"Yes. But I shall turn the corner down. One of the special pages that I go back and look at sometimes. Take good care, lamb."
When she got to the door I said, "You are..."
She turned, waiting for the rest of it. "Yes?"
But how to tell her she had achieved her aim in life? And wouldn"t she be aware of it anyway? "You are completely Becky."
"Hmm. Rather nice that. Some are totally barmy. And I am completely Becky. Really no other way to say it, is there? Keep well, luv." She waggled her fingers at me, slammed the door smartly, and soon thereafter rammed the Lotus up the slope with thunderous verve.
I walked back to the cottage. Meyer said, "Would it be possible for you to stop smirking?"
"You have a foul manner today, Meyer."
"Let"s give up on the whole thing, Trav. What the h.e.l.l good are we doing? We can"t tell Harl any of this. She was on a gay adventure, full of plans and excitement and fun. Until the tragic accident. Let"s rehea.r.s.e it. I don"t want to know any more about it. I knew that girl. She was a quiet, calm, decent kid. So she tripped and fell into this d.a.m.ned septic tank, and we don"t have to follow her any further into it, do we?"
"Can I tell you one thing I want to know?"
"You get compulsive about these things."
"The sergeant found a boy who saw a man that afternoon back up in those mountains with Bix. Everything we"ve learned thus far tells us she was in no shape to drive down a six-lane highway across Kansas at high noon. But somebody let her bring a car down that mountain, or try to, at dusk. Is it any different than pushing her off a bridge? And with Harl, which would fester the longest, pure accident, self-destruction, or contrived murder? I think it"s something we ought to know before we leave this place."
I watched him work it out. Finally he grunted and rubbed his eyes.
"So, I won"t get off just yet. I"ll ride to the next stop. But I don"t think I"ll like it any better than the whole ride up till now."
Eleven.
AFTER A hotel lunch, a few miles out of the city on the Mitla road we came upon El Tule, and Meyer said that he wanted to be a tourist for a few minutes, and look at the biggest tree in the world.
It was not far from the highway, a hundred yards perhaps. It dwarfed the old church nearby. I was astonished to see how rich and vital and green it was. Seemed to be of the banyan family. Elephant-gray bark. Glossy dark leaves. There was a low iron fence all the way around it. The trunk was maybe a hundred and fifty feet in circ.u.mference. It made better than an acre of shade.
Meyer stood absolutely still, staring up into the cool green shadowy places beyond the giant lower limbs. When he turned smiling toward me, I knew that the tree had restored his nerves and composure.
"At the time of Christ," he said, "n.o.body was giving this tree a second look. It was just an ordinary little tree."
"It looks as if it has decided to stay around awhile."
"And I am going to come back here," he said, "and I am going to paint myself blue, and I am going to live up there in the top of that tree forever."
"Come on, Meyer. Ya vamonos."
The knowledge of the huge black beard on Jerome Nesta simplified the search.
"El americano con una barba negra y grande. Un escultor. "
Ah, yes. I have seen him. Yes, he goes often to the ruins. Also to the Museo de Arte Zapoteca, near the plaza and central market. No, I do not know where he lives.
We found an American student at the small museum. He was an archeology major from the University of New Mexico, an exchange student working on the continuing excavation and restoration program at the Mitla ruins. His name was Burt Koontz, and he was out in the rear courtyard, carefully washing and brushing the fragile shards of an old broken vase. He was burned to the rough red shade of roof tiles. He wore a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, and G.I. boots.
"I know Jerry. I mean as much as I guess you can get to know him. They let him come in and make sketches. He"s been sketching some of the old stone heads. I haven"t seen him around the last few days though. Maybe even a week. I couldn"t say for sure."
He told us, as he worked, that he had been curious about Nesta. He was big and he moved carefully, as if he were convalescing from a serious illness. A Mexican girl always came with him. Young, but not pretty. One of those broad, stocky ones with the same kind of Indio face you see in the old carvings. She would sit with infinite patience under one of the trees and wait for him, then get up when he came out, and follow him, a few steps behind, usually carrying one of those baskets they take to the market.
He had the impression that Nesta was living over toward the south side of town, up one of those steep dirt streets to the left of the main road as you come in.
