BUFFALOED

The sun has not yet come up, and the air feels cool enough that Rocky reconsiders wearing shorts. His terrycloth pullover keeps his arms warm, but chill bumps race up and down his legs. He knows, though, that when the sun does rise, long pants will be a liability.

His deck shoes squeak as he swings around the mast, ducks under the stays, and jumps up onto the dock. Belle wobbles in her slip; her nylon lines slap against her aluminum mast, and it rings like crystal.

He hefts the last scuba tank and hands it down to Jan in the boat’s cockpit. She wrestles it into the tiny cabin. Her pullover, shorts, and rubber-soled shoes match his, but she also has on the paisley top of her swim suit. Her skin glistens with a sheen of moisture.

Rocky clamors back down into the boat. His voice loud in the quiet, he asks, “Ready?”

Jan nods, grinning. Rocky casts off the last line and yanks on the starter cord of the small outboard motor. They pilot out of the harbor noisily, trailing thick clouds of oily smoke. Once outside the bay, the wind grabs the boat; Rocky kills the engine, and Jan hoists the jib over the bow. He pulls the line that raises the mainsail. The nylon sheet fills with a flutter and a sudden snap, and Belle leaps away from the harbor.

*

The first time he had seen her, she stood alone in the corner of the room. In the swirl and flash of the party, her muted blouse and sweeping skirt looked quaint and out of place. Her black hair reached to her waist, shimmering when she moved her head. Curious, he elbowed and twisted his way through the crowd. Even standing next to her, he had to shout to be heard. “I like your necklace. Is it turquoise?”

Her voice was so low he could not hear her. It was more the shaking of her head that told him her answer.

“No?” he shouted.

She fingered her silver and blue-green squash blossoms.

“What did you say?” He leaned closer, his ear practically against her lips.

“It’s called maliginum.” Her fingers flitted from her necklace to her hair and back to her necklace. “It just looks like turquoise.”

“Oh, yeah.” He peered at the stones. “I can see that now. Stupid of me.”

“Yes.” She looked out into the iridescent crowd, sparkling in the gaudy lights.

He moved off, but soon returned with two glasses of punch. He handed her one. “You seem to know a lot about turquoise,” he said. “Are you Navajo?”

Her mouth grew smaller; her eyebrows tightened. “And you seem awfully pushy. You’re Anglo, aren’t you?”

He laughed. “Guilty as charged.”

The static of the party filled their silence. She moistened her lips, and he leaned closer. “Sorry,” he shouted. “I couldn’t hear what you said.”

In the face of their common difficulty, her hostility softened a bit. “I’m Papago,” she said.

“I thought,” he yelled, “the Papago had changed their name to Tohono O’odham.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t expect you to know that.”

“Why? Just because I’m a white guy?”

She nodded. “Pushy white guys don’t usually have much empathy.”

“Now who’s stereotyping?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not me. I’m just making an observation based on experience of past behavior.”

He raised his drink in a toast. “I guess I’ll have to change your mind. I like challenges. Are you from San Xavier?”

“Komkch’ed e Wa:’osidk.”

“Pardon?”

Her eyes locked on her own boots. “Our name for Sells.”

“What does it mean?”

She shrugged. “Komkch’ed e Wa:’osidk.”

“No,” he said. “I mean in English.”

“Turtle Got Wedged.”

“Really? Imagine that.” They sipped their drinks. Her gaze flitted around the room again.

“So,” he said. “What brings you to the city?”

“The University.” She tasted her punch.

“A student?” he asked. “What are you going for your degree in?”

“Pre-law.”

“Really?”

She frowned again. “You sound surprised.”

She was irritated, he could tell, as if she got that reaction from everybody. “I am,” he said. “It’s a nice coincidence. I’m a lawyer.”

“You are?” Now she was the one sounding surprised.

“I’m the junior partner of Morgan, Gordon, Howard, and O’Ryon.”

“You’re O’Ryon?”

“His father’s only son.”

She hesitated, but finally held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. O’Ryon.”

His smooth hand engulfed hers which felt rough and calloused. “My friends call me Rocky.”

“An old nickname from high school football days,” she said rather than asked.

“Good guess, counselor. Football, yes. Nickname, no. It really is my name. On my birth certificate and everything. What’s yours?”

“Jan.”

“That’s all? Just Jan?”

“Juanita,” she said. “Juanita Zepeda. On my birth certificate and everything. Friends call me Jan.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jan.”

“Thank you, Rocky,” she said.

He twisted one end of his moustache. “I have a question I hope isn’t too forward.”

Her eyebrows arched.

