“Later, the pythoness, who was famously lazy, grew quite fat and began spending her money and time at European spas, health farms, to lose weight. She had plastic surgery, too, which made her look like she was chewing tobacco all the time. Eventually, she preferred goin’ to bed with women, gave up men, includin’ me. Shot heroin, too, and sailed that Chinese junk straight to the isle of Lesbos. So, amigos, I made my slow exit, reluctantly, suffering humiliation upon humiliation. Despite her unsurpassed narcissism and diabolical behavior, I remained hopelessly in love with Raquelita. Only Dolores del Rio, or maybe Hedy Lamarr, had a face to rival the one she had before those witch doctors cut into it. Compared to La Pitonisa, Garbo might as well have been a chimpanzee.”
Hugo Gresca’s monologue, fueled by Cinco Estrellas and Negra Modelos, Pace and Terry realized, would not cease until he collapsed or died. They never did find out how Hugo had ended up in Matamoros because just as he started to tell them about a night he and Sean Connery and Huston spent in a Kabul whorehouse called The Den of Forbidden Fruit during the filming of The Man Who Would Be King, a very large, purple-black man wearing a crocodile-skin vest over his bare chest, entered the bar and lifted Gresca out of his chair and without saying a word carried him away.
Terry was awakened early the next morning in their motel by a call from his father. Terry’s mother had had a heart attack and she was in the hospital. Pace drove Terry back across the border to a small airport in Brownsville, where he got on a plane to San Antonio. From there he could catch a flight to Raleigh-Durham or Charlotte. Pace again pointed his 4Runner south. He needed more of Mexico, or thought he did.
3
Pace drove on Highway 230 out of Matamoros to Monterrey and across the mountains to Saltillo, in the state of Coahuila. He had read about this part of the country, how in the middle of the 19th century, when the Austrian emperor Maximilian ruled Mexico, there had been a strong secessionist movement that resulted in battles between the insurrectionists and federal troops. It was during this period that the government of Coahuila granted sanctuary to the Black Seminoles, an integrated tribe from the United States comprised of Seminole Indians from Florida, breakaway Southern Creeks, who had fled relocation camps in Oklahoma, and fugitive slaves mostly from Texas. These people were called Mascogos by the Mexicans; they were unique in that they mixed freely and banded together against both slavehunters and the U.S. government. The Black Seminoles were allowed to settle in Coahuila in return for their help protecting villages along the U.S.-Mexico border from raiding Comanches and Apaches. The Mascogos became farmers and staunch supporters of the insurrectionists opposing Maximilian’s army.
Pace stopped at the Hotel Río Salado, got a room, cleaned himself up a little, then went downstairs to the dining room. Only one other person was there, a tall, ruggedly handsome, broad-shouldered man in his forties, sitting at a table sipping through a straw what appeared to be fruit punch. As soon as this man saw Pace about to seat himself at another table, he stood up, motioned with a raised hand, and said, “Señor, if you would be so kind to join me.”
Pace walked over and introduced himself, and the man said, “I am Aurelio Audaz.”
They shook hands and sat down.
“As we are the only customers,” said Aurelio Audaz, “I thought it could be agreeable to keep each other company.”
“Por qué no?”
“Ah, you speak Spanish.”
“Very little, I’m afraid. But your English is excellent.”
“My mother was from San Francisco, California. At home we spoke English and Spanish interchangeably. May I ask what brings you to Saltillo?”
“I’m meandering toward Mexico City. I’m a tourist, never been to Mexico before. I live in North Carolina, though I grew up in New Orleans. And you?”
“I live in Coycacán, near Mexico City. I am here in Coahuila to hunt jaguars.”
“Do the local cattle ranchers pay you for this service?”
“No, I do so for my own pleasure. I hunt exclusively with bow and arrow. Wild animals don’t carry guns, so neither do I.”
“They don’t use bow and arrows, either.”
