I sat up and lit a Bisonte. I had a strong urge to bed April down and knew I was going to try. All work and no play, I told myself, makes Jack a dull boy. But maybe some work and some play would make—April. On that happily lecherous thought I got up and went across the cinder track again, this time to the canteen. I bought a couple of bottles of Tío Pepe and one of Fundador and brought them back to my tent. Well, that was the boy scout motto, wasn’t it? Be prepared. This time I slept.
At first there were only the crowds milling expectantly on Estafeta Street, the main drag of Pamplona. The narrow, cobbled street was brilliantly lit. A dark little man who looked like a gypsy came up to April and me and sold us a pair of red bandannas.
“It’s the symbol of the fiesta,” April said, and we tied the red bandannas around our necks. April was wearing a white shirt, white slacks and hemp sandals on her feet. “They ought to be dancing pretty soon,” she said. “That’s what everybody’s waiting for.” She scowled. “I wish I didn’t have this darn red hair. Then I could wear a red beret and really go native.”
I saw what she meant a moment later. Suddenly a group of about thirty men and boys burst into Estafeta Street. Wearing red berets, white shirts and slacks and red bandannas and sashes, they danced, sang and shoved their way through the milling crowds to the beat of drums and the wail of pipes. All of them were sweating. Most of them were drunk. Every now and then one would stop, raise a goatskin winebag, tilt his head back and squirt a stream of wine down his throat. The goatskin bags were tossed around like footballs. I caught one, held it extended at arm’s length, opened my mouth and squeezed. Wine squirted down my throat with an audible hiss, touching neither my lips nor mouth. A Spaniard nearby shouted a drunken ole! and I tossed him the goatskin. The dancers whirled by, those bringing up the rear carrying a large banner on two poles proclaiming the name of their club. In a few moments another club came dancing, drumming and piping through. Everybody was shouting. The street was a bedlam.
“It’s amazing,” April said. “Every night for seven nights they dance the jota like that, from dusk to dawn, and they never stop drinking. Then in the morning with their hangovers they run with the bulls, and in the afternoon they watch the bullfight. If they’re lucky they get maybe three hours’ sleep out of twenty-four. But don’t waste your time wondering where they get the energy. You’ll find out soon enough whether you have it or not, because everybody gets into the act, and I mean everybody.”
All of a sudden a two-liter winebag appeared in her hands. She laughed, tilted her head back, opened her mouth and let go with a squirt. After a while she bit the thin jetting stream of wine off and tossed the bag at random into the crowd.
She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Not supposed to do that. Either the wine squirts down your throat without touching your lips or you’ve got it wrong. I’m out of practice, I guess.”
“Are you hungry?”
She laughed again. “I’m five feet nine and hate to admit it but weigh a hundred and forty-seven pounds buck, or should I say doe, naked. I’m—”
“I’d like to see that,” I cut in quickly.
“—starving.” The crowd had pressed us close together. Her green eyes looked at me with amusement and appraisal. “What did you say?”
“Skip it,” I said, deciding to back off a little.
“I heard you. I’ll take it as an objective compliment from a guy who’s been around. Did you notice something? They have singing and dancing in the streets, and later on fireworks. They have good wine free for the asking or no asking necessary, they have lots of good food if you don’t mind standing ten-deep at a bodega bar to get your hands on it, they’ll have excitement and danger in the encierro every morning starting tomorrow and the bullfight every afternoon, but what’s the one thing they don’t have here at the festival of San Fermin?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What?”
“Take a look around. Almost the only girls you’ll see are estranjeras—foreigners. The singing and dancing clubs are strictly men only. Funny people, the Navarrese. The men are perfectly normal, but they spend every minute they can with their social clubs. They marry old and consider their women a kind of unfortunate necessity. It’s almost an oriental way of life. What I’m trying to say is the one thing they don’t have much time for is sex.”
“Maybe they figure we foreigners can fill the gap,” I said lightly.
April patted my shoulder. “That’s two passes you made at me in as many minutes. Down, boy. I’ll let you know if and when the feeling’s mutual.” She looked at me soberly for a moment “Because it’s got to be. Fair enough?”