“You lied, didn’t you? About your necklace. It really is turquoise, isn’t it?”

For the first time, her smile flashed. Her teeth were a little crooked, but incredibly white. She covered her mouth with her hand. “But I had you going for a while.”

It was after midnight before she agreed to dance with him.

*

The sun has sunk low to port when they reach their destination. Tiburon Island, though large, is deserted. Rumor has it cannibals once lived here.

Rocky tacks Belle into a small, low-walled cove. As they coast toward the beach, the ocean’s deep indigo fades to a pale blue-green. They anchor only a few meters out from the bright playa.

Without hesitation, Jan dives in. Rocky watches as she glides over the bottom. She swims back and forth, the long rope of her braid swinging behind her. The longer she stays under, the larger his smile grows.

Later, during the long twilight, they build a bonfire on the beach, roast corn on the cob, and cook hamburgers. By the time they eat, the moon has risen, and night has settled around them. Rocky stretches out on the warm sand. Jan lies beside him with her head on his chest.

Embers pop in the fire. Waves hiss on the beach. Silver stardust crawls slowly across the sky above them.

*

A couple of weeks after the party, he took her to the offices where he worked.

He introduced her to Mr. Morgan, Mr. Gordon, and Mrs. Howard, then led her to the back of the suite. “And here,” he said, “back beyond the library, behind the copy machine room, past the water cooler, here at the very edge of the known universe, is my office.”

She glanced around. “It’s kind of small, isn’t it?”

He herded her further into the clutter. “Hey, I told you I’m just the junior, junior, junior partner.” He closed the door behind them. “When I’ve been practicing law as long as they have, I’ll have an office as big as theirs.”

And there in the depths of the law offices, in the cave of his windowless room, he kissed her long and hard.

*

The next morning, she pulls him out of his sleeping bag. “Let’s go,” she says. “Time’s awasting!”

Rocky yawns. “What time is it?”

“Five-thirty, you landlubber. What is that in bells? Never mind. Come on. The sun will be up any minute now.”

He yawns again and stretches, but she is wide awake and will not slow down. Soon she has them suited up with all their gear, standing waist-deep in the water. “Now remember everything I told you,” Rocky says. They have had several practice dives in the pool at his apartment complex, but the idea of her in the open water makes him pause.

Contrary to all his fears, though, Jan adapts easily to the ocean. They spend the morning scuba-diving along the stony cliffs outside the cove. The deeper waters swarm with groupers, sea bass, and tiny gold-and-red fish whose name Rocky cannot remember.

Later, as he is investigating some coral formations, Jan floats by, playing with a fist-sized octopus. In a sudden flash, she is back beside him, pointing excitedly out to sea. He turns. A huge shadow moves dreamily away from them. They hang suspended, two humans and some fading giant.

Rocky grabs Jan’s arm and pulls her to the surface. Bursting into the air, he spits out his regulator and shouts, “What was that?”

“A whale,” she yells back. “It was a whale!”

Afterwards, back on the beach again, they lunch on fruit and cheese.

“Did you see that beauty?” Jan asks. She tries to keep talking even after having stuffed her mouth with sections of an orange. Rocky laughs deep and loud.

All through their meal, she keeps watch on the ocean outside the bay. After they finish, she paces, nervous and agitated, impatient at having to wait before going back in. She argues for more scuba-diving, but he points out that they have only one tank each left, and no way to refill them here on Tiburon.

“Why don’t we spend the afternoon snorkeling,” he suggests. “Then tomorrow morning we can do more diving. Like we planned.” He makes his living being persuasive.

Even with only her snorkel, though, Jan swims back to the mouth of the bay.

“Wait for me,” he shouts, bobbing in the swells. “We have to stay together!” She does not even slow down, and he has to follow her, to hang among the glimmering shafts of sunlight high above the grottos he had already investigated in depth that morning. Below, the world is quiet, dim, and peaceful. Above, the sun bastes him, the wind scours him, and the waves slap him. For hours he indulges her. And for nothing. They don’t see the whale again. By suppertime, they both feel tired, thirsty, and sunburned.

The next morning, he wakes even later, and does so only when he hears her splashing around on the beach. He sees her coming up from the alabaster water, wearing her mask and snorkel, and carrying her fins.

He rolls over and pulls the pillow over his head. If he asks where she has been, she will tell him, and since he would rather not have to scold her, he tries to go back to sleep.

All day she reels between the camp and the ocean, animated and lively; he cannot keep her out of the water. By sundown, though, she has not seen the whale again, and she lapses into silence.

