I stopped back in the bar on my way to my cabina like I hadn’t just seen that crazy shit with the hammerhead. Milton went in the other direction to his house. There was no one in the bar except the bartendress. Not Tweety. I drank my last beer at 2 a.m. then walked past the soccer field (I’m not scared there anymore) back to my cabina.

With drink and sun, there’s no problem collapsing to sleep. I did that. But in the 30 seconds between the collapse and the sleep, I wondered what time it was, exactly, and so I rose and turned on the lights and searched for my wristwatch (which works, as long as I don’t take it outside of the room, into the humidity). My wristwatch said 9:20 p.m. was the truth.

I go to sleep around the same time every night. And I wake near 9 a.m. Had I slept till 9 a.m. this morning, it would have been my fourth night with 14 hours sleep. And there are naps every hot afternoon. But after three days like that, you get one sleepless night, or sleep gorged night where you couldn’t take another wink so you have to wait for the sun, when your surroundings will get going along with you. But this morning I woke up early to catch the, "Something fucked up," Milton had offered to show me if I made it out to the pier "early in the mornin’". I left my cabina at 6 a.m.

The lady who owns the cabina stopped me on my way out. We spoke in Spanish and I think she asked me, "Why don’t you go live on a farm while you’re here in Costa Rica?" I didn’t have an answer for her.

By 6:15 a.m. my feet had taken me to the pier. I waited again but not like waiting for lazy white girls; I waited a happy half hour before the first wave of daytime restlessness. The tide was low. It is always low here, except at night. At night the water spreads out when the gulf fills up and it looks like a real beach, mountains in the background beautiful, but by morning it all hides again. Sand flats for miles. You walk to the other side of the gulf during the daylight.

The flats are scattered with 15 to 20-foot boats that the Ticos leave to the mercy of the tides; when the tide goes out the boats are dry-docked, dumb on their bellies in the ugly mud, like now.

Waiting for Milton, I walked between the boats, waiting to be shown something fucked up. Then I remembered his crab trap tied at the pier, something fucked up, so I headed back, hoping to catch a peak of it before he showed up. I didn’t think he’d show it to me if I asked.

On my way back to the pier I found another cow’s jawbone full of teeth in the water. It is the third one I’ve found and now I don’t think I should swim here. The water can’t be healthy. The low tide gulf stinks like a diaper and the water is the hottest I’ve ever felt and even though it’s still so interesting to look at, I think of rotted meat diseases leaking into my orifices as I loll in the urine-water drinking Rum and Coke in cans.

The steaming stink was strong as I came around the nose of one boat and lying there was the long, stripped hammerhead carcass from last night, white-washed flesh blended into the gulf’s rich stew. It had washed in last night and I wondered if this were the fucked up thing Milton planned to show me. The shark, from head, down the meatless spine, to its elegant tail, was another boat stranded in the mud and dark sand around it, though it would stand out from the other vessels when the 100 degree noon comes. There were already flies.

When I returned to the pier I found the yellow tie line of the trap and reeled it in. I expected color, but the trap came up a black shadow through layers of light blue morning saltwater. A little closer and there were silver twinkles. And then some solid white. When I cranked up the last several feet of line and my arm hurt and the trap emerged, that was it: black and white. It was stuffed square to capacity as it had been the last murderous time, but the sea life lacked primary colors; only black and white fish: sheepsheads, angel fish, spotted rays, and still those little glass octopus. Trying not to think about it, I pushed the trap over the plank board pier with my shoe, into the blue, when I saw Milton far away on the sidewalk curving toward me around the outskirts of the beach.

There is always so much bird chatter here that bird chatter and even screams become silence. In the silence I heard Milton’s buckets banging as walked up to meet me. When he was close I saw he had four buckets. He drawled, "Man, I was so fucked up I forgot I invited you last night."

"So are you not gonna show me something fucked up?"

"It’s not really fucked up," He retracted. "But it’s neat if you never seen it before."

I took two of his four mop buckets for him. He turned in the opposite direction and I followed him. He was wearing a plain white shirt and light orange curls crept down like vines over the skin burns of his neck. He pointed a long arm wrapped in freckled leather to the shark carcass out among the boats and said, "They’re gonna smell that come noon."

