I pressed the doctor with searching questions about the Houston blowout but I couldn’t get any straight answers and so I gave it up.
Five
THE SUN CAME UP out of the sea, or I should say the Bay of Campeche. The warm air seemed heavy and I had the fanciful notion that it was pressing against us and holding us back. I say “seemed” because I know as well as any professional pilot that warm air is less dense than cool air. I had forgotten about the baloney and cheese in the ice chest. We ate the marshmallows and rolls, and after the rolls got hard I threw them out to goats along the way.
In the town of Coatzacoalcos I double-parked on a narrow street in front of an auto supply store and bought two quarts of transmission fluid and a small can of solvent. This solvent was a patent medicine from the States that was supposed to cure sticking valves and noisy valve lifters. Dr. Symes was worried about the clicking noise. He wouldn’t shut up about it.
Down the way I found a shady grove of palm trees just off the road. I got out my plastic funnel and red fluid and topped up the transmission. Then I read all the print on the solvent can. There were warnings about breathing the stuff and lengthy instructions as to its use. At the very bottom there was a hedging note in red that had caught my eye too late: “May take two cans.” I poured half of it through the carburetor at a fast idle and emptied the rest into the crankcase. The clicking went on as before.
Dr. Symes said, “I can still hear it. I think you’ve made it worse. I think it’s louder than it was.”
“It hasn’t had time to work yet.”
“How long does it take?”
“It says about five minutes. It says it may take two cans.”
“How many cans did you get?”
“One.”
“Why didn’t you get two?”
“I didn’t know that at the time.”
He took the empty can from me and studied it. He found the red note and pointed it out to me. “It says, ‘May take two cans.’”
“I know what it says now.”
“You should have known a car like this would need two cans.”
“How was I to know that? I didn’t have time to read all that stuff.”
“We’ll never get there!”
“Yes, we will.”
“Never! We’ll never make it! Look how little it is!” The size of the can was funny to him. He went into a laughing fit and then a coughing fit, which in turn triggered a sneezing fit.
“Half of the cars on the road are making this noise,” I said. “It’s not serious. The engine’s not going to stop.”
“One can! One can of this shit wouldn’t fix a lawn mower and you expect it to fix a Buick! Fifty cans would be more like it! You chump! You said you’d take me to Mama and you don’t even know where we are! You don’t know your ass from first base! I never can get where I want to go because I’m always stuck with chumps like you! Rolling along! Oh, yes! Rolling along! Rolling on home to Mama!”
He sang these last words to a little tune.
I knew where we were all right. It was the doctor himself who had funny notions about geography. He thought we were driving along the Pacific Ocean, and he had the idea that a momentary lapse at the wheel, one wrong turn, would always lead to monstrous circular error, taking us back where we started. Maybe it had happened to him a lot.
We drove straight through without stopping anywhere to sleep. The road was closed on the direct route across southern Campeche and so we had to take the longer coastal road, which meant waiting for ferries and crossing on them in the night. It also meant that we had to go north up into Yucatan and then south again through Quintana Roo to the border town of Chetumal.
What these ferries crossed were the mouths of rivers along the Gulf, two rivers and a lagoon, I believe, or maybe the other way around, a long stretch of delta at any rate. Dr. Symes remained in the car and I strode the decks and took the air, although there was nothing to see in the darkness, nothing but the bow waves, curling and glassy. There was fog too, and once again I was denied the spectacle of the southern heavens.
I had told the doctor that the engine wasn’t going to stop and then in the midday heat of Yucatan it did stop. He might have thrown one of his fits if we had not been in a village with people standing around watching us. He sulked instead. I thought the fuel filter was clogged, the little sintered bronze device in the side of the carburetor. I borrowed two pairs of pliers and got it out and rapped it and blew through it. That didn’t help. A Mexican truck driver diagnosed the trouble as vapor lock. He draped a wet rag over the fuel pump to cool it down, to condense the vapor in the gas line. I had never seen that trick before but it worked and we were soon off again.
The road was flat and straight in this country and there was very little traffic. Visibility was good too. I decided to let the doctor drive for a bit while I took a short nap. We swapped seats. He was a better driver than I had any reason to expect. I’ve seen many worse. The steering slack didn’t throw him at all. Still he had his own style and there was to be no sleeping with him at the wheel. He would hold the accelerator down for about four seconds and then let up on it. Then he would press it down again and let up on it again. That was the way he drove. I was rocking back and forth like one of those toy birds that drinks water from a glass.
I tried to read the Dix book. I couldn’t seem to penetrate the man’s message. The pages were brittle and the type was heavy and black and hard to read. There were tips on how to turn disadvantages into advantages and how to take insults and rebuffs in stride. The good salesman must make one more call, Dix said, before stopping for the day. That might be the big one! He said you must save your money but you must not be afraid to spend it either, and at the same time you must give no thought to money. A lot of his stuff was formulated in this way. You must do this and that, two contrary things, and you must also be careful to do neither. Dynamic tension! Avoid excessive blinking and wild eye movement, Dix said, when talking to prospects. Restrain your hands. Watch for openings, for the tiniest breaches. These were good enough tips in their way but I had been led to expect balls of fire. I became impatient with the thing. The doctor had deposited bits of gray snot on every page and these boogers were dried and crystallized.
