“I don’t know. A long time.”
“Shep won’t cash my check.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve bought 50,000 drinks in this place and he won’t take my check. Can you believe that guy?”
It was hard to get a straight answer out of Nelms. The drinkers were standing two deep at the bar. A good turnout. Crouch and his jolly wife were popular and would be missed. She said, “I like Mérida all right but there’s nothing to do here.” They were seated at a table amid well-wishers. There was a pink cake. I hoped she would find some interesting activities in Cuernavaca. It would be cooler there anyway, and the gringo drunks would be richer and drunker.
I stopped to wish them luck and then went to the bar, which was a long flat slab of cypress. A man in a baseball cap made room for me. I knew his name, Nordstrom, and he knew mine, and that was about it. He was looking at the ice-skating scene behind the bar, perhaps longing for Milwaukee. The two skaters were dolls on a round mirror. There was some fluffed-up cotton to represent snow. This was Shep’s annual Christmas display.
Shep hopped about on a twisted foot. The crowd was such that he himself was serving drinks and washing glasses tonight, along with the regular bartenders, Cosme and Luisito. Cosme gave me a look as he made change. He had an unspoken agreement with a few old customers. We paid only for every other drink and then tipped him the difference, or a little less. Everybody won but Shep, and with his prices he didn’t really lose. But tonight, with the boss hovering, the deal was off. I gave Cosme a tiny nod of perfect understanding.
Mr. Nordstrom showed me a piece of engraved amber in the shape of a crescent. He wanted to know how much it was worth and where he could sell it. He said he had paid $50 for it.
It was an ornamental nose clip of a reddish cast, finely worked, probably from Monte Albán or thereabouts, certainly not Mayan, but rare in any case. I had never seen a piece quite like it and I wouldn’t have hesitated to ask $750 for it, though there really wasn’t enough amber on the market to establish a price range.
He had made a great buy, beginners luck, but I didn’t want to encourage him. Still, it was a bit early in my conversion for me to be lecturing others on the evils of the trade. A decent silence was indicated, and I was no good at that either.
“You don’t want to get mixed up in this business, Mr. Nordstrom. When you buy this stuff you’ll be cheated, and when you go to sell it you may end up in big trouble. It’s not worth it. Leave it at the museum. Drop it in the church box.”
“I got stung?”
“It’s not a bad piece but I really can’t advise you.”
“Shep said you would know.”
“That tall fellow back there in the T-shirt and cowboy hat. He might be able to help you. His name is Eli. But don’t go showing it around to just anyone.”
Along the bar various claims to personal distinction were being made.
“I have a stainless-steel plate in my head.”
“I am one-sixteenth Cherokee.”
“I have never voted in my life.”
“My mother ate speckled butterbeans every day of her life.”
“I don’t even take aspirins.”
Suarez, the Spaniard, the old gachupín, was standing at my right with his newspaper and his glass of Ron Castillo. The chest-high bar was a bit high for his chest. He was a little man who drank alone in public places. He lived and drank alone and unapproached. Once in a while you would catch him shaking with private laughter. He hissed at me and nudged me and pointed to an item in the paper. “Señor Mostaza. Read that if you please.” He called me that, Mr. Mustard, having once observed me spreading what he thought was far too much mustard on a ham sandwich. I read it, a single paragraph in Diario Del Sureste, about an exchange of gunfire between some squatters and a landowner near Mazatlán.
He said, “The straw is beginning to burn, no?”
“No, I don’t think so. Too early. This means nothing.”
