by T. C. Boyle
Fitz was leaning into the chaise, his back pressed to her bare legs, the flesh hot there, slick with sweat. He turned to her and she saw the way his mouth had gone slack at the corners, an indication he’d had too much to drink. The sun was setting now, the shadows thickening, and he reached up to slip off his sunglasses, his eyes floating there a moment, naked and unfocused. “Now? I mean, we just got here—”
Corey flitted across the patio then, chased by the Roberts kids and Nancy Eggers. Before they’d left Boston, Nancy had sent him a note in a scented pink envelope to tell him she liked him and was really looking forward to seeing him in Mexico, which was cute enough in its way, she supposed, but a kind of warning flag too. Nancy was developed, fully developed, an adult in teenager’s clothing, and Corey was a child still—he hadn’t had his growth spurt (if he ever was going to have it, and that was a worry of hers, though Fitz dismissed it), nor had his voice changed either. It was just a moment, the kids gone as quickly as they’d appeared, replaced now by Brenda, Tim’s girlfriend, who was making her way up from the pool, but it imparted something to her she really didn’t want to think about. She watched Brenda cross the patio in her black spandex suit and wet flip-flops, rotating her hips as if she were wearing heels, until she came up behind Tim and wrapped her arms around him in a way that made all the men look up, Fitz included.
“Yes,” she said. “Now. We waited all the way across the country—”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “You heard Tim—everybody’s on a schedule here.”
“I heard him,” she said, and why did she feel so disappointed? She could wait. It wasn’t as if she needed the drug, not really, but the moment was perfect and it would enhance the experience, that was all she was saying. “I also heard him say this wasn’t the Catalina Hotel anymore.”
Fitz was slow on the uptake, even more saturated with tequila than she was. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she said, shifting her legs so she could get up from the chair, find her way to the room and dig one of the smooth white pills out of the bottle in the pocket of her suitcase, “this is Freedom House, or didn’t you hear?”
She tripped three times that first week, schedule or no schedule, and the first two were seamless, Fanchon acting as her guide and the visions coming so lucidly and in such a rush it was a kind of ecstasy, Fanchon there for her the entire time, easing her along with the tranquilizing touch of her fingers and the soft purr of her voice. The third time she was on her own. Nobody knew she’d taken the sacrament, or at least she hadn’t told anyone, not even Fitz, and she’d weathered the blaze of the drug in one of the palapas on the beach, her body wedded to the sand, become the sand, fine grained and warm and eternal. Late in the afternoon, when she was coming down, she took the gondola back up to the hotel and sat out on the patio with a margarita while her friends’ voices murmured around her and Dick’s latest protégé, Martin Dugard, strummed his guitar and sang folk songs in a tremulous tenor that was as good as anything you’d hear on the radio (not that there was much on the dial down here beyond tinny Mexican music rattling through its endless verses like a carousel ride you couldn’t get off of). Fitz wasn’t there. He was up in their room, worrying over his notes and filling one lined yellow tablet after another in his graceful fluid hand. He’d been at it all week, trying to make his research congeal into a paper he could expand into a thesis that would pass muster and move him up the academic food chain, which was not to say he wasn’t drinking as many margaritas as anybody else—and he’d tripped once, on schedule, with her and Charlie and Alice and some of the others—just that he was consecrating the daylight hours to his texts and charts and notes. She didn’t mind—she had the sun and surf, the margaritas and the sacrament and the upwelling love of everybody there to sustain her.
Martin strummed his guitar. Pedro, the tame parrot with the clipped wings whose job it was to remind them all just what country they were in, waddled past, crying “Disfrute!,” whatever that meant, in his sandpaper voice. She was drifting still, as happy as she’d ever been, not really listening to Martin or the conversations rising and falling around her, when suddenly she was brought back to the moment by Fanchon, who let out a harsh choked cry that rearranged everything.
But what was it? Corey. Corey and Richard, trooping across the patio and dragging something behind them, something that might have been the branch of a tree weaving over the floor with a soft undulant swish and release. Only it wasn’t a branch, it was . . . flesh, bleeding flesh, and the blood was scribbling its own message across the face of the tiles.
