by David Pierce
"I, too, get fairly aroused if anyone messes up my tresses," I said. "Except Evonne—she can do what she wants with them, including a perm for all I care." Funny what you talk about sometimes, like when you're waiting for the federales to collar you and throw you in solitary for the rest of your days.
"What happened to him finally?"
"He became a professional wrestler, he made a lot of money, then he went mad."
"Me too if Billy keeps us waiting any longer," I said.
We heard the cab door open, then close again.
"Thank God," I said. "Jorge, do your stuff, get movin'!"
We bounced off.
"And so we say good-bye to exotic Mérida," Benny intoned dreamily, "where the old meets the even older, land of the deer and the puma, the pheasant and the dove."
"You've been reading Rod McKuen again," I said.
We bounced onward. We laughed a lot. It was beginning to sink in that maybe we had gotten away with it after all, and it was a heady feeling. Sara woke up about a half-hour into the trip. She wanted to know why it was dark. I told her. She claimed she felt fine, aside from a headache, so I gave her three aspirins with some water and a piece of chocolate I found, and convinced her that no matter how fine she felt, she should take it easy for a while, and if she felt at all faint or started seeing double, to let me know. She said I'd be the first in line, and stop fussing. I said I wasn't fussing, I was merely showing the compassion due to any human being I ran across who was bleeding all over the carpet. Then I applied a couple of Band-Aids as best I could over her cut.
I filled her in on what had taken place while she was sleeping on the job; she of course wanted all the details, and as we had nothing but time, I gave them to her, trying successfully, I believe, not to take too much of the credit for the success of the operation for myself. I asked her how she got KO'd. She said she'd tell me if I told her how we got phone calls meant for the real Cul. Ass.
"There is a state of mind," I said to her with appropriate solemnity. "We in the Zen Buddhists' hierarchy have a name for it, but we are not allowed to speak it aloud in front of neophytes."
"Baloney is the name I call it," she said.
"Feeling your old self again, I see," I said. "This state of mind, of semitrance, achievable only after years of vigils, self-flagellation and meditation—"
"And shootin' the shit," she said.
"—is one wherein one is able to pluck brilliant and imaginative ideas out of a sort of information ribbon, an ethereal data bank circling above our globe just this side of the stratosphere. Or—take your choice, it's up to you, darlin'—I got the idea from an old caper movie I saw on the box with Mom just before we left. What the plot hinged on was getting the sucker to phone a number he believed was that of a famous museum, so what the con men did was replace the phone book in a busy café with one that had been doctored so it listed a different number for the museum. Well, we couldn't get to Joaquín's phone book, if he even had one, or his switchboard operator's, so we did the next best thing."
"We got to the switchboard operator," Benny interrupted rudely. "Or rather I did. I took a drive back out to the prison Tuesday, remember, and by no coincidence got there at lunchtime. Then I had a short but fruitful chat with a poverty-stricken clerk, name of Ernesto Byass. I gave Ernesto our phone number. All he had to do to earn himself two and a half million pesos was to dial it any time Lt. Esparza asked to be connected to the Cultural Association. And Lt. Esparza, you remember him, he's the one who thought you were so pretty, as indeed we all do, my dear, he couldn't dial it himself because all calls at Febrero Segundo, we noticed, went through a central switchboard manned by none other than Sr. Ernesto Byass."
"Naturally," I interceded smoothly, "Ernesto only got half his dinero in advance. He gets the other half after a month or two if he keeps his mouth shut if anyone ever asks him about it, which is highly unlikely because they'll blame it all on Ethel. It is perhaps needless to mention that Benjamin impressed on him the necessity of not flaunting his new wealth by suddenly going out and buying six new twenty-six-inch color TVs for his hut, which doesn't have electricity yet."
"Ernesto thought that perhaps in a year or two his wealthy uncle up in Monterrey might sadly pass away after a long and painful illness, leaving the Yucatán branch of the family a tidy and completely unexpected windfall."
"I hope I don't get so busy that I forget to send him the rest of his money," I said. "Ah well, time will tell. It's not as if he can go to the cops if he doesn't get it because he's already taken half."
