Gringos

“Okay.”

  “And don’t tell anybody where I am. Just say I’m at—Chichén Itzá.”

  “Right. The sacred well.”

  We stopped at the fording place on the Tabí and loosened the fan belt on the little truck, to keep the fan from turning and throwing water back on the distributor. A family of rusty brown iguanas watched us from an overhanging limb, then plopped into the water on their lizard bellies, a family dive. Skinner dithered and stalled around. Finally he took the plunge in his truck and made it across without mishap.

  I was busy dodging roots and hanging onto the gear-stick. The girls talked between themselves, about some certificate they probably wouldn’t get now. Denise asked me if there were any drugstores in Mérida.

  “There’s one on every street corner.”

  Once out on the wider road I dropped back and let Skinner and Lund pull ahead, out of sight. There was no dust, but I disliked being part of a convoy. Denise said she and Gail had not been sick a single day and had washed more potsherds than any four of the others. She wanted me to know that their departure had nothing to do with female hysteria but was rather a carefully considered and justifiable move.

  I agreed. “You stayed longer than I would have.”

  We picked up a hitchhiker, an old man, who piled into the cab with us and sat by the door, silent, with his stick between his knees. He rolled up the window, as I knew he would, to keep the aires—evil winds—from swirling about his head, seeking entry. These dark spirits penetrate the body by way of the ears and nose and mouth, and cause internal mischief. He would suffocate on a bus before he would crack a window.

  At Refugio’s place we had some coffee with hot milk. He was sitting under a shade tree, bolt upright on a wooden chair, with his hands placed stiffly on his knees. He was a pharaoh. Sula was trimming his hair. Manolo was polishing the new red truck.

  “No!” said Refugio. “But this is terrible news! Dr. Ritchie! Such an amiable man! There was a light in his eyes! So quiet! Always dedicated to bennee! He leaves small children?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so.”

  He said he had seen the pagano Skinner go by in his truck and had wondered. Now Skinner was a pagan monkey. Was his stupid cloche then fixed? Yes, I said, but they were going to the wrong town, to Villahermosa. The death had occurred in Chiapas, and the proper place to deliver the body and make the report was Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital. They didn’t know that Villahermosa was across the state line in Tabasco, or didn’t think it important. There would be bureaucratic delays, various Mexican hitches. Skinner’s temper would flare. He would insult the officials and his problems would be compounded tenfold. He and Lund would be gone for days. The fellow with the motorcycle, Burt, was now the boss at Ektún. He was an agreeable young man. Refugio could now resume his deliveries to the site and perhaps even sell the boy some odd lengths of plastic pipe.

  “Yes, this is good thinking, Jaime. But my little green man? You won’t forget him?”

  It took me a moment to make the connection. His Olmec jade piece, my photograph of same. “No, I won’t forget.”

  The fuel gauge needle had long been resting on E when we reached Palenque. The old man got out at the town plaza. He took off his straw hat and said, “You have my thanks, sir, until you are better paid.”

  If the girls offered to help pay for the gasoline I would accept. We would split the cost three ways. But I would let it be their own idea to give me money. As they say in New York, I should live so long. They drank Cokes and ate potato chips at the Pemex station while the boy pumped 160-odd liters of leaded Nova into my two tanks. They watched with mild interest and said not a word as I stood there for some little time peeling off fifty-peso notes. Gasoline was fairly cheap then, but they didn’t give it away.

  On the drive to Mérida the girls played around with the CB radio and scratched at tick bites on their ankles. Denise was a laugher. Her Spanish was excellent and she made jokes with the Mexican truck drivers. She kept asking me what people were doing along the way. “Now what is he doing?” A man lashing milk cans to a motorbike. A man selling bags of soft cheese. A woman bathing a child. If it was some activity I didn’t understand, I said it was a local custom, a ritual, just a little thing they did around here to insure a good crop. This was a line I had picked up from the anthropologists.

