Gringos

  Back in Mérida I did get to see the reunion of LaJoye Mishell and her father, Dorsey Teeter, a bony man of about my age in a pale blue suit made of some spongy looking cloth. He was a logging contractor. I had telephoned him in Florida, bypassing Gilbert, at the Blue Sheet office, and now here he was at the airport. I stood aside and looked away as he and his daughter came together in an embrace. He wept. “Your mama and them thought you was dead but I never did give up.” LaJoye Mishell was pleased enough to see him, too, but in no way upset or remorseful. She still held her sprig of Jumping Jack greenery. It was acacia, she said, though she didn’t know what acacia was. I didn’t either. She wore a new orange dress and a flattop Zorro hat with little balls swinging from the brim, and some big earrings, silver-plated hoops, bought with a little money I had given her. Dorsey was uncomfortable with me. In his eyes I was guilty of something, too. “What do you do down here anyway?” He asked me that two or three times. He was eager to get the business over with, just as I was, and so I spared him the details. I simply told him, again, that his daughter had been traveling around with a pack of hippies, more or less against her will, in a spotted station wagon.

  “No,” she said. “Not the first one. The first car was a blue four-door Oldsmobile Regency Brougham with a moon roof and dual glass-pack mufflers and blue velour seats. But Dan rolled the Regency in Texas, totalled it out, and that’s when Harvey stole the Country Squire wagon. Then we came down here to Old Mexico to clarify our thoughts. Dan kept saying he was going to put us all in white coveralls, but we never did get our white coveralls. He told us we were going to live far away from everybody under the roots of a giant tree called Ogon. Every night he said the same thing to us. He said, ‘Death is lighter than a feather.’”

  So, it was worse even than rockers; his daughter had run off with some nasty poet, but Dorsey had little interest in the man and his remote burrow. A little of this stuff went a long way with Dorsey. He cut down pine trees by the thousand, like weeds, and not one of them had a name of its own. He didn’t want to linger in this country and he wouldn’t even set foot outside the terminal. There was a general smell of flyspray, as with all Latin American airports, and long dim corridors that led nowhere, with empty offices along the way. The ones here had a quiet yellowish Mexican vacancy all their own. We went to the cafeteria. Dorsey had a Coke, not wanting to eat whatever kind of food it was they had here. He laid two booklets of travelers’ checks on the table and got out his pen to countersign them. I explained once again that there was no fee, that I was in the woods on other business when I found the girl, and so was really out nothing in the way of expenses.

  “But what about the Blue Sheet man?”

  “I’ll square it with Gilbert. You don’t have to worry about that. There won’t be any bill.”

  “Don’t I need to see the police about anything? Sign some papers?”

  “No. Unless you want to hang around here for two or three weeks.”

  “LaJoye Mishell is a good girl.”

  “Yes, and she’s had a hard time of it, too. You’re not going to whip her, are you?”

  “Naw, I’m not.”

  “She’s too old for that now.”

  “I never taken a switch to her in her life but two or three times. She never did have a smart mouth.”

  “Just go easy on her for a while. She’ll be all right.”

  “Well. I feel like I ought to give you something for your trouble.”

  “It’s all taken care of, thanks anyway. We do a free one every now and then for tax purposes. You can pay for the Cokes.”

  “I’ll tell everybody what a good job ya’ll done for us.”

  “You tell them we deliver the goods.”

  Dorsey was still looking for the catch. He couldn’t size me up except that he was pretty sure I didn’t report to work every morning. The back of his neck, a web of cracks, was burnt to the color and texture of red brick from much honest labor in the sun. A badge of honor, you might think, but no, it was the mark of the beast. The thanks Dorsey and his people got for all their noonday sweat was to be called a contemptuous name. Few rednecks actually had red necks these days, but Dorsey Teeter had one that glowed. At least he had come here personally to pick up his lost child, which was more than his betters could find the time to do. Usually I had to turn these kids over to the protection officer at the embassy in Mexico City.

