I left with no information about the Dupree place. About two miles farther along I came to a pasture airstrip with a limp windsock, and then a house, an unpainted structure made of broad reddish planks. It stood well off the wet ground so that Webster or Travis might have walked upright beneath it. I would have had to crouch. There was a sorry fence around the house, a sagging wire affair, and a sign, “KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU,” on the makeshift gate. There was a porch with a rope hammock hanging at one end. In a shed next to the house there was a green tractor.
I parked in a turnout across the road from the house. It was a turning-around place and a garbage dump too, with bottles and cans and eggshells and swollen magazines scattered about. I had no way of measuring 16.4 miles but I thought I must be getting close. These people here would surely know something about the Dupree farm, unless Sergeant Wattli had put me altogether wrong. There was a terrible stink in the air and I thought at first it came from the garbage. Then I saw two dead and bloated cows with their legs flung out stiff.
I got out of the car and started across the road and then stopped when a red dog came from beneath the house. Was this Dupree’s chow dog? He yawned and stretched one front leg and then the other one. He looked deformed with his coat trimmed, his big square head now out of proportion to his diminished body. A clear plastic bag was tied around each of his feet.
He walked to the gate and looked at me without recognition. After a while he registered me in his dog brain as a negligible presence and then he sat back on his haunches and snapped at mosquitoes. I couldn’t believe this was the same dog I had known in Little Rock, the same red beast I had seen springing from cover to nip the ankles of motorcyclists and to send small children into screaming flight down the sidewalk. He had been unmanned perhaps by the long journey and the shearing and the plastic bags on his paws.
The screen door opened and Dupree came out on the porch. He was shirtless, his skin glistening with oil, and he was wearing a tall gray cowboy hat. He had grown a beard. His cowboy boots had pointed toes that curled up like elf shoes. This was a new, Western Dupree. He had a new walk too, a rolling, tough-guy walk. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and he squinted at me with one eye. The other one was black and almost closed. His lips were broken and swollen. They had already been at him with their fists here. People’s justice! He was holding my .410 shotgun by the barrel in the position that is called “trail arms” in the drill manuals.
“Popo?” he said.
The weak-eyed monkey couldn’t even make out who I was. He didn’t even recognize his own car.
I said, “Well, Dupree, I see you have some little boots on the dog.”
“He doesn’t like to get his feet wet. Is that you, Waymon?”
He sometimes called me by this countrified version of “Raymond,” not in an affectionate way but with malice.
“You have a lot to answer for, Dupree.”
“You’ll get your money back. Don’t worry about it. Who’s with you?”
“Nobody.”
“Who told you where I was?”
“Tell Norma to come on out.”
“She’s not here.”
“Then where is she?”
“Gone. Sick. How did you get here anyway?”
“I don’t see my Torino.”
“I sold it.”
“Where?”
“Everybody will get their money as soon as I can get a crop out. Don’t push me. The best thing you can do is leave me alone.”
“I’m coming into that house.”
“No, you better hold it right there.” He raised the shotgun. I didn’t think he would shoot but you never know. Here was an unstable person who had threatened the President. It was a pump gun, an old Model 42, and I wasn’t sure he even knew how to work it but I certainly didn’t want to be killed with a .410.
“This is not much of a place,” I said. “I was expecting a big plantation. Where are the people who do the work?”
“They’re gone too. The head bozo quit and they all went with him. They tore up the generator and the water pump before they left. They shot some of the cows and ran the others off. About what you could expect. I’m through with those creeps.”
“Tell Norma to come out on the porch for a minute.”
“She’s not here.”
“Is she afraid to face me?”
“She’s gone, vamoosed.”
“I think she’s in there looking out at me from somewhere.”
“There’s no one here but me.”
“Does your father know you’re here?”
“I’m through with him. His day is over. I’m through with you too. You don’t have a clue to what’s going on. You never did. Are you driving my Buick Special?”
“Yes.”
“How did it do?”
“It did all right but I’m not here to discuss that.”
“I thought clods like you were always ready to discuss cars.”
“Not this time.”
He went over to the hammock and sat down in it with the gun across his knees. I was standing in the road trying to think of what to do and say. I had started with a great moral advantage but it seemed to be slipping away. Was Norma in that house? I couldn’t tell. Dupree was a liar but you couldn’t even count on him to lie.
I said, “What about the woman who lives behind the Game and Fish Building?”
“What about her?”
“Why didn’t you bring her with you?”
“Because I didn’t want to.”
“Did Norma rub that oil on you?”
“These are my natural body oils. We’re short of water. Now leave me alone. Everybody will be paid.”
“I’m not leaving until I talk to Norma.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you. She said she was tired of living with a little old man.”
“She never said that.”
“She said she was tired of looking at your freckled shoulders and your dead hair.”
“Norma never told you that. She doesn’t talk that way.”
“She doesn’t like your name either.”