  North of Champotón where the road runs along the Gulf there is a rocky promontory and a small sandy crescent of beach. I stopped to see if anything of value had washed up. Sure enough, there were two mahogany planks bobbing about in the eddy. They were fine wide planks, newly cut, unplaned, about twelve feet long, soaked and heavy. Gail and Denise helped me drag them up the bank and manhandle them into the truck. When I was going with Beth, she said it was awkward introducing me to her friends as a scavenger. I called this foraging. We had other differences.

  How were they fixed, these two girls? Poor graduate students? Was there family money? Neither of them had ever seen a CB radio before. Did that place them socially? Or just regionally? Assuming them to be at least temporarily short, I recommended the Posada Fausto. It was cheap but clean, I told them, certainly no flophouse, and handy to everything. Calle 55 was dark when we arrived. There was a feeble yellow light in the hotel doorway. Fausto’s twenty-watt bulb put them off a little. They were expecting a place that offered two complimentary margaritas on check-in.

  Denise said, “This is where you live?”

  “I keep a room here for when I’m in town, yes. It’s all right after you get inside. The rooms are okay. They have high ceilings and ten-speed ceiling fans. You don’t need air-conditioning. The doorknobs are porcelain with many hairline cracks. The towels are rough-dried in the sun. Very stiff and invigorating after a bath.” I caught myself overselling the place, making it out to be a charming little hotel. It wasn’t that but it was all right.

  Gail said, “Is that it, next to the shoe place? It doesn’t even look like it’s open.” That was the first peep I had heard out of her for many miles.

  What they wanted to do was ride around town some more, make a hotel inspection tour, find a properly lighted one that accepted credit cards but was at the same time reasonably priced, with maybe a swimming pool and a newsstand. This was why I no longer worked with other people—Refugio, Eli, Doc, whoever. The great nuisance of having a debate every hour or so and taking a vote on the next move.

  I took them out to the Holiday Inn and dropped them. Then I made a jog over the Calle 61 to deliver Rudy’s package. He and Louise had rooms at a place called Casitas Lola. I found her working away, typing up taped dictation from Rudy. What a job. The machine ran a little fast, and he sounded like a castrato. “Just five more to do and I’m caught up,” she said. My gift of cacao beans delighted her. It was Christmas again.

  “Did you see Rudy at Tumbalá?”

  “I’m not supposed to say. You’ll have to read his letter. It’s written in lemon juice.”

  “You think you’re oh so funny. Well, there’s nothing funny about our security methods. There are people who would pay thousands of dollars just to get a peek at this material. You never have grasped the importance of our work and you never will. Did you know I was a late child?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “My mother was forty-three years old when I was born. There are so many interesting things you don’t know about me. I may tell you some of those things later. I may not. It all depends. I haven’t decided yet. Whether to confide in a vandal.”

  It was a shadowy room with a raftered ceiling, very low, and a single old-fashioned floor lamp with a parchment shade, a good room in which to carry on some quiet mad enterprise. Louise worked at a long table in the pool of light. She sat erect before her typewriter, the perfect secretary, in fashion eyewear, white blouse and floppy red bow tie. She had blue eyes set far back in her head, so that they appeared to be dark eyes. Her blond ringlets were trimmed short and sort of tossed about. Next door I could hear a child singing, in En
glish. The new people in the next casita, a family from New Jersey. They had moved down here to escape the blast from the coining nuclear war.

  “Do you mind very much being called a vandal?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  “I mean after all that’s what you are. I’ve never known one before. I mean who worked at it full time. You’ll never guess what I dreamed last night. I dreamed I had a baby and gave it away to Beth. Can you imagine that? Just gave it away. The same day. I said, ‘Here’s a little baby for you, Beth.’ ”

  “Maybe it was a mutation. A rejected sport.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. A space baby. Genetically altered. You’re joking, but it happens, you know, all the time. The hospitals aren’t permitted to report it. But even so, why would I give it away? I would never give my baby away, even if it was a mutant. With his tiny knowing eyes following me around the room.”

  “I’ve got to go, Short Stuff. It’s late. I’ve been on the road all day.”

  “Don’t call me that. Wait. I was just going to make some hot chocolate.”

  “Thanks anyway, no, I’m beat.”

