I turned to get the proprietor’s reaction to this, he who was sitting, somewhat more stiffly in his chair now, still staring at the drunk, and frowning. Then he gave a short humorless laugh, and said in measured tones:
“Let’s-see-you-do-that-again.”
This caused the drunk to stop looking at us, and to turn around to the proprietor as though he hadn’t seen him before; and after staring straight at him, he laid his head back down on the table.
The proprietor slapped the table and gave several short, barking laughs, then resumed his scrutinous vigil.
During this vignette, Pablo and Emmanuel had abandoned their cups, which, I saw now, were crowded with the drowned.
“Well, that seems to be that,” I said, “shall we go to the bar?”
“Man, let’s cut out of this place,” said Emmanuel.
Pablo, with deeply furrowed brow, was staring at where the man had been sick. Finally he shook his shoulders violently.
“Man, I dunt dig . . . vomit!”
“Are you kidding?” I said, “I happen to know that you do dig good greaser vomit.”
The remark amused Emmanuel. “Ha-ha-ha! Good greaser vomit! Pablo digs good greaser vomit! That’s too much, man!”
“Listen,” said Pablo, leaning forward in serious confidence, “let’s go to the bar now, I think there are groovy chicks there.”
Like the café, the bar was unpretentious; but, where the café had been sparse and fairly lighted, the bar was close and steeped in shadow—sinister enough, as dark places go, but there wasn’t much happening, at least not to meet the eye. A few men at the tables, a few beat hustlers at the bar.
My friends, being at the head of our party now, chose a table in the very heart of things, and we ordered tequila.
Emmanuel nodded toward the bar, straightening his tie.
“See, man,” he said, giving me a little nudge, “dig the chicks.”
“Sure,” I said, “you’re swinging.” Pablo kept involuntarily clearing his throat and making sporadic little adjustments to his person and attire, even touching his hair once or twice. But after a moment or two, this fidgeting turned into annoyance that the girls, though they had seen us come in, had not made a play; so very soon, he and Emmanuel got up and took their drinks to the bar.
The girls, there were four of them, appeared to be extremely beat—two, by way of example, not wearing shoes—and were each holding a glass, untouched it seemed, of dark brown drink.
It was interesting to see them and my friends at a distance, not hearing, only seeing the gestures of hands and mouth, the flash of teeth and the tilted glass—man at an ancient disadvantage.
Sipping my tequila, I began to pretend I had settled down around here—quite near the toll bridge, actually. And a few days after my arrival, there had been a nasty run-in with the fat roadblock greaser, who, it developed, was loathed and feared throughout the region, and was known as “Pigman.” I heard the hushed whispers of the gathering crowd:
“Good Lord! The stranger’s smashed his face away!”
“Did you see that—a single blow from the stranger sent the Pigman reeling!”
“Smashed his face entirely away! Good Lord!” Etc., etc.
I was going along with variations on this, when Pablo and Emmanuel came back to the table, sullen now and unrequited.
“Man, those chicks are the worst,” Emmanuel said, as they sat down, “let’s cut out of this place.”
Pablo was looking as though he might black out momentarily.
When I asked what had happened, it was to learn that the girls had said they weren’t working tonight, that they never worked on Tuesday night (or whatever night it was—it wasn’t Sunday) and to come back tomorrow.
I took another look at them, and whatever rationale was behind their refusal, they were evidently satisfied with it, though it was obvious they could have made their entire month off my madcap friends.
As we rose in leaving though, one of them raised her dark glass in a toast of promise, and tomorrow.
Now we were off for the second lost city: San Luiz. It would be ten or twelve miles along the road that had brought us, so we recrossed the square and drove out on the opposite side we had come in.
The road here was just two tracks across a flat, rock-strewn plain. In five minutes we were in wilderness again, and after ten miles or so, when we finally reached the place where the town was supposed to be, the road stopped dead, at an extraordinary wire fence—a fence about seventeen feet high and made of wire mesh the size of quarter-inch rope. We got out to have a look.