I laughed hard even though I’d thought the same thing earlier. We walked over the little bridge, past the tiny one-room house where the traveling white girls stay, past Alana’s house, aimed at the mangroves where I go to hide and smoke. As we entered the twisted cave of trees I asked Milton, "Do you want to get high?"

"No, man, I get too crazy." He said, still walking, but looking at me over his right shoulder as he talked, exposing the silouhette of a round, dime-sized sun scab. He said, "You don’t freak out like I do when you get high. That shit last night…it was fun and funny but…I need to shut up."

I couldn’t believe he was giving so many words though he wasn’t stoned. I lit and smoked. We walked through the mangroves. During my regular walks into there, I stop at a prescribed point, the spot where I saw those paw prints, and I turn around and head back. I followed Milton past the mark and went further in than I had yet been and there was a mysterious smell of burning hair and I never found out why. When I asked about it Milton said, "I don’t know."

Not too far past my marker of return, the mangroves opened out into a stream or small river that turned sharp left. The land was crooked and strange, waves of dirt with hooked crests, form fit like tupperwear for crocodiles to stuff and hide their rotting leftovers. There were definitely snakes. As we walked, Milton picked up dirt colored sea shells with the snotty animals moving inside them, twisting out to see what was happening to them as Milton set them in his bucket. I noticed a few shells myself on the way out and picked them up and put them in my bucket.

When we stopped, one of his buckets was full as well as half of one of mine. The shells crawling over each other in the buckets sounded like a sink full of china dishes. Milton hadn’t explained anything to me. He continued not to, but soon pointed down at a hole in the mud then sat down on his muddy ass with his legs splayed out on either side of the hole. From behind his back he pulled two spades which I hadn’t seen despite following behind him until now. Like salad forks, or baby tongs, or the jaws of life, he dove the spades into the mud in tandem and with a sound like a giant swallow in your own throat, he sucked them out and tossed a cylinder of mud to the side, and dove the tongs back in, tossed the dirt aside. The forth time, he lay his spades aside, and sifted through the forth load of mud, though there wasn’t much mud in the forth load, just a white monster; a foot-long, albino horse cock, held on either side by a small set of thin, white parakeet wings. It was some sort of clam with a mouthful that those little wings could never wrap around or protect; three times as much meat as container. Never a more helpless creature. Mother nature had given it the wrong glass slipper.

"They’re called Paper Clams and they hide way down in the mud because they’re really fragile man, and actually," He held the white clam burger up and said, "I fucking cracked this diggin it up so it’s worthless now." He dropped it onto the soft mud and I heard it crack again. He stood and moved to a new hole and sat down in the mud and inserted the spades. I followed him, after nudging the cracked paper clam into the hole with my shoe and kicking the forth load of mud on top.

When he’d extracted a "complete pair" from the mud he told me, "These are the last white shells around here besides the few Junonias. They have Paper Clams in Florida too, so I can find em here and sell them to Florida shell shops."

"Why don’t you sell them here?" I asked.

"Oh, hell no." He layed the successful Paper Clam in the bucket and stood up to find and conquer a new hole. He continued, "It’s not illegal or nothin but if anyone around here, especially all the monkey toenail clippin white kids, they bitch about it. So, I just sell to Florida. Or on the internet."

I told him, "Yeah, I saw a Junonia at Angelica’s bar."

"Where?"

"Outside the bathroom; it was a soap dish. Is that what people use them for after you murder the ocean to get them?"

"No, rednecks would use them as a soapdish." He said. "They’re for show, display; you put them on a shelf with a nice lamp. In Florida, they’re rare, so if you have one there, you can lie to people and say you found it yerself and you’re hot shit then." He stopped digging and said, "This is too much work." He was really sweating and he’d recovered five complete pairs of paper clams. "My momma would sit out here and dig em up until a crocodile chased her out." Milton said. I couldn’t tell if he sounded proud. "But I’m quitting now."

"So there are crocs back here then?" I asked him.

