John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 11 - Dress Her in Indigo

by Dress Her in Indigo(lit)

  I said, "She told me I'd made Brucey very nervous, but there isn't enough there, in her story, to make him nervous, so the best part is yet to come. So I am supposed to drop in, alone, for drinks and dinner tonight. And be spoon-fed another little fragment. By the time I know it all, she'll be able to bury me at the foot of her garden, so it will be less wearing to find out what color belt Brucey earned from Brucey himself. Anyway, I'm imposing. I'm taking up too much of your time."

  "No. There are some small things I must do here, then it is enough for this day. Let me say one thing. In the picture you showed me, that is one lovely little chicken. I have respect for what you do, Travis. A father should know more of how such a one came to die. He will never understand why. But to know a little-not too much---will help."

  Seven

  MOST OF the tables on the hotel porch were full when I got there. I spotted Meyer at the far end, sitting at a table with a portly man wearing a pale tan suit and a yellow sports shirt.

  While the waiter was hustling me a chair, Meyer introduced him as Wally McLeen from Youngstown, Ohio. Mr. McLeen's handshake was moist and unemphatic. His hazel eyes were magnified by the thick lenses of glasses with thick black frames. There were steel-wool tufts of hair on his sunburned skull.

  Meyer said that Wally had sold out his business and had been in Oaxaca since August first, looking for his daughter, Minda.

  "It's more than just looking for her, Mr. McGee. It's trying to understand more about what the young people are looking for. Way back in January she wrote me that she was going to go to Mexico with some friends. Just like that. Well, I wrote airmail special to the University of Miami asking them if she left any forwarding address or anything like that, and they wrote back that she'd stopped going to classes way back last year, before summer started. She came on home last summer for about ten days and then went back. She told me she was doing extra work over the summer. I sent my little girl money every month. Then I just didn't know where to send it, or where she was or anything.

  "You know, I got to thinking, Mr. McGee. I had four establishments, located real good in nice shopping centers, turning a nice profit. I worked hard all my life. Connie died three years ago. We had one other daughter, older than Minda, but she died in infancy. I got to wondering just what the hell I was working for. My little girl came home and didn't have much to say. She acted sour, sort of. It was like lying to me, her not telling me she'd already dropped out of college. Once I decided, it took me a long time to make the right deal on the stores. I figured this way. The only thing I've got in this world is my daughter, Minda. And if I can't communicate with her, then there's no point in anything. If I kept working we'd be in two different worlds. She couldn't or wouldn't move into mine, so what I have to do is move into hers. It's the only way I'll be able to talk to her when I find her."

  "You expect to find her soon, Mr. McLeen?"

  "Wally, please. Yes, I've got it pretty well pinned down that sooner or later she's coming back down here. I'm right in this hotel, right in the center of things. Room number twelve, on the second floor, looking out over the zocalo. When she gets back, I'll be here."

  "Where is she?"

  "Someplace in Mexico City, but there's six million people in that city... What do people call you?"

  "Travis. Trav "

