“What are you searching for?”
As if the question had made Mike more dangerous, “Stand against the truck, please,” the sergeant said.
Rafo was flexing his injured leg. “Does it hurt bad?” Mike asked.
The boy didn’t answer him but turned to the sergeant and asked whether it would be all right if he sat down.
It was the first time the sergeant had heard him speak—and the boy, unlike the man, was speaking Spanish. He hadn’t expected it. Turning to Rafo in puzzlement, he directed the beam of the flashlight full focus on the boy’s face. Rafo winced at the light and turned his face away. The sergeant seemed perplexed. He started to ask a question, thought better of it, turned the beam down. He didn’t at all address himself to Rafo’s question, so the boy let himself carefully onto the ground and sat there.
The driver went back toward the cab. Opening the right front door, he yanked at the upholstered seat and, wrenching it out, let it drop at his feet. He pulled out his pocketknife and began slashing at the upholstery.
Mike heard the sound. He turned. “Hey—what the hell are you doing?” He started to move to the front. The sergeant’s gun went up and as the older officer said alto, Mike demanded angrily, “What’s he doing?”
The sergeant talked only to Rafo. Out of the rapid Spanish all Mike could hear intelligibly, and the word kept repeating, was “narcóticos.”
“Narcotics?” Mike said hotly. “What’s he saying about narcotics?”
Interrupting, the driver appeared, shrugged nada and simply stood there, hesitant.
“Where do you carry them?” the sergeant demanded.
“What? Narcotics? We don’t have any narcotics.”
Half to Mike, half to Rafo: “Mescalina—heroina!”
“Nothing, for Christ sake!” Mike retorted. “Did you find anything?”
The two officers exchanged a glance. It wasn’t clear what they were trying to convey to one another, but there was frustration in it. The sergeant tried once more with the Yankee.
“This boy is with you all day?”
“Yes—all day.”
“You did not have another man in the truck?”
“No—nobody.”
Again a glance at the driver. The latter simply whispered, “Veracruz.” The sergeant nodded and turned to Mike. “When did you leave Veracruz?”
“I’ve never been to Veracruz in my life.”
The sergeant half turned to the driver and mumbled something not meant for Mike and Rafo to hear. The driver nodded and whispered a few words into the ear of the older man. The latter shrugged. There was a hesitant moment, concealed—nothing apparent in it except indecision. Then the sergeant looked a little sheepish. He smiled, trying to ingratiate himself.
“Maybe we make a little mistake,” he said.
Mike pointed to the ripped upholstery. “That’s a helluva little mistake.”
As the driver hurried to put the seat back inside the cab of the truck, the embarrassed sergeant continued to make excuses. But to belittle the size of the damage he pointed to the beat-up condition of the truck—the door missing, the dents the horses’ hooves had made, the twisted hood. “Is not in perfectly condition, this truck,” he said. Then, with a charmingly helpless smile, “But I am sorry—believe me—much sorry. Perdóneme! Esscuse!”
He gave them an especially romantic salute, turned off his flashlight, beckoned to his driver and they started walking down the hill.
Mike looked at Rafo, not knowing whether to laugh at their good fortune or to weep at the wretched irony. To think of all the moil and toil, all the delay, all the fright and tension they’d gone through to elude a patrol that hadn’t even been hunting them. They could have avoided it all, every bit of it, if they’d only known, if there had been a way of finding out, and if they had dared to try. They could have had an easy trip, they could have ridden comfortably on main roads instead of through drought and dust storms, through miserable detours into bleak mountains and backwater towns . . . like Janasco.
They might have missed Janasco.
It was worth it all . . . for they didn’t miss Janasco. They would miss it now for the rest of their lives. But they had had it for that one joyous detour of the trip. So perhaps the blunder of the amateurs had been blessed. Anyway, the danger of the patrol car was over.
Not quite.
The sergeant was coming back, the driver a pace or two behind him. The older man had a heavy, deliberate look on his face. He was troubled.
