The show droned on and the boys began to stir and mutter. Before the second reel was done, one of them stood up in the life-giving radiance from the projector and said, “This don’t be Tarzan, Meemaw.”
“It is too,” she said. “Sit down.”
But it wasn’t. It was just Johnny Weissmuller in the Coast Guard and not even at war. We could watch this thing all night and he wasn’t going to stop being Dave. Father Jackie had a full bag of tricks!
The boys began to drift out in twos and threes and the door monitor made no effort to stop them. I asked Victor if he wanted to leave too. He seemed to be drugged, stupefied. I caught Webster as he was making his way to the door.
“How are you tonight, Webster?”
“Meemaw is vexed.”
“I know. Here, I want you to meet Victor Walls. Victor, give me your attention for a minute. This is Webster Spooner, a friend of mine. He’s the bell captain at my hotel. I have a job to do and I want you boys to help me.”
“What kind of job?”
“An important job. We’re going for a drive.”
Both of them rode in the front seat. I stopped at the Fair Play and told them to wait in the car while I went to my room and put on my boots. Ruth was gone. I went behind the desk and poked around to see if anything had come in for me. I opened the shoebox and found the message to my father, with the money still pinned to it. Ruth had never sent it to the cable office. All my letters were there too, the British Honduras covers I had addressed to myself in Little Rock. What a hotel!
I unpinned the money and took it with me upstairs and searched my room for boots. They were not in the suitcase and they were not under the bed. Where could they be? There was no other place in this bare cube of a room where black engineer’s boots might be concealed. A dog, I said to myself. Some town dog has nosed open the door here and carried off my boots in his mouth. But both boots? Could a dog manage that? Two trips maybe. Or two dogs. But had I in fact ever seen a dog in the hotel? No. Not counting the foyer where they sometimes gamboled and fought around Webster’s box. I had never seen a dog on the stairs or in the hallway. Then it came to me with a swelling rush that I didn’t own a pair of black engineer’s boots either, or any other kind of boots.
Next door I could hear a heavy person walking back and forth on the creaking boards. Karl, perhaps, pondering his next move, whetting his knife and pacing, trying to decide whether to buy a new radio or get the old one repaired, the old tube set that had served him so well in so many different rooms. I felt a visceral twinge of pain, lungs maybe, and I sat down on the bed to wait for it to pass. The pain was concentrated in one burning spot about the size of a dime. I wondered if I might have been hit by a small stray bullet sometime during the afternoon. I had handled news accounts of men who had been shot and then walked about for hours, days, a lifetime, unaware of such wounds. Maybe the heart itself. I took the last of the orange pills, first blowing off the pocket lint. Downstairs the boys were honking the horn.
Twelve
I DROVE WITH CARE on Bishop Lane. The shadows were deceptive under the headlights and it was hard to tell the big holes from the little holes. I soon became fatigued from making so many judgments, half of them wrong, and so I gave up making them, or rather, acting on them, and I hit the holes as they came, without regard to width or depth.
Victor had shaken off his grogginess in the night air. After each violent jolt he would shout, “Good deal, Lucille!” and Webster would laugh. Victor fiddled with all the knobs too, and he wanted to know why things didn’t work, the dash lights and the radio.
He said, “How much will this thing do, hey? What kind of old car is this anyway? I hate it. You need to get you a Volkswagen where you can sit up high. My mom says Volkswagens are the most powerful cars in the world.” There was a sharp edge to his voice. The little Yankee had never been taught to say “sir.”
“It’ll do plenty,” I said, and I stepped on the gas and we hit the creeks at high speed. Water shot up through the floor and the boys began to squeal and jump about. Now I was driving recklessly.
A catlike animal sprang into the road and then stopped. I saw his face in the glare and it looked almost human in that brief moment of indecision. He decided against chancing it, the full crossing, and scrambled back to his starting place.
“A fox!” said Victor.
“No,” I said. “That was a coati, or coatimundi. He’s related to another animal that we know well. A very clever fellow who washes his food. He has a ringed tail and a black burglar’s mask. Can anyone tell me the name of that animal?”
They weren’t listening to me. We came up out of a creek bottom and topped a low rise and there in the middle of the road was a dead cow. I swung the car to the left, catching the bloated corpse with the right headlights. It was only a glancing blow and I didn’t stop. Both headlights on the right side were smashed and the steering was further affected so that there was now almost a half-turn of slack in the steering wheel. The position of the crossbar on the wheel was altered too, from horizontal to vertical, and with this new alignment I couldn’t seem to get my hands placed right.
“Webster?”
“Sor?”
“Who is responsible for removing dead animals from your roads?”
“I don’t know.”
“One of those rib bones could go right through a tire at today’s high speeds.”
It was more than I could do to keep the car in the narrow lane, what with the steering and the lighting problems. We swung from one side to the other, our progress describing a sine curve. Bushes slapped against the undercarriage each time we left the road. It didn’t occur to me to slow down. On one of these swoops we hurtled through the Mayan clearing where the Indian brothers had retired for the night to their stone chamber. That is, I could see the glow of a candle behind the doorway curtain as we passed within inches of it, but we were in and out of the place before they could do much more than exchange apprehensive glances.
