To hell with it,” I decided. The night was half gone and tomorrow I’d be out on that barge again.
Drilling the Mohole.
1970
Nobody Believes an Indian
G.C. Edmondson’s offbeat “mad friend” stories have appeared here at infrequent intervals for a good many years; time, we felt, to ask the author for a few words of background on the series:
“The part that nobody’s willing to believe about the mad friend series is that they’re all true. Not even my friends among the old pros were convinced until the mad friend actually showed up at a convention last summer and proved at least to some of the ladies that he was not a figment of my imagination.
“I’ll not go so far’s t’say everything happened exactly and in the same order as the stories are written, but life is usually less tidy than literature—especially as lived in some of the godforsaken creationis ani where my friend and I have been called to show the flag and snow the natives as per our other, non-literary occupations.
“The stories are actually a sort of literary crossword or, musically, a fugue: Two or more separate melodic strains which occasionally intersect as they spin out in separate orbits, hoping to hold the involved reader on the edge of his seat waiting for everything to resolve with one magnificent final crashing chord.”
TWENTY-FOOT-CEILINGED rooms surrounding a fountained patio, wheelbarrow and sand tastefully concealed behind bougainvillea of pornographic brilliance. White-coated boy bringing beer to the shady side when the hotel’s tranquillity was disrupted by a man in a spacesuit.
The spaceman came into the sun-drenched patio and was merely a motorcyclist in full racing-leathers. He pulled off his brain bucket and behind a guardsman mustache I saw my mad friend. “When’d you start wearing that stuff?” I asked.
My friend squinted into the shade. Sinking into a chair, he said, “Comes a time in every man’s life when he’s seduced by the thought of living another twenty-four hours. What’re you doing here?”
I was explaining our troubles with the tracking station whose grid covered a square mile of delta land when some moderately grabbable women appeared. “Guess who’s here,” one said. Then she saw my mad friend.
A waiter banged and scraped extra chairs in place. “Two triple X and one coffee,” I said.
“You remembered our song,” my friend murmured.
“Why the spacesuit?”
My question was answered when the desk clerk and a waiter wheeled an immense, police-style motorcycle into the lobby. “Aren’t you a bit old for that?” I asked.
“Speak for yourself, dad.”
Waiters finished positioning the bike. One scattered sand beneath the engine.
“What’s that sand pile doing in the lobby?” a wife asked.
“Taxes go up when they’re through building. Ergo, a hotel in this country never quite gets finished.”
“I like this place,” my friend said.
Considering what would be left of a motorcycle after parking one night on local streets, I could see why.
The waiter returned. My friend accepted coffee with a wistful glance at dark-foaming beer. I was raising my glass when a shadow fell across the table. The short, dark, and very fat man wore a business suit and a felt, go-to-hell hat which Mexicans call a sombrero de cuatro pedradas—a hat that’s had four rocks thrown at it.
“Don Pancho!” he exclaimed, and opened his arms. My friend returned the formal embrace and introduced us. We exchanged names and promised eternal fealty. He bowed to the ladies and the waiter hastened with another chair, Cutty Sark, and an old-fashioned seltzer bottle.
“Gen’l Marquez is at home in several Indo-European tongues,” my friend warned.
“More like a paying guest,” the general said in English. “I’m only at home in Amerind.”
“To become a general,” I hazarded, “takes a large slice out of one’s life. How did you find the time?”
General Marquez settled in a chair. Squirting soda over scotch, he lapsed into Spanish. “You have heard of generales de división, generales de brigada. I am a general de dedo.”
“Finger general?” a wife echoed.
“One day Pancho Villa was short of officers. He pointed his finger at me and said, ‘You are a general.’ ”
The story was an old one but this was the first time I’d heard it from a general.
“He fights a different war now,” my friend said. “Against the thousand and one enemies of the tomato.”
“You’re a planter?”
“In a modest way. I have a thousand hectareas.”
Before a wife could ask, my friend said, “Four square miles.”
The general finished his drink in two gulps. He sighed expansively and after a moment asked, “Would you like to see the ranch?”
Wives were not enthused at the thought of tomatoes under a delta sun. Nor did the prospect awaken boundless joy in me.
“Come along,” my friend said.
“Why?”
“You’ll find it interesting.”
I sighed and stood up. “If we’re not here when you get back,” a wife said, “we’ll be somewhere else.”
Out in the street stood a dusty jeep sans muffler. I looked at my mad friend. “If you think I’m going to—” but desk clerk and waiter were already wheeling out my friend’s motorcycle. I studied its hydraulically damped frame.
“They’ve changed since you got your scars,” he said.
It looked softer than a jeep. I strained my leg over the saddle. Electric starter whirred and my mad friend tore off like a striapygous ape, leaving desk clerk and waiter agape in the dust. “Must five up to my image,” he shouted apologetically. Once out of town he settled down to a pace more suited to that miserable parody of a road.
“What are you up to down here?” I shouted over his shoulder.
“Have you head of Operation Intercept?”