  “Is it very far away? Where Rudy is? I worry about him traveling all alone in that old car.”

  “Rudy’s okay. He’s down in Chiapas with some college people. He’ll be back in a few days. The mosquitoes will soon run him off.”

  “Thanks for bringing the tape. Watch your step. There was a lot of slick stuff out there today.”

  She meant outside Dr. Estevez’s House of Complete Modern Dentistry, where the sidewalk was spattered daily with gobbets of bloody spit.

  THE MAYAS had a ceremonial year of 260 days called a tzolkin, and then they had one of 360 days called a tun, and finally there was the haab of 365 days, the least important one, not used in their long calculation. This was simply a tun, plus five nameless days of dread and suspended activity, the uayeb, corresponding somewhat to our dead week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

  Here in Mérida the sky was blue and the air soft, no driving sleet, no dense waves of northern guilt, but there was a seasonal lethargy all the same. The year had run down and nobody was quite ready to start the grind again. These were our nameless days.

  Beatriz was moping at the desk the next morning. She said Doc Flandin had called three times asking for me. There was no letter from Ah Kin, only a sharp note from Frau Kobold. Her cakes again! I picked them up for her weekly when I was in town, a big plastic sack of stale muffins and pastelitos and broken cookies, which she got from the Hoolywood Panaderia for next to nothing. It was a long-standing arrangement, and this was all she ate, as far as anyone knew. It seems you can live for years on pan dulce and Nescafé and cigarettes, and even thrive. She appeared to be none the worse for having smoked 900,000 Faros cigarettes.

  I walked over to the Hoolywood and waited for the rejects to be bagged. Someone clapped a hand on my shoulder from behind. It was a man named Beavers and he wanted to borrow ten dollars. I barely knew him but he was on me so fast I couldn’t think of a way to say no. He said Flandin was looking for me.

  On the way back I paused at the zócalo to watch the Mexican flag being raised. There was a color guard and a drum and bugle platoon from the army barracks. I had seen it all many times but I could no more pass up a display like that than I could a car wreck with personal injuries. They were smart looking troops, with one or two corny touches—chromed bayonets and white laces in their black boots, all back-laced and looped about. The rifles were real, though the M-16 makes a poor ceremonial piece—ugly, too short, too black, too much plastic. More a weapon to be brandished defiantly above the head by irregular forces. There it went, the big tricolor, as big and soft as a bedsheet, creeping up inch by deliberate inch. I was trained to run the colors up briskly and bring them down gravely, but this way was all right, too, I suppose.

  I saw Beth across the plaza. She was smiling and must have been watching me. Had she caught me muttering to myself? With that bag of crumbs slung across my back I was a cartoon burglar making off with his swag in a pillowcase. She looked good, in her washed-out, pioneer woman way, with little or no makeup, with her hair parted in the middle and pulled back into a knob. She wore a peach-colored dress with shoulder straps. Bollard was with her, sitting lumpily on a bench with a newspaper. What did she see in that cinnamon bear? There’s always some jerk who won’t rise for the national anthem, his own or anyone else’s. No wait, now he was getting up, but grudgingly, humoring Beth, and the natives, in their absurd ritual.

  Bollard lived on the top floor of the Napoles Apartments and wrote novels. Of the grim modern kind, if I can read faces. I hadn’t read his books. My fear was that they might not be quite as bad as I wanted them to be. Art and Mike said they were no worse than other books. He had a certain following. He called me The Great Excavator, and also, Our Mathematical Friend, after I had once corrected him on a compound interest calculation. He thought he was going to make a fortune off his Mexican telephone bonds. Bollard wasn’t always lost in his art, up there in the penthouse. It was a nice place. I had once lived in the Napoles myself, when I was selling those long leather coats.

