Mojo - 32. Chapter 29: “Fish, Flame or Worm”

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Part Nine – Temptation in the Desert

Chapter 29: “Fish, Flame or Worm”

If gravity had a color, it would have been black. For dense blackness was what I felt compelled to move through. Sensations of gradually twirling pulled me in all directions at once, as if caught in the invisible tentacles of a formless eddy.

I suddenly panicked. ‘Where is Gordon’ became an all-consuming refrain in my mind. ‘My boy; my boy; my boy; where are you?’

As I continued to be drawn down, down and around into an uncertain event horizon, sadness seemed to sink in the center of my being as well. I felt I had lost my Gordon forever and wished for nothing but insensibility.

Without warning, I perceived a flash of white foam forced to move in the whirlpool of energy with me. Using all my might, I began to ‘swim’ to it, with each breaststroke feeling hope revive, for the shape was human; could it be my Gordon? Perhaps I had not lost him after all.

Through herculean efforts to live, to be despite darkness insisting that I give up, I reached out to the form. Just barely making contact with the shoulder, it rotated.

Lloyd’s frightened eyes made contact with mine. He was the figure; he was the one sinking to nihility with me.

The dying man reached out arms to grab me. I moved back, out of his grasp, and anger arose within him. Though I could not hear a sound above the static tingle of the vortex, I clearly saw the man’s lips move. He said, “It’s all your fault!”

He lunged for my throat, and I voicelessly screamed, shielding my eyes.

After a moment or so of abject fear, I gradually perceived the sensation of falling had ceased. It felt as if I were on terra firma, and in another moment, birdsong greeted my ear, and then the soft lick of sunshine and a summer breeze touched my skin.

I slowly removed my hands one at a time.

Greenery was all around me. I stood in a slight depression cupped out of the living earth; a hoe was cradled in the crook of my arm.

A foul smell seeped into my nose and I looked down to see I stood at the base of a compost heap, mucking it out as it were. A wide-brimmed Mexican straw hat shielded my eyes from the bright California sun.

I suddenly knew where I was. Aptos.

But before I could even think another thought, a glorious sight appeared: my boy wearing overalls and pushing a wheelbarrow of flowering potted plants.

As he passed on a trail about fifteen feet away, Gordon’s sly head turned to me. He smiled, in his sexy way, and jostled his head towards a particular greenhouse.

I waited a couple of minutes, watching Gordon round the side and disappear from view by the building he’d indicated. I felt relief, that and happiness. I had my boy; all was well.

After a while, I looked around. The shore was clear, so I climbed out of my hole and wiped hands on a bandana from a back pocket. I inched my way around the corner of the greenhouse, full of the pleasure of anticipation – I was hard as a rock.

Before I could see anything, I heard odd sounds. I freed my view beyond the final turn, and there was Gordon bent over a potting table, pants and drawers down by his ankles, Priapus’ huge member fucking my boyfriend from behind.

The dirty god’s face turned to me, and he shoved with more force, making my lusty partner moan in increased rapture.

With every indication of submittal and pleasure, the ugly god-face smirked at me in greater triumph.

˚˚˚˚˚

My grating breath caught, and I started bolt upright.

Confused, while the sights and emotions of the horrible vision faded, I glanced around. I was in a living room of sorts: wood paneling; bunk seats with cushions; a television mounted near the relatively low ceiling. Small windows and lit wall fixtures told me it was night outside.

My skin was clammy and wet, but I wore a dry robe. It took the rolling of the sea beneath the boat to make me realize this ‘living room’ was the main cabin of some oceangoing vessel. I looked to my side – Gordon was there.

I scooped up the robe-wearing and sleeping boy tenderly. My happy tears woke him up. He opened his brown eyes and slowly used a thumb to brush my cheek. I vowed internally, most solemnly, that I wanted never to argue or accuse Gordon through jealousy again. There is a quote in German. Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft, which means, Jealousy is a passionate pain, passionately seeking self-inflicted suffering. But I felt done with self-torment through my innocent boy. He deserved none of it.

