Aphra was getting more concerned every second that Curtsy didn’t swim back out of the cave. Her concerns had been a little different, watching her tuck and drive down from the surface, driving into the dark underwater cavity with lazy kicks, her buttocks bunching powerfully under the white bikini. How long has this been going on, she’d wondered. Babes underwater with tits all floaty and zero-grav, scissoring legs right at you like that? Damn?

But that had to have been over five minutes ago. She’d been extremely impressed by the blonde’s condition and diving skills on the way out to the reef–she and MeiMei cheating by hauling themselves along the Avalon marker rope, Curtsy mostly sculling along on the bottom peering at whatever weird skindiver shit was down in the silt. But this was beyond “experienced”; this was edging into “humanly impossible” and getting out there toward, “the dum bitch just drowned herself”.

She floated facedown, fixed with growing anxiety on the suddenly evil-looking overhang of the cave, crusted with strange growths and probably jagged teeth. MeiMei was really freaking out, taking big breaths and diving down, like she could do anything out here, and her as newbie at this shit as Aphra. Now WTF?

She was dithering between taking one desperation dive to the bottom, less than twenty feet, after all, and seeing if she could spot that damn ditz, or just writing off the money and heading back to the corral when she heard a piercing whistle. Her head popped out of the water and she stared across the ten yards of shallow water over the top of the reef and saw Curtsy standing knee-deep, laughing her ass off. Crazy bitch.

She caught MeiMei when she breached, gasping after another of her increasing frantic and useless attempts to see back into the cave. Pointed out the Golden Girl, posing like a Sports Illustrated cover standing in an infinite blue plate of Caribbean under scudding heaps of cumulous. “Must have been a back door,” she said, testily.

MeiMei started to yell something about scaring the crap out of them, but realized that had been the idea. “Very cute. How do we get over there?”

“Hyperventilate for a minute,” Curtsy told her, seriously. “Then drive straight down and power into the tunnel. Turn belly up. If you lose a fin or get in trouble, just crawl out along the roof of the tunnel. I’ll watch for you from this end.”

“Yeah, right,” Aphra sneered. “That why you brought us out here, play hidey-seeky?”

“Move to your right about six yards,” Curtsy told them. “See how the reef is skinnier there? Wait until a wave comes, give you a little more depth, then zip across real quick.”

She watched as her pupils followed her instructions with only a few false starts and a scrape or two, then rounded them up on the other side and tipped her mask back to give them her full gaze. “I brought you out here to see how you do,” she said. “See if you can handle being in the water. How you act if something goes wrong.”
“So did we pass, Teach?” Aphra was over it, but stuck with her pissed-off diction.

“Not bad. Nobody panicked, nobody ran for home, nobody started yelling.” She turned to MeiMei. “I appreciate your concern. You were going to try to come after me, weren’t you? Bad idea, good attitude.”

“Got any more caves you want to lose us in?” Aphra asked, looking around.

“Caves and tunnels and arches, oh my!” Curtsy burst out, her eyes shining. “It’s what makes this place so special. The whole Yucatan is just a flat plate of limestone eaten full of holes like Swiss cheese. On land they call them cenotes, underwater, they’re my personal playground.”

“That just sounds so dangerous,” MeiMei said, staring around at the curl of waves out to the lighthouse, a power cruiser spanking around the point. “What if you get stuck or run out of air.”

“The technical term for that,” Curtsy lectured learnedly, “Is ‘crab chow’. Kind of like, what happens if you run out of handhold when you’re mountain climbing. And you can’t do underwater spelunking with SCUBA tanks.”

Aphra nodded at that. She’d wanted to spring for tanks, feeling it would be safer and more professional than just swimming to the yacht with snorkles. But this little exercise Curtsy had termed a “test dive” had convinced her freedive was the way to go. No bulky gear, no tell-tale bubbles, no wetsuits covering up the goodies of her companions out here on this invisible meniscus between aquamarine water and deep-dish blue sky. “So.” she said. “What next, Houdinita?”

Well, we could go out to the lighthouse if you want. It’s really fun sitting out there, up in the air like that. But mostly let’s screw around in here. We can go outside…” she waved at the inlets between the string of low flat rocks, waves rushing though them and occasionally breaking over the rocks, scattering gulls and pelicans. “But we aren’t planning on going anywhere with wave motion, so let’s screw around in here for awhile, get used to diving, learn some signals.”

