"Ben!" she said.
He smiled at her. "Honey, I've been writing this novel for a year. I have to talk like a novelist, don't I?"
"But you don't have to sound like the dean of men."
"Rocko seemed clean as far as I could tell. He hit the bottle sometimes, which is a good indication he was clean. And he is one mean drunk. Jerry, the one with the black beard, I'd label a semi-predator. He was on something, and getting closer to getting hooked on it every week. That's the way the predators turn into victims. The guitar player, Carl, was already way down the old drain. The blond girl, Bix, didn't look much like her picture any more. She wasn't too many steps behind Carl. The McLeen girl seemed to be on stimulants of some kind. She was burning herself up."
Mrs. Knighton shuddered. "That Carl used to sit over there under that tree and think he was playing the guitar. But there weren't any strings on it. And when the wind was from that direction, you could hear his long dirty fingernails rattling on the wood where the strings should have been."
"Cats tire of crippled mice that can't scamper any more," Ben said. "Sessions left, and then one day the girls were gone. But there was a fresh supply available in town and they used to bring them back. They'd stay three or four days sometimes and then they'd leave. Rocko and Jerry weren't a pair anybody'd want a permanent home with. Rocko was mostly bluff though. See those two tanks fastened there to the yoke of our house trailer? Gas tanks. Cooking gas. Twenty gallons each. That camper had been jacked off the truck and was on blocks. One day after Jerry had left, too, and Rocko was there alone, he drove back from town and found out somebody had pried open a little locked hatch in the back of the camper and stolen his bottled gas. He went storming around to all the sites, fussing about whether anybody saw the theft. He came over here, ugly, loud and mean. I was adjusting the fan belt on the Rover. I kept working and told him I didn't know a thing about it. I guess he thought I should stand at attention when spoken to. So he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up and spun me around, and I came right around with the lug wrench I was using, and rang it off the top of his skull."
"Ben doesn't like people grabbing hold of him," Mrs. Knighton explained with a little air of pride.
"He walked back on his heels with his hands clapped on top of his head. Then he shook himself like a wet dog, and I knew from his eyes he was going to make a try for me, so I walked into him while he was getting organized and popped him again the same way but harder. He went down onto one knee and I told him to stay off my site from then on. I could tell from his color it had made him sick to his stomach. He looked at me and knew I meant it. He went away and I went back to tightening the nuts under the hood. Then he pulled out about two weeks later because Tomas wouldn't rent to him for another month."
"How bad off was the Bowie girl?" Meyer asked him.
"Bad. Passive, dirty, confused. Disoriented." Laura Knighton said, "She seemed withdrawn and dull and listless. Stringy hair and a puffy face and bad color. I'd say she looked fifteen years older than that picture you've got. One of the retired couples hitched up and moved out because of her. She had... a habit they didn't take to."
"Don't get so fastidious, darling, nobody knows what you're trying to say. If that girl was walking slowly across that site over there and had an urge to pee, she'd pull up her skirt and squat wherever she was, unconscious as a dog in a cemetery."
"Then," said Laura, "there was that one day she had a blouse on and forgot her skirt or pants or whatever she was going to wear. And the little dark girl came running out and got her by the hand and tugged her back and got her inside and got her dressed the rest of the way. The poor lost thing is dead now, and I can't help saying it. I think it's for the best, just as I think the guitar player is better off dead, no matter what sorrow his folks may be feeling for him. They'd have no way of knowing how bad off he got toward the end."
I said, "It would be a help if you knew how we could locate any of the others, Rocko or Jerry or Miss McLeen."
"I wish we could help you," Ben said.
"I did see that truck and the camper that day, dear," she said.
"You maybe saw a blue truck with an aluminum camper body."
"That is exactly what I saw!"
He went into the trailer and brought out a large map of the State of Oaxaca, and also brought along his work journal to pin down the date. In one part of the historical novel he was finishing, a young Mixtec priest from Mitla flees all the way down the long slope of the Sierra Madre del Sur to the Pacific coast a hundred and fifty miles away. He had decided the imaginary priest would follow the dry bed of the Rio Miahuatlan, and so on Tuesday, August 5th, over three weeks ago, they had driven the Rover south along the road to Puerto Angel as far as Ocotlan, and then headed east on a road that was barely more than a dusty trace. Where it was blocked by a rock fall, they had gone ahead on foot. They had climbed a ledge and surveyed the country to the east with a pair of seven power binoculars. When he had gone wandering off, she had picked up a dust swirl far to the east, appearing and disappearing across rolling country. She had steadied the glasses and identified it as a blue truck with an aluminum truck body or camper on it.
