“You still hanging around?”
I had announced recently, as I did once or twice a year, that I was leaving Mexico for good, going back to Shreveport to join my brother in the construction business. “Yes, but not for long,” I said. “You better make the best of me while you can.” I chose to sit at another table, one offering a better view of street events, with Simcoe, Pleat, McNeese, Coney, Minim and Mott. Already there was something to see, a car fire in the cab rank across the street. The cabbies were throwing clods of dirt at it and slapping at it with rags.
Pleat, great favorite with the ladies, said he had owned thirty-odd cars in his lifetime and never once had an engine fire. Coney, the English painter, whose tuneless humming drove people away, said he once had a car fire so hot that the aluminum carburetor melted and ran down over the block. Minim was in the Bowling Hall of Fame. He was a retired bowler and sports poet, and he maintained that bowling was held in even lower esteem than poetry, though it was a close call. He had made more money with his short sports poems, he said, than he had ever made on the bowling circuit, though not much more. Mott always looked sprightly and pleased with himself, like Harry Truman at the piano, with his rimless glasses and neatly combed hair. He had gone crazy in the army and now received a check each month, having been declared fifty percent psychologically disabled. Had they determined him to be half crazy all the time or full crazy half the time? Mott said the VA doctors never would spell it out for him. He had whatever the opposite of paranoia is called. He thought everybody liked him and took a deep personal interest in his welfare. But then everybody did like him.
“Don Ricardo is looking for you,” he said.
“So I heard.”
Let him look. He knew where to find me. “Don Ricardo” was another of Flandin’s self-bestowed titles. This one had never caught on outside his own household. His wife, Nan, had pushed it, and of course the servants had to call him that. The rest of us refused to do so, out of pettiness no doubt. All except for the guileless Mott.
Simcoe said he had seen an interesting thing in the zócalo that morning. He had spied a rat high up in the topmost branches of a laurel tree. Minim said rats didn’t climb trees and that it must have been a squirrel or a gray bird. Simcoe didn’t like having his eyesight or his honesty questioned. He said, “A gray bird eating a Baby Ruth from the wrapper? What speeshees of gray bird might that be?” In the end we agreed that city rats could climb trees but did not often choose to climb trees and that Simcoe was right to report his sighting.
A portly hippie with a two-stranded beard went ambling past our table. McNeese said, “Look at that morphadite creep. On his way to shoot some dope into his old flabby white ass, I’ll bet.”
Mott said, “Is that the way they do it? Wouldn’t he need an assistant? An accomplice?”
Coney said, “I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole.”
“What are they up to? Is there some hippie convention?”
“I don’t understand how they get across the border.”
I had a boy polish my shoes. Coney sketched and hummed. Simcoe read a book. It was all right to do that here. In the States it was acceptable to read newspapers and magazines in public, but not books, unless you wanted to be taken for a student or a bum or a lunatic or all three. Here you could read books in cafés without giving much offense, and even write them. I had seen Bollard doing it, scratching many life-destroying things on a legal pad. McNeese said, “Speaking of hippies, I heard they picked up your man in the station wagon.”
“What, here?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“Did they get the little girl back?”
“I don’t know the details. I just heard something at Shep’s about it.”
Just then Doc Flandin came up in his slippers. When I first met him he wore a seersucker suit and a spotless Panama, day in and day out. Now he looked like a wino. He was unshaven, and his shirttail was out, and he had an odd little brimless cap pushed down on his ears, of the kind James Cagney used to wear in prison. He beamed down on us with one fist on his hip. We amused him.
“Well, boys, what is it this morning? Pork Chop Hill? Leyte Gulf? Chesty Puller? Service-connected disabilities? Fort Benning?”
Supposedly we sat here all day drinking coffee and telling grotesque military anecdotes, impatiently waiting our turn in a round-robin. Bollard called us the Private Slovik Post of the American Legion.
Minim said, “No sir, our topic today is the sinking peso. We were hoping you might come along and shed some light on the matter.”
“What? Economics? Good God. No, not my line, gentlemen.”
Coney said, “Do join us, sir, in our banter. Your presence alone would raise the tone of things.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure of that. Jimmy, I’d like a word with you.”
I followed him across the street to the little park. The old man was in bad shape. His plum face had gone off to the color of lead.
“Where in the world have you been?” he said. “I need to talk to you. Big news. You never come by to see me anymore.”
“I’ve been to your house three times since Nan died.”
“What, I was out?”
“Mrs. Blaney said you couldn’t be interrupted. I finally got the message.”
“Lucille told you that? Well, things have been all balled up lately. Look here, I want you to come by Izamál for lunch at two. Can you do that? It’s important.”
“Have you cleared this with Mrs. Blaney?”
“I believe you’re sulking. A fancied slight? Let me tell you frankly, it’s not very becoming. The poor woman made a mistake, that’s all.”
“Did you hear about Dr. Ritchie?”
“Yes, I did. Too bad.”
“It was his heart, I think. I was there. A bad business. He was quite a man in his field, wasn’t he?”
