He said he had been a bit mixed up before and had shown me the wrong room. The Norma-Dupree room was actually one floor above the first room he had shown me, and was in fact the very room he had given me. Did I wish to be moved? I said no, it made no difference. Then there was a disturbance in the kitchen and he went to investigate. When he came back, he said, “It was nothing, the mop caught fire. All my employees are fools.”
This Mexican lunch was a long affair and before it was over we were joined by a tall bird wearing metallic-silver coveralls. He was a Canadian artist who made paper rabbits. He showed me one and it was a pretty well done bunny except for the big eyelashes. The price was ten dollars. I remarked that there seemed to be quite a few Canadians in Mexico.
He bristled. “Why shouldn't there be?”
“Out of proportion to your numbers, I mean. It was just a neutral observation.”
“We're quite free to travel, you know. We can even go to Cuba if we wish.”
“I'm not making myself clear.”
“Do please make yourself clear.”
“Well, there are two hundred million Americans and twenty million Canadians, and my country is closer to Mexico than yours, but I get the impression that there are just about as many Canadians here as Americans. At this table, for instance.”
“You're not the only Americans. You people just stole that name.”
“Look here, why don't you kiss my ass?”
“So bright of you. So typical.”
It was my guess that this queer was having big trouble selling his overpriced rabbits. That was the only way I could account for his manner. The hotel man became jolly and tried to patch things up. But this too annoyed the artist and he got up and flounced out, stopping for a moment under the archway as he thought of something pretty good to call me, which was “rat face.”
He thought it was pretty good but it was old stuff to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I look more like a predatory bird than a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year.
We finished our meal in peace and then I went downtown to trade bonds for pesos. The bank was closed for lunch until 4 p.m. Some lunch! I wandered about town on foot looking for my Torino.
There was a bandstand in the central square, and some wrought-iron benches and some noisy flocking birds with long tail feathers. I took them to be members of the grackle family. There were elegant trees too, of the kind that architects like to sketch in front of their buildings. A few gringos were scattered around on the benches, dozing and reading newspapers and working crossword puzzles. I approached them one by one and made inquiries. I got nowhere until I mentioned the dog. They remembered the dog. Still, they could give nothing more than bare sighting reports. I could get no leads and no firm dates.
Hippies interfered with my work by stopping me and asking me the time. Why did they care? And if so, why didn't they have watches? The watch factories were humming day and night in Tokyo and Geneva and Little Rock so that everyone might have a cheap watch, but not one of these hippies had a watch. Maybe the winding put them off. Or maybe it was all mockery of me and my coat and tie. The same hippies seemed to be stopping me again and again, though I couldn't be sure.
A retired army sergeant told me that he had chatted for a bit with Dupree. He said they had discussed the curious drinking laws of the different states, and the curious alcoholic beverages of the world, such as ouzo and pulque, and he made me glad I wasn't there. In all his travels over the world, he said, he had found only one thing he couldn't drink and that was some first-run brandy in Parral, Chihuahua.
“Where did you talk to him?”
“That Southern boy?”
“Yes.”
“Right here. I don't sit in the same place every day. It's not like I have my own bench but I
was
here that day. The boy sat over there and bought a Popsicle for his dog.”
I wondered if the man might be confused. The Popsicle business sounded all right but I couldn't see Dupree sitting here being civil and swapping yarns with Sarge.
“Did he say where he was going from here?”
“I don't believe he did. He didn't have a whole lot to say.”
“And the girl wasn't with him?”
“I didn't see any girl, just the dog. A big shaggy chow. The boy said he was going to trim his coat. He was worried about the tropical heat and humidity and he said he was going to give him a close trim with some scissors. He wanted to know where he could buy some flea powder and some heavy scissors.”
“When was this?”
“It's been a while. I don't know. They come and go. Did he steal your dog?”
“No. Did you see him after that?”
“I saw him once in a car with some other people.”
“Was it a Ford Torino?”
“No, it was a small foreign car. All beat up. It was some odd little car like a Simca. They were just cruising around the
jardÃn
here. I didn't pay much attention.”
Other people? Foreign car? Dupree was not one to take up with strangers. What was this all about? But Sarge could tell me nothing more, except that the people were “scruffy” and appeared to be Americans. He pointed out the drugstore on the corner where he had sent Dupree for the flea powder. Then he took a ballpoint pen and some glasses from his shirt pocket and I jumped up from the bench in alarm, fearing he was about to diagram something for me, but he was only rearranging his pocket stuff.
I thanked him and went to the drugstore and learned that an American wearing glasses had indeed bought some flea powder in the place. The woman pharmacist could tell me nothing else. I was tired. All this chasing around to prove something that I already knew, that Dupree had been in San Miguel. I couldn't get beyond that point. What I needed was a new investigative approach, a new plan, and I couldn't think of one. I looked over the aspirin display.
“¿Dolor?”
said the woman, and I said
SÃ
, and pointed to my head. Aspirins were too weak, she said, and she sold me some orange pills wrapped in a piece of brown paper. I took the pills to a café and crushed one on the table and tasted a bit of it. For all I knew, they were dangerous Mexican drugs, but I took a couple of them anyway. They were bitter.
On the way to the bank for a second try I got sidetracked into a small museum. The man who ran the place was standing on the sidewalk and he coaxed me inside. The admission fee was only two pesos. He had some good stuff to show. There were rough chunks of silver ore and clay figurines and two rotting mummies and colonial artifacts and delicate bird skulls and utensils of hammered copper. The man let me handle the silver. I wrote my name in the guest book and I saw that Norma and Dupree had been there. In the space for remarks Dupree had written, “A big gyp. Most boring exhibition in North America.” Norma had written, “I like the opals best. They are very striking.” She had signed herself Norma Midge. She was still using my name. I stood there and looked at her signature, at the little teacup handles on her capital N and capital M.