  "Trav, you're one hell of a lot younger than I am, but you're older than these kids. I don't know what you think about them. But I've been talking to them now for a long time, and I've changed a lot of my ideas, like I was telling Meyer. It used to make me so damned irritated just to look at those young boys with all the long hair and beards and beads. I figured them for fanatics and dope addicts and degenerates. I can't stand that rock music and those songs about freedom. All right. Some of them are nuts, so far gone on pills and drugs, they're dirty, dumb, sick, and dangerous as wild animals. But most of them are damned good kids. They care about things. They've taken a good long look at our world and they don't like it. They don't like the corruption, and the way the power structure takes care of its own, and the way we're all being hammered down into being a bunch of numbers in a whole country full of computers. They believe that each individual person is getting so insignificant you can't really change anything by voting for a change. You get the same old crap. So what they want to do is get away from all the machinery that makes Vietnams and makes slums and discrimination and legalized theft and murder. How do you get away? Well, you have to go against the establishment in visible ways, so nobody will have any chance of ever thinking you are part of it. And so you can identify the other people who don't want any part of it either. You pick ways to dress and act and look that turn the establishment people off. You're against the idea of accumulating money and things, so you cut life down to the simplest kind of food and shelter you can scrounge. Because establishment morality is a lot of hypocrisy, like Lenny Bruce pointed out, you say and you write the words that shock the establishment, and you turn sex into something simple and natural and easy. The art and the music-everything has to be something the establishment can't stand. Because, little by little, or maybe in one big fire, you're going to tear all the false fronts down and start everything over again, in a lot simpler and more decent way, without a lot of hangups about money and race and sex and war. I didn't see where pot and pills and LSD fitted in for a while, but I think I do now. They want to turn on because they believe every person has the right to do anything to himself that doesn't harm others. Society makes laws about that because society doesn't want people to make themselves unusable to the power structure. If everybody turned on every day, what would happen to industry? They're saying this, Trav. They're saying, `I don't want any part of things the way they are, man. So don't tell me I'm ruining my life because I'm ruining just that part of me that you'd want to use up if you had a chance. The rest of me belongs to me to do what I want with. And what I want is everything you despise. So don't make a lot of value judgments about a scene you can't dig. You are all caught in the machinery, and you want everybody else to get caught in it, too. I make you uncomfortable, old man, because I get more out of every week of my life than you ever got out of a whole year of yours."

  "You know, they will talk to me about these things once they find out I'm not just trying to tell them the same old crap they've always heard. When they find out I want to learn what this is all about, then they'll talk about it. And I'll tell them how I feel about my life. What was so great about my life up till now? Mortgage payments, inventories, worries, sickness... and so damned many things! Color television and the new car every two years, and a lawn mower to ride on. Your friends die and you die, and what's the point of any of it? Who ever misses you? Yes sir, like I've been telling Meyer, when I see my Minda again, I'll be able to talk to her like I never could before. I talk too much about all this, and I guess I bore people, but I have the idea I want to spread the word about these kids. I want to be a sort of... a messenger." He looked at me with a goggle-eyed earnestness. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "Sure, Wally," I said, comfortingly. "We dig you."

  He smiled. "Jesus! When I think of how the guys back in Youngstown would take it, I get the idea nobody over twenty-five can understand what I'm trying to say."

  "Wally I understand you've been trying to locate Walter Rockland too."

  "To see if he knew anything about Minda. She was with that group for a while. The groups that travel together keep changing. People split and new ones join. I told Meyer that my Minda and the girl that was killed, Bix something, they left at the same time and took a cheap room at the Hotel Ruiz. That's over there, diagonally across the zocalo on Guerrero. They moved in sometime late in May. I saw the room. It's on the second floor in the back. There's a bath down the hall. There's four kids living in that room right now. But only one was there when Minda and Bix moved in. One from the present group, I mean. He thinks there were six or seven kids there in the room while Minda and Bix were there, and as he remembers it, they le
ft at the end of June or early July when Mrs. Vitrier invited them to stay in her guest house. Such a small room, and pretty beat up. You try to give your girl the best of everything. It hurts to think of her living like that. But what can you do? They just don't want the things you can give them. Not this new bunch of kids. They've turned their backs on the whole thing." He shook his head slowly. "Maybe it wouldn't be nice for you men to go back and tell Bix's father about things like that little room in the Hotel Ruiz. It could give him the same feeling I had, thinking of my daughter there at night, in some dirty sleeping bag in a dark corner, and some boy with a dirty beard laying her, and the others sleeping so close, or hearing it happening. Maybe he should think it is all like the posters and the travel ads.... A daughter is not like a son."

  Meyer tried him on the other names. Carl Sessions, musician. Jerry Nesta, sculptor.

