Gringos (30 page)

“I don't know. I have no idea.”

“But what are you saying? A prophet with no teachings? Look at what you're saying. Cuco has informed me that the fellow preys on children. A corrupter of children. A man with no regard or respect for innocence. All right. Then you go on to say that he has followers of a sort. Now I don't know about you but to me that implies teachings of some kind.”

“I'm not saying he didn't have any teachings, I'm just saying I don't know what his teachings were.”

“Excuse me, maybe I'm stupid today, but I fail to see how he can lead people around like that without some kind of teachings. Tell me this. Does he wear magnificent robes?”

“No.”

“Just what was his business at Likín? Why should he go there, of all places?”

“I don't know that either.”

“Can you tell us anything about his ritual? Were there lowland Mayan elements, for instance?”

“As far as I could see, no, none.”

“To the best of your limited knowledge, that is.”

“Very limited.”

“Yes, that's the difference between us, you see. The complacent mind and the inquiring mind. You couldn't trouble yourself to ask a few simple questions. I would have given this Danny a grilling he wouldn't soon forget. I would have held his feet to the fire and shown him up for what he is. I would have dealt with him. You couldn't be bothered.”

“We were in a hurry and I really didn't care what his teachings were.”

“Too lazy to get involved,” said Louise. “Character flaw.”

“Exactly,” said Doc. “Here's what it boils down to then. You want us to believe that this fellow has no natural gifts. A brute without the least trace of nobility in his features. A man with no winning ways, no message, no teachings whatsoever. And yet somehow he manages to gain ascendancy over these people. Correct me if I'm wrong.”

He couldn't get a rise out of me and so he did the next best thing. What better way to annoy all the guests than to lecture them on ancient Indian ritual, on
Hunab Ku
or
Itzam
, the great lizard god, on the
Chacs
and the
Bacabs
and the red goddess. Soon he was lost in that thicket himself, trying to describe a forgotten religion that was thought to be formless, creedless and without moral content. It was worse than a pottery talk. Even those who professed an interest in the subject were finally stupefied by it. It was a teeming and confused throng, the Maya pantheon, and no one had ever sorted it out in a very convincing way. Doc certainly wasn't going to do it here over lunch. Art and Mike had given up on it long ago. Their current theory was that everything about pre-Columbian America was completely misunderstood.

I took Gail aside after lunch and asked her about the Olmec jade. As long as we were calling in gifts I thought I would have a go at it. The little green
idolo
was worth several thousand dollars, I told her, and it wasn't Doc's to give away. There had been a misunderstanding. It was on loan. The piece really belonged to Refugio, and I knew she would want to see it returned.

But she no longer had it, or so she said. The thing had disappeared. She had last seen it in the hands of LaJoye Mishell Teeter. Perhaps the girl had stolen it. “I've looked and I've looked. Such a beautiful work too. I'm so sorry.”

I said it didn't matter. Good riddance. Let it remain in the piney woods of Florida. Art and Mike thought all the virtue had probably gone out of it anyway, the spirit fled, as with objects in museums. I said to her that Doc still had a bad gray look, for all his sparkle and new plans, and I urged her to press on with the big book and get it done
de prisa
. Time was short. Get on with it. That was my advice to Gail.

“It's going to be quite a job,” she said.

Quite a job.
This peculiar girl gave out even less information than I did. She was humoring me, almost defying me to make some comment on the new situation here. The water in the pool was still and no leaf trembled on the bushes. It was a warm day in January. She wore a loose flowery housedress to show that she was at home, that she was receiving guests at her home. She was at perfect ease. I suspected that she still had the jade. I couldn't be sure. This pool and this big house would soon be hers, too. A clean sweep for Gail. While I wound up with the handkerchiefs and the trailer. She was dedicated to bennee, all right. Well, she had her way to make in the world, too, just like the rest of us, but I thought she was lying through her teeth and still had Refugio's jade man. I was pretty sure of it, if not absolutely sure, and now I wondered too about Denise's lost contact lenses at the Holiday Inn and how they came to be lost.

