He had taken to saying that lately. Everything is a cube. I don’t know what he had in mind. When you get right down to it everything is not a cube. You can look around and see that. Hardly anything in nature is a cube. Some few crystals, I suppose. Art and Mike thought it might have to do with cubic increase, geometric progression, or with some mystical notion, of life raised to the third power. Had Doc really hit on something? Who knows. Maybe he just liked the ring of the words. I made a point of not asking questions.
We stopped in Palenque to check with the police, and they had a body to show us. I knew it was going to be Rudy. A fisherman had found it bobbing about in the Usumacinta. Some loggers had brought it in on a truck.
The officer in charge, who for some reason believed Rudy to be a painter of pictures, was sympathetic. He took a flashlight, and Refugio and I followed him through the back door to a toolshed. There in the wooden tray of a wheelbarrow lay the body, wrapped in a tarpaulin. It was all very sad, the officer said, a fine artist drowned young. Even at its lower stages the big river was treacherous. There would be no more beautiful pictures form the hand of this particular young artist. But there were other artists, hundreds of them, plenty of artists, and the identification would take only a moment and then we could have some coffee in his office and deal with the various forms and fees. He was looking forward to a good long session with his rubber stamps and his stapler.
“The young man was your brother?”
“No, just a friend,” I said.
“He was an unfortunate leproso? Your brother?”
“What? A leper? No.”
He held the beam of his flashlight on the wheelbarrow. “There,” he said, standing well back. He wasn’t going to touch the thing. No one is more fastidious than a fastidious Mexican in uniform. It was the Chicanos in the Marine Corps who had their shirts tailored for a skin-tight fit, like those of state troopers, and who had gleaming horseshoe taps nailed to the heels of their cordovan shoes.
Refugio crossed himself, and the two of us set about unrolling the tarp. The smell wasn’t so bad. The corpse hadn’t gone off much because it was all leather, mummified. The eyes were two dull yellow marbles, bulging out from the face like the eyes of a Chihuahua dog. It wasn’t Rudy, it was King Tut, a tiny old man, long dead, with bald head and bared teeth. It was a freak-show exhibit.
Refugio said, “This is what you call a young man? Drowned three or four days ago? This is some fine young artist you show us!” He grabbed a toe and held up one of the feet for the officer to see. It was a pitiful brown lump, badly calloused, as broad as it was long. “This is what you call the foot of a gringo? You are wasting the time of important men!”
The officer turned to me. “The man is not your brother?”
“No.”
“You don’t identify the person? Look carefully.”
“I don’t know him, no.”
“They told me it was the missing artist.”
“Anyone can make a mistake. We are grateful for your help.”
“It was nothing, sir. Our work goes on.”
The others were waiting for us out front by the truck, under a dim street light. Everyone was tired. None of these people knew Rudy Kurle. My news, that the body was not his but that of an ancient little man, caused no stir. Refugio told them it was the body of a chaneque. There was a dead chaneque back there in that shed. Here was their chance to see one of those evil dwarfs in the flesh. Did anyone want to see the chaneque? They seemed not to understand what he was saying. Doc was drooping. I had gone without sleep for two days. I suggested that we stop here at Palenque for the night.
At that, Winkel suddenly became assertive. “No, no, I have no money to waste on a hotel. Let us go on to the pipe place.”
Doc took a handful of paper money from his pocket. Those knots in his pockets were wads of money. “Don’t worry, I’m paying. We’ll put up at the Motel Barrios.”
But Winkel wouldn’t hear of it. “No, no, please, this was not our agreement.”
So we drove on to Refugio’s place.
THERE IS a lot of nonpoverty in Mexico that you don’t hear about. Everybody is not destitute or filthy rich. Refugio, for example, had just bought a new Dodge truck, bright red, with V-8 engine, a fine truck. He paid cash for it. But he wouldn’t use it for hard service until the new was off. He was waiting for a molded plastic bedliner to come in from Veracruz.
