Gringos (14 page)

Possibly, but he went too far in assuming that Rudy would do the sensible thing. I suspected that Rudy had gone down the Usumacinta, walking the banks, in search of Tumbalá, the place of the little temples. He was there or he was lost or he was drowned or he was dead of snakebite or he was shot or captured in the guerilla war across the river.

We lingered over coffee. The ragged old man called
El Obispo
passed by on the sidewalk, and we all turned our heads away so as not to meet his evil eye. The danger was small, he never looked up from the ground, but one day he might raise those red eyes. Pedestrians gave way. They peeled off left and right about six paces ahead of him. The effective range of his gaze was not thought to be great. He jabbered away as he walked, saying the same thing over and over again, and today he was moving right along. Some days he took it slow, placing one foot directly in front of the other with the care of a tightrope walker. He was called The Bishop because he slept in a shed behind the cathedral.

Refugio spit between his legs to neutralize the evil. What he hawked up, this heavy smoker, was a viscous ball of speckled matter resembling frog spawn. I had put off telling him about Doc. Now I told him. His hands flew up in alarm. Cancer is cancer in Spanish, too, and the word is avoided in polite company.

“No! Not the Doctor! This is too cruel! I must go to him!”

“Yes, but let me call first. They have a new set-up at that house.”

I called Mrs. Blaney and simply told her that we were coming by, and then I dropped Refugio off at Izamál, he carrying his gift .45 in a paper sack. Doc was waiting for him outside. They embraced on the lawn, with Doc calling him by an old nickname, Cuco.

There was another unpleasant duty to perform. I tracked Louise down to the museum, where she was helping Beth take some school children through on a tour. The kids were in blue and white uniforms, and of that age, twelve or so, when the girls are a head taller than the boys. Andean flute music came over the speaker system. A bit of stagecraft, suggestive of eerie rites, but nothing to do with the Maya. Beth also liked to run the lights up and down with the rheostat.

I took Louise aside and told her that Rudy was missing. She didn't collapse in tears but was only fretful. A blank stare, a delicate cough, some floating thought, a quotation from L. Ron Hubbard—I never knew what to expect from her. Maybe she saw this as a merciful release, free at last, from Rudy and his tapes.

“I knew something like this was coming,” she said. “I could feel it. It's all my fault because I'm such a coward.”

Louise was far from being a coward. She was largely indifferent to the ordinary hazards of life, and yet she had a fear of stinging insects, something to do with an allergy, and she seldom ventured into the deep woods. She seemed to think she was to blame because she had stayed behind.

“It's not as bad as it sounds,” I said. “He's just out of touch. We'll find him. I have a friend who knows that country well.”

“Do the police know about this?”

“They know in Chiapas.”

“Should we notify the vice-consul?”

“It won't hurt.”

“I wonder if he can do anything. That man has the pink eyes of a rabbit.”

“He'll do what he can.”

“What about an air search? Beth would lend me the money to charter an airplane.”

“You couldn't see anything but treetops. There's really no such thing as searching the Petén jungle. Miles and miles of unbroken greenery. He hasn't gone far. We'll turn him up along the river somewhere. Tumbalá, probably.”

“He may have lost his memory. Rudy may be wandering around down there with no idea of who he is or where he is.”

“Has that happened before?”

“No.”

I waited for an explanation. None came.

“I'm just turning things over in my mind. Various possibilities. Someone could have murdered him for his tapes.”

“You have his latest tape. I brought it to you.”

“Not the very latest one. He would have made others by now.”

She thought he might have fallen into the hands of hostile Indians. He was lying on the ground, bound hand and foot, with the village elders squatting in a circle around him. They were chewing bitter narcotic leaves as they passed judgment on him, and took their time over it. I assured her that the Lacondón were a peaceable enough folk. They might tease Rudy or sell him a defective souvenir but they weren't likely to knock him in the head. I asked her what he was really up to down there.

“I don't know.”

“I think you do know and you better tell me if you want to see him again.”

“You're the one who gave him the map to that place. It's all your fault. That place with the little houses you told him about.”

“What was on the tape he sent back?”

“Nothing much.”

“I want to hear it.”

“Rudy has strict rules—”

“I don't care about his rules. Either I hear that tape or I'm not lifting a finger.”

“All right, but there's nothing useful on it. I didn't want to mention this—not to you—but it has to be considered. He may very well have been carried away in a spacecraft.”

“I don't think that's likely, Louise.”

“No, you wouldn't, would you? You don't want us to make a quality contact. Rudy finally makes a quality contact and you resent it. You're jealous of him. You've always been envious of his field equipment and his City Planning degree, and for some reason I don't understand you're trying to stop him from becoming a distinguished author and lecturer. It's small-minded people like you who make it so hard for the rest of us. You're jealous of anybody and everybody who's working on the frontiers of knowledge.”

“Yes, but when these visitors do snatch someone, don't they always bring him back? To pass on their warnings about pollution and atom bombs and such?”

“A simple peasant, yes, or some dumbbell off the street, sure, they would bring him back after a quick body scan, but with someone like Rudy they would want to take him onto the mother ship. They would want to go over his notes and listen to his tapes and study his brain. They must have known he was on to something down there. It was a golden opportunity for them.”

“Well, no need to borrow trouble. My guess is he hasn't gone far. There's a good chance he's already walked out somewhere.”

“Not if they took him back to their own planet.”

“No, in that case he's sunk, but there have been no reports of any landings. Someone would have seen the lights. The nights are very dark in Chiapas.”

“They don't always use lights in the visible part of the spectrum. They're so far ahead of us in lasers and fiber optics that it isn't funny.”

