George Mills (38 page)

“No no,” the old man reassured him, “the machine will be fine. You bribed him good.”

Mills made Judith Glazer’s arrangements with the receptionist and returned to the car. The old man was with him, watching him as he unlocked the automobile. “I already gave you your five pesos,” George said. “What do you want now?”

The old fellow shook his head. “You could have done all this over the phone,” he said tragically.

“Is that what you do? Give advice?”

“I am a tout,” he said proudly. “I saved you two hours. It cost you less than a quarter.”

“Yeah, well, when I come back with the lady I work for don’t expect any more.”

“Don’t come back,” he said earnestly, touching George’s arm.

“What?”

“Don’t come back. This is not a good place. For rich
gringos.
”

Mills, who was only a delegated
gringo,
and for whom wealth and international travel and the perks of life, sleeping in motels and eating out, were merely assignments, was not so much offended as surprised by the old tout’s warning.

“You listen to him, Misters,” the boy said who had watched his car. “Father Merchant is the wisest tout in all Mexico.”

“He didn’t have such terrific things to say about joo,” George said.

“Father Merchant knowing my heart,” the boy said sadly.

Mills opened the car door. “Uhn uh, uhn uh,” Father Merchant said. “Always is it too hot. Crack the window of the side of the passenger three inches, and the window of the side of the driver two, to force the circulation of the air. Carry the towel with you to protect yourself when you touch metal surfaces.” Mills looked at the wisest tout in all Mexico. “
Es verdad,
” he said. Mills started the engine and began to back out of the space. The old man walked beside the car, trying to hand a card to him through the open window. Mills stepped on the brake and put the car in neutral.

“Please,” he said.

“Nightspot,” said Father Merchant, and gave George the card. “
Institute de Cancer
too sad. No cover, no minimum. Very refine. Intimate. No clip joint. Sophisticate. Tell them who sent you, they let you sit ringside, close enough to stick your finger up the pony’s asshole. Go,
señor.
Take the
señora.
All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” Mills started to back out again. “Father Ixtlan Xalpa Teocaltiche hears confessions in English. Thursday before 6:00 A.M. mass. He’s been to Chicago. Church of the Conquistador Martyrs.” Mills was out of the space and pulled hard on the wheel to turn into the street. The old man called to him through cupped hands. “On Sundays, at the bullfights?
Sol y sombre?
Shady side is not always the best choice. You could freeze your nuts off if it’s a cool day.” Mills could see him now in the rear mirror. “
Don’t drink the water!
” the old tout shouted.

They sat by the small pool in deep lounges, idly watching children play Marco Polo. The kids had driven most of the grownups out of the water, making it impossible for anyone to swim with their excited thrashing and sudden, abandoned lunges that obliterated the pool’s invisible lanes whenever the child who was
it
moved away from the coping and plunged, eyes shut tight, toward the voices that answered “Polo” in response to his honor-blind “Marco.”

Mrs. Glazer seemed rested, looked better. Mills remarked on this. “It’s my sunburn,” she said. “It covers the jaundice. Oh, Mills,” she said, “I’ve been to the lobby. It’s more hospital here than motel. The guests bring their nurses. Some arrive in ambulances. I saw one with New Jersey plates. Have you looked at the room service menu? The salads and entrees have been approved by the clinic’s nutritionist. Monks openly solicit money to pray for the remission of your cancer. Urchins show you the candles they’ll light if you’ll give them some dinner.

“And everyone’s so hopeful, Mills! As if the decision to come here, break with their doctors, defy science and throw themselves into all the desperate optimisms of last resort were measures in the cure. I myself have not been unaffected. Why, we’ve not been here two days yet and already I’m feeling better than I have in weeks. A little, a little I am. Oh, Mills,” she said, “how are we to know what is so and what is just psychology?”

“From the blood tests,” Mills said, and his charge glanced at him.

“Yes,” she said. “Well, what do we do now?”

“Maybe you should rest.”

“No. No, I’m not tired.”

“Do you want to eat something?”

“I’m not hungry. I’m raring to go. What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what? What is it?”

“A Mex at the clinic gave me a card.”

“A card?”

“The address of some nightclub.”

