He looked around and said, “Where's the boy who's going to British Honduras?”
I said nothing.
He raised his voice. “I'm looking for the boy who's going to British Honduras! Is he here?”
If I had kept my mouth shut for five more seconds, he would have gone his way and I would have gone mine. I said, “Here I am! In the corner! I'm not supposed to talk!” I hadn't spoken for a long time and my voice croaked and had no authority in it.
“Where?”
“Over here!”
“I can't see you!”
“In the corner!”
He bumped his way across the room and took off his hat and joined me on the bench. His white pants were too long and even when he was seated there was excess cloth piled up on top of his shoes. “I couldn't see you over all those heads,” he said.
I was still fuming, a resentful drunk, and I took my anger out on him. “You couldn't see any normal human being over here from where you were standing. I'm not a giraffe. For your information, sir, a lot of navy pilots are five seven. Why don't you try calling Audie Murphy a runt? You do and you'll wake up in St. Vincent's Infirmary.”
He paid no attention to this rant. “My bus broke down and I need to get back on the road,” he said. “When are you leaving?”
“They won't let me talk in here.”
“Who won't?”
“All these juiceheads. You'd think they owned the place. I have just as much right to be here as they do and if they don't want to hear about the greenhouse they can all kiss my ass! These juiceheads never grew anything in their lives!”
Neither had I for that matter but it wasn't the same thing. The old man introduced himself as Dr. Reo Symes. He looked to be in bad health. His belt was about eight inches too long, with the end curling out limp from the buckle. There were dark bags under his eyes and he had long meaty ears. One eye was badly inflamed and this was the thing that made me feel I was talking to Mr. Proctor or Mr. Meigs.
He said he was from Louisiana and had been making his way to British Honduras when his school-bus camper broke down. He was the owner of The Dog of the South. He asked if he might ride along with me and share the expenses. Overdoing everything like the disgusting drunk that I was, I told him that he would be more than welcome and that there would be absolutely no charge. His company would be payment enough. He questioned me about my driving skills and I assured him that I was a good driver. He said he was afraid to take a Mexican bus because the drivers here had a reputation for trying to beat out locomotives at grade crossings. He offered me some money in advance and I waved it aside. I told him I would pick him up in the morning.
I had planned on searching the sky that night for the Southern Cross and the Coalsack but when I left the bar it was overcast and drizzling rain. I bought two hot dogs from a man pushing a cart around the square. One block away the town was totally dark. I staggered down the middle of the cobbled street and tried to make it appear that I was sauntering. In the darkened doorways there were people smoking cigarettes and thinking their Mexican thoughts.
A hotel cat, a white one, followed me up the stairs to my room and I gave him one of the hot dogs. I didn't let him in the room. That would be a misplaced kindness. He would take up with me and then I would have to leave. Just inside the door there was a full-length mirror and the image it gave back was wavy and yellowish. I knew that Norma must have stood before it and adjusted her clothes. What would she be wearing? I liked her best in her winter clothes and I couldn't remember much about her summer things. What a knockout she was in her white coat and her red knit cap! With Jack Frost nipping her cheeks and her wavy nose!
Four
R
AIN WAS STILL FALLING when I got up in the morning. After I had paid the hotel bill, I had seven or eight dollars and around sixty pesos left. There was a terrible metallic clatter when I tried to start the car. A bad water pump or a bad universal joint will give you notice before it goes but this was some sudden and major failure, or so I thought. A broken connecting rod or a broken timing chain. Strength of materials! Well, I said to myself, the little Buick is done.
I got out and opened the hood. There was the white cat, decapitated by the fan blades. I couldn't believe it. He had crawled up into the engine compartment of this car, not another car, and there was my bloody handiwork. I couldn't handle anything. I couldn't even manage the minor decencies of life. I could hardly get my breath and I walked around and around the car.