So Meyer and I trudged up and down a lot of steep little streets, and met with varying degrees of suspicion, indifference, and secret amus.e.m.e.nt. But with the help of pesos and persistence, we finally found the place, on Calle Alivera, halfway up the hill. There was a pink house that seemed to be crumbling away. There was a walled courtyard with a broken gate. In the courtyard were mounds of litter, a couple of dozen small noisy children, and some women squatting around a pump, several of them nursing the future members of the gang.
We had a twelve-year-old businessman who led us across to a room in a far corner with a door that opened onto the roofed gallery that extended along the side of the courtyard. It was a dark little room. There was a cement and plaster fireplace-stove built into one corner. There was a raised platform along the opposite wall, where pallets could be placed for sleeping. The little room was entirely empty. I could not get it through the boy"s head that I wanted him to speak slowly and clearly. So I had to make him repeat everything over and over until I thought I had the general idea.
The wife of the Americano was Luz. They had lived here many weeks. Then they had gone away. Three days ago. Four. Maybe they were married, maybe not. It was the same. They were poor. For marriage the priests and the government charge too much money, so one waits. The Americano had little Spanish. Luz had been married to a baker and had three sons. The baker and the three sons had died of enormous pain in the belly. Luz had the pain but had not died. The Americano seemed often sick. The room was five pesos a week. Maybe the Americano had sold his... I could not understand what it was that Nesta was supposed to have sold. He said it so many times he was getting discouraged and angry before I caught on. It was a gigantic head made of wood, taller than a man. The senor worked on it each day. It was a very curious thing. It was very ugly.
As near as I could tell, the giant head had been carried away by the senor and another big Americano, with great difficulty. And the tools and the cooking pots and the clothing and the beds. They all went away in a heap-di-row. In a what? Heap-di-row. What? Heap-di-row! Again, please? Heap-dirow! Heap-di-row!
He was close to tears with frustration. So I brightened his face with pesos. Once again as we crossed the courtyard the children fell silent, stopped all movement, and stared at us. The women pulled the edges of serapes together to hide the sleepy suck of small mouths.
And then, twenty-four miles back to Oaxaca, feeling glazed and unreal. When you stack into one day the biggest oldest tree in the world, a gigantic ugly wooden head, a magical disappearance in a heap-di-row, and a page with the corner turned down in the Book of Becky, it is time to start searching the hedgerows for Alice and that well-known rabbit.
I had been counting on a therapeutic Sunday siesta, one which might have lasted right through to Monday breakfast. But when we got back to the hotel, there was a message to call Enelio Fuentes and a number where he could be reached. He was at a party at something that sounded less than interesting, called the Commercial Club. I tried to beg off but he insisted. It was atop a great big new farm equipment agency building set back off the Oaxaca Puebla highway a mile or so beyond the city limits. He had said to drive around in back and go up the stairs in back. The cars were varied and impressive, parked back there.
When we walked out onto the gigantic roof, I saw why he had insisted. That part of it was called the Beach Club. There was a gigantic swimming pool with some kind of infernal device that created pretty good waves which broke on a realistic slope of sand beach. The high wall beyond the pool was painted to resemble a seascape. There were areas of lawn, small trees, fountains, cement sculpture, big bright beach umbrellas. There were several bars, and there were waiters in red coats, and there was a good trio working hard in the waning day. There were tennis courts and badminton courts, and the whole happy busy place was aswarm with jolly tanned Mexican businessmen with the same stamp of success as Enelio, but generally smaller and heavier, and the entire scene was bubbling and dancing with platoons of the vivid young girls that Enelio variously described as either cheeklets or crumpets. There seemed to be a difference, but I could not identify it.
"Just a simple, warm, primitive people," Meyer muttered.
Enelio found us and took us to his table. He had been playing tennis. Pretty soon he would change. He recommended the tall sour rum drink he was having. He said, "An old friend, Ramon, he put up this dull building here, and one day we realize here is this h.e.l.l of a big roof, and we can have the storage floor underneath too. So we made the initiation big, and big dues, because where else can they go, and we brought down a crazy man from Mexico City, told him to go ahead, make a place to have fun. Three million pesos! By G.o.d, you find out everybody uses the club to get back the fun for the money. Hey now, over here, you pollitas. These soaking wet crumpets, they are here on vacation from Guadalajara. This one, she is Lita, short for Carmelita, and has very little English so she is with me, okay? And these two here in pink they are the sisters del Vega, the tall one Elena, the not so tall one Margarita. Darlings, this big ogly one is Senor Travis McGee, and this round hairy one is Meyer. They are my friends, so they are evil dangerous fellows, eh? Now we sit. Elena, you are to be with this McGee, and Margarita, here, dear, between me and Meyer. Now smile and greet my friends."