“Tell me . . .” And he paused. Then he started over again. “I do not understand,” he said to Mike. “If you do not have narcotics, what do you have?”
“Nothing. What do you mean?”
Losing his patience because he had gotten nowhere—and had embarrassed himself to boot—the sergeant was more curt than before. “If you do not do bad thing, why you run away?”
“We weren’t running away.”
“Oh, yes! You run, we follow—you run, we follow! Why? From what crime do you run?”
“No crime—none!”
That might have been enough, had Rafo been silent. But he started to speak angrily in Spanish. The boy—because he was speaking Spanish perhaps, or because he and the Yankee did not look right together—gave the sergeant a bothersome moment, something disjointed. The officer turned to Mike and, in his most polite manner, went back to first principles.
“May I see your tourist card, please.”
Mike reached for his coat in the back of the truck, foraged through his pockets, found the billfold, pulled out the folded tourist card and handed it to the officer. The latter turned his flashlight on again, perused the card and handed it back.
“And the boy?” he said.
There was a silence. The sergeant continued. “Passport? Visa?”
Again Rafo talked to him in Spanish. The sergeant didn’t respond immediately. Then he said to Mike, “You know what the boy say?”
“No.”
Rafo was about to interpret himself but the sergeant held up his hand for silence. The officer wanted to tell it his own way—he didn’t want the boy coaching his companion. “The boy say his father will meet him with all his papers—at the border.” He paused. “Is correct?”
Mike looked to Rafo, wondering whether that was actually what he had said. The boy’s face was filled with confusion, but there was no hint that the sergeant had misquoted him.
Mike turned to his questioner. “Yes.”
“Then perhaps is good if we call his father to the telephone,” the sergeant said. “Or his mother. Or somebody. We will make assurance, yes?”
Smiling to show how civil he was, he gestured for Mike and Rafo to get into the truck. As they entered, he and the driver jumped into the back of the vehicle.
Mike drove the truck downward, in reverse, a short distance—then, where the road widened somewhat, turned around and drove in the darkness, his far beams blazing, down the hill. At the fork in the road they came to the empty patrol car. The sergeant ordered Mike to stop the truck. The driver jumped out of the rear of the vehicle, got into the car and drove behind them, still further down the hill but this time by way of the right fork, which was the road Mike should have taken in the first place.
They drove a couple of hours, then stopped to awaken a poor old Pemex attendant with midnight outcries of gasolina, filled their vehicles, paid exorbitantly for the fuel and drove on again. Two hours later, the headlights of Mike’s truck picked up a sign that told them they were forty kilometers from the border. Less than twenty-five miles.
An hour later, as they were approaching an inn, they saw another road sign. It said they were only two kilometers from the border. That’s where they stopped.
17
The night clerk of the Fonda de los Quinos was a sallow young man with red-rimmed eyes and a supercilious grin
that didn’t seem to belong to him. He knew the two national patrol officers and with barely disguised sarcasm addressed the sergeant as comandante. The latter couldn’t say whether they were spending the night, he told the clerk; it depended on the outcome of his telephone calls.
Like the most solicitous of hosts, the sergeant invited Mike and Rafo to make themselves comfortable right here in the paso of the inn while he tried to get various people, all probably dead asleep, to answer his nighttime calls. By comfortable he meant they could sit down, but not out of his sight and certainly not out of sight of his driver-with-a-gun. In fact, he made the point: wouldn’t it be comfortable for them to sit right here, on the wooden bench that faced the front desk where it would be convenient to the telephone, just in case he wanted to ask them whatever questions might come up?
Mike didn’t sit, but Rafo did, stiffly upright, apparently not even trying to relax. Mike wondered if the boy’s leg ached, but Rafo gave no sign of it. No sign of anything in fact; just watchful waiting, obviously trying to overhear the sergeant’s whisperings on the phone.
