“Do you like golf?” asked a man loitering alongside the polished stone of the Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó. Then he tried to sell me a time-share. Barack Obama had played the course there once, he said. On the brochure was photographic evidence of the former president smiling with the Sea of Cortez over his shoulder. The image looked photoshopped. Seeing my lack of interest, the salesman pretended to be impressed by my dog. He looked very powerful, the man said; he must have many girlfriends.
Henderson is broad chested and nearly a hundred pounds, one of a succession of Labrador retrievers I have lived with over the past thirty years. When I told people I was bringing him with me to Mexico’s Baja Peninsula for the summer, they warned that he would catch some strange disease from the street dogs there. This was hogwash, of course. The street dogs themselves, though, were very real, a hodgepodge of mongrels and mangy house dogs: nippers, snarlers, stiff-leggers. None ever touched me, but once I was terrified by some nondescript brown canines that snapped their jaws just shy of my genitals. Henderson, on the other hand, got roughed up, slobbered on, and harangued. Some aggressors ended up with a mouthful of his jet-black fur, and one seized his tail and didn’t let go until I side-armed a rock at the attacker, missing absurdly. My dog simply wouldn’t fight back. He just looked up at me pleadingly. I resented him for this. Then I resented myself for resenting him.
After a month of such frightening encounters, none of which drew any visible blood, I began carrying a pocketful of stones. Word quickly got around the street-dog community that I was not above chucking a rock in their direction to protect Henderson. Still, I occasionally had to make good on the threat. Whenever a passerby witnessed me in the act of throwing, I immediately wanted to tell them that I wasn’t normally like this; that I was a reliable donor to the Humane Society back home in Wyoming; that they were just catching me at a bad moment; that I’m a dog guy, really. People in Casper were frequently asking me to dog- sit. My opinion on hunting dogs was often sought. But, adrift in Mexico with limited Spanish, I wasn’t sure how much would get past the language barrier.
In the afternoons, when the heat soared past a hundred, it was best to keep Henderson inside the casita with both AC units blasting. He lazed on the tiles and sighed heavily, his black tongue lolling. Clumps of hair freed themselves from his great mass of fur and moved in the air-conditioned breeze, scuttling across the floor like fiddler crabs. I’d make myself a soda water and lime and sit outside under the palapa, tapping lightly on my laptop. One day I noticed a large spider on the couch where I sat. He didn’t approach but rather watched me from afar. He came back the next day, and the next.
My casita was one of several apartments behind an enormous, rusted iron gate. Almost all the units were seasonal rentals. This being the offseason, most were empty. I rarely saw anyone but Sergio, the handyman who came to water the plants and sweep the common area, and Robert, the one full-time resident. A seventy-something former investment banker from Illinois, Robert said he hadn’t worked in forty years. “I listened to my father and saved my money,” he told me early one morning as I was setting out to walk Henderson. Shirtless, Robert lifted a cup of coffee to his lips, then warned me about the street dogs.
Robert had been living in Mexico for decades and owned a home in La Paz in addition to this one in Loreto, yet he hardly spoke a word of Spanish. He went around naked to the waist, his feet in flip-flops, and ran with a group of other American expats: retired high school principals, ex–insurance men, and former highway-patrol officers, all of whom had bought property at the right time, some twenty years earlier—the “sweet spot,” they called it. They hung out at a train-themed coffee shop run by a couple of Canadians. Sometimes, when I was setting off at four in the morning to fish the mangrove-lined coves, I’d discover Robert standing in the darkened common area with his white poodle, Shasta, and his cup of coffee. In most corners of the world people would call what Robert had “success.” Yet with his insomnia, his constant fussing with the lock on the gate, and his seemingly endless complaints about the local people—including but not limited to a recent scandal wherein he had witnessed a woman weighing raw chicken on a scale at the Wednesday organic market without a plastic baggie, just letting the chicken juices collect on the scale—I was beginning to think what Robert had was the opposite of success. Whatever it was, I told myself, I didn’t want it.
