The sand changed to black dirt and mud. I drove through shallow creeks and the water splashed up on my feet. I was entering a different kind of forest, dark woods that pressed in and made a leafy tunnel of the road. There were scrub trees and giant trees, nothing in between. The big ones had smooth gray trunks and few branches except at the very top where they spread into canopies. Roots flared out at the base for buttressing support. I watched for parrots and saw none.
I met no traffic and saw no people either until I came to the Mayan ruin. Two Indian men were there working with machetes. They were hacking away at brush and swatting at mosquitoes. Here and there on the ground they had placed buckets of smoldering woody husks that gave off white smoke âhomemade mosquito bombs.
It wasn't a spectacular ruin, nothing to gape at, just a small clearing and two grassy mounds that were the eroded remains of pyramids. They were about twenty feet high. On one of them a stone stairway had been exposed, which led up to a small square temple on the top. Farther back in the woods I could see another mound, a higher one, with trees still growing from it. I stopped to inquire about the Dupree place.
The Indians spoke no English and they couldn't seem to understand my scraps of Spanish either but they were delighted to see me. They welcomed the break from their hopeless task. They seemed to think I had come to tour the ruin and so I followed them about. I tried to stand in the white smoke and it kept shifting around, away from me. The Indians laughed at this perverse joke of nature, so often on them but this time on me. We looked into a dark stone chamber. There were shiny crystals on the walls where water had been dripping for centuries. The chamber next to it had a canvas curtain across the doorway and there were bedrolls and a radio inside. These birds lived here!
We climbed the stone steps and looked into the temple. I ran my hand over the carvings. The stone was coarsegrained and badly weathered and I couldn't make out the design but I knew it must be a representation of some toothy demon or some vile lizard god. I had read about these Mayans and their impenetrable glyphs and their corbeled arches and their madness for calculating the passage of time. But no wheel! I won't discuss their permutation calendar, though I could. I gave the Indians a dollar apiece. They asked me for cigarettes and I had none. But that was all right too, I was still a good fellow. They laughed and laughed over their hard luck.
I left with no information about the Dupree place. About two miles farther along I came to a pasture airstrip with a limp windsock, and then a house, an unpainted structure made of broad reddish planks. It stood well off the wet ground so that Webster or Travis might have walked upright beneath it. I would have had to crouch. There was a sorry fence around the house, a sagging wire affair, and a sign, “KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU,” on the makeshift gate. There was a porch with a rope hammock hanging at one end. In a shed next to the house there was a green tractor.
I parked in a turnout across the road from the house. It was a turning-around place and a garbage dump too, with bottles and cans and eggshells and swollen magazines scattered about. I had no way of measuring 16.4 miles but I thought I must be getting close. These people here would surely know something about the Dupree farm, unless Sergeant Wattli had put me altogether wrong. There was a terrible stink in the air and I thought at first it came from the garbage. Then I saw two dead and bloated cows with their legs flung out stiff.
I got out of the car and started across the road and then stopped when a red dog came from beneath the house. Was this Dupree's chow dog? He yawned and stretched one front leg and then the other one. He looked deformed with his coat trimmed, his big square head now out of proportion to his diminished body. A clear plastic bag was tied around each of his feet.
He walked to the gate and looked at me without recognition. After a while he registered me in his dog brain as a negligible presence and then he sat back on his haunches and snapped at mosquitoes. I couldn't believe this was the same dog I had known in Little Rock, the same red beast I had seen springing from cover to nip the ankles of motorcyclists and to send small children into screaming flight down the sidewalk. He had been unmanned perhaps by the long journey and the shearing and the plastic bags on his paws.
The screen door opened and Dupree came out on the porch. He was shirtless, his skin glistening with oil, and he was wearing a tall gray cowboy hat. He had grown a beard. His cowboy boots had pointed toes that curled up like elf shoes. This was a new, Western Dupree. He had a new walk too, a rolling, tough-guy walk. He wasn't wearing his glasses and he squinted at me with one eye. The other one was black and almost closed. His lips were broken and swollen. They had already been at him with their fists here. People's justice! He was holding my .410 shotgun by the barrel in the position that is called “trail arms” in the drill manuals.
“Popo?” he said.
The weak-eyed monkey couldn't even make out who I was. He didn't even recognize his own car.
I said, “Well, Dupree, I see you have some little boots on the dog.”
“He doesn't like to get his feet wet. Is that you, Waymon?”
He sometimes called me by this countrified version of “Raymond,” not in an affectionate way but with malice.
“You have a lot to answer for, Dupree.”
“You'll get your money back. Don't worry about it. Who's with you?”
“Nobody.”
“Who told you where I was?”
“Tell Norma to come on out.”
“She's not here.”
“Then where is she?”
“Gone. Sick. How did you get here anyway?”
“I don't see my Torino.”
“I sold it.”
“Where?”
“Everybody will get their money as soon as I can get a crop out. Don't push me. The best thing you can do is leave me alone.”
“I'm coming into that house.”
“No, you better hold it right there.” He raised the shotgun. I didn't think he would shoot but you never know. Here was an unstable person who had threatened the President. It was a pump gun, an old Model 42, and I wasn't sure he even knew how to work it but I certainly didn't want to be killed with a .410.
“This is not much of a place,” I said. “I was expecting a big plantation. Where are the people who do the work?”
“They're gone too. The head bozo quit and they all went with him. They tore up the generator and the water pump before they left. They shot some of the cows and ran the others off. About what you could expect. I'm through with those creeps.”
“Tell Norma to come out on the porch for a minute.”
“She's not here.”
“Is she afraid to face me?”
“She's gone, vamoosed.”
“I think she's in there looking out at me from somewhere.”