  I said my goodbyes and got up from the table, and my head went light and strange for a moment. The dengue fever was coming on again. I thought it might go away this time without really taking hold. I gave everything a good chance to go away before seeing a doctor, and then I saw Soledad Bravo. But what a relief, to get to the end of this mess, this custodial care. It had been a problem, keeping watch on LaJoye Mishell. She could say what she liked in Florida, but I didn’t want her talking around here about Dan and how he came to a bad end, and I could hardly stuff a sock in her mouth and lead her around wired to my wrist, not here in town. She had already told Fausto that I had blown her master’s head off with a bazooka.

  Dorsey called out a parting word as I reached the glass doors. “I appreciate it,” he said, and Little Red said, “Bye,” with her hat balls in agitation and the heavy hoops swaying from her peeling red ears. She was still clutching her weeds. Was she going to press them in a book? It galled me that Dorsey seemed to think I was a hippie of some kind myself—why did I need his approval?—but no matter, I was done with all the Teeters of Teeterville, and I thought I had seen the last of the Jumping Jacks.

  Neither of Emmett’s sons came down from the States for the funeral. They must have written him off long ago. He said to me once, “I love my children but I don’t rejoice in them.” We buried him in Doc’s mahogany coffin, and it was all I could do to hold up my end of it, what with the bad knee and the fever coming on. Old Suarez was a pallbearer, too, for the first time ever, he told me, in a long friendless life. He couldn’t lift much weight at his age, and then there was hunchback Coney, in no shape for this work, and Professor Camacho Puut, frail and thin, flicking his head to one side, like a swimmer trying to clear an ear. The others were sturdy enough.

  Huerta’s coffin was a fine piece of work, though the copper fittings showed to no advantage, being the same color as the wood. Ulises’ shallow carvings were hard to make out, too. More art to be buried. Doc said he wouldn’t need the coffin now that he had some decent staff support and wasn’t going to die. He said cancer was all in your mind. You couldn’t let your body cells give way to cubic replication. Gail had moved into the big house on the Paseo Montejo and was helping him with his book. There was no more talk about lying down in the forest and melting away. But Doc wouldn’t come to the service because he couldn’t bear to see a person he knew let down heavily into the earth, hand over hand on the two ropes. He said Emmett had no one but himself to blame, guzzling all that pure cane alcohol day after day. Only two women came. Louise was there with her ringlets brushed out soft, and one of Emmett’s former wives, an American widow he had met on a bus. It was one of the later, shorter marriages, and this woman, Geneva, who had some retirement income of her own, still lived here in town somewhere.

  Father Mateo, good man that he was, came boldly to the graveside wearing his cassock, in defiance of the anti-clerical laws. He said what words he could over the remains of a non-Catholic. After the prayer, Harold Bolus sang “Let Me Be Your Salty Dog,” a lively bluegrass tune. He stood leaning on his canes in a cream-colored coat and sang:Let me be your salty dog

  Or I won’t be your man at all

  Honey, let me be your salty dog ...

  I don’t know whose idea that was, but it fell flat. At the proper time and place, yes, by all means, let us have a song from Bolus, give us “The Orange Blossom Special” on the harmonica, but here it didn’t work at all. Supposedly it was Emmett’s favorite song, which was news to me, and the idea was that we would make merry in the presence of death, take it lightly in our stride, raffish crowd t
hat we were, in fitting remembrance of our old friend. But it was forced, we couldn’t bring it off, and the appearance was that we were meanly and nervously celebrating our own survival. Bolus himself admitted as much later. And how could that be anyone’s favorite song, least of all Emmett’s, he who was never known to dance the two-step, or any other step? Otherwise the service went off well. Suarez addressed the padre as Señor Cuervo, Mr. Black Crow, but otherwise behaved himself. Father Mateo called Suarez a godo (Goth) and said he should learn to curb his evil tongue, that other unruly member.

