Changes in latitudes, p.9
Changes in Latitudes, page 9
I had worries of my own. I was starring to worry about my rendezvous at the Oceano Hacienda. She was so self-assured, and I wasn’t at all.
After we got back to the hotel and my mother had “rested” awhile, she said for us to go ahead without her. “I’m just not strong enough.”
“I’ll stay with you,” Jennifer said.
“No, you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
“Jennifer, I’ll be fine. If I feel up to it, I might even go back to the market and buy that dress. I don’t know what I’ll do—I’ll probably just stay here.”
Jennifer glanced at me, asking in effect, “Is this what you were talking about?”
I shrugged a “yes.”
Jennifer was hamstrung. She couldn’t say, “Hold everything—would somebody tell me what’s going on here?” because she knew I wouldn’t tell her, and she couldn’t exactly ask Mom. Mom had always confided in her. They trusted each other.
“You really don’t want me to stay with you?” was all she could manage.
My mother looked relieved that Jennifer had given up. “I’ll be better after a good rest, don’t worry about me. Run along and have a good time.”
There was a hollow feel to her voice: indecisive, lonely, distant. She was right there with us, and she’d never been farther away. I didn’t say a word, even though I could tell she wasn’t that sold on running off on us. I could have stopped her but I didn’t feel like it.
My anxieties about the evening were getting out of control. I wished there was something like a wonder drug I could take. Then I thought about Teddy’s turtle eggs. It sounds stupid, I know, but I needed a little insurance. Even if it didn’t do anything, it would give me a psychological edge, a “placebo effect.”
So I stole one, and hid it for later.
WHEN WE WERE halfway down the Playa Tortugas and Teddy was content that no one was in sight, he selected a spot above the high-tide mark and began to dig furiously, like a dog going after a gopher. Jennifer and I were posted to keep watch. This was serious business.
As for me, I was relieved to have something going on for the afternoon. For a time I could get my mind out of Room 837. The anticipation was burning me up.
Jennifer really enjoyed herself watching Teddy dig that hole. “I finally got here,” she said wistfully. “You guys assume I wouldn’t be interested, but I am.”
“Ca-ca-hua-tes,” I replied.
“What’s that?”
“Peanuts.” I pulled a plastic pack from my back pocket. “Want some?”
Teddy placed the eggs in a clutch in the hole he’d dug. He stood back and inspected his work. “Maybe they’re too deep. They can’t be too deep or too shallow.”
One at a time, he carefully returned them to the box, then filled in the hole a little.
Jennifer and I ate peanuts and kept on the lookout for spies. Jennifer tried again to get me to talk. This time she came right to the point. “What’s going on with Mom, Travis?”
That’s all it took to get the juices flowing. “Hey, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil—that’s my policy. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”
She turned away and helped Teddy plant the eggs, then cover them with sand. Afterwards they made everything look natural.
Teddy inspected the area from every angle. Something wasn’t right. He took off his thongs and walked barefoot right over the spot. Then he was satisfied. “Good job, Paco,” I told him.
As we walked away he glanced over his shoulder, as if those baby turtles might be surfacing already. “I really think they’re going to hatch.”
I remember once when Teddy was a toddler I found him sticking duck feathers in the flowerbed. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was going to grow some ducks. Compared to those ducks, these turtles were going to be a lead-pipe cinch.
Teddy hurried us down the beach, afraid he’d miss the Grand Opening. As it turned out we walked right in the open door of the lab and joined the show. I doubt we were all that late, and in any case we didn’t miss anything. It didn’t look like any Grand Opening I’d ever seen. No hot dogs, soda, nothing. Domingo was standing in front of the first of six long rows of metal bins filled with sand. He was orating magnificently to about thirty people, all men. I can’t speak for the others but the vocabulary Domingo used sure had me bamboozled. I couldn’t understand a thing he said, but it sure sounded good.
With his height and blond hair, Casey stood out. Even though he wore a short-sleeved shirt and slacks, he’d underdressed—all the Mexicans wore suits. Nonetheless he looked impressive. Maybe it was his forearms.
Teddy led us to him and caught his eye. Casey acknowledged Jennifer and flashed us each a warm smile. Teddy whispered, “What’s he saying?” Casey was listening hard and signaled him to wait. I nodded toward Domingo and asked Jennifer, “Would you buy a used car from this guy?”
“It sure is warm in here. Do you know what he’s saying?”
“He’s extolling the virtues of pre-chewed cacahuates.”
Domingo ended a long stretch of monologue with a grand gesture. Evidently he’d made a joke because some of the group were laughing. Some of the others however, including Casey, were shaking their heads.
Casey gave us a quick summary. “He said that close to one hundred percent of the eggs laid on the beach used to be dug up by poachers, but now they’ve solved the problem by removing the eggs from the slaughtered females and incubating them here in the laboratory.”
I asked what the joke was. Casey whispered to me, so Teddy wouldn’t hear, “He said they remove them by cesarian section.”
