Gringos (31 page)

“Not that I noticed.”

“Muriatic acid?”

“I wouldn't know that smell.”

“Any animal panic?”

“The monkeys were howling.”

“Monkeys! I hadn't counted on monkeys! Did you see anyone collecting leaves or soil samples? Usually these creatures work in pairs. But only one carries the sample bag. Two busy little shining men.”

“I didn't see anything like that.”

“Any aerial phenomena?”

“No. Well, yes, it rained. That's about it. Some hippies were there and had a kind of party.”

“Wearing white coveralls? Calling themselves the Children of the Sun?”

“Not in so many words. I don't remember hearing those exact words. They did talk some about the sun. A few of them were wearing coveralls.”

“You say the monkeys were howling.”

“Yes, but that's what they do. They're howler monkeys.”

“Likín. I've seen it often in my dreams but the light is so poor in my dreams. It must have been a hard trip.”

“Not all that hard. It takes a few days to get there, but it's accessible enough. Once you reach the river it's nothing more than a boat ride.”

“I wonder. The rain. The monkeys. Not much in that. But something may have happened and you didn't recognize it for what it was. Some small thing. Something arbitrary—something—of grace. A tiny pressure surge or some slight shift in the balance of things. The significance may have escaped you.”

“That's possible.”

“What are people here whispering about me behind my back?”

“I don't believe I've heard anything.”

“I see. You're going to be polite. I wouldn't have expected that. Most of the Americans here are of a very crude type. The kind who would fire .22 shorts at superior beings, the way those barnyard louts did in Texas last May. Never mind, let me tell you what they're saying.” He stuck his thumbs in his belt, in what he took to be barroom swagger, and spoke in what he took to be our comical lingo. “ ‘That there feller? Why I reckon he's plumb loco, Clem!' Well, you can just inform your pals that their ignorant remarks don't bother me in the least. I merely consider the source.”

He had nothing to say about his jail time. I gave him my opinion that it was less dangerous in the countryside than in the cities. I asked if he had ever heard of a place called the Gulf of Molo, but he was no longer listening to me or talking to me. Cosme told me that Wade had been here most of the day and had set little fires here and there, on the tables and the bar. He would tear paper napkins into strips and make mounds of them and set fire to them.

“We can't have that,
Señor Jaime
.
No le hace asi
. It won't do.”

“No, it won't.”

I sent over to the Bugambilia Cafe for a chicken sandwich on toast, always good. Wade ate it in silence, and then Louise and I took him back to the airport. She told him that he had let her down and that he really must go home this time.

“I can't get you out of jail again. If the police find you here they're going to lock you up. You don't want that, do you?”

“No.”

“This will all blow over. You can come back another time when you're feeling better and go to the Forbidden City.”

“The City of Dawn.”

“That's what I meant to say.”

“Too late for me now. I had my chance. I didn't measure up.”

Wade was agreeable enough in his distracted way. He went where we pointed him and stopped when we stopped. He stood perfectly still, but rigid, like a dog being washed, as I turned out his pockets and removed all matches. There was no luggage—he had lost that on the first go-round. The woman at the Mexicana counter rolled her eyes and groaned and in the end agreed to honor his expired ticket. Louise thought we should take our leave of him in the departure lounge. To linger on and hover would be insulting. We had his word. But that wasn't my idea of seeing Wade off. I said no, we would wait here until he was boarded and the hatch dogged down behind him and the plane airborne, until wheels up at the very earliest. We waited, behind tinted glass. We watched from a distance as the passengers straggled across the hot concrete, and I thought I saw Chip and Diane in identical red knit shirts going up the boarding stairway, if that was their names. They carried matching green duffel bags and disappeared into the belly of the plane before I could be certain. Then Wade Watson taking his mechanical man steps. He was embarked. We didn't see him again.

It was now late afternoon and Louise had another errand, which was to give
El Obispo
his $50. She had talked Shep out of it, though strictly speaking the old man didn't meet the conditions of Emmett's will, being neither blind, nor, as far as anyone knew, musical. It couldn't have been easy, getting money out of Shep. She had kept after him. “He knew somewhere in his false heart that I was right.”