Knowing this, I should have seen the sandbag job that was coming my way. The pair of us were up at daybreak, and Sula was serving us breakfast in the little office, where I had slept. “The Doctor is still sleeping,” she said. They had put him up in their own air-conditioned bedroom.
Refugio said, “Well, don’t disturb him. Let the man have his rest. Where are those beautiful roses he brought you?”
“I have them in a bowl of water.”
“Bring them in here so we can smell them and enjoy them with our coffee. You see how this great man is always thinking of other people? You have a saint sleeping in your feather bed (colchón de plumo). Jaime and I are coarse men of business (hombres groseros) but look here, how the Doctor has time to think of the pretty roses.”
They weren’t roses. They had no smell that I could smell, whatever they were. I think they were dahlias, national flower of Mexico, shaggy and orange, nothing at all like roses. Refugio knew his trees, he could tell you the names of all the bigger trees in the forest, the local names, but any flower at all was a rosa to him.
He sprang his proposal on me as we ate, calling my attention to two important points. His truck was new and mine was old. Mine was sagging. One more crumpled fender, one more busted headlight, one more rock flying through my radiator could hardly matter. The only thing to do was to use my truck for the pipe delivery. He could hook up his flatbed trailer to it, and Valentín could haul the pipe away while we went on to the selva to look for the young gringo. We would take the Volkswagen into the woods. This was an old salvaged delivery van that still carried the yellow markings of Sabritas potato chips.
“No, you can forget that,” I said. “Valentín is not driving my truck.”
“Then I myself will have to take the pipe to the evangelistas.”
“Manolo can do it.”
“Sula would never let Manolo drive to Yucatán alone.”
“Valentín can go with him. Or better, Valentín can go alone in your truck.”
“I don’t want my trailer ball scratched up just yet.”
“But it’s all right to scratch mine up.”
“Yours is rusty and ugly. Mine is still silver.”
“Then we can switch balls. Or put a rag over yours.”
“I don’t want my bed exposed to the sun just yet. The sun fades red paint.”
“I’ve been hearing about this bedliner for months. When is it going to get here?”
“God alone knows. You say all these hard things. Why can’t you let me eat in peace?”
Valentín was Refugio’s half brother or stepbrother. I never got it straight. I never got the relatives completely straight in my head, all these Bautistas and Peñas and Osorios and Zamúdios. Valentín was a jackleg mechanic and carpenter, fairly useful to have around, when he wasn’t drunk. I didn’t trust him. He was sly, with the startled eyes of a chicken. Sula didn’t care for him either. She said Valentín never got his full growth because he was nursed as a baby on Coca-Cola instead of milk. She thought some of those gaseosa bubbles had floated up to his brain.
Winkel, of course, didn’t want to impose on anybody. He had slept in the back of my truck, and then he said he wasn’t hungry and Refugio had to force some breakfast on him. Winkel was up early, too, working alone, loading the pipe on the flatbed trailer. There was more than he had expected. He was delighted with his daring purchase. Small animals who had nested in the pipes scurried for new cover as they were disturbed, snakes and rats and scorpions and rabbits and lizards. Refugio showed Winkel how easy it was to cut the plastic pipe with a hacksaw. Saws wit
h coarser teeth would splinter the ends. These were special hacksaw blades, he said, and he recommended that Winkel buy a dozen of them to insure clean cuts and no wastage. That was his advice. Winkel said he had his own arco blades at home.
I was walking the grounds. Gail joined me, with a mug of coffee. Dogs trailed at our heels, though not Ramos, son of Chino. Ramos didn’t mix much with the yard dogs. Gail said she had slept comfortably enough in a hammock, in a small room with a great heap of red fire extinguishers bearing yellow tags that were long expired. She said, “What is that I smell? Surely they don’t have an oil refinery around here.”
“No, that’s only the stuff in those drums out there.”
“What is it?”
“Various choking and blistering agents.”
“What are we waiting for now? When are we going on to Ektún?”
“First they have to stack all that white pipe on the trailer and tie it down. It won’t take long after Refugio gets his people stirring.”
