Please Write for Details

by John D. MacDonald

  Gambel Torrigan overrode her with that rich voice of his, smiling confidently at her, saying, “My good woman, you have come down here to learn what painting is. You must forget all you think you know. I will not have one of my students turning out sickly, insipid little daubs. Leave the pretty flowers, my dear, for tourists going clickety-click with their Kodaks. Under me you will learn that painting is fire and iron and blood. Not sugar cookies. You are down here to work. To learn. I will start you from the beginning. I will teach you to use your eyes and your hands and your soul. And first you must throw away all those stinking tiresome water colors in that precious paintbox of yours.”

  Agnes Partridge Keeley’s screech finally cut through the velvety unctuousness.

  “Just who the hell do you think you are!”

  Slight bow. “I am Gambel Torrigan, your painting instructor.”

  “In a p--- a--- you’re my painting instructor!” She thumped her chest with a pink fist and yelled, “I am the instructor! I am Agnes Partridge Keeley.”

  Torrigan stared at her in comprehension and consternation and then turned with majestic regret toward Miles Drummond. “Mr. Drummond, I was not advised that I would have to try to conduct a school with the dubious assistance of an illustrator of post cards.”

  Agnes advanced on him, brush held like a dirk. “Oh, I know your type. Hah! I’ve seen a thousand of you. You couldn’t draw a horse without making it look like a chow dog.”

  “I have no intention of … excuse the expression … drawing a horse.”

  “All of you look like bums. I have made over three hundred thousand dollars from my paintings!”

  “A monstrous tribute, madam, to the cultural level of our society.”

  She whirled toward Miles. “I will not have my students confused and misled by this … this … Communist.”

  “And I,” said Torrigan, “will not be a party to any conspiracy that pours over the inquiring souls of my students this … vast heritage of molasses.” Torrigan stalked off. Agnes Partridge Keeley snatched up the tools of her trade and trotted off in the opposite direction.

  By three in the afternoon, Miles felt as though he had covered endless miles between Torrigan’s room and Agnes’ room. But he had effected a compromise. Agnes would take all the students all morning. Torrigan would take them all during the afternoon. At the end of the first full week of instruction, each individual student would elect which group he would belong to for the rest of the Workshop period.

  On Tuesday the red VW bus was released by the mecánico. Fidelio Melocotonero, sitting proudly behind the wheel, drove Miles Drummond around town on his errands. Because Miles could not drive, he could not properly appraise Fidelio’s skill. But it seemed to him that Fidelio stalled the bus rather often, that he excited more than the customary number of horn sounds from other vehicles, and that several times he bumped up over a curb unnecessarily when rounding a corner. And, when parked and waiting for Miles, he liked to make the motor roar.

  When Fidelio drove him to the post office, Miles found two more acceptances. Two new students, both men. Paul Klauss of Philadelphia, and Harvey Ardos, also from Philadelphia. Thirteen students in all. And close to four thousand dollars for Miles. Seven female and six male. He wished one more male would sign up. It would make it so … neat.

  After depositing money, Miles drew out some cash and, accompanied by Felipe Cedro, who had been his houseman for many years, and Alberto Buceada, the stringy and ineffectual hotel janitor he had hired, Miles took the red bus to the public market to acquire the first large block of supplies as indicated on the list Gloria had helped him prepare.

  He had expected the job to take an hour or so, but it was late afternoon before he had finished. He was certain he had gotten the wrong quantities of many items and had overlooked others. Yet even the luggage rack on the roof was full of supplies. The red bus complained sullenly about climbing the long hill to the Hutchinson with such a load, and it went very slowly indeed, to the disgust of Fidelio who, from time to time, indicated his irritation by banging the horn button with his fist until Miles ordered him to stop. Felipe Cedro rode with them in remote dignity, isolating himself with a perfect indifference. Felipe was a strikingly handsome man … from the waist up. But he had been cursed with small, knotty, bandy legs that reduced him from the height that should have been his to an inconsequential stature.

