Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst

Author:Doug Dorst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

The white sand is still warm from the afternoon sun, and Reyna carves trails in it with her bare feet, enjoying the feel of the fine grains against her soles, between her toes. She doesn’t dig her feet in, because the sand underneath is cold; it’s winter here, and even though the temperature must’ve hit seventy-five today, there’s something delicate about the warmth, something insubstantial, it doesn’t have the heavy crush of summer heat. She’s sitting in a nylon-backed collapsible camping chair that Bobby stole out of the back of a VW bus full of college girls from Irvine. If you take what you like, then you have what you like, Bobby says, every time they swipe something good.

The college girls are gone now, with their chatters and shrieks and their coconut rum and their squeaky nylon athletic shorts, and the crescent-shaped beach is quiet. Apart from Reyna and Bobby, there’s just a gray-haired hippie couple with twin ponytails and matching balloony Guatemalan knit pants, and a shark-eyed, greasy-looking Russian named Ilya who claims he winters here in Baja and runs drugs up to Alaska in the spring and summer but who seems like the kind of guy who’s full of lies and boasts and bullshit. They’ve spaced themselves evenly around the wide swing of shore: the hippies at the north end, Reyna and Bobby at the south, Ilya in between. Bobby’s over talking to Ilya right now, probably checking into whether the Russian is holding.

Thirty pesos for a night on the beach under one of the thatched huts. Thirty pesos for paradise. A full moon on the rise in the new dusk. A cold can of Azteca in her hand, and she’s superdreamyhigh because she and Bobby just shared a ball of oily black hash that they picked up in Tijuana. A breeze that’s stroking her scalp and keeping the bugs away too. A bird in the reeds behind the beach—at least, she thinks it’s a bird—makes a funny gulping noise that makes the whole world absurdly alive. Ga-gulmmm, ga-gulmmm, ga-gulmmm.

They’re on Playa Coyote, near a town called Mulegé. They’re a long way from San Francisco, two full days on the road due south. Nobody’s expecting her anywhere, because she told her housemates she was taking off for a couple of weeks, and she quit her waitressing job from a pay phone in Kettleman City. She learned early on that you’d better have fun while you’re young, because she doesn’t know a single adult who’s happy. Not her dad, coming home late every night for a dinner of scotch and Ativan. Not her mom, erratic and bitter and fond of throwing things. As soon as she left home, they split up. They should’ve done it a long time before.

Reyna sips her beer, feels warmth prickling her skin down her arms, down her legs, around her ears. She may be just as fucked up as her mom, but at least she has the good sense to be fucked up on

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