Dress Her in Indigo (18 page)

Enelio turned and looked back at me. "Forget something?"

"Remember something. Any 'j' is pronounced like an 'h.' Jalisco. Jugar. And so, by God, we are riding in a heep."

"Very fonny joke. But very old," Enelio said.

"I know what he's getting at," Meyer said. "That kid at Mitla. You couldn't understand that thing he was saying."

"Heap-di-row. Jeep de rojo. Jeep de color rojo."

"Yes indeed," said Enelio. "A red jeep. And this is a yellow one. Is the game over?"

Meyer had hitched almost all the way around so as to look directly at me. "A painter and a sculptor. Why not? What's Mike's last name? Barrington?"

"And Della Davis."

"Too much sun at this altitude," Enelio said, "and the brain gets cooked and people don't make sense."

"Enelio, what's the name of the road toward the airport?"

"The Coyotepec Road."

"And about a mile out, is there some kind of a tourist place that burned?"

"I know the place. It burned a long time ago."

"Can we go out there?" I asked. "I want to check something out."

I leaned forward and hollered the explanations over the wind roar and tire whine as Enelio pushed the jeep hard.

The place had been surrounded by a thick high adobe wall, enclosing about an acre of land.

There were shade trees inside and outside the wall, but the land around it was bare and flat, and planted with parched and scraggly corn. Over the wall, which began back about a hundred yards from the highway, I could see the broken and sooty stone walls of the structure, open to the sky, with an angle of charred, leaning beam that had rank green vines clinging to it. The old red jeep was parked close to the wall over at the left, under the shade trees. Several little groups of people sat and squatted in the shade, at respectful distances, looking toward the wall. Two police cars were parked with their noses toward the red jeep, and at an angle to each other, as though snuffing it.

"Something bad is going on here," Enelio said. "Those are people who have stopped working the fields to come and wait and watch. They don't do that for a small thing. Something very bad, I think."

Both doors of the entrance gate in the side wall stood open. A very shiny black Mercedes sedan was parked inside the compound. An adobe cottage was built into the corner of the compound, so that the encircling wall formed two walls of the cottage. Two wooden sheds had been attached to it, one on either side, braced against the wall.

A big young man sat in the sunlight on a scarred wooden bench. He was hunched forward, elbows on his knees, face in his hands, shoulders thrust high. He wore dirty gray denim work pants and a clean white shirt. He was barefoot. The fringe of a huge glossy black beard curled inward around the edges of the hands he held against his face. A bald man in a black suit was standing in front of him. Three uniformed policemen stood off to one side.

Our acquaintance, Sergeant Martinez, in civilian clothes, stood a couple of paces behind the bald man.

All except the man on the bench looked toward us as we came through the open gate. I saw a startled look cross the sergeant's face, immediately replaced by that cop look I had seen before, but this time considerably reinforced by this new coincidence.

The bald man said, "Enelio! Using you for speaking here, maybe?"

He came several steps to meet us. Enelio introduced us to Doctor Francisco Martel and then the doctor launched into such rapid Spanish I gave up trying to catch the meaning of any part of it.

He did much gesturing and pointing, and spoke with dramatic emphasis. The sergeant joined them and there was discussion for a time, then Enelio came and told us what had happened.

An hour ago a man had run out and waved a city-bound bus down and told the driver people were dying behind the wall. The driver stopped at the first telephone and reported it. The police sedan had arrived just before the ambulance. The young black girl was just inside the gate, sprawled in the dust, killed with a single blow that had apparently come from behind, and had so ruined her skull that brain tissue had made a spatter pattern in the dust. The big blond bearded American youth had been over beyond the shed, the whole upper left side of his forehead smashed inward. There was a heartbeat but it had stopped before they could load him into the ambulance. Near him lay the Mexican woman, dead of a similar single stupendous blow over the left ear, eyes bulged and staring by the force of the hydraulic pressure created within the brain case. And the black-bearded one was sitting on the ground with her head in his lap, weeping. He claimed he had arrived minutes before the police, and found them like that.