"I don’t know." He said, just like Alana.

On the way walking back we collected more brown shells. Lightening Whelks, several as big as Easter hams. Milton continued to walk past the first pier, then he took a right into the jungle. I continued following him, assuming we were headed to his house and curious to see what it was like, to see his typewriter, if he had his books laying around, his journal out.

Not too deep in was a yard full of walls with no roof. It was a gray space. Concrete. A jail cell with freedom. Between the walls was a stove, a sink, a hammock and a dozen silver buckets which he loaded with small shells, placing and arranging the shells for the sake of economy, like a Publix bag boy, and then filled the buckets with fresh water.

The sinks and stove were painted light, teal green, but still looked gray. He lit the stove with a match and it came on orange. He set three pots of water (the forth burner didn’t work he said) to boil. He still explained nothing to me. I asked him if we were allowed to smoke inside. I meant it as a joke but he stopped and was quiet for a minute and then said, "I guess. I’d rather you not."

So I smoked more pot, then his house didn’t seem as strange. We waited for the water to boil and when tiny hot bubbles appeared, he talked.

"I have to save the big ones for last," He said, pointing at the giant Whelks still in the buckets on the floor. The snails inside were as big as fists and they were wilting down the sides of their shells. "Those take up one whole pot a piece sometimes." He said. "I get all the small ones out of the way first." Then he was quiet again for a long time.

Then there was steam and the muscles slammed their shells around the inside of the boiling pots under thick clouds of green smog, a salty dead sea smoke; if there were a roof, we would have choked. But even the freestanding walls trapped the air unbearable enough to force us ‘outside.’ We went out the back and around one wall and there were five white, plastic buckets. I leaned over them; more sea shells. I asked because he wouldn’t volunteer, "What are these doing here?"

"Well, after you get the animal out, you have to soak them in bleach, so they don’t stink. And then the barnacles get soft too and you chip them off and they’re clean and ready to be sold in Florida."

"Or on the internet." I added. I’d meant to throw it back at him; peddling flesh on the cold wasteland of the internet, but he didn’t catch it, or he didn’t care. He just said, "Yeah, some on the internet."

When we went back inside the walls the smaller shells were done boiling. The water was viscous and green. He reached into it and plucked them from the water with cooking tongs and set them steaming on the cement floor, added more water to the pots on the stove, then filled them with the ham-sized Lightening Whelks. When the big ones were set to boil, he turned and sat down with the smaller shells on the floor.

The slick bodies were lifeless and abundant, hanging limp from their shells, dramatic like Shakespeare intended. Milton had a pen knife and he stuck the sharp tip into the muscles and eased the boiled body out. They came in a grey-black-brown curly-cues; meat like cork screws to match the shape of the inside of the shell.

He volunteered one lesson as her performed the delicate operation, he said, "The meat is really soft after you boil it and sometimes when you’re pulling it out, the end piece will break off in there, and then you have to soak the shell in bleach for an extra three weeks to rot out the meat. It’s a hassle. Usually, if that happens, I just throw it away. It’s only 35 cents down the drain."

"35 cents!" I exclaimed.

"Yeah, for Lightening Whelks, that’s why I have to take so many. They only go for 27 cents apiece on the innernet, that’s another reason I don’t like the innernet as much. But for Junonias I’ll get like $7 a piece. About the same on the innernet. But then they turn around and sell em for 30 bucks."

Eventually the big ones were boiling and the stench was bad again, the green steam came and the novelty of it all was turning to vague guilt and before I could even, "Take a look at one of these big huge dead snails when I pull it out," I went outside to smoke again and get fresh air.

My chest hurt as I puffed on my last pre-rolled joint. Milton’s head came around the corner like I was caught by the high-school principal. He asked, "Do you always have to be smoking that shit? Especially around my house."

I wanted to leave anyway, so instead of making fun of his lack of a house I said, "I’ll remember you said that next time there’s a weed shortage in the village. I’ll see you tomorrow probably."

"You’re not going to the bar tonight?" He asked. "Tweety likes you."

"But if I did that, everyone would know and Alana would find out and that’d be dumb."