Gringos (11 page)

Mrs. Blaney poked her head into the room. Always looming and hovering, this woman. “Oh. I thought you had gone, Mr. Burns. Don Ricardo usually has his nap at this time.”

“No, I'm still here.”

Doc said, “It's all right, Lucille. We're talking business.”

“Oh. Well, then. I'll just—leave you two.”

She left and I asked him if she knew about the cancer.

“Not yet but she suspects something.”

That meant she probably did know. Nothing was said about the house. We got down to my instructions. Dr. Solís was to send for me the moment that he, Flandin, died. There would be no lingering decline in a hospital. He would die in this room. I would come at once and stand guard by his bed, allowing no one to move his body for thirty-six hours.

“Are you willing to do that? Without asking a lot of questions? Don't humor me along now. I want an honest answer.”

“Yes, I can do that. Do you mean exactly thirty-six hours?”

“No less than that. I want your solemn word.”

“You have it. What else? What about the funeral?”

“I've already gone over that with Huerta. You just do your job. You just make sure I'm dead.”

He was afraid of being buried alive. A childhood nightmare of screaming and clawing and tossing about in a dark box. It wasn't an unreasonable fear. Any doctor can make a mistake. Funerals were carried out promptly here, and usually there was no embalming. Some morticians offered same-day service. Harlan Shrader died one morning in his hotel room, and we buried him before the sun went down, in a coffin too narrow for his shoulders, and they weren't broad. The box was made of thin pine boards and six-penny nails. Huerta charged us $40 for everything, including the grave plot, and he even put some cowboy boots on Harlan's limp feet. I don't know how he did it, slit them perhaps. We found them in Harlan's closet, but I think they must have belonged to some former occupant. In life Harlan tramped around town in threadbare canvas shoes with his toes poking out, and in death he became a member of the equestrian class. Mott and I paid Huerta. Shep applied to the Veterans Administration for the $250 burial allowance but said he never got it.

“Not a word about this to anyone,” said Doc. “I know I can count on you, Jimmy. Now I want you to go up to the attic. The black steamer trunk. It's not locked. Open it up and you'll see a pasteboard box tied up with rope. It's marked notes. I want you to bring it down here.”

I went up to the attic, an oven, just below the round cupola, and made haste to find the thing. It must have been 150 degrees Fahrenheit in that room. While poking around in the trunk, I came across a blue case with gold lettering. It held a Carnegie Medal for heroism and a citation on thick paper telling how young Richard Flandin, a grocer's delivery boy, had rescued an old lady and her dog, both unconscious, from a burning house in Los Angeles. Quite a little man. Doc in knickers. Sweat dripped from my nose and made splotches on the soft paper. Great boaster that he was, he had never told me about this. Had he forgotten? It served to remind me, too, that he was an old Angeleno, American to the bone, for all his French posturing. In a rare moment of weakness, he confessed to me one night that he was only five years old when his widowed mother made the move from Paris to California with him and his sister. He saved coins. I found a cigar box filled with silver pesos, and I bounced one, nice and heavy, on my hand. It was once one of the world's standard currencies, like the Spanish dollar, or piece of eight, and now a single peso was all but worthless. It was worth less than a single cacao bean, which the Mayans had used for money.

My first improvement to this house would be some roof turbines. Clear out all of this hot air. Would I allow Mrs. Blaney to stay on? Perhaps, but with much reduced authority and visibility.

The pasteboard box was packed with Doc's old notebooks. They were engineers' field notebooks, with yellow waterproof covers and water-resistant pages, each sheet scored off with a grid pattern. On the inner sides of the covers there were printed formulas for solving curves and triangles. I lugged it down to the bedroom and began untying the ropes. I thought he wanted the notes for reference. I thought this had something to do with his book.

“No, bind it back up,” he said. “They're yours, Jimmy, to do with as you please. All my early field notes. I want you to have them.”

His notes? Not the house then. I was to receive instead this dusty parcel of data. Unreadable scribbling and baffling diagrams with numbers, and here and there the multi-legged silhouette of a bug smashed between the pages. Did the stuff have any value at all? It was like being told that you had just inherited a zircon mine, unless zircons are quarried, I don't know. I was caught up short. I was at a loss.

“This is very good of you, Doc. I wonder though. Shouldn't valuable material like this go to some library or museum?”

“They had their chances. You're not pleased?”

“Yes, of course I am, a great honor, but you know how I live. Right now I'm camping out in a room at Fausto's place. You know how I move around. These notebooks should be catalogued and stored somewhere. I'm no scholar.”

