Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Let him wait,” Saint John said. “The longer he waits the more he’ll want you.”

  “You’re just saying that,” Rhoda said. But she was in a wonderful suggestive drunken state and so she began to picture herself as she had been at fifteen, sitting in her room for fifteen minutes while her date cooled his heels waiting for her to come down the stairs. Fifteen minutes, LeLe had always insisted. You have to make them wait at least fifteen minutes. Don’t ever be on time. Don’t ever be waiting for them.

  When they had eaten all they could eat of the exotic dangerous food, they wandered back out onto the street where the parade had ended and the carnival had begun. There were street vendors selling food and musicians playing, children everywhere, young men and women walking in groups and couples, drinking beer and sangria and calling out greetings. Dudley and Saint John and Rhoda and Mariana walked back to the hotel where they had left the station wagon and took possession of the rooms Mariana’s friends at the hotel had saved for them. There were two large adjoining rooms with big tiled bathrooms and a common sitting room. They carried their small amount of luggage up the stairs and went into the rooms and all fell down on one enormous walnut bed. Dudley was still making up limericks.

  “There was a young girl from Brownsville, who always wanted to swill wine, and when they said no, she said, ‘You know where to go,’ and now she is there waiting for them.”

  “That’s terrible,” Saint John said.

  “There was a young doctor from New Orleans, who always said, ‘I am going to warn you, you’ll get into trouble if you go out with me, for I won’t marry you but I’ll charm you.’”

  “Worse.”

  “There was a young girl from the womb,” Rhoda began. “Who barely got laid from there to the tomb. She said, ‘Well, goddamn, so that’s where I am, who did this to me. I must find a way to blame whom.’ Sinking spell,” she added. “I am having a sinking spell.” She rolled up on the bed, cuddling into Saint John’s shirt.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It will pass.”

  A short while later Rhoda made a recovery. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Where’s my cosmetic kit? I have to do something about my face.” She got up and found the small leather kit and carried it into the bathroom. She put the kit on the counter and examined herself in the dark mirror. I’ll have to start all over, she decided. She took out a jar of Charles of the Ritz face cleanser and began to apply it to her face. Then she decided it was going to get all over her hair so she dug around in the bag until she found a shower cap and she put that on. She went back into the room and opened the suitcase and took out a clean blouse and disappeared back into the bathroom. Dudley had gone downstairs to procure a bottle of wine and some glasses. Saint John and Mariana were propped up on the bed having a conversation about whitewing dove hunting and how to get the birds to come to Laredo instead of Brownsville.

  Now Rhoda decided to take a bath in the stone bathtub. She took off all her clothes and wrapped herself in a towel and took her clothes back out to the room and hung them over the back of a chair. “Don’t mess these up,” she said. “They’re all I have to wear.”

  “He won’t expect you to come,” Mariana said, in a voice so low only Saint John could hear her.

  “Don’t talk about it,” Saint John said. “Don’t say anything. So tell me, how much land has your uncle leased? Has he got it all, all along the irrigation ditches?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Para ustedes solamente. All of it. All the land.”

  Rhoda ran water in the tub and washed the tub out. Then she filled the tub with hot water and got in. What was I going to do? she was thinking. Oh, yes, I’m going over there and see the matador. LeLe will have a fit. She’ll die of jealousy. If Anna was alive what would Anna say? Anna would say, Rhoda, you are drunk. Rhoda giggled, the thought was very heavy, the thought would sink the hotel. That’s why you got cancer, Anna, she decided. From always thinking shit like that just when I was about to have a good time. Rhoda examined her legs as they floated in the water. They didn’t look very good anymore. There was something wrong with the quality of the flesh, with the color of the skin. I hate my fucking body, Rhoda decided. I just fucking hate growing old. There isn’t one single thing about it that I like. She got out of the tub and wrapped the towel around her and went out into the room.

  “We should give all our money to young people,” she said. “It is wasted on people as old as we are.”

  “What’s wrong now?” Saint John asked.