"Pretty crafty, guys," Doris said from her bed of pain. "I'll give you that one."
"Thank you," I said sincerely. "Now it's your turn. What happened with you and the sarge? Did you show him a little too much leg so that he got all excited and leapt at you like a wild beast?"
"So I'm typin' away," she said, "and singin' away when you guys goof up and there's this god-awful racket from your office. Sarge heads for the door, what else? All I knew is if anything like that happened, I was supposed to try and delay him as long as I could—good luck, Doris. I could've torn off all my clothes, I guess, but what I did was scream '¡Raton!' like I'd seen a mouse, and I jumped into his arms. How was that for quick thinkin', guys?"
"Terrific," Benny said.
"Lucky for you the one word of Spanish you knew wasn't chocolate chip cookies," I said.
"So I hang on as long as I can, but the guy's a big mother and he finally peels me off and chucks me across the room like I'm a bag of laundry. I must have caught my head on the corner of the desk is all I can think of," she said. "What's it look like back there?" Sara made a move to explore the damage with one hand but thought better of it.
"Ah, it's just a scratch," I said. "You'll need a complete head transplant, but that's all. Maybe we can arrange to get you a head with hair already grown on it. Any particular color you like? You used to be partial to frosted magenta, as I recall."
"Piss off, Prof," she said, with a grin I could just make out in the half-light.
On we went. We nibbled at cheese sandwiches, apples, and biscuits. We sipped water. We bounced. We felt good; we were halfway home. Suddenly we really started bouncing; we'd turned off the highway. After a minute we pulled up, and Jorge cut the engine.
"More than likely giving us a chance to stretch our legs and water the greenery," I said.
We heard Jorge or Billy or both get out, and then the sack of hammocks hiding our tunnel entrance was removed and we gratefully crawled in the open air. As I had thought, we had turned off the main road and parked out of sight of it behind a clump of stunted bushes Cap'n Dan undoubtedly knew the Greek name for.
Jorge beamed at us and asked us if everything was all right. We said it was maravilloso and asked him the same thing. He said igualmente, but there was one little thing—he hoped it was all right—but we'd lost Billy.
"Lost?" I said incredulously. "You mean like mislaid? Did you look under the seat? How about the glove compartment?"
"All I know is I stopped where the señor wanted me to and off he went, and ten minutes later some child opens the cab door, hands me a paper bag, says the señor's taken off and I better do the same, which I did," said Jorge.
"I can't believe it," I said.
"After all we did for that mother," Doris said.
"Wonder what's in the paper bag?" Benny said.
"Probably his fingers," I said.
Jorge got the bag from the truck and passed it to me. I looked at it with unfathomable dislike.
"Go on, open up," Doris said. "It won't bite."
"Unless it's his teeth," I said.
I opened it. Inside were a note and a souvenir. I took out the note. It was scrawled in pencil on a second paper bag that had been torn down one side and flattened out. Sara and Benny gathered around and we all read it together:
Vic—sorry as hell but I got no choice with this much money involved. Don't worry about me, I got friends, I'll make out. Take care of
yourselves. I'll be in touch when I get back and explain all. DO NOT LOSE THE ENCLOSED IT IS ONE GOOD LUCK PIECE THAT WORKS.
Adiós, abrazos, and muchas gracias, yore ol' pal Gray Lobo.
Kisses to Doris. Happy landings.
I looked at Benny. Then I looked at Doris. Then I looked at Jorge. Then I took out the souvenir, a heavy statuette about five inches high, painted black, portraying some Mayan deity, I guess, a goofball with protruding ears, squatting on his heels. I'd seen a million similar in the windows of souvenir stores in Mérida. I placed its value optimistically at $2.99.
I hefted it—or is it him?—in one hand and wondered if I could throw it far enough to hit the cactus Jorge had modestly retired behind to commune with nature. I finally pocketed the damn thing, I could always give it to someone I didn't like for Christmas as a paperweight. Then I started feeling around in the bag again and finally turned it inside out.
"Now what are you looking for?" said Doris.