The book was on a high table like a lectern and behind it, tacked to the wall, was a map of Mexico. I drew closer to admire the map. It dated from around 1880 and it was a fine piece of English cartography. Your newer map is not always your better map! The relief was shown by hachuring, with every tiny line perfectly spaced. The engraver was a master and the printer had done wonders with only two shades of ink, black and brown. It was hand-lettered. I located myself at about 21 degrees north and 101 degrees west. This was as far south as I had ever been, about two degrees below the Tropic of Cancer.
Then after a few minutes it came to me. I knew where Dupree had gone and I should have known all along. He had gone to his father's farm in Central America. San Miguel was technically within the tropics but at an elevation of over six thousand feet the heat here would not be such as to cause dog suffering. And there was no humidity to speak of. They were on that farm in British Honduras. That monkey had taken my wife to British Honduras and he had planned it all in the Wormington Motel!
I was excited, my
dolor
suddenly gone, and I wanted to share the good news with someone.
¡Misión cumplida!
That is, it was not exactly accomplished, but the rest would be easy. I looked about for a place to gloat and soon hit on a bar called the Cucaracha.
It was a dark square room with a high ceiling. Some padded wooden benches were arranged in a maze-like pattern. They faced this way and that way and they were so close together that it was hard to move about. I drank bourbon until I figured out what it cost and then I switched to gin and tonic, which was much cheaper.
The customers were mostly gringos and they were a curious mix of retired veterans and hippies and alimony dodgers and artists. They were friendly people and I liked the place immediately.
We've all run off to Mexico
âthat was the thing that hung in the air, and it made for a kind of sad bonhomie. I was surprised to find myself speaking so freely of my private affairs. The Cucaracha people offered tips on the drive south to British Honduras. I basked in their attention as a figure of international drama. My headache returned and I took some more pills.
One of the hippies turned out to be from Little Rock. I never thought I would be glad to see a hippie but I was glad to see this fellow. He had a hippie sweetheart with him who was wearing white nurse stockings. She was a pretty little thing but I didn't realize it for a while because her electrified hair was so ugly. It was dark in there too. I asked the hippie what he did and he said he drank a liter of Madero brandy every day and took six Benzedrine tablets. He asked me what I did and I had to say I did nothing much at all. Then we talked about Little Rock, or at least I did. I thought we might have some mutual friends, or if not, we could always talk about the different streets and their names. The hippie wasn't interested in this. He said, “Little Rock is a pain in the ass,” and his sweetheart said, “North Little Rock too.”
But it didn't matter, I was having a good time. Everything was funny. An American woman wearing a white tennis hat stuck her head in the doorway and then withdrew it in one second when she saw what kind of place it was. The Cucaracha gang got a good laugh out of this, each one accusing the other of being the frightful person who had scared her away. I talked to a crippled man, a gringo with gray hair, who was being shunned by the other drinkers. He said he had shot down two Nip planes when he was in the Flying Tigers. He now owned a Chiclets factory in Guadalajara. People hated him, he said, because his principles didn't permit him to lend money, or to buy drinks for anyone but himself. He described for me the first six plays of an important Stanford football game of 1935, or I should say the first six plays from scrimmage, since he didn't count the kickoff as a play.
There were two Australian girls across the room and the Flying Tiger said they wanted to see me. He told me they had been trying to get my attention for quite a while. I went over at once and sat with them. These girls were slender cuties who were hitchhiking around the world with their shoulder bags. But it was all a hoax, the invitation, and they didn't want to see me at all. I sat down by another girl, this one a teacher from Chicago, and then I had to get up again because the seat was saved, or so she said. I watched that empty seat for a long time and it wasn't really saved for anyone. A hippie wearing striped bib overalls came in from the bar and sat beside her. She advised him that the seat was saved but that bird didn't get up. “You can't save seats,” he said. What a statement! You can't save seats! I would never have thought of that in a thousand years!
I forgot about the bank business and I sat there and drank gin and tonic until the quinine in the tonic water made my ears hum. Someone that night told me about having seen Dupree with a fellow wearing a neck brace but I was too drunk to pursue it and the thing went completely out of my mind. I began to babble. I told everybody about my father's Midgestone business, how the stone veneer was cut with special band saws, and how it was shaped and sanded. I told them about my greatgrandfather building the first greenhouse in Arkansas and how he had developed a hard little peach called the Lydia that was bird-resistant and well suited for shipping, although tasteless. I couldn't stop talking. I was a raving bore and I knew it too, but I couldn't stop. It was important to me that they know these things and who would tell them if I didn't?
They fled my presence, the hippies and vets and cuties alike, and left me sitting alone in the corner. I kept drinking, I refused to leave. They had all turned on me but I wasn't going to let them run me off. There was a lot of old stuff on the jukebox and I who had never played a jukebox in my life had the waiter take my change after each drink and play “It's Magic” by Doris Day. She was singing that song, a new one to me, when I first entered the place. I had heard of Doris Day but no one had ever told me what a good singer she was.
Sometime around midnight the hippie couple from Little Rock got into a squabble. I couldn't hear what he was saying because his voice was low but I heard her say, “My
daddy
don't even talk to me like that and you
damn
sure ain't!” The little girl was blazing. He put his hand out to touch her or to make some new point and she pushed it away and got up and left, stepping smartly in her white stockings and brushing past an old man who had appeared in the doorway.
He was a fat man, older than the Flying Tiger, and he was looking from left to right like an animal questing for food. He wore a white hat and a white shirt and white trousers and a black bow tie. This old-timer, I said to myself, looks very much like a boxing referee, except for the big floppy hat and the army flashlight clipped to his belt.