“Most assuredly,” I shouted back. Uncle was pressuring this country to discourage pot farming by creating colossal traffic jams at the border, disrupting the economy on both sides, and treating citizens like criminals. Official philosophy had it that citizens would pressure their own government to do something about pot and pill suppliers.
All it really did was anger a race well aware of the American factories which unrestrictedly export pills to the border whence they work their way north again for illicit sale.
“So you’re helping the local army napalm the pot farmers?”
“That’s why they sent me,” my friend said. “But you know how it goes.”
I did indeed. Each year some poor sucker’s fields, be they of pot, alfalfa, or strawberries, are saturated with oil, fired, and filmed from enough angles and exposures to make footage for the year’s anti-pot campaign. The photography has been known to convince some foreign journalists.
“What’s the general growing besides tomatoes?” I asked.
“The general has been affable, correct, cooperative, and has done everything he can for me, short of actually letting me see what’s growing in his fields,” my friend said.
“So I’m your witness?”
“Two missing Americans are harder to explain than one.”
The Harley hummed across the delta through paths that snaked between towering reeds and cattails. Finally we broke into cleared land and I squinted across monotonous miles of maturing tomato plants. Outside an air-conditioned office I saw the general’s jeep.
My friend razzed the Harley, retarding the spark until it backfired twice. By the time he had the kickstand down the general was beckoning. We rushed into air-conditioned coolness before we could start sweating.
One wall was covered with maps. “Here,” the general pointed, “is where we are. Here,” pointing elsewhere, “picking is in progress. If your government doesn’t change customs regulations and pull the rug out from under me again, I may make a profit. And here,” pointing at another spot near the center of the map, “is where we had trouble
last year.”
I was settling into a chair, trying to relax accumulated strains out of my back. “Bugs?” I asked.
“There was an infestation,” the general said.
“Is that where you had to do some burning?” my friend asked.
“The government was kind enough to cooperate,” General Marquez said. I assumed this was his face-saving way of explaining that he had been that year’s pigeon for the filming. “Would you like to see the area?” he asked.
Frankly, I think one part of a tomato field looks much like any other part, but my friend was on his feet again.
Thanks to irrigation, the paths here were not dusty, so we followed the general’s jeep. The trouble spot had gone to weeds. Inside forty fenced-off acres, burros grazed.
“Can we go in?” my friend asked. He was about to ask again when he noticed the general peering intently, mumbling under his breath. Then abruptly the general was with us again. “Of course,” he said. The driver opened a makeshift gate through barbed wire.
The general walked warily, like a man in a mine field. Suddenly he stopped to pull up a tiny plant which struggled among the assorted milkweeds, burdocks, and quelites. “Stuff grows everywhere,” he said, tossing aside a lid of potential pleasure.
“Even without planting?” my friend enquired maliciously.
“The birds and the bees,” the general said. “Only it’s mostly cattle and burros distribute the seed in their droppings.”
Our cautious stroll progressed and he uprooted several more plants. Even my mad friend was beginning to droop. How did the short, fat general stand the heat? Finally we returned to the air-conditioned office. The general produced beer and a bottle of mineral water for my friend. When we had savored the cool darkness for a moment, he said, “Now you must dine with me.”
“But our wives—” I protested. The general waved my objection away. “The Cadillac has already picked them up.”
Cadillac or not, I was distinctly uncomfortable at the thought that our entire party was now in the general’s power. Glancing at my friend, I knew the thought had crossed his mind too.
“Shapiro will have kittens out at the tracking station if I don’t report in soon,” I said. To my surprise the general handed me a telephone. After clicks and buzzes of an astonishing volume I received an even greater surprise when Shapiro answered.
“I’m dining with friends at Gen’l Marquez’,” I said.
“Oh?” Shapiro plainly didn’t know what business of his it was where I spent my evenings.
“How’s it acting?” I pursued.
“Same damn bogie,” Shapiro groused. “Too low and fast to be anything in a natural orbit. You suppose a comsat signal could be heterodyning with some other carrier?”
“Feed it into the black box and see what crawls out,” I said.
“What d’you think I’ve been doing for the last month?” Shapiro said disgustedly.
I rambled on and managed to repeat where I’d be that evening. Finally I hung up and the general cheerfully commandeered the phone. Twenty minutes later the three of us crowded into the air-conditioned comfort of the big car’s back seat. The general’s chauffeur deposited us at the casa grande. I wondered how the wives had enjoyed his driving.
Stepping into the sala, I stumbled over a large conical rock. It looked like the lapilli which occasionally shoot from volcanoes. Wives were in the patio sipping Gibsons with a small, very dark woman who could only afford that dress if she were the general’s wife, since she was too old to be his mistress. As we walked in they cut short a discussion of whether boots could properly be worn with the new botch-look.
The house dated from a day when the general and his likes had entered such premises with hat in hand. He caught my glance. “My father was a servant here,” he said. “Slave is a more accurate term.”
“And you?” my friend asked.