Even I didn’t think that was funny. I couldn’t work up much appreciation for Domingo. After seeing his slaughterhouse, I thought he was a real Nazi. He should have been a PR man to that doctor at Auschwitz who conducted all those experiments on little kids and afterwards lined the shelves of his office with pickle jars full of their eyeballs. Domingo could have conducted tours for the VIPs who came to visit, and told jokes to make them feel at home.
Domingo pointed to the fluorescent lights suspended over the bins. I gathered he was explaining how they do a better job than the sun at hatching turtles. Then he had everybody follow him down the aisle a ways, and he stopped at one of the bins to create a photo opportunity for the press. Expounding all the while, he took off his suit jacket and dug in the sand until he uncovered some eggs, then covered them up again. I didn’t get the point.
After that he led us over to three waist-high metal tanks against the wall, which each turned out to have about a hundred hatchlings swimming around and around in about a foot of water. From the look on the proud father’s face, you knew this was the climax of the tour. He didn’t hold anything back, and must have set some kind of a record for eloquence. Just when you thought he’d reached the absolute heights, he climbed for more.
Ten minutes later I was losing my mind with boredom. If I had a shotgun I could have blasted Domingo and put him out of his ecstasy. Actually that wouldn’t have been a bad idea. Nothing else would have turned out the same if I’d done that. I would have gone to jail of course, but there are fringe benefits, like all the Mexican food you can eat.
Instead I started looking around checking everybody out. I watched the reactions on the audience’s perspiring faces as they stood around in their tight black shoes. Most of them hung on Domingo’s every word. I took them for officials or relatives or both. The conservationists Casey mentioned were easy to identify. They were frowning and they wore two-piece suits, as opposed to the three-piece suits of the vested interests. Also they foamed slightly at the mouth. It’s good to know that Mexico too has its “rabid environmentalists.”
Finally Domingo finished with a nourish, his partisans applauded, and Casey translated the water-tank speech. “He says these are eighty percent of the trial batch from the previous arribada.”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s all he said of any substance. He claims this shows he’ll hatch eighty percent of the eggs he has in the bins here.”
He started to add his own commentary but quit when he heard one of the environmentalists grilling Domingo. It seems this fellow had the nerve to question the man’s integrity.
Most of the audience could care less. They were standing around ogling the parrot on Jennifer’s chest. She was a knock-out in that blouse.
I noticed a lab employee slouching along between the tanks and the wall. He wore dirty green trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. I could swear I’d seen him before; I pointed him out to Teddy. Sure enough. Our first day on the Playa Tortugas, he was the one who absconded with the hatchlings we were shepherding to the sea.
Everyone was leaving. Domingo had evidently decided to keep the show on the road. Casey stood outside talking with the angriest conservationist. Jennifer and I went out to hear what they were saying.
The Mexican was speaking English: “I told him that it is too early to see if his experiment has been a success. What can we tell from these few turtles on display? I am very dissatisfied, señor, as I’m sure you are. There is no objectivity here whatsoever.”
“I hope those government officials are unhappy, too.”
I looked around for Teddy. He’d want to tell what we figured out about the lab employee. Any way I added them up, the implications were nothing but nasty.
Teddy was the last one out. In fact, he had to knock to be let out. The turtle kidnapper, who was locking the door, was pretty surprised he was still in there.
The conservationist had run off to catch up with the others. In a few minutes we could hear the cars roaring off from behind the slaughterhouse. Not even Domingo’s friends had wanted to loiter around this place very long.
It was just me and Teddy and Jennifer and Casey. Casey explained to Teddy how the outspoken one was the head of a nationwide organization, and how he wanted to come back to inspect Domingo’s rate of success with the lion’s share of the eggs.
‘Tell him, Teddy, “I said.
Teddy pointed to the turtlenapper, who had almost reached the slaughterhouse. “We saw that guy picking up hatchlings on the beach a few days ago.”
That disturbed Casey, and then some. “You did?”
I saw my chance for checkmate.
“Yep,” I said. “Whenever your friend comes back to inspect this place, Domingo’s just going to say, ‘Oh, they already hatched and we let ’em go.’ ”
“You don’t think he even has any eggs in those tubs—except the ones he showed us?”
I’d been right the first time about Casey. For all his good intentions he was totally powerless. A typical environmentalist, like my father. If Casey were to write an article about what was happening to the sea turtles, my father would love to read it. He loves to quote environmental disaster trivia. For example, he told me that an amount of the world’s rain forest the size of England is slashed and burned every year. Exposed to the sunlight, he said, the tropical soil has all the life-regenerating capacity of a slab of concrete. Trees make oxygen, we breathe oxygen, and so on. That’s great that he knows all this stuff—a lot of difference it makes. Before we die from suffocation it’s probably going to be nuclear wintertime anyway.
Sorry about the digression. What I should have said was, in my opinion Domingo’s bins had about as much chance of sprouting turtles as our flowerbed did ducks, and left it at that.
ONCE WE LEFT the lab and started north, some kind of breaker tripped in my brain and there was no way to keep Room 837 in the back of my mind any longer. Scenes began to play one after the other in the movie house of my imagination. I have no recall of our walk up the beach, the bus ride into town, or anything that Jennifer or Teddy might have said. I was getting pretty uptight. I wanted so bad not to blow it.