It was an old inn, a dreary one. Scarcely any old inns in Mexico were originally built as hostelries and this one might at one time have been a hermitage of sorts or a modest hacienda. Exceptional in not having been built around an open courtyard, it had, instead, a mean little paso which functioned now as a lobby. There was too much furniture in it, all too massive, of the California Spanish kind once called mission, built with only one purpose, to endure. The upholstered davenport was covered with plastic which had been fitted after the fabric it was meant to protect was already stained and threadbare. The place filled Mike with gloom, he would almost have preferred to wait in a jail somewhere.
It looked like the wait would be long. The sergeant managed to get somebody on the phone, then, a few moments later, somebody else. But Mike couldn’t guess whether or not he was getting any information, for the officer cupped his hand over his mouth and the phone, shielding every word. From time to time, the man would make a gurgle of satisfaction, but for the most part the noises he made were of frustration. Occasionally Rafo’s attention would quicken—once when the sergeant reached the police department in the Distrito Federal; later, Mike felt sure, when he managed to get Rafo’s mother on the phone.
What Rafo was piecing together from these tiny overheard fragments of information Mike couldn’t tell, but as time wore on he could see the boy’s eyes get graver and he knew Rafo was going deeper and deeper into himself.
It was very late at night—hours had gone by, it seemed—when the sergeant got Rafo’s father on the phone. As the conversation became angrier, the sergeant’s voice became louder and soon, surrendering secrecy, he started to shout. Almost immediately he controlled his temper, found his former civil self again and said, with every syllable calculated:
“Mr. Polk, I did not call you to make a quarrel with you. I call only for the information. What do you want me to do about your son?” He listened for only the time it takes to shut a door. Then: “That is all I want to know. Good night. And thank you, Mr. Polk.”
He hung up. His face was tight. He turned toward the bench where Rafo was sitting. Hardly had he gone a few steps when the phone began to ring. The night clerk, on the other side of the counter, started to reach for it, but the sergeant bounded back to the counter and snatched the phone off its cradle. He spoke in Spanish, going back to his former secrecy, his voice even more hushed than before. When he hung up this time there was an air of finality about him. He beckoned for Mike to sit down beside Rafo and he stood over them. He tried to make his voice as impersonal, altogether official, as if he were issuing a quiet pronunciamento:
“I will say in English, so you will both understand,” he said. He directed his attention first to the boy. “I have call many people. The national police. Your mother. And your father.” He paused, as if he were turning a page. “First, the police. They look for you in the Distrito Federal. To arrest you. For the truancy. Also, petty theft. And resisting the arrest.” He paused again. Another page. “Your mother. She say she will not defend you—because she do not know how to defend you. She say maybe is better for you to learn that the law is the law.” He looked unsure of himself now, even a bit distressed. “About your father . . . I do not know what to tell you. He say he does not know anything about this.”
Rafo started to speak, then stopped, not certain he could rely on what his voice would do. He started again. “But he . . . sent for me.”
“He say no.”
“But he did!” the boy said. “Ask him!”
He pointed to Mike. The sergeant turned to Mike, waiting for an answer. Perhaps if he had waited a moment longer—or if Rafo had waited—Mike would have found something to say.
But Rafo couldn’t stand the silence and turned away.
The sergeant, looking at Mike, began to unbend a little, losing some of his starchy courtesy. He wanted Mike to know he was a well-intentioned man, even amiably disposed, despite what he was saying. “He is under arrest—and you also. For kidnapping. We will have to take you to the Distrito Federal.”
He looked at his watch and was suddenly weary. He made a small, apologetic shrug and said it had been a tough two days for him, difícil y penoso. Since he’d had very little sleep last night and hated going back to the main road by way of the mountain, he directed a question to the night clerk who turned to the keyboard behind him and pulled down two keys. The sergeant took them from the clerk, kept one and handed the other to the driver.
“We will get a little sleep,” he said to Mike, “and start in early morning.” He pointed to the driver. “You go with him.”
