A distant storm surge pulsed into the moon sparkling waters along Mendano Beach in Cabo San Lucas. Angie and I lay there sleepless as waves thundered, vibrating our bed in our beachfront hotel room. Glumps of sand that were heaved skyward by the waves slapped back down hard upon the surface like a cheek. Out around the point, froth-crested waves could be seen bending their backs against El Arco, the giant stone arch separating the Gulf of California from the Pacific Ocean.
In the morning Tourists laid out their beach towels for the day, blithely unaware of the monstrous forces climbing up from the depths. Most treacherous of all were the long periods of calm between wave sets, a deceptively blue-sunny-day kind of calm that was picture-perfect for a swim. Tourists smeared on sunscreen, lulled by the gentle wash of sparkling sea foam that spread shoreward like mayonnaise over an open sandwich. Newly arrived hotel guests beamed for photos as their children ran to the water’s edge with inflated swim rings. Nobody warned them. Not the hotel staff, or the already sun burnt tourists who had barely escaped an early swim. Those who knew better sat a little higher on the beach, as if waiting for the hotel staff to finish cleaning the pool. “Sure, why not? Another margarita, por favor.”
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It was 1981 and Mexico’s Baja California was still relatively untraveled and a cheap escape. I never went on vacations till I met Angie. She was an escape artist. Like many of her dancer friends she partied hard when she could. She showed me that people who love what they do can be free from tension of their work. Over the years I just got better at convincing clients that I was the designer they needed. My dad said I could sell a dead cat to anyone. Maybe that’s why I never could convince myself of anything. I felt like a Houdini sinking in handcuffs. So Angie loosened me up on vacation. We smoked and drank and laughed a lot. Did some party drugs, soaked in pools, and soaked up sun in those small mineral spring resorts you find in the desert outside Los Angeles. She was the best companion I ever had.
Last year we met in Maui, Hawaii. She deboarded the plane at Kahului Airport, and walked down the steps wearing swim fins and a diving mask. Her cheeks bulged out like a manatee with the snorkel in her mouth. I loved her for that. She never cared what anyone else thought if she could make me laugh. Once I drank so many martinis dancing with her at a Greek restaurant, that Greeks stuffed bills in my pants. I puked in my sleep that night, and Angie leapt up screaming, “Now you have to marry me.” That was the thing; she was not getting what she wanted, and neither was I.
#
The conspicuous absence of any high surf warnings, or any effort by the hotel to protect their unwary guests was… well, what can I say, black hearted business. No lifeguard, no red flags on the shore, or even a sketch of a wave break falling on a person’s head could be seen anywhere. I decided that I had to do something about it. I trudged up to the hotel lobby, and leaned over the counter to interrupt the Mexican staff checking in a van full of newly arrived guests. “Excuse me. There really should be warnings on the beach about the waves,” I said. “People really don’t realize how dangerous it is to swim right now. There are children down there.” But the clerk said they were busy checking in guests. People standing in line with their suitcases glared at me as if I were butting in.
Back in our room I leaned against the back of the couch and peered out the bay window. I had brought my old Churchill fins in my carryon instead of extra clothes. They were heavy, but the classic body surfing fins I had grown up using in California. It was already afternoon, and I had been picking up and putting down my fins since early morning. I was not so young, and out of shape. But this is what I loved to do. Waves call some people to them. Like sailors to the sea. Like a charge coming up from the ground to meet a lightning bolt coming down. Big glassy walls snapped like bullwhips in shallow water. I knew well enough that there was no soaring under them in counter currents, or choreographing my tumbles under an avalanche of foam. There would be no holding my breath slammed down on sand hard as stone, or staying afloat with broken bones.
Angie always sensed the risk I needed to take to be true to myself. She knew how to push forward to get a part. She was a kind of good danger to me that way. Looking a bit worried, she asked if I was going out. The waves seemed to have eased up.
Just then a scruffy young man in his early 20’s with sun bleached hair appeared, walking across the beach. He wore dirty looking and threadbare jeans sunk over his heels. He pushed forward on the balls of his feet in an agitated gait over the hot sand. His skin was overcooked like someone living rough outside. Every few steps he wobbled to shout out at the sky, jerking his right arm up in the air. I tried to hear him, but the sea drowned out his voice. Right behind him was a young clean-cut boy, about eight or nine years old who was eager to keep up, just as a younger brother might. They walked off in the direction of the bluffs at the end of the beach where I hoped to find a more rideable wave shape.
“I’m going out,” I told Angie.
“Keep your eye on that little boy. Something is not right with those two. And be careful,” she said.