Suarez was always looking for signs of revolution and finding them. It couldn’t come soon enough to suit him, this great wind that would blow all the monkeys out of the trees. He was an old communist who had fled Spain in 1939, only to become a fascist here in Mexico, a Gold Shirt. But then he left that banner too and now he had some sort of pan-hispano-anarcho-rojo-swino-nihilo program of his own devising. There would be a good many summary executions, with Jews, Masons, Chinamen, Jesuits and Moros heading the list, and with no parliamentary nonsense—no republican tontería. He would close the borders for a period of national cleansing. He would change the marriage laws for some eugenic purpose. It nettled him a little when I called him a comunista. He said it made him sound like a pansy (hermanita). Back in the days when he was eviscerating priests and burning down churches in Barcelona (Barthalona), he told me, the communists were the squeamish moderates. He had contempt for Mexicans, even though they had given him refuge, or perhaps because of it. It showed their weakness. The French and the Italians were soft too. Spaniards were the only hard Latinos. Julius Caesar would have none but Spaniards as bodyguards—for all the good it did him. Nor did he think much of Americans. We were not a tribe he admired. We were the Alemanni, the hairy and dull-witted barbarians from across the Rhine, or in this case the Rio Grande, jabbering away in a Low German dialect called English.
He placed his finger on the Mazatlán dateline. “There. This time the rising will come from the Pacific. The Alzamiento.”
“You once told me Veracruz.”
“Habladores,” he said, showing me with thumb and fingers how the Cruzanos chattered away to no purpose. “No, I am looking to Sinaloa now. I am watching the west.”
A hippie with his hair pulled back in a ponytail came traipsing along behind us. Shep reached across the bar and gave him a flick with his fly swatter.
“Just where do you think you’re going, pal?”
“To the head.”
“No, you’re not. You people come in here and never buy anything and what, I’m supposed to provide facilities for you?”
“Hey, what is this? I just walked in. I may get a beer or a Coke or something. I don’t know yet. First I got to go to the head.”
“Okay, but in and out. Number one and that’s all. I don’t want you taking a bath back there.”
It was too crowded at the bar. I went to the Crouch table and had a piece of cake. Minim recited some verses he had composed for the occasion, a long poem for him, which ended with these words: “And so we say goodbye for now to Peg and Vernon Crouch.” Beth was sitting there with Bollard. He wore a white turtleneck sweater. She couldn’t stay away from these literary fellows, poets for preference, and they invariably let her down. Last spring there had been Frank, the uninspired poet. She listened to his complaints. She lent him money. It was Minim who told me he was uninspired, though I don’t see how he could know. Frank didn’t write anything, or at least he didn’t publish anything. Beth claimed he burned with a nonluminous flame, and all the hotter for that. Perhaps. A nonflowering plant. He soon drifted away. The Olmecs didn’t like to show their art around either. They buried it twenty-five feet deep in the earth and came back with spades to check up on it every ten years or so, to make sure it was still there, unviolated. Then they covered it up again.
Bollard talked about his investments. I had to get away from these poems and telephone bonds, and I moved on to another table, with Art and Mike and a young man named Jerry, who called himself an “ethnomusicologist.” He was supposed to be out in the villages spying on people and recording Mayan songs, but he preferred to spend his time and his grant money here at Shep’s. We sat there drinking and talking foolishly under the huge fresco map of the Yucatán peninsula. There are many fine wall paintings in Mexico but this wasn’t one of them. As a map it was so distorted as to be useless, and it didn’t please as art either, or it didn’t please me. I know nothing about art, but in my business we gave ourselves these airs. Even Eli had opinions.
The hippie came out of the
toilet, having bathed and washed his hair and generally freshened up. He stopped at the bar to bum a cigarette. Vick gave him one and he also gave him some Scripture to think over. “ ‘If a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him,’ ” he said. “First Corinthians, eleven, fourteen.”
Shep swatted the hippie again. “You. Stop hustling the customers. Out.”
“Hey, man, you never been down and needed a smoke?”
“Yeah, I have, and you know what I did? The first thing I did was quit smoking and the next thing I did was get a job.”
“You can’t get a job in Mexico. A gringo can’t.”
“The hell you can’t. You want a job? I’m calling your bluff, pal. I got a job right here for you.”
It was a dilemma for the hippie. He knew the job would be something like cleaning out a grease trap and that he would probably be paid not in cash but with some old clothes and broken-down shoes. But then he was shown up if he didn’t accept.
“All right, but first I need to see this guy. I’ll be back.”