  Emmett left his money, what little remained of the family fortune, to be distributed among blind street musicians, with Shep to control the share-out. An odd choice for a steward. Emmett had some odd ideas. He left me the trailer and that was odd, too, quite a surprise. I had done him a few trifling favors over the years but nothing to justify this gesture. He meant Louise to have it, I think, and just never got around to changing his will. But I took it and gladly, and it was unseemly the way I moved into the Mobile Star so fast, ahead of the legal process and with the fill dirt still loose on his grave. I found hundreds of brown paper sacks stuffed under the bed and crammed into the cabinets and closets. “So, he saved sacks,” I said aloud to myself. In a drawer I found a stack of newsletters from a foreign matrimonial agency called Asian Gals Seeking U.S. Pals. There were small photographs of the gals with a few lines underneath listing their hobbies and telling of their sunny natures and other good points. But it seems Emmett was only browsing here, thumbing idly through a mail order catalogue of women, window shopping, as none of the pictures had been circled or checked off in any way.

  Fausto said I would soon be back downtown asking for my old room, that he knew me too well, that I would not stay long confined in a tin box on the edge of town. It was just one step up from a tent. It would be an oven and there would be no maid service and a storm would blow it away and the beds and toilet seats in those things were less than full size and trailer air was unhealthy and so on. He had already tacked up a photograph of Frau Kobold in the hotel lobby. She was still alive, barely, but there was her face, that of a younger Alma, but with the bloom off, already gone hard, up on the wall in the company of Mr. Rumpler, who had taken a heart walk every morning to no avail, and the Pedrell woman from Cuba, and other deceased guests. Fausto put up pictures of all the people who died in his hotel, or who had been residents near the time of their deaths. There was also in this gallery a newspaper clipping showing the inky, murky likeness of a young boy, not a guest, who had been struck and killed by a speeding motorcycle in front of the hotel. Fausto claimed him too.

  I saw Alma once more before I collapsed into my own bed. This time I had no stale cakes for her. She was all doped up with an intravenous tube in her arm but she knew me. She was waiting for me. “Ah, der schatzgraber. You took your time getting here. I have an urgent commission for you.” She lay in a high bed in an open hospital ward. A bowl of tomato soup had gone cold on her table. No Fumar, the sign said, but I lit a Faros cigarette for her, with the sweet-tasting paper, and she polished it off with three deep drags. The commission wasn’t so urgent that she couldn’t tell me again about the time she and Karl were filmed by the Fox Movietone newsreel crew. “They showed it in theaters all over the world. ‘Bringing an Ancient Civilization to Light.’ With march music in the background. Did you see it?”

  “Everybody saw it.”

  I told her about finding her handprint at the Likín ruin. Likín? She had never heard of the place. Then she said wait, yes, she did remember it, high on a bluff, Late Classic, with the medial moldings and the high roof combs, though not the business about pressing her blackened hand to the stone. “What a goose I must have been in those days. Writing my name on walls. Well, I’m properly ashamed. Fools’ names and fools’ faces are often seen in public places.”

  “The City of Dawn,” I said. “That’s what some people call it.”

  She looked at me in an odd way and said something I didn’t understand at the time. “Yes, of course they do. With the tau-cross window. My mind is going. They’ve got me on all this dope. Well, well, the City of Dawn. Mercy me. Hee hee. The young gringos at their foolery. Were there many fools there? Besides you?”

  “A few.”

  Then she got down to business. Night was gathering fast and there were things to be done. Fausto was the beneficiary of her small insurance policy. What she wanted me to do was clear out her room, load all the boxes of relics and photographs into my white truck with great care, and deliver them to Terry Teremoto, the crank sculptor of Japanese descent, in Veracruz. Terry had once worked with Karl Kobold in some way and had shown Alma many kindnesses in her long widowhood. Well and good. The problem was that Terry was dead, along with all his works. I had to stop and think but I was pretty sure of it. At this point I, too, was confusing the living and the dead in the moist folds of my brain. My eyes hurt. The chills would come next.

  “Take special care with the glass negatives,” she said. “They will make Karl immortal if you don’t break them.”

  She feared that the Kobold collection would fall into the hands of some university or museum, hated institutions, or that “the old chinch bug Flandin” with his influence might wangle possession. She disliked Doc because he posed as the scorned outsider while all the time he lived like a king. I was to move fast, before she died, intestate. Otherwise the vice-consul would seal her room and take inventory, and, there being no immediate kin, dispose of her things to all the wrong people, the tired old official gang of committee sitters, funded scholars, and the like, who so enjoyed clipping the wings of genuine artists like Karl Kobold.

