Two
Clarity invited Jenna to a Piña Acuatica and teased Mr. LT about his standard flirting speech on single women, which worked ninety nine percent of the time according to the bartender. The remaining one percent of the women weren´t single, he said. She decided to sit in a lounge chair with Jenna and the girls to see the cocktail preparation contest, as the ship finished docking in the Acapulco harbour. The City of Wellington would stay docked in the Mexican seaport for a few hours, until it refuelled and was ready to continue its travelling journey to Costa Rica and the Panama canal. She watched Mr. LT select the two sets of contestants, those who would prepare the cocktail and those who would taste the final concoction.
She eyed the upper deck and saw a man dressed in a grey uniform with a red stripe talk with the captain. They had been warned that police officer Juarez would hop on the ship with his men to control passports and tourist visas on behalf of Mexican authorities. In preparation, Clarity and the girls had given their passports to the head of Administration, Miss Tik, a woman in her mid thirties from Acapulco who also knew a lot about yoga and spiritual practices. Clarity knew that Miss Tik was not on very good terms with Shazaiah, who had a more glamorous position on the ship as motivational coach and yoga instructor. She knew that Miss Tik wasn´t happy with her salary and that she wanted Shazaiah´s position. In fact, she had seen the head of Administration take abundant notes during Shazaiah´s advanced yoga classes, training on her own around the ship´s sun decks during her free time with the head of maintenance everyone called Cactus because he always seemed to be angry when he spoke. Cactus was originally from Acapulco and rarely spoke of his own initiative. Clarity had tried to strike a conversation with him about baseball but the only answer she had received from him was a brief “I like L.A. Dodgers only.”
Clarity moved her lounge chair closer to the cocktail table and placed her hand on her forehead to protect her eyes from the sun. She grabbed her sun glasses from her small purse and adjusted them in place. She really enjoyed the sun and was careful to apply maximum protection factor lotion to protect her skin from the always hot tropical sunshine.
The girl with auburn hair noticed an attractive passenger in swimsuit engaging in a lively talk with Mr. LT. In addition to wearing two different gold watches, one during the day and one at night, the woman had been ostentatious about her wealth to all those on the ship, and her favourite talk of conversation was asking questions to portfolio managers or bankers on the ship about possible stock market investments in hedge funds requiring a million dollars as their minimum investing amount. Nobody knew exactly how she made her money, but everybody knew that she was wealthy and that she spent a considerable amount of time in Acapulco during the year. Clarity spotted her speaking to Miss Tik several times, with whom she shared an interest in Shazaiah´s yoga classes.
Clarity and the girls had ran onto her a few times in the shuffleboard area, learning that her name was June Avenworth, and that she was single again, after a long divorce settlement with a retired bodybuilder. She knew that Ms. Avenworth had been eyeing Mr. LT from the moment the ship had left Los Angeles docks, but the bartender just wasn´t very receptive to her offers of sustaining him for the rest of his life in exchange for being her very private bartender. Ms. Avenworth had inquired sometimes for over half an hour about a particular cocktail, and everybody interpreted her interest as a strategy to woo Mr. LT.
Clarity turned on her MP3 and watched Ms. Avenworth jump up and down enthusiastically in front of Mr. LT, until the bartender had no other choice but to select her among the ten contestants.
Amused by the woman´s eagerness, Clarity watched her take her place and run quickly to the fruit repository at the end of the deck, where Mr. LT had placed all the ingredients for the cocktail to prepare, a Bandera Mexicana cocktail. The fruits in the cocktail, banana, seedless grapes and Maraschino cherries, represented the colors of the Mexican Flag, red, white and green. Ms. Avenworth was quick in cutting fruit and adding tequila, lime juice and sugar, but a professional bartender from New York who had worked at Bar 151, Bungalow 8, and Milk & Honey, won the contest, judged for both preparation speed and taste, finishing the cocktail in less than thirty seconds.
Getting up from her chair to see the contestants more closely, Clarity saw Ms. Avenworth leave the deck and head back to her cabin, disappointed by her unglamorous contest results. Less than five minutes later, she almost crushed her body into the captain´s left rib, screaming short high pitched guttural sounds, gesturing with her arms in desperation. Everybody who was enjoying their morning sun bath on the pool deck turned their heads.
“Captain, something´s wrong, very wrong, my cabin, disaster has struck…”