“Okay,” I said.
Then she smiled. “I can just see Neil’s face if he gets here suspecting we filled that gap you were talking about and finds out he was right.”
I shook my head. “That would be one lousy reason for you to decide the feeling’s mutual, April.”
She said nothing for a few seconds. Then she said, “You know something? I think you’re a guy I could get to like.”
“Let’s go eat,” I said.
The place to go, if you could fight your way through the thirsty, hungry crowds, was a bodega called La Tortuga. Halfway down the worn stone steps the noise and the smells assailed you. There were country-cured hams hanging from the rafters and pendulous loops of garlic. Small glasses of wine drawn at the big casks behind the bar were being slapped on its zinc surface by half a dozen sweating waiters, along with plates of crayfish, clams, shrimps, beans, sausages and the dark red country ham. The bodega could comfortably have held fifty or sixty people. Three or four hundred must have been squeezed in there when I arrived with April, most of them shouting at the top of their voices and advancing on the zinc bar like a Greek phalanx on the march.
I caught a glimpse, across the room, of Carmen Prieto with her father. He was the only guy in the place wearing a jacket and tie. He looked morose and self-conscious, as. though wishing he were anywhere on the Iberian Peninsula except in a bodega in Pamplona on the eve of the fiesta of San Fermin. Carmen, holding a wine glass in one hand and a chicken leg in the other, giving flashing-eyed glances to the señoritos who were ogling her, looked like she was having a ball. I remembered my advice to her about how to kick the marijuana habit and hoped it was working. My eyes caught hers. She started to smile and then changed her mind and looked away abruptly.
“Somebody you know?” April asked. “Is it the dark girl over there?”
I said it was the dark girl over there.
“She’s lovely.” Her head turned. “Look, there’s Ray Moyers. Ray, over here! Ray!”
While Luz Robles’ brother was making his way toward us with a sullen-eyed señorita in tow, April told me, “The Navarrese say everybody comes to Pamplona for the running of the bulls and that the smartest ones, sooner or later, wind up at the Tortuga. I can believe it.”
Moyers joined us as we finally reached the first row standing at the bar. He planted a kiss on April’s cheek and shook hands with me. “This is Concha,” he said, and Concha smiled just enough to show a set of very bad teeth that spoiled her looks. “Concha doesn’t speak English. Hablas tu inglés?” he asked the Spanish girl. He was a little drunk.
“Inglés? No,” said Concha, smiling without showing her teeth this time.
“Where’s Neil?” Moyers asked April.
“Doesn’t get here till tomorrow.”
“I see,” Moyers said, looking at April, then at me, then at April again. “I see, the blind man said.” He laughed. Concha studied his face and decided it was time to laugh too.
One of the sweating barmen looked at me expectantly.
“What’s it going to be?” I asked April.
“Got a strong stomach and a brave heart?”
“Why not?” I said.
“Then let’s try the angulas pil-pil.”
I ordered the baby eels for four, and four glasses of vino bianco. The wine came first, and we polished it off in
a hurry. The barman refilled our glasses, and when we drained the second round quickly too, he filled a bottle at one of the casks and set it before us, grinning.
“Now there’s a guy after my own heart,” Moyers said. He drank a third glass and poured a fourth.
“He drinks like this all night,” Concha said in Spanish.
The angulas came, each portion in its own earthenware crock. There were hundreds of the tiny, translucent baby eels in each dish, all of them staring up popeyed as though trying to escape from the chili pepper and garlic sauce that was still bubbling from the heat of the oven. I dug a spoon into my crock and blew on it and tasted. Right away my lips began to sting.
“Now I know what a flame swallower goes through,” I said.
Moyers hardly touched his food. He seemed nervous and self-conscious about something. “Listen,” he said finally. “I don’t know how to say this, but I was hoping I’d find you here. Not with April, I mean. I didn’t even know you and April knew each other.”
“We met this morning in Zaragoza,” I said.
