Gringos

  Things had turned around, and now it was the palefaces who were being taken in with beads and trinkets. Emmett carefully wrapped it again and put it away in a drawer. I dozed. I had work to do, bills to pay, an overdue delivery job in Chiapas, but not today. Emmett read a detective novel. He and Frau Kobold read them day in and day out, preferably English ones and none written after about 1960. He said the later ones were no good. The books started going wrong about that time, along with other things. I put the watershed at 1964, the last year of silver coinage. For McNeese it was when they took the lead out of house paint and ruined the paint. I forget the year, when they debased the paint.

  Poor Emmett. He had been here more than thirty years, perhaps the only person ever to come to Mexico seeking relief from intestinal cramps, and still he thought he could beat a zopilote like Eli Withering, a hard-trading buzzard, at his own game. Emmett came from Denver and went first to Tehuacán for the mineral water treatment, then drifted on to Mazatlán, San Cristóbal, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Cuernavaca, Mérida, in that order. It wasn’t a natural progression or one easy to understand. Along the way he had been married and divorced many times. He could still call all the wives by name. Now his money was gone, from the family-owned chain of movie theaters in Colorado, or almost gone.

  I said nothing about the anonymous letter. It was unlikely that Emmett would write such things, but then sometimes he was out of his head, from all that medication.

  Later that evening Louise came by the hotel and gave me some green figs and a handmade card for Christmas. She had tried to give Frau Kobold a little knitted belt of some kind, only to be turned away at the door.

  “What’s wrong with that old woman?”

  “She won’t accept charity from strangers. I’ve told you that, Louise.”

  “A Christmas gift is not charity.”

  “No, but that’s her way. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just leave her alone.”

  She walked around inspecting my room. She pulled the curtain and looked into the closet, which was so shallow that the coat hangers hung at a slant. She asked if she could use my bathroom. When she came out she said, “I didn’t really have to go but I wanted to see how you had organized your bathroom. I wanted to check out your shaving things and your medicine cabinet.”

  “Well? What did you think?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t have much stuff. I knew it would be neat and noncommittal. Where are all your Mayan things?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “You must have one or two things. Some keepsakes.”

  “No, I’m not a collector.”

  “You just dig things up and sell them.”

  “I used to. A little recovery work, that’s all. People make too much of it.”

  “Rudy says you’re not really a college-trained archaeologist.”

  “Well, he’s right about that. All I know is that the older stuff is usually at the bottom.”

  “You know, I was looking at you today in the truck and you look better at a distance than you do up close. I mean most people do but in your case the difference is striking.”

  “I’m sorry to let you down.”

  “That’s all right. Can you see anything out of this window?”

  “Not much. Just a wall back there and a little courtyard below. A pile of sand and a broken wheelbarrow.”

  “If I lived here I would have a room with some kind of view.”

  “I did have one, up front, but I had to move out. I couldn’t get any sleep. The women wouldn’t leave me alone. They were out there at all hours of the night throwing pebbles against my window.”

  “Uh huh. Don’t you wish.”

  “You say that but here you are.”

  “Not for long. I’m way behind on Rudy’s tapes. I’ve still got a lot of typing to do tonight.”

  YOU PUT things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck. On the way out I looked in on Frau Kobold. I threaded a needle for her. She was no seamstress but she did do a little mending. “You forgot my cakes,” she said. I told her, once again, that when I was out of town she should get Agustín, the boy, to fetch her cakes. “Agustín doesn’t show the proper respect,” she said. We had been through this before. It was true, she and her husband had once been in Fox Movietone News, but how was the boy to know that? He was polite. What did she expect of him?

  I stopped at the desk and gave Beatriz some money, and she promised to see that these confounded cakes were picked up and delivered. She and Fausto were listening to a soap opera on the radio. Fausto said they should put the story of his life on one of those shows and call it “Domestic Vexations” (Vejaciones de la Casa). He was suffering from a heaviness of spirit, an opresión, he said, because of troubles at home with his wife, all caused by her wicked sister, a chismosa, who had nothing better to do than spread poisonous tales.