One morning I phoned my friend Julie, who was doing landscape work for the summer back in Wyoming. A few years earlier she had decided that she was asexual. After a string of awkward and underwhelming lovers—myself among them—she’d taken a long look at human sexuality and decided to bow out before it became even more humiliating. She frequently pointed out that the very young and the very old don’t have sex—“and look how happy they are.” Ferns, too, are asexual. Furthermore, the whole act of undressing in front of another person gave her the heebie-jeebies. She was “shutting it down,” she announced, gesturing to her midsection. When she was over at my house for dinner, which happened as often as three times a week, we were so invested in not touching each other that we performed a type of tai chi as we prepared the meal in my tiny kitchen.
On the phone, after telling me about all the people she wasn’t having sex with, Julie filled me in on the local news: A black bear had come down from Casper Mountain and flipped over some garbage bins, and now some residents were campaigning for Game and Fish officers to euthanize the bear. All bears, really, or else the men would load into their trucks and take matters into their own hands.
“I hate humans,” she said, yawning. What else was happening, I asked. The old-school bowling alley had gone tits up. An invasive species of mussel had been discovered in the North Platte River. Pickleball was becoming a thing. There were plans to scrape acres of prairie to install courts. I said pickleball was surging in popularity in Loreto too. One day the whole world would be a single pickleball court.
I told her about the spider that lived in the couch on my patio and how I had overcome my arachnophobia by allowing him to approach me several times now. He was a nonthreatening specimen: furry; short legs; sad, humorous eyes. Probably a banana spider, but I didn’t know. He would move in quick jerks, then seem to look up at me. I told her Henderson had proven to be a terrible coward when it came to street dogs. I told her about the mission bells that rang at five in the morning and what a pleasant feeling it was knowing there was someone up in the tower—an actual person—ringing the bell for everyone. I told her there was a chicken place down the block where I’d buy whole chickens and later eat them shirtless, standing beside the tiny sink in my poorly lit kitchenette, tossing the fat and gristle to Henderson, in much the same way I had in the States.
“So, basically,” she said, “nothing for you has changed.”
Banana spiders are not indigenous to the Baja area, I learned. When the spider ventured onto my pants the next day, I asked, “How did you get so far from home?”
We were both out of our element. Having worked all winter to save money for this trip, I was now wondering if leaving Wyoming was a good move. I was renting my house to a lawyer who had just helped her mother through the process of dying and now wanted to hang out in Casper with an old college friend. She’d said my house was perfect, then asked me to take down all the taxidermy before she arrived. But she’d paid in advance, which almost never happens, and this had freed me to go wherever I wanted. The only problem was, where did I want to go? There is a flip side to freedom that no one talks about.
For a few months I considered putting up a tent in an abandoned gravel pit in Valentine, Nebraska. I also considered Tennessee and Oklahoma. “I could see a guy of your caliber in Tulsa,” said Julie. But I wanted to escape the American empire, even if just for a few months. I thought by leaving the country, perhaps I could come to some understanding about it, or about myself. I paid for an online Spanish-language program. I read Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez and studied maps. I envisioned meeting interesting local people and being invited into their houses, where homemade dishes would arrive at the table. I bought all kinds of fishing gear that was foreign to me.
I’d since left most of that gear on the rocks by the water in frustration. Without a guide and a boat, I’d found, I wasn’t much of an outdoorsman. The local people didn’t know what to think when they spotted me walking under the sagging mango trees. Henderson, with his blocky head and wide chest, frightened them. I had concluded that this trip was inadvisable.
I told my spider friend all of this.
Glory is sunshine for the dead, he replied—quoting Balzac, I think.
The spider then told his own story of migration: How he had come over on the ferry from the mainland near Topolobampo, a wet, jungle-covered place. How he dreamed of Chiapas—though, when pressed, he admitted he had never been there. He’d wanted some sort of change in his life. So he’d taken his chances.
Together we landed on the conclusion that the way we imagine something often turns out to be a great lesson in misjudgment, once we experience how it actually is.