Elena was spectacular. "Yam ver" please to knowing you, Meester McGee," she said with a five hundred watt smile.
"You will have one little drink with us now, and then you will run away and play in the pool, while we make man talk, and we will summon you when we want you back. Waiter! And you will not make friends with any sly fellows or never, never, never again will Enelio Fuentes fly his little airplane to Guadalajara and bring you here for such a nice vacation from that insurance company office."
They had their drink and they giggled, and then they went trotting off in their little sopping bikinis back to the artificial waves breaking on the artificial beach.
So we gave Enelio the full report of our activities. Meyer and I took turns filling him in on the details. He was particularly interested in the information about the truck being seen by Mrs. Knighton, heading south on a distant road at high speed.
"Yes, it fits the time," he said. "It is taken from Bundy"s place before dawn on the fifth, that same day. Tuesday. I know those little roads. I used to hunt there. I used to kill small things in that burned country. One day I said, Who are you, Fuentes, killing things that breathe the same air, walk the same earth? What gives you the right? Who said you are more important, and other life is just for your sport? So I stopped. No matter. Those roads do not go to anyplace. Interesting. I think it would be nice, we go down there in my jeep. Not tomorrow. Some d.a.m.n engineers are coming in to spoil my day. Tuesday, eh? Maybe in the morning. I will phone to you. Now I am wondering what things can be true and maybe not so true in the story Bundy tells you. I think you were great fools to do what you did, but it worked, eh? A man like that, it is easy for him to twist things a little, change things a little, the way a woman can do."
I said, "It"s exactly the same story he told Lady Becky."
He looked puzzled. "But, my friend, I do not understand: You talked with Becky before you got all the story from Bruce."
"Well... I talked to her last night again."
"You are some kind of man to go visiting Becky again.
"Well... she visited me. By the time I got back from the hospital, she was at the cottage and Meyer was gone. Nice fellow when you get to know him, this Meyer."
He shook his head slowly and then he began to grin. "Oh boy. And how did you feel when you meet Elena, eh? Strong, young, handsome girl, eh? Look I am not the kind of man who hands you out a sure-thing cheeklet, man. Just only a nice girl who if she decides she likes you, and if you make the struggle to be nice to her, then there she is, without teasing. Oh boy. One time in California on television I saw a contest, many men at tables eating apple pies as fast as they could. An ogly scene, truly. The winner, I don"t know, eight or nine whole pies maybe. He walks careful. When he is getting the prize, the poor fellow looks sick. So here you are, McGee. You win the contest. So here I come with your prize, eh? Know what it is? Piece of apple pie. This is very, very fonny."
"Look at McGee chortling," Meyer said.
"Pretty girls are nice to be with," I said. "You are a very considerate man, Enelio. We will have drinks and we will have dinner, and they will brighten the table and the hours. And I will make excuses and slip away and you two can work things out."
"Just a minute!" Meyer said. "That girl is just a child!"
Enelio and I agreed she looked grown up. We reconfirmed the Tuesday date. Enelio went to shower and change, and when he came back the Guadalajara girls were with us, and Margarita was studying Meyer"s palm and telling his fortune, and Meyer, so help me, was blushing.
So off went the girls from Guadalajara and they came back in their vivid little shifts and high-heeled sandals and with their big handbags and funsparkle eyes, all golden sun-glowing in the blue dusk under the festive lights strung across the roofed dining areas and umbrellaed bar areas. The trio had become a quartet with the addition of a muted trumpet of great clarity and pa.s.sion, and they played a lot of Augustin Larra"s romantic ballads. Meyer was the light-footed tireless dancing bear, and Enelio Fuentes was the good and amusing host. The world of Bundy, of Rockland, of Carl"s stringless guitar, of plane tickets to Oklahoma City that Meyer had arranged in the early morning all were far from the elegant roof where they had stopped the wavemaking machine and the colors of the lights striped the still water of the giant pool.
