Shadows Everywhere (18 page)

He had to deal with three waves this way before he finally was safe on the rocks. Smiling, he climbed up to the road and walked wet and triumphant among the
turistas,
gratefully accepting their compliments, pesos, and the admiring glances of the young women. The
turistas
voiced appreciation of his great courage. He smiled and told them he hoped they had gotten good photographs to take home from their Mexican vacations.

When the
turistas
had left, Vicente Escobar, one of the silver vendors, walked over to Hector and stood with him watching the exhaust-darkened square backs of the departing buses. A few of the
turistas
waved from the open windows, then quickly closed the glass to conserve the air conditioning.

"You're going to kill yourself," Vicente Escobar said. "Why do you continue to dive?" Even as he asked, he knew it was a question for which there was a universal answer.

"I do it for this," Hector said, holding up the fistful of pesos he had collected for his dive. He had in his hand over eleven hundred pesos. Almost seven American dollars.

At the end of the day, Hector changed from his low-cut black trunks into worn jeans and a sleeveless red T-shirt. Then, with his day's profits locked in a steel box in the car's trunk, he climbed into his ten-year-old gray Plymouth and drove south twenty miles to the village of Barbilla, where he lived with Maria, their five-year-old son Eugenio, and their six-year-old daughter Ramona.

The Gomezes' lifestyle was much like everyone else's in Barbilla. Their home was small, simple, with a dirt floor, and a sheet metal roof held down by nails driven through bottle caps whose cork linings kept out the seasonal rains. In the Gomez home was running water, and a bathroom. Because Hector dived rather than eke out a living as a fisherman, the Gomezes were only occasionally hungry.

M
aria Gomez watched her husband walk up the path to their home. To her right, where the land overlooked the ocean, she knew that the American Martin still stood before his canvas and easel, painting another of his seascapes. She had gone up the trail to the rocks and talked to the American again today. Why not? She was lonely, with Hector always gone. To be alone with two small children was enough to drive any twenty-five-year-old woman
loco,
especially a woman as energetic and pretty as Maria. Probably, she thought, lowering her hands to wipe grease from tortillas onto her print skirt, Hector wouldn't object to her talking with the American Martin. But it would be just as well if Hector never found out. He had a man's foolish pride.

Eugenio saw Hector and ran out to embrace his father. Young Ramona followed. Hector hugged his children to him, smiling whitely, his lean muscles dancing and cording as he lifted a child in each arm.

"It was a profitable day," he said, as he lowered the children and bent to kiss Maria. "Almost four thousand pesos." He was beaming proudly, this man who risked death to provide for his family, so she smiled at him. "Soon we might have enough saved to move away from here, into Mazatlan."

Into a house almost like this only larger, Maria thought, though she said, "Supper is almost ready."

He walked past her. She could feel the weariness emanating from his body. Herself weary, she followed him into the house and tended to the rice and shrimp on the propane gas stove. If Hector moved them to Mazatlan Maria might have an electric stove; she'd heard they were better. But she wanted more than that, really. She wanted her meals cooked for her like the rich in the cities. She wanted not just better clothes, but fine clothes. For herself. For her children. For the foolishly daring Hector.

What she did not want was for Hector to time one of his dives wrong and die. Or worse, become a cripple she would have to support for the rest of their marriage. Maria, living in poverty, remembered abject poverty, and was afraid of it. When she passed a beggar in the square, pleading respectfully with the
turistas
for money for herself and the children, Maria felt something cold crawl about inside her. She could be that woman, she knew. The difference between what she was and what she might become was only a fraction of a second, an insane risk taken three times a day every day twenty miles down the coast at the Tower of Saint Marcos.

Hector ate greedily, gratefully, complimenting Maria on her cooking. After supper he played with the children, laughing and making promises he couldn't keep. Though he was a man, and a good one, there was something childlike in Hector's dark, lithe handsomeness. His was a youthful, whipcord body that moved with a matador's grace and strength. Yet now he was thirty-four, and above his black diving trunks was the beginning of a stomach paunch. Maria knew that Hector was at the time of life when men's reflexes and timing were beginning to deteriorate without them even suspecting. This was a time of danger, especially in Hector's line of work.

In bed, he placed his lean, strong arms about her, and immediately fell asleep.

T
he next morning, the American Martin was again at his easel on the rocks overlooking the sea and a view of the coast, and was working on the painting he'd begun yesterday. Before speaking to him, Maria stood silently at the bend in the steep path, watching him work. His huge hands were gentle and sure with the brush, lending the canvas life. He was a tall, muscular man with pale blue eyes and a full red beard. Always beside his easel was a gray foam cooler containing ice and beer. Maria had heard that he painted dozens of pictures, then drove them into the Arts and Crafts Center in Mazatlan and sold them to
turistas
.
She didn't know where Martin lived; no one seemed to know that.

He must have heard her, or sensed her presence on the path. "Good morning, Maria," he said, not looking away from his canvas. He was dabbing clouds in a blue sky.

She said nothing but moved nearer.

"What do you think?' he asked, nodding his shaggy head toward the canvas.

It amazed her that anyone could create a likeness so, accurately.
"Bonito,
"she said. Pretty. Not beautiful. Not majestic.
Only Bonito.

The American Martin smiled bitterly. "Here," he said, moving away from before the easel. He gripped her elbow and positioned her to stand where he had stood, placed a brush in her hand and moved behind her. His thick arms, pale and dusted with reddish hair, slipped around her waist.

For the next two weeks, Maria went almost every day to the rocks above the ocean. The American Martin's gentle, thick hands did things to her that she had never dreamed possible, that Hector could never imagine. In Martin's loving clasp she poured out all of her fears, and he gladly accepted them and kept them safely where they no longer haunted her and foretold a bleak future.

