“Don't count on it,” Bloor muttered. They grinned nervously and sped off down the frontera on their tiny Hondas. We were left alone at the big round table, sipping margaritas and staring out at the sunset over the Yucatan Peninsula, 12 miles across the channel. After a few long moments of silence, Bloor reached into his pocket and came up with a hollowed-out glass eye he had bought from one of the street peddlers. There was a silver cap on the back and he flipped it up, then jammed the straw from his margarita into the hole and snorted heavily before handing it over to me. “Here,” he said. “Try some of Frank's best.”

The waiter was hovering over us, but I ignored him -- until I realized I was having problems, then I looked up from the eyeball in my hand and asked for two more drinks and a dry straw. “ÀComo no?” he hissed, moving quickly away from the table.

“This thing's all jammed up from the moisture,” I said to Bloor, showing him the powder-packed straw. “We'll have to slice it open.”

“Never mind,” he said. “There's plenty more where that came from.”

I nodded, accepting a fresh drink and about six dry straws from the waiter. “You notice how fast our friends left,” I said, bearing down on the eyeball again. “I suspect they believed all that gibberish.”

He sipped his own new drink and stared at the glass eye in my hand. “Why shouldn't they?” he mumbled. “I'm beginning to believe it myself.”

I felt a great numbness in the back of my mouth and my throat as I snapped the cap shut and handed the eyeball back to him. “Don't worry,” I said. “We're professionals -- keep that in mind.”

“I am,” he said. “But I'm afraid they might figure that out.”

It was late Saturday night, as I recall, when we learned that Frank Oliver had officially won the tournament -- by one fish, ahead of the balls-out poor-boy crew on Lucky Striker. I wrote this down in my notebook as we roamed round the dock where the boats were tied up. Nobody urged us to come aboard for “a friendly drink” -- as I heard some of the anglers put it to others on the dock -- and, in fact, there were only a few people who spoke to us at all. Frank and his friend were sipping beers at the open-air bar nearby, but his kind of hospitality was not in tune with this scene. Jack Daniels and heavy petting on the foredeck is about as heavy as the Striker crowd gets. . . and after a week of mounting isolation from this scene I was supposed to be “covering,” I was hung on the dark and ugly truth that “my story” was fucked. Not only did the boat people view me with gross disapproval but most of them no longer even believed I was working for P layboy . All they knew, for sure, was that there was something very strange and off-center, to say the least, about me and all my “assistants.”