“Oh,” Fanchon cried, “this is disgusting, is it dead?”
It took her a minute. She was coming down, yes, but this was a jolt, a hallucination in real time with scales and claws and teeth that made her heart seize. There was blood on her son’s chest, his legs, his arms. “Mom,” Corey was saying, “Mom, look!”
They were all on their feet now, except her—she was frozen there in the depths of the chaise, everything a horror all of a sudden, the blood, her son’s face, Richard, who was showing his teeth in a grimace that was a smile, a killer’s smile, and here was this animal the size of a beagle with an arrow thrust through the folds of its corrugated throat. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t speak. All she wanted was to be somewhere else.
“I killed it,” Corey said. “With the bow and arrow from the hotel.”
“What is it?” she heard herself ask, and it was as if she weren’t even in control of her own voice.
“An iguana. A big iguana, the granddaddy of them all.”
“We killed it,” Richard corrected. He was shorter than Corey, squatter, with a sharp thrust of nose and two glittering eyes the color of pea soup. “I stabbed my knife right through its head.” He held up the knife, rusted, chipped, brown with dried blood, in evidence.
“But why?” Alice asked in a thin voice. She was standing apart from the boys in a filmy Mexican wrap, the sun high over her and diminishing her shadow till all there was of it was a little puddle of shade no wider than her feet. She had a cigarette in one hand, a paperback book in the other. Her hair was piled up on her head, frizzy with the salt of the ocean that never seemed to wash out no matter how many showers you took.
“For meat,” Richard said.
“Because it’s dangerous,” Corey said in the same moment, talking over him. “Look at its claws.”
She looked. The thing was magnificently ugly, like a dragon, with a snake’s slickness and a scaly beard and hackles down its back. And claws, the big hooks of its claws.
Corey abruptly dropped his end of the arrow, which had been thrust through the thing like a skewer, and that forced Richard to drop his end too, so that the carcass fell at their feet and Corey went on in a breathless rush to tell them all how he and Richard had gone up along the stream in the jungle out back, hoping to catch fish, when they’d seen the iguana clinging to a tree trunk and how lucky they were to have brought the bow and arrows along in case of snakes. “Wasn’t that great?” he insisted, his voice leaping. “Wasn’t that smart of us?”
Dick was there now, pushing through the circle gathered round her son, Martin at his side. Both of them were peeling across the back and shoulders and in a kind of scrim across their chests that looked like what was left behind when a tide pool dries up. “All right, then,” he said, “let’s give a shout for Carlos and have him make what, roast haunch of iguana? With a nice salsa verde and patas fritas on the side?”
Everybody laughed then and it was all right. If there was blood on the tiles, Carlos, chef and majordomo, could hose it off. Her son was fine, she was fine, they were all fine.
“Or what,” Dick went on, “lizard tacos? Hey”—and he clapped his hands as if a light bulb had just gone on in his head—“anybody have a craving? I mean, get ’em while they’re hot, ladies and gentlemen, your basic highly nutritious, supremely delicious and always-in-demand lizard tacos.”
“Come on, Dick, that’s disgusting,” Alice sai
d, squinting down the length of her cigarette.
“You think so? Tell it to the villagers around here. What about you, Corey? You want iguana tacos for dinner tonight?”
Her son flushed. His shorts were dirty, there was dried blood on his shins and his chest and arms were striated with a dozen cuts and scrapes she hoped weren’t going to get infected, and maybe she should get up, maybe she should march him off to the room for a shower, or better yet, a bath. “Uh-uh,” Corey said. “Shrimp.”
“Or chicken?”
Corey shrugged. He was the center of attention, at least for the moment, at least until they all moved on and Carlos came out of the kitchen to clean up the mess. “I guess,” he said.
“Okay, right,” Dick said, “so we’re just going to let all this meat go to waste? Martin, what do you think?”