“A nightclub? Oh, I don’t think I’m up for a nightclub. Oh,” she said, “a
nightclub,
a border town nightclub. Exhibitions, you mean. Burros and girls. Fetishists. Consenting adults. I don’t think so, but I’m feeling well enough to spare you. You go, Mills. Take the car.”

“No,” he said, ashamed he had spoken. “I don’t want to go.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “The motel has a caretaker service. All I have to do is notify the desk. Someone checks the room every fifteen minutes. Go on, go ahead. I don’t expect you to be always on duty. Go, you’ve the urge.”

“No. Honest,” Mills said, “I don’t have any urge. It was a joke. When you said you were raring to go. It was a joke.”

“Because I won’t think less well of you, you know. People are curious about what they think of as depravity. The act means nothing. The curiosity’s at least as depraved as anything the girl will do with the beast.”

“I never put it in any animal,” Mills said, hurt. “I ain’t never licked instep or spanked ass or sniffed panty. I never gave pain or asked for it. It never came up.”

“Well I have,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Nearly all those things. What difference does it make?”

“You have?”

“I was a madwoman eleven years.”

Which was when it came up. Welcome to Mexico, he thought.
Bienvenidos
to the border towns!

They drove, at the woman’s discretion, through Ciudad Juarez, Mrs. Glazer in the wide back seat murmuring the turns, calling their routes, demanding the sights. She pronounced herself dissatisfied with Twelfth of August Avenue, the long main street, all appliance stores and tire shops, and asked that Mills show her the clinic. Somehow he found his way back to the low stucco buildings of that morning, and drove into the parking lot. A watchman stopped them. “All close,” he said, “
finito.
”

“Should you give him a tip?”

The man poked his flashlight through the open window into the back of the car.

“Hey,” Mills said, “turn that off. You’re shining it in the lady’s eyes.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s his job, Mills.”

George turned to look, following the tight white beam that lay across his shoulder like a rifle. Judith Glazer sat prim as a confirmation girl, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes lowered. She looked like someone in a tumbril. Inexplicably, the guard crossed himself.

“Give him money,” Mrs. Glazer said. “He may be an old lover.”

“What for? Why’d he do that?”

“He saw my condition,” she said.

“Are you tired?” Mills asked. “Do you want me to take you back?”

“Not at all.”

They passed the church where the priest who had been to Chicago heard confessions in English. And stopped for a light on the corner where the nightclub was situated. It was on a narrow street with much traffic. A boy came up to the driver’s window and offered to watch their car.

“No,” Mills said. “We’re not parking.”

“No,” the boy said, “till the light changes.”

“Maybe we ought to start back,” Mills said when they were driving again. “It’s pretty late.”

“No,” she said, “I’m enjoying my joy ride.”

“You had a long trip yesterday. All the way from a different country.”

“If you’re tired I’ll drive.”

“No,” Mills said. “That’s all right.”

“Let me. I feel like driving.”

“You’d better not.”

“Pull over. If you’re afraid you can go back in a cab.”

“Please, Mrs.”

“I want to,” Mrs. Glazer said. “My pill is wearing off and I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable. It would distract me.” She was kneading her thighs and legs with her hands, taking her flesh and squeezing as if she would wring water from it. “If only I could get the knots out,” she said.

“I’m turning back,” Mills said.

“I told you no,” Mrs. Glazer said. “I don’t want to. If you insist on driving you may, but I won’t go back. I was crazy more than a decade, shut up when I could have been traveling. What’s the good of being rich anyway? I never got anything for my money but the best care. In the end I simply grew out of my madness anyway. Now I’m dying. That watchman saw it with a flashlight. I don’t want the best care. That’s why I came to this place. That’s why I chose you to bring me. Perhaps it will be like the last time. Perhaps I’ll grow out of my cancer too. Don’t you
dare
turn back.”

“You’re the doctor,” Mills said gloomily.

“I am,” she said, “yes. Don’t sulk, Mills. Look at the countryside.” They had left the city and entered the desert.

“It’s the idea of the pain,” Mills said when they had driven perhaps five more miles.

“Did you say something?”

“It’s the idea that somebody only three feet away has pain. It fills up the space. It’s all you can think about so it’s all I can think about too. I can’t stand it if I know my wife has a headache. I get mad at her for telling me.”