The driver seemed to know the way. He led them to the rear of the paso where, in the semidarkness, they saw a flight of stairs. He pointed upward. Rafo went first. Mike, following, heard the driver immediately behind him, making grouchy, carping noises, under his breath and unintelligible. He understood the young man’s complaint well enough when the latter unlocked the door of one of the rooms, kept the key, displayed his gun to Mike and Rafo, then sat down on the hard corridor floor to spend a vigilant, sleepless, petulant night.
The room was even more depressing than the lobby. A naked light bulb hung from the middle of the ceiling. It was too small to illuminate anything; it simply cast a merciless glare. Although there were two beds, a chair and a shabby chest of drawers, it was as if the light bulb were the sole furnishing of the room; it stared everything else out of existence.
When the door closed and they were alone, Rafo sat quietly on the edge of the bed closest to the door. Mike went to the window and looked out. The inn was on the barranca side of the hill. Through the solitary sash, the view, moonlit but barely visible, was beautiful in its treacherousness, straight down. Even if he were able to open the window, which was nailed tight shut, it would be foolish to set foot outside it, for he would be throwing himself into a gorge. The room, he thought wryly, had been chosen with cunning and probably had been so chosen any number of times before, for wetbacks.
So close to the border, he thought frustratedly, so close.
He stayed at the window, trying to keep his thoughts on escape. No matter how balking such thoughts might be, no matter how disheartening, it was better than facing Rafo. He could feel the accusation in the air, the silence that was taking him to account. If only he could keep looking out the window, he thought; if only he didn’t have to turn and be confronted by the boy.
He turned.
Rafo’s voice was quiet.
“You tell me lies, yes?”
“. . . Yes.”
“My father did not want me.”
“Not in the way I told it . . . no.”
“What did he want? . . . Money?” He took Mike’s silence as meaning yes. “From my mother?”
“Yes.”
Rafo thought a moment. “Is a joke. I always know she would never give
one peso for me. But I think maybe she change—she sends the police for me.” He tried to laugh; it wasn’t successful. “A big joke. And a big lie.” A moment, to measure it, to see if he could take its enormity. Then: “My father—did he ever ride a wild horse?”
“. . . No.”
Again he tried to laugh but, punished for the fake, his eyes filled up. Then he seemed to make a grim effort to pull himself together. “So . . . if my father does not want me . . . and you . . .” He didn’t finish that part of the sentence. He started another. “So the only one who wants me is the police.” He paused and looked at Mike. “And with you it was all money.”
“It started that way, yes.”
“Yes, money. Somebody gives you a job. My father. He is your boss. And I am—what is the word?—I am the sucker. And you are . . .” He tried to remember the word Mike had used. He seemed to be racking his brain to remember it, a word contemptible enough to apply right now. He found it.
“. . . the shill,” he said.
“Only at the beginning,” Mike answered.
An outburst: “You are the shill!”
“Rafo, listen—”
The boy lost control. “The shill is the worst!” the boy cried. “The shill is a nobody! He is not the boss—he is not even the sucker! He is a weak man—he is a nobody!”
He reached for the boy, not to hit him, but to hold him, to pull him together so he wouldn’t go to pieces, but Rafo didn’t let him near.
“No!” It was no use trying to hide the heartbreak. “I thought—when I saw you on the top of the hill—riding the wild horse—I thought you were a great man! Macho! I thought you were my friend! For the first time I have a friend! But you are not macho and you are not my friend! You are a weak man—and you are nothing to me! You are nothing, you are nothing!”
The boy was hitting him. Hitting with all his strength, yet as awkwardly as if he had never struck a blow before, never struck anyone. But this time Mike was not striking back, he was taking it, not trying to restrain the boy, not flinching from him either, only his eyes flinching. At last, without thinking, but certainly more for the boy’s sake than for his own, he did strike. He slapped the boy hard across the face.
Cry Macho Page 28