When we got back to the hotel my mother wasn’t there. No note or anything. As calm as Jennifer usually stays, she got pretty weirded out. I was hungry, so I talked her into eating in the hotel restaurant. The three of us went through the motions down there. Neither she nor Teddy seemed to have any appetite. I was trying to guess what was best for my purposes and decided I should eat something, not too much or not too little.
Jennifer kept looking to the door as if Mom would walk in. No one said a word. Jennifer fidgeted and Teddy brooded. It seemed like we were under the weight of ten atmospheres. I didn’t even try to lighten things up—I had my own concerns.
Finally Jennifer said, “She can’t be shopping this long.”
“Maybe she left just before we got back,” I said.
She knew I didn’t believe that. “Something’s wrong.”
“You can say that again.”
It seemed she was about to say something, and she would have if it weren’t for Teddy, but she settled for some hard and bitter looks.
Upstairs, we went to our rooms. Teddy sat on his bed with his sea turtle in his lap and petted it mechanically. He was someplace out in the ozone. It was time for me to get ready for my “date.”
Maybe it was the lukewarm water, or maybe the anxiety had gotten to me. As I showered, I could care less. It was crazy, I didn’t even know her name. For a second I thought about not showing up. Then I knew I was going no matter what. She wouldn’t have invited me to her room if she didn’t have something in mind, and I needed this more than anything.
When I got out of the shower I stood there awhile staring at my face in the mirror. I sure didn’t look like a guy going out for a good time. I needed a boost, that was for sure.
I took the turtle egg out of the sock I’d set on the back of the toilet tank, turned it over and over in my hand, and wondered if I could really eat it. What if it turned out to have a half-formed turtle inside?
There was only one way to find out. I broke it into the glass by the sink. Teddy was right—it was a perfectly fresh egg. In the glass it hardly looked different from a chicken egg.
I held the glass up and looked in the mirror at me holding it. I should have drunk it right away. Then I could have said I didn’t know what I was doing, convinced myself I’d had an attack of “temporary depravity.” As it was, I looked into my own eyes and recognized all too well that I was about to do the most sordid thing I’d ever done, and I don’t mean swallowing a potential sea turtle. I knew I was about to betray my brother.
It’s not so hard to betray someone you love. Probably you’ll get the chance sometime in your life. When the time comes, it won’t be so hard. It’s as easy as saying a few words or swallowing an egg. All you have to do is think of yourself first and the rest will come easy.
I stood there with the glass raised as if I were toasting myself. I heard Teddy move across the room and stop right outside the bathroom door. He said in a fragile, hopeful voice, “Travis, do you think Domingo is really hatching any eggs?”
I thought, if I’m going to go for it, I’d better go for it now. So I chugged the egg.
“He’s a phony,” I said, gagging a bit. I chased the egg with water, then quickly collected the bits of shell, stashed them in the sock, and washed out the glass so nothing would show.
Those were the last words we ever spoke. That egg might have been fresh, but I still can’t get the taste of it out of my mouth.
WHEN I GOT OUT of the bathroom, Teddy was back in bed with his turtle, staring into space.
Jennifer stuck her head in the door and said in a no-nonsense tone, “Travis, I’d like to talk with you—in the other room.”
“Be right there, Ma’am.” I stashed the sock in my suitcase and went right over.
Jennifer noticed I was still wearing only the towel around my waist. “You could have gotten dressed.”
“It sounded urgent.”
“You weren’t serious about leaving.”
“You bet I was.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going out. Did Mom tell us where she was going? Shopping, was that it?”
“Look, Travis, I’m really worried. You can’t leave now.”
“She’s all right,” I said sincerely.
“How do you know?”
Now that I’d set her up, she was ripe for a sudden display of ferocity. I exploded. “What do you want me to tell you, the name of the guy she’s with?”
“What are you saying?”
“You want the room number? I could find that out for you if you’re really interested.”
“How do you know?” she asked wildly.
“You don’t need to know how I know. Just ask her about ‘Mitch’ sometime and see what she says. Look, I have to get dressed—I got a date of my own. You just hold the fort.”
I wanted to have the last word, so with that I returned to my room.
Teddy wasn’t there. His sea turtle was on the night-stand, but Teddy was gone.
I went back to Jennifer’s room and told her to look around for him downstairs while I got dressed.
I brushed my teeth, then checked my watch. Thanks to Jennifer I’d gotten behind schedule. I resolved not to let her get to me any more than she already had. I had to keep my head right or I’d blow my big opportunity for sure.
I shaved as deliberately as possible—no nicks even. I slapped on my after-shave, reached for the deodorant. I sang a song to try to soothe myself. Here’s how it went:
It’s these changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes,
Nothing remains quite the same.
With all of our cunning and all of our running,
If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.
If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.
Nobody—not Jennifer, Teddy, or my mother—was going to come between me and destiny.
Too much deodorant. It was already a big sticky mess under there, like a washing machine overflowing with suds. I had to clean it out with a washcloth and start over.
I dressed in my best jeans, best shirt, and put on my corduroy jacket. I was ready.
Jennifer came flying in, all overwrought. “I looked all over—he’s gone!”
