The Return: A Novel (11 page)

“Yeah, I did, as a matter of fact. I got it on Fourth Avenue. It was something my mom and I used to do. There’re all these used bookstores on lower Fourth, and we used to take the subway up from Brooklyn. Starting when I was about six and up ’til, I don’t know, ’til I was too old to go out shopping with my mother, I guess. I picked it up, the paperback, because of the red cover and the title.”

“What did you think of it?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t figure out what the guy’s problem was. I mean, he went to prep school, so he must’ve been loaded, or his folks were, so what did he have to complain about? But the whole book is one long bitch about how phony everything is, how everything isn’t just right for wonderful what’s-his-name, Canfield—”

“Caulfield. Holden Caulfield.”

“Right. Why did you ask?”

“Because I’m what Holden Caulfield turned into.” He laughed then and shook his head. “You know, Marder, we’re probably the only two people in northern Laos capable of discussing
The Catcher in the Rye.
I might have to keep you alive after all.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. So you got kicked out of prep school?”

“Yep. I thought they were all phonies. You never thought your parents were fucked up?”

“No, I thought they were decent, honest people. I told you, my father’s a union guy, a printer. He’s proud of what he does; he thinks he’s preserving the printed word, the backbone of civilization, and then he always said the printers were the aristocrats of the labor movement, the vanguard. And my mom—I’d come home from school and there’d be this stranger, some old bum off the street, and she’d be feeding him soup. Ladies would come up to me at the grocery store, or wherever, and say, ‘Oh, your mother’s a saint.’ I didn’t think anything of it. And she was a reader too; she read to me for as long as I can remember, and she made sure the nuns didn’t mess with me. In our neighborhood, I’d walk down the street with the two of them, I’d be smiling, I was so glad they were my folks. So, no. The army is fucked up, the world may be fucked up, but not the Marders. Why did they kick you out?”

“I got liquored up and took a big crap on the school seal. They had it inlaid in marble in Byron Hall, the main building there at Vaughan Preparatory Academy. Then my father sent me to the Christian Brothers, where he’d gone to school, to see if they could, as he put it, beat some sense into me.” Skelly lit another cigarette and gazed upward at the smoke rising through the thatch, weaving like a serpent around the thin shafts of light that descended from above.

“And did they?”

“Well, they sure beat me, I’ll give them that. I didn’t think
they
were phony. They were extremely sincere about whipping boys. I thought they were nuts, all that God bullshit, and I wouldn’t do it—I mean pray or pretend to believe in it—and I got beat, and I still wouldn’t, and basically I lasted about a month and I just took off. I broke into the school office and stole all the cash that the students had on deposit for pocket money and like that, a couple of hundred bucks, I guess, and then I hitched south. I got to Florida, got a job in a restaurant in Orlando, slept in a crash pad with a bunch of other runaways. It was a nice time, really, and then I got picked up and the cops sent me back to Dad.”

“He must’ve been pissed.”

“Not really. He’d sort of written me off. He delegated his executive secretary to deal with me, Mrs. Tatum. Actually, she was the only person I can recall who took me seriously when I was a kid, I mean as someone who had a mind of his own.”

“What about your mom?”

“Oh, the lovely Clarissa? After I ruined her figure, the lovely Clarissa took off and married an Argentinian polo player. I get a check and a card from her on Christmas and birthdays. Anyway, Mrs. Tatum handled it perfectly—asked me where I wanted to go to school, if anywhere, and I said I wanted to go to a regular public high school, and she sent me to Hancock High and I loved it. Girls, for example: I’d never had daily access to girls before, and to guys who were just regular assholes and not rich assholes, which is a completely different level of assholery and much harder for me to take, my father being the classic rich asshole. And it was the whole fucked-up urban high school thing you see in the movies. No one’s interested in anything but who’s cool and who’s not, and it’s all about getting sex and having laughs and getting high, with the actual studying as something you did as little of as possible. And nobody beat me or told me I was a disgrace to the school, because in a school like that, if you weren’t arrested for murder you were considered an honor student.