“No, don’t bother.”
Art and Mike didn’t believe the story of how Shep, finding himself up against it, had given up his Chesterfields and knuckled down in earnest to a life of hard work. I was inclined to believe it. Jerry sat on the fence. Judgments came hard to him. It was true that Shep didn’t exert himself much these days, but I was thinking of a younger Shep, hopping from door to door selling term life insurance, and later, peddling badly worn furniture and carpeting from bankrupt motels. I wondered who bought those rugs. People make fun of salesmen, people with salaries or remittances, who don’t have to produce. They have no idea of what a tough game it is. Art and Mike said Shep had a dog’s name. Jerry said he had no manners. Art and Mike went further and said he had no soul, or at most the soul of a bug, an ant-size portion of the divine element. I thought they went too far.
Nelms was going from table to table seeking sympathy. “How long have I been coming here? . . . This is how he repays me . . .” He had a drink in one hand and a boiled pig’s foot in the other. His lips were frosted with coarse grains of margarita salt. Nardo Cepeda had announced his presence at the bar, crying out every few minutes, “Beebah Mehico!” and “We want Nardo!”
Louise and Emmett and a young man in a blue suit joined us. They had been to a movie. The young fellow was introduced to us as Wade Watson, a government clerk from Jefferson City, Missouri, who wrote science-fiction tales in his spare time. “I just flew in this afternoon,” he said. “I had seat 28F at the back behind the emergency door. You get more leg room that way. I still can’t believe I’m actually in Mérida. The ancient name, you know, was Tiho, or more correctly, T’ho. I won’t have time to inspect all the great pyramids and monuments because I have an appointment at the City of Dawn. After I see El Mago. First I have to meet with him in the town of Progreso.”
Wade’s fingernails were bitten down to the quick. Louise had found him wandering the streets and she took him in tow. Art and Mike cautioned him that the Mayaland picture books made things appear bigger than they were, and that the colors were touched up, as with picture postcards. Even so, the ruins were magnificent, and he wouldn’t be disappointed. Wade asked where he could catch a bus to Progreso.
Louise had little to say about the movie, something called Amor sin Palabras, only that it was “thought-provoking.” That was her lowest rating.
Jerry said, “But ‘Love without Words’? How did they manage that?”
“Well, of course they didn’t,” said Emmett. “You never heard so much gabble and twittering in your life.”
He bought a round of drinks and said that Louise had been right, this night on the town was just what he needed. He had been cooped up in the trailer too long. He was feeling much better. The new medicine worked better than the old medicine, and the only side effects so far were blurred vision, hair loss, vertigo, burning feet, nightmares, thickened tongue, nosebleed, feelings of dread, skin eruptions and cloudy urine. Art and Mike said it was a scandal the way she went gadding about town with this old man. She said she was only trying to protect him from fortune-hunting women. Emmett said she was much too late for that. Nelms came by and appealed to her, and she went off with him to see why Shep wouldn’t accept his check.
The City of Dawn. That was where Dan and his people were going. I asked Wade about it. “Is it a place or what?”
“Yes, a place, of course, but much more than that. Much more!”
“Where is it?”
“Where indeed.”
“You don’t know?”
“I see what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to trap me into an indiscretion.”
“Hardly a trap. I simply asked you where it was.”
“Aren’t we curious!”
No use to press him. Smirking and coy, he was like all the others of his breed. I would have to grab him by the throat to get any sense out of him and I couldn’t do that here.
A strolling mariachi band came in and added to the din. We had to raise our voices. Over at the Crouch table they were laughing and shouting in each other’s faces, taking feverish delight in their powers of speech. They appeared to be practicing words and phrases on one another, drunken delegates at an Esperanto congress. Mott led the applause for the band and gave the cornet player a handful of money. Louise was at the bar demanding answers from Shep. I caught sight of Eli up there, waving me over. Mr. Nordstrom had gone, and Eli was drinking with Nardo, the lawyer.
They were both drunk or close to it. Nardo clapped me on the back. “What is this, Boornez, you’re not in jail?” Boornez was his rendering of Burns.