“This car seems to be going sideways,” he said to me.
The car wasn’t going sideways and I didn’t bother to answer him.
A little later he said, “This engine seems to be sucking air.”
I let that go too. He began to talk about his youth, about his days as a medical student at Wooten Institute in New Orleans. I couldn’t follow all that stuff and I tuned him out as best I could. He ended the long account by saying that Dr. Wooten “invented clamps.”
“Medical clamps?” I idly inquired.
“No, just clamps. He invented the clamp.”
“I don’t understand that. What kind of clamp are you talking about?”
“Clamps! Clamps! That you hold two things together with! Can’t you understand plain English?”
“Are you saying this man made the first clamp?”
“He got a patent on it. He invented the clamp.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. And you don’t know Smitty Wooten either but you want to tell me he didn’t invent the clamp.”
“He may have invented some special kind of clamp but he didn’t invent the clamp. The principle of the clamp was probably known to the Sumerians. You can’t go around saying this fellow from Louisiana invented the clamp.”
“He was the finest diagnostician of our time. I suppose you deny that too.”
“That’s something else.”
“No, go ahead. Attack him all you please. He’s dead now and can’t defend himself. Call him a liar and a bum. It’s great sport for people who sit on the sidelines of life. They do the same thing with Dix. People who aren’t fit to utter his name.”
I d
idn’t want to provoke another frenzy while he was driving, so I let the matter drop. There was very little traffic, as I say, in that desolate green scrubland, and no rivers and creeks at all, but he managed to find a narrow bridge and meet a cattle truck on it. As soon as the truck hove into view, a good halfmile away, the doctor began to make delicate speed adjustments so as to assure an encounter in the exact center of the bridge. We clipped a mirror off the truck and when we were well clear of the scene I took the wheel again.
Then one of the motor mounts snapped. The decayed rubber finally gave way. Strength of materials! With this support gone the least acceleration would throw the engine over to the right from the torque, and the fan blades would clatter against the shroud. I straightened out two coat hangers and fastened one end of the stiff wires to the exhaust manifold on the left side, and anchored the other ends to the frame member. This steadied the engine somewhat and kept it from jumping over so far. I thought it was a clever piece of work, even though I had burned my fingers on the manifold.
For a little car it had a lot of secrets. Another tire went flat near Chetumal, the left rear, and I almost twisted the lug bolts off before I figured out that they had left-hand threads. Far from being clever, I was slow and stupid! Of all the odd-sized tires on the car this one was the smallest, and when I got it off I saw molded in the rubber these words: “Property of U-Haul Co. Not to be sold.” A trailer tire!
Dr. Symes waited in the shade of some bushes. My blistered fingers hurt and I was angry at myself and I was hot and dirty and thirsty. I asked him to bring me the water jug. He didn’t answer and I spoke to him again, sharply. He just stared at me with his mouth open. His face was gray and he was breathing hard. One eye was closed, the red one. The old man was sick! No laughing fits here!
I took the grip and the water jug to him. He drank some chalky-looking medicine and almost gagged on it. He said he was dizzy. He didn’t want to move for a few minutes. I drank the last of the tepid water in the jug and lay back in the shade. The sand was coarse and warm. I said I would take him to a doctor in Chetumal. He said, “No, it’s just a spell. It’ll pass. I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s not far to Mama’s place, is it?”
“No, it’s not far now.”
He took off his long belt and this seemed to give him some relief. Then he took off his bow tie. He unchained the giant wallet from his clothes and handed it to me, along with his flashlight, and told me to see that his mother got these things, a Mrs. Nell Symes. I didn’t like the sound of that. We sat there for a long time and said nothing.
The booted tire thumped all the way in to Chetumal, and then to the border crossing, which was a river just outside of town. The officer there on the Mexican end of the bridge paid no attention to my faulty papers but he didn’t like the doctor, didn’t want to touch him or brush up against him, this holloweyed old gringo with his mouth open, and he was determined not to let him leave Mexico without his bus. Dr. Symes’s tourist card was clearly stamped “Entro con Automóvil,” as was mine, and if one enters Mexico with an automóvil then one must also leave with it.
I explained that the doctor’s bus had broken down through no fault of his own and that he intended to return for it after a brief visit with his ailing mother in Belize. The officer said that anyone might tell such a story, which was true enough. The law was the law. Produce the bus. Dr. Symes offered the man a hundred pesos and the man studied the brown note for an instant and then shook his head; this was a serious matter and money could not settle it, certainly not a hundred pesos.
I took the doctor aside and suggested that he give the man five hundred pesos. He said, “No, that’s too much.”
“What are you going to do then?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not giving that son of a bitch forty dollars.”
I saw a red bus cross the bridge with only a brief inspection at each end. I told the doctor I would take him back to Chetumal. He could wait there until dark and catch a red bus to Belize. Then, very likely, there would be a different officer here at this post. The doctor would probably not be noticed and the bus ride would not be a long one. It was only another eighty miles or so to Belize.