Martin was as beautiful as an angel come down to earth, blond, perfectly proportioned, with a beatific face and lashes he emphasized with a touch of mascara. He was holding his guitar by the neck, the soundboard lightly poised against one leg. “Lizard tacos are the best, the very best—and you know what they taste like?”
Corey shook his head.
“Guess.”
“I’ll give you a hint,” Dick said. “Cluck, cluck, cluck?”
Each day was more or less like the one that preceded it, people tripping or not, writing up reports or not, but everybody tanning on the beach and sipping cocktails by the pool come dinnertime. There was snorkeling, canoeing, fishing for the men and shopping in the plaza for the women, where in the stalls there you could get silver necklaces, pottery, Mexican blankets and embroidered peasant blouses so cheap they were practically free. She took advantage of it all. For the first time in as long as she could remember she wasn’t expected to do anything, the food and cocktails prepared for them and the maids there to change the bedding and hang fresh towels on the rack, the kids vanishing after breakfast and reappearing only for meals, and always somebody to chat with or indulge in a game of cards or chess or checkers. She read. Relaxed. Tripped. And if anything happened at all, like the time the mayor of the village and five other officials dropped by with bottles of tequila and mescal to welcome all the Harvard researchers to Mexico, it barely caused a ripple. The Mexicans were courteous and soft-spoken and capable of drinking every bit as much as anybody at Freedom House, and if they knew about the LSD—or had an opinion about it—they never let on. Of course, she could barely understand a word of what they were saying, but it was a thrill just to be there to look into their darting black eyes and imagine the time of the pyramids and stelae and the mushroom cult that had sent its tendrils north to bring her here all the way from Boston, which was a kind of miracle in itself.
Toward the end of the summer Peggy flew down with her brother Tommy for a ten-day visit, and that did produce a ripple, though it was no fault of Peggy’s. It was never clear whether Tim had miscounted the days or Brenda had stayed on longer than expected, but now both of them were there at the same time, and the first night, after a tense dinner during which Brenda sat off by herself in the shadows at the far end of the patio, tipping back shots of tequila and flicking one cigarette butt after another into the flowerbed, things came unglued.
At the time, she herself was immersed in a deep pool of calm. She’d spent the day as a guide, overseeing Alice and Paulette while they tripped in the lifeguard tower, and that had given her a kind of satisfaction and clarity that made her feel as if all this—the project, their mission—was the solidest foundation for human understanding ever devised. And good. Purely good. If she’d ever had doubts, she had them no more. Both women had gone deep and never experienced any sort of crisis that couldn’t be cured by a gentle roll in the waves or the embrace of the sun, though at one point Paulette had become agitated by the shore crabs when she went down to dip her feet in the surf and saw them for what they were—monsters, that is, flesh-eating monsters—but that passed and she calmed down and slipped into an ecstatic state that lasted out the day.
After dinner Joanie went out to sit by the pool with Corey, trying to give him a little attention. He was fine, she kept telling herself, having the time of his life with the other kids, running from one thing to the other, catching fish, roaming the jungle, setting up an aquarium in a five-gallon pickle jar Carlos had given him and falling off to sleep each night as if he’d run a marathon, but still she felt the smallest nagging thread of guilt. And so she was sitting with him, drink in hand, the sun setting behind them, just listening to what he had to say.
“Did you see what I caught today?” he asked. He was drinking a Soldado de Chocolate, a kind of Mexican Yoo-hoo, and his lips were dark with the residue.
“No, what?”
“It’s in the aquarium.” A week earlier he’d hauled the pickle jar across the gleaming tile floor and positioned it on the big table in the center of the patio where everyone could admire it, and ever since he’d devoted himself to maintaining its contents, scraping the algae off the glass the minute it appeared, changing the water, adding or deleting specimens depending on what wound up in his net that day. “I mean, didn’t you look?”
She shook her head. “I was guiding today.”
And now—not for the first time—he asked what that was like, guiding, and if anybody had flipped out. “It was Alice, right? And Paulette?”