“Ritchie was adequate. Undistinguished.”
He left me abruptly, and I went back to the Express to use the telephone. I called a man named Lozano, with the Judicial Police, to whom I had made my report about Dan and the runaway girl, LaJoye Mishell Teeter. But no, McNeese had gotten it wrong, Big Dan had not been arrested. Or rather the Municipal Police in Valladolid had picked him up, then let him go. Lozano said the patrolmen had not seen the bulletin on him. Three of them had gone to answer a call about a big gringo who was trying to entice a small boy into his spotted car. They came and handcuffed him, but it was at the end of a shift and they didn’t want to bother taking him back to the station, going through all the paperwork, with a foreigner. So they hammered him to his knees with their sticks, gave him a good bloody beating, and turned him loose with a warning.
Lozano said, “We’ll have him in a day or two. A car like that.”
Hard to say. I wasn’t so sure. The Jumping Jacks might well have another car by now. They might be in Belize or Guatemala. Off to their City of Dawn, beyond the range of my understanding.
As for Doc’s big news, I could make a pretty good guess at that. His book was finished at long last. Well, it was big news. He had been working on the thing for almost forty years, his masterful survey of Meso-American civilization, from Olmec dawn through the fall of the Aztecs. It was a grand synthesis, he said, proving that the several cultures were essentially all the same, or closely related. Along the way he would clear up all the old mysteries. He would show that Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcán was a historical figure and not just some mythical “culture hero,” and he would explain the basis for the 260-day year (the human gestation period, with the odd days lopped off) and the twenty-day “month,” which seemed to have no astronomical significance. He would set forth in detail the real reasons for the collapse of the Mayan high culture in the ninth century. He would tell us who the Olmecs really were, appearing suddenly out of darkness, and why they carved those colossal heads that look like Fernando Valenzuela of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He would give the location of Aztlán, the original home of the Aztecs, and he would end speculatio
n once and for all on transoceanic contacts, by revealing the simple truth of the matter. He would identify “the dancing men” at Monte Alban, and he would settle the question of the “elephant” carving at Copán. For good measure he would decipher the Mayan hieroglyphics.
Some of it would be nonsense and perhaps a lot of it but not all of it. Flandin was formidable in his way. I was eager to read the part about the glyph translation, hoping it wouldn’t be silly. For some time now he had told me he could read the inscriptions. When I pressed him he was evasive. “I can tell you this much and no more, for the present. These writings are not just calendric piffle.” Some other kind of piffle then. Thousand-year-old weather reports. Champion Spark Plugs. I knew he hadn’t actually broken the code, but it was possible that he had hit on some useful new approach to the problem.
Beth was waiting for me in front of the Posada Fausto. She wanted me to haul some chairs for her. They wouldn’t fit in Bollard’s Peugeot. If you have a truck your friends will drive you crazy. We drove out to a carpentry shop on Colón, where a man named Chelo made tables and things out of withes and sticks and swatches of rawhide leather. He made baby furniture, too, strange rough cradles with a lot of bark showing and little Goldilocks chairs. I tried to sell him my big planks. Chelo said he never worked in mahogany, seeming to suggest there was something vulgar about it. Another artist.
Beth had bought a round table and four chairs, bulky pieces but not heavy, and I transported them and set them up in her courtyard. She had a nice roomy place all to herself behind the museum. There was a flowery patio with bees and paper lanterns and wind chimes and two prowling cats. These people on grants did all right for themselves. She had a grant from some foundation to manage this children’s museum, which was a very good one, no expense spared, the idea being to march the local niños through in troops and give them some appreciation of their Mayan heritage.
Beth wiped her hands on a fresh towel and tossed it into the hamper. It was one use and out for her. She didn’t have to wash them. She made a pitcher of limeade, and we sat in the new chairs. The rawhide was smelly. Bits of flesh still adhered to the skin. I knew a little about the leather business and even I knew that rawhide must be scraped and dried and stretched properly. Beth denied that there was any smell and then denied that the smell was unpleasant. To her it was agreeable and even bracing. She defended all things Mexican.
“I haven’t seen you around. What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “Trying to save some money.”
“Out at night drinking with your buddies, I suppose. Ike and Mutt, are they? Those two you’re always quoting?”
She meant Art and Mike, the inseparable Munn brothers.
“No, I haven’t been drinking at all.”
“Will you read something if I give it to you?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“I don’t mean now. I’m still working on it. Just some observations. A kind of list. It’s about the kind of person you’ve become.”
“A list of my shortcomings then.”
“Not exactly that. More about personal growth. Our repetitive acts. How our growth can be arrested and we may not even be aware of it.”
“Growth? That sounds like one of Bollard’s words.”
“Do you think I can’t have my own ideas?”
“I think you’d do better to stay away from people like that.”
“Like what? Look who’s talking. Carleton had nothing whatever to do with this and you know it.”
“Well, no, I don’t know it. I see you all over town with him.”
“Will you read it?”
“I’ll read it if you can put it on one sheet of paper.”
“Now what is that, some military thing?”