“True, but the big cats are far more powerful and agile than human beings, and have large jaws with very sharp teeth that can crunch your bones, also razor-like claws that with a single swipe will remove a man’s face.”
“At least you’re not going at it hand to paw.”
“Not yet. I lie still and wait for the beast to come to me. It takes great patience.”
A waiter came to their table. Pace ordered an Indio and accepted a menu from him. He went away.
“And when you are not tracking and lying in wait for jaguars, Señor Audaz?”
“I teach economics at a university in Mexico City. Hunting provides an agreeable contrast.”
The waiter returned with Pace’s beer.
“The mole here is excellent,” said Aurelio Audaz. “I recommend it. They make it with chocolate.”
“Mole, then,” Pace told the waiter.
“Lo mismo para mí.”
The waiter nodded and left.
“I’ve done some reading about the Black Seminoles,” said Pace, “called Mascogos, who used to live in Coahuila. It’s quite an interesting history.”
“I know it. Their community was in Nacimiento. I encountered a descendant of the Mascogos once, twenty years ago in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental. He was an old man, perhaps your age, but still sturdy. I was twenty-five. He challenged me to a knife fight.”
“Why?”
Audaz shrugged his shoulders. “Quién sabe? Who knows? He was alone, as was I. Perhaps he was deranged, a mountain hermit. His clothes were torn, even his sombrero. He was dressed like a vaquero, but he had no horse. His skin was black yet his eyes were blue. You know there were whites among the Mascogos? They were not only Negro or Indian.”
“William Powell was one,” Pace said. “He was part white, one of their leaders from Florida. He renamed himself Osceola and led his tribe into the Everglades, where they took refuge.”
“I would like to have met Osceola, the Seminole chief. He must have been a great warrior. He never surrendered to the United States government.”
“That’s right. The Seminoles refused to sign a treaty. Osceola was bayoneted to death at Fort Moultrie, in South Carolina. A doctor there decapitated the body and took Osceola’s head to New York. It was destroyed in a fire.”
“What a terrible indignity,” said Aurelio Audaz.
The waiter arrived with two servings of mole.
“Mole was invented in Puebla,” Audaz said. “Now you can get it almost anywhere in Mexico, but if you stop in Puebla, have it. They do it right.”
Pace finished his beer and signaled to the waiter for another.
“Would you like a beer?” Pace asked Aurelio.
“No, gracias. I don’t drink alcohol.”
“You’ll live longer.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. The most popular way for drunks to die is while driving.”
“I’m sure it’s best not to drink when hunting a jaguar.”
“Fuera de duda, beyond any doubt. Unless, of course, the jaguar also has been drinking.”
After they had finished eating, Pace suddenly felt weary.
“I’m sorry, Aurelio, but I must excuse myself now. I need to sleep. I’m an old man and driving a great distance tires me out.”
Audaz stood up and extended his right hand.
“Of course, Señor Ripley. I leave before dawn tomorrow, so I’ll say buen viaje to you now.”
Pace shook his hand and said, “Good hunting to you, my friend. Don’t let a big cat get his claws too close to your face. It’s a good one.”
“Muchas gracias. If it should happen, we would never meet again, and that would also be, if not a tragedy, a disappointment.”
Pace turned to go, but then remembered Aurelio’s story about his meeting the man in the mountains, and turned back.
“Tell me, Aurelio, what happened with you and the old Mascogo? Did you fight him?”
Audaz grinned and shook his head.
“No, he pulled out his knife, a very long, dark blade, stained from many years of use, from animal and perhaps men’s blood, with uneven chips on the edge. I told him I was sure he had conquered many men braver than I, that I would be an insufficient test of his prowess. He stared hard at me for a long time, and at the moment when I became convinced he was going to lunge at me, seeing that he held his dagger with the cutting edge inward, so that his strokes be directed upward, as experienced knife fighters do, he returned his weapon to his belt and walked away.”
“Good for you.” said Pace.
“Sí,” said Audaz, “but even better for him.”
