“You must think I'm a dope,” I said. “You never intended to publish that book.”
“No, it was a straight deal. Do you know the Moon Publishing Company?”
“No.”
“They have offices in Palestine, Texas, and Muldrow, Oklahoma.”
“I've never heard of it.”
“It's a well-known outfit. They do job printing and they put out calendars and cookbooks and flying-saucer books and children's books, books on boating safety, all kinds of stuff. A
Boy's Life of Lyndon B. Johnson
. That's a Moon book. It was a straight enough deal.”
“How much money did Leon Vurro get?”
“I don't know. Whatever was there, he cleaned it out. It's a shame too. We could have finished that thing in two weeks. We were already through the M's and that was halfway. More, really, because there wouldn't be many X's and Z's. You never know. Maybe Leon was right. You have to know when to lay'em down. It was a weekend deal, you see. There's a lot of mischief on weekends and not just check-kiting either. Leon cleared out the account on Friday afternoon. I was in San Antonio trying to sell ads for that fool book. The word got out fast on Leon but it didn't get to me. It didn't reach the Alamo City. I got back in my room in Houston on Sunday night. I was staying at Jim's Modern Cabins out on Galveston Road. My cabin was dark and the window was open. You had to leave your windows open. Jim doesn't have air-conditioning except in his own office. He's got a big window unit in his office that will rattle the walls. I walked by my front window and I could smell Ski's fruity breath. He has diabetes, you see. These young doctors tell everybody they have diabetes but Ski really has it. I knew he was waiting inside that cabin in the dark and I didn't know why. I left with hardly any delay and then it was nip and tuck in south Houston. I made it on down to Corpus and traded my car for that hippie bus at the first car lot that opened up. I knew I didn't have any business driving a car forty feet long but that was the only unit on the lot the fellow would trade even for. I thought it might make a nice little home on the road. Your top gospel singers all have private buses.”
“Why would Ski be after you if Leon Vurro got the money?”
“Leon's wife was behind all that. Bella set that up. I never said she was dumb.”
“How do you know all that stuff if you left town so fast? That part is not clear to me.”
“You get a feel for these things.”
“I don't see how you could get a feel for all the circumstances.”
“I should never have tied up with Leon. People like that can do nothing but drag you down. He didn't know the first thing about meeting the public and he was never dressed properly. They'll bury that son of a bitch in his zipper jacket.”
“How did you know, for instance, that Leon had cleaned out the bank account?”
“I always tried to help Leon and you see the thanks I got. I hired him to drive for me right after his rat died. He was with Murrell Brothers Shows at that time, exhibiting a fifty-pound rat from the sewers of Paris, France. Of course it didn't really weigh fifty pounds and it wasn't your true rat and it wasn't from Paris, France, either. It was some kind of animal from South America. Anyway, the thing died and I hired Leon to drive for me. I was selling birthstone rings and vibrating jowl straps from door to door and he would let me out at one end of the block and wait on me at the other end. He could handle that all right. That was just about his speed. I made a serious mistake when I promoted Leon to a higher level of responsibility.”
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
T
HE 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, âMay 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 didn'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?”