Punta Cana

I left a purple towel over the back of the wicker cabana chair and the cold cup of beer on the bar and slipped over along the left side of the hut where the resort boys were handling the towels and cutting coconuts with machetes long enough to take down a tree. The path along the back wasn't really a path so I had to bob and weave under the low hanging palm trees, which they didn't make dull either. I could hear Miguel and a newcomer shooting the breeze in Spanish, maybe something about the two maids walking by on the sidewalk minding their own business. I tapped him on the shoulder nice and soft. He didn't expect that. "Hola Miguel, now let me introduce myself. My name Jay Kane and I come from the states. Way up there at top, where it's far too cold come January and so we all bunch in our planes and make the flight so we can sit inside a blue sky for awhile and mind our own business. Why the tail?" Miguel was far more cheery looking in person than he had been afar. He feigned a lack of language in the beginning, but quickly snapped out of it. "Oh, Hola, yes, a tail you call it. Do you mean why am here at the resort? This is my job, I am a personal concierge, for your family." It was a fine try, really. "We already have one of those, her name is Sabrina, and my kids like her a bunch." Miguel wasn't sure what to do with that, so he made a quick gesture over to his friend, a long, more slender kid, with a strong mane of black hair, perfect teeth, but a different uniform than Miguel. He poked in the conversation with a little more gusto than Miguel. There was a chain of command that was slowly revealing itself in this play and I wondered just how far up it all stopped. "Mr. Cisnero runs the casino here on the grounds. You have seen it, yes?" Now the pawn pieces were beginning to line up on their squares nicely. "Sure, sure, we walk by it every night on the way to ice cream. I tried to stop the next chess piece before it could be picked up. "Please kindly let Mr. Cisneros that this is vacation with children. No funny stuff. When you are on a foreign island it means your off duty, for real. "Mr. Cisneros is very willing to make sure you never see your hotel bill, if that helps," said the tall one, no smile this time, just two serious eyes and a little chess piece in the voice. The hotel would set us back far more than I would have ever anticipated, that I could concede. "Let's take a short walk down along the sunny beach so I can keep a look out alright?" Hundreds more people had filtered down to the soft shores in the just the last half hour. Rocking catamarans scooted across the horizon. Tall white sails like swords cut through the scene and long fishing boats bobbed at the surf. The three girls were all knee deep water timing the crashing waves to ride them in face first. "So boys, there is my job right now, three of them bobbing in the water, having a gay time. That's it. "As much as I have enjoyed meeting you both, I assume I won't be seeing you again. Adios." I took a seat up along a small beach ridge that carried bunches of kelp, warmed up a little, then ran as fast as I could into the warm water and caught a wave.