“Signals?” Aphra stuck in. “We aren’t going to be down in the Titanic or nothing. We can just stick our heads up and talk, right.”

“Yeah,” Curtsy said brusquely. “If we want people to hear us.”

Aphra nodded. She was suddenly aware that she resented not being the stealth expert. She was on Curtsy’s turf and aware that the girl could lose her or even kill her out here with no trouble whatsoever. She was in the hands of a blond for crissakes.

But she liked what she was seeing. Curtsy leading, MeiMei–in pretty decent shape her self for a scholarly type–because she needed to find and ID what they were looking for, and Aphra because she was bankrolling and anyway had a long-standing prejudice towards being on the scene when the shit goes down.

And if you wanted a practice field or dive dojo or whatever, this place was perfect. She could see now that the reef with the tunnel was paralleled by the other reef, that stuck up above water a foot or so, leaving a nice sheltered pool in between the two. To the south the strange triangle of the Avalon Reef stuck up like an abandoned Lego project, to the north was a necklace of rock wreathed with a tossing lace of wave, back behind them was an immense stretch of sand-bottomed shallows.

Curtsy was no drillmistress. She led them around showing them sights. Sting rays flying along the bottom like slo-mo birds, darting clouds of Blue Tangs, a big Parrotfish grinning like his dentures hurt. starfish, fan corals. But Aphra noticed each time they examined some cool little fish or cavern or shell they were getting smoother at going down, coming up without noise as she taught them how to displace the water in their snorkles before tipping them up to sip air, learning to be aware of each other’s positions and understand the others’ signals and gestures. They were starting to move together, like a herd of some kind as they learned their environment. Hmmph, she thought, School of Fish, is what we got here.

Curtsy pulled them up in the lee of the largest islet, MeiMei jabbering in wonder at the fish and various specimens she was seeing. “Is there always reef this close to the island?” she asked.

Curtsy laughed. “La Isla is a reef, Doc. A limestone reef. Where it’s dry they build houses on it; where it’s wet enough the coral build on it.”

Aphra was more into business than science. “You think we’ve got it together enough for the caper?”

“I think so. For beginners, you guys are doing fine. And everybody’s in shape. Should be a piece of cake now that we’re starting to move like a unit. Just remember: it’s two little raids we’re doing here. Yours and mine.”

Aphra nodded and started to speak when they heard another shrill whistle, this one brassy and cop-like. The girls started and looked towards shore, where a bulky guy in the red and white livery of the Avalon security squad was blowing a whistle and angrily motioning at them to go back into the roped-off area. All three laughed in unison.

“Not many rules in open ocean,” Curtsy giggled.

“And enforcement’s a bitch,” Aphra added.

MeiMei chuckled. “Know what we should do?”

Moving almost as if choreographed, the three spun around and laid out prone in the water. Then all three hauled down their bikini bottoms and paddled hard to hoist their gleaming butts above water, shooting the security guy a triple-barreled, tri-tone, multi-racial moon.

They turned and lay back, finning slowly to see the guard’s reaction. He stood for a minute, scowling, then laughed and started to applaud. They waved and Curtsy did a sort of water curtsy, then started back towards towels and shooters at Na Balam, laughing like schoolgirls.

“No, honey,” Aphra said between laugh spasms. “Now we’re moving like a unit.”

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You have to fly into Cancun in the daytime to even get a clue. Miles out you look down into open ocean and it looks like desert. You’re seeing the bottom because you can’t see the water. That’s your first clue.
Seagull, in The Blasé Sojourner.

It had come on pretty smoothly, considering half of the trippers were virgins. Xchab had fretted nervously, pacing and twitching and popping her eyes in totally non-noble redman sort of tension. Loris had tried to soothe the girl, but realized she was skittish and suspicious, so she just gave her some space and concentrated on her own little pre-flight mantras and mudras.