  “The skin on my legs looks like shit. I mean, the flesh. The flesh looks terrible. There’s something wrong with it. It’s mottled looking. I hate myself. I hate getting old, Saint John, it sucks to hell and back.”

  Dudley came in the door with a tray. A Mexican boy was behind him with the glasses. There was fruit and cheese and champagne and Dudley opened the champagne while the young boy tried not to notice that Rhoda was wearing a towel. She picked up her clothes from the chair and took them into the bathroom. Dudley brought her a glass of champagne and she drank it. Then she sat down at the bathroom stool and began to put on makeup.

  Saint John turned on the radio beside the bed. Wild music began to play. United States music. It was a broadcast from Tom and Jerry’s in Laredo. They were interviewing people who had come there to party all night. The music rose and fell and the people who were being interviewed told where they were from and what they had come to find in the border towns. It was funny. It was hilarious. The people were drunk and the broadcast was from Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican side so the interviewees were saying anything they wanted to say. It was amazing to hear people telling the truth on the radio. “I came down to get laid.” “I came down to get drunk and let it all hang out.” “I came down to find chicks.” “I came down to find some guys to party with.” “I came down to get away from it all.” “It’s cheap here.” “You can find a party, you can have a good time.” And so on.

  Rhoda was getting back into a wonderful mood. The champagne had erased time. Her face was starting to look mysterious and beautiful. The bathroom was beautiful and mysterious. There were baskets of beautiful colored towels. There was a tile wall of fine blue and white figured tiles, each one different, each one made by hand. Everything in the room had been made by hand. The wicker stool was high and comfortable. The lights were soft. Rhoda applied more rouge, added some blue eye shadow, then a small single line of silver. She was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world. She thought of the matador pacing around the lobby of the hotel waiting for her. Waiting and waiting, thinking she wasn’t going to come. Then she would appear. Fresh and lovely, his dream come true.

  Dudley came into the bathroom and filled her champagne glass. He kissed her on the cheek. “I’m about ready to go,” Rhoda said. “As soon as I finish my face.”

  “You’re sure you want to go there?”

  “I am sure. I have to have experiences, Dudley. I can’t live my whole life in a straitjacket.” She peered into the mirror. A deep line furrowed her brow. She was not quite as beautiful as she had been a moment before. “Don’t back out on taking me. You said you’d take me. You promised me.”

  “I’ll take you. We’re going to see the matador. El matador.” He was serious. He was playing the game. He wasn’t making fun of her. One thing about Dudley, Rhoda decided. He never makes fun of me. Their eyes met. Yes, they were going to take the world seriously. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth ruling in case they were ruling it.

  “What’s going on in there?” Saint John called out. “I thought we were going to the Inn of the Sun God to see a matador. You better hurry up before I go to sleep instead.”

  “Let’s go,” Dudley said. “Come on if we’re going.”

  It was eleven o’clock when they left the hotel and walked back to the square to look for the matador’s inn. The fiesta was in full swing. The cafés were full. Mariachi music was playing. Music was coming out of the doors of the cafés. Drunks were falling off of benches o
n the square. People had been drinking all day. The car with the throne perched on top was parked sideways on a curb.

  “Where is the Inn of the Sun?” Rhoda kept asking people.

  “Keep going,” someone said, “you will come to it.”

  “I’m just going over there,” Rhoda kept saying. “I may not stay.”

  It was a square brick hotel on the corner of a street two blocks off the square. There was a lamp over a desk in the lobby. The light was dim and no one was behind the desk. They went into the lobby and waited. “Anybody here?” Rhoda called out. Dudley and Saint John didn’t say a word. Mariana cuddled into Dudley’s arm. A sleepy-looking man came out a door and asked what they wanted.

  “I am looking for the torero, Guillarmo Perdigo,” Rhoda said. “Is he staying here?”

  “He was here,” the proprietor said. “With his family. But he is gone now. He has been gone for a while.”

  “Will he be back?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps in the morning. Perhaps not.”