I knew this was a lie too. From Edge to Midge was at worst a lateral move—no hybrid vigor to be expected from our union—and Norma was never one to make hateful remarks. Leave him alone! Next to me he was the least importuned person in Little Rock—people fled from rooms at the sound of his voice—and he kept saying leave him alone. I took a couple of steps toward the gate. He raised the shotgun.
“Better hold it right there.”
“Why can’t I come in if Norma is not there?”
“Because all my papers and my graphics are on the table. Does that answer your question?”
“What kind of papers? I didn’t know you had any papers.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Where did you sell my car? How much did you get for it?”
“Everybody will be paid in time. That’s if they stop bothering me.”
“Did you think I would come all the way down here just to listen to a few of your lies and then go home?”
“You’ll get your money. And then you’ll be happy. It doesn’t take much for people like you.”
“What will you do, mail it to me? Should I go home and watch the mail?”
“You’ll get it.”
“When?”
“As soon as I can get a crop out.”
“Get a crop out. I’d like to see that. What kind of crop? You don’t know the first thing about farming, Dupree. You don’t know how to do anything. Look at that fence.”
“You don’t have to know much. What you have to know is how to make niggers work. That’s the hard part.”
“You say that from your hammock. Do you know Webster Spooner?”
“No.”
“He’s the bellboy at my hotel. He has three jobs, if not four. I’ll bet you haven’t made one friend in this country.”
“You goofball.”
“Put that shotgun down, you cow
ard, and meet me out here in this road like a man and we’ll see who the goofball is.”
Instead of making his blood boil, my straightforward challenge only made him toss his head.
“I’m coming into that house, Dupree.”
“Better not try it.”
“Then I’ll have to come back.”
“Better not come at night.”
“I have a .44 magnum out here in the glove compartment. It’s as big as a flare pistol. You can fire just four more rounds from it and the next day the arch of your hand is so sore and numb you can’t pick up a dime. That may give you some idea of its power and range. I’d rather not have to use it.”
“What crap.”
“I’m going now but I’ll be back. Tell Norma I’m staying at the Fair Play Hotel in Belize.”
“She’s not interested in your accommodations. And I’m through passing along information from lower-middle-class creeps like you. I never did like doing it. Your time is coming, pal, soon. You better just leave me alone. If you people would leave me alone, maybe I could get some work done on my book.”
“Your book?”
“My book on horde control.”
“I didn’t know about this.”
“Shaping up the skraelings. Getting them organized. I’ll tell them about rights and grievances they haven’t even thought of yet in New York City. It’s a breakthrough. Nobody has ever been able to get their attention and hold it for any appreciable length of time. I’ve hit on a way to do it with low-voltage strobe lights and certain audio-visual techniques that I’m not going into at this time. I couldn’t expect you to understand it. My outline is almost complete but now I’ve lost another day’s work, thanks to you.”
Letters weren’t enough for him. This monkey was writing a book! I said, “We are weaker than our fathers, Dupree.”
“What did you say?”
“We don’t even look like them. Here we are, almost thirty years old, and neither one of us even has a job. We’re worse than the hippies.”
“Leave it to you to come up with some heavy thinking like that. You find me trapped here in this land of niggers with your water-waster wife and you say we are weaker than our fathers. That’s just the kind of crap I’m through passing along.”
“I’ll be back, Dupree.”
“Why do you keep calling me by my name?”
“How do you wish to be addressed now?”
“You’re saying my name too much.”
“I’ll be back.”
“Better not come at night.”
“I’m leaving this bottle right here in the road. It’s Norma’s lower-back medicine. Make sure she gets it before a car runs over it.”
He went into the house. After a moment I saw the weak glow of a candle or an oil lamp from an inner room. I called out for Norma. There was no answer. I knew it was my duty to walk into that yard and up those steps and into that house but I was afraid to do it. I thought of ramming the two front pilings of the house with the Buick, thereby causing the house to topple forward and spilling forth Dupree through a door or window. Nothing to disconcert a proud man like a sudden tumble from his home. But might not Norma be injured too, flung perhaps from a bathtub? The hammock was still moving and I stood there and counted the diminishing oscillations until the thing came to rest at bottom dead center. I would lay Dupree out in that hammock when I had killed him. I would take a stick and pry his teeth apart—they would be clenched in a rictus—and I would place the candle between them. I would leave him in the hammock with the candle burning in his mouth and let the Belize detectives make of it what they would. I poked idly about in the garbage dump with my foot and turned up nothing of any real interest except for a one-gallon pickle jar. I put it in the car and left.
When I drove by the Mayan ruin, the two brush-cutters were taking another break and this time they had cigarettes. They were talking to a third man who was sitting astride a three-wheel motorcycle rig. Little crosses were painted all over the wooden cargo box and the name “Popo” was spelled out in red plastic reflectors on the back. There were brown-paper sacks in the cargo box. I waved. Then it came to me. Those were probably Dupree’s supplies. I turned around and went back.