“There's no one here but me.”
“Does your father know you're here?”
“I'm through with him. His day is over. I'm through with you too. You don't have a clue to what's going on. You never did. Are you driving my Buick Special?”
“Yes.”
“How did it do?”
“It did all right but I'm not here to discuss that.”
“I thought clods like you were always ready to discuss cars.”
“Not this time.”
He went over to the hammock and sat down in it with the gun across his knees. I was standing in the road trying to think of what to do and say. I had started with a great moral advantage but it seemed to be slipping away. Was Norma in that house? I couldn't tell. Dupree was a liar but you couldn't even count on him to lie.
I said, “What about the woman who lives behind the Game and Fish Building?”
“What about her?”
“Why didn't you bring her with you?”
“Because I didn't want to.”
“Did Norma rub that oil on you?”
“These are my natural body oils. We're short of water. Now leave me alone. Everybody will be paid.”
“I'm not leaving until I talk to Norma.”
“She doesn't want to talk to you. She said she was tired of living with a little old man.”
“She never said that.”
“She said she was tired of looking at your freckled shoulders and your dead hair.”
“Norma never told you that. She doesn't talk that way.”
“She doesn't like your name either.”
I knew this was a lie too. From Edge to Midge was at worst a lateral moveâno hybrid vigor to be expected from our unionâand Norma was never one to make hateful remarks. Leave him alone! Next to me he was the least importuned person in Little Rockâpeople fled from rooms at the sound of his voiceâand he kept saying leave him alone. I took a couple of steps toward the gate. He raised the shotgun.
“Better hold it right there.”
“Why can't I come in if Norma is not there?”
“Because all my papers and my graphics are on the table. Does that answer your question?”
“What kind of papers? I didn't know you had any papers.”
“There's a lot you don't know.”
“Where did you sell my car? How much did you get for it?”
“Everybody will be paid in time. That's if they stop bothering me.”
“Did you think I would come all the way down here just to listen to a few of your lies and then go home?”
“You'll get your money. And then you'll be happy. It doesn't take much for people like you.”
“What will you do, mail it to me? Should I go home and watch the mail?”
“You'll get it.”
“When?”
“As soon as I can get a crop out.”
“Get a crop out. I'd like to see that. What kind of crop? You don't know the first thing about farming, Dupree. You don't know how to do anything. Look at that fence.”
“You don't have to know much. What you have to know is how to make niggers work. That's the hard part.”
“You say that from your hammock. Do you know Webster Spooner?”
“No.”
“He's the bellboy at my hotel. He has three jobs, if not four. I'll bet you haven't made one friend in this country.”
“You goofball.”
“Put that shotgun down, you coward, and meet me out here in this road like a man and we'll see who the goofball is.”
Instead of making his blood boil, my straightforward challenge only made him toss his head.
“I'm coming into that house, Dupree.”
“Better not try it.”
“Then I'll have to come back.”
“Better not come at night.”
“I have a .44 magnum out here in the glove compartment. It's as big as a flare pistol. You can fire just four more rounds from it and the next day the arch of your hand is so sore and numb you can't pick up a dime. That may give you some idea of its power and range. I'd rather not have to use it.”
“What crap.”
“I'm going now but I'll be back. Tell Norma I'm staying at the Fair Play Hotel in Belize.”
“She's not interested in your accommodations. And I'm through passing along information from lower-middle-class creeps like you. I never did like doing it. Your time is coming, pal, soon. You better just leave me alone. If you people would leave me alone, maybe I could get some work done on my book.”
“Your book?”
“My book on horde control.”
“I didn't know about this.”
“Shaping up the skraelings. Getting them organized. I'll tell them about rights and grievances they haven't even thought of yet in New York City. It's a breakthrough. Nobody has ever been able to get their attention and hold it for any appreciable length of time. I've hit on a way to do it with low-voltage strobe lights and certain audio-visual techniques that I'm not going into at this time. I couldn't expect you to understand it. My outline is almost complete but now I've lost another day's work, thanks to you.”
Letters weren't enough for him. This monkey was writing a book! I said, “We are weaker than our fathers, Dupree.”
“What did you say?”
“We don't even look like them. Here we are, almost thirty years old, and neither one of us even has a job. We're worse than the hippies.”
“Leave it to you to come up with some heavy thinking like that. You find me trapped here in this land of niggers with your water-waster wife and you say we are weaker than our fathers. That's just the kind of crap I'm through passing along.”
“I'll be back, Dupree.”
“Why do you keep calling me by my name?”
“How do you wish to be addressed now?”
“You're saying my name too much.”
“I'll be back.”
“Better not come at night.”
“I'm leaving this bottle right here in the road. It's Norma's lower-back medicine. Make sure she gets it before a car runs over it.”
He went into the house. After a moment I saw the weak glow of a candle or an oil lamp from an inner room. I called out for Norma. There was no answer. I knew it was my duty to walk into that yard and up those steps and into that house but I was afraid to do it. I thought of ramming the two front pilings of the house with the Buick, thereby causing the house to topple forward and spilling forth Dupree through a door or window. Nothing to disconcert a proud man like a sudden tumble from his home. But might not Norma be injured too, flung perhaps from a bathtub? The hammock was still moving and I stood there and counted the diminishing oscillations until the thing came to rest at bottom dead center. I would lay Dupree out in that hammock when I had killed him. I would take a stick and pry his teeth apartâthey would be clenched in a rictusâand I would place the candle between them. I would leave him in the hammock with the candle burning in his mouth and let the Belize detectives make of it what they would. I poked idly about in the garbage dump with my foot and turned up nothing of any real interest except for a one-gallon pickle jar. I put it in the car and left.