  “Thank you,” Rhoda said, and turned and led the way out of the inn and back out onto the street. They walked back to the hotel and went up to their rooms and told each other good night. Saint John was sleeping on a pull-out bed in the sitting room. After a while Rhoda got up and went into the room and got into the bed with him. “I’m lonely as shit,” she said. “I want to be near you.”

  “Get in,” he said. “It’s okay. I love you. You’re our little girl. Are you okay?” He reached over and pulled the cover up over her shoulder. He patted her shoulder. He patted her tired worn-out head. Her used-to-be-red, now sunbleached, hair which was not standing up very well under the trip to Mexico.

  “No,” she said. “I drank too much and besides I wanted to go and meet that bullfighter. I wasn’t really going to sleep with him, Saint John, I just wanted to get to know him.”

  “But you might catch something, Rhoda. Kissing is worse than intercourse for some of the viruses. You should see what I see every day. It’s really depressing.”

  “I never think of you getting depressed.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “I really wanted to go over there and meet him.”

  “We went there.”

  “No, you got me drunk to keep me from going.”

  “I was afraid for you, Rhoda. I love you.” He patted her shoulder. He felt old suddenly, very old and far away from the world where he and Rhoda and Dudley had been alive and hot and terrible.

  “I miss my children,” Rhoda said. “I am lonesome for them.”

  “I know you are,” Saint John said, and kept on patting until Rhoda settled down and was still.

  “Thank God,” he said out loud and moved his hand and went to sleep beside her.

  In the morning they drove back to the hacienda. No one mentioned the matador or having gone to the inn to look for him. Rhoda folded her arms around herself and thought about the softness of his shoulders and his black eyes seeking out hers across the concrete concession stand. Win some, lose some, she was thinking. Outside the windows of the station wagon the hills were purple in the early light. I love this country, Rhoda decided. Any place that can produce a man like that is okay with me. Oh, God, I wish Anna were here. I could call up Anna and tell it to her and she would say, What a wonderful story. What a lovely encounter. Remember when she fell in love with that tennis player that summer in New Orleans and he fell in love with her? Some enchanted evening, only it was afternoon at the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club right after they moved to the new club and the next day she showed up at my house at about eight in the morning so excited and horny and borrowed my makeup because she had been up all night making love to him in his apartment on Philip Street. God, what a summer. What a hot exciting world. It’s true, we got to live in the best of times. Now they have to have rubbers and spermicides and be scared to death of catching things. We weren’t afraid of anything. Oh, God, Guillarmo’s back and arms are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. I would like to see him fight bulls from now till the dawn of time.

  “Rhoda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all right back there?” It was Dudley speaking. Saint John was asleep beside him in the front seat. Mariana was asleep beside Rhoda.

  “Let’s stop and get something to eat,” Rhoda said. “I didn’t have any breakfast.”

  “We’ll be at the hacienda soon. Can you wait till then? I don’t think there’s anywhere to stop between here and there, except maybe a native market.”

  “No, it’s all right. I forgot. I forgot where I am.”

  “I want to take you to a special place this afternoon. To meet some friends of mine.”

  “Sure.”

  “They’re Americans who live down here. The man’s from Austin and his wife is from Ireland. You’ll like them. They have a really interesting place. An animal farm. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Where do they get the bulls?”

  “For the fights?”

  “Yes.”

  “They raise them. It’s quite an art, to keep the bloodlines pure and keep from overbreeding them. I’ll take you sometime to one of the ranches where they are raised.”

  “I want to go back to Monterrey and see another bullfight.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “Okay, Dudley. Well, I’m going back to sleep.” She closed her eyes. Went into a fantasy of meeting Guillarmo on an island off the coast of Spain. Having babies with him. Raising bulls.

  They got back to the hacienda in Agualeguas at noon and had lunch and packed up and said their farewells to Mariana. Mariana was wearing a new gold bracelet with the teeth of a saber-toothed tiger embedded in the gold. Does he carry that stuff around with him in the glove compartment? Rhoda wondered. I mean, does he just have it ready in case he gets laid or does he go out at night and buy it? Maybe the fairies deliver it. God, what a man.