"I was terribly curious about it because it was goIng so fast," she explained earnestly. "Mexicans will drive like maniacs on paved roads, but when they get onto dirt roads they positively creep, because if they break springs or anything in the holes or on the rocks it is so terribly expensive to replace them. And tourists in this country drive very carefully when they get off the paved roads. And anyway, what would there be over there to attract a tourist. I mean it was just so unusual I was interested and I wondered about it. I decided the driver was drunk or it was some terrible emergency."
He showed us on the map where the road had to be, but there was not even a dotted line on the map. It had been headed south, Mrs. Iznighton said. It had to be some road that turned south of 190 somewhere beyond Mitla, maybe as far as the village of Totolapan. Distances, he said, were very deceptive in the dry, high air. "But the chance of it being Rockland?" He shrugged.
We thanked them for the good coffee and the talk. He talked a little bit about his book. We wished him luck.
As we walked out, Tomas, the manager, was unlocking the store and the office. He was delighted to serve us by looking up the date he had copied from the vehicle papers on Rockland's truck. Yes indeed, the permit had been issued at Nogales on April 10th, and was thus good for yet another month and a half.
As we drove away Meyer made listless agreement with my observation that the Knightons seemed like nice people. He seemed dejected. I knew what was wrong with him. The picture they had given us of Bix Bowie had been vivid, ugly, and depressing. I could not get him to talk. He did not feel like going to Mitla to look for Jerry Nesta. He seemed to want to go back to the cottage at the Victoria, so I skirted the center of town, drove up there. He plumped himself into a porch chair, sighing. I put on swim pants and walked up through the noon sun and swam slow lengths of the big handsome pool, staying out of the way of the young'uns who came squealing down off the diving tower. I dried off in the sun on a towel spread on the fitted stones of the poolside paving. The high altitude sun had a deep stinging bite to it that went all the way down through all the old layers of Gulfstream tan.
I opened small gates and let the immediate sensory memories of Becky flow into my mind. By rights I should have felt even more surfeited and exhausted than before. But though this weariness was deep, it seemed more gentle, with a spice of male arrogance, of satisfaction, of knowledge of satisfaction given in full measure.
She had been simpler, softer, more feminine somehow. She had been involved more with herself and her own reactions and timings. Before, we had used me, and this time we had used her, first in partial- measures and at last in a final full measure which had been, she said, more than she had wanted to spend.
Later we had talked in a sleepy way of half sentences, and the sound of her shower had awakened me. I slept again, and wa
s awakened by the kiss that was good morning and good-by, sat up to see her standing tall and smiling nicely, dressed in orange linen, white leather hatbox in her hand.
"You were very wicked, darling. I am utter ruin. It will take a week to mend my puffy old face. But I feel buttery delicious. And you are very dear. Afterward, remember, we chuckled together at nothing. Just at feeling nice. That is rare and very nice."
"And now you turn the page, Becky?"
"Yes. But I shall turn the corner down. One of the special pages that I go back and look at sometimes. Take good care, lamb."
When she got to the door I said, "You are..."
She turned, waiting for the rest of it. "Yes?"
But how to tell her she had achieved her aim in life? And wouldn't she be aware of it anyway? "You are completely Becky."
"Hmm. Rather nice that. Some are totally barmy. And I am completely Becky. Really no other way to say it, is there? Keep well, luv." She waggled her fingers at me, slammed the door smartly, and soon thereafter rammed the Lotus up the slope with thunderous verve.
I walked back to the cottage. Meyer said, "Would it be possible for you to stop smirking?"
"You have a foul manner today, Meyer."
"Let's give up on the whole thing, Trav. What the hell good are we doing? We can't tell Harl any of this. She was on a gay adventure, full of plans and excitement and fun. Until the tragic accident. Let's rehearse it. I don't want to know any more about it. I knew that girl. She was a quiet, calm, decent kid. So she tripped and fell into this damned septic tank, and we don't have to follow her any further into it, do we?"
"Can I tell you one thing I want to know?"
"You get compulsive about these things."
"The sergeant found a boy who saw a man that afternoon back up in those mountains with Bix. Everything we've learned thus far tells us she was in no shape to drive down a six-lane highway across Kansas at high noon. But somebody let her bring a car down that mountain, or try to, at dusk. Is it any different than pushing her off a bridge? And with Harl, which would fester the longest, pure accident, self-destruction, or contrived murder? I think it's something we ought to know before we leave this place."
I watched him work it out. Finally he grunted and rubbed his eyes.
"So, I won't get off just yet. I'll ride to the next stop. But I don't think I'll like it any better than the whole ride up till now."
Eleven
AFTER A hotel lunch, a few miles out of the city on the Mitla road we came upon El Tule, and Meyer said that he wanted to be a tourist for a few minutes, and look at the biggest tree in the world.
It was not far from the highway, a hundred yards perhaps. It dwarfed the old church nearby. I was astonished to see how rich and vital and green it was. Seemed to be of the banyan family. Elephant-gray bark. Glossy dark leaves. There was a low iron fence all the way around it. The trunk was maybe a hundred and fifty feet in circumference. It made better than an acre of shade.