“No, I read about it in a business book. The need for keeping memos and reports short. How it concentrates your thinking and saves time for everybody along the line.”
“You’re afraid of smart women, aren’t you?”
She had used this ploy before, having heard via the female bush telegraph that it was unanswerable. She was right though. I was leery of them. Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were both amusing for awhile but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator. Beth asked if I remembered her green sofa that the cats had scratched up. I said I did but I had no memory for particular pieces of furniture, having hauled so much of it. She told a long story about how she had given the sofa to an ungrateful person who had in turn given it away to someone else.
“You’re not even listening to me.”
“Yes, I am. The green sofa. I tell you what. I’ve got some things to do. Let me know when you’ve finished the paper and I’ll read it and think it over.”
“You’re too kind. How much do I owe you for the delivery job?”
“No charge.”
“I saw that mud on your truck and all those branches caught up underneath. You’ve been out ransacking temples again, haven’t you? You never did really stop. On top of everything else you’re a liar.”
On top of all my other defects, too many to be recorded on a single page. I had meant to ask her if Bollard brought cat treats when he came calling, as I had done, but I let it go.
MEXICAN HOMES as a rule are closed off to the world by high blank walls of yellowish masonry, topped with broken glass to discourage escaladores, or climbing burglars. The gardens and fountains and other delights are hidden, as in an Arab city. Each city block is a fortress. But on the Paseo Montejo in Mérida there are two-story houses standing detached with their own lawns and tropical shrubbery. The Paseo is a shady boulevard where the sisal millionaires once lived, a short version of St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and a very un-Mexican street.
Doc Flandin lived on the near end of it in a fine white house with a wraparound porch and a little round tower on top, a cupola. Izamál, it was called, or place of the lizard. Doc had come late in life to this luxury, when he married Nan. She had the money.
Mrs. Blaney admitted me this time, making a show of checking her watch. This was to let me know that formal luncheon appointments are one thing and drop-in calls quite another.
“Don Ricardo will see you in his bedroom. Can you find your way? Just follow the music.”
“I think I can find it.”
I was wandering around in this house before Lucille Blaney had ever set foot in Mexico. I had met Eric Thompson, the great Mayanist, in this very room, with its cold tile floor and grand piano. No one played the piano, but the lid was always propped up on its slender stick. Sir Eric, I should say. He called Flandin Dicky. It was Eric this and Dicky that. I still cringe when I remember how I talked so much that day, trying to show off my piddling scraps of knowledge.
The music came from an old wind-up phonograph. Doc was listening once again to Al Jolson singing “April Showers.” I found the old lizard upstairs in his bed, a big canopied affair made of dark oak. The posts and beams were carved with a running fretwork design in the Uxmal style. The room was long and sunny. There were casement windows and a fireplace and a balcony. He allowed Al to finish, then lifted the arm from the thick black record.
“Do you mind if we eat here?”
“No, of course not.”
“It would be nicer by the pool, but this way we can have some privacy. Lucille has the ears of a jackrabbit.”
“You’re no match for that woman, Doc. Nan could handle her, but you can’t. She’s got your number.”
“Well, I can’t kick her out now.”
“No, it’s too late in the day for that.”
The maid, Lorena, served crabmeat salad in avocado halves. I told Doc about my run to Ektún, the death of Dr. Ritchie and how that Refugio had asked about his book and his tobacco pipe. He found that funny. He and Refugio had some running joke about the pipe that I wasn’t privy to. A little reminder that they had worked together before I came along.
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“Was Ritchie one of these trotters or joggers?” he asked me. “Some exercise nut?”
“I don’t know. You couldn’t do much jogging at Ektún.”
“He was not really a good field man, you know.”
“No? He had a good reputation.”
“Look at all the staff support he had. If I had been set up like that in my sixties, I would have accomplished great things. I would have shown them a thing or two.”
“You’ve done all right. You found the Seibal scepter. That should be enough for one man. Nobody can do very much. Then there’s your book.”
“They won’t acknowledge that I’ve done anything.”
“I saw you in church on Christmas day.”
“Well, why not? I’m an old sinner.”
“No, I approve. It’s just that I hadn’t seen you in church before.”
“But I was never a public and obstinate sinner. No one can say that.”
“No.”
“A love for truth too. I’ve always had a love for truth and that in itself is a sign of grace. Did you never hear that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m dying, Jimmy. You’re talking to a corpse.”
“What?”
“It’s prostate cancer. I’m waiting for the biopsy report from Dr. Solís, but that’s only a formality. I wanted you to know. We won’t talk about it. I’ve arranged for Father Mateo to say some masses for me.”
“Have you seen Soledad Bravo about this?”
“No, I haven’t consulted any witch doctors, thank you.”
“When do you get the report?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We don’t have to talk about it for three hours, but you can’t say something like that and then just drop it.”
“There’s nothing to be said or done. You can’t beat the slowworm. Sometimes he’s not so slow.”
“L. C. Bowers beat it. He went up to the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, and they cut it out. That was what, three years ago, and he’s still walking around.”
“Bowers had some lesser form of the thing.”