“Well, listen, what I want to say, I called the ranch this afternoon, my uncle’s place, and they told me.…” His voice trailed off and tears sprang to his eyes. He clamped a heavy paw on my shoulder and grabbed my hand and shook it hard, up and down, many times, not letting go. “I talked to Luz. I didn’t even know she was back until I heard her voice. Christ, I almost passed out when she got on the phone like that. She told me.…” His voice trailed off again and he kept shaking my hand. “You were there when Spade and my uncle got there, she said. It was you Who found her.
“I want to thank you, mister,” he said maudlinly, with the tears actually running down his cheeks. “Christ, I wish I could say this better. You know what Luz means to me. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, buddy, and I mean anything, just holler.” He pumped my hand a final time and released it. “All you got to do is holler.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling somewhat embarrassed by his effusiveness. “Did Luz say she’d be in Pamplona?”
“My uncle’s got an abono for the fights, takes one every year. They’ll all be here, Spade too, except for their wedding day.” He gulped. “That’s the day after tomorrow.”
“Aren’t they going off on a honeymoon after the wedding?”
“I got the impression they’d be at the fights all week.” His eyes were moist again, and he blew his nose. “The day after tomorrow,” he said musingly, shaking his head as though he didn’t quite believe it.
He gulped what was left in his wine glass and smiled a brittle smile at Concha. In rapid Spanish he told her; “It’s time for the fireworks, Conchita. How about one more glass of wine and then we go see what the local pirotécnico cooks up?” Concha nodded. Moyers asked me; “You and April want to come along?”
I shot a glance in April’s direction. She shook her head quickly. “We’ll catch them some other night,” I said, and with Concha at his side Moyers began to maneuver his way through the crowd toward the stairs.
“I wouldn’t have minded the fireworks,” April told me, “but I guess I’d rather talk. There’s one sensitive guy. Touch him with your thumb and you’ll leave a thumb-print,” she said. “Sometimes it gets embarrassing. You looked embarrassed.”
“Right. I was.”
“But it’s more than that. Did you get the impression—it’s only a notion and it’s hard to put into words, but—oh, I don’t know. Probably I’m wrong.”
“The notion that he’s behaving the way you’d expect Hollister to, or any guy who was carrying a torch, and his girl friend was about to marry somebody else?”
April nodded. “I’m glad you put it into words because that’s exactly what I mean even though it sounds haywire. After all, they’re brother and sister.” She made a face. “I guess I don’t want to talk about it anymore. All of a sudden it sounds—ugly. If we’re right I feel so sorry, so damn sorry for Ray. Maybe I’m just a simple corn-fed type from Iowa, but I can’t take dwelling on a subject like that.”
“They grow their simple corn-fed types right nice in Iowa, ma’am,” I said, and that was no line.
“Why don’t we get outside and get some air?” April said.
A crowd was clogging the entrance of the bogeda. All we could see coming out were their backs. They were watching something in the street. “He’ll kill him!” someone shouted. A woman screamed. It was Concha. She detached herself from the crowd and stumbled out into the narrow street, where two men were down on the cobblestones fighting. The one on top had the other by his hair and was banging his head repeatedly on the ground. I pushed through after Concha, who had reached the struggling figures.
“Cabrón!” she cried, and yanked at a white shirt collar. It ripped. A huge arm swatted at her and she went sprawling back into the crowd.
The man on top resumed his activity. “I kill all nortearnericana bastards they kill my boy,” he shouted drunkenly, and then I saw his face with the one squinty eye and the one glass eye where the eye patch had been and the terrible scar running down into his torn collar. It was El Macareno. He was kneeling over Ray Moyers and rhythmically bashing his head on the cobbles, not very hard yet but harder each time. I ran toward them, brushing April’s restraining hand away.
El Macareno saw me coming. He recognized me and started up with a roar. You do not reason with homicidal drunks, not unless you want to be their victim. I kicked the side of his head and he rolled all the way clear of Moyers. But his arm, snake-tongue-quick, darted out. He caught my ankle and yanked, and we both fell. He got up first. On his face, made lopsided by the huge scar, was the sort of smile that can give you nightmares.