  I was feeling fine myself, back now in my honest khakis, all cotton, stiffly creased and starched hard as boards. I sent them out to a woman who knew just the way I liked them finished. West of town there was a clearing or series of clearings in the dense scrub thicket that covers Yucatán. It was a garbage dump where I changed my oil, adding my bit to the mess. Wisps of greasy smoke rose here and there from smoldering trash. Fumaroles from Hell. The air was so foul here that the rats couldn’t take it. A city dump and not a rat to be seen. I parked on a sandy slope and while the oil was draining I shot grease into the fittings. Then I let the truck roll back, away from the oil puddle, so I could lie on my back in a relatively clean place and replace the drain plug and the filter. I poured oil into the filter before screwing it on, to prevent dry scuffing on start-up. It was a little trick I had picked up from a cab driver.

  A car drove up. Doors slammed. I saw legs and heard American voices.

  “What is this guy doing out here?”

  “All by himself.”

  “Long-bed pickup with Louisiana plate. Some kind of sharecropper.”

  “With a stupid accent. Like Red.”

  “I’ve seen that truck before.”

  “Wait, don’t tell me. I believe this guy is—working on his car!”

  “That’s all those cotton-choppers do. Day and night.”

  “They listen to car races on the radio.”

  I slid out from beneath the truck. A gang of hippies had piled out of an old Ford station wagon. They called themselves The Jumping Jacks, which name was stuck across the rear window, in letters made from strips of silver tape. The letters had an angular, runic look. The number of these clowns varied. I made them out to be seven this time, three males and four females, though they were hard to count, like the chaneques (chanekkies) in the woods. Anyway, a full load for the old Ford Country Squire.

  Back in October at Tuxpan they had stolen three ignition wires from my truck. I saw them there on the waterfront as I was going into a café. When I came out they were gone and my wires were gone and a newsboy told me the gringo tóxicos in the Ford guayin, the station wagon, had been under my hood. I hadn’t seen them since, but the car was unmistakable—cracked glass, no wheel covers, a red sock stuffed in the gas filler spout. Once black, the wagon was now streaked and blotched. They had painted it white with brushes, using some kind of water-based paint. A lot of it had peeled off in long curls. It was the only paint job I had ever seen blow away.

  The leader was a big fellow with dirt necklaces in the fleshy creases of his neck, a fat man in his forties, with curly black beard, silver earrings, a fringed black vest with no shirt underneath, a rotting blue bandana on his head, and loose white campesino trousers. They were cinched up with a rope like pajamas, and the bottoms were stuffed into green canvas jungle boots. Big Dan looked like a wrestling act, beef gone to fat, but with his costume not quite worked out. It wasn’t all of a piece yet. Maybe an old biker. Almost certainly an ex-convict. I could see the letters AB—for Aryan Brotherhood—tattooed under his left breast. It was a rough, homemade job done with a pin and spit and
burnt match-heads.

  He grinned at me, coming forward with a knobby walking stick, taking golf chops at cans and clods. The others hung back. The two boys were much younger than Dan. A pair of cueballs, these fellows, with shaved heads and vacant eyes. Much better than long hair. No hair at all meant you were at a more advanced stage of revolt. One of the girls, or a tall woman rather with lank brown hair, squatted where she stood and lifted her skirt and took a long noisy leak right there on the ground in front of everybody.

  Dan called me Curtis. He said, “Merry Christmas to you, Curtis.”

  “You too.”

  “And mucho happiness for the new year.”

  The girls laughed. I had seen one of them before, and not, I thought, in connection with this crew. She was a little rabbit they called Red, standing about barefooted on the hot sand. She looked like a Dust Bowl child, a bony waif in a thin cotton dress that hung straight down to her knees. I had seen that face before but couldn’t place it.

  Dan said, “Well, did you get it fixed?”