A boy with some schoolbooks stopped to watch me and I gave him ten pesos to remove the carcass. I tried to get a grip on myself. Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners. I drove down to the square and waited for the bank to open. My hands were shaking. I had read somewhere that white cats were very often deaf, like Dalmatian dogs. I had dry mouth and tunnel vision.
The bank manager said he could not cash the bonds but he could accept them as a deposit if I wished to open a checking account. They should clear in about a month. A month! Why had I not cashed them all in the States? What a piddler! Norma would have enjoyed this and I couldn't have blamed her for it. I was always impatient with this kind of childish improvidence in other people.
The Siesta trailer park was now a field of mud. Dr. Symes was having coffee in his white Ford bus. The passenger seats had been removed from the thing and replaced by a clutter of household furnishings that had not been anchored or scaled down or customized in any way. There was a dirty mattress on the floor and a jumble of boxes and chairs and tables. It was an old man's mess on top of a hippie mess. I accepted a roll and passed up the coffee. I loved those Mexican rolls but I didn't like the looks of the doctor's cup and I've never cared for instant coffee because it has no smell.
I was frank with him. I explained the bonds problem and I showed him exactly how much money I had. It was a bad moment. I was already embarrassed by my behavior in the bar and now, after all the expansive talk of a free ride, I was making myself look like a cheap liar. I made him a proposition. I would drive him to British Honduras if he would pay for the gasoline and other expenses. When we reached Belize, I would wire home for money and repay him half of his outlay. In the meantime I would give him five of my savings bonds to hold.
He was suspicious and I could understand that, although the deal seemed fair enough to me. The bonds were not negotiable, he said, and they were of no use to him. I pointed out that they did have a certain hostage value. It would be in my interest to redeem them. He looked at me and he looked outside at the car. It sat funny because the tires were of different sizes. He said, “All right then, let's go,” and he flung his coffee through a window.
There was a staple-and-hasp affair on the bus door and he locked it with a brass padlock. He brought along his grip and a gallon of drinking water in a plastic jug and a sack of marshmallows. We left The Dog of the South parked there in the mud.
He was wary. He had little to say. He tried the radio, longer than I would have, and then gave it up. He said, “If a man wanted to get the news in this car, he would be out of luck, wouldn't he?”
“This is not my car. Everything works in my car.”
The skies were clearing and the morning sun was blinding. He reached up for the right-hand sun visor that had never been there. His hand fell away and he grunted.
“It runs okay,” I said.
“What's all that vibration?”
“The motor mounts are shot.”
“The what?”
“The motor mounts. They look like black jelly down there. A V-6 shakes a lot anyway. It'll be all right after we get up some speed.”
“Do you think it'll make it?”
“Yes, I do. It's a good car.” I had said that just to be saying something but I thought it over and decided it was true.
“I hope a wheel doesn't fly off this thing,” he said.
“I do too.”
He worried a lot about that, a wheel flying off, and I gathered it had happened to him once and made an impression on him.
When we reached Celaya, which was only thirty miles or so from San Miguel, I left the highway and went downtown. I drove slowly up one street and down another. I thought I might see some shell-pocked buildings or at least a statue or a plaque of some kind.
Dr. Symes said, “What are you doing now?”
“This is Celaya.”
“What about it?”
“There was a big battle here in 1915.”
“I never heard of this place.”
“I figure it was the third bloodiest battle ever fought in this hemisphere.”
“So what?”
“Some sources say the fourth bloodiest. Obregón lost his arm here. Pancho Villa's army was routed. Do you know what he said?”
“No.”
“He said, âI would rather have been beaten by a Chinaman than by that
perfumado
, Obregón.'”
“Who were they fighting?”
“It was a civil war. They were fighting each other.”
“I never heard of it.”
“Well, it wasn't that long ago, and it was all right here, in this very town. I'll bet there are plenty of old-timers walking around here who were in that fight. If my Spanish was better, I would try to find one and talk to him.”
“Let's don't do that.”