Next door to my casita was a sports bar, Vic’s, that catered to Americans and Canadians who came to Mexico to day-drink, play golf, and drive their ATVs through the cardon-cactus forests. Happy hour began at two and lasted until eight. Swarms of E-Z-GO golf carts would zoom up, and gray-headed, beslippered men with thick eyeglasses would step out, a bit dazed in the glaring sunlight. Some wore white robes that fell open to reveal perfectly round, taut bellies. They sat and drank two-for-ones with comical regularity and didn’t welcome me into their company. Why would they? I only wanted to talk about Steinbeck and mackerel.
I noticed that nearly all the cars and SUVs arriving at Vic’s bore South Dakota plates. At first, misled by optimism, I thought the South Dakotans were true sportsmen who had come here for the fishing, like me. But I soon found out that there were huge tax advantages to registering your wealth in South Dakota, and anyone with a checkbook can be from the Mount Rushmore state. Really, if you listened to the guys at Vic’s, you’re an idiot if you don’t claim to be from South Dakota. This made me an idiot, obviously.
The newly minted South Dakotans stayed at Vic’s for the duration of happy hour. I sat drinking soda water with lime and feeling as if my teetotaling presence was interrupting their ritual. They demanded the television stay tuned to the NBA finals. They fussed with their cell phones nonstop. They wore masculine gold bracelets or hunks of aquamarine. Worst were the dune buggies that roared up to the bar covered in dust and bits of fresh cactus flesh. Sunburned, thin-lipped women emerged and darted to the bathroom, while the beer-bellied pilots swaggered from the driver’s seats. Someone requested a Jimmy Buffett song, and, like magic, the troubadour’s familiar voice sprang from tiny speakers mounted to the ceiling.
Carlos the bartender also did car washes for one hundred pesos, two hundred for the dune buggies, which was a bargain if you asked me, but no one did. Young women from Miramar, a neighborhood just outside of town, allowed the old guys to buy them drinks and then sat with them, legs nearly touching. One time someone brought a whole mahi-mahi that must have weighed fifteen pounds. Carlos ran for a grill, and they cooked it right there in the street and ate hunks of it while watching basketball from Utah. I plied a few expats for information about the local fishing spots, but they leaned over their beers and fiddled with their phones. Fishing was something the tourists did, like snorkeling and going to see the sea-lion colony. This was a drinking town, they told me.
“But if you really have to fish,” said Stan, a retired ear, nose, and throat guy from Kansas City, “go down to the seawall at first light and cast a silver spoon.”
I went a few times, but all I caught were tiny barracuda, which bled absurdly. I could not save them.
So I went back to tapping on my laptop in the shade, rising occasionally to slice a mango on the cutting board. Here I was in paradise—or, at least, a close runner-up—and I felt the usual creep of unhappiness. I looked at my to-do list: Cut up pineapple. I called Julie and got her voicemail. I checked the calendar to see when I could set off to the next place. There were other palm-shaded towns and cast-off settlements along the Baja coast. I’d find a different paradise, one in the fabled “sweet spot” when you could buy a house for a few thousand dollars. Over on the Pacific side were rough fishing villages dominated by wranglers who went to sea slightly buzzed and used handlines to yank huge fish from the rocky reefs. Go there, I thought. Fuck this place.
It didn’t help that happy hour was in full swing next door, and the sound of E-Z-GOs coming and going filled the street. The banana spider emerged from the crease between couch cushions, spun in half circles, then twitched as if to communicate. I allowed him to crawl onto my shorts and turned the computer screen so he could see the essay I was working on. (Could a banana spider read 12-point Times New Roman?) It was an essay about a doctor I’d dated and how we’d fallen apart. I was working on the scene where she throws me out of her house on Christmas Eve. And this wasn’t the only time I had been dumped on a major holiday. I told the spider about some of the others. We spent the afternoon like this, hardly a word passing between us. But I couldn’t write with all the noise of golf carts and Robert grinding beans for his coffee and blasting the sort of twenty-four-hour news channel I thought I had left behind in the States. The breeze off the Sea of Cortez was rustling the palm fronds. I figured it was cool enough to walk Henderson. The spider, sensing I was about to rise, snapped across the cushions and disappeared into the folds.