  He was the son of a gardener, and in his childhood had aspired to be a torero. But when he had acquired sufficient skill and knowledge of the animals to appear, at fifteen, in his first novillero fights at small village festivals, he found that not only did his physical construction make him an object of derision, but he was not sufficiently fleet of foot to avoid horrible buffetings from the horns. He had sense enough to quit before he was seriously gored. And, with reluctance, he had given up his dream. He told himself that had he been able to be a great bullfighter, he would have been rich, and noble and honest. The most suitable revenge on the world was to become rich, through ignobility and dishonesty.

  He thought his employer a fool. He knew that during the six years of his employment by Miles Drummond, the servant had surpassed the master in worldly goods. On the back streets of Cuernavaca, Felipe Cedro was known as a shrewd and greedy and dangerous man. He owned fragments of many small business enterprises, some of which were almost entirely legitimate. Through his excellent contacts with police officials and politicians, he had become a valuable man to know, whether your problem was that of disposing of stolen goods or finding a young woman suitable for a certain German tourist.

  Felipe had about decided to terminate his association with Miles Drummond and had, in fact, made a mental list of the small objects he would take with him upon his departure when this Workshop venture had taken form. Felipe decided at once that it might present sufficient chance for gain to warrant remaining with Miles until September. And on this day his hunch had been partially justified. He had steered Miles to those vendors who could be depended upon for a kickback. And the quantities purchased had been large enough to make for a profitable afternoon. He was certain that rich and foolish American women would come to study painting. And there, if you kept your eyes open and your wits about you, was a chance for much greater profit.

  He nodded and dreamed in the red bus on the way back to the Hutchinson. Don Felipe Cedro would one day own a vast house with a pool for the swimming, and three mistresses, all of whom had been in the cinema or appeared upon the television. He would ride in a great, long golden car with a top that went up and down, and they would bow to Don Felipe when the car passed them.

  And then they arrived and he had to unload the supplies and help carry them into the kitchen area. Work for a burro.

  Chapter Three

  On Wednesday morning at ten o’clock Miles Drummond held a meeting of his service staff in the big gloomy kitchen. Though it heartened him to have them all in one place and to be able to look at them, when he examined them individually he had a feeling of misgiving, a drear knowledge of the inevitability of disaster.

  He could find no reassurance in the familiar face of Felipe Cedro. Felipe had seemed moody lately, and his work had not been entirely satisfactory. Rosalinda Gomez would be in charge of the kitchen. She was a very fat Mexican woman with a generous mixture of Indio blood. She wore a broad smile upon her dark face. Miles had found it extraordinarily difficult to establish communication with her. No matter what he said to her, she giggled as though he had made some delicious joke. And, from the few meals she had served the small group thus far, he was certain that she was a startlingly bad cook. When he had overheard her talking to Alberto Buceada, the stringy janitor, her speech had been bristly with the clickings and glottal stops of Indian words. And from her manner toward Alberto he had come to suspect that, out in the building that served as storage space and staff quarters, Rosalinda and Alberto had come to some intimate arrangement satisfactory to both parties. He had no intention of investigating this arrangement f
urther.

  The least consequential member of the staff was named Pepe. Miles assumed he was about twelve years old, a raggedy child with black hair that grew down from the top of his head like a conical thatched roof. His function was to serve as kitchen help to Rosalinda, to run errands and perform other duties that might present themselves from time to time.

  Pepe, Rosalinda, Alberto, Felipe and Fidelio Melocotonero would live at the Hutchinson, though it might be assumed that Fidelio would retain his habit of sleeping in the red VW bus.

  The two maids, who would double as waitresses, both lived nearby in humble family dwellings perched on the slope of the barranca. The prettier of the two, Margarita Esponjar, made him particularly uneasy. She was smoking a cigarette and leaning her pert and jaunty haunches against one of the kitchen tables and looking directly at Miles with a telling and sensual vacuity. She wore a rather sleazy red dress and red shoes. The shoes were apparently too large for her, and it gave her a peculiar gait when she walked in them. There seemed to Miles to be too much extraneous movement in her walk.