The doctor made a show of counting his money. He said he had only about fifty dollars. His scuffed leather wallet was about a foot long and it was chained to his clothing in some way. It was like the big wallets carried by route men, by milkmen and potato-chip men.
There were three grades of gasoline in Mexico at that time and I had been buying the top grade, the Pemex 100. Now, to save money, the doctor's money, I began using the middle grade, which was supposed to be around 90 octane. I don't believe it was that high, because on the long mountain pulls the pistons rattled like empty bottles in a sack.
This noise bothered the doctor. He said, “The old Model A had a spark advance you could manipulate. I don't know why they got rid of it. Well, that's your Detroit smarties. The hand choke too. That's gone.
Been
gone.”
“What's wrong with your bus?”
“I think it's a burnt wheel bearing. My right front wheel. The wheel was shaking and there was a grinding racket coming out of that hub. I had a man look at it in a garage in Ciudad Victoria.”
“What did he say?”
“I don't know what he said. He greased it. I went on and it did all right for a while. Then that wheel commenced shaking again and I was afraid that booger might fly off on me.”
But the doctor didn't talk much, except to make complaints, and I thought it was going to be a long silent trip. I made some travel observations. I said that Mexican parents seemed to be kinder and more affectionate to their children than American parents. He said nothing. I remarked on the new buildings, on the flamboyant Mexican architecture. He said, “There's not much going on inside those buildings.”
My abrupt steering movements bothered him too. He sat rigid in the seat and watched and listened. He complained about the dog smell on the seat and the dust that came up from the floor. He drank from a bottle of B and B liqueur. He said he had the chronic bronchitis of a singer and had used this liqueur for his throat ever since the government had barred the use of codeine in cough syrup.
“Pure baloney,” he said. “I've seen every kind of addict there is and I've never known one person who was addicted to codeine. I've taken fifty gallons of the stuff myself. Wine will drive you crazy faster than anything I know and you can buy all the wine you want. Well, that's your Washington smarties. They know everything.”
“Are you a medical doctor?”
“I'm not in active practice at this time.”
“I once looked into medicine myself. I sent off for some university catalogues.”
“I'm retired from active practice.”
“These doctors make plenty of money.”
“That's generally true, yes. I would be well fixed today if I had paid more attention to my screening methods. Screening is your big worry. I was always more concerned with healing. That was a serious mistake on my part. My entire life was ruined by a man named Brimlett. I didn't screen him.”
After a time he seemed to realize that I wasn't going to rob him and I wasn't going to wreck the car. He relaxed and took off his big hat. There was a pointed crest of hair at the back of his head like that of a jaybird. He couldn't remember my name and he kept calling me “Speed.”
I learned that he had been dwelling in the shadows for several years. He had sold hi-lo shag carpet remnants and velvet paintings from the back of a truck in California. He had sold wide shoes by mail, shoes that must have been almost round, at widths up to EEEEEE. He had sold gladiola bulbs and vitamins for men and fat-melting pills and all-purpose hooks and hail-damaged pears. He had picked up small fees counseling veterans on how to fake chest pains so as to gain immediate admission to V.A. hospitals and a free week in bed. He had sold ranchettes in Colorado and unregistered securities in Arkansas.
He said he had had very little trouble with the law in recent years, although he had been arrested twice in California: once for disturbing divine service, and again for impersonating a naval officer. They were trifling matters. He was collared in San Diego on the last charge; the uniform was a poor fit and he was too old for the modest rank he had assumed. He said he was only trying to establish a short line of credit at a bank. A friend from Tijuana named Rod Garza bailed him out and the thing never even came to trial. The church arrest had grown out of a squabble with some choir members who had pinched him and bitten him and goosed him. They were trying to force him out of the choir, he said, because they claimed he sang at an odd tempo and threw them off the beat. One Sunday he turned on them and whipped at them with a short piece of grass rope. Some of the women cried.