She’d smiled watching Bannock adjusting, peering around at first; trying to analyze and guard. But after her one of her prolonged dips, lowering backwards and sinking into the silky, accepting water, she emerged and whipcracked her hair and saw him staring at the pellets of water flying our like a crown of pearls shimmering with the reflected lights of the hotel zone. She waved to him and he waved back, then fell into the whole fingertip thing, wiping and weaving in the air. She giggled and kicked a spray of jeweled water at him.

Winston, of course, came on like a true slut, psychodillies as mother’s milk to him. He did a boneless dance in the shallows, flapping his floppy shirt to internal music. She gave another glance at Xchab, paralyzed on the sand, and figured it was time to shed a little light. She waded in, and approached the Mayan girl slowly. She got on response, seeing eyes focused inwards and dead-centered. She stood in front of the girl motionless, beaming herself into her. Xchab blinked once, in slow motion, the met her eyes, directly and without evasion for the first time. She sensed something powerful in the dark gaze, but also undirected, drifting in currents that emitted no light. She reached to her own waist and undid her soaked dress, then stepped out of it and whirled it around her head. Drops of moon-hue spun out into the darkness around them. Xchab stared at her, then tipped her head to watch the outward spiral of light drops into the night.

The girl reached out now, laid her hand tentatively on Loris’ cheek as if checking to see if she was really there. Her hand trailed down the pale skin, slid off the pale breast, hung heavily at her side. Loris tossed the wet huipil onto the sand and made a simple gesture.

Immediately Xchab shed her own clothes, which blew whatever was left of Winston’s mind. Xchab had emphatically not been the type for public nudity. He stopped his ghost dance and stared at the two naked women standing face to face, the short one so dark and solid, the tall one so while and slim. Whoa!

Bannock stared at the pair, also. He exulted in the sight, wiped out by the beauty of both of them. But without a touch of lust, a lack he was somewhat aware of. Sublime shapes under the cresting moon. Then Loris turned and walked back into the sea. Once waist-deep, she dived, the flash of her half-moons and wonder under the lunar lighting. When she breached again, she waved to Xchab, laughing. Xchab stared then did the last thing either Bannock or Winston expected. She broke into a laugh and charged into the water, kicking up a fountain of spray until she, also, took a dive.

She came up and paddled towards Loris like a puppy, chortling in childish glee. Loris splashed water in her face, initiating a spate of horseplay that the men watched, struck dumb and motionless. Until Loris glanced at them, standing ankle deep in their street clothes and snickered. “Wotta bunch of wussies.”

Winston glanced at the big guy and said, “Are we going to take that?”

“Hell no, podnuh.” And Bannock was immediately pulling off his attire and sailing it back onto the beach.

“Who’s the rotten egg?” Loris taunted while Xchab cackled and tossed Mayan catcalls at them.

The two men thundered into the water like Percherons, belly-flopping noisily into the wet warmth, then swam at the howling girls with windmilling crawl strokes that filled the air with a filigree of moonwater. They slithered through the pale light like otters, basking and bellowing in the electric night over the reef.

The sky was lightening, the turquoise tint seeping into the water, and Bannock was spending more and more time below the surface, watching the quicksilver underside of the surface, snatching at fish, sliding around Loris’ legs like an eel. He pushed off the bottom and came into the air like a killer whale, a big male upsurge into a sky going pink but still full of stars. He stood near Loris and tossed big double handfuls of water into the sky, watching the seductive play of color in the droplets, striving to build his own rainbow. “So this is where stars come from,” he murmured.

Then he turned to Loris, and was washed over by feeling. The beauty of her, rising from the water like a Greek marble. The wonder of her, every line and movement a hint of the strong, smooth stream he’d plunged into in her depths. Then he saw that the water on her cheeks wasn’t seawater, but tears and was beside her in a minute, waiting for her words.

“We made a big mistake,” she whispered, and Bannock felt the big red balloon inside him go slack.

“I don’t think so,” he told her, trying to catch her eye and not succeeding. “I feel better about us all the time.”

That brought her around, sweeping him with a sorrowful gaze he saw as somehow Italian. “So do it. And when I’m, you know… like this… and feel that way, I take it pretty seriously.”

Winston had been floating with eyes dilated upwards and all the drive and animation of a barnacled log, Xchab also back-floating with her head to his, her lush hair pulsing around him like seaweed. He suddenly tipped his head up, the girl’s hair spilling over his brow like the world’s worst comb-over. “Seriously?” he piped. “Are you serious? Don’t take anything seriously. Or it will take you right back.”