Pace slept well that night. A long-tailed animal with a tawny body and a black face appeared in a dream. When he woke up in the morning, Pace could not remember if it was a jaguar or not, only that it seemed to be pursuing a naked woman who was laughing as they both ran into darkness.
4
Late the following afternoon, Pace stopped at a roadside fruit stand to buy oranges and cherries. He stood next to his 4Runner and read the hand-painted sign: NARANJAS, MANZANAS, CEREZAS. Wind, dust, high clouds, beanfields. This felt and looked like what he expected Mexico to feel and look like. A short, portly, young woman wearing a brown dress with a thin, green rebozo around her shoulders, was stacking apples at the counter. A boy, about three years old, wearing only a faded red T-shirt, no pants or shoes, was pedaling a blue and white tricycle back and forth in front of the stand. Where were the flies? Pace expected flies but there were none; probably because the wind was blowing the stench of fertilizer or raw manure in the opposite direction. He was thinking about last night’s dream: the jaguar, or puma, following the woman reminded him of Sailor, his lanky, loping gait; and the female had long, glistening black hair, like Lula’s when she was young.
The little boy fell off his tricycle and started crying. The woman came around from behind the counter in a hurry, brushing against a small pile of apples, causing them to spill onto the ground. She was yelling, “Arriba, mijo! Arriba!” And she was laughing until two black Cadillac Escalades sped by with assault rifles firing from the rear passenger windows. The woman’s face went dark and her shawl flew off as she ran toward the boy, shouting, “Abajo! Abajo!” before countless bullets tore into the fruit stand. Pace froze. He was still standing after the Cadillacs were gone. The boy was wailing, his tiny body covered by his mother’s. She was not moving. Her last two words had been arriba and abajo, up and down.
Pace removed the boy and held him until he calmed down, then placed him in the front passenger seat of the 4Runner and buckled him in. Amazingly, his vehicle had not absorbed a single round. Pace found a few empty burlap sacks on the ground behind the counter of the fruit stand and used them, as well as her green rebozo, to cover the woman’s body. He then drove himself and the boy back to Saltillo and took him into the Hotel Río Salado. Pace told the manager what had happened and he instructed two maids to take care of the boy. He asked Pace if he wanted him to notify the police.
“I’ve been told that in Mexico it’s never a good idea to call the police,” Pace said.
“The men who killed the woman must be narcotraficantes,” said the manager, “drug runners, probably Los Zetas. They were shooting at the fruit stand for their amusement, and she got in the way. The police and los narcos have an accommodation. I will call the local authorities if you request it, but, unfortunately, I do not think the police will do anything other than to cause you delay, and, perhaps, to cost you money.”
“What about the boy?”
“If he has family, we will find them. Do you wish to pass the night here, Señor Ripley? There would be no charges.”
“No, gracias. Thank you for taking care of the boy.”
Pace headed north. He would stay in Monterrey, then re-cross the border at Matamoros into Texas. There was nothing more for him now in Mexico. He turned on the radio and dialed in an American news station. The Vatican was considering the possibility of baptizing extraterrestrials.
5
The first call Pace made after he got home was to Terry and his father. Oscarito, Jr., answered the phone at his service station and told Pace that his wife was in stable condition and was expected to be able to leave the hospital in a few days. She was at Bay St. Clement Baptist but visitation was restricted to family members. Oscarito, Jr., thanked Pace for his concern and then passed the phone to his son, who wanted to know why Pace had come back so soon.
“Well, Terry, I ran into a situation just south of Saltillo that pretty much soured the trip for me. I’m all right, but there was an incident where a woman got murdered for no good reason and it literally turned me around. There are good people in Mexico but the country’s kind of out of control, I guess. I’m not saying I won’t go back there some time, just this isn’t the time.”
