When I drove by the Mayan ruin, the two brush-cutters were taking another break and this time they had cigarettes. They were talking to a third man who was sitting astride a three-wheel motorcycle rig. Little crosses were painted all over the wooden cargo box and the name “Popo” was spelled out in red plastic reflectors on the back. There were brown-paper sacks in the cargo box. I waved. Then it came to me. Those were probably Dupree's supplies. I turned around and went back.
The Indians thought I wanted to tour the ruin again and so I did. Popo joined us. He was Spanish. We looked into the stone chambers again. Mosquitoes swarmed in our faces. Popo sat on a scooped-out block of stone that must have been a kind of altar. He smirked and crossed his arms and legs and asked me to take his picture. I didn't think he should behave that way on someone's altar but the Indians themselves found his antics funny and in any case I had no camera. Some gringo. No smokes and no camera and no money!
Popo spoke a little English. He said he had seen no woman at the Dupree place, no other person at all since the workers had left, but he had made only one previous delivery and he had not been inside the house. Dupree would not let him go past the gate. I looked through the paper sacks. I found no Pall Mall cigarettes, Norma's brand, or any other kind, and no single item that might have been for her exclusive use, except possibly for a bottle of hand lotion. But maybe Dupree had now taken up the use of Jergen's lotion. It was hard to say what he might or might not be doing in that house, in his strange new life.
I gave Popo a savings bond and told him that Dupree was flying back to the States in a few hours. An emergency at home. He would no longer need this service. Popo was to keep the food and the beer and the kerosene and the change too, if any. Dupree wanted Popo and his family to have these things.
Popo was baffled. What about his glasses? What about the
remedios
, the
drogas
? He showed me Dupree's eyeglasses, wrapped in a repair order, and a big bottle of St. Joseph aspirins and a smaller bottle of yellow Valium tablets. I hadn't known that Dupree was a pillhead on top of everything else but I can't say I was surprised.
I said yes, Dupree did want the glasses and the drugs and I would see that he got them. Popo was reluctant to go along with all this and I gave him another E bond. The Indians pressed me again for cigarettes and I gave them each a bond too. I asked Popo about these birds. He said they were brothers. They worked for the government and they had been here for years fighting the brush. They could make the clearing no bigger because the stuff grew up behind them so fast. There was a third brother somewhere around, Popo told me, but he was always hiding in the woods and was seldom seen by outsiders.
I made sure that Popo followed me back to town and I drove slow on the sandy part so as not to dust him up.
Nine
T
HE CHINAMAN'S STORE was still open and I bought some crackers and a thick oval can of Mexican sardines and took them to my room. Karl's radio was playing at moderate volume. I don't think I had even noticed it until I heard the announcer say, “No more calls, please, we have a winner.” Then Karl switched it off for the first time since my arrival.
Or maybe tube collapse or power failure or a political coup at the station itself. They always went for the radio station in these places. I wondered if they had ever had a really first-class slaughter of students here. Better watch my step. Dupree had better watch his smart mouth too. Name your cat or dog after the Prime Minister in a place like this and you would be in the jug but pronto.
And there would be no fool here to go his bail, if they had bail. His papers! His book! His social program! It was some sort of nasty Communist claptrap, no doubt, with people who sounded a lot like Dupree as the bosses. He would tell us what to do and when to do it. The chairman! He would reward us and punish us. What a fate! Give me Mr. Dupree any day. The book would never be finished of course. The great outline of history! His slide shows! His skraelings! Pinch their arms and he could get their attention. But was Norma in that house or not? That was the important thing.
I ate my sardine supper and took a bath. I washed the big pickle jar, along with the top, and put them on the windowsill to dry. Then I called down the stairs for Webster Spooner. He appeared with his notebook, ready for any assignment. I showed him the jar.
“A little surprise for you, Webster.”
“Sor?”
“I thought you might have some use for it. It's clean. You can save pennies in it. Keep a pet fish maybe. You would have to change the water. If you decide on the fish.”
He looked it over but I could see he wasn't interested in it and I suggested he give it to Ruth, who could make some household use of it. He took the jar away and a few minutes later I heard Ruth slam it against something and break it.
