Crazy for the Storm

As we came through the barrier of mangroves a young woman stood on the bare back of a horse, across the trail, picking papayas off a huge tree.

Buenas tardes, said my dad.

She teetered for a second then found her balance. She shot him a scornful look, nodded and cut her eyes away. Her hands kept feeling the papayas. She was a real beauty. Black hair, thick and shiny all the way to the middle of her back. Long arms, smooth and brown. Sleepy dark eyes. A slightly curved-down nose. Snarly lips. A scar under her eye. She was not like any girl I had ever seen before.

Give them to her, I heard my dad say.

I snapped my eyes over to him. I shook my head.

Come on, he said. Just set them down.

I was confused. Then I did what he said. We walked away and I glanced back and she was gone.

My dad handed the rest of our pukas to the first grown woman we saw. She was an elder and she sat outside the center hut, watching over things. She said gracias and she wasn’t opposed to looking into my dad’s eyes like the young woman had been. Someone pulled my hair and jolted me out of my stupor. I turned around and a little girl was running away shouting. My dad told me to let them touch it. I stood stiffly and the kids inched up to me as if I were a rabid dog. One of the mothers shooed them away and spoke to my dad while the entire village surrounded us, staring at us. My dad seemed impervious. I watched the ground.

Someone gave my dad two blankets and I followed him to the cone-shaped hut on the end. The entire village moved with us and stood outside the hut even after we entered a slitlike doorway. My dad put the blankets down and laughed. I laughed too. It was strange seeing all those eyes peeking through the slit.

The glamorous life of a rock star, he said.

We sat there trapped for a long time. Then the vaqueros arrived and dispersed the crowd. The short guy with the mustache poked his head through the slit. My dad laughed at whatever he said and they suddenly seemed like friends. When the vaquero left an elderly woman with no neck brought us beans and tortillas and a drumstick.

Is it from those chickens outside?

Uh-huh.

Do they eat the pigs too?

Yeah. Carnitas.

I put the drumstick down, then my dad made me take three bites. By the time he was finished eating it was dark. We set the plates near the doorway and felt our way back to the blankets.

What do we do now?

Sleep.

I insisted on lying close enough to touch him. There were bug noises and a few human-sounding noises and it was so black I could not see the pathway right outside the hut. We were lost in complete darkness and buried away at the edge of a jungle, and Topanga Beach didn’t seem so isolated, or even very wild, anymore.

I dreamed of the papaya picker slaughtering a pig before the roosters woke me. My dad was gone. I sat up with a start, confused about where I was. Scattered clouds hung outside the slit. The path was already caking under the bald tropical sun. Sweat made my whole body sticky. I called for my dad. I went to the slit and peeked out. The village was empty. It was eight or nine o’clock, I guessed. A fragment of sunlight burned my cheek and I wondered what it would be like at noon.

I crossed the broken tiles of mud and searched for the path to the beach. The clouds over the ocean cracked in the same pattern as the dried mud. There was no one around and a rush of panic made me move too quickly over the shells and they cut my feet.

My dad was helping lift a net full of fish out of a dory. Two elders hauled one side and my dad hauled the other with one hand grabbing the middle. The elders sweated under their ponchos and palm-woven hats, juxtaposing my dad’s minimalist wardrobe of surf trunks.

Take the other side, he said.

I hooked my fingers into the slimy net. A dying roosterfish, eyes stuck open, looked right at me. We put the net down outside one of the middle huts. Inside the hut I counted five palm-woven mats edge to edge on the ground. How many people slept in there?

Let’s get wet, said my dad.

My dad was way ahead of me when I stepped out of the hut. A stampede of kids appeared. I turned my back on them and got a good grip on my board and walked quickly toward the beach. The kids trampled over the shells and looked down at me from both sides of the path. A couple of boys ran their fingers over the surfboard and fired questions at me.

Surfing, I said, fashioning my hand into a surfboard riding an imaginary wave in the air.

I saw my dad way out on the sand spit gazing at the surf. The waves were eclipsed by the slight rise of the spit and his arms hung blithely at his sides, the board dangling. He was motionless. Big surf, I thought. Shit.

Some of the kids lost interest in me and lagged behind and the others began throwing rocks and shells into the ocean. I slowed my pace and hoped my dad would disappear around the spit. I was barely moving and thought about just sitting down. But if he turned and saw me lollygagging it might piss him off.

The kids spotted a turtle and surrounded it and hucked rocks at it. They poked it with a stick as it shimmied toward the safety of the ocean. I wanted to yell at them but it was their beach and every beach was different with its own rules. So I walked on.

There was a horse tied up near a papaya tree where the jungle met the beach. I wondered which vaquero was here. When I came up behind my dad on the sand spit I startled him and he became flustered for a moment. His mouth opened like he was going to say something but closed a second later. He walked off the spit and down the beach.

I stepped into his footprints and peered out. Just offshore I saw her—those snarling lips and the scar under her eye so distinct. She floated on her back and her breasts stood out like big acorns, firm and brown. The smell of papaya fruit was all around and in that instant I named her Papaya. I watched her and my arms hung and I was dead still, a miniature version of the man standing in this place only moments before. Had my dad been watching her? Did she know? Then her eyes opened. They tracked all the way into the corners and only then did she see me.

She flipped over and dove. She swam along the white ocean floor, her brown color beautiful like a trail of brown sugar. She popped up far enough away that I could not see her body through the clear water. She seemed to catch her breath looking out toward the big reef and then she swam farther out.

My dad was way down the beach and I saw his footprints going past her yellow T-shirt and white skirt. I knew that my dad had been watching her but I didn’t know if she had let him and only afterward had been surprised by me, or whether she had been surprised that anyone was there at all.

I looked for her and saw her splashing halfway out to the reef. It worried me that she might get tired and drown. I envisioned paddling hard and whisking her out of the deep sea and onto my board. She thanked me. You’re safe now, Papaya, I said.

My adrenaline was pumping. Then a gaggle of kids rounded the spit, apparently finished with the turtle and ready to pursue some new curiosity. Full of erratic energy I trotted down the beach.

My dad was waxing his board and mixing sand into the wax when I finally reached him. He studied me and it seemed like we both were starstruck and speechless and floating in some weird space.

Cleaned up nicely, said my dad, glancing at the reef.

Totally, I said.

The Mexican kids must have thought we really were aliens the way we just lingered there—the heat and the aroma and the girl congealing into an orgy of sensations, and Dad and I laughing like drunken half-wits.

I was close to the reef and my dad was behind me for some reason. Coming out of the trance, I realized the waves were twice my size. I sat up on my board. The reef halted the swell’s forward momentum and the swell lurched upward then heaved outward, hollowing out the face of the wave. The leading crest was pointed like an