  Beth gave me a mock curtsy. I nodded. Our flickering little romance had just about flickered out. She had taken me at first for a colorful Cajun, sucker of crawdad heads, wild dancer to swamp tunes, then lost interest when she found I was from the Anglo, Arkansas-Texas part of Louisiana. Of our Arklatex folkways she knew nothing. She suspected them to be dark ways, a good deal of sweaty cruel laughter, but of a darkness that wasn’t particularly interesting. Then she began to cultivate me again when someone told her I was a pretty fair hand at sorting out genuine Mayan pieces from the modern forgeries. Then someone else told her how I came by my knowledge and she got frosty again.

  Frau Kobold was waiting for me in her wicker wheelchair. She wasn’t exactly lame, just old. Her bones were dry sticks. I went carefully over the explanation again, how other cake arrangements were going to have to be made when I was gone.

  “I don’t like people knowing my business,” she said.

  Her pride, yes, I understood that, but Fausto and Beatriz and Agustín already knew her business, her situation. Louise was right, there was too much stuff in this room. There were bulging pasteboard boxes, packed with clothing and dishes, as for an immediate move. They had been sitting here for years. Mayan relics were jumbled about on tables and chairs. On the walls there were framed photographs of temples and carved stelae taken by her husband, Oskar Kobold, long dead. Some of these prints were fifty years old but they were still the best I had ever seen of low-relief carvings. With all their fierce lighting and fine lenses and fast film, the modern photographers still couldn’t capture those shadowy lines the way Oskar Kobold did, which is why the inscription scholars have to rely on drawings.

  He died a poor and bitter man, having been cheated of both recognition and money by museums, universities, governments, publishers, all manner of high-minded institutions. They had used his work freely, were still using it and had paid him trifling fees when they paid at all. Mostly they sent him remaindered books. But then he had a reputation for being prickly and hard to deal with, too, something of a nut. Frau Kobold, the former Miss Alma Dunbar of Memphis, had traipsed about in the bush with him in jodhpurs and pith helmet. She carried his tripod and mixed his chemicals and prepared his wet plates and kept his notes. None of it seemed to mean much to her now. She seldom talked about the old days, except for the time she and Oskar had appeared in a Fox Movietone Newsreel—Bringing an Ancient Civilization to Light! Doc said it was a segment lasting two or three minutes. Nothing much pleased her anymore or engaged her interest. She said her sleep was dreamless.

  I sat on the bed and had coffee with her. Stale cake is not bad. The shaggy balls of the chenille bedspread were worn down to nubs from countless washings. The mystery novels were within easy reach of the insomniac, all lined up on improvised shelving of pine boards and bricks. She had some new reading material, too
, a newsletter called Gamma Bulletin, which came once a month from the States, and which I took to be some archaeological journal. She boiled the water with an electric immersion coil in plastic cups.

  I said, “Alma, you were rude to a friend of mine the other night.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  “A girl named Louise Kurle. She took the trouble to come by here and wish you a merry Christmas.”

  “Oh yes. She had been here before. I didn’t want to encourage her. I thought she might become a pest. I don’t care to make new friends at my time of life.”

  “You might make an exception. Stretch a point.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I didn’t like her manner. She doesn’t appreciate who I am.”

  “She’d be glad to do things for you.”

  “No, she doesn’t fit in around here. Do you think because I’m poor I should have to tolerate fools?”

  She showed me her coins, knotted up in a handkerchief, schoolgirl style, and said I had also forgotten about her appointment at the beauty shop. Once a month I rolled her down to the sala de belleza to get her hair done, and air her out a bit. She still paid the girls at the sala five pesos, having no idea of what the peso was worth these days. Fausto and Doc and I made up the difference behind her back, as we did with her other creditors. Coffee was cheap enough, and postage stamps. She ran through a lot of stamps. But the expenses didn’t amount to much, except for the medicine. Terry Teremoto, the crank sculptor, had helped too, with a regular check, until his recent death in Veracruz.

  “Well, make another appointment and let me know. I should be in town for awhile. Here, let me see your glasses.” They were smeared. I breathed on them and wiped them on the bedspread.

  Now it was time for a real breakfast, and I went along to the Express, a sidewalk café where the gringos gathered. Here I was greeted by Vick, Crouch, Cribbs, Bolus and Nelms, who feigned surprise.

  “I wish you would look.”

  “Not him again.”