On the Rio Mayo Read online

On the Rio Mayo

  Lorraine Ray

  Copyright 2011 Lorraine Ray

  Someone was coming into camp. Half in, half out of a moving veil of white, the figure of a man advanced toward them.

  Jack Tatum’s dogs, which had spent the windy night under the truck, came to life in a mad scramble. The two dogs growled, shot sand every which way, and strained to pull themselves forward, their claws tearing deep grooves in the beach until they could duck under the rear axle of the ‘42 Ford. For a moment after they emerged, they retreated in confusion to the yard in front of the bungalow. There the youngest dog milled about stupidly, unable to reestablish the scent. Eventually, the venerable black Labrador lifted its muzzle in several directions and tested the air with trembling nostrils to find the scent again. Then, in stiff formality, partly arthritic, partly from an old dog’s sense of dignity, its head held high to sniff the wind as though it weren’t certain of its verdict, it led the younger dog in a trot up the path that was lined with volcanic rocks. Finally, the old dog lost command of its companion, and the younger dog charged past with its pink yapping mouth warning insistently of a visitor. It darted away toward the dunes.

  “Back!” Frank shouted. “Call in the dogs,” he yelled to Harry, his father, who had taken those dogs to Mexico before and who had more control over them.

  “Barney! Mammoth! Both of you, come in! Come! Come in now!” Harry shouted. And then, when the very obedient dogs returned, rather sheepishly sniffing and throwing glances over their shoulder at the something they didn’t like, Harry chastised them: “Hah! Hah! Get in there and stay! Get in there with you! What are you barking at so early in the morning?”

  The beach became silent, except for that scouring wind.

  Frank crouched barefoot in the sand near the truck bed, his fingers rooting around in a tackle box. “I have a survival gear lure in here somewhere. I wanted to try it out in the surf. I painted a number on it. I’m sure I dropped it in here. Now the goddamned thing is lost. Shit, I’m disorganized.”

  “Ay, and I’ve lost the ham,” said Harry from the bed of the truck. Somewhere in the jumble of boxes, Jack Tatum claimed to have packed a canned hickory-smoked Virginia ham. Harry slid several of the boxes that they’d left out overnight toward the tailgate. He opened the cardboard flaps and took out bread, and then eggs, and then a paper sack full of green chilies. “Oh,” he said, “was the ham in the box with the shrimp dressed up as dancers?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Frank absentmindedly.

  Harry straightened up and clambered over a net and a bucket, walking toward the cab of the truck where the pile of boxed supplies sprawled. Had the canned ham been packed in the red box with shrimps dancing on the outside (and Harry bent over to find it) or the small chiller parts box nearly hidden in a corner against the cab? The answer was impossible to determine without clearing half a dozen other boxes. The thought of shifting all that weight caused Harry to reconsider. Perhaps breakfast would suit him perfectly without slices of fried ham beside his scrambled eggs? Yes, it ought to, Harry decided, and he’d leave the ham for another breakfast, or a dinner, if the fishing were bad, though everything about the sea that morning pleased Harry.

  He straightened up again and leveled his brown eyes on the horizon to enjoy again the sparkling profile of the Sea of Cortez. A ribbon of lavender and pink draped the wet sand and a matching, paler ribbon, worn low on the sky, stretched below thin gray clouds. And inland, inland was beautiful too, where the white tops of the sand dunes splayed in a stiff morning breeze.

  His eyes drifted further up the estuary to the glittering Rio Mayo, but there he was surprised.

  “Saaannn--ta Monica, Redondo Beach,” said Harry in a drawl that stretched out the ‘Santa’ to a tremendous length and ran the rest of the words together. He said this, almost whispered it to himself, and then stood transfixed, studying the dunes where the sand blew thickly over the Rio Mayo. “Someone’s coming into camp. He’s running in the dunes.”

  Harry kept watching the shifting veil of blowing sand.

  “He’s still running,” Harry said.