She asked me about Doc, or Dicky, as she called him, and I told her he was a great Mayanist and a rich man who had lived in Mérida for many years.
“Great Mayanist? I’ve never heard of him.”
I let it go but I thought she should have heard of him. If she had known her business, she would have heard of Doc.
“This coffee has cinnamon in it.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of business is Mr. Bautista in?”
“Salvataje. We’re both in the salvataje business. Salvamento.”
“Salvation?”
“Well, salvage.”
“I heard him calling this place his ranchita. It doesn’t look much like a ranch.”
“He just says that. Anybody who lives out of town has a ranchita. It’s a junkyard.”
It was an industrial age boneyard in the jungle. It was a little kingdom. Refugio’s father, the old chiclero, he who had gathered tree sap so we could have Juicy Fruit gum, had squatted here long ago, before there was a road. Refugio had made improvements. He kept pushing his whitewashed boundary stones outward and now claimed to own twenty-two hectares. Certainly he possessed the land. He held dominion over these fifty-odd acres, and anyone disputing his claim could expect to be threatened and called a monkey-head at the very least.
Once he had suggested that we clear the tract across the road and plant onions. Someone had told him that there was a fortune to be made in sweet red onions. But neither of us was a farmer, and besides, the soil was poor, and it seemed to me there were already enough onions in Mexico to go around, and then some, sweet or not. You pull up onions one by one and then sell them by the ton. That didn’t appeal to me. We had other schemes. Now and again we talked about our kennel scheme. We would breed dogs here and train them to sniff out dope and explosives at airports. The government would pay us well. The way to get rich was on government contracts. Or we would breed war dogs. Not to work singly, leashed, on sentry duty, but in snarling packs. We would form them into platoons and train them to assault fortified positions at night. Once loosed and engaged in the actual fighting, they would be led by their own officers, such as Ramos.
The loading went forward. Refugio brought out his box of Mayan pieces to show Gail. He held them up and quoted prices to her. She was amazed that such things should be in private hands. Why not buy three or four of these little idolos, he asked her, all of a similar style? She could smudge them up, claim she had found them here or there, then return to her comfortable home and write books about them. Why not? Other arqueos did this. He knew from experience. No one would know. The pieces were genuine. They were a good investment and would put her just that much ahead of her hated rivals.
She laughed. “Yes, but I am only a poor student, you see. I can’t afford such things.”
“Ah, pobrecita. Well then, I make you a gift.”
He stuffed a small ceramic bird in her shirt pocket. She protested, he insisted, and they went back and forth until she gave in. Now then, he said, shaking his finger, I will speak to you as a father. She had her Indian toy and could return home. She had no business messing around out here in the dirt far from her comfortable home. She should be with her family at Christmas time. This filthy arqueo work was not suitable for young ladies.
Gail went red in the face. “I am not ready to go home yet, Señor Bautista.”
At last we came to an agreement about the delivery. Manolo, sitting on a pillow, was to drive my truck and tow the load of pipe to the Mennonite farm. Valentín would go along but was not at any time to be allowed behind the wheel.
“Do you understand that, Manolo?”
“Papa knows I can do this job. How many times have I driven him to Villahermosa?”
He was swaggering and dancing about so that I had to grab his shoulder to get his attention. He had the same quick moves as his father. With a swipe of his hand he could catch a fly in midair.
“I know you can do the job, but this time you’re answering to me, not your Papa. This is my truck. Do you remember when those loggers in Ocosingo jumped Flaco Peralta and me and your Papa? Do you remember what Flaco did to that Tzeltzal who called himself the Captain? Well, that’s just what I’ll do to you if you wreck my truck.”
Manolo laughed and dropped to a crouch and began weaving about and making passes with an imaginary knife.
