Louise had me stop at the In-Between Club on the way back. She wanted to check up on Shep and see what he was doing with Emmett’s money, which wasn’t a bad idea. The place was darker in the afternoon than it was at night. Cribbs was standing alone at the near end of the bar, away from the strangers. Louise warned him that this day drinking would kill him, just as it had killed Emmett, and not only that but he never gave blood to the Red Cross either. “You old barflies never do anything for anybody and you never do anything to promote international understanding.” Cribbs told her that a bottle of beer or two in the afternoon wouldn’t hurt a baby. He told Cosme to bring me one and he said let us all drink to better days. Louise went to confer with Shep in the office.
Back in the shadows the strangers were talking about UFO’s. Some new blood in town. It didn’t take long for arriving gringos to nose out this place. One of the voices, a high-pitched drone, overrode the others and made me think of Wade Watson, but I knew he was gone. This fellow had the floor. He spoke with the insistence of an expert and he kept interrupting the others, who made themselves out to be sensible, judicious men, open-minded but no fools. They deferred to him. It wasn’t enough, their good will. They were out of their depth, and the scornful expert wanted to show up their ignorance. He had them reeling with his command of detail. They could have used some tips from Art and Mike, who had refined the position of having it both ways right down to a fare-thee-well. Art and Mike conceded the existence of flying saucers as a general proposition but refused to believe in any particular sighting or landing.
The strangers began to drift away. A small fire erupted on the bar back there. Cosme beat it out with a wet rag. The droning fellow came edging up toward me.
“Sir? Sir? Excuse me? Sir? May I relate a personal experience?”
I saw him in the light now. It was Wade, dirty and smelly and rumpled. The police had let him go, poor Wade, into Louise’s care, on the condition that she get him out of the country. She thought she had done so, having taken him to the airport and put him on his honor, if not actually on a plane. He missed the flight and had been hanging about town ever since.
He recognized me. “Oh yes, you. Burns, isn’t it? The nosey one with all the questions. Are you very busy right now? May I relate an interesting personal experience?”
I couldn’t get anything out of him before. Now there was no shutting him up. Cribbs knocked back the rest of his beer and stumbled away in haste, but it seems to me you must let a haunted man make his report.
“All right. Sure.”
“Thank you. First, who am I? I am a payroll programmer for the state of Missouri and I wear nice shirts and nice suits when I’m at home. I live in a garage apartment, which suits me, though I could afford something much, much nicer. It’s comfortable enough and very private. I sleep upstairs, alone, needless to say, and my bedroom window faces southwest. At a little after 11 o’clock on the night of August third I was awakened by an expiring rush of air. Then there came a pulsing light and a low-frequency hum, or a sort of throbbing. There really is no name for this disturbance I heard, and felt more than heard. Now it is important for you to understand, Mr. Burns, that I am not a repeater. Get that through your head. This was my first and only contact. I am a professional man with a peptic ulcer and chronic scalp problems. Otherwise I enjoy normal good health. In my spare time I write stories of a speculative nature, if you want to hold that against me. People like you would call them fantasy or science fiction. Other hobbies? Well, I enjoy certain light operas. I play polka tunes on the concertina for my own amusement and for the entertainment of my friends. And yes, I am a student of the great Maya civilization, but that is not invariably a sign of madness. In my room the light rose and fell, in phase with the hum. There was sharp pressure on my chest. . . .”
He made a smooth story of it. Two shining androids one meter tall came through his window and stood at the foot of his bed. They wore white coveralls. They spoke a guttural, synthesized English and put it across to him that he must go soon to the ancient home of “the old earth mutants,” which was Mayaland in Mexico, there to await—“something incommunicable.” Always that. I was waiting for it, the point at which things go blurred. Wade said he had written a long account of his bedroom contact and that it was published in a UFO newsletter called Gamma Bulletin, out of Tempe, Arizona. The October edition was given over entirely to his story, an unprecedented event. No other contributor had ever been so honored.
Then, in the November issue, there came further instructions for him, via the mail this time, in the form of a letter to the editor from the city of Mérida, in Mexico. It was dated “End of the Fifth Creation,” and in this letter Wade was told that he must come to the eastern beach of a small seaside town called Progreso, in Yucatán. He must wait there “near the turn of the year” and be patient. After a brief period of observation he would be met there and led to an ancient city in the heart of the Petén forest. This was the City of Dawn. Certain things would be revealed to him there. The letter was signed “El Mago.” Underneath it, Wade said, the editor of Gamma Bulletin had appended a note stating that while he personally could not vouch for the authenticity of this El Mago, he could say that the Petén jungle was known with certainty to be an ancient mutation center. Furthermore, it was reported to be active again, in current and quite heavy use as an entry window.
So Wade came to Mérida, but then he began to lose heart and stall around. He couldn’t be sure of the appointed day. He was afraid it had passed with the coming of the new year. The day had come and gone, and he had hesitated out of fear. He couldn’t bring himself to leave town. He felt safe enough in Mérida but the countryside of Mexico was an unknown place of terror to him. He feared bandits, strange hot food, stinging plants, unsanitary pillows, transport breakdown. He was afraid to get on a bus or take a taxicab to Progreso, twenty miles away on a perfectly good paved highway. Now he was broke and had lost his suitcase and his credit card.
As it happened, I said, some friends and I had visited this same City of Dawn just a few weeks back.
“What? You? Not the real city in the jungle?”
“The Likín ruin, yes.”
“But you weren’t there at the first of the year.”
“We were, yes.”
“I don’t understand. Why would you be there?”
“No special reason. We were just going down the river at the time.”
“This is amazing. You were actually on ground zero. What happened?”
“Nothing much. Some hippies were there.”
“El Mago? You saw him?”
“No, I don’t believe he showed.”
“But I wonder if you would even recognize him. Was there a faint smell of ammonia in the air?”
“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.
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