I hurried out fins in hand, and came upon the small boy sitting at the end of the beach where the bluffs descended into the high tide. He stared out at the head of his older brother stroking near some rocks jutting up from the surface. No sooner had I swum out, than a big set of swells started coming in. I took off on the first wave that seemed a manageable size and shape, forcefully pumping my fins down into the tube. To my surprise I was thoroughly trounced, lifted and flung onto the bottom. I burst to the surface, and swam seaward with all my strength to get into deeper water and under the next approaching wall.
Once safely beyond the surf line, I rose and fell in the swells, treading water, already exhausted, and waiting for my chance to swim in. The surf was too heavy for me. In the explosions of sea foam climbing the bluffs to my right, I heard what sounded like a shout for help. Some construction workers up on the barren bluffs heard it too. They hurried down from their scaffolding to look over the cliffs. I heard another shout, clipped short by waves grating off the rocks. I pumped my fins under me to get some height and see where the calls were coming from. They must have been from the young man I had seen, but his head was nowhere in sight.
I made my way ashore, and ran up the beach to the boy. We both peered out over the surging undulations rebounding from the bluffs. I scanned the lacy sweeps of water for his brother’s head to reemerge as the Mexican construction workers up on the bluffs returned to their building site. I told the young boy to wait there, and ran off for help from the Hotel. A manager at reception stepped from his office, and firmly told me there was nothing the hotel could do. He said he could not spare any staff to go in search. He directed me to the police station in town.
I rushed back out to the young boy and asked him where his parents were, if they were staying at this hotel, or nearby? The boy would not answer or say anything, but he allowed me to take his hand, and lead him back to our room.
“Oh my god,” Angie whispered aside. I knew it.”
I left the boy with Angie and ran into town looking for the police station. People directed me this way and that until I found Policia Municipal in a row of storefronts, a bare cement room with wooden benches facing a reception window. The policeman on duty seemed concerned but said there was nothing he could do. He directed me to the harbor master, who he said had a good boat.
I ran down to the harbor to the Harbor Master’s office, but the door was padlocked shut. Local fisherman pointed further down the waterfront to a thatched Palapa, opposite some moorings for sleek cabin cruisers and charter fishing boats. I found the Harbor Master sitting at a table eating lunch and having a beer. Out of breath I explained how I feared the young man might be clinging to the rocks in high surf just around the point from El Arco near our hotel. He apologized, saying that his boat was having propeller work done. It would not be ready till the next day about noon. He promised he would take me then.
The sun had already begun sinking on the horizon, but down on the shore I managed to hire a weather faced old fisherman and his boat. It had a small outboard motor and was piled with nets in the bow. Out at Land’s End we rose to the fiery swells as the fisherman, turned tourist guide, shouted above the engine to point out El Arco. I waved him on, insisting he continue around the point to Lover’s Beach. Just beyond was Mendano Beach in front of our hotel. The boat jolted in the chaotic seas rebounding like broken shards of glass from the bluffs. I jabbed my finger repeatedly for him to steer closer to the seafoam climbing the darkening walls of rock. I peered with all the visual acuity I could muster for the shape of an arm, or a clinging fist in the fading light.
I looked back into the boatman’s old sea eyes and swam my arms in the air, jabbing my finger to steer closer to the darkness under the bluffs. He quavered, realizing he had misunderstood my mission. His face hardened in the old creases that had stared out to sea long enough to know his place in it. For him it was already too late. Whatever the sea had claimed belonged to it. If I had wanted to visit El Arco in the moonlight or night-fished for squid, he might have agreed, but instead he tightened his grip on the tiller, pushing it around in the blue shadow over the sea back toward the harbor.
I returned to our room on the beach in the dark. Angie jumped up to greet me at the terrace door, staring into my eyes for news. I shook my head. The boy was sitting at the end of our bed eating a hamburger with fries and watching television. Angie whispered that he had not spoken one word. After the boy finished his food, I turned off the TV, and sat beside him. He must have been in shock. Think we all must have been. He barely moved his body. So I just sat there with him in Angie’s gaze. After a moment, I asked him if he had a brother. He nodded. Then I asked him if he knew where his brother was? He stared blankly at the empty TV screen, and simply pointed his finger up at the ceiling, then lowered his hand. I heard Angie gasp.
The boy obediently brushed his teeth with the tooth brush we gave him. Angie sat beside him, and tucked him into the bed she had made on the couch. She looked at me with her hand gently stroking his back. Her eyes were opened wide, with iris’s deep and black as a deer’s eye. A deer’s eye caught in the glare of something. After five years our relationship had never progressed to the conceiving kind, but the boy eating hamburgers and getting his back rubbed in our room closed the gap in a flash. A child had been delivered upon our doorstep. Not that his biological parents did not exist somewhere, but we both had the crazy feeling that we had found a lost human child in the wilderness, and would care for him like wolves, or like I remembered tigers had for a baby monkey on YouTube, or like a crow that fed a feral kitten and kept it alive through the winter. That wonderful craziness that is our nature to care for life was very exciting. All night Angie climbed out of bed and checked on him. She sat in the thundering darkness on the floor beside him with her head laid on the edge of the couch.