The fence was topped by four running strands of an odd-looking barbed wire, jutting outward, and along this, at intervals, was a large, white, professional sign which said in Spanish:
KEEP OUT
VEBY HIGH VOLTAGE
DANGER OF DEATH
Beyond the fence, a trace of the old road’s continuation was visible in our headlights for about fifty feet, before it disappeared into the night. On our side of the fence the road branched out left and right, and it ran alongside the fence in both directions for as far as one could see.
With the idea now of driving around the fence and picking up the road again, we got back into the car and took the right branch, following it until, shortly, at a ravine, it turned away from the fence and back toward the town. Retracing our route, we took the other branch of the road; again, after an eighth of a mile or so, the road turned away from the fence and back to the town, while the fence itself disappeared in the heavy growth.
Here it seemed to me that one might follow the fence on foot, and while I didn’t think we could actually do it, having no flashlight, I was eager to try. So we left the car and walked alongside the fence, on a field of rock and stubble, but it was immediately so dense as to be almost impassable. The thicket grew right into the fence, and the fence had evidently been there for quite a while. Emmanuel soon turned back toward the car.
“It’s a drag, man,” he said.
Pablo, who had wandered off to the left, kept stopping and brushing at his clothes.
“Man, what is this? This is all scratch.”
Finally he stopped completely and began striking matches; he seemed to be examining something in his hand. I beat my way through the brush to him.
“Man, this is bad,” he said, “this is all scratch.”
He was examining what appeared to be an invisible scratch on his hand.
“I couldn’t see it,” I said as the match died, “is it bleeding?”
“Bleeding?” He struck another match. “Man, is it bleeding? Where?”
We both peered at his hand.
“It looks all right,” I said, “doesn’t it?”
“Man, I dunt dig this place? What is this?”
I suggested that he go back to the car and I would try to follow the fence a little farther.
I had become obsessed by the mystery of it. What was it behind this fence, in the vast area where one town used to exist and no town was supposed to? The fabulous estate of a mad billionaire? The testing ground for some fantastic weapon? Why had not the sign proclaimed the source of its authority? Why had it not strengthened itself with “Private Property,” or “Government Property”? No, here was a case of security so elaborate, so resolved upon, that even the power behind it would remain secret. Whatever it was—was so dreadful it was not supposed to exist.
Many are familiar with the story that infant-mortality (in childbirth) is not the figure it is represented to be—and that the discrepancy between the actual figure and the statistics are teratological cases—with the consequence that in every Christian country there is a monster-home, wholly secret, maintained by permanent appropriation, in the form of a “hidden-rider,” self-perpetuating, and never revealed by the breakdown of any budget.
As I mused on this, moving cautiously along the edge of the black fence, and now at a considerable distance from the car, I stumbled against a rock and fell; I grabbed at the dry brush, but t
he terrain had changed, dropping away sharply from the fence, as did I with it now, about fifteen feet down into a small gully. Here there was even less light than above, and as I sat there in pitch blackness, momentarily rubbing my forehead, I had a sudden uneasiness of something very menacing nearby and moving closer. And, as suddenly, I knew what it was.
Wild dogs have existed in Mexico for so long that they are a breed apart; the dissimilarity between them and ordinary dogs is remarkable. Wild dogs do not bark; the sound they produce comes from the uppermost part of the throat—a frantic and sustained snarl, and the strangeness of it is accentuated by its being directed down, for the reason that they run with their heads very low, nose almost touching the ground. Even in a pack, with blood dripping hot from their muzzles, they keep their backs arched and their tails between their legs. Their resemblance, in many ways, is less to the dog than to the hyena; they do not spring—their instinct is to chase a thing, biting at it, until it falls to break a leg . . . whereupon they hit it like piranha fish, taking bites at random, not going for the throat, but flaying it alive. It is improbable that wild dogs will attack a person who holds his ground—at least, so I was told later—so that it was a rather serious mistake that I began to run.