He flopped back into sensory deprivation and Loris stepped to Bannock and laid her hands on his pectorals, her head on his chest near his heart. “I’m talking about oXo,” she said forlornly. “Those guys are assholes. They are imprisoning him to exploit him.”

Bannock placed his palms just where her hips curved out from her waist and spoke into the top of her head. “Did you have a vision of him chained in a dungeon begging you to come rescue him and bring some crack?”

“I just know, okay? We have to get him back.”

He took a long pause, feeling her skin, the warmth of her against the hair of his chest, watching the fingers of day creep up the eastern sky over Isla Mujeres. “I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with me anymore, but I guess that’s a good enough reason for me, too.”

Winston bobbed up, eyeing them like a graying sea otter. “Good enough for me, too. Whatever you’re talking about.”

Bannock ignored the old hippie, who receded once again into the sea. “If it wasn’t for you and ol’ oXo I wouldn’t have been caught dead eating this crazy shit. But now I can’t believe I would have turned it down, ever. It changed me too, somehow. I feel like a different person. Does that wear off?”

She smiled softly into his wet chest thatch and said, “Not if you work at it.”

“So I’m a different person now? Would you say?”

“If you say so. And not just you, either.”

Bannock turned where she was looking and saw Xchab slowly rise, the water slicking down off her cinnamon body as if off sheet metal. As she came up out of the water her hair slid off Winston’s head, like a stop-action of aging. She stood facing the dawn and reached out towards the faintest aura of sun, doing something ritualistic with her fingers. She turned to them and Bannock saw what Loris meant: the girl’s face was cast into a firmer mold, hard as igneous rock, ductile as sand. She was a solemn priestess, eyeing them for worthiness. And spoke: “This is the place where the sun is born.”

She reached down and gently lifted Winston’s head, Loris noting a more tender attitude towards the geezer. He stood and looked around at them, then at the shivering new sun. And Xchab spoke again. “The place and the time.”

Xchab’s hand had come to rest on the green fender of the taxi as they got in, tracing the last three letters of the words “EcoCab”. Winston chuckled and leaned over to tell Loris, “Cab is a Mayan word. It means ‘bee’, wouldn’t you know”.

The ride from Punta Nizuc to the other end of the lagoon had been almost entirely silent. The driver didn’t know what to make of the odd quartet, and anyway their clothes were soaked and sogging up his cool Toluca seatcovers. The foursome, wrapped in the soft, brown ego-restructure of a waning good trip, had little to say, but found it very comfortable to relax in one another’s company without babbling.

They got out at the gravel lot by the bridge, huddled together in the post-dawn while Bannock handed the cabbie a too-big bill and got no change. But as soon as they turned to head down the path hacked years ago through the mangroves they saw Copper slumped under the stunted trees like a sack of old clothes.

Winston moved to her, shocked at seeing her in such an abject, beaten posture: unthinkable for the ebullient, defiant redhead. Bannock was looking around for threat as he followed Winston towards Copper, Loris moving in with a calm certainty. Just as Winston reached her, she tilted her head back, her eyes puffed and tearful. “It’s gone!” she sobbed. “They killed it!”

Winston looked where she was pointing and saw only a slick of oily rubbish and chopped vegetation where his home had once floated.

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Loris had already slipped out of her huipil and waded waist deep in the warm tropic waters just inside Point Nizuc. She stood topless, lapped by gentle dark waves, arms raised as if to embrace the gibbous moon.

Winston still had on his droopy hemp pants, standing knee-deep in the water carefully counting out a handful of mushrooms. Xchab eyed him with guarded disgust. Old hippy getting set to bend his brains again. He’d be naked in a hour if her experience proved true; humming his Hindu chants or barking like a dog.

Bannock had kicked off his shoes and rolled up his Dockers, wading tentatively in the shallows while keeping an eye towards the hotels and Club Med buildings.

