“You weren’t wearing that jacket thing before.”
“This is my traffic coat. Mrs. Meigs made it for me so the cars and trucks could see me at night and not run over me. It’s just got this one button in the middle and these two pockets here at the bottom. How do you like it?”
“I like it all right. It looks like a pharmacist’s coat.”
“It don’t have near enough pockets to suit me but you can’t have everything.”
“What else do you do? What else are you going to do tonight?”
“First let me tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to stand here any longer and talk to you. If I gave this much time to everybody, I’d never get through my rounds, would I?”
He produced a harmonica, not a trombone this time, and rapped it against his palm in a professional way to dislodge any spittle or crumbs. He stuck it in his mouth and inhaled and exhaled, making those two different sounds, in and out, and then he rapped it again to clear the passages and put it away. I had nothing to say to that, to those two chords, and he bolted and was gone.
I took the card to bed and studied it. Tiny things take on significance when I’m away from home. I’m on the alert for omens. Odd things happen when you get out of town. At the top of the card there were two crossed American flags printed in color. Under that was the ever-popular “Kwitcherbellyachin” and at the bottom was “Mr. and Mrs. Meigs/Laredo, Texas.” On the back of the card Meigs or his wife had added a penciled postscript: “adios AMIGO and watch out for the FLORR.”
I couldn’t make anything out of this and I turned off the light. I could hear a Mexican shouting angrily at Meigs down the way. I still couldn’t sleep. I got up again and drank one of the beers from the ice chest. I looked at the card again. “Kwitcherbellyachin”! I thought, Well, all right, I will. I decided to leave at once. I would get the jump on Jack. It was worth a try. I dressed quickly and loaded the suitcase and the ice chest in the trunk of the car.
Nothing at all was stirring in downtown Laredo. I didn’t bother with the Mexican car insurance. I drove across the Rio Grande and on the other side of the bridge a Mexican officer flagged me into a parking compound that was enclosed by a high wire fence.
I was the only person entering Nuevo Laredo at that dead hour but it still took a long time to get my tourist card and car papers. The Mexican officer at the typewriter didn’t believe that my Arkansas driver’s license was really a driver’s license. At that time it was just a flimsy piece of paper torn from a pad and it looked like a fishing license. I gave him the registration slip for my Torino and he didn’t bother to look outside to see if that was in fact what I was driving. The big problem was the typing. When you run up against a policeman at a typewriter, you might as well get a Coke and relax.
While I was waiting, an idea drifted into my head that made me laugh a little. The idea was to get this Mexican fellow and Nub or Dub on a television show for a type-off. You would have them on a stage glaring at each other from behind their big Underwoods and Nub would try to peck out “Choice of 3 Veg.” on his menu while this Mexican was trying to get “Raymond Earl Midge” down on his form. People would be howling from coast to coast at those two slow-pokes. I slipped the man a dollar bill folded to the size of a stick of gum. I did the same with the porters and customs men outside.
This was the thing to do, I had been told, but it bothered me a little. You could look on a dollar as a tip and you could also look on it as a small bribe. I was afraid one of these fellows might turn out to be a zealot like Bruce Wayne, whose parents were murdered by crooks and who had dedicated his entire life to the fight against crime. An attempted bribe, followed by the discovery of a pistol concealed in a pie carton, and I would really be in the soup. But nothing happened. They palmed those dollars like carnival guys and nobody looked into anything. The customs man marked my suitcase with a piece of chalk and a porter stuck the decals on my windows and I was gone. I was free and clear in Mexico with my Colt Cobra.
Those boys were sleepy and not much interested in their work, it’s true enough, but I was still pleased at the way I had brought it off. I couldn’t get over how composed I had been, looking prison right in the face. Now I was surprised and lightheaded, like a domestic fowl that finds itself able to fly over a low fence in a moment of terror. Vestigial Midge powers were rising in the blood. I was pleased too that I was in Mexico and not at home, but that works both ways because after sunrise I met Americans driving out of Mexico and they all appeared to be singing happy songs.
I waved at children carrying buckets of water and at old women with shawls on their heads. It was a chilly morning. I’m a gringo of goodwill in a small Buick! I’ll try to observe your customs! That was what I put into my waves.
The poor people of Mexico were the ones without sunglasses. I could see that right off the bat. The others, descendants of the great Cortez, he who had burned his ships at Veracruz, were stealing small advantages in traffic. They would speed up and hog the center line when you tried to pass them. They hated to be passed. I say Cortez “burned” his ships because everyone else does, but I know perfectly well that he only had them dismantled there on the beach—not that it takes away from his courage.
A few miles from the border there was a checkpoint and an officer there examined my papers. Nothing matched! I was driving a completely different car from the one described on the form. He couldn’t deal with such a big lie so early in the morning and he gave the papers back to me and waved me on.
The desert road was straight and the guidebook said it was boring but I didn’t find it so. I was interested in everything, the gray-green bushes, the cactus, a low brown hill, a spider crossing the road. Later in the morning a dark cloud came up that had a green rim and then rain fell in such torrents that cars and buses pulled over to wait it out. A desert rainstorm! You couldn’t see three feet! I turned on the headlights and slowed down but I kept going until the brake linings got wet and wouldn’t hold.
