The Green Flash

The Green Flash

By Dan Ward

The rooster must have eaten a chili this morning.

He sat on Carl’s unscreened window sill and crowed like he owned the morning. At the first flicker of morning light, the beautiful but totally moronic bird crammed his noise into Carl’s unwelcoming ears like an old guy on a Harley.

“Asshole,” Carl muttered, cracking an eye.

 It was Monday, the day after Rita’s cleaning day.

Three days a week, Maria cleaned his house, which was three rooms in a concrete shell on the edge of the sandy bay known as Boca de Tomatlan. Maria washed his dishes, cleaned his clothes and dumped the trash, consisting mostly of tequila bottles and used toilet paper that would block up his drains otherwise. But Maria wouldn’t work on the Sabbath, so Rita came on Sundays.

As it evolved, Rita was happier attending to Carl’s sexual needs than keeping house, which suited him just fine. In her 40s, Rita wasn’t a handsome woman, but she was sweet and passionate and undemanding. After a late encounter with Rita and a little too much tequila, Carl would have preferred to sleep late on Monday.

Carl sat up, pulled on some baggy linen lounge pants and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and walked outside to piss off the terrace. On his way, he threw a flipflop at the damn rooster. He could get a shower later.

As he tied the drawstring on his pants, Carl heard footsteps on the sandy path that served as the road past his door.

“Hey, neighbor.” Howard was a fellow gringo who stayed in Boca about half of the year. Howard had the irritating habit of taking healthy early morning walks when an expat ought to be nursing a hangover.

“Let’s go get some coffee,” Howard suggested.

Carl fetched his flipflop, grabbed his wallet off the table that tripled as bedstand and kitchen counter, and joined Howard on the trail. They walked the quarter mile to a beachside café, pushing through palm fronds along the way.

Howard, neat in a blue polo shirt, white shorts and huaraches, contrasted with his breakfast buddy. He was glad to mix with the laid-back, hard-drinking expat crowd when he was on vacation, but was still the respectable businessman, owner of a tour bus line in Anchorage.

After a career in a white-collar job, Carl had said to hell with grooming and went about with wild hair and beard stubble. At 65, he looked like a homeless guy in paradise.

Howard, not quite 60, liked that about Carl; one needs colorful characters around to keep life interesting.

Carl’s transition to Jimmy Buffet caricature had been abrupt.

He’d played by the rules all his life. He’d married his college sweetheart, raised three normal kids, worked hard and rose in the ranks from cold-call salesman to regional manager. He was doing so well that he felt entitled to a little action on the side with a new hire in sales, and then another and another. When his office flings came to the attention of his boss, his career ended. At 62, he found himself jobless and divorced. He gave up the house and savings to his ex, applied for reduced Social Security and began to look for somewhere cheap and warm to drop out and, he hoped, host his children now and then. The solution was Boca de Tomatlan.

“Have you had the huevos rancheros here?” Howard asked as they settled into plastic Corona chairs at a plastic beachside table. “They use roasted chilies. Excellent.”

“I’ll probably just stick with coffee. And maybe some hair of the mezcal dog.

“Just kidding,” Carl added quickly. He liked his booze, but he drew the line at drinking before noon.

The huge cups of sweet, chocolatey coffee went down well as the two watched the narrow-hulled wooden palapas come and go from the bay, delivering everything from tourists to bags of cement. The morning was heating fast, paced by the increasing hum of cicadas from the palms and banana trees beyond the beach.

“This guy told me yesterday that he saw the flash,” Howard said.

Neither Carl nor Howard had ever seen the green flash, a blast of light that is said to be emitted the moment that the sun sets into the ocean. Everyone talked about it, but nobody seemed to have witnessed it. They regarded it as a tall tale told to rubes.

"Bullshit," Carl said. "Some tourist trying to fit in."

"No. This guy’s an expat, here all year. A friend of CIA Bill.”

If you believed all the expats who claim to have worked for the CIA or DEA, Carl thought, three quarters of everyone feeding at the public trough back home snoops on us and then retires to Mexico. It makes a better story than saying you sold life insurance. He liked to tell people he was a retired gigolo.

“So where did he see the flash?” Carl asked, indulging the impossibility.

“From the balcony of the Sea Monkey on Los Muertos Beach.”

“No such thing as a green flash,” Carl insisted.

“No, really. I looked it up. Photos and all. It happens when weather conditions are just right.”

“Or you’re extra drunk.”

“Maybe that, too. Seems the light from the setting sun can interact with some people’s retina to let them see the flash when others don’t. Not sure if a few drinks help.”

“I’ll watch for it tonight” Carl said. “Maybe sober, maybe not.”

Back home, Carl tried to nap but kept thinking about the green flash. He liked to think that the impossible was possible, that what he assumed to be a myth was real and beautiful.

His life was populated with the impossible. Impossible to return for good to the States, with football and cookouts and good pizza. Impossible to share confidences again with his wife, who moved on and married a family friend. Most of all, impossible to share the lives of his grown children, who blamed him for their family’s destruction.

He had written to each of the kids, two who were now parents themselves, apologizing and begging their forgiveness. He invited them to visit, to see he hadn’t sunk too far to still be a father and grandfather. None responded, so he gave up hope.

He especially missed his youngest, his daughter Erin. She was still in college when he left, embracing life and love, and a joy to be around. She had met a guy she thought would be her lover forever. She was crushed when her father ended his own forever love.

When it all became too painful to ponder, he would open a beer and go fishing.

“Noon oh one,” Carl said to himself as he reached for a Pacifico in his rusty mini-fridge. He wasn’t sure how Boca got electrical service, especially out to his place, when the only road is a dirt footpath. But he got mostly consistent power, and he was glad of it. Warm beer is so uncivilized.

Grabbing his fishing pole, he headed down the narrow jungly path to the rocky end of the beach near his house. He baited his hook with the head of the snapper he cooked last night and cast it into the surf. Sitting on a rock and squinting into the sun, he imagined the miraculous green flash it held – or didn’t.

As he waited to catch dinner, he watched the horizon. No green flash yet, but twice he saw the spouts and waving flukes of passing whales, tourists here to bear their calves before the long swim back to Alaska. That in itself seemed a miracle. Fishing boats began heading back to port as the sun shifted lower into the west. Maybe tonight he would watch for the green flash. Carl landed a snapper just before giving up and headed back to the house. Filleted and cut into strips, it would make fine tacos tonight with the serranos, onions and tortillas he’d bought in town this morning. There was plenty to share with Maria for lunch tomorrow.

As the fish sizzled over the propane stove, he heard footsteps on the darkening path. Probably Howard stumbling home after drinks and cards at the café with fellow gringos.

“Daddy?”

The voice must be a hallucination. It sounded like his daughter.

“Daddy? Can you stand company?”

The young backpacker, with long dark braids, gauzy blouse and shorts, stepped from the trail’s shadows to the dim light of his terrace.

“Erin? I can’t believe it. What are you doing here?”

“Came in on the chicken bus,” she said through an easy smile.

“It’s time to know my father again. I missed you. I missed all of us. I’m sorry it took so long to figure that out.”

She paused. A moment of discomfort crossed her face.

“Jason and I broke up. I realize now that staying in love takes a lot of work. I judged you too hard.

“But you ARE still a rat,” she teased.

She was a vision of beauty, a piece of his heart he never expected to see again.

Tearing up, she reached for him. Carl pulled her to a hug, burying his face in her shoulder.

Squinting through his own tears, he saw the fading light of the sun shine through her emerald earring.

“The green flash,” he said.