“In my senior year, Mrs. Tatum asked me if I wanted to go to college and I realized that I didn’t, that sitting at a desk or going to the library or writing bullshit was not what I wanted to do, and one day I was downtown with a bunch of my pals and I passed a recruiting office and I walked in, just curious, and there was this master sergeant there, a big black guy with rows of ribbons, and, what can I say? He saw me, he knew who I was, what I was supposed to do. I realize that he was only doing his job, that he wanted me to fill a quota, but the wanting part was real. And no one had wanted me before, I was a pain in the ass to everyone, and even if the army just wanted me to get killed, that was cool with me. I was only seventeen, so I had to get my father to sign off on the form, and Mrs. T. didn’t even bother him with it. She ran it through the autopen and there I was, in a place where I could either die or kill somebody, which were the only two options that interested me at the time.”

*   *   *

Marder recalled that last line very well, although the rest of it might not have all come through that first evening. There were a lot of such evenings. Looking back, sitting in this camper with the sun rising over the peaks, warming the day, Marder thought about how astonishingly young they’d been, himself scarcely more than eighteen, Skelly two or three years older. Skelly was the first contemporary Marder had found with whom he could discuss the ideas found in books, who thought as he did that the things in books could form your life. It had been intense, frightening almost, almost as memorable as the slender, skillful girls of Thailand.

*   *   *

They entered Mexico at Presidio, a little-used border crossing in the Chinati Mountains. Marder was driving at the time, and when he handed the passports to the Mexican border agent, he could not help noticing that Skelly’s was in someone else’s name. They drove south on the two-lane, through Ojinaga, a typical Mexican borderland town, bustling, American-looking, but clearly a different country. They filled the gas and water tank here and had a meal in a
taquería
near the gas station.

Skelly said, “Well, we’re in Mexico.”

“What was your first clue?”

“You know, guys in serapes, señoritas with flashing eyes. My point was, now we’re here, did you have any particular place in mind?”

“Yes, I’m going to stay in my house. It’s in Playa Diamante on the Pacific coast in Michoacán.”

“Where Chole was from.”

“Right. I’m going to bury her ashes in her family crypt.”

“And…?”

“And I hate these commercial flour tortillas. I’m really looking forward to getting some handmade corn tortillas.”

“You’re being mysterious again, Marder. It doesn’t suit you. I’m the mysterious guy. You’re the solid family guy, with the straight job and the loving friends and family. Have you called Statch recently?”

“Recently enough.”

“I doubt that. Your phone’s been off since Pascagoula. I haven’t heard a beep from it, no text, no mail, no calls.”

“I don’t see why the state of my cell phone concerns you.”

Skelly shrugged. “Suit yourself, chief. But if you’re not going to use it, I’d advise you to get rid of it. They can trace them when they’re turned on, and since you’re behaving like a man who doesn’t want to be traced, that would be a good move. I speak as a man who knows a little about hiding traces.”

Skelly finished his beer and walked out of the
taquería
. Marder took out his iPhone, looked at it for a while, and felt a pang of regret. The silly thing had grown on him, had become almost a part of his brain, another organ. Yes, his brain: it would continue to maintain a record of his family and friends, his musings, his tastes, his curiosities, long after he was gone, and when he thought this he all at once could not bear the sight of the once-dear glassy slab. When he followed Skelly out the door, he shrouded it in a paper napkin and slipped it into the trash.

*   *   *

They drove southwest on Highway 16 through the sere countryside of Chihuahua state, past the scarce straggling towns, over the lizard-backed violet hills, over the few grass-green watercourses. They didn’t speak much or, rather, spoke only in spates and then were silent for a while, in the manner of men who know each other very well but have very different lives. Skelly smoked, occasionally smoked marijuana, and Marder remarked that he must be the only man in history to import marijuana into the Mexican republic, and Skelly answered that a man couldn’t have too many distinctions.

Marder found that Mexico had not changed all that much since the last time he’d been down this very route, thirty-odd years before. The cities they passed through were somewhat more Americanized, more cars traveled the streets, the public spaces appeared in somewhat better repair, but this surface modernization seemed to him like a scrim over a deeper Mexico, which had not changed, which nothing could change, or ever had.