I dropped her off downtown and then went to the zoo for a quick look at the fine new jaguar. It was embarrassing. I had traveled all up and down the south and east of Mexico, and over into Belize and Guatemala, much of it on foot, and still I had to go to the zoo like everybody else to see this wonderful beast. He was a big fellow, built low to the ground, all rounded muscle, a heavy cat, nothing at all like the bony puma with his long legs and lank folds of skin. He paced about behind the bars taking no notice of us. Some children stood there with me and spoke in whispers. His coat was a light orange. The spots were black rosettes and broken black rings, and in the center of the rings there were black dots. It was a map of the starry night sky, but I couldn't read it. People here were right to call him
the
tiger.

A quick look and out for me. The place was fairly well kept, but I could never stay long. My mother didn't approve of zoos. She took things as they came, and it was always startling when she expressed some strong opinion like that. We would stop and look at each other, startled members of the Burns family, when she came out with something like that. She didn't approve of circus clowns. They were only making fun of tramps, she said, and poor fun it was. I wondered if in fact I had missed something back there at Likín. I couldn't read that pattern either. The surge, the slippage, the convergence, the vibrations, the whiff of ammonia, the design—all was lost on me. Rudy had said, correctly, that I was an untrained observer, and Wade thought I was incapable of recognizing any sign or portent short of a crack in the earth. Wade, of course, may have gotten his instructions wrong, or the androids may have lied to him, though you don't expect such radiant creatures to be jokers, swooping down on Jefferson City with their light show to have some fun with Wade Watson. You don't raise the point. You never question the veracity of the invaders.

Louise was talking to
El Obispo,
or Arturo, as she called him, on the shady side of the cathedral. Always he came back to this sanctuary. He was slumped against the wall. Did he ever go inside? Take communion? I waited by the truck, eating popcorn from a sack, thinking she should leave him alone.
Born to Meddle
. She should have had that tattooed across her forehead, to give people notice. It was a one-way chat. She had lied to me about getting a response out of the ragged old man. I was learning more about her day by day. She had a heavy tread for such a small person, coming down harder on her heels than I would have liked. Floor joists creaked under her step. I would come to recognize it at a distance, that smart little step, if I went blind, and take comfort in it, knowing my soup was on the way. Here was another thing. Where I spoke to myself, properly, in the second person, she used the third. If she dropped a coin, for instance, she would put her fists on her hips and say, “Well! Look at Louise! Just throwing her money away!” She wanted me to buy some new shirts and stop wearing boxer shorts and rearrange my hair, let it grow out into a bush and fluff it up in some way. She wanted me to confide in her and tell her my long-range plans that I couldn't bear to disclose. She wanted me to start reading nature books. We were both early risers. That had worked out well enough. She made a good meatloaf, with a nice crust, the way I like it. She knew how to make deviled eggs. She wasn't a bad cook and she didn't mind cooking.

But no, she hadn't lied. Here was
El Obispo
on his feet all of a sudden, chattering away at her, and this time about something other than the doomed towers of man.
“¡Izquierda!”
he said, flinging one hand around and around.
“¡Siempre a la izquierda!
Always to the left!”

What had roused him was her mention of the night dog. He held the dollars she had given him in one claw and made wild gestures with the other. Still he spoke with his head down. The people of Mérida, he said, were wrong to associate him with the dog, just as they were wrong and profane to call him The Bishop. He had nothing to do with the animal. He, Arturo, went one way and the dog went another. The courses they took around town were entirely different. The little dog was far too proud, like his master, a sly man, but there was no mystery about him. He was a
pelón
, a hairless
xolo
or
sholo
dog, with cropped ears, owned by a rich man, proud and sly, who turned him out every night, as with a cat. The dog made a patrol around town, stopping for nothing, going always at a trot to the left, in a diminishing spiral, until he fetched up back home in the early hours. That was his way. That was his habit, his daily exercise. Nothing more. This was the true story of the night dog, and the ignorant people of Mérida were wrong to say otherwise, to say that he, Arturo, was possessed and in demonic league with the proud little dog. They told other lies about him, too! They said that he, Arturo, stole milk! And lapped it up like a dog! That he ate no more than a snake! Just gobbled down a rat or a frog every two or three weeks! One day they would answer for their lies! And for every idle word they spoke!

