by Howard Engel
SEVEN
I GOT THROUGH THE NEXT DAY with a combination of window shopping and noshing in the cafés. I stretched out these expeditions with naps in my room, which helped put me on local time. I began to think about the various kinds of head coverings around me. Each one probably told volumes about the wearer. Head scarves and knitted caps, straw coolies and turbans. They all had me guessing. My street wandering was buttressed with many pillow monologues. Funny how the sour, dive-bombing sound of the mosquito is the same the world over, while, I hear, frog noises change from place to place. My informant said that Aristophanes wouldn’t recognize a Texas frog or even one from Brooklyn. I was getting used to the idea that wherever skin touched skin, perspiration followed. I was reminded of this again while I cleaned melted chocolate from the inside of my pocket. That got me thinking once more of my friend the local cop. He was becoming sand in my Jell-O.
In the streets, vendors with trays or baskets of cold fingerfood plied their trade on the sidewalks. Others, with steaming pots, offered me everything from Pad Thai noodles to fried scorpions and other bugs to eat. Interesting smells followed me everywhere. I found that I was beginning to like the life of the streets: the noise, the commerce, the bustle.
Somewhere in here, the day changed. I had had a serious sleep and the sun was turning the walls of the building opposite whiter than white. I had treated myself to a meal of local things I didn’t dare quiz the waiter too closely about and had wandered back to the hotel without incident. Street thieves notwithstanding, I was starting to get a feel for this place. I was beginning to know where things were located and how far they were from one another. Space was sorting itself out in my troubled brain, but time was another matter. I was already becoming vague about how long I had been in Takot. Was it yesterday I had arrived or was it the day before? I looked at my bed for an answer. I had had a long time-catchup sleep and then last night’s. Did I tell you that already? This had to be the morning of my second day. Or was it the third? This was the day before I was going to dive the reef offshore. Tuesday, by my pocket calendar. But you know about time away from home. Every day is a holiday. In fact, it was like this sprawling city was an extension of my floor back at the hospital. I hardly ever knew the day there either. I tried to remember the name of yesterday’s policeman. And there was a girl’s name too, wasn’t there? Another diver, another Westerner?
I got the hotel to call me a taxi. One of those tip-tops or whatever they call them. I was told that I’d have to settle for a regular taxi. Tuk-tuks were available only on the street. (I think I heard that.) I watched out the window for a normal small European car to drive up to the door.
The driver looked to be twelve or thirteen, but wore the same dark glasses that most of the other drivers affected. He held the door for me, like I was a somebody. I enjoyed that. Except for a few sharp turns, an abrupt stop or two, and circumnavigating the marooned freighter, we rode down to the harbor without incident. At the edge of the ocean, the Andaman Sea to be precise, at least you knew where you were.
I’ve always responded to boats and ships of all kinds. The activity of a busy port or waterfront was always stimulating. The taxi, an old Ford, sent clouds of white exhaust along the road behind us. Since I had no official destination, I paid off the driver and decided to walk a bit. Actually, I decided first and then paid the driver. I still get sequences mixed up in my head. In general, I had to admit, this trip was agreeing with me. Since I knew I was a stranger here, I wasn’t always straining to remember when I’d been here before. My cracked skull and the new streets sorted well together.
There were wooden buildings along the harbor, some of them supported by pilings that rose from the water. They looked black in the sun, as did most of the weather-beaten wood the warehouses and shipping company buildings were made of. Here and there, new woodwork showed scars of the tidal wave, the tsunami, or whatever they called it.
The sun was embarrassingly high over the mountains. Most of the people along the docks had likely been working for hours. I watched them packing up fish from the fishermen’s yellow plastic barrels, while others were folding nets or spreading them out to dry on the sand beach.
A small crowd had gathered on the shore below where I was walking, so I made my way down from the pavement, across a scrubby incline, to the beach proper. I soon had sand in my shoes. Others were joining the crowd as I did myself. We wanted to know what the fuss was all about.