He indicated a wish to do so, so I helped him sit up. We assessed one another by touch, feeling limbs and legs. Nothing was broken.

He asked, “Do you know where we are?”

“No, baby, but I guess a boat dragged us out of the sea and saved us.”

“Oh.”

Gordon seemed a little shell-shocked, so I joked, “Think of it this way: it may have required extreme methods, but at least we are free of that mad poet.”

All of a sudden, the boat reverberated with the deep and hearty laughter of about a dozen men. In the center of which rose a familiar shrill voice speaking Spanish.

We rose to our feet and followed the sound down a narrow corridor. It opened up at the end into the captain’s cabin. There Sadeeq sat, as if a jester in a royal court, entertaining with bawdy stories and jokes.

“Ah!” he cried out, getting up and coming over to us. “You’re awake. Good! I just telling my new amigos about a true story, La Matrona de Altiplano—”

“Where are we?” I wanted to know.

“On a boat, dummy.”

“I think that much we got, Sadeeq,” said Gordon.

“Oh, yes,” the poet muttered. “Seems once the first lifeboats hit the shore, a bunch of fishing vessels, like this one, went out to pick through the shipwreck loot. But when they got there, it turned into a rescue mission.”

Gordon asked, “Where is Michael-Francis?”

“Safe. He sent me a text from shore before the boat went down.”

By this time, many of the Mexican fishermen had risen; a couple of them squeezed past us, and now the sounds of pots and pans in the galley clanged.

The captain spoke to Sadeeq.

In another minute, the poet turned to us and said, “Now that you’re awake, we’ll eat, chat and open the tequila!”

˚˚˚˚˚

As the wet sand and minute particles of debris squished through my toes, my mind drifted onto a promise made and broken long ago, if ‘history’ is to be believed anyway. I remembered Noah in similar circumstances interpreting the appearance of a rainbow as God’s vow to never again hurt mankind in a biblical way, but maybe the gods today heed no such honorable pronouncement. Man certainly doesn’t.

It was the morning after the storm, and me and my boy walked along a stretch of shoreline. The incredible blue-azure of the Pacific, along with its plate-glass composure, made it almost impossible to believe a horrendous outburst of bad weather had passed over its surface only twelve hours previous. There were however some wispy dark streaks of cloud in the sky to remind humankind that tempests will be our lot until the end of time.

The little village our rescue vessel pulled into just as dawn was breaking could be considered anything but romantic. A collection of modest houses, and lots of blue tarps here and there to augment roofing shortcomings efficiently.

We had learned many of the Ekdíkisi’s lifeboats had landed to the north, and the Red Cross was assisting with necessities. We also learned that teams of volunteers had been dispatched to comb the beaches from our village to the main point of contact. So far, about a hundred passengers and crew were unaccounted for, and the official search and rescue mission had progressed to a search and recovery phase.

For the three of us picked up by the fishing trawler, the crew itself had invited us into their homes, but Gordon and I needed to get away for just a bit. The trauma of events weighed heavily on us, so we just held hands and walked; no words were needed for the pair of us to acknowledge just how close to death we’d come, and how precious the new day dawned in our eyes.

My love for my boy knew no bounds, and with this renewal of our lives, I wondered how and when I’d find my cure; when and where we’d be able to lift this curse. A faint hope existed though when I recalled Trọng saying he’d take us to some place sacred to Priapus once we landed in Puerto Vallarta. Sadly, we were many miles north of there, marooned on not just an island of sand, but one in the form of a mighty peninsula, stretching nearly a thousand miles long, while the width of land separating the Sea of Cortez from the placid, blue Pacific was a hundred miles for most of its length.

Baja California had a foreboding kind of beauty. It’s craggy bluffs, wind-shorn by eons of precipitation offered little by way of human sympathy, while its interior mountains, hills and parched hallows seemed only fit for rough and tumble plants and armored creatures like armadillos and horned toads.