I, too, had my fortune told. Elena studied for a long time, biting at her lip, and then looked at me, head c.o.c.ked to the side, unexpectedly solemn.
"I do not know how to say. Bad things happening. You are smile but you are sad. It is a... a evil time for you in your lifetime, Trrrravis."
Twelve.
MONDAY wws hiatus. A quiet day, useful as a compress on an ugly bruise. Meyer was up early by prearrangement and braved the traffic in our rental to go down to the Hotel Marques del Valle and pick up Lita, Elena, and Margarita, who were staying there, and take them all the way out to visit the ruins at Mitla, stopping on the way to admire, once again, the great tree in which he had vowed he would one day live.
I slept so deeply that when I awoke I had that rare and strange feeling of not only being unable to figure out where I was, or what month and year it was, but even who I was. The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, k.n.o.bbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the white tracks of scar tissue across the deepwater brown of the leathery useful body, and marveled that childhood should turn into this-into the pale-eyed, scruff-headed, bony stranger who looked so lazily competent, yet, on the inside, felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he had never lived.
After long showering, I went up the hill and sat out on the high deck of the hotel und ate enough breakfast for any three people, then sat in delightful digestive stupor, making the pots of coffee last. When I began to wonder how the waiters would.react if I went over and did a handstand on the wide cement railing, I realized that I felt very, very good indeed, felt better than I deserved to feel, felt as if I had a sudden dividend of youth, available for the misspending. Then I decided, for like the ten thousandth time, that I was one rotten contradictory fellow, that my talent of dissipation should have long since turned me into a slack, wheezing, puffy ruin, had it not been combined with that iron Calvinistic conscience which, upon noting too much progressive decay, would drive me into the kind of training the decathlon boys seem to enjoy, punishing myself back into the kind of fitness that makes you feel as if no maniac could dent you with a sledge hammer.
Meyer arrived at one-thirty with the three crumpets, complete with swim togs. While they changed in our cottage, he explained to me that a crumpet was a cheeklet with a warm m.u.f.finy heart, whereas a cheeklet was a crumpet with a talent for creating special problems. I told him that was worth knowing, certainly. He told me his tree was fine, and he had driven with raceway verve, and he could understand why the Mixtecs took Mitla away from the Zapotecs. He said that he had checked with the girl at the hotel, and that the redhead had picked up the two tickets and had made the flight.
We lolled the long afternoon, with sunshine, hamburgers, beers, and pleasant, sidelong, inconspicuous admiration of the tender textures of the maidens of Guadalajara. Enelio arrived at rum-time, full of such fury at the arrogance and ignorance of visiting engineers that he had to swim a dozen thrashing laps before he could get the scowl off his forehead. Before he left, taking Lita with him, he brought a map from his car to the lighted cottage and spread it out and showed me, by drawing a pencil line, the road which the Chevy truck had probably been on when Laura Knighton had seen it.
On Tuesday morning at a little before eleven, Meyer and I were standing out in front of the lobby entrance to the Victoria when Enelio, in a yellow jeep, came roaring in low gear up the steep hotel driveway. It was the earliest he could get away from the agency. Enelio looked very elegant and dashing in his white-hunter hat. He came to a flashing grinning stop within a few feet of us. The jeep had those special fat low-pressure tires useful for traversing open country full of stone and sand.
As we clambered in, two little Mexican boys who had been vigorously rubbing a tourist sedan with greasy rags came trotting over to examine the vehicle with their quick, bright obsidian eyes. They looked at the gas can racks and the power takeoff winch and the big spotlight.
One asked the other one a question, and got the authoritative answer, in the slightly contemptuous tone of all authority, "Es un heep especial, seguro." Enelio spun it in a tight turn and went charging down the hill. He stopped at the bottom to wait for truck traffic on the highway. The word had been echoing in my head.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Please wait right here a minute."
Enelio turned and looked back at me. "Forget something?"
"Remember something. Any "j" is p.r.o.nounced like an "h." Jalisco. Jugar. And so, by G.o.d, we are riding in a heep."
"Very fonny joke. But very old," Enelio said.
"I know what he"s getting at," Meyer said. "That kid at Mitla. You couldn"t understand that thing he was saying."
"Heap-di-row. Jeep de rojo. Jeep de color rojo."