Through the snarls, before they caught me, I could hear the teeth snapping, as though they were so possessed by rage as to bite even the air itself. I half stumbled and turned when the first one bit the back of my leg and clung to it, in a loathsome knot, like a tarantula; I kicked it away violently, but so much more in a fit of repulsion than in adroitness that I took a nifty pratfall, there to grope for a frantic second or two for a rock or stick of defense, before scrambling to my feet again while being bitten again on the same leg. Exactly how many there were I don’t know—at least six. I was bitten two or three times more, on the legs, before I fell again; and the bites, having come at just the moment before I fell, gave me the strong impression that they were now closing in.
But abruptly the scene was flooded with white light and the scream of twisting mambo, as our car came lurching and crashing down the ravine, headlights bouncing; then it suddenly stalled.
For an instant the action became a frozen tableau, the dogs petrified in strange attitudes of attack, and myself crouching at bay—a tableau at which my friends in the car simply sat and stared.
“Man, what’s he doing?” I imagined Emmanuel saying. “Dig those weird dogs.”
And by the interior light of the car I could see Pablo’s expression of exasperated amazement.
I was on the verge of shouting urgent instructions about completing my rescue, when Pablo, apparently at the end of his tether, began honking the horn wildly and lunged the car forward with a terrible roar, lights flashing—and the dogs scattered into the night.
“Come, man,” said Pablo, gesturing impatiently, “we cut out now.”
There was no sign of life as we crossed the square at Corpus Christi, so we drove on to the outskirts of Mexico City where we managed to rouse a doctor. He gave me a shot of tetanus, a couple of sutures, and some morphia tablets—which I had to share with Pablo and Emmanuel, after the doctor indignantly refused to sell them a hundred goofballs. Pablo was more indignant about it than the doctor, and as we drove away, he leaned out the window and shook his fist at the dark building:
“Go to devil, you greaser quack!” This broke Emmanuel up, but we got home without further incident.
My friends left the pension a few days after that, on a Sunday. I came out to the car and we shook hands lightly.
“You ought to make it,” Emmanuel said. He had a thin, unlit cigar in his mouth. “Swinging chicks in Guadalajara, man.”
“Guadalajara? I thought you were going to Acapulco.”
“No, man, I don’t think we’ll go there. I don’t think anything’s happening there. Why? You want to go to Acapulco?”
“No,” I said.
“How about Guadalajara? Crazy town, man.”
“No, thanks.”
Emmanuel nodded.
“Okay, man,” he said.
Pablo raced the engine and leaned over the wheel, turning his head toward me; he looked like a progressive young missionary in his white linen suit and dark glasses.
“Later, man,” he said.
“Yeah, man,” said Emmanuel, “later.”
“Later,” I said.
They took off with a roar. At the corner, a very old woman with a great black shawl over her head, started across the street without looking. Pablo didn’t slow down or perceptibly alter his course, and as she passed in front of the car, it looked like he missed her by the length of a matchstick. She hardly seemed to notice it though, only slowly turned her head after them, but by then they were almost out of sight.
So that was that; and the point of it all is, they left me the map—that is, should anyone ever care to make it, I mean, down to the big fence on that road out of Axotle.
Apartment to Exchange
CHARACTERS:
FRANZ KAFKA: About 34, of medium height, slender build, and with a thin, haunted, extremely sensitive face; he is carefully dressed in the dark-suited style of a provincial bank clerk. There is an odd stiff meticulousness and deliberation in his behavior, which convey the heightened self-awareness he has of his every word and movement.
FRAU KAFKA, his mother: A high-strung, possessive woman of about 55—not nervous in the usual sense of being “fidgety,” but seemingly in a state of constant impatience, bordering on exasperation and often plunging into it.