The end came a few minutes later. Webster and Victor were wrestling and crawling back and forth over the seat and one of them kicked the shift lever down into reverse, which, on this singular car, was on the far right side of the shifting arc. The transmission shuddered and screeched and quit before I could make a move, my hands being occupied with the wheel. The car coasted to a stop in a marshy place.
“Now see what you’ve done!”
We got out and stood around in the mud. The boys were quiet for a change. I would have cut a limb and gladly beaten them both but you always have to weigh one thing against another and I didn’t want to listen to their bawling. They might have run too, the second one anyway. I could hear transmission fluid dripping and I could smell the odor of burnt sugar. There was another sound that I couldn’t place immediately. Something unpleasant was disturbing the air. Then I figured out that it was rock-and-roll music and that it must be coming from the Indians’ transistor radio.
I said, “All right then, we’ll walk. It’s not far now. There better not be any more monkeyshines, I can tell you that.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to see Guy Dupree.”
“You don’t have no electric torch?”
“We don’t need one. I can see at night. I can see stars down to the seventh magnitude. Just stay behind me and step where I step.”
Above the trees in the narrow cut of the road there was a dazzling band of stars. My eye went directly to the Clouds of Magellan, although I had never seen them before. I knew then that I would not be able to see the Southern Cross, not at this time of year. I had only a rough picture in my mind of the southern celestial sphere but I did know that the Southern Cross was very far away from those clouds, perhaps as much as 180 degrees. I pointed out the two galaxies to Webster and Victor, or tried to. They found the large cloud easily enough but I couldn’t make them see the pattern, the luminous smudge of the small cloud, low in the south.
I said, “Can anyone tell me what
a galaxy is? A little knowledge about these things can greatly increase our enjoyment of them.”
There was no answer, as before, with the much easier raccoon question. Webster asked me about a red star, not Betelgeuse or Antares, directly overhead. I couldn’t identify it. “These are poor horizons,” I said, “and I’m not really familiar with these skies. Now here’s something interesting. Victor and I can’t see all those stars where we live. We have different stars, you see, depending on how far north or south we live.”
Victor spoke up. “My mom says this is the age of Aquarius.”
I set off down the road at a brisk marching pace. Victor continually disobeyed my orders. He ran ahead and stirred up some small hopping birds, shooing them before him with his hands.
“Stop chasing those birds, Victor. You can’t catch a bird. I want you both to stay behind me. I’m supposed to be in front at all times.”
“What kind of birds are they?”
“They’re just road birds.”
“Can they talk?”
“No.”
“Do they lay their tiny eggs in the road?”
“I don’t know. Get behind me and stay there. I won’t tell you again.”
“I hate this road and I hate all these trees.”
“You boys must do just as I say. I want us to stay together. If you mind me and don’t give me any more trouble, I’m going to buy you each a nice gift when we get back to town. But you must do just what I say.”
Webster said, “I already know what I want. I want a tack hammer and a rubber stamp with my name on it and a walkie-talkie radio.”
“The tack hammer and the rubber stamp are all right. I’m not buying any walkie-talkie.”
Victor said, “I don’t get this. What are we doing out here anyway?”
“I told you we’re going to see Guy Dupree. He has my wife in his house out here and I mean to go in there after her. I’m through fooling around with him. It’s a long story and I don’t want to go into it any further than that.”
“What was his name again?”
“Guy Dupree.”
“You mean you’re going to fight this Guy Dupree?”
“Yes.”
“Oh boy, this will be good. I’m glad I came now. Will you have to kill him?”
“No more chatter.”
“Oh boy, this will really be good. What we ought to do is cut off Guy Dupree’s head with a knife and see what his eyes look like then.”
“What I want you to do is hush.”
“If somebody got my mom, I’d cut off his head and see if it could talk and then I would watch his eyes to see if they moved any.”
“Webster is minding me and you’re not. Do you know what that means, Victor? That means he’ll get a nice gift and you’ll get nothing.”
No sooner had I commended Webster for his silence and put him forward as an example than he pinched my arm and asked a question. “Does Guy Dupree be in the hands of the devil?”
“Guy Dupree is sorry. We’ll leave it at that. I can’t answer any of your questions about the devil. That’s out of my field.”
“Meemaw say the devil he have a scaly body and a long tongue that run in and out of his mouf like a snake.”
“That’s a traditional representation, yes. And goat feet.”
“She say he have a gold pocket watch a million years old that don’t never run down.”
“I’ve never heard anything about the watch.”
“He always know what time it is.”
“My mom says there’s no such thing as the devil.”
“Your mom is misinformed about many things, Victor. She may well be wrong about that too.”
“How do the devil be everywhere at one time?”
“I don’t know, Webster. I tell you I can’t answer questions like that. You see me as a can-do guy from the States, but I don’t have all the answers. I’m white and I don’t dance but that doesn’t mean I have all the answers. Now I want you both to listen up. From here on in we’re playing the quiet game. I don’t want to hear another peep out of anybody until I give the allclear signal, which will be my open hand rotating rapidly above my head, like this.”
