A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (35 page)

“Of course,” I declared, not knowing exactly what she had said but sure from the way she was looking at me that this was the right response. She waited, wanting more, and I said to the men, “Let’s go. I really want to.”

Vinh said, “Is this the place you were telling me about? The iguana thing?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”

Now I could see Vinh turn up the heat in his eyes. Who were Liz and Dick to him, after all? Only a product of what he had big trouble tolerating in America. I knew I was supposed to persuade him now. He was persuadable about these little interests of mine, but he always made me work for his approval. Well, I didn’t feel like it at the moment. That was for certain. All I knew was that the great red and yellow parachute was lying slack on the beach and I wanted to excite it, wanted it to fill up full of this warm morning air and carry me into the sky.

So without a word I stepped past Frank and Eileen and Vinh, and I asked the young Mexican man holding the harness how much and he told me and I paid it and I turned around and the man put me in the harness, and all of this was so unexpected and it was done so quickly that nobody could react. Frank and Eileen and Vinh just stood there in a row and gawked at me and finally, just before I took off, Vinh choked out a “Gabrielle what are you doing?” and Eileen suddenly smiled and cried something that wasn’t quite a word, like “hurrah” or something. And the Mexican was telling me about the whistle and about the rope up there over my right ear and the boat was moving and the tether went taut and there were hands on me briefly, helping me rise, and then there were no hands and I was soaring into the air.

I did not look back. The boat headed straight out into the bay for a time and I looked down at the water and it was calm, it looked as stiff as vinyl, like I’d bounce off it if I fell. But it was very fine being up here. I was very aware of being alone. Off to my right about a hundred meters was a little pack of pelicans heading back toward the beach. They were returning but I was still on the way out. The wind whistled faintly in my ears and it struck me that this was not the ravishing physical experience I’d expected it to be. My feet dangled down, but there was no heaviness in them, like the ride at the carnivals where you sit in a chair and they swing you around. My feet just dangled like I was a child in a tall chair. I was not frightened. The harness held me tight and I gripped the ropes and I looked down at the sea, the green wake of the boat ripping apart the great brown stain from the mountains.

And the boat turned now and headed along the coast and my parachute brought me around and I was as high as the highest hotel, but I pondered the long stretch of Puerto Vallarta along the beach as calmly as if it was a mural on a wall. I was flying but I was very quiet inside. This was more like a certain kind of dream, where you can fly and everything is peaceful. Or it was like I’d left my body, the way some people on the Donahue show had done when everyone thought they were dead. I was separated from my body.

And now I looked back over my shoulder and found the beach and the three tiny figures there, still standing in a row, still gawking, probably. So I turned around and let go of the rope and let my hands dangle like my feet and I felt the air flowing against my face and I drifted there, thinking, Yes, I just died and it’s all very nice and I won’t have to worry about anything on the planet Earth anymore.

And this feeling lasted for however long it was that I was in the air. It was probably no more than ten minutes, but it seemed much longer, which struck me as odd later, because I enjoyed the experience, I truly did, and usually that makes time go fast. But I floated along and the boat turned and headed back the opposite way and I swung around, too, in a long curve, very graceful, like a gesture I might make with my hand if I was a big movie star. And I was nearer to the shore on the return trip. I was only a little ways out over the sea and I could clearly see the hotel pools passing, the bodies all laid out in the sun.

Then I found myself moving nearer to the shore and nearer still, and I was over the beach. I looked ahead and saw the boat curving out to sea, but it must have slowed because I was starting to come down. That’s when I heard the whistle. I looked ahead and I could see the beach where I’d taken off. It was not far away. The whistle blew again, insistent, and I felt a little knot cinch in my stomach. I had something to do now. The rope over my right shoulder. I reached up and grabbed it just as I was supposed to. I pulled it.

It didn’t move. It was a heavy rope. Hard to pull. The knot inside me cinched tighter and I pulled as hard as I could. The rope gave a bit, but not nearly as much as it was supposed to. Pull it down by your ear, I remembered the man say. I pulled harder and it budged a bit further and my muscles clamped up in my fist and down my arm and under my arm and down my side all the way to my hip.