The children trooped out with their teacher, and Beth came over to see what was up. She and Louise badgered me with suggestions, relishing the drama. Beth thought I should use my “underworld connections” to help in the hunt. I went dead silent. Usually I brighten up a bit in the company of women and am not so much the lugubrious bore, my natural and most comfortable role, but my thoughts were far away. I was thinking not of Rudy but of Dan and his tribe and the little runaway girl they called Red. Yes, that was me to a T, lugubrious and punctual and facetious, all at once, a combination I would have found tiresome in another person, if I had known one.

Louise and I went to her
casita
and listened to the tape. It was just Rudy going on and on with his descriptions and measurements at Ektún. I thought it would never end. The murdering tape thief would have been annoyed when he got back to the quiet of his room and heard this stuff and looked at the blood on his hands. I fast-forwarded some of it. Rudy made no mention of his plans. I left the Checker car with Louise and suggested she move in with Beth, who had a telephone. “Stay close and I'll let you know as soon as I find out anything.”

The night had turned off cool. A
norte
must have blown in. I walked over to the Posada and got my truck. Refugio would be waiting for me at Doc's place. On the way back across town I caught a glimpse of the night dog. I checked the moon. It seemed to be in about the third quarter.

A word here about the night dog and
El Obispo
. It took me almost two years to figure out what the old man was muttering. I picked up a word here and a word there and finally pieced them all together. Then one day Jerry asked me what he was saying. I told him and he wrote it down in his anthropology notebook. I felt cheated of my time and labor.

The common belief was that The Bishop was simply going through his rosary, but no, I knew the sounds of that litany all too well, from mountain bus rides on rainy nights, with terrified passengers all around me telling their beads. No, it was a text from Mark he was reciting. I looked it up.

“¿Ves estos grandes edificios? No quedará piedra sobre piedra, que no sea derribada.”
(“Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”)

Those were
El Obispo
's words as he marched around Mérida with his eyes cast down. That, with variations, was what he said day in and day out. At noon he sat against the shady side of the cathedral and rested and ate squash seeds. Once I stuck an ice cream cone into his curled paw. He received it passively and may or may not have eaten it. He may have been asleep. I kept moving and didn't look back. On certain nights, in his shed behind the church, he changed himself into a small reddish dog with a fox face. The animal was about eighteen inches long, exclusive of the tail, which itself was about the same length, and stiff as a new rope. It curled up and around to form a near-circle, with the tip touching his back.

At least there was such a dog, I had seen him myself many times, and Fausto and others claimed that you could never catch the two of them together, The Bishop and the night dog. He moved at a trot, a dog on pressing business, and was always just going around a corner, it seemed, out of view. He was too healthy and sleek for a scavenger.

But on what business? No one could say. As it happened, I caught a glimpse of him on this night. He was jogging into an alley. The looped tail was unmistakable. I parked the truck and got out with my flashlight.

I knew this street slightly. This was the Naroody block. The Hotel Naroody was on the corner, and next to it was Foto Naroody, a photography
estudio
, with framed pictures in the window, portraits of brides and fat babies tinted with gruesome colors. Along the way there were shops with such names as Importaciones Naroody and Curiosidades Naroody. I had never seen Naroody taking any
fotos
. The display pictures gathered dust and were never changed. Some of those falsely colored babies may have been brides themselves by now. I wasn't even sure I had seen Naroody. Whenever I spotted some likely Levantine candidate I would be told, “Him? No, that's not Naroody.”

I played the light about in the alley and kicked at boxes and piles of trash. The dog was gone. I doubled back and found a chubby man waiting for me at the entrance. He too had a flashlight. His eyelids drooped. One hand was resting in the pocket of a loose smock, such as a photographer might wear in his darkroom. I asked him if he had seen the jaunty dog.

“Ah, the dog. I thought you were a burglar. Yes, I know this dog. You will never capture him.”

“I'm not trying to capture him. I just thought I had found his sleeping place.”

“He passes this way on his rounds but he doesn't sleep here. He never stops. Why do you wish to capture him? The little dog is not harming anyone.”

“I don't wish to capture him. I don't wish to bother him in any way but I would like to get a closer look at him.”

“Why?”

“I hear these stories. I'm curious.”

“The stories are nonsense.”

“They say he comes out at certain phases of the moon.”

“I don't listen to such talk.”

“You're not Naroody, are you?”

He was startled. “What? Naroody? No. I only work for him.”

“I hear he's a good man to work for.”

“Where do you hear this?”

“You must be the watchman.”

“I keep an eye on things, yes, but I have other duties too.” He looked around and drew close and his voice fell to a whisper. “May I tell you something in confidence? All his methods are out of date.”

“Naroody's methods?”

“His business methods. He won't listen to anyone.”

“Do you know where the dog goes from here?”

He hesitated. I gave him some money. He thanked me and apologized, saying he was not moving up as fast in the Naroody organization as he had hoped. Naroody kept him short of pocket money. He got his keep and little more. He pointed to a window above one of the shops. That was his room. He had a room of his own up there with running water, or trickling water anyway, and he ate well enough at Naroody's second table, but he saw very little cash, not nearly enough to buy fashionable clothes and take women out at night. His life was not fulfilled. There were men his age, much less deserving, who drove cars and had as many as ten pairs of pointed shoes in their closets.

“But the dog.”

“They say he goes to the rail yard and later comes out of the big drain pipe behind the feed mill. After that I don't know. Who has time to listen to such foolishness? These are not good questions. You drive a fine white truck that will take you anywhere you wish to go. Do you tell me that you believe in ghost animals?”

“I believe he's a strange dog. You say yourself that I could never capture him.”