  Wally McLeen said he might have met them and talked to them, but he didn't remember those names. He had asked everyone about Minda. He had shown them her picture. And he had added up the little crumbs of information. She had gone alone to Mexico City. She would be back one day. He would wait. If, instead, she showed up in Youngstown, a friend would cable him. He looked at his watch. Some of his new young friends were expecting him. He said he would look us up and let us know if he learned anything interesting, anything that might make that poor girl's father feel better.

  Enelio Fuentes appeared promptly at two, and he had Sergeant Carlos Martinez with him. Martinez, a squat, broad man with very dark skin and several gold teeth, was in civilian uniform. We all got into Enelio's car, a new Volkswagen squareback sedan, custom-painted a strange metallic purple. Enelio took the wheel. Meyer and the sergeant sat in the back. Siesta traffic was light, and Enelio wasted no time scooting north to Route 190, the Pan American Highway, where he turned right on the road toward Mitla. About a mile beyond the city limits he turned left on State of Oaxaca Route 175, and began streaking across the flats at astonishing speed toward the lift of the high brown mountains.

  "I didn't know these things had so much snap," I said, speaking loudly over the sound of wind and engine.

  "They don't. We put a Porsche engine in this one, race tuned, man. Heavy duty springs and shocks. Disc brakes. I can make Mexico City from Oaaiaca In five and a half hours. Hey, how do you like it? See? One eighty kilometros which is... a hundred and ten."

  When we hit the first curves and began climbing, I was able to relax. Roaring along the straights proves nothing. On the curves he proved the nice mating of man and machine. He found the right track around every curve. He was showing off and enjoying himself, and it was a pleasure to watch. But it certainly was one hell of a road. It was very narrow asphalt and the climb grew steeper and steeper, with switchbacks, cuts, and no banking on the turns, and not a sign of a guardpost. Ahead I would get glimpses of our road halfway up the next mountain, a little man-made ledge with a rock wall on one side and mountain air on the other. Sometimes I could see where we had been, and it was like an aerial view of a road.

  We met two buses hurtling down the mountains, and passed one old truck grinding its way up in low-low-low, radiator steaming. The sergeant told Enelio we were getting very near the place. Enelio slowed down and soon found a place to pull off the road, on the outside of a curve where the car was visible from both directions. We got out and chunked the doors shut. The silence was enormous, the air thin, chilly and very pure:

  We followed the sergeant about a hundred and fifty yards further up the road to the next curve. He sat on his heels and pointed at a black rubber skidmark on the asphalt. The mark ran off the asphalt and he pointed to some small bushes with broken branches. The branches dangled and the leaves had turned brown. It was easy to see where the car had come back onto the asphalt. We walked back down the slope and saw where she had gone across into the wrong lane and off the road. He pointed to the yellow paint marks on the rock wall and, a hundred feet further, to some oddly shaped skid marks on the road, like gigantic commas. He made a fast circular gesture with his hand, fingers down, like somebody stirring something in a bowl. Then he made a thrusting gesture with his hand toward the precipice indicating how it had shot out over the edge. Giving me a broad golden grin, he said, "Too fassss!"

  Yes indeed. It was vivid. She lost it on a downhill curve to the left, maybe because the curve was sharper than she had anticipated. She fought for control but went across at a long angle and hit the stone cliff, bounced off it into a spin, and shot backwards or forwards-it didn't matter which-over the edge at maybe a forty-five degree angle, and maybe a hundred feet short of the next curve, also left-hand, where the purple tiger was parked.

  The sergeant led me to the brink and pointed down. I could not see what he was pointing at. He spoke to Enelio. Enelio shaded his eyes and looked. "Hey, I see it. Travis, you see those three little bushes that grow out of the edge of shale down here, near that round rock? Okay, now about ten feet to the right of the three bushes, and a little way back up the slope..."

