Gringos (33 page)

He gave me his address on Euphrates Avenue and said he would wait two weeks for me and no longer. I was to bring all my tools and a roll of coarse-mesh screen wire for sifting boxes and my three-burner Coleman stove and a can of white gasoline.

“But you ain't coming, are you, Budro?”

“No, I'm not.”

I said I probably wouldn't be venturing out much anymore, into the
selva
. He opened the car door, and a pomegranate rolled out. Neither of us made a move to pick it up. A sour and messy fruit. Somebody gives you one and you haul it around until it turns black or rolls away out of your life. He introduced me to Freda. In the light of the dome lamp, I saw her face for the first time tonight. It was Beany Girl, all cleaned up and looking pretty good in a white shirt with faint blue stripes. Her hair was tied up with a blue ribbon, and there was some more blue on her eyelids. She was coordinating her colors these days. She was brushing her hair and washing her face and even painting it. But still jumping into cars, it seemed, like LaJoye Mishell Teeter. She had put on a pound or two. Beany Girl was getting regular meals now out of the kitchenette, and perhaps snacking a bit on that couch. Eli and Beany Girl at home with their magazines. An evening at home with the Witherings.

“Glad to meet you, Freda.”

“Hi.”

“You doing all right tonight?”

“Yeah, I'm okay.”

A spark there of the old defiance. She recognized me, all right. I had some questions for her but I couldn't think of how to put them, with Eli standing there. He showed me some of the advanced features of the Cadillac radio, how in the scanning mode the needle would glide across the dial and stop for a bit on the stronger signals. I told him I wouldn't be needing my three-burner stove and he could take the thing along if he wanted it. He went to get it out of the back of my truck.

Beany Girl spoke to me without looking at me. “All right, it's me. So what? What have you got to say to that? I knew I would run into you again somewhere. I told Dan we weren't through with you.”

“I heard you left him at Flores.”

“You heard right, Curtis.”

“Good move. What happened there?”

“That's my business. I suppose now you'll go running off to tell him where I am.”

“No, we won't be seeing Dan anymore. Dan is right where he ought to be.”

“That's how much you know.”

“I know he's gone.”

“That's what you think. You don't know him. There was a girl in Seattle who refused to dance with him. It stayed on his mind real bad and he came back two years later and smothered her with a pillow. You don't know his powers. He'll find me if he takes a notion to.”

“Not this time. He's dead.”

“Where? What happened? I don't believe it. How do you know? He hasn't completed his mission yet. Dan has a glorious destiny.”

“He's gone, don't worry. The mission didn't work out.”

“Who told you about Flores?”

“That's my business.”

“Do you know for a fact that he's dead?”

“Wild pigs are feeding on Dan. You can take my word for it, Beany Girl.”

“I still don't believe it. Are you going to tell Eli about me? Well, go ahead and see if I care.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Do you know what happened to Little Red? I keep thinking about her. Do you remember that little skinny girl?”

“She's okay. The Mexican boy, too, if you're interested. It's a little late in the day for you to be worrying about them, isn't it?”

If there had been a hatchet on the seat, she would have split my skull with it. “I wish Eli would tear your head off. He could do it too.”

“You think so? He's certainly got the reach on me. I think he might want to quit before I did. Hard to say. But you may be right. I better not start anything.”

“All right, I should have taken those kids with me but I was afraid of Dan. You don't know how it was. I had to slip away in the night. You don't know anything at all about his powers. He was a beautiful man five years ago. You don't know anything about me either. You think I'm just some old trashy bag but you don't know the first thing about me. I don't suppose you ever made any bad mistakes in your life, Curtis. You think you're a just man too, just like Dan does.”

I asked her about the Gulf of Molo. Where was it? What was it? She was going to give me some kind of answer, too, but then the trunk lid came down with a thud and here was Eli again. Anything in the way of a door
El Zopilote
shut with decisive force. The stove was packed away in the trunk—and so was my Coleman lantern, I learned later, with a box of spare mantles. He gave me his hand.

“We got to get on the road. You give it some hard thought now. If I don't see you in two weeks, I'll catch you sometime on the go-around. I'll holler at you one of these days. Tell everybody at Shep's to kiss my ass. Don't let your plow get caught in a root, Budro.”

He drove away at a creep, lights out, down the lane of darkened trailers, and when he reached the highway his headlights blazed up and he honked once.

The only lighted box in the park was our Mobile Star. The coffee was made and so Louise and I sat up in our own kitchenette and had coffee and broken cookies from the Hoolywood bakery. She wanted the names of my visitors for her diary, to get it up to date, right up to the minute, the last event of the day duly recorded.
Some people named Eli and Beany Girl came to call from Belize in an old Cadillac
. Rudy sometimes made false entries in his diary, she said, and he saw nothing wrong in the practice. We talked some about going home, or I talked about it, going back to Shreveport. Louise thought we should stay on here for awhile.

“It's early in the year. Let's give Mérida another year.”

She knew she could count on me to put things off. She had a plan, too, and nothing to do with sitting on a rock and watching milk goats this time. If we could get loans from Beth and Dr. Flandin, she said, we could make a down payment on Fausto's hotel. My good friend Refugio Bautista could be a partner and serve as the owner of record. Fausto himself might be persuaded to carry the note. We could have our own hotel on Calle 55. Neither of us had ever learned a useful trade, but we weren't dumb. We were quite capable of managing a narrow hotel. After all, we weren't genuine drifters, not by nature. We weren't really beach people. You had to commit to something. You finally had to plant a tree somewhere.

“What do you think?”

It wasn't a bad idea, if we could put together the down money and get some long-term credit. She had thought it all out. A mom-and-pop hotel, with mom no doubt perched behind the cash register all day. There was no telling what innovations she had in mind for the old Posada. I feared debt and already I missed going out at night and putting my light in people's faces but it was a better plan than any plan of mine and I said we would see. I said we would talk some more about it. It comes to me now, late, as I wind this up, what it was those hippies were singing on the hilltop above the river. It was “My Darling Clementine,” a good song.