“I’ll take my pill,” she said.

“You took one before we left the motel. It isn’t four hours.”

“What do you think will happen? Do you think I’ll become addicted? Turn around,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”

In the city, children were sleeping on the sidewalks. They lay solitary, curled as dogs on the pavement. A small girl lay on her back, her arms thrown out behind her head. She looked like someone floating in a pool toy.

“God is good,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“Sure.”

“He really is. He’s a genius. He creates the poor and homeless and gives them a warm climate to sleep it off in. Shall we wake them? Shall we give them money?”

“They’re street kids. They’d have their knives in me as soon as I shook their shoulder.”

“I want you to go back,” she said. “Give them twenty pesos each.”

Mills left the motor running. He woke the children and put money in their hands while Mrs. Glazer sat in the back seat and looked on through the rolled and dusty windows.

It was how they spent their first days in Mexico. Mills gave Mrs. Glazer’s money away. Considerable sums. As much, he estimated, as the rental car would cost, or his motel room. Often as much as a hundred pesos to an individual beggar. They crossed themselves before their benefactress’s deputy with beggars’ gratitude, conferring the lavish, sinister blessings of the down-and-out. It was not his money. It was not their benediction. And he had a sense of proxy encounter, a delegate notion of agented exchange. At first he followed their responses in a dictionary, nervously had them repeat themselves when he did not understand, and scrupulously relayed their thanks in English equivalencies, rendering the tone and degree of already hyperbolized requital, hoping to suggest to the woman that the poor and homeless were on to her.

“The starving woman thanks you on behalf of her five starving children, and wishes you to know that every bite of their first meal in four days will be dedicated to the honor of your gracious self.”

“Hmph,” Judith Glazer said.

“The legless cripple is profoundly moved by your generosity, and says that he will direct the nephews who carry him to his post every morning and pick him up again in the evening to take him up the steps and into the church so that he may light candles for your continued health and good fortune.”

“Tell him,” Mrs. Glazer said evenly, “don’t try to thank me.”

“The impaired wino sends his and his Saviour’s compliments, and resolves to pledge himself to a new life in partial repayment for the three dollars.”

She had him take her into poorer and poorer sections of the city, abandoning the busy street corners and entrances to the fashionable shops and restaurants, the hotels and museums where beggars congregated to groan their appeals against the chipper discourse of the rich, driving with her into the narrow barrios, the blighted box board and charred, tar paper slums, places where the beggars had only each other to importune, raising the ante of their already stretched humility to outright, outraged fantasy.

And now she had him lower the car windows. And now she had him open the doors.

They looked on the big, late-model American car with as much astonishment and fear as if it had been a tank. Children backed against the jagged, chicken wire frames they used as doorways and called their adults to witness the strange new avatar, the queer incarnation, sudden in the roadless, streetless jumble of singed, mismatched shacks as a visitation of angels or government.

Seeing it was only a lone man, a lone woman, they lost their alarm and began to push forward.

“This is crazy,” Mills said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Sound the horn,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Let them know we’re here.”

“They already know we’re here.”

Mrs. Glazer raised herself from where she was slumped in the back seat and leaned forward. She reached over Mills’s shoulder and pressed the horn.

“Oh boy,” Mills said.

“Don’t get out. They can come forward and you can hand the money out to them.”

When Mills didn’t move she reached for her purse and undid the clasp. Hands and arms like the feelers of sea creatures groped toward her through the car’s opened doors. Mills, frightened, pulled out his pesos and started to cram them into the first hand he saw. “No,” she said, “just one note. Just
one!
Here,” she said, “give me.” She pulled the notes out of his fist and, selecting the smallest denomination, pushed it into one of the outstretched hands. Then, inspired, she smiled, dropped the rest of the money into her lap, and took some loose change from her purse. She held out a handful of coins to them, ten-centavo pieces, twenty. “For all of you,” she said. “
Para todos. Para todos de usted.
” She sat back in her seat, lightly tapping the thick pile of bills in her lap, her gold and diamond rings loosely spinning on her thin fingers. She looked on serenely while the Mexicans talked to each other in whispers. Then, with great effort, she moved out of the car toward them, holding out the last of her change, perhaps six or seven cents.