MY FRIEND PHIL

I pictured myself in a Mexican jail. forever…

By: John Long

Mrs. Davenport screamed bloody murder. Phil and I were in the next room, swinging face down in hammocks and trying to spit through rifts in the floor, when the fiddler crab scampered across Mrs. Davenport’s bedspread. We were finally in Mexico. I’d been counting the hours for what felt like a year to blow town and spend Easter vacation in Baja, California, with the Davenports: my best friend, Phil, his folks, Harold “Pops” Davenport, and his wife, Katherine Putnam Davenport, a Jane Eyre on triple sec and valium. We’d only arrived in Mexico that afternoon, but Mrs. Davenport couldn’t stay in the casita another second.

Pops loaded Mrs. Davenport’s three Rimowa suitcases into the rental Jeep for their evacuation to the Hotel Rosario La Paz, a few miles away. We could come if we wanted to. We didn’t. Pop would swing by in the morning to take us out for breakfast. The Jeep wheeled off, and Phil and I were alone. We were both 16 years old.

The Davenport casita lay just off a dirt road, in a copse of bamboo, set up on oak pylons and cantilevered over gulf waters famous for sport fishing. The front of the house had a plain wooden door, white-washed plaster walls and no windows, probably to limit break-ins. Pop had spent a bundle trimming out the inside, with portraits of Aztec noblemen and a few San Sebastian bullfighters on the reed walls, combed steer hides on the wooden floor, and a collection of faux Olmec artifacts staged in cabinets against the den walls. But this was Baja, so the electricity was off and on, mostly off, the humidity was terminal and the flooring in the bedrooms was so warped you could see the anxious ocean through the gaps. A chrome plated horseshoe hung over the kitchen door for suerte, or luck. And now we had the run of the place.

Phil rifled the liquor cabinet and came away with a black earth­enware jug, sealed with a waxed cork. “The real mierda,” said Phil.

He drew out the cork with his teeth and drained off an inch of te­quila. He shuddered, trying not to, and handed me the bottle. We’d watched Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly 10 times each, and studied how Clint Eastwood tossed off 100-proof hooch like it was branch water, so we had to drink our liquor with impunity. We moved to the back of the house where a plank staircase descended between two rotting pylons, from the den straight into the sea.

At the bottom step, tied off a pylon, bobbed a frail-looking dinghy. We sat on the last step with our legs in saltwater and gazed out over the moon-rinsed gulf, talking about climbing up at Tahquitz, and maybe doing some bull fighting here in La Paz, if they’d let us. The tequila burned all the way down to our toes.

Then we spotted the giant cutlass carving through the water, flashing like mother-of-pearl as it swiveled into a shaft of moonlight.

“Shark,” Phil whispered.

I moved up a couple of stairs as Phil jumped into the dinghy, snatched an oar and started bashing the water.

“Frenzied movements attract them,” said Phil. “I read so in Argosy.”

“Man, that fin’s big as I am,” I said, clinging to a pylon. “Sure you wannabe fuckin’ with it?”

Phil thrashed the water harder still. I moved to the top step as the fin swept close by the dinghy, circled under the house and plowed back into the deep. Phil jumped from the dinghy, splashed up the stairs and into the house, returning with the remains of our chicken dinner, chum­ming the water with bones and gizzards. Several times the gleaming fin cruised past but never as close as the first time.

“Blood,” Phil said. “We need blood.” And he hurled the jug into the sea. It was nearly dawn before I drifted off in my hammock, pictur­ing that great fin circling under the bedroom floor.

When I woke the next morning, Phil was in the kitchen, studying the chrome horseshoe hanging above the door. Pop Davenport had already come and gone, and Phil showed me a wad of pesos to prove it. His mom had a fever and Pops couldn’t leave her alone in the hotel. We’d have to fetch our own breakfast.

Phil reached up above the doorjamb and yanked the horseshoe off the wall, his eyes burning.

“We’re going fishing, amigo.”