Spread out along the waterline was a giant squid. Most of it looked like a ton of raw liver, but the rubbery tentacles were the giveaway. The suckers on the twisted loops of tentacles were over an inch across. Their color also reminded me of raw liver. There was no sign of what had killed it, and it hadn’t been caught in one of the fishing nets further down the beach. Just one of those mysteries the sea throws up from time to time. A reject from fifty fathoms down. I looked at it as I would have looked at a visitor from another planet. It seemed to hit my fellow gawkers the same way.
“Architeuthis!” a voice said beside me. It belonged to a young woman in a T-shirt and shorts. She was bronzed by the sun and her hair was as blond as corn silk. “Isn’t she beautiful!”
It’s unnerving to have your very thought stolen from you even as it is forming. Only she meant the raw meat on the shoreline. “She belongs to the Cephalopoda, same family as garden snails. Poor dear, she’s got all twisted in her prehensile arms.”
“Those long sticky things?”
“Right.”
“I thought they were sex organs. That’s a relief.”
She turned to look at me: at first seriously, like I was a slug on a microscope slide, then she broke into a broad smile.
“I’m Fiona Calaghan,” she said. “Who are you?”
I told her, and she tried my name on her tongue a few times before she was ready to collect the rest of my basic information.
“You’re a friend of the priest, Father What’s-his-name.”
“Father O’Mahannay. That’s right.”
“He wants to hear from you. He thinks you’re putting your immortal soul in hock to the powers of darkness. Call him.”
“I’m glad somebody’s worried about it. I’ve been too busy. How do you know him?”
I told her I was on holiday, that I’d shared a taxi with her friend the priest on the way from the airport.
“What a wonderful way to begin your trip,” she said. “There’s nothing worth knowing about this place that Father O’Mahannay doesn’t know. You landed on your feet, Mr Cooperman.”
“Call me Benny. All my friends do.”
“So you’ve already got me down for a friend, have you?”
“I hope it ends up that way. Tell me about the tsunami. Were you here then?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it. So many people lost, such damage here on land, and just as bad out there, at sea.”
“I saw the pictures on television. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry for nature, Mr Cooperman. That’s nice.” She was laughing at me, I thought. “You know, we know far more about the moon’s surface than we know about the bottom of this ocean. Any ocean.”
A fisherman emptying a plastic barrel from the side of his scooter-truck splashed both of us with seawater. It was salty, smelling of iodine and seaweed. I didn’t mind it in this heat, but Fiona got more than her fair share of it. The fisherman came over, giving us the pointed-hands bow along with an unintelligible explanation. We moved along the beach, drying off in the sun.
“He didn’t see us,” she said, with a glance back at the fisherman and wringing out the tail of her shirt. Fiona was beautiful. No two ways about that. Her wet T-shirt brought to attention all of my dozing masculinity. Scanning my face and seeing the usual signs, Fiona’s smile went indoors. She had grown used to my sort of sudden enthusiasm. The story of her life, if I had time to hear it.
“Is that what they call a giant squid?” I asked, with a backward glance, to change the unspoken subject.
“I thought that only a few of them are seen in a century.”
“They live a long way down. I don’t know what’s up here for them. Nothing but low pressure and sudden death.”
“Father O’Mahannay told me you were an unsung underwater pro.” Her grin told me she liked that.
“It goes with the territory: I’m a marine biologist. I’m trying to protect what’s left of the ocean wildlife.”
“Is it in a bad way?”
“Well, there’s less of it every time I look. We keep using the oceans as a toilet. We can’t do that and catch fish indefinitely.”
“I came here to go scuba diving for fun and relaxation. And you do it for a living. What do you do to relax?” A cloud covered her smile. She didn’t answer. Why was I probing like this? I’d only just met the woman. Without the cover of his profession, a private investigator often sounds bold, as my mother used to say. You might add rude and forward. I’m sure there are other Victorian expressions that reveal how professional and rude I was sounding.
A fat orange crab avoided my feet as it shunted sideways back to the water. The fisherman’s truck was now moving slowly down the beach.
“What happened to that giant squid back there? What killed it?”
“Could have been lots of things. I’d have to do a postmortem. Even then … it’s probably the Hemingway reason.”
“Hemingway?”