"Yes indeed," said Enelio. "A red jeep. And this is a yellow one. Is the game over?"
Meyer had hitched almost all the way around so as to look directly at me. "A painter and a sculptor. Why not? What"s Mike"s last name? Barrington?"
"And Della Davis."
"Too much sun at this alt.i.tude," Enelio said, "and the brain gets cooked and people don"t make sense."
"Enelio, what"s the name of the road toward the airport?"
"The Coyotepec Road."
"And about a mile out, is there some kind of a tourist place that burned?"
"I know the place. It burned a long time ago."
"Can we go out there?" I asked. "I want to check something out."
I leaned forward and hollered the explanations over the wind roar and tire whine as Enelio pushed the jeep hard.
The place had been surrounded by a thick high adobe wall, enclosing about an acre of land. There were shade trees inside and outside the wall, but the land around it was bare and flat, and planted with parched and scraggly corn. Over the wall, which began back about a hundred yards from the highway, I could see the broken and sooty stone walls of the structure, open to the sky, with an angle of charred, leaning beam that had rank green vines clinging to it. The old red jeep was parked close to the wall over at the left, under the shade trees. Several little groups of people sat and squatted in the shade, at respectful distances, looking toward the wall. Two police cars were parked with their noses toward the red jeep, and at an angle to each other, as though snuffing it.
"Something bad is going on here," Enelio said. "Those are people who have stopped working the fields to come and wait and watch. They don"t do that for a small thing. Something very bad, I think."
Both doors of the entrance gate in the side wall stood open. A very shiny black Mercedes sedan was parked inside the compound. An adobe cottage was built into the corner of the compound, so that the encircling wall formed two walls of the cottage. Two wooden sheds had been attached to it, one on either side, braced against the wall.
A big young man sat in the sunlight on a scarred wooden bench. He was hunched forward, elbows on his knees, face in his hands, shoulders thrust high. He wore dirty gray denim work pants and a clean white shirt. He was barefoot. The fringe of a huge glossy black beard curled inward around the edges of the hands he held against his face. A bald man in a black suit was standing in front of him. Three uniformed policemen stood off to one side.
Our acquaintance, Sergeant Martinez, in civilian clothes, stood a couple of paces behind the bald man.
All except the man on the bench looked toward us as we came through the open gate. I saw a startled look cross the sergeant"s face, immediately replaced by that cop look I had seen before, but this time considerably reinforced by this new coincidence.
The bald man said, "Enelio! Using you for speaking here, maybe?"
He came several steps to meet us. Enelio introduced us to Doctor Francisco Martel and then the doctor launched into such rapid Spanish I gave up trying to catch the meaning of any part of it. He did much gesturing and pointing, and spoke with dramatic emphasis. The sergeant joined them and there was discussion for a time, then Enelio came and told us what had happened.
An hour ago a man had run out and waved a city-bound bus down and told the driver people were dying behind the wall. The driver stopped at the first telephone and reported it. The police sedan had arrived just before the ambulance. The young black girl was just inside the gate, sprawled in the dust, killed with a single blow that had apparently come from behind, and had so ruined her skull that brain tissue had made a spatter pattern in the dust. The big blond bearded American youth had been over beyond the shed, the whole upper left side of his forehead smashed inward. There was a heartbeat but it had stopped before they could load him into the ambulance. Near him lay the Mexican woman, dead of a similar single stupendous blow over the left ear, eyes bulged and staring by the force of the hydraulic pressure created within the brain case. And the black-bearded one was sitting on the ground with her head in his lap, weeping. He claimed he had arrived minutes before the police, and found them like that.
"Have they identified him?"
The sergeant brought the tourist card over. It was sweat-stained and dog-eared. The ink on the signature had run. He was Jerome Nesta. Enelio said, "Martinez knows he"s guilty of being in Mexico illegally. The card has run out. Guilty of one thing, guilty of everything. That"s how the official mind works, eh? So I have the permission to ask some questions. Come listen. Maybe you two think of some, help me out a little."
Enelio sat on his heels in front of Nesta. "Jerry?" he said softly. "Hey, you. Jerry!"
The head lifted from the hands. The eyes did not match the virility and vitality of the great black beard. They were gray-blue, hesitant, uncertain. And reddened by tears.