“Did you ever read
The Plumed Serpent
?” he asked Skelly as they drove west out of Durango.

“D. H. Lawrence? No, not that I recall. Does it have dirty parts?”

“No, but it’s about Mexico, about Michoacán—not the coast, where we’re going, but up north, around the lakes.”

“Any good?”

“Oh, it’s a little dated, with a lot of that racist horseshit they went in for back then. He thought men in western civilization had all lost their balls because of Christianity, and he thought Mexicans were in contact with the dark, fertile forces and that made up for them being dirty, lazy, and corrupt. Chole hated it. The book, I mean. All that stuff about yearning for Quetzalcoatl and the return of the dark and powerful gods. It’s about an Englishwoman who despises the men of her own culture and falls under the spell of Mexican machismo. Lots of purple language about true manhood and true womanhood and how materialism and reform have poisoned Mexico and how Christianity is the worst poison of all. Chole used to say it was typical gringo colonialism: it’s okay for the darker people to be brutalized and poor and stupid, because they still have something the white man has lost, animal power, plugged into the natural world, full of the true juice of life, open to the old gods of Mexico.”

“And it’s not true?”

“What do you think?”

“Makes sense to me and will make a lot more sense when I finish this fat joint. So, besides the ashes, is that why you’re going down there, to get in contact with the old gods and the juice of life?”

“No, and to talk about why that stuff is bullshit, I’d have to mention my religion, and then we’d have to have fight number three thousand four hundred and twenty-seven on the subject. But I recall you making similar comments back then, about the Hmong.”

“The Hmong are gone,” said Skelly. “All that’s over.”

He took a deep drag on his dope and closed his eyes. It was one of the many subjects Skelly did not care to discuss.

Outside, the sky was darkening and blushing toward the horizon, preparing for yet another gorgeous desert sunset. The pale tan of the land was going mauve in response, and the isolated yucca were entering their nightly transformation into the shadows of mythological creatures. Marder didn’t buy the whole Lawrence agenda, but he knew that something was indeed sick in his culture and he knew that Mexico, while itself sick almost unto death, had within its own sickness the possibility of a cure.

Or such was his hope, now near the unpredictable hour of his death. He realized that he had started to think of Mr. Thing as a Mexican, with a stony face and indifferent, merciless black eyes, a D. H. Lawrence figure perhaps, careless of death but possessed of a heedless, violent, passionate life. Mr. Thing had a wide Villista sombrero and crossed bandoliers and a big revolver stuck in his pants; he was drinking and brooding in his cantina, but soon he would rise and do what he was meant to do. Marder smiled inwardly at Mr. Thing, or Sr. Thing or Don Thingado, and he thought that Mr. Thing smiled back. They understood each other now.

He switched on the radio and fiddled with the search button until he found the kind of music he liked, the Mexican equivalent of an oldies station, playing straight
ranchera
, not the pestilent
cumbia
, the Mexican version of rock, or, worse, pathetic rap derivations.

He glanced at Skelly, who was stone-frozen, the dead joint poised in his hand, a silly smile on his face. Marder actually preferred Skelly when he was a little wasted on dope, when the sad, ruined boy emerged from the depths of the man and occupied his face, softening the grim lines cut by war and worse things than war.

They listened for a while; the sun sank down in flamingo hues; the road rose quickly and grew serpentine as they climbed into the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental.

“What’s he singing?” Skelly asked.

“I thought you knew Spanish—you can’t get the lyrics?”

“I can barely get the lyrics to songs in English. My Spanish is entirely concerned with making money, eating, and fucking.”

“Okay, this is a famous song by Cuco Sánchez. It’s called ‘The Bed of Stone.’ It goes, ‘Let my bed and headboard be made of stone. The woman who loves me must love me truly. I went to the courtroom and asked the judge if it’s a crime to love you. He sentenced me to death. The day they kill me, may it be with five bullets, and I will be very close to you, so as to die in your arms. Give me a serape for a casket, give me my crossed ammunition belts for a crucifix, shoot a thousand bullets into my tombstone for my final farewell.’ And the chorus—”