“Ran away to Texas.” The general sighed. “That’s where I really learned to live like a dog. When Madero and Villa were ready, I was too.”
My friend smiled. “And now you invite us into your home.”
The general glanced at wives and lapsed into the language they were speaking. “Every gringo comes to strip this country of its treasures,” he said. “You show better taste than most.”
A criada poked her head into the patio and said something. “Dinner’s ready,” the general translated.
“What was that?” I asked, “Huichol or Cora?”
“Cora.”
“You speak it well?” a wife asked.
General Marquez smiled. “Until I was twelve I spoke nothing else.”
We filed into the sola. The table was a masterpiece of intimidation, with a salad centerpiece which looked as if it had been assembled by a hairdresser. I studied the array of forks by my plate and tried to remember if one works inside out or outside in. Under the table a wife was sending frantic podograms. We were in for an ordeal of the tasteless Parisian put-on which Latins use to impress one another. Even when they import a French chef, the result is hopeless.
The general’s wife deftly parted lettuce leaves which gave the centerpiece the appearance of a gigantic artichoke. My friend and I exchanged despairing glances. We were still picking at salad when the criada entered again, this time with steaming bowls of squash-blossom soup and a basket of yard-wide, paper-thin tortillas.
“Tdcarim!” I exclaimed. It was ten percent of my total vocabulary in Cora.
The general glanced at his wife and laughed uproariously. Finally she gave an unwilling grin. “Take that thing out to the pigs where it belongs,” he said. The criada removed the centerpiece.
I attacked squash-blossom soup with the largest spoon, simultaneously ripping off a square foot of tortilla. Abruptly, the general and his wife were just people. Rather nice people, it seemed to me. Could he really be a pot farmer? Sadly, I supposed he could. It was a quick cash-crop and this country had no sociological problems, since it was not an in thing for their young people.
“I suppose most pot farmers would be willing to quit if the Americans would stop making pills,” I hazarded.
“Posiblemente” the general said noncommittally. “I’ve never had enough of an in to consider planting it.”
“Really?” My friend sounded less than totally convinced. “What was that infestation you had to burn out last year?”
“Nobody believes an Indian,” the general complained.
My mad friend said something in Cora. The only words I caught were “horse” and “manure”.
The general stared fixedly at my friend, and for a moment I thought things were going to turn unpleasant. Then with an air of sudden decision the fat man said, “Malintzín, I think you should know what really happened.”
“My government pays me a salary based on that assumption,” my friend said.
“The only trouble nowadays,” the general began, “is nobody listens to Indians except anthropologists and mostly they have weak stomachs.”
“Surest way to turn one off,” I said, “is to suggest there might be a grain of fact in all those legends he’s so busy tape recording.”
“Oddly enough, it started with a legend,” the general said. Wives suddenly interrupted their debate over boots and hemlines.
Turning to my mad friend, the general said, “You troubled to learn our language. Do you know the story of Earth Shaker?”
My friend frowned and shook his head.
“It’s logical, this being earthquake country,” I said. “Poseidon was important where the Greeks had similar geological difficulties.”
“That’s what I thought,” the general said. “Of course, I never got to know the Old Men well, working here at the casa grande all the time. But I remember nights when the moon was in a certain phase we used to sneak off to sit around a fire and do things with drums to keep Earth Shaker quiet. Each Sunday the owners of the big house lined us up for confession, and the priest used to give us hell but then—priests give Indians hell
just for breathing.”
My mad friend mumbled something in Latin and made a gesture of exorcism.
“After two revolutions I drifted from Indian ways,” the general continued. “I don’t suppose I thought of Earth Shaker again until a couple of years ago.”
“Not the sort of topic that’s cropping up all the time,” a wife agreed.
“I had just cleared this land and gotten it producing. I needed that first crop.”
“Of tomatoes?” my friend asked.
“As you probably know,” the general continued, “a tomato has no patience. Pick it a day late and you might as well not waste money shipping it.”
“You had a sudden plague of labor troubles?” I asked.
“Overnight my pickers all disappeared.”
“Which neighbor needed your newly cleared land?” my friend asked.
“I did some detective work.”
“You?”
The general smiled. “People see what they expect to see,” he said. “In white calzones and shirt, with a feather in mv hatband, I am not a landowner. Just another Indian looking for a job.”
My friend reviewed the list of landowners in the delta. “The tracking station bought out Herrera. Johnson lies north of you—”
‘You are having difficulties with a satellite?” the general asked.
I’d forgotten about making a big thing of our bogie over the phone. “Not really,” I said. “Things like this happen all the time. Something goes wrong with the equipment and you get a false signal. Right now weve got something sitting directly overhead. If it was really there, you could see it with the naked eye. At that altitude it’d probably look bigger than the moon.”
“I have seen nothing,” the general said.
“Of course not,” I explained. “Our radar sees it but telescopes and all sorts of other things don’t see it. Therefore, it’s not there. It takes time and patience to find out what’s wrong with the radar.”
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 21