The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way down the bay’s arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a detonation. Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structure’s fa~ade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and pattern of tile HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capi- tals above one concrete arch. “Mar,” he said, completing it, though he’d removed the microsoft. “It’s over,” she said, stepping beneath the arch, into shadow. “What’s over?” He followed, the straw basket rubbing against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between his toes. “Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future.” He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed- springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls. “It smells like piss,” he said. “Let’s swim.
The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between them now. They sat on a blanket from Turner’s room and ate, silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved her sun-streaked hair. “You make me think about horses,” he said finally “Well,” she said, as though she spoke from the depths of exhaustion, “they’ve only been extinct for thirty years.” “No,” he said, “their hair. The hair on their necks, when they ran.” “Manes,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. “Fuck it.” Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the beach. “It, me, what’s it matter?” Her arms around him again. “Oh, come on, Turner Come on” And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen, where the water met the sky.
When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did, back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadn’t survived. The waves had licked away its foundation. “Give me the basket She was buttoning her blouse. He’d bought it for her in one of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. “I said give me the basket.” She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon, finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple slices drenched in lime and dusted with cayenne. He pulled them out, a compact pair of 6 X 30 combat glasses. He snapped the integral covers from the objectives and the pad- ded eyepieces, and studied the streamlined ideograms of the Hosaka logo. A yellow inflatable rounded the stern and swung toward the beach. “Turner, I”
“Get up.” Bundling the blanket and her towel into the basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “If I am, get out of here. Cut for that second stand of palms.” He pointed. “Don’t go back to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home~~ He could hear the purr of the outboard now He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stum- bling in a drift of sand. She didn’t look back. He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflat- able was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named Tsushima, and he’d last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. He’d seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck. He didn’t need the glasses to know that the inflatable’s passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosaka’s ninjas. He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his last can of Mexican beer.