I met him in Belize.
He was in his late 60s, but wiry and tough looking. He had become a man that didn’t really
have an age. He was one of those
guys. He had been around awhile,
knew a few things, and you wouldn’t fuck with him on a dare. He seemed like a guy capable of
immediate maximum violence, but age had softened that edge. We talked while waiting for a
bartender. I bought him a drink.
He was a master diver.
He showed me a weathered plastic ID card validating his claim. We talked about diving. I told him about the beginner’s dive I
had done, and how excited I was about it.
He was enthusiastic. I
asked him about some of the craziest dives he had done. He had been on over 5000. He thought for a second and told me
about a dive where he took his wife, a beginner at that point, where they had
to dive through a wide cave so they could swim under schooling hammerhead
sharks. It was in some secret
location that someone had to let you in on. It wasn’t a spot for just anyone. “You gotta make sure you don’t ascend too high though, cause
the current will push you right into the middle of ‘em.” I asked how big they were. “Oh, the little ones are about 6 feet,
and the real big ones are about 12-14 feet. You don’t want to mess with them. You gotta give them their space.” His wife came over to tell me she had been terrified, but it
had been worth it.
She was from Los Angeles, or at least that’s what she told
everyone. She was one of those
Southern California women because of constant plastic surgery; you couldn’t
tell if she was 45 or 60. She was
thin, and had enough procedures done to her face that she didn’t look real
anymore, almost like a Barbie.
Everyone looked at her, not so much because of her long striking hair
and matching long legs, but rather because she didn’t look quite real. It was as if a department store
mannequin was walking around the bar.
It made everyone do a double take.
“Let’s get out of here. We’ll go to AJ’s”.
We climbed on his golf cart, the primary form of transportation on the
island. His wife’s friend the
masseuse was coming along. Her
boyfriend was playing in a reggae band at our destination. I could tell the older guy didn’t like
him very much. It was a small
place. What are you going to do? I asked how he wound up in Belize, and
he said that they always liked it here and decided to move from LA full time a
number of years back. They had to
watch their pennies to scratch out a life here.
We go to AJ’s.
It was a cement pad with a metal roof. A 55-gallon drum was cut in half, and had been converted into
a grill to roast chicken. AJ was a
Canadian expat that owned the bar.
The bar was little more than a shelf where he would pass out Belikin
beers and shots of rum. A few
plastic tables were set out on the cement pad with the same ubiquitous plastic
chairs you see anywhere. I sat
down at a table with the man. The
women went to the bar and listened to the “band”, the masseuse’s dreadlocked
boyfriend singing and another guy playing keyboards to pre recorded drum
tracks.
After a few Belikins, I asked again about how he wound up in
Belize. He used to do some work in
the area, and would relax here. He
liked it. He kept coming
back. He volunteered that his last
ex-wife (there had been three) said he didn’t have an emotional center. He didn’t know what that meant exactly,
but told me that he understood why she left him. “I have a lack of certain emotions I guess…”, he said while
staring at his wife flirting at the bar.
“Now take her for instance.
We understand each other.
She has some needs, and I get that. She feels like she has to fly back to LA every so often and
see this guy for some things she needs.
I get that. I don’t want to
stop her happiness.
Understand?” I nodded my head
at the unexpected turn in conversation.
What choice did I have but to agree? Was I going to clarify that his wife flew to LA to get
fucked by some younger guy on a quarterly basis? No way.
“I just always had an emotional detachment. It’s why I was good at the work I did.”
What did you do? “I did some government work.” I pushed. He had been in the Army. He was a good shot.
One day two guys in black suits asked him if he would be interested in a
job. It seemed better than what he
was doing so he agreed. He spent
the 60s and 70s shooting people from a great distance in Asia and then Central
America. He never really knew who
they were. They were just pictures
in a folder.
We talked for a while about Laos, Cambodia, and his old
friends he had gone with through training. There were 12.
Two KIA, three in psych wards, four suicides, one career guy, one
missing, and him. He said you were
never closer with anyone than your partner. They would be in a banana tree for days, looking at a guy
through a scope, back at a picture, and back through the scope. Was it him? Was it? Finally
they would decide he was the target and blow out the back of that man’s skull
at 900-1000 yards. Afterwards all
hell would break loose, and they would have to hide in the jungle until they could
be extracted. “It never really
bothered me. I figured if it
wasn’t me, someone else was going to do it anyway.” He looked off blankly in the distance. The stories were crazy. Horrible. Interesting. He
didn’t care about them. He wanted
to tell me about the time in LA he and his wife had gone to a party at Beau
Bridge’s house in a Dodge Viper.
That’s how you know the sniper shit was real. Who is going to lie about Beau Bridges?
We had another beer.
He was getting tired. The
masseuse was making a play to have a threesome. No one was too interested. It was her way of getting attention. The band played “No Woman No Cry”. It was terrible. We finished the beers. He drove us back. Everyone said goodbye to
one another. It was a good
night. He drove down the dusty
road, heading back to his place.
*****
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