Very early in the morning someone banged on our door. A blond young man with a Swedish accent introduced himself as a friend of the family. He was holding a dirty backpack that must have been the young man’s. I invited him in, and he looked over at the boy, who did not seem to know him. The man said he would take him to his parents on a yacht anchored not far up the coast. He said the parents had heard what happened, and that the police were looking for the body. He confirmed that the young man had been travelling, and had met up with his family on their sailboat. He had brought his brother down to Cabo by bus for the day.
Angie sat unmoving, and holding the boy’s hand on the couch. The Swedish man thanked us, and said they needed to leave. The boy stood obediently. There was nothing to delay his departure, nothing to pack. He just walked abruptly out with the Swedish man. We did not know how to say goodbye, and still did not know his name.
I shut the door on the morning glare through the curtains. How hollow the sea echoed in our room suddenly, hollow as under the empty arch of El Arco. Angie rebounded like one of the waves off the bluffs, and asked me if I still wanted to go out to Lover’s beach. She reminded me that we had already booked and paid for the boat.
Lover’s beach was just up this side of Lands End where I had searched with the fisherman last night. We took a hotel taxi to the harbor, and were met by a tourist boatman with a small fiberglass speedboat. In a few minutes we swooshed through clear turquoise water onto the beach on the Gulf side. We unloaded our picnic lunches prepared by the hotel, our drinking water, and the day’s beaching stuff. The boatman said he would pick us back up about 3 pm.
A warm sea wind blew in our faces as we climbed the sun sparkling hump of sand to Lover’s Beach on the Pacific side. Lands End was all that separated the two oceans, like two parallel worlds. It was a nice easy stroll at low tide along Lover’s beach, as we looked for a good picnic spot. The warmth and this glorious day was what we had come for. Neither of us discussed what had happened. Lover’s beach was just on the other side of our flight home tomorrow.
My eyes followed the empty curve of desert shoreline that hummed under its breath. An energy you can’t really hear, until you put your ear very close to something, like a yucca whipeli in the evening desert breeze, or in the timeless curve of the blue bay that day, a few more steps to see a shape in the distance, slightly sunken in the sand. I stopped and lowered my head, waiting for Angie to catch up. I heard her gasp, “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
I turned up the beach to put our stuff down on dry sand. Angie followed as if she were drawn by a magnet. She took a seat by our beach things, firmly staring off the other direction.
I walked over to greet him alone, for it surely felt as if he had come to meet us here. Step by step, as I drew closer to the body of the young man, I recognized the same threadbare jeans, now too tight on his swollen torso. His scruffy head of hair was partially buried in the sand, looking away up the beach. His skin had scrapes and bruises, bloody places that I could have knelt down and bandaged. His arms laid out like flippers, palms up by his side as if he were still swimming. The old fisherman with the sunset in his eyes might have known he was already under our boat, gliding on the currents to meet us here.
I did not walk around to look at his face. I would not have recognized him anyway, not from the distance I first saw him on the beach opposite our hotel room, shaking his fist in the air. Nor did I want to look into his fish dead eyes, or contemplate a sandy whisper on his lips. Violence always finds a shore to break on, and all of us made it here to Lover’s beach, each in our own way.
We had no means to call for help, and no other tourists got dropped off that day. We were all alone together in a dream, colliding with underwater rocks. We gathered our things and walked back over to the Gulf side of Lands’ End. We found a spot in a pungent cavity of rock shade, numb with the sound of the sea. Eventually we ate our sandwiches, and drank our sodas.
“This is just weird,” Angie said finally, “him laying over there while we have our lunch.”
“What else can we do.”
“How could a parent allowed their young child to go off with someone so obviously disturbed. In a foreign country. Even if it was his brother.”
“We don’t really know the circumstances,” I replied. “The parents might have been desperate to bring their son home. And they completely trusted his love for his little brother. I mean that’s one scenario. I don’t know.”
“If that little boy were mine, I would have never let him out of my sight.”
“Yes, I believe that. I have never seen you so taken with a child before.”
“He had just watched his brother drown. He was all alone. Like an orphan.”
“Yes, His brother drowned. Not his parents.”
“He still felt orphaned,” Angie cried. “Didn’t you feel it too.”
“Like he was ours?”
“Yes. Like he was ours!”
Angie began to cry, and we embraced, laying back in the sand in the rock shade. She wanted to make love, or I did. I can’t remember. We clung to each other. Time had run out. Our flight back was tomorrow. Our missing boy would never be ours.
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