Victor said, “I want a pellet gun for my present. I want one you can pump up about thirty times.”
“I’m not buying any pellet gun. Forget it. That’s out.”
“Why can’t we have what we want?”
“I’m not buying any expensive junk. The pellet gun and the walkie-talkie are both out.”
“I hate these mosquitoes.”
As for the gifts, I had already given some thought to setting Webster up in the snow-cone business. No one seemed to be selling snow cones in this steaming land. A small cart and an ice scraper and some flavored syrups and conical paper cups and he would be ready to roll. Mr. Wu knew a good thing when he saw it. He was making a fortune off soft ice cream and spending it on God knows what Oriental cravings, or more likely, stashing it away in a white Chinese sock with a toe pouch. Webster would have the advantage of being mobile. He could take his refreshing ices directly to the chicken fights and harvest festivals. One thousand grape snow cones at the summer corn dance! I had not yet mentioned the idea because I didn’t want it to get out. Something cheap would do for Victor. I had seen a little book called Fun with Magnets in the window of a variety store in Belize. The book was faded and shopworn and I could probably get it for less than a dollar.
He was walking along behind me chanting, “Guy Dupree, Guy Dupree, Guy Dupree,” and Webster picked it up, this chant. I made them stop it. Victor asked me if they could walk backward.
“You can walk any way you please as long as you keep up and don’t make a lot of noise.”
“Can we hold our knees together and just take little short steps?”
“No, I don’t want you to do that.”
“You said—”
“I don’t want you to walk like that. And if you don’t shut up I’m going to put a rubber stopper in your mouth.”
“A stopper? I don’t get that.”
“One of those things that babies suck on. With a flange and a ring on the outside. If you behave like a baby, I’ll have to treat you like a baby.”
He was quiet for a while and then he began to pester me with questions about the Buick. How would we get back to town? What if a crook stole it? What would I do if it was full of animals when we got back?
“I may just leave it there,” I said. “A man told me today that there are no spare parts here for that particular transmission. I’m no longer interested in that car and I’m not answering any more questions about it. Do you hear me?”
“You can’t just leave your car out in the woods.”
“The subject is closed. I don’t want to hear another word. I haven’t had anything to eat since this morning and I can’t answer any more questions.”
“If you leave it there, how will you get back to Texas?”
“I’m not from Texas.”
“You can’t ride in our van.”
“Have you heard me say at any time that I wanted to ride in your van?”
“We just have two bucket seats. One is mine and one is my mom’s.”
“For your information, Victor, I plan to fly home with my wife.”
“Yeah, but what if the plane goes into a tailspin and you don’t have a parachute to bail out in?”
“The plane is not going into a tailspin for the very simple reason that these commercial pilots know what they’re doing. All those planes get regular maintenance too. So many flying hours and that’s it, they’re back in the shop.”
There was no light in the Dupree house and I wondered if he had heard us coming. All this chatter. He was very likely posted at one of the darkened windows and cooking up a plan. I felt sure he couldn’t see us in any detail with his feeble eyes. He wouldn’t be able to make out that Webster and Victor were children. For all he knew, they could be short hired thugs or two boy detectives. I had a plan of my own. I
didn’t intend to expose the boys to any real danger but I thought they could serve well enough and safely enough as a base of fire. I knew that the attacking force should always be at least three times the size of the defending force.
I marked off a place beside the garbage dump and told the boys, whispering, to gather rocks and place them in a pile there.
“What kind of rocks?”
“Rocks like this, for throwing. Not too big and not too little.”
We set about our task without speaking. The quality of the rocks was poor, running mostly to thin limestone shards, and even these were hard to find. Victor appeared to be doing a fine job. He scurried about and made two and sometimes three trips to the pile for every one that Webster and I made. Then I saw that he was just picking up whatever came to hand, sticks and cans and clods of dirt, and was making the rock pile ridiculous with these things. He soon stopped work altogether and said he was tired.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll rest for a minute.”
Webster said, “What do these rocks be for?”
“We’re going to throw them at that house.”
“At Guy Dupree’s house?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like to do that, sor.”
“Dupree has my wife in that house and she may be sick. People get sick down here.”
Webster was shamed into silence.
“How would you like it if a gang of howling raiders came over here from Guatemala and stole your women? You would strike back, wouldn’t you? And very properly so. We’ll make Dupree keep his head down with these rocks and then I’ll dash across the road. I’ll be in the house before he knows it.”
We lined up three abreast and flung a volley across the road. I was disappointed by the puny effect, by the soft thunks of the rocks striking wood. I had the boys lie down, against the possibility of a shotgun blast, but there was no answer of any kind, not even a bark.
I stepped up the attack. With each salvo our aim improved and before long we were breaking windows. Webster and Victor quickly got into the spirit of the thing, so much so that I had to restrain them. Still there was no response. I mixed things up so that Dupree could not count on a recurring pattern. One volley might follow another instantly, or there might be an interval of several minutes. Once, instead of loosing the expected flurry of small rocks, I heaved one big rock the size of a cantaloupe onto the porch. Watch out for the florr! Dupree would soon be whimpering for his pills.