"Have they identified him?"

The sergeant brought the tourist card over. It was sweat-stained and dog-eared. The ink on the signature had run. He was Jerome Nesta. Enelio said, "Martinez knows he's guilty of being in Mexico illegally. The card has run out. Guilty of one thing, guilty of everything. That's how the official mind works, eh? So I have the permission to ask some questions. Come listen. Maybe you two think of some, help me out a little."

Enelio sat on his heels in front of Nesta. "Jerry?" he said softly. "Hey, you. Jerry!"

The head lifted from the hands. The eyes did not match the virility and vitality of the great black beard. They were gray-blue, hesitant, uncertain. And reddened by tears.

"How you making it, boy?" Enelio asked.

"All... all three of them. Jesus! All three of them. I just can't... can't start to believe it's true."

"Who did it, Jerry?"

"I don't know! There wasn't anybody here. I didn't see anybody. I came in, calling Della on account of I wanted to know where to put the stuff."

"What Stuff?"

'The stuff I brought back from town. It was my turn to go in. Nobody felt like coming along.

Luz was doing washing, and Mike was going good on a painting, and Della had a headache."

"You drove the jeep to town?"

"Yes, sir."

"What time did you leave here?"

"I don't know. Maybe a little before ten. I bought fruit and radishes and beans, and a kilo of masa for Luz to make tortillas. I guess I was gone most of an hour probably."

"How soon after you got back did the police come?"

"I don't know. Like two minutes."

"Jerry, can you think of any way we could pin it down, what time you got back here, man?"

"I don't know how I can."

Enelio got up and went over and spoke to the doctor for a little while. They walked over near one of the sheds and the doctor indicated a dark stain on the dust and stones. Enelio came back and sat on the bench beside Nesta. "Did you see anything unusual or hear anything unusual on your way out of town or on the highway?"

"I can't remember anything."

"Nothing interesting at all?"

"Oh, wait a minute. There was something. Right near the edge of town, where the railroad tracks are, there was an old truck pulled over and the engine was on fire, and people were running around yelling, and they were throwing dirt on it and a man was beating at it with a blanket."

Enelio said, "You are one lucky fellow. The cops saw it too and stopped for a minute. They were just putting the fire out. So they were, like you said, a minute or two behind you."

"What difference does it make?"

"This wasn't robbers, Jerry. Nobody touched a pocket or a purse. From the blood over there, it had to have happened at least twenty minutes before the police got here, according to the doctor here."

Jerry stared at Enelio. "Would these damn fools think I'd kill my friends?"

"That's what most people kill. Their family or their friends. Very few people kill strangers. I got to tell what you said to the sergeant."

I sat where Enelio had been. "How come you and Luz moved in here with Mike and Della?"

He looked at me, puzzled. "Who are you?"

"My name is McGee. I've been trying to locate you. I found where you had been living, out at Mitla."

"Why have you been looking for me?"

"Just to see what you might know about Bix Bowie."

"Bix got killed in an accident."

"I know. And Carl Sessions died of an overdose. So the only ones left to talk to are you and Minda and Rocko."

"Why should anybody know anything about Bix? Minda, maybe. It happened after everybody had split."

"A girl named Gillian saw you in Mitla and told a friend. Gillian talked to you and she said you weren't very friendly. She asked you where Rocko was and you said you didn't know."

"I didn't and I don't. I was the last one to split. I had to get the hell away from Rocko. I got pretty sick there. I had to try to get clean. I'm not in real good shape yet. I get this ringing in my ears, and I get shaky, and my eyes blur sometimes. I have real bad nightmares, but I don't hallucinate any more. Luz took care of me when I was real, real bad. I don't even know how I got to Mitla. It was all part of a bad trip. She pulled me out of a ditch and got some friends to help her get me under a roof. I had the idea Rocko was trying to kill me, you know, like paranoia, and I had to cut out. Jesus! Why would anybody kill Luz? You know she had a beautiful smile? When she smiled... I tell you it was something else."