We jogged up to the paved road, swung up onto an autobus and were soon scudding around central La Paz, grabbing a shrimp cocktail in one stall, ogling the senoritas in others. We found an old man, hunched over a foot-powered grinder, and he milled one end of the silver horseshoe into a pick. I watched the fury of peso notes changing hands, Phil rattling off Español like a local. He’d mostly grown up with Pop, a kook gentleman anthropologist who had fooled away nearly 30 years annoying natives and “studying” antique cultures deep in the Peruvian rain forest. So Phil could speak Spanish like Zoro.

We hustled on through the fish market, ankle deep in mullet offal. At another stall a fleshy woman, her cavernous cleavage dusted with talc, cut 10 feet of chain off a gigantic, rusty spool.

“For leader,” said Phil, grabbing my arm and racing off.

Phil bought 200 meters of stout polypro­pylene rope from another lady in a booth hung with crocheted murals of Jesu Cristo. Meanwhile, her husband welded the chain leader onto the sharpened horseshoe, sparks from the acetylene torch raining over Jesus like shooting stars.

“Now for the bait.”

We took a cab to the slaughterhouse on the edge of town. Outside the reeking, sheet-metal structure, Phil waved through a curtain of flies and stopped an Indian girl, around our age. Her hair was pulled back in thick black braids and her oval face was a picture. She was selling fried pork rinds and sweetbread, and when Phil asked her a probing question, she killed him with her eyes. Phil kept talking in dulcet Spanish and the girl started to snigger. When Phil’s hand went out with a ten-peso note, she glanced around at empty streets, then hiked up her white muslin blouse and for about one thousandth of a second my eyes feasted on her per­fect brown globes crowned with two perky, pinto-bean-like nipples. Then her shirt was back down and the bill was gone from Phil’s hand and all we saw were two golden heels hot-footing to some shady nook to admire the gringo boy’s money.

“I’d marry her in a second,” Phil said, “if I was old enough.”

An autobus took us back to the casita, me laden with a giant bull’s heart wrapped in brown paper and a plastic bucket of bloody slop so heavy it put my hand to sleep. On the stairs behind the house Phil baited the sharpened horseshoe with the ruby bull’s heart, duct taped a soccer ball to the chain leader just below where he’d tied on the polypropylene rope, then coiled the rope on the stairs and lashed the free end round one of the creaky pylons. Then he hefted the bucket of entrails into the dinghy.

“You either watch the line here in the bow, or row. Your choice.”

“I thought we were going to just chuck the thing in from here.”

“Shark won’t go for it. You saw how he shied away last night. And anyway, I bought all this rope.”

Two hundred meters of nylon rope seemed a poor reason to row into shark-infested waters in a leaky dinghy full of blood and guts, but Phil was already in the boat, yelling, “Come on, John. It’s a two-minute job.”

I took the oars and rowed straight out into the gulf, my limbs trem­bling so hard I could barely pull. The dinghy was overloaded and tippy and little geysers spewed up through gaps in the hull. I watched the house slowly recede, the line slithering out from its coil. The water rose to ankle level around my sneakers.

Fifty yards out, Phil tossed the bucket of gore overboard and a red ring bled out around us.

“That sucker’s any closer than Acapulco, he’ll smell this,” said, Phil. “Believe it.”

“I do.”

Phil hurled the big heart overboard with a plunk, the weight yank­ing out the chain leader, which chattered over the low gunwale of the dinghy. The soccer ball shot out and sank. Phil panned the ocean for a moment. Then the ball popped up near us, the waters churned, and he screamed, “Pull, man, pull!”

I heaved at the oars, my heart thundering in my ears, the dinghy fairly hydroplaning, Phil bailing with the bucket and screaming, “Put your back into it or we’re goners!” I pulled harder and faster, trying to retrace the line floating on the water, marking the way back home. The flimsy oars nearly bent in half as Phil screamed to go faster and faster till my oars were driving like bee’s wings. Twenty yards from the house we were both screaming, breathless, and terrified, the dinghy shin deep and sinking by the second. A final heave and I powered right into the stairs and we stampeded over each other and through the house and out the front door, finally collapsing in front of a man selling shaved ice from a pushcart.

Phil lay in the dirt, sucking down breaths.

“Not that we’re afraid to die or anything,” Phil laughed.

The man with the pushcart couldn’t have looked more surprised had a burro pranced by on its hind legs.