Meyer stood absolutely still, staring up into the cool green shadowy places beyond the giant lower limbs. When he turned smiling toward me, I knew that the tree had restored his nerves and composure.
"At the time of Christ," he said, "nobody was giving this tree a second look. It was just an ordinary little tree."
"It looks as if it has decided to stay around awhile."
"And I am going to come back here," he said, "and I am going to paint myself blue, and I am going to live up there in the top of that tree forever."
"Come on, Meyer. Ya vamonos."
The knowledge of the huge black beard on Jerome Nesta simplified the search.
"El americano con una barba negra y grande. Un escultor. "
Ah, yes. I have seen him. Yes, he goes often to the ruins. Also to the Museo de Arte Zapoteca, near the plaza and central market. No, I do not know where he lives.
We found an American student at the small museum. He was an archeology major from the University of New Mexico, an exchange student working on the continuing excavation and restoration program at the Mitla ruins. His name was Burt Koontz, and he was out in the rear courtyard, carefully washing and brushing the fragile shards of an old broken vase. He was burned to the rough red shade of roof tiles. He wore a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, and G.I. boots.
"I know Jerry. I mean as much as I guess you can get to know him. They let him come in and make sketches. He's been sketching some of the old stone heads. I haven't seen him around the last few days though. Maybe even a week. I couldn't say for sure."
He told us, as he worked, that he had been curious about Nesta. He was big and he moved carefully, as if he were convalescing from a serious illness. A Mexican girl always came with him. Young, but not pretty. One of those broad, stocky ones with the same kind of Indio face you see in the old carvings. She would sit with infinite patience under one of the trees and wait for him, then get up when he came out, and follow him, a few steps behind, usually carrying one of those baskets they take to the market.
He had the impression that Nesta was living over toward the south side of town, up one of those steep dirt streets to the left of the main road as you come in.
So Meyer and I trudged up and down a lot of steep little streets, and met with varying degrees of suspicion, indifference, and secret amusement. But with the help of pesos and persistence, we finally found the place, on Calle Alivera, halfway up the hill. There was a pink house that seemed to be crumbling away. There was a walled courtyard with a broken gate. In the courtyard were mounds of litter, a couple of dozen small noisy children, and some women squatting around a pump, several of them nursing the future members of the gang.
We had a twelve-year-old businessman who led us across to a room in a far corner with a door that opened onto the roofed gallery that extended along the side of the courtyard. It was a dark little room. There was a cement and plaster fireplace-stove built into one corner. There was a raised platform along the opposite wall, where pallets could be placed for sleeping. The little room was entirely empty. I could not get it through the boy's head that I wanted him to speak slowly and clearly. So I had to make him repeat everything over and over until I thought I had the general idea.
The wife of the Americano was Luz. They had lived here many weeks. Then they had gone away. Three days ago. Four. Maybe they were married, maybe not. It was the same. They were poor. For marriage the priests and the government charge too much money, so one waits. The Americano had little Spanish. Luz had been married to a baker and had three sons. The baker and the three sons had died of enormous pain in the belly. Luz had the pain but had not died. The Americano seemed often sick. The room was five pesos a week. Maybe the Americano had sold his... I could not understand what it was that Nesta was supposed to have sold. He said it so many times he was getting discouraged and angry before I caught on. It was a gigantic head made of wood, taller than a man. The senor worked on it each day. It was a very curious thing. It was very ugly.
As near as I could tell, the giant head had been carried away by the senor and another big Americano, with great difficulty. And the tools and the cooking pots and the clothing and the beds. They all went away in a heap-di-row. In a what? Heap-di-row. What? Heap-di-row! Again, please? Heap-dirow! Heap-di-row!
He was close to tears with frustration. So I brightened his face with pesos. Once again as we crossed the courtyard the children fell silent, stopped all movement, and stared at us. The women pulled the edges of serapes together to hide the sleepy suck of small mouths.
And then, twenty-four miles back to Oaxaca, feeling glazed and unreal. When you stack into one day the biggest oldest tree in the world, a gigantic ugly wooden head, a magical disappearance in a heap-di-row, and a page with the corner turned down in the Book of Becky, it is time to start searching the hedgerows for Alice and that well-known rabbit.
I had been counting on a therapeutic Sunday siesta, one which might have lasted right through to Monday breakfast. But when we got back to the hotel, there was a mes
sage to call Enelio Fuentes and a number where he could be reached. He was at a party at something that sounded less than interesting, called the Commercial Club. I tried to beg off but he insisted. It was atop a great big new farm equipment agency building set back off the Oaxaca Puebla highway a mile or so beyond the city limits. He had said to drive around in back and go up the stairs in back. The cars were varied and impressive, parked back there.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 11 - Dress Her in Indigo Page 13