I was coming down, down, and I was curving a little, but I could see already I was in trouble. The curve wasn’t sharp enough to bring me into the path to the waiting men and the three faces of Frank and Eileen and Vinh, which I could see very clearly for one moment. Their eyes were wide and their jaws were dropping and my arm and side were trembling now and shot full of flames and I didn’t know if I could even hold the rope down at all for much longer. The Mexicans were running up the beach and I saw a line of coconut trees at the back of a hotel and I was heading straight for them, I was at about the fourth-floor level and falling fast, like an elevator out of control, the third floor and the trees were dipping like they were afraid of me but they couldn’t run, and I fell past the second floor.

I lifted my other arm and grabbed the rope with both hands and I pulled as hard as I could and I closed my eyes and the rope gave some more and I felt myself veer away and a man’s voice rushed from beneath me and it said, “Caramba!” and then my feet hit the sand hard and I flexed at the knees and came up standing but I was instantly moving forward again, dragged along the sand, and then there were hands on me, many hands, and I was upright again.

But I was laughing. My eyes were open and I was laughing, though I wished I was back in the sky, especially since everyone was rushing over to me like I’d just fainted or something. Eileen cried, “Are you all right?” as she approached and I looked and I saw Vinh running beside her. His face was sweet. His lower lip was pushed up like he was pouting, like he was a little boy and pouting at some very bad news. Then Frank came from around the other side of Eileen and he was running fast and was the first one to get to me.

“You’re one gutsy lady,” he said. “Airborne all the way.” And he brushed the Mexican boy aside who was taking off my harness and Frank’s big hands went flick, flick, and I was free. He took me by the arm and turned me toward Vinh, who finally arrived, puffing.

“I’m fine,” I said firmly to them all. “Don’t make a fuss.”

Vinh pulled up before me and he said, low, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes,” I said in a voice as low as his but as sharp as I could make it.

He looked into my eyes and nodded and then he shook his head. “I suppose the only thing to do after an adventure on a parachute is to go to a movie set.”

Eileen’s face snapped toward Vinh and she said, “Great idea.”

I wasn’t sure what r thought of the way this all came about. Did he think I went up on a parachute to force his hand on this? Like I was a child threatening to do myself harm if I didn’t get my way? It wasn’t true, if that’s what he thought. At that moment I would’ve traded the whole trip to Mismaloya for one more flight over the sea. But, of course, that wasn’t possible.

Frank said, “Outstanding,” and I figured I would at least get a chance to watch these two men together a little more closely.

So Eileen and I went back to our rooms and changed from our bathing suits, both of us reappearing in the hallway almost simultaneously and in record time, for we did not want the men to have a chance to change their minds. We met them in the lobby and we all stepped out the front doors of the hotel together to a chorus of “Hey, taxi” from half a dozen men in sandals and jeans. Vinh stepped a little in front of Frank and motioned for the first man in line and I drew near to the two men because they interested me very much.

“Dodgers,” Frank snorted, and I’m sure Vinh did not know what he was talking about, but when the taxi rolled up in front of us and the driver sprung out, he was wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap. I knew the cap from television. Many of the actors on television series wear baseball caps and this one was very popular, though I liked the bright red color and the tangle of letters on the cap of the St. Louis Cardinals the best.

The driver saw me looking at his cap, I think, and he did a surprising thing. He tipped it to me, and he opened the back door. He was a man about the same age as Vinh and me, perhaps forty—could see it around his eyes and in the smudge of gray in his hair—but there was a bounce to him that was very young.

Vinh said, “Why don’t you sit in the front, Frank.”

“Hey there, Major, you outrank this soldier by quite a lot. You should take the favored place.”

“I always rode in the backseat as a major,” Vinh said, and there was just a little sharpness in it. But then he added, “Besides, you’ve got the longer legs by quite a lot.”

Frank laughed and so did Vinh. Then Frank turned to us and said, “You watch out for that man back there.”