After a few minutes we stole back into the house, tiptoeing through the hall, through the narrow den, past the wall of glassware and artifacts, pausing at the open door and the stairs below and staring out over the gulf at the line sleeping on the surface and the soccer ball bobbing peacefully fifty yards away. There wasn’t so much as a mackerel on the line. Never had been.

“Chickenshit shark,” Phil mumbled.

For several hours we sat hip to hip on the stairs, talking about the Indian girl as we stared out at the bobbing ball so hard that the flat horizon and the heat of high noon put us in a trance. Then everything went quiet.

“Wonder where the gulls went?” I asked.

The rope suddenly jumped out of the water, the staircase groaned and splinters flew off the pylon as the line lashed itself taut as a bow­ string.

“He’s hooked!” cried Phil.

We leaped up and grabbed the rope as the pylon bowed against the stairs. Rusty nails sprang up from fractured planks and sand crabs scurried from dark places. Far out on the water we saw an invincible fin, a roil of water and a jagged snap. A scythe-shaped tail curled on itself and the rope went slack against the pylon. A gathering surge was tearing straight toward us, looking like a submarine surfac­ing as the line doubled back on itself. Then the fin swerved maybe 10 yards off and headed out to open sea fast as a cigarette boat.

“Grab the rope, or the house is going with him,” Phil yelled, lung­ing for the line.

There was no checking that monster but I grabbed the rope anyhow and when the shark hit the slack line it wrenched me off the stairs and straight into carnivorous waters. I crabbed from the water and up the stairs and didn’t stop running till the den, where I stood, shitless, my trunks draining onto the rug. I was nearly dry before I crept back out to the stairs.

The line went slack, then taut. Then slack again. We pulled like mad. “Eres tan ugly que hiciste llorar a una onion you pinche cocksucker!” Phil yelled. The rope smoked through my hands. We pulled some more and Phil kept swearing, calling up the remotest, most colossal vulgarities, so piquant with the odd Spanish word tossed in that I could only pull in awe. It was genius.

After an hour we’d gained a little. With the rope doubled round a pylon, we had just enough purchase to lock the beast off, ­even gain some little rope when the tension eased for a second. After two hours we’d reeled the creature a quarter of the way in. Several times it broke the surface, obsidian eyes glinting in the sun. The monster would relax for a moment and we’d win a yard, then the line would twang tight, the pylon would creak and the stairs would twist and shudder under our feet. The line dripped red below my hands and the saltwater stung like hell.

“Pops got this place from Old Man Daley,” said Phil, when the line went lax for a minute. “Or from the widow Daley,” he added, spitting into his palms and rubbing his hands together, saying that Old Man Daley – whoever he was – used to come down there on weekends from San Diego and drink some and fish for tiger sharks . Then one Sunday he didn’t return home so a brother or cousin came down looking. “’Cept all he found, washed up under the house, was part of a leg and a huarche.”

Phil was hopping up the story because he couldn’t stand it when things simmered down, even for a minute.

“This ain’t working,” said Phil, staring out to sea. “Just lock that chingadera off for a sec.” He stomped up the stairs and was gone.

I braced against the pylon and held fast as the house behind me filled with whoever Phil could snag off the dirt road – dark-haired boys, street urchins, even the man with the pushcart. Phil returned to the steps and when the line went momentarily slack, Phil unwound it from the pylon, ran the rope in a straight line from the water up the stairs and through the den, down the hall, and right out the front door.

The brown crowd turned its back on the casita, each man and boy clasping the rope over the shoulder, Phil yelling, “Hale, hale, caballeros!” And the tug-of-war was on, “Tiburon! Pinche tiburon!” yelled over and over like a chant at a soccer match.

Phil joined me once more on the crumbling stairs, hauling hand over hand. Out in the gulf, a huge swell spooled toward us as the shark, big as a four ­man bobsled, b-lined for the casita.

“Let off,” I yelled, releasing the rope and backpedaling away, “Tell them to let the fuck off.”

But it was no good. The gathering crowd was well past the front door, thirty feet churning the dust. Phil and I jumped to a pylon when, with one titanic lurch, they hauled the opalescent monster to light. It flopped lengthwise onto the buckling stairs, the silver horseshoe hooked deep through its saw-toothed lower jaw, the line taut as a guy wire.