I took Henderson down to the seawall, where he licked the wave chop, then sneezed uncontrollably. Two brownish street hounds shadowed us but did not approach. At the marina events leading up to the annual clam festival were underway. The band was playing ZZ Top to a mostly American audience in folding chairs. Young girls who hoped to be this year’s clam princess were dressed in colorful costumes. Though they were just children, they wore heavy rouge and hair extensions and fake nails and lipstick. They held plastic buckets and asked for donations. I contributed a hundred pesos, and their smiles brightened.
Robert regularly refreshed his warning to me about the feral dogs, saying they were becoming difficult to keep at bay. He carried a varnished oak baton he’d purchased for this exact purpose, which felt like overkill to me. Obviously, he was no dog guy. I was conflicted about the rocks in my pockets and disliked the whole idea of having to use them, even as the dogs snarled and yipped and strained against flimsy fences to get at Henderson. The street dogs were almost all bat-eared, flat-footed, and brown: Canis familiaris. The thousands of years we’d spent breeding Chihuahuas, setters, Chows, and Labradors had gone up in smoke in a few generations of unchecked mating. But I had to admire their intelligence and survival instinct. Each morning I saw one large male with his head plunged into a hole where a lawn sprinkler leaked. Several mutts hobbled around on broken legs. Some badly scarred dogs played in the surf just past the breakwater. They led hard, dangerous, brief lives. Dogs that menaced me in the afternoon sometimes lay dead in the street the next morning. City workers collected their stiff bodies while new litters of puppies boiled up out of the sewer grates.
I liked to take walks in the evening, when the air cooled and the stars hung over the dark, uninhabited islands that lurked just offshore. Henderson and I traveled past the sprawling ruins of failed businesses, their entrances strung with bougainvillea. These buildings were all coming down, to be replaced with condos and hotels. Notices had been posted by real-estate companies and partnerships whose names I recognized from the States. The abandoned lots bloomed with garbage. The smell of wild honeysuckle was everywhere, and the mango trees sagged with the weight of their fruit. I’d often hear the ripe ones fall to the street with a heavy, wet thud, or else bang off the metal roofs of outbuildings where homeless wanderers sometimes slept. This abundance of fruit made Loreto seem like an impossible place to starve, yet I saw a few souls who looked like they were trying their best to do just that. Was it legal, I wondered, to simply reach up and pull a ripe mango from someone else’s tree? Being a foreigner with money, I didn’t need to find out. I bought my mangoes at the Ley grocery, where the price dropped every day until they were nearly giving them away.
When I got back, it was too late to write—it was always too late to write—so I sat on the patio sofa and read Clavijero’s Historia de la Antigua ó Baja California and waited for my spider to come out. He never did. I suppose his species isn’t nocturnal. Or maybe he was put off by the presence of Henderson panting beside me. Sergio came and sprinkled neem oil on the cacti and fruit trees to kill the aphids and flies. He said the oil wasn’t poisonous to humans, but I had better go inside, just to be safe. I went and counted my pesos, checked to make sure my passport was where I’d left it, and inventoried my antibiotics. My biggest fear while traveling was dying of a tropical disease in a foreign city among people like Robert.
As the summer wore on, my predawn fishing trips deteriorated into ugly bouts with needlefish and puffers. So I spent more time at Vic’s, stewing over a nonalcoholic beer and eavesdropping on the men who came there to fill the time between pickleball and happy hour. They bossed Carlos around, ignored the street people, and argued about the best places to cross the border. When I had crossed at Mexicali, I’d been stunned to see miles of snarled traffic going the other way. There was an orderly, steady flow headed south, but the real action was going north, into the hazy flatlands of America. You could distinguish the Americans’ vehicles, which carried kayaks or towed Airstreams, from the Mexicans’, which carried only workers. We each desired, it seemed, what the other had.