Xchab winced as Winston gulped down a big pinch of the dread hongos, then stared as Loris turned from her moonitation and approached him like a marble goddess emerging from the sea. She had been respectful of Loris from first sight: unable to pigeon her into any imaginable hole, wiped out by her beauty and whiteness and grave aura. And there she was examining the fungi, holding one up to examine by moonlight. The big matón who was obviously her boyfriend had come up to watch as Winston wolfed down another dried cap.

“So what’s the dose on these little beauties?” Loris asked.

“Well, based on your estimated body weight, obvious attitude, and extraneous pulchritude,” Winston offered in judicious tones, “I think three or four should do you wrong.”

He hunched a shoulder at Bannock and added, “Tuffy, here, about the same.”

“Okay, can I get eight, then? Wait, make it twelve.”

“Whoa, you’re a trouper after my own riddled heart.”

“There are still three of us unserved, if you recall.”

Winston shot a highly un-inclusive look at Xchab, who was hanging way outside the companionable circle the others had fallen into around the handful of shrooms. Then shrugged and handed Loris a dozen of the shriveled little pixie caps and gobbled the ones remaining. He waded out deeper, staring into the shifting moondepths for minnows.

Loris turned to Bannock, cupping the sacraments between her breasts. She quietly took in his reluctance and smiled.

“You know, the first time I ate these things I was a completely different person.” She stared past him, into some temporal inner distance. “They squared me away, put my life into a different order.”

“I thought that was oXo’s job.” He spoke lightly, but was actually very interested in her past. A first for him. He wanted all of it, everything about her.

“Simplest answer; they worked hand in hand.”

“So how long ago was this different person?” How much past baggage could she have at her age, anyway?

“Not as long as you’d think. I was a cheerleader, how do you like that?”

“I can see you cheering people up. Kind of unexpected, though.”

“Not really. I was definitely attractive. I was also a neurotic, grasping, manipulative, shallow little rotten twat. All social, just what looks best and how can you get it. Messed up.”

“Kind of typical, though.”

“Worse than par, I’d say. I was a pretty fucked-up kid. I was heading for suicide or one of the installment plan suicides lots of my friends had already signed on for.”

“But you dropped acid and traded your pom-poms for tom-toms?”

“It was a process. But I’d have to say that drugs saved my life.”

“Try not to give any speeches at PTA rallies, okay?”

Her only answer was holding out cupped hands full of p. cubensis

“So your opinion as a professional healer/weirdo is that I should eat this disgusting crap?”

“Absolutely. Cross my heart.”

“Okay, but I gotta tell you…”

She leaned in quickly, stopping him with a quick brush of her lips. “No you don’t.”

Bannock bowed his head to sniff the fungus in her hands. They had a little smell, but faint amid her vanilla soap, faint musk, and clean, silvery personal scent. He carefully picked out half the shrooms, then paused.

“Should I chew them up?”

“Not recommended. They taste nasty. Just get them down the hatch quick as you can.”

He popped them in his mouth and bent to scoop up a handful of the lukewarm Caribe water, and lapped it like a dog to chase them home. “Well. That’s that. Do I get my money back if I end up drooling in a loonybin somewhere?”

She stepped close to him and cupped his face in her hands. She stared into his eyes from six inches away, luminous under the moon. “We’re going to be just fine.”

And he believed her. Maybe that was what it really was about her all along: he believed her.

Loris turned and approached Xchab, who was on the point of turning tail, but stuck around mostly because of her personal awe of the white girl. She dressed like a queen on the tele, took charge, didn’t defer in the least to Bannock–who Xchab had immediately seen as a macho, dangerous guy–and in fact had obviously talked him into eating the mushrooms. And, don’t forget, she hadn’t batted an eye when thousands of dollars crossed the table back in Pericos.

But above all, she’d been nice to her. Had noticed her, for one thing. Invited her to the table and treated her well. There was something about her that just told you she was on the right side. She walked up to Xchab with two hands full of fungus, held them out to Xchab as if it was already agreed.

The Mayan girl glanced at the men, who were watching her with a careful neutrality, just wanting to see what she’d do. She wondered, herself. Then she looked back at Loris, pale breasts luminous under the moonglow, her face ancient and innocent, and couldn’t look away.

“I’ve never thought of it as a trip,” Loris said. “Always as coming home. And I’m all I’ve got to come home to.”

