Mexico - 9. Chapter 9 of 16

I know I slept because I dreamed. It wasn’t the Chris dream, the old one or a variation. This was different.
I was standing outside one of those big Adirondack lodges. Dark shingles. White trim. Green roof. Five stories tall. Then I was being chased by a very friendly soccer player. Then he was showing me around the main hall. Except it was all wrong. High ceilings. White plaster walls. English manor house.
There was nothing on the walls. The hallway was circular, and inside so was the house. The corridor had four doors. We looked at four, quadrant-shaped rooms, all stark white. One of them had an opening in the ceiling, where there should have been a stairway. The others had stairways. There was another room above the opening. An abandoned mezzanine. The house had become a boys’ school.
Then we were in bed. I was on top of the soccer player, and he was either naked or his shirt was pulled up around his neck, his shorts yanked down to his spikes. I stared straight into his face. He wasn’t good-looking. His hair was blond, streaky, oddly cut. It was short and almost a brush at the top, shaved on the sides, up to the crown. Very pale skin. Bad on his face, but a great, lightly hairy body, untrimmed. A long, wavering British nose.
I tousled his hair, and it got longer. Curlier. Attractively streaked. He got better-looking, but still in a very pale way. His eyes were closed.
Then there were boys outside in the hall. I went to shut the door, but that was tricky. It was really a pair of doors, unequally wide. One closed but with no lock. I fastened them with shiny brass allen wrench on a leather cord. Then I was back in bed.
And I was biting on the soccer player’s nipple, the right one, on his calendar boy chest, when I knew I was coming. For real. That was no dream. And I woke up.
I’d been sleeping naked. I must have slipped off my clothes during the night. I was lying on my stomach and sticking to the rough sheet.
How could I get to the john? How not to embarrass myself? I was still hard.
The room was light. It was clearly morning. I looked at Mark. He was still sleeping, still naked, now on his back. I’d seen pieces of him before, but there he was, stretched out.
He had the same body as the soccer player, but darker. Healthier skin. Dark hair. But tight.
He slept without a sound. One arm was up over the pillow, his armpit seeming almost more vulnerable than his dick.
I just wanted to watch him that way. Then the light changed. Brightened. The sun came through the slats. Then it faded again.
Mark moved, but he didn’t, but I could see his stomach gently rise and fall with his breathing. Almost without noise, I found my shorts and slipped into them. I eased off my bed and into the john. There wasn’t a door to shut, and I didn’t dare run water with the clanking pipes. But the towels were still damp, and I cleaned myself. I hoped Mark wouldn’t notice the smell of sex.
I slipped out of the bathroom, hoping to find Mark sleeping. But he was sitting up, rubbing his eyes, pushing his hands through his hair. The blanket now modestly covered his lap.
“’Morning,” he said, grinning. “God, I slept.”
I still wanted to look at him.
“Yeah, well,” I said. Grinning, too. “Comes from being drunk enough to pass out, without being so drunk you feel it in the morning.”
He laughed. “You shower?”
I was standing by the foot of his bed, in my shorts, safe now. “Nah, I just had to get up.”
He laughed, hopped out of bed, and brushed naked by me. He pissed as I turned away.
“Can I shower first?” he called.
“Sure.”
I went back to my bed and noticed the wet sheet. He could have already seen it, but I didn’t think so. I pulled up the blanket, jammed on my jeans and T-shirt, and raced, shoeless, down to the lobby for clean towels.
Mark was still in the shower when I came back. I slipped the towels onto the sink, tossed the dirty ones to the floor, and eased out of the john. When Mark finished, he came into the room with one towel around his waist.
“I need new clothes,” he said, smiling. “Should’ve bought some yesterday.”
I know you don’t offer a guy your shorts, though I had several clean pair in my knapsack. Mark wore slicker briefs anyhow.
“You’re welcome to anything I have,” I said. “Though I’m not traveling with much. I wash things every couple of days.”
“Makes sense.”
He was grinning again, and he noticed me noticing that.
“I can’t help it,” he explained. “I just feel so good. Last night, I still felt awful. Guilty. Dumb. The whole thing. It took everything I had to forget it. But this morning... After the drinking... I don’t feel that anymore. I feel right. Like this is the way it should be. Like this is what I should be doing with my life.”
“Drinking?” I joked. He laughed, but I didn’t push it further. I knew what he meant. Being away from Anne.
“Let me take a shower,” I went on. “Then let’s find some food. Get you some clean clothes.”
“Good idea,” he said. “You got something I can borrow?”
I tossed him my keys. “Check the back of my car. There’s another knapsack. Full of shorts and jeans and stuff. Anything in there’s yours.”
As I turned toward the bathroom, he was pulling on his khakis without shorts. From the shower, I could see him heading out the door without a shirt.
I took a long time in the shower. It was better than the one in the motel. The water was hot and strong, and the clanking had stopped. I shaved without a mirror, the shower still on around me. When I dried and came back into the room, Mark was wearing a pair of my cut-offs.
I had lots of them. I was always going through the knees of jeans so was always buying new ones.
He was also wearing one of my T-shirts. A plain one. No logo. I’d brought maybe a dozen with me. I had one good shirt, to go with my sports jacket and teaching pants. But they were packed away.