I went to bed and reviewed the day's events, a depressing exercise. I had not handled myself so badly, I thought, and yet there were no results. I must do better. Tomorrow I would enter the Dupree house, come what may. I would watch for an opening and then make a dash across the road. What I needed was a timetable of things to do. An orderly schedule. I sat up in bed and ruled off a sheet of paper with evenly spaced lines and corresponding numbers down to sixteen. It was a neat piece of work, the form itself.
But I suddenly despaired of trying to think of that many things to do and of getting them in the proper order. I didn't want to leave any blank spaces and I didn't want to pad it out with dishonest filler items either, like “tie shoes.” What was wrong with me? I had once been very good at this kind of thing. I crumpled the paper and dropped it on the floor.
The sardine stink filled the room and overwhelmed the river stink. Outside on the street I heard the slow grinding whine of a Mopar starterâa Plymouth or a Dodge or a Chrysler. The engine caught and idled smoothly and after a minute or so the car drove away.
Jack Wilkie, perhaps, in his Imperial. He had finally arrived. He had been outside watching my window. But no, Jack would never lurk. He might break down the door but he wouldn't lurk. That was more in my line. I felt queasy. I took two of the orange pills. I can't say I was really sick, unless you count narcolepsy and mild xenophobia, but I was a little queasy. If there had been a gang of reporters outside clamoring to know my condition, Webster would have had to announce to them that it was satisfactory.
I slept and dreamed fitfully. In one dream I was looking through a Sears catalogue and I came across Mrs. Symes and Melba and the doctor modeling lawn furniture. They were wearing their ordinary clothes, unlike the other models, who were in bright summer togs. The other dream took place in a dark bar. The boy Travis was sitting on a stool with his legs dangling. That is, he looked like Travis, only his name seemed to be Chet this time. He was drinking from a tall frosted glass and he was waiting for five o'clock and victims to chirp at. I took a seat at the other end of the bar. He didn't see me for a while and then when he did see me he shifted around and said, “So how you been, Ray? You never come around anymore.” I said I was all right and I asked about his mother. Chet said she was fine. He offered to buy me a drink and I said I had to go to Texarkana.
I woke early and saw that I had been drooling on the pillow. The ear hair couldn't be far behind now. I washed and dressed and ate the rest of the sardines and drove back to the Dupree place.
The hairy monkey was up early too. I had no sooner parked in the turnout than he came to the door with the .410. He said nothing. I opened all the car doors to catch any breeze that might come up and sat in the driver's seat with my feet outside on the garbage. Dupree went back inside. The medicine bottle full of four-dollar capsules was still standing in the road where I had left it.
Now and then I would get out as though to start across the road and he would instantly appear at the door. He must have been sitting just behind it in the shadow. I called out for Norma. I told her that I had her medicine and her silver and that if she would just come to the fence for a minute I would give it to her. There was no answer.
After the engine had cooled off, I sat on the hood with my heels hooked on the bumper. At the end of each hour, just as the second hand hit twelve, I called out for her. Late in the morning Dupree came out and sat in the hammock with the gun on his lap. He read a magazine, holding it about five inches from his eyes.
He wouldn't answer me when I spoke. His plan, I could see, was to keep silent and not acknowledge my presence, except for the countering moves with the shotgun. When he looked about, he pretended not to see me, in the way of a movie actor whose eyes go professionally blank when tracking across the gaze of the camera. The dog picked up on his mood and he too ignored me. Dupree sat there with his magazine, feigning solitude and peace. He fondled his belly and chest with his fingertips the way some people do when they find themselves in swimming trunks. I got one of the rusty cans of warm beer from the trunk and made a show of opening it and drinking it.
Around noon he stood up and stretched. He strolled out into the yard and peered down the road with his watery eyes. I had been waiting for some such move.
“Popo is not coming today,” I said. “He's not coming tomorrow either.” I held up his eyeglasses but he wouldn't look at me. “I have your glasses here, Dupree. They're right here. I have your aspirins and your dope too. Look. Here's what I think of your dope.” I poured the yellow pills out and crushed them into the garbage with my foot. He couldn't see what I was doing and the effect was thus lost.
