'I don't wish to seem overbearing, but that probably saved your harmless life, my friend. I repeat Jorge's advice-stay away from that Spanish of yours unless you are absolutely sure of being understood.'
'I know it's ghastly.'
'That's not actually the problem. The problem is that it isn't ghastly enough. Your pronunciation is quite fair, and you've mastered some good idioms, so people who don't know you think you speak more fluently than you do. In this case the trouble came from your damned rolled rrrs. Would you mind saying the words for 'but' and 'dog'?'
'Pero… perro. Why?'
'The difference between a rolled and a single r, particularly in Maya Spanish, is very slight. The upshot of it was that you not only insulted his boat in various ways, but you ended by referring to his mother as a dog… He was going to take you out beyond the Dead Reef and leave you there.'
'What?'
'Yes. And if it hadn't been I who asked-he knows I know the story-you'd never have understood a thing. Until you turned up as a statistic.'
'Oh, Jesus Christ…'
'Yes,' he said dryly.
'I guess some thanks are in order,' I said finally. 'But words seem a shade inadequate. Have you any suggestions?'
My companion suddenly turned and gave a highly concentrated look.
'You were in World War Two, weren't you? And afterwards you worked around quite a bit.' He wasn't asking me, so I kept quiet. 'Right now, I don't see anything,' he went on. 'But just possibly I might be calling on you,' he grinned, 'with something you may not like.'
'If it's anything I can do from a wheelchair, I won't forget.'
'Fair enough. We'll say no more about it now.'
'Oh yes, we will,' I countered. 'You may not know it, but you owe me something. I can smell a story when one smacks me in the face. What I want from you is the story behind this Dead Reef business, and how it is that Jorge knows you know something special about it. If I'm not asking too much? I'd really like to end our evening with your tale of the Dead Reef.'
'Oho. My error-I'd forgotten Marcial telling me you wrote… Well, I can't say I enjoy reliving it, but maybe it'll have a salutary effect on your future dealings in Spanish. The fact is, I was the one it happened to, and Jorge was driving a certain boat. You realize, though, there's not a shred of proof except my own word? And my own word-' he tapped the pocket holding his flask '-is only as good as you happen to think it is.'
'It's good enough for me.'
'Very well, then. Very well,' he said slowly, leaning back. 'It happened about three, no, four years back-by god, you know this is hard to tell, though there's not much to it.' He fished in another pocket, and took out, not a flask, but the first cigarette I'd seen him smoke, a Petit Caporal. 'I was still up to a long day's scuba then, and, like you, I wanted to explore north. I'd run into this nice, strong, young couple who wanted the same thing. Their gear was good, they seemed experienced and sensible. So we got a third tank apiece, and hired a trustable boatman-not Jorge, Victor Camul- to take us north over the worst of the reef. It wasn't so bad then, you know.
'We would be swimming north with the current until a certain point, where if you turn east, you run into a long reverse eddy that makes it a lot easier to swim back to Cozumel. And just to be extra safe, Victor was to start out up the eddy in two hours sharp to meet us and bring us home. I hadn't one qualm about the arrangements. Even the weather cooperated-not a cloud, and the forecast perfect. Of course, if you miss up around here, the next stop is four hundred miles to Cuba, but you know that; one gets used to it… By the way, have you heard they're still looking for that girl who's been gone two days on a Sunfish with no water?'
I said nothing.
'Sorry.' He cleared his throat. 'Well, Victor put us out well in sight of shore. We checked watches and compasses and lights. The plan was for the lad Harry to lead, Ann to follow, and me to bring up the rear. Harry had Day Glo-red shorts you could see a mile, and Ann was white-skinned with long black hair and a brilliant neon-blue- and-orange bathing suit on her little rump-you could have seen her in a mine at midnight. Even I got some yellow safety-tape and tied it around my arse and tanks.
'The one thing we didn't have then was a radio. At the time they didn't seem worth the crazy cost, and were unreliable besides. I had no way of guessing I'd soon give my life for one-and very nearly did.