"I just thought there was an outside chance my old pal Money No Object might have included a blank check."
Jorge came back and asked us the equivalent of Now what, folks? As if we had any choice. We could hardly go back to Mérida and track down Billy and then massacre the little fucker, could we? So we climbed back into the truck, and Jorge replaced the hammocks, and off we went again.
After a while I simmered down somewhat.
After a while I surprised myself by dozing off for an hour.
More hours passed, about three of them.
We stopped for gas somewhere outside Cancún, then drove into and then straight out of town. I wanted to stop and let a doc or a vet have a look at Sara, but she insisted she was all right and it would be foolish to take the chance and anyway she could have it looked at in a day or two. Jorge stopped again, this time for twenty minutes or so, as we were leaving Cancún. About twenty minutes after that, the truck started jolting again. This time when it stopped and when we'd all emerged stiffly, we found ourselves in a deserted, peaceful grove of trees deep in the rain forest somewhere. It turned out Jorge's last stop had been for more provisions. Since we had over three hours until we were due at the rendezvous with Dan, we got to have our picnic after all. I was the only one with the intelligence to even think of keeping a close eye on the encircling underbrush for any herd of starving pumas who might want to share our ham sandwiches with us, or us with the ham sandwiches.
Afterward we lay around on the blankets we'd stretched out, and Jorge snored and Doris wrote in her diary and Benny stared at his chess set and I rued the day and counted killer ants and watched it get dark and then watched it get darker.
It was just on eleven when we started off again, with Sara in the front this time as there didn't seem to be any reason for her to face the discomfort of tunneling back into the womb again. For me, it was no discomfort; not only is a womb a nice place to visit, but it's not a bad place to live in either.
The moment Sara had climbed up into the cab, she rapped loudly on the partition separating us and called out, "Everyone comfy back there?"
"No," I said. "And keep it down, will you? I've started a diary of my own and I'm trying to concentrate."
After that she kept it down except for the occasional comment, like "This is your friendly tour guide. Puerto Morelos comin' up straight ahead," and "Puerto Morelos Hilton, next stop," and "Hang on, creepy crawlies ahead."
We bounced. We lurched. We jolted. We jarred. At last we stopped, this time in a clearing just big enough to turn the truck around in. I took a look around with the flashlight. We were on one side of a sluggish-looking river some thirty feet across. A decrepit, mossy, slippery gangplank only a couple of feet wide extended out from the bank to two uprights sunk in the river.
"That'll be fun too, with all the baggage," I said to Benny.
"Don't worry, we'll carry you, Prof," said Doris. "And crocs don't feed at night unless something large, with a lot of fat, falls in."
We had a half hour to wait, so we sat and waited. There were a lot of stars high above and a lot of mosquitoes lower down. There was the occasional unforgettable cry of the lesser Cancún vulture.
Twelve o'clock came, then twelve-thirty, then one, with no sign of Dan—or maybe he'd arrived in a submarine.
By two o'clock, we had to face it. Something must have come up, and I'm not talking about that old devil moon.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"Now what, o wise one?" Sara asked, popping the last chocolate-covered marshmallow into her greedy little mouth. We had decided to give Dan up until three o'clock to show, which time it undoubtedly then was. "We could always do like Huck Finn did and make a raft," she offered.
"Keep your bright ideas to yourself, will you?" I said. "It's easy for you to be funny, no one's looking for a bald tomboy in sneakers and hip-huggers, are they? They're looking for Doris the dumb blond secretary. Even the lieutenant wouldn't recognize you if he saw you, and how's he going to see you? He can't be everywhere. And as for Benny, he could kiss Benny's hand for an hour and not recognize him—in fact, I hardly recognize him. I'm not sure I'd want to."
Benny had passed part of the time while we were waiting changing into baggy, knee-length yellow shorts; long socks; sandals; a T-shirt that read 1986 Hang Gliding Nationals, Riverside, Ca.; a cap that had Isla Mujeres written on it, the visor of which was painted to resemble a shark's gaping mouth complete with teeth, yellow-tinted sunglasses, and a false upper plate that fitted over his own teeth and completely altered the shape of his mouth.