“Nobody flipped out,” she said, “if that’s what you want to call it. It was peaceful, beautiful, really.”
He was silent a moment, swirling a dark fan of liquid round the bottom of the bottle. “What I don’t get is why you have to do it at all. Dad keeps saying it’s for research, so you can tell if the pills are going to help crazy people get better, right?”
“Not crazy. Just people with psychological problems, people in hospitals or undergoing analysis. It’s a tool, that’s all. A medicine.”
“I know that,” he said. “You already told me. But if you aren’t crazy yourself, then how can you tell if it works?”
She laughed. “Maybe I am crazy. I have you, don’t I? And your father?”
“Come on, Mom, I’m serious.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” she said.
“What way does it work?”
The slush had melted in her drink and it was thin now and acidic. She lifted it to her lips and set it down again. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to put in words.”
“Is it bad for you?”
“Bad? No, not at all—just the opposite.”
“You’re not just saying that, are you?”
She made herself look into his eyes so he could see she meant what she was saying. “I would never lie to you.”
There was a sudden sharp crash from the direction of the patio, which made them both look up. She didn’t realize it yet, but that crash was the sound of the aquarium shattering on the tiles and sending five gallons of murky water and a spangled assortment of tropical fish out across the room in a miniature tidal wave. Somebody cursed, and then Brenda’s voice rose up, harsh, shrill, shot through with rage. “You bitch!”
And then Peggy: “You call me a bitch? You’re a tramp, that’s what you are, a common tramp!”
In the aftermath, both of them appeared at the top of the steps to the pool area, shoving and snatching at one another, and there was blood on the tiles all over again, Brenda’s blood, because Brenda, as it turned out, had flung the aquarium at Peggy and then, in the struggle that followed, wound up stepping on a fragment of shattered glass. Tim was right behind them, and everybody else too, and Tim was saying, “All right, all right, enough already,” to no effect whatever. Brenda had Peggy by the wrists, trying to force her down the stairs and into the pool, but Peggy sidestepped her and broke free, and it was Brenda who missed her step and flailed backward into the water to come up sputtering an instant later while Peggy, her shoulders rigid and her teeth clenched, stalked off down the path to the beach.
Brenda was a bobbing dark spot in the pool, treading water and cursi
ng. Tim seemed to be at a loss. He stood there at the edge of the pool looking down the path where Peggy had disappeared, until Brenda slashed her way to the coping and thrust both her elbows and her face up out of the water and in a low nasty voice demanded, “Are you just going to fucking stand there or are you going to help me out of here?”
The next morning, when she made her way down to breakfast, Brenda was gone. Fitz was already sitting at a table in the back corner of the patio, dressed in the shorts and unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt he’d taken to wearing day in and day out, Corey slouched beside him in his even more minimal outfit—shorts, period. They’d finished the huevos rancheros Carlos’s wife, Reina, had served them and pushed away their plates, Fitz bent now over a dog-eared text called Personality Psychology and Corey absorbed in one of the Mexican comics Carlos had given him from his own personal supply stacked up on the shelves just inside the door to the pantry. “Good morning,” she said, easing down across from them while gesturing to Reina to bring her coffee and a plate of the eggs. “Or should I say, ‘Buenos días’?”
“Buenos días,” Fitz said, without glancing up. Corey said nothing. His eyes never left the page.
“Well, okay,” she said, “thanks for that enthusiastic greeting, you two. By the way, anybody hear what happened with Peggy? Or Brenda?”
Fitz glanced up. “Carlos drove her to the airport first thing.”
“Who, Brenda?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s gone?”
“Apparently.”
She paused to light a cigarette and watch a lizard no longer than her teaspoon appear over the rim of the table, then shoot across the surface and down the far side before Corey, his senses alerted now, could snatch it up and add it to the terrarium he’d already begun to assemble in the wake of last night’s disaster. “That was sudden,” she said.
“You can only have one girlfriend at a time,” Corey piped up, looking from her to Fitz and back again. “Tommy Eggers told me.”