“I’m out on work release.”
“No, you’re a shadow and they can’t see you. They can’t see a ghost. You have Don Ricardo looking after you too.”
“Speaking of that, why aren’t you locked up?”
“Me! Nardo in prison! What an idea! But look. Eli here is a real criminal. The question is, how does he stay out?”
“I mind my own business,” said Eli.
“And what business is that? Let me tell you something, my zopilote friend. The days are over when you gringos can come down here and use my country for a playground.”
“I don’t think them days are quite over yet, Nardo.”
“We’ll see! Luisito! Give these two coyotes whatever they’re drinking and bring me the telephone!”
There was no telephone at the bar and never had been. He and Luisito argued the point once again.
Eli was a solemn drunk with a slightly curved spine and a drooping head. The Mexicans called him The Vulture, El Zopilote. He had a pointed beard and long ropy arms with Disney bluebirds tattooed on them. There was a black leather strap on his left wrist, which had no function that I could see, other than to be vaguely menacing.
“What was wrong with that amber piece?” he said.
“Nothing. You didn’t buy it?”
He stared at me and went back to his drink. I could see his difficulty. Why would I be sending him such a sweet deal? He couldn’t believe that I was really out of the business. Tiny blood vessels were breaking inside his head as he tried to think it out.
“Where was it from, Tepíc?”
“I thought Oaxaca. Zápotec.”
“How did he come by it? I mean a guy like that.”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“There’s nothing funny about it?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Damn. Now he’s gone. He only wanted a hundred for it. The amber itself is worth more than that. Where does the old man live?”
“I don’t know. You mean where he stay?”
“I mean where he be staying.”
“You must mean where he be staying when he at home.”
Eli was from Mississippi, and we sometimes fell into this black man patter. “What time it is?” and such stuff as that. We had a lot in common. One difference between us was this: He said shevel and I said shovel. Trust me to go with the crowd. Lui
sito pushed more glasses at us. “Señor Mott,” he said. Mott was treating and circulating about like a host, with a word of welcome for everyone.
“Come on, come on,” he said, urging us to clap for the band. “Let’s show some appreciation. Isn’t that trumpet player great?”
Nardo said Mexicans were the only people in the world who could play the trumpet. Nobody else had the heart for it. Mott said all his life he had envied Harry James, who would go out at night to some ballroom and knock everybody dead playing “Ciribiribin,” and then when he got home Betty Grable was there. Nardo said Harry James was a Mexican and that Mexican trumpet players and athletes were the envy of the world.
Mott moved on to greet the others. Eli said that he, too, would go around grinning at the world and buying drinks for everybody if the government sent him a disability check every month. I told him I didn’t think he would. He went off to search for Mr. Nordstrom.
Shep was trying to explain things to Louise. “But I’m not running a bank, little lady.” She hated those diminutives. “I’ll take his check for the amount of his drinks but I’m through handing out cash. With the peso changing from day to day, I can’t sit on the paper. I can’t afford it no more and I can’t make no exceptions.”
Nardo had gone into his football chant. He was slapping the bar with his hands. “Nar-do! Nar-do! We want Nar-do!” That was from the stadium fans at Bonar College. They wanted to see Nardo on the field, running back a punt or a kickoff, or knocking some pass receiver cold. He had played both ways, and he was a real player, too, no mere place kicker, as the rumor went. I had seen the newspaper clippings.
He held up a fist to his mouth, a microphone. “Oh yes, that’s Nardo Cepeda, and let me tell you something, this little guy never calls for a fair catch! Oh brother, can he scoot! He’s a little man, only five-six and a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet, but can he fly! Will you look at that! The little guy can turn on a dime! You can’t coach those moves! He’s gone! Cepeda is gone! See you later! No way that kicker will catch him now . . .”
It was one of his weaker performances, and suddenly he just stopped. “They think I’m a clown. These people don’t know anything. We went twenty-eight and two in three years. I was pretty good for my size, Boornez.”