  The other one, Esperanza Clueca, was more reassuring. She was neatly dressed and stood at attention. Her eyes were set rather closely together, and she had a long, severe upper lip. She had obtained permission from Miles to be away from her job from four in the afternoon to eight in the evening five days a week. She was attending school and would one day become a schoolteacher. Esperanza spoke politely and quietly, but with an ominous firmness, whereas Margarita had a peculiarly gay and piercing voice.

  When he looked at the seven of them as a group, he could almost believe that the services might run smoothly.

  He cleared his throat and said, “There is coming thirteen students. I am going in the bus tomorrow, picking up the first two students. El Señor Torrigan is going to Mexico Friday to meet others. The rest are coming in their own cars. The food, each meal, is sufficient to feed the two teachers, the thirteen students, and the eight of us who now stand here, and sometimes there is guests. I am clear?”

  There were nods and little murmurs of agreement.

  “Breakfast is from eight to nine. Lunch is from noon to one-thirty. Dinner is from eight-thirty until ten. Felipe is doing the necessary buying in the market. Rosalinda is telling Felipe what is needed. Fidelio is driving Felipe to the market, and to get the mail each day. But the bus is not going anywhere until it is with my permission. And at all times everything is made very clean here. I am clear?”

  Rosalinda giggled and said, “I will buy what is needed, señor. You will give me the money and I will go in the red bus and buy the things we need.”

  “She will stay in the kitchen where she belongs,” Felipe said.

  “Then I will not use what he buys,” Rosalina said and giggled some more.

  “Then you are both going together,” Miles directed. Rosalinda and Felipe looked at each other with hostility.

  “And we will take Pepe and Alberto to carry the purchases, señor,” Felipe said.

  “Uh … it is well,” Miles said. He had the feeling he had been outmaneuvered.

  Margarita dropped her cigarette on the floor and stepped on it with a tall red shoe. Miles looked at the cigarette and swallowed and said, “It is important all things are clean. It is important our students are … happy. We are working hard this summer making them clean and happy, no?”

  “Sí señor,” they said in smiling chorus. He smiled back and squared his shoulders and marched out of the kitchen. He heard them all start chattering at once, Margarita’s voice more clear than all the others, proclaiming, “I too shall ride in the red bus, Fidelio!”

  On Thursday morning the red bus gasped, choked and died. Fidelio blew the horn angrily for a few moments after he found that he could not start it again. He got out and kicked the door on the driver’s side and stalked away. Miles got out and examined the new dent. Miles went in and phoned Las Rosas, but Gloria was not in her room. He phoned Antonio Vasques, the mechanic, and made a report on the symptoms the bus had shown just before expiring. Antonio sounded most distressed and said that he would most certainly try to come and visit the bus as soon as possible.

  When, by eleven-thirty, he had not been able to reach Gloria, he looked for Agnes Partridge Keeley, and found her outside the wall being solemnly watched by four small children and a large brown cow as she was finishing one of her nimble water colors of the shacks on the lip of the barranca. She sat in the sun, flushed and humid, biting her lips as she worked.

  Miles explained about the bus and she said she would be delighted to drive him to Mexico City to pick up the two gentlemen, the first students to arrive.

  As, a half-hour later, they drifted almost silently up the mountain highway in the big gray Cadillac, Miles leaned back into the softness of the upholstery and was pleased that he had not been able to get in touch with Gloria. Agnes seemed a very careful driver. Almost too cautious. The interior of the car was scented with her flower perfume. And she talked and talked and talked.

  And, at the same time, in the DC-7B droning south toward the high spine of the Sierra Madres, Paul Klauss was being inundated by a relentless flood of conversation, directed at him moistly and forcibly by a young man named Harvey Ardos. Klauss had been bored into a state of helpless and irritable stupor. When he had sent in his late registration for the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop, along with his payment in full of five hundred dollars, Paul Klauss had hoped that, this summer, he was not making a mistake as grave as the one he had made last summer. Harvey Ardos had very nearly convinced him that this might be an even worse summer.