'Well, when Victor let us out and we got organized and started north single file over the dead part of the reef, we almost surfaced and yelled for him to take us back right then. It was purely awful. But we knew there was better stuff ahead, so we stuck it out and flippered doggedly along-actually doing pretty damn fair time, with the current-and trying not to look too closely at what lay below.
'Not only was the coral dead, you understand-that's where the name got started. We think now it's from oil and chemical wash, such as that pretty ship out there is about to contribute-but there was tons and tons of litter, basura of all description, crusted there. It's everywhere, of course-you've seen what washes onto the mainland beach-but here the current and the reef produce a particularly visible concentration. Even quite large heavy things- bedsprings, auto chassis-in addition to things you'd expect, like wrecked skiffs. Cozumel, Basurero del Caribe!'
He gave a short laugh, mocking the Gem-of-the-Caribbean ads, as he lit up another Caporal. The most polite translation of basure ro is garbage can.
'A great deal of the older stuff was covered with that evil killer algae-you know, the big coarse red-brown hairy kind, which means that nothing else can ever grow there again. But some of the heaps were too new.
'I ended by getting fascinated and swimming lower to look, always keeping one eye on that blue-and-orange rump above me with her white legs and black flippers. And the stuff-I don't mean just Clorox and detergente bottles, beer cans and netting-but weird things like about ten square meters of butchered pink plas-tic baby-dolls- arms and legs wiggling, and rosebud mouths-it looked like a babies' slaughter-house. Syringes, hypos galore. Fluorescent tubes on end, waving like drowned orchestra conductors. A great big red sofa with a skeletonized banana-stem or something sitting on it-when I saw that, I went back up and followed right behind Ann.
'And then the sun dimmed unexpectedly, so I surfaced for a look. The shoreline was fine, we had plenty of time, and the cloud was just one of a dozen little thermals that form on a hot afternoon like this. When I went back down Ann was looking at me, so I gave her the All's Fair sign. And with that we swam over a pair of broken dories and found ourselves in a different world-the beauty patch we'd been looking for.
'The reef was live here-whatever had killed the coral hadn't reached yet, and the damned basura had quit or been deflected, aside from a beer bottle or two. There was life everywhere; anemones, sponges, conches, fans, stars-and fish, oh my! No one ever came here, you see. In fact, there didn't seem to have been any spearing, the fish were as tame as they used to be years back.
'Well, we began zig-zagging back and forth, just reveling in it. And every time we'd meet head-on we'd make the gesture of putting our fingers to our lips, meaning, Don't tell anyone about this, ever!
'The formation of the reef was charming, too. It broadened into a sort of big stadium, with allees and cliffs and secret pockets, and there were at least eight different kinds of coral. And most of it was shallow enough so the sunlight brought out the glorious colors-those little black-and-yellow fish-butterflies, I forget their proper name-were dazzling. I kept having to brush them off my mask, they wanted to look in.
'The two ahead seemed to be in ecstasies; I expect they hadn't seen much like this before. They swam on and on, investigating it all-and I soon realized there was real danger of losing them in some coral pass. So I stuck tight to Ann. But time was passing. Presently I surfaced again to investigate-and, my god, the shoreline was damn near invisible and the line-up we had selected for our turn marker was all but passed! Moreover, a faint hazy overcast was rising from the west.
'So I cut down again, intending to grab Ann and start, which Harry would have to see. So I set off after the girl. I used to be a fair sprint swimmer, but I was amazed how long it took me to catch her. I recall vaguely noticing that the reef was going a bit bad again, dead coral here and there. Finally I came right over her, signed to her to halt, and kicked up in front of her nose for another look.
'To my horror the shoreline was gone and the overcast had overtaken the sun. We would have to swim east by compass, and swim hard. I took a moment to hitch my compass around where I could see it well-it was the old- fashioned kind-and then I went back down for Ann. And the damn fool girl wasn't there. It took me a minute to locate that blue bottom and white legs; I assumed she'd gone after Harry, having clearly no idea of the urgency of
