“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in a long time. We split up after Baja. I don’t know where he went.”
She reached for Ellen’s cigarettes.
“May I?”
“Sure.”
“I haven’t smoked in a while,” she said and her hands trembled slightly as she lit the cigarette.
“I did hear from him for a while after I left Baja, but not much.” She tried to smile. It still wasn’t easy.
“I guess I really didn’t want this,” she said as she put out the cigarette.
“Good,” commented Ellen. “They’ll kill you.”
“It was really interesting in Baja,” Debbie continued, wanting to give this woman a bigger, better story. “We had these friends who lived there, college friends from Oregon and they were renting this house right in Ensenada. They let us have a room. You know, for a few dollars a week. It was a great vacation.”
“What were they doing down there, your friends?” Ellen asked. She figured it probably had something to do with drugs but it could be anything.
“Well, Eric, that was the guy, he was sort of building this boat, a ferro-cement boat.”
“A cement boat? You’re kidding?” Ellen laughed.
“No, really. It’s not new but a lot of people don’t know about it. Ferro-cement boats last forever and Eric was building one and Michael was really interested in building one too, so he was helping out.”
“What did you do while everyone was busy building boats?”
“Oh, I went to the beach and read a lot. There wasn’t much else to do.” She stared at her empty glass. It did sound stupid.
Ellen pulled back with an exaggerated look of surprise. “For six months?”
“Well, maybe it was more like four. Anyway, I shopped and did a lot of the cooking. Eric’s girlfriend Diana was a painter. That’s what she was doing down there. She was painting these Mexican kids with the big eyes. You know? A lot of people buy her paintings.”
Ellen shook her head.
“This guy would come down from LA and pick up some for his gallery. After he left, we’d rent a sailboat and sail down the coast. It was wonderful.” She smiled with the memory.
“She also had this loom.”
The words were falling around her, happy, good words.
“It was amazing, all these strings and things and at night, when she wasn’t painting, she would weave blankets.”
There had really been only one blanket. Debbie watched her weave it with amazement and a sadness at her own inability to create anything.
“I guess she was sort of like a hippy,” she said.
“A hippy? Why a hippy?”
“I don’t know. She was free, happy, like a hippy.” Debbie smiled softly.
“Huh.”
“The house was great,” Debbie went on. “They painted all the walls these strange colors. The living room was this deep forest green and their bedroom was lavender. It was very cool.”
Maybe someday she would tell Ellen that Michael had been her creative writing teacher, that he was thirty to her eighteen when they first met and that he was divorced and the father of a boy he never saw. She could tell her that Diana and Eric had been Michael’s friends, not hers. But, not tonight.
“Who was making a living?” Ellen asked. “I can understand the painter, but what about everyone else?”
Debbie lowered her gaze.
“That’s what happened. We didn’t know how strict the laws were about working in Mexico. Michael thought he could make money by chartering fishing boats and taking people out. He thought Eric was doing that. We found out Eric only did that a couple of times. He met some Americans at Hussong’s who wanted someone who spoke English to go with them.”
“What’s Hussong’s?”
“It’s this bar that’s famous for something. Some writer drank there or a movie star. A lot of Americans go there.”
“What finally happened?”
“We left.”
They sat in silence.
“Did he ever build the boat?” Ellen asked.
“What?”
“Did this Michael ever build his cement boat?”
“I don’t know,” Debbie shrugged. “I don’t know.”
*
Baja had been a nightmare. She still wondered why she didn’t get into the van much sooner and drive back home. Two or three days and she could have been safe in the house in Eugene. If she had done that perhaps there would have been no breakdown. But, by the time she locked her hands around the steering wheel, it was too late.
“Let’s not worry about money or time or anything,” Michael said as they drove to Baja. “Let’s have a good time in old Mexico.”
She agreed. A good time in old Mexico.
“A few months,” he said. “Relax, sit on the beach.”
“And help Eric build the boat,” she reminded him.
“God,” he said to Eric when they first walked along the murky bay, “what a life. Buy a boat, take the tourists out, that’s what I want to do.”
They met the Captain and his blond lady that first night.
“Dope,” Eric whispered. “Watch what you say.”
They sat on the deck of the Captain’s trawler as the Mexican crew worked around them and they all, except for the crew, smoked marijuana.
The Captain and Eric and Michael sat together, rolling joints and laughing as they smoked. Michael told her that you had to trust a guy after he shared his dope and smoked with you. That’s the way it was in the Sixties.
Diana painted in the mornings, Eric and Michael stayed out of the house, and Debbie read and waited for the night. In the evenings they would drink rum-and-Cokes and eat the dinner Debbie prepared. Sometimes the men smoked marijuana and chose cookies and candy over her salads and casseroles.
They would sit on the screened-in porch and Diana’s two Siamese cats, Tuptim and Yul, would stroll around them, touching, purring, slapping at them. Eric would sometimes reach for Diana’s hand as she sat drumming her long fingers on the wicker side table.
“He’s fucking around,” Michael told her in the dark of their bedroom. He laughed.
“He couldn’t be,” she argued.
“Sure as hell is. Didn’t you ever wonder why he never gets very far on the boat?”
She
