All My Relations

In a Landscape Animals Shrink to Nothing

IN A LANDSCAPE ANIMALS SHRINK TO NOTHING "Mouth gaping! Eyes bulging! Out of the water, burned, eaten up." Boehm spread the foil and jabbed the crisp skin of the snapper with a fork. "That's how I feel when I look at you." Olivia, shucking corn, said nothing. Hunched, her small breasts in her bikini top drooping with a weight Boehm could almost feel in his palm, she ripped the fine blonde tassels that reminded Boehm of her own hair, and dropped them into a hole in the sand. Her concentration, teeth nibbling the curve of her underlip, made Boehm nervous. She would be thinking of her bare new apartment, her choices in decor, of the last truckload of boxes stacked in their living room. Boehm clenched his eyes shut as if in pain, mushing the snapper with his fork, whipping the flesh like meringue. The fish's elegant shape was destroyed. Keeping the smashed pulpy section forhimself, Boehm served the fish. He reclined his beach chair and swigged from the mezcal bottle. Olivia had stopped drinking hours before because soon she would be taking her sleeping pills for bed. They were stupefyingly potent, illegal, and since her announcement that she was leaving Boehmshe'd been unable to sleep without them. "Even with that corn you've got a system," Boehm said. "You In a Landscape Animals Shrink to Nothing / 121 do three ears in the time it would take me to do one. You're so intelligent. It's never bothered me that you're more intelligent than I am. I've learned from you." "I don't accept that from you. You're a bright man, Steve." Olivia squatted, her back to Boehm, setting corn in the coals. Bahia Umichehueve was blue, curved like a lens. Two islands, bristling with huge, weird cardon cacti and glazed with pelican guano, lay at the exact center. From time to time the surface of the water was broken by flying fish. Boehm was reminded of a map in a childhood favorite, The Golden Book of Great Explorers , showing the cobalt blue ocean surrounded by crudely drawn lumps for mountains, and in the foreground, gamboling fish with human faces. The beach, which Boehm remembered five or six years before teeming with drunken, near-nakedAmericanstudents and slowwalking , embarrassed American fatties, was virtually empty. A cleaning detail of village children was at work. Beside Boehm a family from Guadalajara, the only other guests at the hotel, read newspapers and magazines.The parents and their three children were dressed in enveloping bathing attire made ofa nubbed, rubbery material. The children had insisted on taking their yearly vacation in Las Playas, the man had explained, though the area was ruined. The climate was fine and the water a delightful warm temperature, like mineral baths. Boehm had nodded, asif understanding that the area was ruined, and why. The children dashed into the mild surf. Watching them spin and collide on their red and yellow plastic rafts, Olivia said, "They have such beautiful, perfect little bodies." Squinting into the setting sun, parted lips exposing her chipped front tooth, she wore what Boehm called her bruised, sensuous look. The sunset colored her deep rose. Boehm drank from the bottle and kissed her, letting the mezcal flow from his mouth into hers. The slow kiss, mezcal dribbling down their chins, was like "two loving amoebas ingesting each other," he told Olivia. 122 / All MyRelations "What an alarmingly rapacious image," she said, drawing back. "For days," Boehm said, "I've felt as if a root boll were expanding in my head, bursting through my skull." "Please, Steve," Olivia said. She trotted into the water. In front of the thatched beachside restaurants the local children were raking the sand. They wore baggy white pants and T-shirts stamped in black letters SANEAMIENTO—sanitation —across the back, or no shirts at all. Floppy hats shadowed their faces. Listlessly they walked backward, dragging the rakes onearmed in straight paths that left as much trash as they gathered. The neat rows of bottles, wadded paper, squashed cups, and fruit rinds looked like a cultivated crop. The children scooped heaps of garbage in their arms and, without aiming, hurled the debris at a rusted oil drum, where it rattled down the outside and lay in a ring around the base. "The place does have an odd feel this year,"Boehm said to the man...