  “Just about.”

  “Curtis says he’s just about got his truck fixed. What a relief that must be.”

  The girls laughed again.

  “Hey, pal, just having a little fun. My name is Dan. These are my friends. We’re The Jumping Jacks and we come from the Gulf of Molo.”

  “Where is that?”

  “It’s beyond your understanding, I’m afraid.”

  “Then why tell me at all?”

  “Hey, don’t come back at me so fast. We’re getting off on the wrong foot here. I was hoping you might be able to help us. We lost all our things. We rely on charity, you see, for our daily needs.”

  “You came to a poor country to do your begging.”

  “Not just to beg.”

  The others chimed in.

  “We came down here to clarify our thoughts.”

  “We have found the correct path.”

  “Big Dan, he is a lot of man. He is one set apart.”

  “We have fled the madness and found the gladness.”

  “People call us trash and throw turnips at us.”

  “Dan is more than our father.”

  “We’re on our way to the Inaccessible City of Dawn.”

  “But El Mago didn’t show up.”

  Dan spoke sharply to them. “Hey, none of that now. Didn’t I tell you about that? Not another word on that.” He turned back to me. “I can see you are not a person of wide sympathy, Curtis. Nothing escapes me. I can see right into your soul. Would you believe we have now made twenty-four enemies in the north and twenty-four enemies in the south? No lie. You are exactly the twenty-fourth person in Mexico to find us loathsome and undesirable.”

  “I would believe fifty-four, Dan.”

  “Hey! Would you listen to this guy! He keeps coming right back at me!”

  He jabbered away, and I went on with my work, opening cans of oil. There was a rustling in the thicket. It was a browsing goat, a billy goat, shouldering his way through the brush. His coat was the color of wet sand.

  Dan became agitated. “A goat! After him! An unblemished ram! Get the goat!”

  The two boys went crashing into the thicket.

  “You too, Red! Go, go! I want that animal! Get him! His name is Azazel! He’s carrying off all the sins of the people! I must lay my hands on him and say some words!”

  “And cut his throat!” said the tall woman.

  Red dashed off to help. The other two girls took up the cry, facing each other and going into a hand-slapping game. “Get that goat and cut his throat! Get that goat and cut his throat! What does Dan say? Dan says get the goat. What does Beany say? Beany says cut his throat. . . .”

  I finished with the oil and slammed the hood down. I had lost sight of Dan. He had wandered around to the back of the truck and was poking about inside with his stick. When I got there he was pulling the top off a can of my vienna sausages.

  He raised the can to me and said, “Your good health,” and drank off the juice. “Soup of the day. Do you have any bread?”

  “No.”

  “I can eat these things plain but let me tell you—say, you didn’t take us for vegetarians, did you? Wandering herbivores?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “People get us all wrong. We gladly eat the flesh of animals. When we can get it. Why would God give us sharp teeth if not to rend and tear things with? Let me tell you how I usually go about this. There are seven of these little men to a can. I take three slices of bread and make three foldover sandwiches, with two sausages to each piece of bread, don’t you see. Then I take the seventh one, the odd man, and just pop it into my mouth naked, like a grape. I’ve done it that way for years, and now you tell me you don’t have no bread.”

  I said nothing. He shrugged and ate the sausages. “Do you have anything else to spare? I mean like sardines or beer or shoes or Mexico rum? Just anything in that line. I like your sleeping bag, all rolled up nice and tight like that. Your plastic lantern, too. I’ll bet that thing comes in handy. Does it float or blink or have some special features I should know about? We could use a good light. The nights are long and we stumble in darkness. Maybe we could look through your stuff and just pick out what we want. I know you must set great store by all these material possessions but look here, my friend, it’s the season for giving and you have so much.”