I wanted to hear more of this. Was Frank kidding my husband over some stories they had shared about women? I looked at Vinh and his face was blank and then the taxi driver said, “You are American?” and the conversation moved on.

Vinh motioned first Eileen and then me into the backseat and he climbed in last. Frank was talking to the cab driver as he circled the car and I felt Vinh pressed against me in the crowded backseat. I never thought of my husband as being the kind of man you had to watch out for as a couple of women in the backseat of a car. I was sure it was just a typical male joke, a natural frame of reference for Army men. Vinh had never given me any reason to doubt him. I had always watched those parts of the soap operas about adultery with some detachment. He had always been with me whenever he wasn’t working. He wasn’t the kind of man to go out on his own. He was a very conservative man. His work was his mistress, I knew, and that was hard enough for me, I guess. But it was odd how my mind kept working at this silly joke Frank made. All the silence between Vinh and me, all the formality, all the waiting for him to take my hand: Would it be better for him if I was someone else? If he was with someone else? Elizabeth Taylor had had a husband and he was a singer. Richard Burton had had a wife, too, though she was less famous. I listened again to the voices bumping around in the taxi.

“Mismaloya Beach?” the driver said, turning his head alarmingly far around, a hundred degrees or more. He looked at Eileen, who I suppose had just told him where we were going. Then he looked at me and I was afraid he would force his head still further, a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty, until he could see Vinh sitting to my left. But I guess I should have been more worried about the car than about the man’s neck snapping. He was rolling down the long drive from the hotel and not watching at all. He said, “You know that you are going to a very special place?”

“We know,” Vinh said firmly.

“You know about Liz and Dick?” the cabbie said.

“
We know,
” Vinh said, and I could hear in his voice how little my husband wanted to sit through this story again.

“It all put this town on the map, you know. I was just a teenage delinquent hanging around the beaches all day and trying not to work hard like I do now. We loved it when all the world started looking at our Vallarta.” By now, the man’s eyes were back on his driving and he turned onto the main road we’d taken in from the airport.

In making the turn, he stopped speaking for a moment and Frank said, “Hell, it must have been nice to be a teenager just goofing around the beaches. Living in a place like this. When I was a teenager all I cared about was turning myself into a goddamn soldier some day. That’s
another
kind of teenage dumb.”

I was a little startled at how far Frank had to reach to pull the conversation around to his military experience. I wondered if he was doing this for Vinh’s benefit, having picked up, too, on how my husband hated all the talk about Burton and Taylor. Vinh said, “When I was a teenager the beaches and the war were all in the same picture.”

He said this like he’d topped Frank. He could get wound up about the war, I knew. I’d heard him with our Vietnamese friends. But was this the kind of thing he and Frank had been doing together? Is this what I’d missed? Just the two of them jerking the conversation around to top each other? Or was this a little instinctive game that would keep our cab driver quiet and us two women out of the conversation?

I didn’t know. But our driver wasn’t picking up on any hints. “The airline, they tried to start it. This was some sleepy godforsaken place when I was a little guy, you know. Then Mexicana Airlines started landing a DC-3 on a dirt strip where the center of town is today.”

Frank turned himself half around in his seat. “You ever fly in a DC-3, Vinh?”

“Sure. They were using some DC-3’S as troop transports when I was a recruit.”

There was only the slightest of pauses after this, like Frank was just taking a little breath before he spoke an answer, but Eileen had wonderful reflexes—probably the key to her success on the buzzer of her game show—and before Frank could open his mouth, she said to the driver, “We know the basic Burton and Taylor story, but tell us something about it we might not know.”

Frank rolled his shoulders and turned to the front and I felt Vinh shift a little bit away from me, and the driver said, “Have you seen the house they stayed in?”

“No,” Eileen said. “Can we?”

“Sure,” the driver said, and to their credit, the men did not protest. “It’s in Gringo Gulch. That’s where all the rich people came when they found out about us. Leonard Bernstein, you know that man with the orchestra?”