  I agreed to do it if she would sign a note spelling out these instructions. A writ of removal, or was it conveyance. It took me some little time to compose the thing, in my pitiful hand. Writing is hard—it’s a form of punishment in school, and rightly so—and I stood paralyzed before all the different ways this simple message might be put. I called over a nurse to witness Alma’s signature. In the note, however, I named Professor Camacho Puut as the recipient instead of Terry Teremoto. The Professor was a good old man, a retired Mérida high school teacher, certainly a poor outsider, an amateur Mayanist, something of a crank himself with his snake cult theories and his shabby pamphlets, held in thorough contempt by Mexican and American scholars alike, and so, I thought, just the man to get these goods, and all in keeping with the spirit of Alma’s wishes.

  That was how I handled it, taking only her Spanish typewriter for myself, and some detective books, and her oscillating fan and the heavy San Cristóbal blanket and an electric Crock-Pot, like new, still in the box, for carefree bachelor cooking, and a small Mixtec piece that caught my eye, a jaguar carved from some speckled stone, sitting up on his haunches like a house cat, and one or two other items. I threw out all her magazines, including the Gamma Bulletins. The pasteboard boxes packed with loot fell apart, and I had to get new ones. Many of the prints and the glass negative plates were ruined, all stuck together with blue mold. Still, there was enough that hadn’t gone bad. It was a treasure. The Professor couldn’t believe his good fortune. “All these amazing retratos!” he said. “Look at the clarity and the force!” They were truly amazing, different in some important way from photographs that other people took of the same things. Sick though I was, I had to stop and look at them, too. After you had seen Kobold’s work, everything else was just Foto Naroody. “Spiritualized artifacts,” the Professor called these brownish prints, this being his definition of art. I knew we should have had the old man at our Yoro art clinic on the bank of the river.

  My white truck. I had forgotten to tell Manolo about the sticking gas gauge needle and how you had to thump it, and about how the first gear, granny low, was nonsynchronized, and about how the steering would be light and dangerous with all that tongue weight on the back, but I needn’t have worried. What a fine capable boy Manolo was. A true-bred Bautista. He had made his long delivery run and collected his fa
ther’s money with no other mishap than a blown tire. My old Chevrolet came back in good shape. I parked it beside the trailer where I could see it when I sat up in bed. When I was able to lift my head from the pillow. You forget how heavy your head is.

  For almost two weeks I lay tangled in wet sheets. About all you can do with breakbone fever is ride it out. Soledad Bravo treated the symptoms with sea salt and sour red wine and tar-water and some yellow powders. The skin peeled off the palms of my hands. Louise sat with me. She put blankets on me and then whipped them off again five minutes later. I kept her hopping, poor girl, peevish invalid that I was. It was in this same scaled-down bed that Emmett had died. She had sat with him, too. Toward the end he spoke of how the years had flown, and at the very end, she said, he was hearing things. Someone was inside his head shouting nautical commands. At other times there were some children in his head singing a spirited song with many verses. Louise thought it might have been their school song. She sat there beside me drinking limeade from a big glass and writing letters and reading a book called Famous Travelling Women.

  Beth came by with some fruit and a piece of news to cheer the sickbay. She said Bollard was putting us all into a new novel he was writing—without our permission, of course. He would make lifelike puppets of us and contrive dim adventures for us with his hard-lead pencil on yellow legal pads. Alma had made it into Movietone News while the rest of us were to be buried alive in one of Bollard’s books. Beth said it was going to be a modern allegory, with me representing Avarice. This was pretty good coming from a short-faced bear who ate four or five full meals each day and who talked of nothing but the fat profits he expected to reap from his Mexican telephone bonds. Beth deserved something better, but what can you do, you can’t stop women from chasing after these artistic bozos. Look at LaJoye Mishell. Look at Alma. Still, I was pleased that Beth had at last broken the series of ever paler poets. Bollard had his points. She could have done worse.