  More laughter from the girls. The tall woman said, “Or maybe he could just lend us a million pesos till payday.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, Beany Girl. It works out well for him too. We get mucho dinero for our pressing needs, and he gets to keep all his much-prized possessions. But I don’t know about this guy. You might think he would say, ‘See see, Seenyore, your house is my house and my house is your house,’ but no, not this guy. Ask Curtis for bread and he don’t even give you a stone.”

  His jocular manner had a dark edge to it that was meant to be unsettling, but it was a transparent act, a bit of old movie business, not well done. The two boys and little Red came back with no goat. A child can hem up a goat, but these three couldn’t catch a goat. They talked about it. Beany Girl said that they hadn’t really tried. There was a silence. Then, on what must have been a signal from Dan, all of them picked up rocks and looked at me. They stood perfectly still with their mouths gaping. They were a clan of early hunters in a museum diorama. And the rocks were big, not missiles but clubs.

  I was wiping my hands on a rag and moving to the cab. I said, “Well, I guess I can spare a few beers. I keep some cans of Modelo in a cooler behind the seat here.” I had rigged up a shallow storage compartment back there, really just a raised and squared-off cover made of sheet metal. It ran the width of the cab and appeared to be a structural part of the floor. I kept my double-barrel shotgun there, an ancient L. C. Smith 12-gauge with exposed hammers and double triggers. I had bought it from a hunting guide called Chombo. It was about sixty years old, and long too. I had sawed two inches off the barrels and the thing still looked like a goose gun.

  I pulled it out and cocked both hammers and walked over to Dan and touched the muzzle lightly to his belly at the parting of his vest. His flesh jumped in a little spasm from the hot metal.

  “No, I guess not. No beer today, Dan. This was all I could find.”

  “No need to get heavy, man. Have we offended you in some way?”

  “Heavee,” said Beany Girl.

  I asked for some identification. Dan said he had none, that he never carried anything on his person.

  “Maybe you ought to start. Where are your tourist papers?”

  “Gone. Stolen. We got ripped off bad at the beach last night. We were supposed to meet someone at Progreso but he didn’t show up. We had all our stuff in plastic bags. That’s what we’re doing here, man. I thought we could find some useful things here at the dump but this is the worst looking trash I ever saw.”

  I took his stick and pointed to a spot. “I want all of you to drop the rocks and si
t on the ground, right there, back to back. No, better not say anything. Just do it.”

  Beany Girl had more spirit than Dan and she held back. She was just a little slow to comply, and I had to whack her across the neck with the knobby stick. The blow came as a surprise. It stung and was effective. She was lucky I didn’t knock her brains out. A grown woman, squatting down like that in front of everybody. There was no mingitorio out here, naturally, but any decent woman would have gone behind a bush. Dan was picking and pulling at his beard. I had to pop him one, too, on the arm. “Get your hand down and keep it down. Nobody talks and nobody moves a finger unless I say so. You got that?”

  When I had them all seated and arranged to suit me, I searched the car. There were no papers. I walked around the car breaking glass, punching at the cracked places with the stick. I smashed the headlights too. Then I propped one end of the stick against a wheel and broke it with my foot and flung the pieces away. Dan took that hardest of all. “My staff,” he said. I raised the hood and ripped out all of the spark plug wires.

  Something moved in the brush. I thought one of the hippies had slipped away. Even at rest these Jumping Jacks were hard to count. I wouldn’t let them talk but I think they must have set up a high frequency hum to interfere with my head. When I reached the fourth or fifth one in my tally I became confused and had to start over again. But no, it was only the goat. He had come back, a curious fellow, bearing the load of sins well. He munched on a mouthful of briars and watched us with sleepy eyes.

  I climbed into the truck with my shotgun and my handful of cables. Three of them were Packard-Delco wires that didn’t belong on a Ford. I started the engine and almost at once the oil pressure needle moved. The pump had picked up the oil.

  Dan said, “You got us wrong, man. No need for all this. You’re not following the correct path.”

  Blood was roaring in my ears. I had to get away from these people before I did something. I could hardly trust myself to speak. “Don’t let me catch you around this truck again,” I said.