Bear and His Daughter (9 page)

“I dig the high windies, man,” Fencer said. “I love it up here.”

There was no life to be seen. Not even goats grazed on the sulfurous pasture. There were no bird calls, not even a buzzard in the sky. The smoke grew thicker.

“Hang in, Fletch,” Fencer said. “We get out in half a mile.”

Their faces were caked with dust. Willie’s parrot had begun to make faint cooing noises.

Fletch turned in his seat and looked with longing at the descending track behind them.

“Maybe,” he said at length, “maybe … we could come to an understanding.”

Fencer smiled. “That’s what we’re up here for.”

“I didn’t really have to come up,” Fletch told them, “but as it is, I did. I could have avoided this. There was plenty of places I could have gotten out—I almost did get out, didn’t I? There were plenty of reasons. But, as it is, I stayed in all the way.”

Fencer nodded. Willie began to hum “The Streets of Laredo.”

“So if I came all this way, it shows some willingness, doesn’t it? It shows some…” He paused and looked uneasily at the sky. “It shows some trust—how about that?”

The road ended in a depression of ocher mud veined with cracks. A wall of black volcanic rock faced them, rising toward the peak and sloping downward toward iron-toothed canyons which they could not see. The wind carried only silence.

“If a man like me can show so much trust to you and Willie Wings, it shows we’ve got something going together; right?”

“Don’t try to verbalize it,” Fencer said. “You’ll just fuck it up.”

They got out of the car and stood before a sign that pointed straight upward. The sign said that San Isobel was five kilometers away; it was riddled with bullet holes.

“If we’ve got this much going,” Fletch told them, “we don’t have to go through with any kind of stunts, do we, Fencer? We don’t have to have sentimental dramas to act out where we’re at.”

Fencer and Willie looked at him sympathetically.

“I mean, we’re all party to the same thing. I proved that by coming up here.”

“You’re sure party to something, Fletch,” Fencer agreed. “But see, we’ve got to go up on the volcano.”

“Literary Fletch,” Willie Wings said.

The path they were to follow led over the rock at the edge of the mountainside. There was no path leading downward.

“It’s gonna be dark,” Fencer said. “That’ll make it harder.”

Fletch saw that they were waiting for him to lead.

He took a drink from the thermos and stepped forward.

“Maybe,” he said, “we could all begin again.”

When he closed his eyes, he saw the formless colors of the mountain. Yellow and black. He tried to raise the thermos again but failed to muster the strength. Opening his eyes, he looked at the steep path for a moment. Then he raised the thermos and hurled it, with surprising force, into Willie’s face.

Ax edges of rock flew up at him as he leaped; the merciless ground tore at his shoes. At times it seemed to him that he was bouncing, gliding over clefts and boulders like a hurdler. He could hear the parrot squawking and Fencer shouting “No!” Once he turned and saw Fencer start after him.

Willie had climbed on a rock and was screaming, waving his pistol. “Don’t you play gingerbread boy with me, you fuckin’ poet!”

Fencer had stopped and was shouting “No!” at Willie. Fletch heard a pistol shot and somewhere a bullet rang against the iron-fibered rock.

When he heard the car engine start up, he ran faster. It was all down, over rank after rank of jagged rock.

After a while, he found the dry bed of a stream and followed it through a dark arroyo. The farther down he went, the more difficult it became for him to see; shadow and rock grew together. After about a mile he could no longer run because the ground was too steep—he climbed downward, facing the rock wall. His knees were bloody but his feet found holds with a sure instinct. At one point a cloud passed over him, leaving him chilled through, and when the cloud had passed he saw that night was coming on the valley below. He could see the last of sunlight play on green waxy leaf in the fingers of rain forest along the lower slope. He found a stretch of smoother rock on which to rest and let the night slip over him. Sounds of a life he had not suspected rustled from the barren ground.