"Was it better here than it was in Mitla?"

"Oh sure. I ran into Mike out at the ruins and we started talking, and I took him back to the place and showed him the big timber head I've been working on. So he came out to see it and he liked it. I mean there are too many people around just talking about doing something. I told him I was trying like hell to work, because it had been too long. I leveled with him. I said I had been on things that didn't do me much good, but now I was clean and I was going to stay clean. I said it was lonely, me not being able to talk much of Luz's language, and he told me about his free place, and how there was room, and Della might like having another woman around to share the scut work. So why not? We got a guy to help and we loaded the big head on his jeep and packed
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and came here. Luz was pretty weird about Della for a little while, until she got used to her.

Then they started to get along. But... they haven't... didn't have much time to get acquainted. Oh goddammit all anyway! It's such a lousy waste. Della was pregnant. That's why she was having headaches."

Enelio sauntered back and said, "Jerry, they want to investigate further, but because the time you got back checks out and because they can't find any kind of a weapon, you ought to be okay."

"One of them was looking at one of my sculptor's mallets."

"And he would like to cry because it was such a nice thing for somebody to use, but there would have to be blood. Blood and skin and hair. And fantastic strength. But they have to take you in anyway."

"Why?"

"Your tourist card is no good. Got money to get home?"

"Hell no."

"So they hold you and ask the American Embassy to make arrangements."

"Look, I forgot the card ran out! I didn't even think about it. I don't want to sit in any Mexican jail."

"Nobody sitting in one wants to be there."

I took Enelio aside. "I want to talk to this kid, alone and in the right relaxing surroundings. Any way to keep him out?"

"Want to pay for his trip to the States?"

"If it'll help."

"Want to give a little gift to the police welfare fund?"

"Like?"

"Five hundred pesos?"

"Sure."

"Then let them keep him overnight and we'll see what we can do tomorrow. Tomorrow they are maybe going to be happy to get rid of any little problems. Newspaper people will be here today from Mexico City. This will be one big stink. The Tourist Bureau will be very ogly about it. This is supposed to be such a nice safe country, eh? But always there are damn fools going off into primitive places where los Indios are still damn savage. No Spanish at all. Cruel land and cruel people. Canoe trips. Hiking. Go see the interesting Indios and get your interested throat cut, and get thrown naked into an interesting river, man. So that is one thing, and that is something else.

One and a half million cars cross the border and stay for a time. God knows how many more go over into border towns for the day. It is a big industry. Come to beautiful Oaxaca and get a big
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hit on the head. Travis, my friend, to get this bearded boy with the sad eyes loose, I must make some little kind of guarantee all will be well. You think everything will go well?"

"I'll know better after I talk to him. If I don't like the vibrations, he better go back in."

Meyer came over to us and said, "Come take a look at something." He took us over to a space against the adobe wall beyond a wooden shed. The wooden sculpture stood there. A head five feet high, carved and gouged and scraped out of old gray beams that had been bolted together.

It was the same sort of Zapotecan face of the ancient carvings in stone. It had the same cruel, brooding look of lost centuries and forgotten myths. It was the size and weight and texture of the old timbers that gave it impact. There was no neck. It sat solidly on the great hard width of jaw. It could have been just a kind of self-conscious trick, but somehow he had given it a presence that made you want to speak softly.

"Son of a bitch," Enelio said slowly.

Jerry Nesta came up behind us, a man in uniform with him. He said, "I had to find hunks of metal and make the tools. I kept them sharp by rubbing them on stone. I kept thinking of the whole 1 figure, and the way he would stand, so the head would carry the look of the whole figure. I thought of it as being something that would stand at the corner of an old temple, looking out. Not a priest or a soldier, but one of the laborers that built all these ruins and died building them. Like maybe the priests decided those unknown people should have a statue, but not out of stone. Mike thought it was... said it was..."

He turned away. Pretty soon they put him in a car and took him in. They left a car and two men to keep watch over the place. As we drove away, the silent people were still under trees, looking toward the place of murder.