Having fled the US, the men at Vic’s were working to create it all over again in Loreto. They spoke in superlatives only: The drive to the mission at San Javier was awesome. So, too, was Stan’s new boat with the twin Mercury engines. The farmers market—absolutely fantastic. Sam and Murray had crushed the pickleball tournament, as always; they should be banned for life, ha ha. It was as if they were all at war with original thought. I wanted to tell them that if the rock band playing Beatles songs in the plaza was “totally awesome,” they had left no room to appreciate true greatness.
One morning Henderson and I got up before sunrise to take a fishing trip down the coast. As I was loading my truck, a fluffy white dog came up to me. She wiggled her tail and rolled over in front of Henderson. I decided to call her Daisy. Probably someone owned her. Or maybe not.
We crept out of town, heading twenty miles south to Juncalito, a tiny beach town where a cove protects moored sailboats and a few aged yachts. Hoping to escape the tourists and expats in Loreto, I was crestfallen, upon arrival, to find a black van with South Dakota plates already parked under the leaning palms. Sergio had advised me to walk the four-wheel-drive trail to the farthest cove. He said there were roosterfish and corvina there. But first Henderson galloped on the beach, plunged into the chop, and scattered the brown pelicans that had been regurgitating baitfish in the shallows. Finally my dog was having some fun.
Starting up the steep trail, we heard yipping from a copse of thorny bushes. Coyote, I thought. We made a wide half circle around the sound and continued on. Finally we came to an area with evidence of heavy traffic—Styrofoam bait trays, scraps of foil smeared with salsa, empty beer cans—and I started casting with the ten-foot surf rod I had brought down from the States. The roosterfish were too far out, but I managed to catch a small jack and a trumpet fish, one of the world’s strangest animals. Somehow it had swallowed the hook in its tubular, cartilaginous mouth. I allowed Henderson to meet it face-to-face before I wished it luck and set it free. But it didn’t swim off, just sank and faded.
As the sun climbed, the heat became too much. By 8:30 AM it was time to split. On the way back we heard the yipping again, only now it sounded more like crying. I found two sand-colored puppies cowering in the meager shade of a thorny bush. No mother in sight. Their ribs showed absurdly, and their eyes were crusted over. Should I bring them water? Should I crush them with stones and get it over with? What’s the ethical thing to do in these situations? Nothing I could do would save them now, I decided. Henderson skulked past, his hackles up.
Back in the city, when I swung open the gate to my parking area, a brand-new Jeep Rubicon with every known aftermarket accoutrement was parked in my place. A solar panel, aimed at the sun, perched on the roof, and the cables of various gizmos snaked along the warm cement like umbilical cords. A shirtless man sat staring into his laptop, which was similarly hooked up.
His name was Bob, and he was staying in the rental unit next door to mine. Though sixty, Bob was fighting like mad never to look a day over fifty-eight. He told me his job was now fully remote, and his son, Bob Jr., wanted nothing to do with him. So Bob had bought this $100,000 Jeep and driven down Highway 1 into Mexico. He’d gone from La Paz, to Cabo, to Todos Santos, and back to La Paz, using online dating apps to meet women along the way.
“It’s getting expensive,” he said, and smiled. His teeth had recently been whitened. Or maybe those were veneers.
Eager for a workout, Bob offered to pay my way to use the CrossFit gym around the corner. Sure, I said. As he changed shirts, I noticed his back was covered in tattoos. There was an American flag, an ominous saying about being the man you were meant to be, and a few random stars descending into his skimpy shorts. “Never Weaken,” read his middle.
Bob told me he had dated the local CrossFit coach for a few weeks. He’d also dated the dentist who had fixed his chipped tooth (“Only a hundred bucks; can you believe that shit?”) and a woman who’d given him a deep-tissue massage. Most of his dates were preceded by monetary transactions, it seemed.
After the workout we sat in a café and drank huge bottles of mineral water. The server was maybe eighteen years old, yet Bob flirted with her unapologetically. I was shocked when she gave him her phone number. On the way back to our rooms he warned me gravely that tortillas, especially the fresh ones, were full of empty calories: two hundred of the dreaded energy units in each. I should avoid them.
“Napping and eating too many carbs—that’s what kills guys our age,” he said.
“Well, you have to die of something,” I said. I laughed nervously, like a goat.