Leaning back against the rock, he tried to shake the colors of the day from his mind. After a while, he discovered the remnant of a joint in his trouser pocket and, having no matches, ate it. The shadows of the valley swayed beneath his feet. In the distance he could see the lights of Corbera, the illumination of the cathedral tower and the wooden bullring.

He began to regret that he had not seen the crater. He deserved to see it, it seemed to him, since he had come all the way and crowned the journey with a masterly escape. Willie Wings and Fencer had sealed him in a box of speed madness that interfered with the spontaneous joys of active living—they were mere circumstances, artifacts. Yet it had been necessary to escape them: the pair were overripe, deracinated by years of smoking grass in the tropics, consumed by maniac ravings and heaven knew what bizarre commitments to serpent-headed lava gods and human sacrifice.

It was humiliating, he thought, to be forced to survive by guile, but in a crisis, could he not bring it to bear? Indeed, it seemed to him, he could.

As the world darkened, Fletch became more and more exhilarated, and for a time he considered retracing his steps and going to the crater after all. But he stayed where he was until the moon rose and then stood up to survey the valley. As he watched, the lights of Corbera suddenly flickered and died—in a few seconds they went on, stayed on for a short time, and died again. Fletch stood waiting, saw the lights return, flicker, disappear. He found the spectacle intensely gratifying. Corbera was a light show.

Heat lightning was flashing over the coast range. Fletch stretched out his arms and with Jovian fingers began to play the illuminations one against the other—with one hand he dispensed lightning for the firmament, with the other darkness for the sons of men. The lightning and the town’s electricity followed the bidding of his fingers with precision.

Fletch cried out joyfully from his Promethean rock.

“I’ll be screwed if I’m not stout Cortés,” he said.

Fletch became, in effect, stout Cortés. When the moon was high enough for him to see his way, he clambered downward, completely unafraid. The fer-de-lance slithering among the rocks, the lurking Gila monsters, the tigers in their caves were fine with him. At intervals he rested, looked up at the peak and saw dark vapors visible against the stars, against Taurus.

I’m all perception, Fletch thought as he descended, all I require is to be left alone by the likes of Fencer and Willie Wings. Revolting to be pursued by epiphenomena.

I am a fortress beset by flying men, he thought. The sleep of reason produces monsters.

Halfway down the slope, he found a trail and followed it; he could smell jungle and black earth below him. In a few minutes he had entered the forest. His passage set off a scurrying among the trees, a sudden silence broken by monkey cries, the din of cicadas and cinches. He felt his presence electrify the night.

“I am the sentient consciousness here,” he said aloud.

He put his hand to a tree and felt hundreds of hard beetle bodies scurry along the surface of the vines. Every now and then lightning flashed above the trees, lighting the grove where he stood and leaving behind his eyes white lighted instants in which unknown creatures stood transfixed on the edge of vision.

Walking on, he found the downward slope still steep, and once, following what he thought to be a trail along a fallen tree trunk, he fell several feet onto soft earth, landed upright, scattering invisible creatures before him.

He walked for well over an hour with what he experienced as animal grace. When he came out of the woods, he found a dark shed beyond a wooden gate; open sewerage was somewhere near at hand. Continuing, he roused an enormous pig that grunted at him savagely—as he hurried on, pigs roused themselves in alarming numbers from the adjoining grounds. He found that he was atop a steep rise above the center of Corbera—the lights were on; he could hear music from the jukeboxes in the Calle Obregon.

The road was on the other side of the pig shed. Fletch followed it downhill toward the market, where intermittent paving and open street lights began.

He found the central square almost deserted. A few old Indian women selling beer dozed beside their stalls. Flags and tricolor pennants swung on the wind honoring the anniversary of the revolution.

The lights and the music were all on the Calle Obregon. Fletch made for it, walking tensely under the colonnades, expecting the lights to go at any moment. He kept his hands clenched to control his conductivity.

Calle Obregón was swarming with soldiery. Men in khaki uniforms were lined up in front of the cathouses drinking beer and clustered in the doorways of the open-fronted bars. Twenty jukeboxes sounded together.