The beast lurched a yard straight up the stairs and was yanked right past us. Its bear-trap maw snapped and a sandpaper flank rasped the skin off my arm as he jack­knifed over the stairs through the open back door and into the den where, with a snap of its jaws, it clipped the legs off the rosewood table.

“Let off, for Christ’s sake,” I screamed from the stairs, “Let it go!”

But every able man along the dirt road had latched onto that rope, and every last one was hauling for pride and country. And half a ton of shark wasn’t going easy.

A smashing tail, and the cabinet was gone, the Olmec artifacts so many shards, the Spanish glassware, sand. Colossal teeth shredded filigreed wood, ripped the hides off wicker chairs. A flip and a twirl and he unraveled the Malagan rug.

The heaving crowd dragged the monster farther through the narrow den. Purple blood splattered white partitions. A deep-water kip, an airborne nose butt, and a wall caved in. Salt-rotted wood fractured and floor slats snapped to attention as the ceiling dropped a yard and parted to show a splintered smile of Mexican sky.

“Jesus almighty!” Phil screamed. “HALLLLLLLLLLLLLLE!”

And the brown mob pulled. The great monster died 10 times, then erupted back to life, knocking plaster off the hallway walls, murdering grandfather clock, blasting the front door off its hinges.

At last the noble creature lay outside, its hornblende eyes locked on infinity, its jagged mouth open. A tough with a ball cap probed the cavity with a tree branch, and in a final show of sea force, the huge mouth snapped shut. The tough jumped back with a wooden stub in his hands, yelling, “Que barrrrrrbaro!

We all stood in a daze, staring at the great monster as kids prodded it with branches. Word of the conquest spread down the dirt road. Several Federales, who gathered with the crowd, posed for pictures taken with an old Kodak Brownie Phil swore had no film in it. Then a flatbed truck from the fish market sputtered up and it took 10 of us to logroll the creature onto the lift and then into the bed of the truck. In five more minutes the shark was a memory. The crowd wandered off, thumping each other’s backs, and once again Phil and I were alone.

I was grated raw, rope-burned, sunburned, splintered and bloodied, my trunks and shirt in tatters, one sneaker gone, my hands two oozing, pulpy knobs. Phil was hardly marked, but the casita was trashed.

We tried a dozen different lies on each other but couldn’t build an excuse as big as that shark or the wreckage it caused. Finally, Phil went to the Hotel Hidalgo to try to explain, and in an example of his transcendental luck, he found his parents packing to leave on the next plane for the States. His mother thought another night in Mexico might kill her. Without reservations, they were able to secure only two seats on the afternoon Air Mexicana flight to Los Angeles. But Pop had booked us on a later flight that same night. The Davenports would wait for us at the airport in LA, and next day we’d all go to Disneyland.

We raced back to the casita and, after wandering through the ruin for several minutes, Phil said, “Shark left us no choice here but to torch it.”

“Torch it?”

“Yeah, burn the place down.”

I pictured myself in a Mexican jail. Forever.

“You want to try and explain this?” Phil laughed, glancing at the ocean through a 10-foot hole in the floor, then up through the rent in the roof.

“This joint’s dusted. Acabó.“

“How do we explain the fire?” I asked.

“We don’t,” Phil smiled. “That’s the beauty of it. It burns down after we’re gone. And it will.”

Phil shagged into town, returned with a cab, a gallon of kerosene and two candles. We threw our suitcases into the cab waiting on the dirt road, then Phil soaked what was left of the den with kerosene, planted two candles in the middle of the buckled floor, lit them, walked out the open door and into the cab.

As we ground up off the tarmac we spotted a plume of smoke out east, rising off the fringe of the ocean. Phil leaned back in his seat and said, “Wonder how big that sucker was?”

When Pops returned to Mexico he found two shrimp boats tied up to the blackened pylons where the casita once stood. Nobody seemed to know how the fire had started, or even when. Years later, shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday, Phil and his two kayaking partners paddled into an unexplored river in Sumatra and were never seen again. Like the shark, like the casita, he existed for a charmed moment “till there came the Destroyer of all delights and the Sunderer of all societies, the Depopulator of palaces and Garnerer for graves…”