Not with a Bang, but a Whimper (3)

“Vanessa,” Beto said again, hurling his voice through the wind. It was cutting the surface of the ocean with lines of foam that tickled his chest. He approached her and this time she heard him when he asked, “Is this what it’s like?”

“What what’s like?”

“To be truly human?”

“No, but this is.” Vanessa looked up at Beto through her windblown hair, her lips parting as he tilted towards her, tasted the honey of his first kiss, the lush warmth of her body against his, the drunkenness of his desire rising up, the forever-ness of the cocoon that wrapped around them. But then, a stupendous wave crashed down on him, and he tasted brine not honey as the fins thrashed, as the snout nudged, and as he reached for light above and the surface darkened. He opened his mouth to breath but sucked in only water. Beto’s last thought on blacking out was of how black the blackness was.

* * * *

Beto stood at the bow of the boat as it chugged along, close to Marajó Island. Not quite noon, the sun had still risen high enough to burn away anything that remained of morning coolness. Beto had awaken alone on Pesquiero beach, as the parakeets from the mangrove forest clouded over him on their way to feed, chirping up a storm. Beto didn’t remember much about what had happened given the aguardiente, and he’d been trying to piece it together since hitching a ride to the docks in Soure.

The facts were these: he’d walked into the water with Vanessa, prepared to take her to the City of the Deep, but somehow she’d turned the tables on him, and he’d awaken on the beach. Beto hadn’t the foggiest notion of why, and his only guess was that it had something to do with all the women he’d carried off through the years. Even though dolphins like Beto were supposed to remain anonymous, word got out, and the fact of the matter was, Beto was famous for his many seductions. It had to be a vendetta, a family member of someone he’d taken down striking back.

Beto felt it on the back of his neck, the stare boring into him, laser-like. Turning, he looked directly into glowing green eyes, and closed his own as quickly as he could. “Uiara.”

“Open your eyes, I’m not a medusa.”

Beto did as she wished, and drank in the beautiful woman who stood before him. Whenever they bumped into one another, it was always a little like the dawn of creation, as sunlight irradiated her blond hair, as her lithe form materialized with a pearly sheen, her breasts sketching luscious contours through a sheer fabric of some sort. Today, Uiara was wearing an ultra-thin T-shirt that said, Touch but don’t Look. Once Beto had recovered his equilibrium, he asked, “OK, I give up. Why are you here?”

“Cobra Grande sent me. News travels fast.”

So it’s that, Beto thought, embarrassed by his failure, and wondering what lay in store for him. “Bad news.”

“I’ve had my ups and downs,” Uiara said.

Beto didn’t believe it. Word was, Uiara always made her mark, always pulled the man down. And she liked it.

“I’m still trying to figure it out,” he admitted, looking off to where the boat was passing. Close by, a ribbon of sand gleamed white in the sun, and coconut palm trees curved over the water like sentinels. Deceptive beauty, Beto thought, hiding the violence beneath, the blood lust of humans.

“Not much to figure. Girl boto meets boy boto.”

“She’s a dolphin?” Beto felt his breath squeezed out. How could she have kept such a secret?

“Jesus, you really didn’t know.”

“Why’d she do it?” Beto asked.

“Who knows? At least she put you back on the beach. I’d have taken you down for good.”

Beto contemplated Uiara’s explanation as the boat pulled away from Marajó Island, on a new course straight for Belém. It wasn’t a vendetta. It was worse, it was…..Beto searched for a word or words to describe the feelings he was having for the first time, and stuck on “betrayal.” Yes, it was most definitely a betrayal, of trust. Beto remembered what some humans said, about love being a four letter word. That was it, exactly. He’d need a good hard swim to get Vanessa out of his system. He also needed to pay a visit to the City of the Deep, to feel the comforting presence of Cobra Grande.

“There’s something else,” Uiara said, pulling him back into conversation. “The City of the Deep...It’s gone.”

Beto wondered if she was pulling his leg, it sounded so preposterous. Uiara saw his reaction and said, “No, really. Cobra Grande told me to tell you don’t bother coming back.”

Beto searched her, saw that she meant it. And it started to make sense, what Cobra Grande had said during his last visit, how sad he seemed. Beto grabbed Uiara’s by the shoulders and wanted to shake her, to make her say it wasn’t so. Instead, he asked, “What happened?”

“Not much, really. He told everyone they could to go home. Then a few swipes of his tail, and that was that. The place was pretty much in shambles anyway, from the container ships.”

“So this is really it. The end times,” Beto said, shaking his head and wanting to cry, but more angry than tearful.

“Yeah. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

Beto and Uiara stood in silence, as the full intensity of a noon-time sun beat down like a hammer. It was over, the mysteries of the Amazon, enchantment, incantation, magic. Everything. Beto wasn’t sure what to do, but he’d need to something, soon.

Uiara interrupted his lonely thoughts. “Cobra Grande wanted you to have this. It’s a burner phone, with one blocked number.”

Beto took it in his hands. “What for?”

“For a surgeon in Manaus who handles dolphins. You can be a human without the defect. If you want. Cobra Grande left us with our powers.”