  I saw it. A few smears of yellow paint on sharp edges of rock, and a twinkling of broken glass among the rocks, and a gleaming piece of twisted chrome trim. So that's where it hit first, but the next bounce had to take it out of sight of where we were.

  The sergeant walked us down past the purple car, and pointed down at an angle toward the valley floor. From there it was easy to spot the car, or what had been a car. If you took one of those matchbox toy cars and put it on top of the charcoal and cooked steaks for a whole party, then retrieved the little car and stepped on it with your heel, you'd have a pretty good imitation of what was lying in the valley.

  "How did they ever get the body?"

  "They came down from the other side. There's our road over there. That's where the bus was when they saw the flame when she hit. You can see from here it's not as steep to get down, or as far."

  "How was identification made?"

  "By Madame Vitrier."

  "That's in the report, Enelio. I mean what condition was the body in?"

  He questioned the sergeant. Finally he turned back to me and swallowed in a sickly way and said, "She was half in and half out of the car, charred from the waist up, and chopped up pretty bad, man. There was a silver chain on her ankle Madame Vitrier identified, and a red shoe that was hers, fifty feet maybe from where they found the car and the body. Didn't find the other shoe."

  "Why was she way up in these mountains? Enelio, this damned road must climb four thousand feet in fifteen miles."

  He turned and pointed. Through a notch in the hills we could see the far valley and the smoke misted shimmer of the city. "Five thousand feet above the sea. Up here we are... maybe eight thousand and a half? Yes. Ten, twelve kilometers more and we are at the top. The puerto, like the gate or the pass. At Relon. Ten thousand, two hundred and seven. I remember from the sign. Little houses here and there. Mountain people. Very sweet. Very cruel. Ah, this is one evil road, Travis. Every year two, three, four vehicles go over. Most of the time everyone dead. Six years ago a bus with eighteen persons. Why would she come up here? Maybe for the same reasons when I was... seventeen? Yes. On an English motorcycle. Early, early in the morning, I went down this crazy road, man. I was yelling. It was a great excitement. It was speed and death and terror. It was a rhythm, Travis McGee. Lean into one curve, lean into the other. Fantastico! Like when it is the very best of sex, like the mountains are all part of the body of a great brooding woman. Way down, near the bottom, somehow the wind got under the goggles, blew them crooked, one eye covered, one eye in the wind, so the tears were running. I think there was a little stone I did not see. Zam! I am turning in the air. Smash into trees. Fall. Broke this wrist. See? It is never quite straight again. Blood running out of my hair. Hey I walked down the road, holding this broken wrist like so. I walked with a big grin and I was singing, and they came out of the huts and dtared at the crazy fellow. I had been to visit death, my friend, and had a taste of it and I was alive and I would live forever, an
d finally see death again and say, 'Remember me! You had me once, old woman, and you let me go!'" He grinned, picked up a stone, threw it over the edge. A truck came grinding and popping and grunting by us, and he waited until it went up around the corner Bix had missed and he could be heard again. "I think it was something like that for the girl. When you are young you drive up the mountains and you drive back down again."

  He turned and questioned the sergeant, listened and then interpreted. I had caught about half of it. "He went on up the road and asked the people about the yellow car. He found a boy who would talk about it. The boy was herding two burros back to the little farm. He'd been in the woods that Sunday, cutting wood and making two big loads for the burros. The yellow car was parked off the road in the late afternoon, about a kilometer this side of Guelatao. The pavement stops there. Beyond that it Is gravel and stone all the way to Papaloapan, and from there paved again until it ends on Route 140, the Gulf of Mexico, south of Veracruz. It can be driven in a Rover or a Jeep or a good truck. No matter. The boy said a big foreigner was leaning against the yellow car, and a young foreign woman was sitting on a stone. He said they spoke greetings and he replied. Because of what the boy said, the sergeant came back with a dozen men and they searched every inch of the slope to be certain the man had not been with her and been thrown clear. They looked in the tops of trees to see if he was wedged there. There was no sign of him."