’ll be back.

  Yet she grasps the leg sliding to the edge, finding the other leg and then the last leg. She secures him, oozing over, her warm and friendly fingers plying up the back muscles to the neck and shoulders as she pins him down to better put him back to sleep. Who is she kidding? Or so he thinks; and ten long minutes later he descends to the depths again at 10:42.

  Many hours later, the sun rises on a most pleasant deprivation of senses. A nameless man with no coordinates feels the luxuriant comfort before he sees it or can fix himself in time or space or circumstance. Pain free, worry free and free of want or desire, he floats weightlessly, indefinitely and anonymously in another realization: it’s a top-drawer bungalow, complimentary, thanks to what’s-her-name, um, Here...Hera...the unusual woman who got him up four times in one night, which hasn’t happened in a while, especially with one so, shall we say, elderly. How did she do that? Unless conditions converged on optimal performance potential in a stallion suffering from improper management.