*

Driving in his Datsun pickup back to her apartment after their first opera, he turned to her suddenly. “Did I ever tell you about my boat?”

She looked away from the rain-streaked night. “No.”

“The Liberty Belle.” His pride glowed like a new father’s. “A six-meter, single-masted beauty. I keep her in San Carlos. In Mexico. On the Gulf of California. Listen. I can finagle some vacation time. A day down there, two days on the boat, a day back. Okay? Have you ever sailed? It’s great down there. You’ll love it.”

*

With the last sunrise, she has regained her composure. She seems as serene as any of those tiny statues of the Virgin. “It’s too bad we have to leave,” Rocky says as he pulls up the anchor, “but duty calls.”

From the stern, Jan says, “I don’t hear a thing.” Even so, it is she, squinting into the rising sun, who steers Belle out of the bay.

Later, after a cold lunch, Rocky says, “Just think. A real supper and a comfortable bed tonight.” He has taken his turn as pilot, and leans against the back of the cockpit, shirtless, his arm draped over the tiller. “Ah, the joys of civilization.”

Jan does not answer. She stares at something beneath them. He turns and looks over the stern. Ten meters below, two large shadows slip languidly past, heading in the same direction as the boat. “It’s the whale again!” Rocky shouts. “And she’s got a calf with her!”

Jan ducks into the cabin and comes out with their snorkeling gear.

“What’re you doing?” Rocky asks with a panicky premonition.

“Going in,” Jan shouts. “I’m not missing this!” He has never seen her grinning so hard. “You coming?”

“Sure,” he says, hoping he sounds more confident than he feels.

He lets go of the tiller, and Belle’s nose swings into the light breeze. Her sails luff, falling slack, and she begins to drift. Jan wastes no time slipping into the water. It doesn’t take Rocky long to pull on mask, snorkel, and fins, and to jump in, too.

The cold water is an electric shock after having lazed in the heat of the sun all day. Looking around, he gets another shock: there are not just two whales. He and Jan have dived into the middle of a pod. As far as they can see in every direction, huge shadowy forms undulate past, dappled by the green kaleidoscope of sunlight and seawater.

And they’re big. Bigger than he could have imagined. Bigger than he can believe. Nothing in the human world has prepared him for life on this scale. Longer than a mobile home. Broader than two cars. Like locomotives gliding through space. He can almost feel the thunder of their heartbeats even this far away. Their size is holy, their indifference absolute.

He watches as Jan dives down to the mother and calf, and strokes the small one’s flank.

She paces the two for as long as she can, then heads back up to the air. Time and again she plunges after them, playing with both. Each dive is longer than the one before, and she becomes less and less clear in the sparkling haze beneath him.

Dangling at the end of his snorkel, impaled against the surface, Rocky watches her closely. He fears that one of these times she may not come back; she may just keep swimming away, transformed by the sea and tribal magic into something that loves life in the ocean more than life on land.

She does come back each time, though, and eventually the whales are only emerald shadows again, fading into green space. She stares after them. Rocky touches her shoulder and points to Belle. Jan nods, takes one last look at the whales, then swims back with him.

They hoist themselves over the stern of the boat, using the rudder and the outboard motor for finger- and toeholds. Gravity weighs them down again; Rock licks his lips and tastes salt. Tossing off their gear, they let it lie where it falls in the cockpit. Jan clambers out onto the bow, crouching beside the jib. Rocky sheets in the mainsail, and they leap ahead, following in the wake of the whales. Whenever Jan sees a sudden geyser, she shouts and points. The sound of each blow and the mist of each breath linger in the tropic air for several seconds. The whales are too fast, though, and leave Belle further and further behind.

Late that afternoon, the boat glides into the harbor of San Carlos. A Mexican dockhand stands at the end of the wharf, dumping buckets of fish guts into the bay, oblivious to the clouds of seagulls which wheel around him, screaming with greed. Rocky and Jan trudge along the walk through the heat of the humid dusk from the boat slip to the motel office. The room they take is on a high bluff with a view of the large, choppy bay. The sea breeze has scrubbed the surrounding headland clean.

Shuttling the first load of leftover food into the room, Jan turns on the tiny air conditioner. Later, Rocky drops his last load on the floor, pulls off his T-shirt, and stands in the machine’s tepid breeze, holding up his arms. They shower, and dress in white cotton shirts and slacks. They go to the restaurant and order dinner of shrimp and lobster, but Jan does not seem to notice the food; her excitement is still too high.

“Did you see those beauties?” Her voice sounds small, but those lightning eyes open wide. She flings her arms apart. “She must have been this big!” she shouts. Everybody in the restaurant turns and looks at her. Laughter bursts out of her like candy from a piñata.