DOCTOR FREUD: About 60, a large and dynamic man with silver hair and a beard of professorial cut. He is also dressed in a dark suit; but, unlike Kafka, his clothes seem baggy and unkempt, as if such matters of appearance were of trivial concern. He is exceedingly self-assured, at times almost blustering, speech loud and jovial, movements sweeping in the grand manner—and while he occasionally lapses into momentary meditative silence (thoughtfully stroking his beard) there is a certain bright shrewdness which equally often lights his face . . . a curious sort of twinkling calculation, whenever he chances to overhear a telling remark.
Scene One
Early evening. We are in the apartment in Prague which Kafka shares with his mother. It is a small living-room in excruciatingly middle-class taste: divan and matching armchair, several hideous lamps, a mantle clock and family-portraits, two or three grotesque vases and plaster figures, a landscape painting, a large souvenir seashell, a radio, a row of books, etc. Near the wall, stage left, is a small writing-desk.
Despite the bric-a-brac, diligent housekeeping has given the room (in certain half-lights) the illusion of neatness and order, even, perhaps, of coziness.
As the curtain rises we see FRAU KAFKA seated in the armchair, center stage, staring straight ahead and drumming her fingers impatiently on the arm of the chair. After a second she glances at the mantel clock (it is six o’clock); she sighs elaborately, and at that moment there is a sound of the door, stage right, being unlocked. frau kafka folds her arms, stares at the door, FRANZ enters.
FRAU KAFKA: [In a cheery sing-song voice, barely disguising the hysteria beneath it:] Lay-ate, Franz! You are lay-ate!
FRANZ: [Frowns, glances at his watch, checking it against the mantel clock, and speaks with maniacal calm:] No, you’re wrong there, Mother. I left the office at 5:35; it is two minutes after six now; the 27 minutes were spent in walking to and from each of the bus termini [raises a finger, adds smugly as though playing his trump card] and . . . and on the bus itself. [Softens, reasonable.] If by “late” however you mean in a figurative sense, it may well be that certain interpretations . . . interpretations, may I say which have—
FRAU KAFKA: [Interrupts by seizing her head in both hands and screaming:] Franz!
[She gets up, walks quickly over to him, demands:] Did you place the ad?
FRANZ: [He has begun to remove his coat.] Yes.
FRAU KAFKA: [Impatiently.] Well, let me see it!
FRANZ: [His coat half off, down o
ver his arms and binding them, he glances at the newspaper protruding from the coat’s sidepocket, is momentarily undecided whether to finish removing his coat before giving her the paper, or to draw the coat back on, in order to free his arms, and give her the paper now; he makes one or two false starts in each direction, then steadies himself and speaks decisively.] I’ll just take off the coat first.
FRAU KAFKA: [Angrily.] Franz!
FRANZ: Oh well. [He draws his coat back on, extracts the paper from the pocket, hands it to her, and continues lamely.] I’ll give you the paper first, and then I’ll [his voice trails away to become almost inaudible as he removes coat and turns his back to the audience in hanging it up] . . . take . . . off . . . the . . . coat.
FRAU KAFKA: [Crossing to her chair with the paper, she sits down and unfolds it.] Where? Where is it?
FRANZ: Page five, column two, under the heading “Apartments to Exchange.” [He looks about the room, uncertain what to do next, glances at his watch, checks it against the mantel clock, then crosses to the writing-desk, stage left, sits down, cautiously withdraws a small notebook from his breast coat pocket, opens it, and studies the page.]
FRAU KAFKA: [Avidly scrutinizing a small section of the paper.] Where is it, Franz? There’s nothing here! Nothing!
FRANZ: [Calmly.] It is the one entry, on page five, column two, under . . . [he pauses and speaks tentatively] . . . no, beneath . . . yes, beneath the heading “Apartments to Exchange.”
FRAU KAFKA: Good God!
FRANZ: [Speechless, he merely frowns, staring at his mother.]
FRAU KAFKA: [Incredulous.] This . . . this is the ad you put in?
FRANZ: Naturally I can only assume you are referring to the entry which I indicated earlier in the conversation; if this is so—
FRAU KAFKA: [Quite beside herself.] This is what you spent all day yesterday and half the night writing and rewriting?
Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes Page 13