The Indians thought I wanted to tour the ruin again and so I did. Popo joined us. He was Spanish. We looked into the stone chambers again. Mosquitoes swarmed in our faces. Popo sat on a scooped-out block of stone that must have been a kind of altar. He smirked and crossed his arms and legs and asked me to take his picture. I didn’t think he should behave that way on someone’s altar but the Indians themselves found his antics funny and in any case I had no camera. Some gringo. No smokes and no camera and no money!
Popo spoke a little English. He said he had seen no woman at the Dupree place, no other person at all since the workers had left, but he had made only one previous delivery and he had not been inside the house. Dupree would not let him go past the gate. I looked through the paper sacks. I found no Pall Mall cigarettes, Norma’s brand, or any other kind, and no single item that might have been for her exclusive use, except possibly for a bottle of hand lotion. But maybe Dupree had now taken up the use of Jergen’s lotion. It was hard to say what he might or might not be doing in that house, in his strange new life.
I gave Popo a savings bond and told him that Dupree was flying back to the States in a few hours. An emergency at home. He would no longer need this service. Popo was to keep the food and the beer and the kerosene and the change too, if any. Dupree wanted Popo and his family to have these things.
Popo was baffled. What about his glasses? What about the remedios, the drogas? He showed me Dupree’s eyeglasses, wrapped in a repair order, and a big bottle of St. Joseph aspirins and a smaller bottle of yellow Valium tablets. I hadn’t known that Dupree was a pillhead on top of everything else but I can’t say I was surprised.
I said yes, Dupree did want the glasses and the drugs and I would see that he got them. Popo was reluctant to go along with all this and I gave him another E bond. The Indians pressed me again for cigarettes and I gave them each a bond too. I asked Popo about these birds. He said they were brothers. They worked for the government and they had been here for years fighting the brush. They could make the clearing no bigger because the stuff grew up behind them so fast. There was a third brother somewhere around, Popo told me, but he was always hiding in the woods and was seldom seen by outsiders.
I made sure that Popo followed me back to town and I drove slow on the sandy part so as not to dust him up.
Nine
THE CHINAMAN’S STORE was still open and I bought some crackers and a thick oval can of Mexican sardines and took them to my room. Karl’s radio was playing at moderate volume. I don’t think I had even noticed it until I heard the announcer say, “No more calls, please, we have a winner.” Then Karl switched it off for the first time since my arrival.
Or maybe tube collapse or power failure or a political coup at the station itself. They always went for the radio station in these places. I wondered if they had ever had a really first-class slaughter of students here. Better watch my step. Dupree had better watch his smart mouth too. Name your cat or dog after the Prime Minister in a place like this and you would be in the jug but pronto.
And there would be no fool here to go his bail, if they had bail. His papers! His book! His social program! It was some sort of nasty Communist claptrap, no doubt, with people who sounded a lot like Dupree as the bosses. He would tell us what to do and when to do it. The chairman! He would reward us and punish us. What a fate! Give me Mr. Dupree any day. The book would never be finished of course. The great outline of history! His slide shows! His skraelings! Pinch their arms and he could get their attention. But was Norma in that house or not? That was the important thing.
I ate my sardine supper and took a bath. I washed the big pickle jar, along with the top, and put them on the windowsill to dry. Then I called down the stairs for Webster Spooner. He appeared with his notebook, ready for an
y assignment. I showed him the jar.
“A little surprise for you, Webster.”
“Sor?”
“I thought you might have some use for it. It’s clean. You can save pennies in it. Keep a pet fish maybe. You would have to change the water. If you decide on the fish.”
He looked it over but I could see he wasn’t interested in it and I suggested he give it to Ruth, who could make some household use of it. He took the jar away and a few minutes later I heard Ruth slam it against something and break it.
I went to bed and reviewed the day’s events, a depressing exercise. I had not handled myself so badly, I thought, and yet there were no results. I must do better. Tomorrow I would enter the Dupree house, come what may. I would watch for an opening and then make a dash across the road. What I needed was a timetable of things to do. An orderly schedule. I sat up in bed and ruled off a sheet of paper with evenly spaced lines and corresponding numbers down to sixteen. It was a neat piece of work, the form itself.
But I suddenly despaired of trying to think of that many things to do and of getting them in the proper order. I didn’t want to leave any blank spaces and I didn’t want to pad it out with dishonest filler items either, like “tie shoes.” What was wrong with me? I had once been very good at this kind of thing. I crumpled the paper and dropped it on the floor.
The sardine stink filled the room and overwhelmed the river stink. Outside on the street I heard the slow grinding whine of a Mopar starter—a Plymouth or a Dodge or a Chrysler. The engine caught and idled smoothly and after a minute or so the car drove away.
Jack Wilkie, perhaps, in his Imperial. He had finally arrived. He had been outside watching my window. But no, Jack would never lurk. He might break down the door but he wouldn’t lurk. That was more in my line. I felt queasy. I took two of the orange pills. I can’t say I was really sick, unless you count narcolepsy and mild xenophobia, but I was a little queasy. If there had been a gang of reporters outside clamoring to know my condition, Webster would have had to announce to them that it was satisfactory.