I don’t like to piddle around when I’m on the road and this stop made me impatient. If you stop for ten minutes, you lose more than ten minutes’ driving time. I don’t know why, but I do know why slow ships can cross the Atlantic Ocean in just a few days. Because they never stop! My ankles and my new cordovan shoes were soaked from water sloshing up through the hole in the floor. I sat out the storm there on the shoulder of the road reading The Life and Glorious Times of Zach Taylor, by Binder. It was not the kind of title I liked but it was a pretty good book.
After the sun came out, I drove slow and rode the brakes for a while until they were dry. I was still on the straight part of the highway north of Monterrey when a big yellow car came racing up behind me and stayed right on my bumper. More Mexican stuff, I thought, and then I saw that it was Jack Wilkie in his Chrysler Imperial. I could see him in my mirror, laughing and tapping a finger on the steering wheel, in time, I supposed, to some radio music. I could see his big silver ring and some frosty flecks of doughnut sugar around his mouth. That was how close he was.
I tapped the brake pedal just enough to flash the brake light but I kept the accelerator depressed. Jack thought I was going to stop suddenly and he braked and skidded. His right-hand wheels dropped off the ledge of the pavement onto the dirt shoulder and dust was boiling up behind him. Then he recovered and got on my bumper again, still laughing. I didn’t like that laughing. The brake-light trick was the only one I knew so I just started going faster and faster. Jack stayed right with me, inches away. He was playing with me. He could have passed me easily enough but he was going to run the Buick into the ground or make me give up, one or the other. I drove the little car as fast as it would go, which I guessed to be around ninety or so. That was nothing at all for the Imperial but I had a six-cylinder engine and a little air-cooled, two-speed transmission that was squealing like a pig.
We went roaring along like this for four or five miles, bumper to bumper, two hell drivers, and I was beginning to lose my stomach for it. I
didn’t even know what the point of it was. The sheet metal was vibrating and resonating and it appeared fuzzy to the eye. Particles of rust and dirt were dancing on the floor. Candy wrappers were flying everywhere.
I’ve had enough of this, I said to myself, and I was just about ready to quit when the exhaust system or the drive shaft dropped to the highway beneath the Chrysler and began to kick up sparks. Jack was done for the day. I shot over a rise and left him with a couple of honks. Harvest yellow Imperial. Like new. Loaded. One owner. See to appreciate. Extra sharp. Good rubber. A real nice car. Needs some work. Call Cherokee Bail Bonds and ask for Jack. Work odd hours. Keep calling.
Three
I LOST SOME MORE TIME in and about the adobe city of Saltillo looking for the Buena Vista battlefield. I couldn’t find it. Binder’s maps were useless and the Mexicans pretended they had never heard of Zachary Taylor and Archibald Yell. At the height of the battle, when it might have gone either way, the cool Taylor turned to his artillery officer and said, “A little more grape, Captain Bragg.” Remarks like that were embedded in my head and took up precious space that should have been occupied with other things but wasn’t.
I gave up the search and pressed on south atop a desolate plateau. It was cool up there and the landscape was not like the friendly earth I knew. This was the cool dry place that we hear so much about, the place where we are supposed to store things. The car ran well and I glowed in the joy of solitary flight. It was almost a blessed state. Was I now a ramblin’ man, like in the country songs? Sorry, lady, but I got to be ramblin’ on!
Or was this just a trip? Whenever I saw a person or a domestic animal, I would shout some greeting, or perhaps a question—“How do you like living here in Mexico?”—just the first thing that came into my head. I stopped for the night at a camper park in Matehuala. A young Canadian couple in a van shared their supper with me.
I slept in the car again, although I didn’t much like it, being exposed that way to people walking by and peering in the windows, watching me sleep. It was like lying supine on the beach with your eyes closed and fearing that some terrible person in heavy shoes will come along and be seized by an impulse to stomp on your vulnerable belly. I rose early and shaved with cold water in the washhouse. The Canadians were up too, and they gave me a slice of pound cake and a cup of coffee. I was in San Miguel de Allende by noon.
The Hotel Mogador was only a block or so from the main square, or jardín, as they called it, which is to say “garden.” There wasn’t one guest in the place. Dupree and Norma had been gone for a little over three weeks. I was not greatly surprised at this, and not much concerned. From this point, I thought, tracing two foreigners and a chow dog in a blue Ford Torino could be no very hard task. I had not realized there were so many other Americans in Mexico.
The owner of the hotel was an accommodating man and he showed me their room, the blocky wooden bed, the short bathtub faced with little blue tiles. I had no particular feeling about the room but I certainly didn’t want to stay in it, as the man suggested. I questioned him closely. Did they say where they were going? No. Had they perhaps moved to another hotel here? Possibly, but he had not seen them around town. Was there a trailer park in San Miguel? Yes, behind the Siesta Motel on the edge of town.