“Yes, but I believe you can handle the job, Gail, if you put your mind to it.”

“Do you think so?”

“I know you can. By the way, you owe me some money for gasoline.”

“What? Oh, I see, you're charging me for the ride. I didn't realize. How much does it come to?”

“Let's say twenty dollars.”

“So much? And you want it now? This minute?”

“If it's convenient.”

“My purse is upstairs in our bedroom. But I tell you what. Maybe this will do. That should cover all expenses, don't you think?”

The loose dress had two pockets and from one of them she had taken a heavy silver coin, badly out of round and worn down smooth as a river pebble. It was an old Spanish dollar, a piece of eight. She had found the trunk in the attic. Already she had been into Doc's coin hoard with her plump little starfish hands.

“Yes, this will settle it.”

“I should think so. Eight reales. It will make a nice memento for you, too, from Dicky's last
entrada.
”

I was sure of it now—she still had the jade. LaJoye Mishell was no thief. Well, let Gail keep the thing and much good may it do her. Or maybe I would speak to Doc about it later. Refugio came out of it well enough anyhow, with his big pipe sale and the pop-top trailer that he claimed as a forfeit. The shooting out in the woods became a pivotal date for him, replacing another memorable occasion—
That time we changed out the ring-and-pinion gears
. It made him laugh every time he thought of it. What a filthy knuckle-busting job. I wouldn't do that again if you gave me the bus. We were repairing the differential of an old school bus. The shop manual said it was a six-hour job for one man and it took Refugio and Valentín and me three days. But now the ring-and-pinion comedy had given way to—
That time we killed the pagans
. Now Refugio would place some event by saying, “It was before that time we killed the pagans,” or, “It wasn't long after that night we killed the pagans in the rain.”

Louise had me stop at the In-Between Club on the way back. She wanted to check up on Shep and see what he was doing with Emmett's money, which wasn't a bad idea. The place was darker in the afternoon than it was at night. Cribbs was standing alone at the near end of the bar, away from the strangers. Louise warned him that this day drinking would kill him, just as it had killed Emmett, and not only that but he never gave blood to the Red Cross either. “You old barflies never do anything for anybody and you never do anything to promote international understanding.” Cribbs told her that a bottle of beer or two in the afternoon wouldn't hurt a baby. He told Cosme to bring me one and he said let us all drink to better days. Louise went to confer with Shep in the office.

Back in the shadows the strangers were talking about UFO's. Some new blood in town. It didn't take long for arriving gringos to nose out this place. One of the voices, a high-pitched drone, overrode the others and made me think of Wade Watson, but I knew he was gone. This fellow had the floor. He spoke with the insistence of an expert and he kept interrupting the others, who made themselves out to be sensible, judicious men, open-minded but no fools. They deferred to him. It wasn't enough, their good will. They were out of their depth, and the scornful expert wanted to show up their ignorance. He had them reeling with his command of detail. They could have used some tips from Art and Mike, who had refined the position of having it both ways right down to a fare-thee-well. Art and Mike conceded the existence of flying saucers as a general proposition but refused to believe in any particular sighting or landing.

The strangers began to drift away. A small fire erupted on the bar back there. Cosme beat it out with a wet rag. The droning fellow came edging up toward me.

“Sir? Sir? Excuse me? Sir? May I relate a personal experience?”

I saw him in the light now. It
was
Wade, dirty and smelly and rumpled. The police had let him go, poor Wade, into Louise's care, on the condition that she get him out of the country. She thought she had done so, having taken him to the airport and put him on his honor, if not actually on a plane. He missed the flight and had been hanging about town ever since.

He recognized me. “Oh yes, you. Burns, isn't it? The nosey one with all the questions. Are you very busy right now? May I relate an interesting personal experience?”