Gordon tugged on my fingers and led us to a place where the exposed cliff face formed a stony niche.

We sat there for quite a while, just watching the surf roll in.

I eventually put my arm around his shoulder; he rested his head against my chest.

“Are you all right? It’s been – well, something awful.”

“I’m okay, Kohl. You?”

Did I dare answer the truth? There was always the risk that a ‘no’ would be misconstrued.

“Getting there,” I said. “But I’m glad to be here, with you.”

He hugged my waist, pressing his cheek deeper into my shirt. “It makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean, is life so tenuous that one moment you can be…and then the next—”

“It’s all right, honey. What matters is that we made it somehow. We are now two of the ‘lucky ones,’ the ones who get a second chance to do more, be more – strive to forge the connections that will matter the most. Do you…feel the same, baby?”

“Yes, Kohl. I feel like – what the hell – how did I make it out okay when others didn’t? Is there something I, we were meant to do.”

“All I know is that I’m a hundred percent determined to get rid of this curse. I’ll go where I need to, do what I have to to be free of this – for both of us, and for our future, baby.”

He stretched and kissed me, and how sweet it was too. My heart beat faster, flushed with the incredible renewal of my life’s blood.

I rose to my feet, pulling my boy up and brushing sand off of his backside.

Hand in hand, we continued to walk…until….

It was about a hundred yards farther along, in a very similar niche to the one where we had sat. At first, a dash of out-of-place color drew our attention. We walked up and found Hesus and Tanguay. They were dead, but lashed together with blue ship line – the ship’s ropes – expertly knotted in front; so we knew they had done the same as Gordon did with us, tied themselves to one another for better or worse.

Through our tears, we went to work. While I prepared a shallow depression on top of the cliff, Gordon collected rocks. Eventually, we undid the ropes, picking up Hesus and placing him first in their joint grave. We positioned his left arm to lay flat. Then we moved Tanguay, the fire gone out of this feisty redhead, and positioned him in his partner’s embrace.

We carefully wound the cordage and placed it at their feet. Then we moved the sandy soil over them, before covering over the grave with enough stones to keep carrion birds and coyote at bay.

Again, no words passed between Gordon and me; none were needed. We were performing the sad obsequies Gordon had prayed on the Ekdíkisi would be done to our remains. Here, unexpectedly, we were doing it for others, not so secretly glad we were the ones allowed to find them and honor their love by carrying it forward into the grave.

Once we’d finished, the afternoon was getting long in the tooth, but we stood by Hesus and Tanguay’s burial place, arm in arm.

These words came to me, and I said them for our mirrored selves in the tomb.

“Hand and foot are we thus tied to the wheel,

Fortune raising one, and the other drown,

While all the while just daring us to feel

Her decisions are mean, cruel or unsound.

Too often the injustices are great

That life forces upon our attention;

Too much havoc in our souls they create,

When what we want is rest and redemption.

Hand in hand, let us stand as life's witness

To celebrate what little time we share,

And thereby acknowledge our love's greatness

To shoulder with us the burdens we bear.

Chaos and cruelty, come do your worst,

For the human spirit won't be coerced.”

We slowly made our way back, feeling like we’d completed a day of penance. Hunger returned as we neared the village in the long light of early evening, but things were not right.

Going up to a tightly clustered crowd on the beach, we found Sadeeq there too.

“What is it?” I asked, pulling his shoulder back slightly.

“See for yourself.”

Gordon and I excused our way to the front of the assembled people, all of whom had removed their hats and clenched them tightly at their waists. We arrived just in time to see two men remove a braided noose of kelp from a drowned man’s neck.

Lloyd’s body was still soaked, as if a vengeful sea had only now disgorged the drug lord’s lifeless remains back to the land for burial within it. Humanity was called upon to deal with one of its own.

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