During the third week, while Hector was at the Tower of Saint Marcos, Martin said, "Drive into Mazatlan with me. We can bring your children. There's a man I want you to meet. His name is Anderson."

"Hector will he home soon."

"It doesn't matter," Martin told her. "We'll be back within a few hours; Hector won't know you've been gone, unless the kids mention it."

"They won't if I tell them not to," Maria said. "And Hector will he tired and go to sleep soon after he eats supper."

"Then come with me," Martin coaxed. He kissed her. When his lips had barely left hers, he said, "Anderson can make us rich, you and me."

Maria knew that, like Hector, she was poised above a steep, exhilarating plunge. It would take courage to leap free.

She nodded silently, walked down the path and got the children, and they drove with Martin in his dusty Jeep into Mazatlan.

T
hat Saturday, high above half a dozen tour buses and scores of American
turistas
,
Hector stood poised on the Tower of Saint Marcos and felt the freedom, but not the fear.

That puzzled him. He studied the incoming swells, waiting for the right one to time for his dive. The ribbons of white surf along the coast beyond the cove seemed to undulate and move in unfamiliar rhythms and patterns. The sea was behaving strangely today. Perhaps that was why he wasn't afraid; the strangeness had something to do with his own new fearlessness.

At last Hector saw an oncoming swell that would provide deep enough water when it entered the cove. He watched it approach, a rolling, glittering vast hill of water, shot with sunlight as if it contained thousands of diamonds.

It seemed to take forever to reach the point Hector had chosen, where he knew it would begin to curl into a green, sloping wall for its assault on the cove. The point from where it would enter the cove only a moment before the plummeting Hector sliced into its cool depths.

In that last few seconds, Hector realized there was something wrong. The oncoming swell wasn't approaching smoothly; it was pausing, then rushing forward, wavering like a liquid rippling in a drunkard's unsteady glass. Hector didn't want to dive.

But his right arm was already raised, signaling to the
turistas
,
all watching from below through admiring, apprehensive eyes. Many were peering through camera lenses, hastily setting F-stops and shutter speeds, not admitting to the secret desire to record on film a brave man's death. It was too late for Hector to turn away with self-respect.

As soon as he launched himself into the air, Hector felt his confidence return. Only when he had safely passed the outcropping of rock and his body was out of its arch and vertical, did he glimpse for an instant below him the backwash of blue-green water.

The wave
was
receding!

Terror clutched at his throat and contorted his body. There was no time to scream. He struck the water with a dark thunder that he knew was death.

"T
hat's that," Martin said to Anderson, the next day in Anderson's cluttered office in Mexico City. Anderson was a gangly giraffe of a man who breathed through his mouth and perspired a lot. "Maria slipped him some
peyote.
It's a drug that distorts time and sense just enough. Will there be any trouble collecting from the company?"

Anderson shook his long, pale head and said, "No problem at all; no clouds on the horizon. Why should there be? A wife uses her husband's earnings to buy life insurance on him. And why not? He was in a dangerous occupation and she had two children to think about. Remember I'm Great Intercontinental Insurance's Mexico claims agent; I can verify Hector's signature on the policy. I'll recommend to the company that they pay his widow the settlement.

There's no way for Great Intercontinental, or anyone else, to know you and I are soon going to split that settlement fifty-fifty. And what they don't know can't hurt us. By the way, where's the wealthy widow?"

"She and the kids are getting into Mexico City tomorrow," Martin said. "After the funeral. I've already rented them a nice furnished apartment on the
Reforma
, where we'll live happily if not ever after."

"Can you get her to sign a policy with you as the beneficiary?" Anderson asked. "A genuine signature is always best. You can't beat the real McCoy."

"I'll tell her it's a form she needs to sign to collect the settlement. She'll believe that. She can barely read and write." Martin paced to the dirty window, gazed out at the traffic on Avenue Morelos, then bit the end off a cigar. He plucked the tobacco crumbs and leaf from his tongue and rolled them between his thumb and forefinger into a tight little ball, which he tossed on the floor. Anderson's litany of smug little platitudes irritated him. Yet he didn't want to do even one more canvas and sell it to oafs for an insultingly small sum. "I'm not so confident about this one, Anderson. Are you sure the company won't suspect?"

Anderson tilted back his narrow, balding head and laughed through his nose. "Do you know how many Maria Gomezes there are in Mexico? They're like Smiths and Joneses in the United States. Like pebbles on the beach. The company will pay; they'll never even know that this Mexico City Gomez was related to Hector Gomez of Barbilla. And your name as beneficiary won't ring any bells at the home office. Believe me, Martin, we're touching all the bases. We'll soon be home free."

"Okay," Martin said, lighting the cigar. He blew smoke off to the side. "Get the policy written up and I'll get Maria to sign tomorrow night, while she's still disoriented by the funeral and the trip here. There's no point in wasting time.”

"You're a man after my own heart," Anderson said, smiling and sliding open a desk drawer. "Time is money."

"For both of us," Martin said.

Or one of us, Anderson thought behind his smile. He was a man who planned ahead even as he tied loose ends.

So the Spanish gold in Saint Marcos Cove was not entirely a legend concocted for
turistas
.
After his last and deepest dive, Hector Gomez did indeed produce a treasure. Complete with a curse.

I
t don't matter a whit to me. Nothing does. I wasn't supposed to be hauling that load. The schedule had me bobtailing my Kenworth tractor back to Saint Louis instead of pulling 60,000 pounds in a new trailer on a special run to Philadelphia. It's all the same to me. The trucking company knows it and that's why they gave me the unscheduled run. Because I don't live by any schedule or set of rules. They say Ruddy Kane don't give a damn if the sun drifts away like a red balloon, that he don't care for anything or anybody, including himself. They're pure right.