“It doesn't matter. You're my good friend. You've been a loyal friend. They're yours. Enough said.”

Lorena came back to collect the dishes. Doc told her to go to the bureau and bring out all his—handkerchiefs—I thought he said.
Pañuelos?
She got one, and he said no, all of them,
todos
. They were plain white handkerchiefs, and she made stacks of them on a tray. He indicated that they were for me.

“I want you to have my handkerchiefs, too, Jimmy. All my old friends are dead now, and most of my new acquaintances are ill-bred people of below-average intelligence. Mental defectives for the most part. They don't use handkerchiefs.”

Lorena served them to me. Doc waved off my thanks. “You do carry one, don't you?”

“Sometimes.”

“I want you to feel free to use them. They're not to be put away now. They're for everyday use. There's plenty of service left in them.”

“Well. They're nice handkerchiefs.”

“Nothing fancy, but you can't beat long-staple cotton for absorbency and a smooth finish. How many are there?”

Now I had to count them. He wanted to draw this out.

“Twenty-two.”

“So many? Well, there you are. Twenty-two flags of truce. You never know when you might need one. Take them, enjoy them. Properly cared for, they will give you years of good service.”

“You mean I'm to take them now?”

“Absolutely. They're yours, enjoy them. The notebooks, the handkerchiefs. A lot of good reading in that box. I never could understand these selfish old people who hang onto everything till their very last gasp.”

A little later he dozed off. I left through the back door, through the kitchen, by way of all the copper pots, thinking to avoid another encounter with Mrs. Blaney. But there she was, poolside, with her English class. She taught English conversation and ballroom dancing to young Mexican matrons. They were sitting in a half-circle, six or seven of them, holding cups and saucers. Mrs. Blaney was drilling them in garden party remarks.

I made a detour around the swimming pool. Purple blossoms were floating in the water, and a blue air mattress, deflated, swamped and becalmed. Mrs. Blaney called out to me. “Mr. Burns? One moment please. What is that you are carrying away?” The young matrons looked at each other. This must be what you said in English to a person who was leaving your grounds at a smart clip with a box on his shoulder and a gun belt draped around his neck. I kept moving. I was thinking about the cancer demon and other things and I had no time for Lucille Blaney's nonsense. Sometimes I thought she was the one who was sending me the Mr. Rose letters.

HUERTA'S FUNERAL parlor was out by the old city wall, with a white glass sign in front, lighted from within.
Inhumaciones Huerta
. I drove around to the workshop and got Huerta out to look at the mahogany planks. Was that enough wood to make a coffin for Dr. Flandin? Or perhaps other plans had been made. I didn't want to interfere. Huerta ran his fingers along the grain. Oh no, this was a wonderful idea. This was more than enough. The mahogany would take a nice finish and would make a much more suitable
ataud
for the Doctor than the ugly metal casket he had chosen. He would dry the wood and stain it and buff it with wax and fashion a fine work of mortuary art. He would use bright copper hinges and fittings. Ulises could do some carving on the lid.

“Not too narrow now,” I said.

“Oh no.
Amplio
.” He spread his hands to show just how wide.
“Asi de amplio.”
But how much time did he have? The Doctor had not been clear about when death would come. I said he had been vague with me, too, but I thought there would be time enough.

On a wooden table nearby a boy was washing down a corpse with a water hose. I stopped to look at the face. Huerta said, “Did you know Enrique? He had a short fit and then dropped dead in his box. Just the way he would have wanted it.” The name meant nothing to me, but I recognized him as a man who had kept a newsstand downtown. He had sat half-hidden in a wooden box behind drooping curtains of newspapers and comic books, deaf, addled, smothered in news. It was a shock to see him outside his nest and laid out dead and cold on a wet table into the bargain.

That night I went to Shep's bar for the first time in weeks. There was a going-away party for Crouch and his wife. Shep's In-Between Club was the proper name, and from the outside it looked like a
pulque
joint in central Mexico, a hole in the wall with slatted, swinging saloon doors. No
pulque
was served here, however, and women were allowed to enter. It was bigger inside than you expected it to be and not as dark as you expected. Shep had a Mexican wife, and the place was registered in her name.

Nelms was intercepting people at the swinging doors. He was eating a curled hunk of fried pork skin that had been dipped in red sauce. He started eating street food at mid-afternoon and ate steadily along until about 11 at night. There was a whine in his voice.

“How long have I been coming in here, Burns?”

“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.