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His arms were that orange-tan of 1950s motel seat covers and so favored by orthopedic manufacturers, complete with complicated wires and belts and metal parts from shoulders to hooks. The hooks themselves were shiny, and real mean looking.

They say that Fred had been picking up trophies in Vietnam.

This is the second in a series of dispatches from our correspondent in coastal Mexico. Read the previous article in the series, "Lust and bullets at Rumba Beach."

By late in the afternoon, every afternoon, Fred would be blind drunk, catcalling the women, offering to fight any man. Sooner or later -- mostly later -- he would pass out, pissing himself in front of the market or on the beach. Most of the Mexicans saw his rants as those of just another noisy, boiled-out gringo, of which we have so many here. For even in the year 2000, you can get a shot of mescal in the local grog shops for a dime and a liter of 111-proof "alcohol puro" in the grocery store for a couple of bucks. (In other words, despite the North American Free Trade Agreement, for some Americans, we are still living under the volcano.)

Every few years, the Friends of Puerto Perdido, a local bunch of do-gooder gringos, would take up a collection to ship Fred off to the veterans hospital in San Antonio to dry out. He would curse them roundly, but they managed to catch him when he was badly hung over, and he would surrender. For a few weeks, he'd be gone, but sooner or later he'd make his way back and start in again, pissing himself in the town square, offering to fight any man in the world, howling at the ladies under the moonlight.

One evening, after being bathed in vast quantities of whiskey, tequila, mescal and other local poisons for so long, Fred's liver gave up the ghost. They found him the next day, hooks and all, on the beach at Cipolete. At first they thought he had passed out yet again, so they didn't bother with him, but after the second day, when he began to swell up, it was decided that Fred had achieved the final state of drunken grace. They boxed him up and bought him a plane ticket to the border.

Getting corpses into the United States is usually difficult. Some people -- or what's left of them -- have to wait in the icebox in the general hospital of Juárez for months, but the veterans affairs office in San Antonio decided ahead of time that Fred was one of them, so they agreed to issue the government permit for him to pass. In Puerto Perdido, they said it would be Fred's first (and last) time crossing over completely sober.

Unfortunately, the Friends of Puerto Perdido booked him on a Taesa night flight via Mazatlán that went down in the Sierras just before it landed. The ground crew blamed the pilots, the pilots blamed Taesa, Taesa blamed the weather and all blamed the divine. Fred, as far as we know, was not implicated.

Since everyone on the flight died, my friend Tommie wants to know if that means that Fred came back to life on impact, and whether he will soon be back here to bother us again. Tom also swears (and he swears he never lies) that Fred's last name was Hook. This I never heard before, but at this stage, after his double death, I'm willing to accept anything having to do with this guy. So now when we talk about him -- our hometown hero who died in wet, pestiferous combat on the beaches of Puerto Perdido -- we refer to him as "Captain Hook."

Fred wasn't the only one done in on that flight. As with all Mexican airlines that blow it, Taesa was put out of business by the regulatory authorities. But it being Mexico, and with a hefty mordida, I suspect it will rise again, to scare the daylights out of us yet again.

Hook? I'm sure he, too, after the required 49 days of drying out in the bardo, will reappear to bother us with his rants and catcalls, to pass out on the streets, to puzzle the tourists, to cause the Mexicans to sigh with wonder.

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Going buggy with machetes

There is a chain of interdependence among families here: mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, aunts, uncles and cousins. In the United States we call it a "support system," but it seems to me to be a network of related people who can't stand one another and yet put up with one another.

They need one another, but they never forget a wrong. They sport an antipathy toward family and friends that is born, I suppose, of the sun, the unyielding sea and the bleak, selfish earth of Puerto Perdido. It's a rage that stays submerged until the dry season, when the heat and the myriad crawling creatures rise up and drive everyone bonkers.

The uncles and cousins and fathers and sons, laughing and drinking in the cantinas, will, out of the blue, unsheath their machetes and go at each other. It must be the sun beating down on the dust of the ravaged land (and on their heads). Maybe it's the seven varieties of snakes they must contend with or maybe it's the hundreds of biting and stinging insects: malarial mosquitoes, wood beetles and avejones (fat black flying buzzy monsters that when they nip you cause you, it is said, to swell up like a balloon and lose your voice for exactly 10 minutes).

There are scorpions that like to nest in your shoes while you are sleeping, tarantulas that seem to enjoy marching down the highway so that we can squash them under the tires. There are wasps, killer bees and the borregito -- a brown worm that nests in saplings and, when you brush against it, falls onto your head to sting you horribly for disturbing its sleep.

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