  “I wish you could stay another night,” Mariana said. “The rooms are free.”

  “We have to get back,” Rhoda said. “Saint John and I have to catch a plane tomorrow. Look, Mariana, could you get me a poster of that bullfight we saw yesterday? I mean if you see one or if you get a chance.” Rhoda held out a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep this in case you see one and buy it and send it to me.”

  Mariana refused the money. “I’ll send you one if I am able to find it.” The women’s eyes met. “Well, come back,” Mariana added. She took Rhoda’s hand. I love Mexico, Rhoda decided. I adore these people. I wish they’d all cross the border. This lovely tropic heat, the bougainvillea, Guillarmo’s shoulders, blood on the arena floor.

  “I’ll come back,” she said. “When the doves are here.” Then Dudley embraced Mariana and Saint John embraced her and Rhoda embraced her and they got into the station wagon and drove off.

  “One more thing we need to see,” Dudley said, as he turned onto the asphalt road. “One more thing to show Shorty.”

  “What is that?” Rhoda asked.

  “The cats,” Saint John said. “Dudley wants you to see the cats.”

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon when they left the hacienda. They turned onto an asphalt road leading northwest to Hidalgo and Candela. A few miles outside of Candela they left the main road and followed the course of a stream until they came to a fence and a gate. Dudley stopped the car and got out and spoke into a microphone attached to the gate. In a few minutes a boy came on a bicycle and opened the gate with a combination and held it while they drove in.

  A well-kept road made of crushed stone led uphill between acacia and scrub birch trees. Dudley drove the station wagon carefully up the road. The road grew steeper and he shifted into second gear. Rhoda was leaning up into the front seat now, trying not to ask questions. They had all slipped once again into their childhood roles. Dudley, the general and pathfinder. Saint John, the faithful quiet lieutenant. Rhoda, lucky to be there, lucky to get to go, interloper.

  “You may see a lion along here,” D
udley said. “Don’t be surprised if you do. They get loose. Dave Hilleen and I had to shoot one last month. Hated to have to do it.”

  “A lion,” Rhoda said. Very softly, very quietly. “He’s kidding, isn’t he, Saint John?”

  “No, he’s not,” Saint John said. “You’ll see.”

  The road wound down a small hill, then across a wooden bridge. The bridge covered a creek that crossed and recrossed the road.

  “There’s a springbok,” Saint John said. “Oh, there’s the herd.” Rhoda looked and there beneath the trees was a herd of twenty or thirty African springbok. Their tall sculpted horns rose like lilies into the low hanging limbs of the scrub brush. They quivered, then disappeared like a school of fish.

  “My God,” Rhoda said. “How lovely. How divine.”

  “There are kudu and sheep and deer,” Dudley said. “We’re hoping to get some rhino in the fall.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, he’s not,” Saint John put in.

  “They’ll love it here,” Dudley said. “It’s exactly like parts of central Africa. Only safer and there is hay. It’s conservation, Shorty. Someday, this may be the only place these creatures live. The African countries are destroying their herds. They’re being hunted out and their preserves raped. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

  “Do you hunt them?”

  “Very little. We sell them to zoos. Sometimes we trade them for cats.”

  “All right. I’ll bite. What cats?”

  “You’ll see,” Saint John said. “Wait till you see.”

  “Cats the circuses can’t train. Ones that go bad. The one Dave and I shot was an old lion that went bad. Ringling Brothers paid us to take him.”

  “Who does this belong to?” Rhoda asked. “Who pays for all of this?”

  “It pays for itself. Dave paid five thousand to shoot the lion. He was scared to death. I didn’t think he was going to pull the trigger when it charged. Jesus, I never saw a man get so white. Afterwards he said to me, I was scared to death, Dudley. How do you do that in the wild? Just like you did it here, I told him. It’s him or you. It took him two shots.” Dudley was talking to Saint John now. “One glanced off the ear and one went in an eye, ruined the head. I shot for the heart and lung when I saw his first shot miss. Old Dave. I never saw a man go so white.”