“The novelist. Nobel Prize. Bullfighting. Cuba.”
“Right! For Whom the Bell Tolls, and that Paris-Spain book.”
“Remember old Santiago, the Cuban fisherman?”
“Which of the fishing stories was that?”
“The Old Man and the Sea.”
“Oh yeah. Let me think. He said he went out too far.”
“Well, this poor squid came up too far. She needs the high pressure of the depths or she implodes. She doesn’t have a pressure valve like the ones on your scuba gear. Poor thing.” Fiona glanced back over her shoulder. “She looks like a sandy heap of cow’s guts. You should see Architeuthis in her element: long and lean, graceful as a swan.” Fiona smiled at me.
“You like your critters don’t you?”
“We get along. It’s land mammals I have trouble with. If you’re taking one of the chartered diving trips, you’ll have lots to look at.”
“I haven’t had that much time under salt water.”
“You’ll be all right. They send experienced divers along with you and you’ll be teamed up with another diver. It’s a good way to meet people. You’ll see. Just stay away from the north end of the reef. The waters there are a bit unpredictable. Currents, tides, that sort of thing.” Fiona grinned, then turned to walk back to the dead thing in the sand. I waved.
Looking back half a minute later, I saw that the crowd around the corpse of the sea monster was breaking up. At the same time, the receding tide conceded that it was time to give up its dead and leave it beached as it retreated down the shingle. People who had seen their fill were making space for newcomers. But there weren’t so many of them. I began to move away from the water, kicking myself for blowing away my chances of quizzing Fiona more about the reef and the things out there that might be of interest to a private investigator like me. I continued walking along the beach. There were more struggling crabs now, and an enterprising pair of kids were picking them up and putting them into a wicker basket.
“Hey! Mr Cooperman!” It was her, or she, or whatever. I turned and waited for Fiona to catch up with me. “When are you catching the boat out to the reef?”
“I’ve booked for—” Here I had to search for the information in my pocket. I showed her the scrap of paper.
“Yes, I know that lot,” she said. “Their gear is the best. And they give you a good look around for your valuable American dollars.”
“Where do you get your stuff? You know—tanks, mask, flippers—that sort of thing?”
“Oh, I’ve got my own. Have to in my business. I’ve got a boat, too, which helps. The dive boats out to the reef would break me, if I had to depend on them. You must come out with me one day.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, by the way: never speak to another diver about ‘flippers.’ We call them ‘fins.’ It’s all part of an arcane lore which you can only pick up a bit at a time. How long are you staying?”
“I expect to be at the Alithia Hotel for about a week. I’ve already lost track of the time. I think I’ve been here two or three days now.”
“You should take off your watch, Mr Cooperman. How do you expect the place to take root in you? Watches and telephones are the enemy. Even as a working girl, I try to stay away from both as much as I can.”
“Right. I’ve already had a run-in with street thieves.”
“They’re getting rarer. But I didn’t mean that. You remind me of my brother. Half-brother. He’s so uptight about being on top of everything. Even at the Faculty Club he forgets to enjoy himself.”
“Are you attached to the university?”
“It’s only a small branch of the Miranam National University. I have about seventy students, half from here, the rest from all over.”
“Have you got time for a beer or coffee or something?”
“Sure.” She looked at me again. Could I be trusted to move up to the next level of intimacy? I seemed to have passed the test, because she recommended a little place halfway up the bank. “I could use a drink right about now. There’s a place called Tam’s, but I don’t think there’s a sign in English. A lot of unsavory, but English-speaking, characters hang out there.”
“Sounds fine.” I grinned, but suddenly her face fell. “What’s wrong?” She stopped walking.
“I’ve got to tell somebody at the university about the squid, before it has initials carved all over it, and feed an albatross that a friend of mine found. He’s done a wonderful job of mending her broken wing. It won’t take me long. There’s a beat-up awning with scruffy sun-bleached beer drinkers under it. I should warn you: Tam’s is a notorious hangout for boozy dive masters. Don’t take any guff from them. They’re harmless. It’s not far.” She pointed the way. We didn’t bother with a formal farewell, since we were to meet again almost immediately. She went off along the beach, where a string of coastal shacks skirted the rising hill facing the water. I watched her out of sight, but she didn’t look back. I turned and began walking along the beach in the direction that Lisa, or whatever her name was, had pointed.