He made no reply and went over to the green tractor and climbed up on it and tried to start it. It was a diesel and by nature hard to start. Dupree lacked patience. His contempt for machinery was unpleasant to watch. He slammed and wrenched things about. A gentler touch and maybe a shot of ether into the breather and it probably would have cranked right up, but Dupree, the farmer's son, knew little of these matters. When he might have been learning how to start a tractor, he was away at various schools, demonstrating in the streets and acquiring his curious manners and his curious notions. The student prince! He even had a place to run to when things got hot.
He went back to the porch and sat on the hammock. I drank another can of warm beer. He suddenly made up his mind to speak, saying, “I suppose you've told everybody where I am, Burke.”
“Not yet, no.”
He was calling me Burke! There followed a silent interval of about an hour before he spoke again. He said, “Those aspirins are for my dog.” I had been quietly thinking over the Burke business and now I had to think about the aspirins and the dog. I should explain that Burke worked on the copy desk with us. It is true that Burke and I were only dimly perceived by the world and that a new acquaintance might have easily gotten us confused, might have hailed Burke on the street as “Midge,” or introduced me to another person as “Burke,” but Dupree knew us well from long association, knew the thousand differences between us, and I could only conclude that he was now so far advanced in his political thinking that he could no longer tell one person from another. I should say too that Burke was by far the best copy editor on the desk. Even Dupree was better at the work than I, who have never had a firm grasp of English grammar, as may be seen. The flow of civic events that made up the news in our paper was incomprehensible to me too, but Burke shone in both these areas. He was always fretting over improper usage, over people saying “hopefully” and “finalized,” and he talked knowledgeably about things that went on in the world. That's enough on Burke.
I got the St. Joseph bottle from my pocket and threw it across to the porch. Dupree picked it up and took it back to the hammock and ate four or five aspirins, making a show of relishing them, as I had done with the beer. He said, “My dog never took an aspirin in his life.” You couldn't believe a word he said.
That afternoon he tried the tractor again. He got it to chug a few times but the black smoke and the noise of the cold idle knock startled him and he shut it down at once. I stayed there all day. It was a blockade. I was ready to intercept any delivery or visitor, but no one came. There was nothing, it seemed, beyond this place. I watched the windows for Norma, for flitting shadows. I was always good at catching roach movement or mouse movement from the corner of my eye. Small or large, any object in my presence had only to change its position slightly, by no more than a centimeter, and my head would snap about and the thing would be instantly trapped by my gaze. But I saw no sign of life in that house. All this time, of course, I was also watching and waiting for the chance to dash across the road. The circumstances were never quite right and, to put it plainly, I funked it again.
It was still daylight when I got back to Belize and I drove aimlessly about town. Sweat stung my eyes. The heat was such that I couldn't focus my mind. The doctor and Webster Spooner and I had all contrived to get ourselves into the power of women and I could see no clear move for any one of us. It was hard to order my thoughts.
I stopped at the Fort George Hotel for something to drink. The bar was on the second floor and it overlooked a kind of estuary. The water was still and brown and not at all inviting. Out there somewhere, I knew, was a coral reef with clear water and fish of strange shapes and dazzling colors. The bar itself was nice enough. I was up to my old trick of rooming in a cheap place and drinking in a better place. I saw the American woman and the boy sitting on a couch by the windows.
Low tumbling clouds approached from the Caribbean. I drank a bottle of Falcon beer. It had a plain label. There were no boasts about choice hops and the stuff had won no medals at any international exposition but it was cold and tasted like every other beer. Exercise, that was what I needed. That always cleared the brain. I could jog around the entire city and look for my car at the same time. But wouldn't children jeer at me all along such a circuit? Pelting me, perhaps, with bits of filth. And what about the town dogs, all at my heels? It would be much more sensible to install some muscle-building spring devices in the privacy of my room. A stationary bicycle. But Webster would have the devil of a time getting that stuff up the stairs. No, a brisk swim. That would be just the thing. An isolated beach and some vigorous strokes in foamy salt water.