  “I don’t see anything. What is it?” asked Frank eventually in a disinterested, distracted voice. He sat in the sand now, one bent knee up and the other lying flat. He continued digging through a tangle of lures in the bottom of a large rusty tackle box. Frank’s brown hair had been shaved into a crew cut and he wore a paint-splattered pair of jeans, a khaki shirt buttoned haphazardly, and a dark blue watch cap, the only item from what had been, until a few days before, his Navy uniform. He’d come home to Arizona, a year after Japan's surrender, having spent the war working in a hospital in Chicago. His father had promised a fishing trip to the Sea of Cortez when he returned.

  “It’s a guy running,” explained Harry again, “I can’t be sure though. The sand is blowing thicker than Aunt Gertrudis’ caldo de queso.”

  Frank grunted. He didn’t know any Aunt Gertrudis, or her cheese soup, either.

  Harry looked and, sure enough, through the blowing sand, the man appeared again. Trotting on the dunes, springing from the smearing purple dawn beginning upstream on the Rio Mayo, the tiny figure of a man materialized. And yet not just an ordinary man, there was something odd about his shoulders and his neck.

  “This man that’s running -- he’s got something over his shoulders. It’s hard to tell what,” Harry said.

  Harry watched as the figure disappeared. “Well, maybe he’s not coming our way after all,” he said, and he remembered he’d decided to give up on the ham, but a last glance back at the dunes showed the same thing again. “Oh yes. There he is again. I think he’ll be coming to see us.”

  Running in to see them it seemed.

  “He’s carrying something,” said Harry. Realizing he had been talking to himself, he tried again, but louder. “It’s a man with something strange over his shoulder.”

  Harry looked again and could now clearly see the man was barefoot and dressed only in torn pants. On his bare shoulders he bore a massive deer. A gaunt dog followed closely at his heels.

  “Frank, please, are you seeing this?” said Harry to his son.

  Frank ignored his father. He was throwing lures around, digging in the bottom of the tackle box and cursing as barbs snagged the tips of his fingers.

  “Frank, you won’t believe this.”

  “Pop, I’m too damn busy,” said Frank, thrusting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses higher on his nose, bending forward as if something fascinating lay in the box in front of him. “I like some of these others better. These other spoon lures.”

  “Let’s take them then!” shouted Harry back jovially. “But please look at this.”

  Harry shifted his weight. He was a short man, already in his mid-fifties, graying around the temples, though most of his brown hair was hidden under a pith helmet that morning. He had a benevolent squint in his kind brown eyes from the years he’d spent working outdoors on roofs in Arizona. His tan shirt and pants, the uniform he wore to repair air conditioners and evaporative coolers, were rumpled after a night spent sleeping in them and the prior day’s drive from Arizona to this fishing spot, a bungalow owned by the family of another repair shop (for Harry was friends with all his competitors). Their camp lay where the mouth of the Rio Mayo emptied into the Sea of Cortez. “Come on, won’t you please look up for me, my son. Come around the back of the truck. You’ve got to see this for yourself. It’s really quite an incredible sight.”

  “I want to find that goddamn lure,” said Frank, “I had it. Hell, I know it’s in here. Somewhere. I threw it in last night.”

  Harry felt again the nagging concern he’d sensed, pushed aside, and reexamined again and again over the last few days and especially the last hours on this fishing t
rip, about his son, about the illogical anger he sometimes displayed, about his constant cursing, the way he conveyed his words in such a clipped, succinct and angry fashion. Maybe it was only language, thought Harry. Harry had spoken Spanish as a child, and he felt it was a much more fluid language. Frank had been brought up with his mother, and spoke only English. “He’s carrying a marvelous buck,” called Harry, “almost fabulous.”

  Frank quit rummaging in the tackle box and tipped his body over so that his shoulder and head cleared the side of the truck. This enabled him to see over the dark blustery dunes.

  The man zigzagged around the scrubby bushes that dotted the sand. With each bounding movement sideways the dangling