Beto studied the cell phone. One call and he’d have his questions answered about what it was like to be human. One call and he’d be betraying Cobra Grande and everything he himself stood for. Beto cocked his arm to throw it into the water. "Humans are bad business. They did this to us.”

“And what if Vanessa changes. You wouldn’t want to hook-up again?”

Beto held his arm ready to throw. “So you’re a counselor now?”

“Oh come’on. It’s no different than being an American. Everyone hates Americans, then they move there and become American.”

Beto thought it over and put the phone in his pocket. He could decide on his long-run plans later. Meanwhile, what about tomorrow? What about, right now? They’d already begun approaching the wharfs of Belém. Skyscrapers shot up like giant fungi just ahead, along the shoreline of the gray-brown river, and container ships lay anchored to either side of their course heading. As Beto knew intimately from his life as a dolphin, they were passing over the exact location of where another city had once existed on the bottom of the river, a city even grander than Belém. A city that humans had destroyed in their vanity to make the world theirs and theirs alone. As the boat pulled alongside the wharf, Beto asked Uiara, “So what are you going to do?”

“As a human, I’d get into trouble. But as a mermaid, this is what I do. Kill.”

* * * *

Beto and Vanessa nestled side by side in a tidal pool shaded by a bushy mangrove tree, on Pesqueiro Beach. Since their fateful encounter at the fiesta six weeks before, Beto had done the surgery, and was adjusting to life as a human being. It was more difficult than he’d anticipated, as things had been relatively simple in the underworld of the river. He was glad he’d done it, though. Vanessa lay with her back to the sun, reading, half in and half out of the water. Beto rubbed her shoulders, squeezed gently, eliciting a happy sigh, then traced his finger along the line marking where her dorsal fin had stood. The scar was barely visible, and would soon be gone. He and Vanessa had managed to find one another in human form shortly after their encounter at the fiesta, and they’d been living together ever since, in Soure.

Their first few days together passed in the haze of a sex explosion. They’d karmasutra-ed into every possible contortion until they ached. The human body had proven infinitely more playful than the dolphin’s, with its legs for twining, its arms for holding, its mouths for kissing, sucking, and licking. Plus, the entire package was wrapped in delectable layers of ticklish skin. Beto had given up his huge dolphin penis, but their mutual reduction in size had more than compensated for any loss that way. They’d gone hard, soft, lubricious, and sore, and started over repeatedly. They’d exploited every flash point, and discovered every nerve ending capable of responding to an emergency of desire. Their sex was only a little less strenuous now, but at least they were coming up for breath and venturing into the world, which for them had the sheen of a dew-drop as seen through the eyes of new-born babes.

Beto wondered once in awhile if he’d made the right decision, turning human. But there was no going back. Even with his occasional doubt, Beto knew it was for the best. Even with the occasional question, like now. “Why didn’t you finish me off? Take me to the City of the Deep.”

Vanessa closed her book, rolled over. “You’re still thinking about all that?”

“Not really.”

Vanessa propped up on her elbows. “I never told you, but I was pretty much a human being, at least mentally, by the time we met. I was ready to go outlaw.”

“So?”

“There we were, having this great time, and you start asking about what it’s like to be human. I knew it was you then, the dolphin they’d been talking about.” Vanessa paused, her face darkening with the memory. “I knew I’d have to take you down first.”

“That’s what I don’t get.” Beto said.

“If you’d drowned me, I’d have really drowned, as in dead.”

Beto protested. “No, you’d have gone to the City of the Deep. You’d have learned the mysteries of the Amazon. You’d have…..” He stopped with the realization that Vanessa had been a boto herself.

“It doesn’t work that way. If a dolphin drowns a dolphin, you’re dead.”

Beto searched his mind for the rules laid down by Cobra Grande so many years before, rules that had grown increasingly irrelevant to his behavior. Yes, he’d always known this, but hadn’t paid much attention because it had never been a cause for concern, even remotely. What were the odds? And towards the end, when he’d been playing kamikaze with the time limit before tossing himself into the river to change into a dolphin, he’d been living on his own terms practically.

“Anyway, the instant you blacked out, I pulled you to shore, made sure you were comfortable. Then I left.”

“You just left me?”

“I didn’t want to get involved with a dolphin.”

Beto nodded but didn’t say anything, and shortly Vanessa returned to her book. By unspoken agreement, they’d be leaving soon to resume exploring their naked human bodies.

Beto hopped up to take a good-bye stroll along the water’s edge. It was mid-afternoon, but the wide river mouth remained calm beneath a blue-gray sky, even as the sea breeze pushed tiny patches of foam across the water. At first he wasn’t sure of what he was seeing. It looked like the bulge of water running out ahead of a submarine, just beneath the waves. But when the tail broke surface a distance behind, Beto knew it was Cobra Grande swimming for the open sea, leaving the City of the Deep behind, escaping the world of the humans, too powerful to overcome. The world to which Beto now belonged, with the great snake’s blessing and acceptance. Beto turned and headed for Vanessa, anxious to get back home, knowing that the Amazon was gone forever, not with a bang, but a whimper.