Bob regaled me with lurid stories of his action-packed sex life on the Sea of Cortez. The woman he’d met in Cabo had turned out to be a “flake,” but there was a single mother of two in La Paz who had given him obvious “choosing signals.” He was almost certainly going to circle back to her. He mentioned that he had scheduled a charter boat to go fishing in a few days, but he was thinking of leaving town before then. I offered to split the cost of the charter with him if he stayed. Perhaps I sounded too eager, but I yearned to be at sea. There was no hiding it.
We agreed. Bob hadn’t been fishing in twenty years and was clueless about how to get a license and what to bring. I gave him a few pointers, then begged off to walk Henderson and do a little writing on my sofa. While Bob went to have his Jeep detailed, I snuck in a thirty-minute nap.
Large mangoes continued to give up their feuds with gravity and fall and split on the hot pavement. The street dogs got all of the mango juice and flesh they wanted during those weeks of plenty. Henderson’s paws grew sticky. He lay beside me in the patio area, licking the nectar from his forelegs.
Bob often worked on his laptop at an outside table, getting up now and then to do crunches or push-ups. I sat on my couch, wondering about the banana spider, who was keeping it low-key while Bob was in town. He emerged just once to look at me sympathetically, then slunk back into the safety of the cushions.
On our fishing trip Bob and I had a few nice bites out by Isla del Carmen. I landed a decent yellowtail, maybe twenty pounds, while Bob caught nothing. He didn’t have the right technique. He sat in the chair and didn’t keep the rod bent. Whenever he hooked one, the powerful fish took his line to the rocks and cut him off. I suggested he stand up, but he remained seated, wearing a straw hat he had bought specifically for the occasion. He was so sure of himself that he had lost the ability to take advice. At the end of the day all we had to show for our efforts was the single yellowtail.
As we neared port, Bob asked the captain to slow the boat. Then he took off his shirt, stood in the bow with the Sierra de la Giganta over his shoulder, and posed with the fish he hadn’t caught. He spent the rest of the day posting the photo on dating apps and writing responses. I heard his phone chirping every few seconds.
Back at the casitas Bob charged up his devices and did some laundry, then had his beard trimmed by the local barber before leaving town. “Adios,” he said. He had a date and wanted to get to San Ignacio before darkness. I felt a wave of loneliness sweep over me as he drove away. How come I couldn’t find companionship? The last woman I’d fallen for lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We did our lovemaking on weekends, down in her darkened basement, where I’d once caught her reflection in an elongated mirror. I’d expected her to look at least marginally happy, but her face wore the disinterested expression of a deepwater squid. I wondered if Bob had ever had that experience. Possibly he and I were more alike than we seemed. He had mentioned that his mother had recently died. Mine too, I could have said but didn’t.
I walked Henderson past the fish processor’s house and saw the yellowtail carcass in the bin, metallic with green flies. I also saw the body of the little white dog, Daisy, lying in the busy road. I used a folded paper plate to clasp her foreleg and drag her out of traffic, then placed her corpse in a weedy spot where she could decompose in peace. A man playing a child’s song on a battered xylophone had set out a cup for tips. The first-shift dancers at the strip club, heavily made-up and laughing, climbed the stairs to work.
Despite it all, that little hamlet on the Sea of Cortez was shockingly beautiful, with its palm trees and Spanish bayonets that cast jagged shade on the dusty streets at no extra cost. The Sierra de la Giganta blazed orange all day for free, then grew purple at last light. The mission bell rang, and packs of Canis familiaris, golden this time of the evening, chased a man on an underachieving motor scooter. Workers on jobsites, noticing the slant in light that meant the day was over, began to sing. Sometimes their wives came to the site with snacks and a radio. Guitars were strummed. It was a singing culture. Grown men burst into romantic songs without shame. They sang as they worked with cinder blocks and rebar; as they swept floors or shaved my neck with a straight razor. No one at Vic’s sang.