Fletch went quickly. Two military policemen with carbines slung over their shoulders passed him with glances of grave suspicion.

The La Florida bar was where Fletch always went in Corbera. He admired the pastoral murals, which were true
art naif,
and the section of earth floor around the bar. That night he found it crowded with cavalrymen, all drunk to the point of silence. He entered as quietly as possible and ordered a rum. As he drank it, a small boy approached with an electric shock machine.

The cavalryman nearest Fletch cursed softly, beckoned to the boy, and put fifty centavos in his hand. Then he gripped the metal handles, planting his feet firmly, legs apart, knees bent. Without looking at his customer, the boy turned the crank, and the soldier, his jaw set, his eyes half closed, received the current. The others watched him without expression. After a few seconds, the soldier’s uniform shirt began to crackle and his hair to stand upon its roots. The machine glowed and the soldier’s face twitched and his chin rose as though his head were being torn from his body. The boy turning the crank never glanced at him.

Fletch did not know very much about electricity but he admired the machine. The generator box was painted bright blue, and on it was the picture of a clenched fist emitting bolts of lightning, over the word
Corazón!
in pink letters. He suspected that the machine might be somehow involved in Corbera’s fits of chiaroscuro.

The cavalryman had huge reserves of
Corazón!
and continued to hang on. Fletch took his drink to another electric spectacle, the jukebox in the back.

The jukebox, enormous and bright with shifting, laminated light, had scores of jungle moths fluttering around it. From time to time a moth would touch against the hot plastic surface and spin to the floor with singed wings. Around the foot of the box was a brilliant litter of burnt and dying moths.

Fletch had settled down in back when he saw Pancho Pillow seated at a nearby table. Pancho Pillow was smiling; he was accompanied by La Beatriz, who was also smiling, and by his Odd Buddy, who was not.

The sight of Pancho Pillow was so little suited to Fletch’s mood that it took him a short time to remember that the strength of his perception had rendered him at peace with the world.

He carried his rum to Pancho’s table.

“God save all here,” he said.

The sight of Fletch seemed to send both Pancho Pillow and La Beatriz into spasms of delight. They laughed uproariously and La Beatriz pinched Pancho on the belly.

“Fletch!” Pancho cried. “Fletch, my friend to be! Sit down and drink with us.”

Fletch sat down. La Beatriz affected to gaze on him with nymphic passion. Pancho’s Odd Buddy watched the soldiers at the bar.

“I’ve been sad all day,” Pancho said merrily. “We saw you today in the company of hoodlums.” Pancho wore a brush mustache and had many chins. His light brown hair was combed straight up from his forehead. “We all wondered—what is a poet doing with hoodlums?” He made his little eyes twinkle confusion.

“That Fences” La Beatriz said with distaste, “that Weelie Weengs! Eeee!” She flung her hand before Fletch’s face as though she were trying to shake something off her fingers.

“I was taking the day off,” Fletch said. “I woke up this morning and I said to myself, Today I’ll do something less literary.”

“You don’t want to know Fencer and Willie Wings,” Pancho said. “They’re bummers.” He leaned forward and spoke softly. “My theory is they work with the body snatchers.”

Fletch savored his drink.

“I have nothing to fear from Fencer and Willie Wings,” he said. “They can’t affect me in the essentials.”

“Ah,” Pancho said, “you can’t cheat an honest man. Before W. C. Fields it was an Arab proverb, and you’d think the Arabs should know.” He put his hand on Fletch’s shoulder; then withdrew it. “But it’s not true.” He cupped his hands, turned them upside down and shrugged. “No, it’s not true. My life hasn’t been easy and I’ve cheated many honest men. It’s just as untrue as it sounds.”

Fletch laughed for quite a while. “What could they possibly cheat me out of?” he asked.

“What do Weelie Weengs and Fencer say about Pancho?” La Beatriz asked him. “They make up goodies on him?”