It had been in my mind all along that I would find them in a trailer park. I suppose I thought it would be a suitable place for their meretricious relationship. I had a plan for that trailer. I would jerk open the flimsy door with such force that the stopchain would snap. Dupree would be sitting down eating a bowl of cereal, holding a big spoon in his monkey hand. I would throw an armlock on his neck from behind. While he sputtered and milk drops flew from his mouth, I would remove my car keys and my credit cards from his pockets. Norma would say, “Let him have some air!” and I would shove him away and leave them there in their sty without a word.
I drove out to the place on the edge of town but it wasn’t a mobile-home community of the kind I had visualized. It was literally a trailer park, a dusty field where Mom and Dad could park their Airstream for a day or two and let their big Olds 98 cool off. The place was all but deserted. At one end of the field there was a square lump of a motor home and at the other end was an old school bus that had been painted white and rigged as a camper. The bus had been given a name, “The Dog of the South,” which was painted in black on one side, but not by a sign painter with a straight-edge and a steady hand. The big childish letters sprawled at different angles and dribbled at the bottom. The white paint had also been applied in a slapdash manner, and it had drawn up in places, presenting a crinkled finish like that seen on old adding machines and cash registers. This thing was a hippie wagon.
I went to the Mogador and had lunch in the courtyard with the owner. I had to take two meals there with my room. There were flowers and cats all around us. I could see the pale blue sky above. We had onion soup and then some veal cutlets and rice. The hotel man fed table scraps to the cats and so I did the same. What a life!
He said he had been a bit mixed up before and had shown me the wrong room. The Norma-Dupree room was actually one floor above the first room he had shown me, and was in fact the very room he had given me. Did I wish to be moved? I said no, it made no difference. Then there was a disturbance in the kitchen and he went to investigate. When he came back, he said, “It was nothing, the mop caught fire. All my employees are fools.”
This Mexican lunch was a long affair and before it was over we were joined by a tall bird wearing metallic-silver coveralls. He was a Canadian artist who made paper rabbits. He showed me one and it was a pretty well done bunny except for the big eyelashes. The price was ten dollars. I remarked that there seemed to be quite a few Canadians in Mexico.
He bristled. “Why shouldn’t there be?”
“Out of proportion to your numbers, I mean. It was just a neutral observation.”
“We’re quite free to travel, you know. We can even go to Cuba if we wish.”
“I’m not making myself clear.”
“Do please make yourself clear.”
“Well, there are two hundred million Americans and twenty million Canadians, and my country is closer to Mexico than yours, but I get the impression that there are just about as many Canadians here as Americans. At this table, for instance.”
“You’re not the only Americans. You people just stole that name.”
“Look here, why don’t you kiss my ass?”
“So bright of you. So typical.”
It was my guess that this queer was having big trouble selling his overpriced rabbits. That was the only way I could account for his manner. The hotel man became jolly and tried to patch things up. But this too annoyed the artist and he got up and flounced out, stopping for a moment under the archway as he thought of something pretty good to call me, which was “rat face.”
He thought it was pretty good but it was old stuff to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I look more like a predatory bird than a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year.
We finished our meal in peace and then I went downtown to trade bonds for pesos. The bank was closed for lunch until 4 p.m. Some lunch! I wandered about town on foot looking for my Torino.
There was a bandstand in the central square, and some wrought-iron benches and some noisy flocking birds with long tail feathers. I took them to be members of the grackle family. There were elegant trees too, of the kind that architects like to sketch in front of their buildings. A few gringos were scattered around on the benches, dozing and reading newspapers and working crossword puzzles. I approached them one by one and made inquiries. I got nowhere until I mentioned the dog. They remembered the dog. Still, they could give nothing more than bare sighting reports. I could get no leads and no firm dates.
Hippies interfered with my work by stopping me and asking me the time. Why did they care? And if so, why didn’t they have watches? The watc
h factories were humming day and night in Tokyo and Geneva and Little Rock so that everyone might have a cheap watch, but not one of these hippies had a watch. Maybe the winding put them off. Or maybe it was all mockery of me and my coat and tie. The same hippies seemed to be stopping me again and again, though I couldn’t be sure.
A retired army sergeant told me that he had chatted for a bit with Dupree. He said they had discussed the curious drinking laws of the different states, and the curious alcoholic beverages of the world, such as ouzo and pulque, and he made me glad I wasn’t there. In all his travels over the world, he said, he had found only one thing he couldn’t drink and that was some first-run brandy in Parral, Chihuahua.
“Where did you talk to him?”
“That Southern boy?”
“Yes.”
“Right here. I don’t sit in the same place every day. It’s not like I have my own bench but I was here that day. The boy sat over there and bought a Popsicle for his dog.”
I wondered if the man might be confused. The Popsicle business sounded all right but I couldn’t see Dupree sitting here being civil and swapping yarns with Sarge.
“Did he say where he was going from here?”
“I don’t believe he did. He didn’t have a whole lot to say.”
“And the girl wasn’t with him?”
“I didn’t see any girl, just the dog. A big shaggy chow. The boy said he was going to trim his coat. He was worried about the tropical heat and humidity and he said he was going to give him a close trim with some scissors. He wanted to know where he could buy some flea powder and some heavy scissors.”
“When was this?”
“It’s been a while. I don’t know. They come and go. Did he steal your dog?”