Rocky laughs, too, and as if caught up in some magic, as if out of the blue, he says, “Marry me.”

Her laughter stops. Her gaze drops to her plate. In her lowest voice, she says, “What?”

He says, “I asked you to marry me.”

She picks up a shrimp. She puts it in her mouth. She chews it.

He pushes a piece of lobster around on his plate. “Look,” he says. “It’s just.” He stabs his lobster. “That I don’t see why we should stop.” He pushes the lobster off his fork with a piece of bread. “Having this much fun.”

Again, her voice is so low, he has to strain to catch it. “We have to be married to do that?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. It just seemed nice to think that you’d always be with me. You know. Us laughing all the time.”

Dinner conversations hum around them. Waiters move from table to table, efficient, invisible.

“Why?” she finally asks.

“Why what?”

Her eyes refuse to look into his. “Why do you want to marry me?”

Never before has language failed him so utterly. Every response he considers sounds too banal, so inane. His status as a promising young barrister evaporates. All he can say is, “I just told you why.”

The meal concludes in silence.

Later that night, she spends what seems like hours washing and combing her hair. When she finally comes to bed, she snuggles close to him and lays her head on his chest, just as she did on their beach. Now, however, her heavy hair smells of soap and fresh water, not sweat and salt.

They lie quietly in each other’s arms, and he feels her breath working in and out, the thunder of her heart pumping clean and strong, but though they hold each other as close as ever, it is not the same. Something has come between them. Something he cannot name and so cannot argue against. It seems as if he lies there forever, wishing they were back aboard Belle.

Later, she gets up and pulls on her jeans and blouse.

“What’re you doing?” he asks with the same feeling of doom and fascination he had diving in among the whales.

“Going out,” she says. “For a walk.” In the white moonlight falling through the window, her ebony hair glows, as full of color as a raven’s wing.

“I’ll go with you,” he offers.

She shakes her head. “I’d rather be alone.”

“Don’t be gone long,” he says, but he knows it’s too late; she’s already long gone. He can think of nothing else to say to her, though.

She nods and walks out.

The next morning, she still has not come back. While cleaning the boat, Rocky keeps a close eye on anyone coming out onto the pier. He eats lunch in the restaurant. He hangs around the marina, talking in his poor Spanish to the Mexicans. They laugh and tell him jokes he can’t quite understand.

That night, he stays in the room on the point again.

He wakes at dawn, stands alone on the edge of the cliff, watching the sun rise. He finally goes back to the room, gathers the last of their things, and walks down to the truck.

She sits on the open tailgate.

He sits beside her, the tiny truck settling beneath his weight. “So, where were you?” he asks.

She nods at a tall peak close by. “Up there.” No shade relieves the stony hill; only a few saguaros and prickly pear cactuses stand on its flanks.

“All day?”

She nods.

“What were you doing up there?”

“Watching you down here.” A pelican glides past on its way to another part of the bay. “Thinking about my answer.”

“Which is?”

Her eyes remain elusive. Her feet swing in opposite circles, making furrows in the dust. A seagull hangs in the air not far from them, on the lookout for scraps.

Jan says, “For more than four hundred years, white priests have told my people we have to marry in the Church, or we would be living in sin in the eyes of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” An outboard motorboat starts up over at the wharf. “That makes about as much sense as saying we should bleach our skin.” The boat pulls out with a screech and a bang. “Some of our old people say we got along fine without white priests since the beginning of the world. What makes Anglos think we need their religion now, anyway?”

He stays quiet for several minutes, trying to get a grip on a rejection that may not be a rejection. He realizes that he is thinking in categories, the way a white man thinks. “Okay,” he says. “But where does that leave us?” His hand squeezes her thigh. “We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

She looks down at her feet, swinging in their circles. She nods. “More than that, if you want. But remember: you have your truck and your boat. I have my people. The people I won’t leave.” She breathes deeply. “Could you live on the reservation? In the middle of the desert, with all those strangers? Could you take that?”

Another backfire of the speedboat echoes off the hills around them. He says, “I waited for you a day and a night. What if I had left without you?”

She shrugs. “I would have watched you go.”

He squints at the gull still hanging in the air in front of them. Behind it rises the hill where she kept vigil. “While you watched me,” he says, “I waited for you. What does that tell you?” He picks up the suitcase, the handle already hot from the morning sun. “Ready?”

The air tastes like salt.

With a stretch and a grin, she nods.

They drive north, out of Mexico. They drive north, going home.

* * *