Beach House

The house was really a hut, straw thatched roof and bamboo shoots for walls, just a handful of meters above the high water mark of the tide. It’s foundation logs were embedded in the beach, and it had a porch with two rocking chairs on it facing the water. There was nothing else nearby- cliffs to the south a ways, gray shining slabs of rock, and to the north nothing but sand and the faint silhouette of a dock. There was no driveway- you parked at the end of a dirt road a good ways away and hoofed it over the dunes. I wasn’t parked there- the men who brought me here had done so in a jeep that, naturally, went back with them. No transportation, just a rusted old bike roped to a palm tree behind the hut. I’d been instructed not to use it, but I hadn’t planned on it anyway.

I walked around barefoot. I’d cut a good five inches off the bottom of my khakis that first day, so they didn’t drag, and the floor was worn smooth enough that splinters weren’t an issue. I had a pair of patent leather dress shoes and some old sneakers, both of which stayed in the closet under one Hawaiian shirt and three t-shirts. Everything there was brought by me in a black duffel bag. I hadn’t had hardly any time when they showed up at my door, and the tall one had tossed me the bag, “Here. You can take.” So I filled it with those shirts, jeans and khakis, shoes, my toothbrush, my meds, a dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby (“take something to read, senor, no TV”), and a nine millimeter.

The first week was hideously boring. The sound of the surf- the only sound for most of the day and night- was not peaceful or calming for me, not then. I still had the jitters, the itch of anxiety in my skin. I kept looking at the phone they’d given me, sitting there on the small kitchen table. Of course, I’d been told not to use it unless there was some horrific emergency. I wasn’t tempted to. I honestly had no one to call. My sister was the only number I had memorized, but she was married with kids and a house in the states, and the absolute last person on this earth she would want to hear from was me. She might take some satisfaction of the “I told you this is how’d you’d end up” variety, which was hardly a compelling reason for me to ring her up.

Of that week, the first couple days were the worst. I felt the constant need to get up, to move, to lift things and examine things and move things around, to look out the windows and pace nervously up and down the beach, watching the edge of jungle. The gun was in my waistband, though I periodically took it out. It had the paradoxical effect of a firearm- making you feel dangerous and endangered at the same time, hoping for and dreading the situation that would call for its use. I had trouble sleeping. No city noise, no people, no cars, just the sound of the wind and the waves pummeling me with relentless repetition. Gust, crash, gust, crash, all night, and me laying on the bed, drumming my fingers on my chest.

TBC

~ by rinks on May 5, 2008.