Sunsets of Tulum. Mr Raymond Avery Bartlett
fruit. It had been precut into six segments; juice was already running down his wrist. “Muchas gracias.”
The construction workers were chuckling, making some comment to themselves that he didn’t understand. Would the fruit make him sick? Should he worry?
He slipped one of the six pieces into his mouth. The orange was crisp, cold, sweet, and yet still tangy, nothing like any orange he’d ever tasted before. He offered a coin to the old woman who’d given it to him, but she shook her head. “No es necesario. Es un regalo para Usted. “
How many years since his two years of college Spanish? And why the hell hadn’t he studied it a little more? He would take Spanish lessons when he went back. Going back made him think about Laurel, and he stared out the window, suddenly regretting, again, that she wasn’t part of this adventure somehow.
As the bus bumped southward, Reed again pulled out her picture in his wallet. Looking at it brought him back to that period in his life. He could look at it and remember all kinds of things that had happened. The cruise in Alaska they’d taken on their honeymoon. How they’d danced around their rented studio apartment like kids on Christmas morning when she quietly announced she was pregnant. He’d lifted her up in his arms and smothered her with kisses. They’d been so happy together at times. They really had. It was unfair, cruel almost, how happy they’d been then only to end up like this.
The bus slowed for another speed bump and Reed snapped back into the present. He craned forward, hoping to see another group of orange vendors. He was going to buy an orange and give it to the old woman this time, but this speed bump had nothing but a curled up, brown and tawny mutt, which only raised its head as the bus rumbled by. No orange sellers. In hesitating too long he had missed his chance forever. The bus picked up speed as it headed south, and on the left side of the bus Reed could see they were passing the other side of the giant lagoon. It was a mesmerizing blue—the same blue-green that swimming pools try to imitate, only this was real water and the bottom was real sand. Easy to see why this part of Mexico had become such a mega-resort overnight. But he wondered what it must have been like to come through the jungle for days and find it occupied by only a few fishermen. An unknown paradise.
The bus passed the airport, leaving the lagoon and the hotels behind. The jungle rose up around them, the trees and vines lush and heavy. Mangrove swamps became hardwood forests, thick and impenetrable. The kind of jungle that swallows people, makes them disappear.
Reed breathed in deeply, as if the air he were breathing inside the bus were piped right from the pores of the jungle vines. At least this was something different from yesterday. It felt as if his vacation was starting. He kept staring out the window until the bus pulled into the dusty Tulum station. As it swung around into the parking space he checked his pockets quickly, surreptitiously, making sure his money and hotel key were still there, and was relieved to feel their familiar weight pushing through the fabric of his pants.
The bus station had only enough room for four buses to park and a few rows of plastic chairs, the kind that were meant to be stackable, but they’d been pushed into wet cement and then left there. Now they were permanently uneven, some tilted slightly back, others forward or side to side, a miniature Stonehenge made of plastic and chrome. Above them sheets of green corrugated fiberglass provided scant protection from the elements except in the calmest of downpours.
Reed waited his turn as people filed off the bus, and smiled for the last time at the señora who’d given him the orange. The juice lingered on his lips like the taste of a kiss.
Gripping the book gently so it wouldn’t fall apart, he stepped off the air-conditioned bus and into the heat of the midmorning sun, so intense that it felt as if he’d opened an oven and inhaled the hot air. He looked at his watch. It was only eleven and already the tar was sticky. Even the dogs didn’t walk on it.
There was only one exit, two open gateposts with only hinges, no door. Beyond it was Avenida Tulum, a wide street made up of a central corridor and median, where the through traffic rushed on its way south, toward Felipe Carillo Puerto and Chetumal, or north back toward Cancún. On either side were smaller parallel streets, cobbled, that had parking spaces and sidewalks. A bunch of T-shirt-and-jeans-clad teens were clustered around a boy at an Internet café playing a video game, blasting away digital bad guys to his companions’ cheers.
Reed walked back into the bus station and asked a mustached man with bright gold dental work if he knew the way to the Welcome Wanderer.
“Turn right,” he said. “Just one block down. Can’t meese it.”
“Muchas gracias,” Reed said, grateful that the man had answered in English.
The hostel was right where the man said it would be. A humble, almost shabby peach-colored facade with a big black sign over the doorway done up to look as if it were a school blackboard, the writing in fake chalk: The Welcome Wanderer! The door was propped open with a five-gallon water jug filled up halfway, but the place looked deserted from the outside.
Reed stayed on the corner for almost fifteen minutes, finally moving from the sunlight into the shade. Nobody came in or out. He shifted his weight from left foot to right, the book feeling heavy in his hands. Finally he turned around and walked back toward the bus station. When he got there he plopped the book into the rusty fifty-five-gallon drum at the entry way. It settled down among empty soda bottles and crumpled, oily papers.
“When’s the next bus to Cancún?” Reed asked.
“You just missed one,” the attendant answered. He was young, no older than twenty, with perfectly coiffed hair and a loud purple shirt. “Next one leaves in an hour.”
“And the one after that?”
“Three thirty.”
Reed nodded and sat down in the nearest plastic chair. After five minutes, he stood up and pulled the Murakami book out of the trash. Then he sat down again, flipping absently through it from back to front until he was again looking at that page with the names. He stared at them, unblinking, long enough for them to hover in green on his eyelids when he finally closed his eyes. Leaning back, he looked up at the green fiberglass, stretched, and stood up and went back out onto the street.
For a second time, Reed could not bring himself to enter the hostel. Instead, he ducked into a small coffee shop run by a girl who looked no older than fifteen. She had her hair up in a loose bun, with long eyelashes accented by turquoise eye shadow that reminded Reed of the lagoon they’d passed on the drive down here. The coffee was embarrassingly bland for a country that exported some of the richest, most flavorful beans in the world. He added milk and three packages of sugar, and sat at a table, sipping it until most of it was gone. Then he ordered another one. This time he finished it entirely, and he waited for a long time before crushing the paper cup, then put it carefully into the trash. After pressing a few coins into the girl’s warm palm, Reed slowly crossed the street and went inside, his knees aching from the adrenaline and caffeine.
The Welcome Wanderer
“Hello?”
Reed peered into a surprisingly spacious inner courtyard. Large, smooth-barked coconut palms rose up like dinosaur legs from thickets of well-groomed hibiscus and prickly pear. Other thick-leaved, succulent jungle plants that Reed couldn’t identify gave the enclosure an oasis-like vibe. The paths were paved with pea stone, which crunched softly underfoot.
The entire right side of the garden had been converted into a kitchen, covered with the same flimsy green plastic used at the bus station to keep out the rain. A small bar held an assortment of bottles, and next to that was a small desktop computer setup with a few chairs. An old 1940s-era refrigerator hummed loudly, condensation pooling on the rough cement, a permanent stain.
In the center were a few weatherworn picnic tables, and on a wall to the left were doorways marked “Bathroom,” “Women’s Dorm,” “Men’s Dorm,” and “No Entry.” At the back, colorful hammocks were strung up between trees. Unused, they looked like a gathering of big tie-dyed bananas. Even farther back was a small palm-roofed bungalow.