I couldn't get anything out of him before. Now there was no shutting him up. Cribbs knocked back the rest of his beer and stumbled away in haste, but it seems to me you must let a haunted man make his report.

“All right. Sure.”

“Thank you. First, who am I? I am a payroll programmer for the state of Missouri and I wear nice shirts and nice suits when I'm at home. I live in a garage apartment, which suits me, though I could afford something much, much nicer. It's comfortable enough and very private. I sleep upstairs, alone, needless to say, and my bedroom window faces southwest. At a little after 11 o'clock on the night of August third I was awakened by an expiring rush of air. Then there came a pulsing light and a low-frequency hum, or a sort of throbbing. There really is no name for this disturbance I heard, and felt more than heard. Now it is important for you to understand, Mr. Burns, that I am not a repeater. Get that through your head. This was my first and only contact. I am a professional man with a peptic ulcer and chronic scalp problems. Otherwise I enjoy normal good health. In my spare time I write stories of a speculative nature, if you want to hold that against me. People like you would call them fantasy or science fiction. Other hobbies? Well, I enjoy certain light operas. I play polka tunes on the concertina for my own amusement and for the entertainment of my friends. And yes, I am a student of the great Maya civilization, but that is not invariably a sign of madness. In my room the light rose and fell, in phase with the hum. There was sharp pressure on my chest. . . .”

He made a smooth story of it. Two shining androids one meter tall came through his window and stood at the foot of his bed. They wore white coveralls. They spoke a guttural, synthesized English and put it across to him that he must go soon to the ancient home of “the old earth mutants,” which was Mayaland in Mexico, there to await—“something incommunicable.” Always that. I was waiting for it, the point at which things go blurred. Wade said he had written a long account of his bedroom contact and that it was published in a UFO newsletter called
Gamma Bulletin
, out of Tempe, Arizona. The October edition was given over entirely to his story, an unprecedented event. No other contributor had ever been so honored.

Then, in the November issue, there came further instructions for him, via the mail this time, in the form of a letter to the editor from the city of Mérida, in Mexico. It was dated “End of the Fifth Creation,” and in this letter Wade was told that he must come to the eastern beach of a small seaside town called Progreso, in Yucatán. He must wait there “near the turn of the year” and be patient. After a brief period of observation he would be met there and led to an ancient city in the heart of the Petén forest. This was the City of Dawn. Certain things would be revealed to him there. The letter was signed
“El Mago
.” Underneath it, Wade said, the editor of
Gamma Bulletin
had appended a note stating that while he personally could not vouch for the authenticity of this
El Mago
, he could say that the Petén jungle was known with certainty to be an ancient mutation center. Furthermore, it was reported to be active again, in current and quite heavy use as an entry window.

So Wade came to Mérida, but then he began to lose heart and stall around. He couldn't be sure of the appointed day. He was afraid it had passed with the coming of the new year. The day had come and gone, and he had hesitated out of fear. He couldn't bring himself to leave town. He felt safe enough in Mérida but the countryside of Mexico was an unknown place of terror to him. He feared bandits, strange hot food, stinging plants, unsanitary pillows, transport breakdown. He was afraid to get on a bus or take a taxicab to Progreso, twenty miles away on a perfectly good paved highway. Now he was broke and had lost his suitcase and his credit card.

As it happened, I said, some friends and I had visited this same City of Dawn just a few weeks back.

“What? You? Not the real city in the jungle?”

“The Likín ruin, yes.”

“But you weren't there at the first of the year.”

“We were, yes.”

“I don't understand. Why would you be there?”

“No special reason. We were just going down the river at the time.”

“This is amazing. You were actually on ground zero. What happened?”

“Nothing much. Some hippies were there.”

“
El Mago?
You saw him?”

“No, I don't believe he showed.”

“But I wonder if you would even recognize him. Was there a faint smell of ammonia in the air?”