"But what am I supposed to do if we have to beachcomb for a week," I said, "find a lighthouse to hide in? Maybe I could bury myself up to the neck in sand like those statues on Easter Island they forgot to put eyes in."
"We gotta do something pretty soon," she said. "I'm gettin' bit to death."
"Me too," I said. "And there's more of me to bite. But you are right, darlin', we sure gotta do something, and I sure wish I knew what it was. However, let us look at it logically. Right, Benny?"
"Right," said Benny.
"One. We decide to wait a week. You and Benny could rent a place in the morning, then I sneak in later and stay snuck in. But it can't be a hotel room because there's no way I could stay hidden in a hotel room for a week, what with maids and the food problem, so it would have to be a house somewhere, preferably isolated and preferably without a live-in maid, gardener, or cook. But it could be done. Or a boat, why not? The problem with that is, if Dan doesn't show up next week either because something's come up, then what?"
"Then we're in the same mess as now," Sara said.
"Exactly," I said. "Benny, do you think Jorge could put me up for a week somewhere and then bring me back down here again next Friday?"
Benny glanced over to the truck where his amigo was dozing.
"He might," he said. "I can always ask."
"If so," I said, "then he can drop you two in Cancún in the morning on the way back, and you can do what you will for a few days, have a holiday until the heat's off, and then fly home. I'll sort things out down here in a week one way or the other. That way at least you two are out of it all."
"Yeah, but you just finished saying we were out of it all already," Sara said.
"Except if you're with me," I said. There was a squawk from a spider-eating great tit in the nearby jungle.
"We could have a word with What's-his-name, Alfredo, at the hotel, to see if he knows anything," Sara said.
"We could," I said. "If he's not on the high seas with Long Dan Silver. And if he knows anything. And if he'll tell us if he does know anything." I looked gloomily downriver one more fruitless time.
A deep silence fell.
"Edgar Allen Poe," said Benjamin after a while.
Doris looked at me and tapped her forehead significantly.
"Swamp fever," she said. "Drives men mad."
" 'The Purloined Letter,' " he said.
"Totally round the bend," she said. "Tragic, really."
"The p
roblem Mr. Poe posed," said Benny, in a lecturing tone, "was how does one hide something of value in a foolproof manner. His solution? Do not hide it at all."
"Taxi!" said Doris. "Take this man to the funny farm."
. . .
It was a quarter after eight in the evening of that same day.
The Mérida bullring, which held just under eight thousand spectators, was filling up fast. There were a surprising number of children, the girls in party frocks, the boys in long pants and white shirts. Vendors of all shapes, sizes, and ages sped up and down the aisles hawking ice cream, beer, soft drinks, caramelos, peanuts. A mariachi band high up in the stands played a lively ditty. The occasionally undecipherable announcement blared over the loudspeaker system. Pretty señoritas flirted with passing gallants. Matrons fanned themselves. Children hopped up and down in restless excitement.
At eight-twenty precisely there came over the loudspeakers the clarion call we were all awaiting—no, not the lonely bugle solo that heralds the start of "La Macarena," that chilling paso doble that is the signal for toreros to cross themselves one more, final time, and then set their satin-covered feet on the still-warm sands for the traditional opening procession, but the stirring strains of "Sweet Georgia Brown," signature tune of the clown princes of basketball, the world-famed Harlem Globetrotters.
And from the large tunnel next to the smaller one aptly named the gates of fear, out of which toros bravos hurtled during bullfights, out pranced the Globetrotters to a roar of applause, tossing basketballs deftly to one another. Leading the team was a fetching miss, the next-to-newest addition to the side: bringing up the rear was the latest addition, V. (for Very Visible, Vulnerable, and Varicosed) Daniel.
Thanks again, Benny, I thought as I puffed my way to "our" bench and subsided onto it gratefully. There you are—you'll be leaving the Rocamar now after happy hour, wending your way down the hill, carefree and gay—and here I am, got up like Othello in warm-ups, being invisible in front of eight thousand Méridians.