  Had Paul Klauss not been almost half asleep when Harvey Ardos approached him, he might have avoided these endless words. But he had looked blearily up into the eager and pimpled face, into the young spaniel eyes behind the thick lenses in their black frames, and said, “Wha?”

  “I said are you going to the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop?”

  “Uh … yes.”

  And Harvey Ardos had dropped into the seat beside him, grinning with a sort of oily and ecstatic warmth, and clasped Paul’s hand in a long, cold-fingered, damp hand and said, “How about that! How about that! I’m going there too. How about that!”

  During the intervening hundreds of miles Paul Klauss had learned more about Harvey Ardos than he wished to know. Harvey was twenty-four. His formal education was limited. “No real good artists ever went for that college crap,” is the way he put it. He was an orphan. He was not married. He had worked as a stock clerk in a Philadelphia department store that winter. “I figure a man has to keep on the move. See the world.” He said that he lived very simply, and whenever he got money ahead he would take courses, study under someone. And this was his big adventure. He carried black-and-white prints of what seemed to be to Klauss several hundred of his paintings. Most of them seemed to be of back alleys illuminated with a scrawl of neon.

  “I figure I’m maybe of the James Penney school. Anyway, somebody told me that once. I haven’t just got the right breaks yet, Mr. Klauss. As soon as I start getting the breaks, I’m going to have it made. The way I figure it, I’ve got something to say. That’s the main thing, you got to have something to say, and then you got to work like hell to say it the way you want to say it. And when you can do that and you’ve got the breaks, you’ve got it made. You know, I’ve never been out of the country before. The army didn’t want me on account of my eyes. But let me tell you, I know how to use my eyes. I don’t look at anything without thinking of painting it. That’s the way I look around me all the time. You know. The colors and shadows and stuff. Shadows aren’t ever black. They’re lousy with colors. Isn’t it the funniest damn thing in the world, you being from Philadephia and us never running into each other?”

  “It’s a big place,” Klauss said weakly.

  “I know, but when you’ve got the same kind of interests, you run into people with the same kind of interests, you know what I mean. What kind of painting do you do?”

  “I’m … a beginne
r.”

  “Oh! Well, you’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time, Mr. Klauss, but I don’t guess it’s too much time. I mean a lot of the good boys got a late start. I figure what makes a painter is being sensitive. I’m real sensitive. You wouldn’t think it, but my feelings get hurt easy. And I think a painter has to work, too. He has to be working every minute. Everything he looks at is part of his work. Just looking at it is part of what he has to do. The guys I work with, they think I’m nuts, but they’ll find out some day. Nobody wants to give you a chance. They all the time want to laugh at you instead. I don’t let them bother me too much. They can go on out and bowl and drink beer and pick up girls, but let me tell you, I go on back to the room and get the stuff all laid out and I start in painting. You know, I even forget what time it is or whether I had dinner or not. The painting is the main thing with me. Mr. Klauss!”

  “Uh?”

  “Hey, I thought you were going to sleep or something. Honest to God, this is going to be a great thing. Mexico! And nothing to do all day every day but paint. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I’m so damn excited right now I feel like running up and down the aisle. You know, this is the second time in my life I ever been on an airplane?”

  And on and on and on. Paul Klauss could imagine, dismally, that the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop would be peopled with dozens of dull, intense, and pimpled young men named Harvey Ardos, all of whom have the same long, black, dank hair and the same stained line around the collar of their cheap white shirts. And so it would be another wasted summer. Two of them in a row. And time was going by too fast to risk the ruin of two summers in succession.

  Paul Klauss was thirty-four. In the right light he could pass for twenty-six or seven. He was a trim-bodied man, five feet eight inches in height, who, by the way he carried himself and through the assistance of his constant use of elevator shoes, gave the impression of being five ten or perhaps a little more. His hair was dark blond and carefully tended. Feature by feature he somewhat resembled a blond Gregory Peck, but the pale eyelashes were longer than they needed to be, and there was a look of weakness around the mouth.