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I'd been in Mazatlan four days and hadn't had my mask on once. I'd walked along the Paseos, looking down at the snarling surf, and I wanted in. There is no safe place to leave anything, so I just walked out to the Mirador from my hotel, barefoot and carrying my gear. After some reconnoitering, I found a childishly easy entry, right at the feet of the huge, busty mermaid hugging the little human kid. El Monumento de mis wildo dreamos of Childhood. I even kissed her nipple on my way by. Some tourists scowled, but a gaggle of giggling Japanese girls took pictures. Below her tail is a calm pool that leads around a turn or two out into a finger of water between two slabs of rocks, pointed right into the surf like a cannon. Therefore, not amazingly, full of some extremely active water with all the limpid clarity or a shaken-up Pepsi. I figured the first twenty yards would be about par for the "stern and rockbound coast" course, pure soda pop and a lot of projections from the bottom and sides. Swimming by braille.
The weird part would come after I got out of the tube, because there was really big stuff slamming in out there, and no shape at all--the random fractal massage made familiar by the Maytag. But it didn't look all that bad, another thirty feet and I'd be into green water and able to start heading around the Plaza and Mirador. Which is the way it went, bump and run, but no blood. I was just breaking out into visibility, already thinking about those arches around the corner, when I looked to my left and there was this eye looking at me, almost as big as my own. I just about defibrillated right on the spot.
But not to worry, it was just a barracuda. A barracuda about five feet long, big around as a young telephone pole. Well, I'd never even seen one before. I thought they were an Atlantic thing, actually, and a lot smaller. Weird cars and Heart album stuff, nothing I had to worry about while taking an innocent swim. Not so, apparently. Here he was, just hanging there giving me a scornful smirk and a very hairy eyeball.
I have looked into the eyes of some strange sea creatures around Mazatlan. A giant squid comes to mind. There aren't that many places left to catch these guys and the Japanese just love to eat them, so they're out here after them. I saw a couple at the Marina, caught by mistake by Marlin oafs and hauled in to make some Calamari Gigantesca. Giant squid are pretty odd, anyway, but their eyes are too much. Each eye looks like a human eye, but the size of a softball. They have a sort of questioning look. I don't blame them.
Moray eels have a bit of a stare, too. Very blank, totally psycho. You'd be nuts to mess with one of these things. Have you ever tried to KILL one? The only way I've ever been able to do it--and I've tried multiple blasts with paralyzer spear tips, sawing them in half with a serrated knife (hey, it was him or me that time), braining them with rocks--is to just toss them up on land and let them suffocate. Which they'd do to me in a New York second, and we both know it. Once dead, the fillets aren't bad eating. But you get eyeball to eyeball with these characters and you are not thinking about how they'd taste, I guarantee it.
I've seen some fairly big sharks around the area too, but sharks don't really have much expression. What they have, as Kevin once put it, is enthusiasm.
And what barracuda have is total disdain. In fact, why kid ourselves? Let's just call it contempt and be done with it. They are not really dangerous. In that peculiar "deadly but not dangerous" category like sea snakes. They aren't going to attack you--you're too big to eat. Oh, if you insist on trolling shiny objects in murky water, they'll strike at them. They can't help it, just like bass hitting a spoon. (I was painfully aware that I was in murky, bubbly water and was wearing a one piece stainless knife with the handle exposed on my calf. I no longer do that: painful is not the kind of awareness I appreciate.) But they look at you like a street killer in a holding cell. They aren't going to kill you and eat you right here and now, but just don't start up.
That's the message in a barracuda's eyes, as near as I can place it. I realize the sneering mouth is not really an expression, they're just drawn that way, but the eyes tell you loud and clear, "Just start something, asshole." And maybe if you aren't copping to it, they'll suddenly lash out so fast you don't really see them accelerate and snap at something, raking a mouthful of sharp, narrow, backset teeth across your nerves. And give you that deathrow stare.
When I left the water, I walked back to my hotel by a different route, and along the rocky shoals by the Marine House, I saw three more Hemi-cudas dead on the beach. All of them four feet or longer and bigger around than my thighs. Over the next month I ate barracuda three separate times at beach fishbakes with the lunatic hippies over on Isla de la Piedra. So who's more dangerous to whom, huhm? They look into our eyes and see these soft, caring wienies: big and puffy, but no moves, no muscle, no speed, and no teeth to speak of. And we kill them eat them, right on the spot. Not dangerous, but deadly.
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