“No, I’m not joking now. Listen to me. I want you to show proper respect for your Uncle Valentín, but you’re the one in charge. If he starts drinking, just leave him behind. Don’t fool with him for one minute. Keep the tanks topped up so you won’t get a lot of bad gas all at once. Don’t pop the clutch and don’t ride the brakes, use the gears. Keep it under sixty millas. Watch the heat needle. If it gets much past the halfway mark, pull over and let the engine cool down. But don’t try to back up on the shoulder of the road or you’ll jackknife the trailer. You’ll need to add a liter of oil when you get to the Escárcega junction. Thirty-weight Ebano is good enough. Check it again in Mérida and once more on the way back. Keep your mind on your business, and remember, that trailer has no brakes and no lights. Now what did I say? Tell me what you’re going to do.”
You couldn’t trust a sixteen-year-old kid in the States these days to look after a goldfish, and not many kids here, but I had confidence in Manolo. I wasn’t really worried, for all my lecturing. He had a better feel for machinery and the flow of the road than I did, a finer touch. Still, it’s just as well to have things understood.
Sula wept. Her only baby was going off into the world. “But so many leagues to Mérida!” she wailed. Valentín, in a clean white shirt, was glad of the trip, happy to be going anywhere. He appeared to take no offense at the slight—having a boy put over him. Maybe I had misjudged him. He held the truck door open for Winkel, poor man, who would have to ride in the middle again. No matter, he was taking home enough irrigation pipe to build a new Zion in the thorny scrubland of Yucatán.
At the last minute Doc came up, cap in hand, and pressed some money on him. “For your mission work, sir. Remember me in your prayers. Richard Flandin. I have always tried to do right by my fellow man. And I have gone beyond personal ambition (aspiración). All that is behind me now (atrás de mé).”
Winkel didn’t understand. He couldn’t follow Doc’s peculiar Spanish. He held the money away from him as though a subpoena had been slapped into his hand. The Mennonites were always the first ones on the scene after a hurricane or earthquake or other disaster. They were much admired for their practical works of charity but they carried on no mission work as such around here, that I knew of. “An offering for your church,” I explained to him. “Keep it.”
Doc, backing away, said, “That man is much closer to God than we are.”
Manolo popped the clutch and they were off with a lurch. Refugio, with Ramos at his side, was very much the patrón this morning. He stood apart from the rest of us, his head thrown back and his fists jammed down into the pockets of his long rubberized apron. He hadn’t lifted
a finger to help, as it wouldn’t do to be seen performing menial labor before his people. He was proud of his son and pleased with the big sale. That PVC pipe had been a slow-moving line of goods. Saplings had sprung up around the pile. We had both known the despair of trying to sell things that nobody wanted.
ON TO Ektún in the potato chip van. The plan was that Refugio and I would drop Gail off there and then make our way down to Tumbalá along the rivers. We would catch a boat ride on the Usumacinta, as Rudy must have done. The van stood high off the ground and did well enough in the water. The hydraulic brake system was out, and Refugio had to work the hand brake and hold the wheel and shift gears, all three things, with his two hands.
Doc was glowing. “What shall we find today?” he said. He seemed to think we were off on a dig. I had tried to persuade him to stay behind at the salvage yard. He could do Refugio a real service there, sorting out his relics and appraising them, but no, he was determined to make one last venture into the forest. “My last entrada,” as he put it. He sat up front beside Refugio, holding Ramos between his knees and calling him Chino.
Dry season or not, a shower of rain was falling when we reached the ruins. The place was deserted. Refugio fired two shots in the air. We went from tent to tent and found no one. The motorcycle was gone. Ramos barked at a wooden box in the mess tent. Refugio kicked it over and a big diamond-back palanca came tumbling out, or what they called a nauyaca around here. In any case, a fer-de-lance, who righted himself in no time. He stood his ground, with his head rolling about and his jaws flung open about 160 degrees. Don’t tread on me! Ramos, still yapping, shied back, as did we all, except for Refugio. With one hand he tossed a rag over the snake’s head and with the other he grabbed the tail and popped him like a whip, cracking his neck. Snakes take a good deal of killing as a rule, it’s a long business, but this one was stone dead, and all at once.
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