“I don’t need to shave,” Mark told me. He was sitting on his bed, rolling his old clothes into a bundle. When he finished, he set them on the floor, and I bet he was going to leave them there. “I’m not growing a beard,” he went on. “But I kind of like this look.”
He had a two-day stubble. With his hair still short, he looked like a lawyer on a weekend. But his hair wasn’t combed. It was slightly wet and spiked.
“Do I look like hell?” he asked. “Don’t lie.”
“You look fine,” I answered honestly. Then I got dressed.
It was after noon when we went downstairs. We were both surprised by the time, but it only made sense. We’d been out most of the night.
We walked in town, looking for a place to eat.
“I feel like having a lazy day,” Mark said. “Maybe eat something. Buy me some stuff. Drive a little.”
“Fine with me,” I agreed.
We found a restaurant and sat at a small table out front. It wasn’t a cafe. More like a stray table in front of a restaurant. We’d ordered inside then brought our food out.
I bought another newspaper. While we ate, Mark and I puzzled out some of it. The headlines were easy. I could always read them. But the further we went into the news, the more we got lost.
“It’ll come back,” Mark advised. “We just need to speak more.”
“¿Cuantos … anos … estudia?” I asked, quickly followed by, “How long did you study?”
“Dos anos,” he replied, then faltered. “In high school. Then I switched over to French.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I wanted to see France someday. I never felt much for Spain.”
In high school, I never thought about traveling, at least not outside the United States. That was something Chris inspired.
After lunch, Mark bought some clothes. Mostly Mexican stuff, though there were lots of American brands. He got a couple of pair of shorts. Some T-shirts. Sandals. No underwear or socks. He bought everything from stands along the street, then we went back to the hotel to change. We hadn’t checked out.
“Want to stick around another night?” he asked.
I thought about it but didn’t think I could take another drunk. Mark seemed fine, but my head was still a little fogged.
And he never mentioned Anne. Not even accidentally. Though we didn’t really talk about much.
“Let’s do what you said,” I suggested. “Drive a little.”
“You think there’s a beach nearby?”
We couldn’t be far from the water. We’d been mainly driving down the coast. When we looked at the map, the beach was approachable.
“Want to?” he asked.
“Sure.”
It wasn’t far out of the way. Again, we didn’t talk as we drove. The windows were open, there was a wind, and there was no point in shouting over it. Mark flipped through my CDs then stashed them and found a good radio station.
He seemed happy to be taking a break. He kicked off his sandals and propped his feet back on the dash.
“I can drive,” he said at one point. “I don’t mean now. Don’t even mean today. Just stick that in the back of your mind.”
“All right.”
He laughed. He seemed almost completely different from the guy I’d picked up with his mother-in-law. Ex-mother-in-law. Ex-almost-mother-in-law. In a way, I was a little suspicious. I couldn’t toss Chris off that quickly, and I doubted Mark had really forgotten Anne. But she seemed to be stored somewhere.
We found a beach. There were lots more people than I’d expected. Local families, with food, and kids, and pets. The water was warm and cloudy. I slipped into shorts in the car, but Mark dove into the water in his new clothes.
“Break them in,” he said, laughing. Then he stripped off his shirt.
We bought more food. We weren’t hungry, but it was there. We opened my sleeping bag and used it as a blanket. We didn’t need towels. It was that hot. The sand was closer to lake sand than to the white kind you find at the ocean. But it was fine.
Mainly, we lay in the sun. Then we went in the water. Then we stretched out again. Listening to the kids play. Smelling the barbecues. Hearing the music.
“I was afraid the water would be cold. Like LA’s,” Mark told me. “You practically have to wear a wetsuit.’
“You’re kidding?”
“No. Beaches there are mainly for walking.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Ever been to LA?”
I laughed. “Not even to California. From what I’ve seen on TV -- and in movies -- there isn’t much reason.”
He laughed, too, but disagreed. “It not all like that.”
“So you don’t surf all the time?”
He shook his head. “There’s tar, too. On the beaches. From all that oil.”
I never thought about California and oil. But then I rarely thought about California.
Around four, we packed up. Mark had stashed his watch somewhere and didn’t put it back on. We didn’t bother putting our shirts on, either, just drove in our quickly drying shorts. Mark stayed barefoot, but I put on running shoes, sockless, to drive.
“How far do you want to go?” he asked.
I shrugged. Checked the sky. “We’ve got another few hours of light.”
He pulled out the map. “Then let’s see what looks good.”
I laughed at that. “You’re gonna pick a place by its name?”
“Why not? I’ve dated girls for the same reason.”
I’d never done that. Though one of my friends changed her husband’s name because it reminded her of an earlier guy.
I drove for a couple hours before Mark began seriously studying the map.
“How’s Los Mochis sound?” he suggested.
“Like a bunch of beggars.”
A moment later, he offered, “Topolobampo?”
“A bunch of strippers.”
He laughed. I didn’t have to tell him what kind.
“Navolato?” he went on.
“Sounds like Christmas. But you know how little that means to me.”
“It’s not very big,” he said.
“How large is the dot?”
He showed me with his fingers barely apart. I glanced at the map.
“Tiny.”
He shrugged. “I don’t care. I don’t need a bar tonight. Just a decent bed.”
“How far?” I asked.
He checked the map and again showed me the distance. About two inches between his fingers. I laughed, thinking of something else.
“Let’s see if we make it,” I simply agreed.
Mark folded the map and lay back in his seat.