He was wobbly and vague. He had heat staggers. I couldn’t get any sense out of him. He had diarrhea too, and he was drinking paregoric from a little bottle. We drove back to Chetumal, the tire bumping.
He said, “Are you going to dump me, Speed?”
“You won’t let me take you to a doctor.”
“I never thought you would just throw me out.”
“I’m not throwing you out. Listen to what I’m saying. You can take a bus across the border tonight. I’ll see that you get on it. I’ll follow the bus.”
“I thought we had a deal.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do. I can’t force these people to let you out of the country.”
“You said you’d take me to Belize. I thought it was a straight deal.”
“I’m doing the best I can. You forget I have my own business to see to.”
“That’s hard, Speed. That’s strong. I don’t know you but I know that’s not worthy of you.”
“What you need is a doctor.”
“I’ll be all right if I can just get something cool to drink.”
I parked on the waterfront in Chetumal and got him out of the car and walked him over to a dockside refreshment stand. We sat on folding metal chairs under a palm-thatched cabaña rig. He looked like a dead man. When the waitress came over, he rallied a little and tried to smile. He said, “Little lady, I want the biggest Co’-Cola you are permitted to serve.” She was a pretty Indian girl with sharp black eyes. He tried to wink, and said, “They’re getting these little girls out of Hollywood now.” A man at the next table was eating a whole fresh pineapple with a knife. I ordered a pineapple for myself and a Coca grande for the doctor.
There was a rising wind. Small boats were chugging about in the bay. Vultures walked boldly along the dock like domestic turkeys. The doctor drank three Cokes and asked for his wallet back. I gave it to him.
“What happened to my flashlight?”
“It’s in the car.”
He saw something shiny and leaned over and scratched at it, trying to pick it up.
I said, “That’s a nailhead.”
“I knew it wasn’t a dime. I just wanted to see what it was.”
“I’ve got to get the spare fixed and I need to see about the bus. I want you to wait right here and don’t go wandering off.”
“I’m not riding any bus.”
“What are you going to do then?”
“I’m not going off a cliff in a Mexican bus.”
His old carcass was very dear to him.
We sat in silence for a while. I went to the car and got my Esso map of British Honduras. It was a beautiful blue map with hardly any roads to clutter it up. Just down the bay from here was a coastal village in British Honduras called Corozal. Why couldn’t the border be bypassed by water? There were plenty of boats available. It wouldn’t be much of a trip—a matter of a few miles.
I proposed this plan to the doctor and showed him how things lay on the map. To keep it from blowing away, I had to anchor the corners with bottles. Over and over again I explained the scheme to him but he couldn’t take it in. “Do what, Speed?” he would say. He was fading again.
Most of the boats were now coming in. I walked along the dock and talked to the owners, trying to explain and sell the plan to them in my feeble Spanish. I got nowhere. They wanted no part of it. There was too much wind and the water was too rough and it would soon be dark. Maybe tomorrow, they said, or the next day. I put the map back in the car and returned to the table. Dr. Symes was drinking yet another Coke. The girl wanted her money and he was trying to match her for it, double or nothing. He had a ready line of patter for all cashiers, the idea being to confuse them so that they might make an error in his favor.
“It’s no use,” I said. “The wind is too high. It??
?s too dangerous. It was a bad plan anyway. You’ll have to ride the red bus and that’s all there is to it.”
“The wind?” he said.
Newspapers were being whipped against our legs and the tablecloth was snapping and donkeys were leaning against buildings and the heavy traffic light that hung over the intersection was standing about thirty degrees off vertical, and into the teeth of this gale he asked me that question.
“A bus. I’m going to put you on a bus. It’s the only way.”
“Not a bus, no.”
“Do you want to see your mother or do you want to stay here?”
“Mama?”
“She’s waiting for you just down the road. You can be there in no time. The bus is safe, I tell you. This is flat country. There are no mountains between here and Belize, not one. It’s a coastal plain. I’ll see that you get there. I’ll drive right along behind the bus.”
“Send me over the mountains in a bus, is that it? That’s your answer for everything. Did you make sure it has no brakes? I don’t even know the name of this town. I wanted to go to Belize and you land us in this place instead. Why do we keep hanging around here anyway?”
“You can be in Belize in just a few hours if you’ll listen to me and do what I say. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
In my desperation I had fallen into the doctor’s habits of speech. He must have spent half his life shouting that hopeless question. I thought of hiring an ambulance. Surely the border guards would not interfere with a mercy dash. But wouldn’t it be very expensive?
Someone pinched me on the fleshy part of my upper arm and I jumped. An Indian boy about seventeen years old was standing behind me. “Corozal?” he said. He took me over to the slip where his wooden boat was tied up, a slender homemade craft with an old-fashioned four-cycle outboard engine on the stern. It was about a six-horse engine, with a high profile. I asked about life preservers. No hay, he said. I indicated that the water was rough and getting rougher all the time. He shrugged it off as inconsequential. We quickly reached an agreement.