He dived at me like a swimmer hitting the water in a racing dive. Drawing my knees up high I shoved the soles of my shoes against his middle and heaved. He went flipping over my head, landing hard on his back. He bounced right up, but he was dazed. His one good eye went out of focus looking for me. By then I was on my feet too. I planted them and delivered what ought to have been a haymaker. Maybe it hit a little too high on the side of El Macareno’s jaw, or maybe he was made of concrete. I felt a knuckle pop. My arm went numb to the elbow. El Macareno swayed but did not go down, and I knew I was in for it. I had never thrown a harder punch.
His left fist flew wildly past my ear. His right clubbed the side of my neck. It didn’t feel like much. It never does when you’re in the midst of a fight. But suddenly I was down on one knee, breathing hard through my mouth.
I heard a whistle blow. Someone shouted, “The Guardia,” and two guys in gray-green uniforms and patent-leather hats appeared out of the crowd. One of them had a revolver in his hand, but he made the mistake of coming too close to El Macareno. A long arm lashed out and the ex-bullfighter was holding the revolver. He threw it at the face of the second Guardia officer, who opened his eyes wide, spit out two teeth and fell without a sound. During the time it took that to happen El Macareno had calmly kicked the first officer in the groin. He dropped to both knees and then forward on his face. He lay there writhing. El Macareno lurched drunkenly in the direction of unfinished business, meaning me. He swung his right hand up from the top of his hemp sandals, missing. I jabbed at his face. The glass eye popped out and shattered on the cobbles. I jabbed at his face again and the scar tissue around his good eye puffed quickly and began to trickle blood. He got me in a bear hug and butted my jaw with his head twice, three times. He stepped back and swung his left fist to the side of my head. Again it didn’t feel like much, but I fell down.
He didn’t come after me. He stood there swaying, his good eye puffed almost shut, looking for me. Taking three little sideways steps he tripped over the guard whose face he’d smashed with the revolver. He groped on hands and knees and found the gun. He stood up, holding it in both hands. It looked very small in his huge hands, like a six-year-old’s cap pistol. He pointed it at no one in particular and said, quietly in the absolute silence that followed, “You shoot my boy, now I shoot you, you son of
a bitch where are you, eh?”
Twice he fixed, barely over the heads of the crowd. He laughed. I walked up to him on tired old legs and broke his nose with my left fist, and he still didn’t go down. Instead he sighed and squeezed the trigger again just as I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand, sending the bullet skyward. His good eye by then was completely shut. We struggled for possession of the gun. I stiffened my right hand and judo-chopped the side of his neck. It was like hitting a lamppost. He grunted and showed me his battered face in profile. My right fist struck it, splitting the scar across his lips so that blood spurted. He took that too without his knees buckling, but he let go of the gun.
He stood in front of me, arms dangling, breathing raggedly through his torn mouth. He was out on his feet, but I lacked the strength to make him realize it. With my left hand I tilted his chin up. He let me do that. He didn’t care any longer. I didn’t care. We swayed before each other.
I hit him behind the ear, once, not very hard, with the revolver, and his body seemed to telescope into itself as he sank to the cobblestones.
April reached me first, and then the Guardia officer who had been kicked in the groin. I leaned on April’s shoulder. The Guardia officer smiled and said something. I tried to smile and say something. I felt drunk. Everybody went away for a while and I was moving somewhere, floating. The next thing I knew we were back in the bodega and I was sitting on a wine cask and some body was squirting wine into my mouth from a goatskin and somebody else was slapping my back, much too hard, and there was guitar music and loud laughter, and April’s face looking very concerned.
I drank too much wine. My right fist was swollen. My jaw ached dully, and the side of my neck. I worried a couple of front teeth with my tongue. They felt loose.
“How’s Ray?” a voice asked. It was my voice.
“Who do you think’s been pumping you full of vino?” someone said. It was Moyers, seated at my side on the wine cask. I nodded sagely. It was good old Ray Moyers, seated at my side on the wine cask.
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