Xchab stepped forward, as though putting her foot over a cliff. She held out her hands, cupped as if to receive water, and Loris poured the remaining shrooms into her grasp. Without breaking her gaze into Loris’ big eyes, she swallowed them. They tasted totally revolting, like dirt and chicken droppings, but she was a jungle girl and had consumed weirder eats out in the village. She gave a deep, all-over shiver like a big dog coming out of water.

The big guy said, “So now what?”

And when Loris spoke, Xchab knew it was profoundly true. “Now we wait,” she said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

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Ever since he showed her the coralcaturas she’d been obsessed with them. He’d come and find here her poring over them, stroking their surfaces, rotating the big coral chunks in different angles of light to study the shape of the symbols on their faces. No stranger than any other gringa behavior, maybe. Ganzo was no authority on how women acted around the house.

He paused inside the door of his rooftop hovel, watching her work on a pencil sketch of one of the coral heads, bending over his crude table in cheap panties and cutdown t-shirt, nibbling her lush lip in concentration. He stood with a stringer of fresh-speared fish dangling from his hand, trapped into immobility by the sight of her.

She finished her drawing and studied it, scowling prettily in dissatisfaction. Then became aware of his presence in the room and turned to smile at him. He smiled back and showed her the fish. She applauded silently and rubbed her bare tummy.

But when he laid the fish by the gas stove and came over to see her sketch, she turned a troubled face up to him. “I just feel like they mean something. Trying to say something, you know?”

Ganzo nodded solemnly and touched her sketch with one finger. “It does mean something. This means, Zotz.”

Her eyes widened and she stared at her sketch with new eyes. “Oh, right. It’s a word. Wow! So what does it mean?”

“It means, Zotz.”

“No wonder you call them cartoons. What does it mean in English, cutie?”

“It’s… they’re like mice, you know.”

“No I don’t know.”

“But they fly. Not like birds, little black wings made out of leather.”

“Bats?”

“That. Like Bacardi bottle.”

“So the coral are talking shit about bats?”

He shrugged and sat down on a hardwood stump, watching her with his still gaze.

“But look at this.” She turned the coral over to show him the bottom, but got no reaction so she grabbed another drawing and held it up beside it. “Look, this thing is six inches thick… it broke off right, like in a storm? But see, it’s this different symbol.”

Ganzo continued his serene gaze, patiently awaiting something he could comprehend.

“So the corals are like, writing these little words, and changing over time. How can that possibly be?”

“I don’t know.” He paused, not really giving her the impression of thinking, but some sort of search going on. “I don’t understand how anything possibly is. If it is, it’s possible, I guess.”

“No shit, big guy.” He looked like a sea God, but wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist. Or even a Little Leaguer, really. “But see… it’s like I’ve seen this thing before. Like I can remember…”

“You remember something?” That seemed to make some changes in his super-calm face.

“Yeah, well, almost. I just know I’ve seen this before.”

“Do you remember your name?”

“Baby steps, fellah,” she sighed. “Baby steps. Maybe I’m better off without a name. Living like this it doesn’t matter much.”

“No. Because if you don’t have a name, they give you one.”

“That’s how you got Ganzo, right?”

He nodded, everything self-evident, and she frowned. “Maybe I should just make one up?”

“Why?”

She stared at him for a long moment, causing zero discomfort to his stolid pose. “Tell me something, Ganzo,” she said softly, “Why do you haul these things up here to your shack?”

“They catch me.”

She waited, but nothing further came, so she made little “get with it” motions with her hands and he cranked back up. “I see many things, but then I see one thing that says I should take this home. It catches me, I can’t look away or leave it there.”

“Like me?”

“Yes.”

“So I caught your eye?”

“Yes. Here you are.”

She could have kicked herself when she heard her coy tone, but had already said it, “Do you think I’m attractive?”

Something almost approaching surprise showed on his impassive face. “Of course. I think you’re the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”

“But you don’t think you have to do anything about that?”

“I do. I look at you. What else to do with something beautiful? You look, you feel good. You look more.”

Curtsy actually felt a little dizzy for a heartbeat, there. She shook her head at him, smiling. “You’re a very sweet heart, Ganzo. It’s really nice.”

Up to a point, she thought.

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