That night, when I opened my computer, the essay I was writing seemed lonelier and sadder than ever. Hard, hard, hard, the banana spider said. He was looking not at the computer but into the tiny apartment: the coffee press and the stained sleeping bag half-escaped from its sack; the rods and reels and twists of monofilament; dusty tennis shoes; rusty pliers; a pair of twenty-pound dumbbells; knotted dog leashes—the belongings of a man who had never quite grown up.
I noticed he appeared dry, and his gorgeous maroon body was beginning to wither. He told me Sergio had killed all the aphids, and he was in dire straits. Could I bring him one of those date-size roaches I often saw darting about in the laundry room? Sure, I said. But I knew banana spiders measure their lives in months, not years. The process we call life was ending for my friend. And this wasn’t one of those happy endings wherein I’d spot dozens of babies to mark his passing. He would die alone on my couch, in the folds of the cushions.
The next day I picked up my frozen packets of yellowtail and brought them to the casita. The freezer was underperforming, so I decided to distribute hunks of fish at various restaurants where I often went to dine. I gave Sergio a piece and asked, in broken Spanish, if he could lay off the neem oil.
That night my skin felt warm, and I couldn’t sleep. There was an electrical current running inside me. I got up and walked Henderson to the marina to read the fishing reports—the only reliable poetry for miles—but even these couldn’t calm me down.
The fever struck at midnight. By then I knew it was coming, as inevitable as the tide. I swallowed some of my emergency medications and took Henderson for another walk. Vic’s was closed, but I saw someone moving around inside, and a female voice said, “Momentito,” in the darkness. Stan was resting in the passenger seat of an E-Z-GO. He wore his stethoscope, and his eyes were closed. I retched in the dry weeds between Vic’s and a Catholic school, then went home and took a shower to cool my skin, but the fever surged. I called Julie, who didn’t pick up. I wanted to tell her that, if I didn’t make it back, she could have my books and my collection of arrowheads. I envisioned the story in my hometown’s online newspaper, wedged between a soup recipe and a feature about the university’s football team: “Beloved Local Writer Dies in Mexico.”
A day passed in which I was unable to do anything but curl up on the bathroom tile. I swallowed the remaining antibiotics, but they wouldn’t stay down. I was shivering one moment, sweating the next. It was the yogurt to blame, I decided; it never stayed quite cool enough in that fridge. But it could have been any number of other things. I had been gorging on street food like a Turkish potentate.
Henderson leaned his big black body against mine as I slept. He shifted his weight and sighed. I dreamed my essay had been published and even saw the page in my mind. In the dream Henderson and I were on a plane headed east, and every passenger was reading it. When I woke, I knew I was alive only because I could feel my dog’s body keeping me tied to the world. Sergio rapped on my door and said, “Todo bien?” and Henderson offered a deep, guttural growl in reply.
When I had the energy to get to the pharmacy, the time-share guy tried to talk to me again. I bent over and dry-heaved as he rambled on about the three restaurants on the property and the American golf pros who came in the fall to offer free lessons. I bought all kinds of stomach aids and hurried back to the casita, where I slept for days, rising only to take Henderson out into the blasting sunlight so he could urinate on the same sad arrangement of weeds. The street dogs gave us plenty of space.
After the illness abated, I remembered my broken promise to the banana spider. Surely he’d understand. I smashed a roach in the common area and presented it on the couch, but the spider did not reappear. I looked around and lifted the cushions to no avail. I never saw my friend again.
I have a fuzzy recollection that, before the fever ebbed, I got through to Julie. I think I suggested that, if I lived, we should move in together. Of course, our house would have to be a five-bedroom, five-bath deal—enough space that we rarely saw each other. There would be separate beds and no physical touching, other than the occasional handshake. She agreed, I think. I was able to sleep happily then, but first I had to tell her that the absolute best day of my life—if I had to choose—was when I’d skipped school in fourth grade. In a Newport News, Virginia, that no longer exists, I sat in the woods reading water-damaged copies of Playboy in a jacket too light for the season. I found comfortable logs and stumps to recline on. And at the end of the school day, when the bus came to drop the other kids off, I simply emerged from the woods and walked home, grinning the whole way. I was never caught. It was the only thing I’d ever truly gotten away with.