He was worried that Louise might go away with the wrong idea. She might go away foolishly thinking that the dog sometimes turned to the right on his circuit,
“¡Izquierda!”
he shouted at her, making a loop with his gnarled hand.
“¡A la izquierda!”

What a word. A truly sinister mouthful for so simple an idea as
left
. Louise found it all convincing enough. The mystery was dispelled. So much for me and my unnatural dog. I let it go without argument but I didn't believe a word of it. The night dog had a sleek red coat and a curling tail with a bit of fringe. His tail was a kind of plume. His ears were uncropped. A
sholo,
on the other hand, is naked as a jaybird, with shiny black skin, and with sweat glands, too, unlike other dogs, and with the tail of a rat. I knew my
sholo
dogs.
El Obispo
had cooked up the story. He was sly, like his invented rich man, and proud too in his rags. I offered him what was left of my popcorn, my
palomitas de maíz
, my little doves of corn, but he had already dropped down to his resting place against the thick yellow masonry and was safely back inside his own head again.

A few hippies were passing through town, not so many as before. I looked them over, half expecting to see some of the Jumping Jack stragglers. Sometimes I thought I saw one. There were days, certain hot afternoons, when the sightings were frequent. It was like watching a wave of alarm running through a prairie dog village, the way I saw their Jumping Jack heads jumping up here and there before me. But it was always someone else. Louise wanted me to stop looking these people over. She thought I should put away my Blue Sheets and my flashlight and stop working for Gilbert. I said I would have to think about it. We had to have some money from somewhere. There were no remittances coming in. I knew I would miss going out at night and putting my light in their faces.

LOUISE WAS addicted to dramatic gestures, and I had the feeling she would wake up some morning and announce that she was going to law school, or that she had decided to open up a metaphysical bookshop, some such bolt from the blue as that. She knew that my conversation, no bargain now, must soon be that of an old coot, all complaint and gloomy prophecy. We went ahead with the marriage all the same. Soledad Bravo said the auspices were fair, good enough,
bastante
, if not entirely favorable. She had seen a spider laying eggs in a dark closet. But then she had seen worse omens in January. It was surprising how fast I moved on the thing, at my age, with so few reservations, how quickly I became a husband, and an indulgent one at that.

We were married at Doc's house. Louise had a friend, Aurélio, who came by and sang, with an accompanist. It was the first time I had ever heard that grand piano played. I didn't know Aurélio and I was expecting some fat little man in frilly white shirt and tiny black plastic shoes with a Mexican night club
quiverando
delivery, some fellow sobbing out that Granada would live again. Not at all. I couldn't have been more wrong. Aurélio was a young college student with a crystal-pure tenor voice and no tricks. He sang “Because God Made Me Thine,” first in Spanish and then in English.

Aurélio brought tears to my eyes, and to everybody's eyes. We took the Mobile Star down to Costa Rica, stopping uneasily in Guatemala only for gasoline, where they sell it not by the liter but by the gringo gallon. We were getting the hang of trailer life. It was like towing a barge. It was like living on a small boat, or in a bank vault. We went to the Pacific side of Costa Rica, to the Nicoya Gulf, and set up camp near a village called Lepanto. Here in the bay water Louise went fishing for the first time in her life. She took up fishing with my little freshwater rod and spinning reel, and I couldn't get her to stop. We had the place pretty much to ourselves. Some kids came over from the village now and then to look at us. At night the crabs dragged themselves about over the sand and fought over our potato peelings. One afternoon a motorcycle came roaring in through the palm grove. A young American couple dismounted and took off their helmets and set up a tent on the sand. They wanted to know where they were. They borrowed a funnel and then a bar of soap. Then a towel. Then a crescent wrench.