“I expect it’ll hurt pretty bad,” he said.
Portis took a drink of the whiskey and then offered me the bottle. I refused, but not because I’m a martyr, or some anti-liquor crusader. I would have drunk the hell out of some wine coolers or peppermint schnapps, anything to dull the pain or distract me, but whiskey makes me puking sick and I wasn’t ready to introduce that specter to the situation.
Portis reached out to help me stand, then slid the pot in front of me.
“When you step in,” he said. “Don’t thrash around and go ass over elbows. If this water dumps, we got to start all over and do it a second time.”
“I’m going to try not to scream,” I said.
“It don’t matter if you do or you don’t. Just don’t wiggle.”
“I don’t want to wake Jenna. She’ll be frightened.”
“Okay,” Portis said. “But you scream out if you need to. Jenna will be fine.”
“Goddamn it,” I said.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to do this.”
“You’ll do it just like Jenna did her diaper. You’ll get through what you need to get through.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t have on better socks.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t say nothing.”
“I didn’t want to slow us down.”
“That was a stupid thing to think.”
“I don’t want you taking the sock from Jenna.”
“I got some spare wool socks right over there in a crate,” Portis said. “We’ll get you and Jenna both squared away.”
“All right,” I said.
“Before we get started,” he said. “I thought I’d share something with you.”
“Share something?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You see, this whole situation reminds me of something that happened once down in old Mex-ee-co.”
I looked down at Portis but he had already lunged at my right ankle and lifted it without warning. I almost fell backward but he took me by the front of my shirt as he plunged my foot into the pot. The air froze in my lungs and I lurched forward as he pushed my left foot in beside the right. I grabbed his shoulder and screamed.
Portis held both my ankles sturdy. He grunted and cursed the burning himself, but did not so much as flinch. I tried to move but I might as well have been roped to concrete blocks. I couldn’t quite believe how badly it hurt.
Portis was saying something about Mexico. I could barely hear him, but I focused on the sound of his voice and tried to listen through the pain and my own cries.
“I was a young man then,” he said. “Full of wanderlust. I had drifted deep into the heart of the country, the real Mexico, which ain’t what it looks like on the postcards.”
Portis was breathing hard through his nose. I knew that water was burning him something terrible. I was sure some had leaked inside his gloves and pooled there, but he kept his grip steady and went right on talking.
“It ain’t no Jimmy Buffett song down there,” he said. “I can tell you that much right now. There’s no fishbowl margaritas or Se?or Frog T-shirts. This was the real Mexico, a place of dust and brown water. There was heat and violence and snakes and coyotes. It is a hard place full of hard people and I was on the trail of Montezuma’s gold.”
There were tears streaming down my face and I was shaking from my middle, from some deep and usually still place that had been dug up in the pain. Maybe it was the same place Jenna had cried from just a little while before, and the thought of her strength helped me as I closed my eyes and told myself to focus on Portis’s fool story.
“I was traveling with another gringo,” he said. “Name of Henderson. He was an expat, a paramilitary type who’d done dirty work for Reagan in the Sandinistas. Somewhere along the line he read some Carlos Castaneda and discovered peyote. He met a village girl, became a pacifist, and eventually renounced the United States as imperialist aggressors.
“Henderson had been searching treasure for near a decade, but mostly what he did was smoke peyote. I smoked some with him, somehow got separated, and woke up several days later on top of a dirt mountain. I was naked and deep fried to a crisp.
“Who knows how I got up there on that crested plane? Who knows why I was unclothed? I was looking for gold, and Mexico is a land of many mysteries. But there I was. Passed out for hours, maybe days.
“Now, that was a burn, Percy James. Put your little toes here to shame. I’m here to tell you, I had welts and yellow pus all over me. I looked like the damn elephant man. I twitched and I shook. I had an erection that could not be reasoned with.”
I sputtered out something that was both a laugh and a cry and he kept on.
“I walked for half a day, barefoot on burning sand. I was cherry red and sailing at full mast. Lord God, was I a sight. Finally, I arrived at a village and was taken in by a kind family, who I believe to this day I owe my life.