The tide was now out a long way. I tried to remember the name of the sea, but couldn’t. It wasn’t one of the well-known names, so I didn’t kick myself for forgetting. When I checked my guidebook, I found that I was looking at the Andaman Sea. Never heard of it. It needed a press agent to spread the name around more. Why shouldn’t it be at least as well known as the Red, the Dead, and the Black? I started looking for a mnemonic device to fix it in my brain. Sand Man. And-a-Man.
On the face of it, it looked like a tip-top sea to me. It did tides, I was told; it had that rancid salty smell that reminded me of our medicine chest at home. No doubt it provided colorful changing tides regularly. One or two a day. Since I was facing west, the sunsets here had to be nothing less than spectacular. Not having had much experience of seas, apart from what I glimpsed at Miami Beach once, I’m sure the Andaman Sea gets top marks in Baedeker. I took another salty sniff of the water before beginning my climb up the beach. When I hit pavement, I emptied my shoes and continued looking for the place Irene, or Iris, had told me about.
Tam’s café wasn’t much of a challenge to find. Most of the other places along that rising hill were warehouses or ships’ chandlers in large and small wares. I saw everything from tiny grommets to half-ton anchors on display. The smell of oakum was powerful on the slight breeze off the water. Tam’s wasn’t much to write home about: from the outside it looked like an imitation French café, like the ones higher up the hill, but it was made of second-hand or cast-away materials. It reminded me of a place back home near the beach at Port Da
lhousie when it was being taken apart board by board. This one was peopled with bronzed youngsters of both sexes in their twenties with their hair so sun-bleached that one wasn’t even suspicious of some bottled assistance. They wore their tans under T-shirts and tank tops, and, having put themselves into the chemical hands of their sunblocks, they wouldn’t discover whether these gels and lotions had worked for another twenty or thirty years. These were the golden people, the sons and daughters of the sun and surf. And they knew it.
Such thoughts depressed me. First, it made me feel old, out of the swim, parochial, behind the times. But a second glance at the swimmers gave me a better view: there were wrinkles on the tanned faces, sagging flesh and incubating paunches. The way they clung together suggested that they would be no more at home in my world than I was in theirs.
I pulled up a chair under the marquee and ordered a bottle of beer. While waiting for it, I slipped the tote bag off my shoulder and set the camera bag on the floor. I tried to lounge in my chair like a regular, spreading my belongings around me. Nobody said a word to me. I drained the first glass. It was like an English pub, if what my brother told me is any guide. He said that the fun and camaraderie of the English pub was a myth. He said that you have as much chance of interacting with the characters on a movie screen as you have of getting anywhere close to the people in an English pub. He said the locals look right through you and carry on their jolly chat all around you. I haven’t had a chance to test this for myself and pass the gen on for what it’s worth. Maybe things get better if you make a second or third visit.
I sipped the second beer more slowly, as though I didn’t have the price of a third in my pockets. I also gulped down another of the pills that allowed me to wander away from the local bathrooms. It’s funny how beer goes down in hot weather. The body seems to absorb it directly, without it passing through the usual channels. The throat is open, less guarded. I was interrupted in these musings when one of the divers nearly tripped into my lap on his way back from the john. The ice was finally broken. Still thinking of English pubs, I ordered some fish and chips to tide me over till the next meal. I quickly asked if Fiona Calaghan came here from time to time. This made us all chaps together, as one of those writers of the ’30s used to say. Anna had been feeding me books from the library. Since she knew I couldn’t read them, she had started reading them to me. Being read to, as I discovered, is one of the great pleasures of life. She took me through Jane Austen and George Eliot. She threw in a bit of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald to keep things in balance. I’ve never been so literate in my life. But being literate now isn’t the same as being literate in my parents’ day. And nowadays the literacy line must be drawn somewhere else. My literary taste marks me as belonging to my own generation. Or, more accurately, Anna’s.