After assuring Terry that he would supply more details about the shooting when they were next together, and telling him how glad he was that his mother was recovering well, Pace rang off. He sat at the kitchen table in his cottage, drinking peppermint tea. It was almost noon and frost was still on the ground. Three blackbirds were pecking at something in the grass next to the driveway in front of Dalceda’s house. Pace recalled an old saying from his childhood: If you see blackbirds on the ground in January, it will snow. There were a few days left in December, so perhaps, he thought, snow will fall sooner.
The fact that the young woman who died at the fruit stand protecting her little boy shouted in Spanish the words for up and down could not have been a coincidence. Or could it? Had it been a sign, or a warning? Did the episode have any meaning regarding his search for the Up-Down? Pace was in a quandary. Perhaps it was foolish to attach significance to such a horrendous event, which had nothing to do with his being there. But why had he not been shot, too? Bullets were whizzing everywhere: How could they all have missed him? Pace realized that he was crying. Tears from his eyes were falling into the teacup.
He stood up and walked outside. The blackbirds ignored him, continuing their pecking at what Pace could now see were the remains of an opossum. He had not cried since Perfume James’s funeral. He was still in shock, he realized, from the incident in Mexico. When in danger, Pace remembered, possums often feign death, in the hope that their pursuers or adversaries will lose interest and leave them alone. When the shooting at the fruit stand started, Pace had not had time to even think about playing dead; yet, unreasonable as he knew it was, he felt guilty that he was alive and the woman was dead. At least her child had survived.
It was too cold outside to cry. Two of the blackbirds took off; the one that remained strutted around the carcass a couple of times before pulling at the possum’s tail. Pace went back inside the cottage. He decided to write a letter to the family of the woman who died, to tell them how heroic she was, that her selfless, final act saved her son’s life. He would mail it to the manager of the Hotel Río Salado and ask him to please see that it was delivered into the proper hands. Pace thought it was important that the boy know of his mother’s bravery and her sacrifice. He regretted that he could not write the letter in Spanish.
That night, Pace dreamt again of the jaguar and the woman, only this time, after the pair had been running for a while, the woman turned to look back at the bounding feline but he was no longer there. She stopped running, and Pace woke up. He looked out the window. It was not yet dawn and snow was falling.
6
It was unseasonably warm the morning of Pace’s 80th birthday. This was July weather, not October’s. Marnie Kowalski had called at six a.m. from New Orleans to wish him a happy birthday. She was sixty-four and already up and baking; in fact, sh
e told Pace, she was about to open a second bakery, in Uptown, near Tulane, called Magdalena’s, in honor of her mother, whose cake and pie recipes were the foundation of Kowalski Cake & Pie Company in the French Quarter.
Pace was on his second cup of coffee, reading a revised translation of Proust’s La Prisonnière, and was in mid-passage wherein Morel is being excoriated for his detestable behavior, when the sound of tires crunching gravel in his driveway forced him to stop. An old Ford pick-up truck parked between the house and the cottage, and a tall, slender, teenaged girl got out of the passenger side.
“This is it, Daddy!” she shouted.
A well-built black man of average height came around from the driver’s side and stood beside the girl. Their mutual resemblance was unmistakable. Pace went out to greet them.
As soon as the girl saw Pace, she smiled and said, “Mister, do you remember me? I’m Gagool Angola, and this is my daddy.”
Pace walked over to her, nodded his head, and said, “I most certainly do, Gagool. You’re all grown up now.”
“I’m seventeen.”
The man came forward and extended a hand.
“I’m Rangoon Angola.”
“Ray-Ray,” said Pace, and shook hands. “My name is Pace Ripley.”
“Gagool has told me many times how kind you were to her when she run off.”
“He made me grilled cheese sandwiches and hot chocolate.”
“I been in a correctional institution, sir, been out now six months, and she be after me to find this place and thank you for your help in her difficult time.”
“I didn’t really help your daughter so much, Mr. Angola. I did feed her, though.”
“A couple times,” said Gagool.
“Would you like to come inside?”
“No, thank you. We’re on our way to Atlanta.”
Pace looked over at the old pick-up.
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