Gringos (4 page)

Two days after Christmas I was off for Chiapas with a load of mixed cargo. The long telephone message had come from the Bonar College people, who were camped out down there on a river bank, mapping a Mayan ruin called Ektún. Dr. Ritchie or one of his people had called my hotel from the Palenque bus station, the nearest telephone, and given Beatriz a shopping list of things they needed.

I had everything but the
embrague por la
Toyota—a Toyota clutch. That was the Spanish word for it all right, but in Mexico, where so many automotive terms had become Americanized, it was generally called a
cloche
. What kind of Toyota? Car? Truck? What year model? Did they want an entire clutch assembly? They didn't say or Beatriz didn't bother to take it down. Refugio and I had helped them carry their stuff in, and I couldn't remember seeing a Toyota.

Probably they had fried the disc pulling down trees and dragging blocks of stone around. But I wasn't going to buy one and then go through the agony of trying to return it. As a rule you get value for your money in Mexico, but it's hard to get any of it back, to get a deposit returned or any sort of refund. In their financial dealings with gringos, the Mexicans employ a ball-check valve that permits money to flow in only one direction. It can't back up. Buy the wrong one and I would have to eat that clutch, throwout bearing and all.

No
embrague
then, but I had everything else. Peanut butter they craved, and Ocosingo cheese and a sack of potatoes and flashlight batteries and two small hydraulic jacks and canned milk and pick handles and 35-millimeter color slides and bread and twenty-five gallons of gasoline and so on. I also had an old Servel gas refrigerator for Refugio. He had asked me to be on the lookout for one. It was too tall to transport upright—my camper shell was only cab high—so I stowed it sideways and hoped for the best.

Mérida, for all its associations with the Maya empire, is not really very close to any of the major ruins, except for Uxmal and Kabah. Mayapán and Dzibilchaltún are nearby but they don't count for much, not as spectacles. I had a good 300-mile run ahead of me, south to Palenque on paved road, then another seventy miles or so of rough track through the woods. At Champotón on the coast I bought two buckets of fresh shrimp, one for Refugio and one for the college diggers. Refugio was crazy about shrimp.

I reached Palenque in the afternoon and worked the ruins there for an hour or so with my Polaroid camera, taking pictures of tourists at five dollars a shot. Hardly any business. The hippies, sunburnt and dazed, had no money, and the older gringos had their own cameras. I left the Mexican tourists alone, lest I be reported. As a foreigner I wasn't legally permitted to do this sort of thing.

Louise kept telling me the term “hippie” was out of date. She couldn't tell me why. These words come and go, but why had that one been pulled? The hippies hadn't gone away. There were even some beatniks still hanging around here and there in Mexico, men my age, still thumping away on bongos with their eyes closed, still lying around in their pads, waiting for poems to come into their heads, and sometimes not waiting long enough. I did perhaps use “hippie” too loosely, to cover all shaggy young Americano vagabonds. Refugio called the real hippies
aves sin nidos,
birds without nests, and
los tóxicos,
the dopers. These were the real hippies, the
viciosos,
the hardened bums, kids gone feral. I knew the difference between them and the ordinary youngsters knocking around on the cheap with their backpacks.

They came now the year 'round to Palenque, which is everyone's idea of a lost city in the jungle—real hippies, false hippies, pyramid power people, various cranks and mystics, hollow earth people, flower children and the von Däniken people—such as Rudy Kurle, with his space invader theories. At night they sat on top of the pyramids in the moonlight. They were right to come here, too, to see these amazing temples on a dark green jungle hillside. The scholars say that Uxmal has the finest architecture, and of course there is nothing to touch Tikal, for monumental ruins on the grand, Egyptian scale, but the hippies got it right instinctively. They knew Palenque was the jewel of Mayaland.

Between the ruins and the little town of Santo Domingo del Palenque there was a pasture where they camped out, these young travelers, with their vans and tents and ponchos. The rock music never let up. I stopped with my Blue Sheets to walk around the place and look them over. I took my flashlight and peered in tents and car windows. I put my light in their faces. What drove them to herd up like this in open fields? Even as a kid, and a foolish one, too, all too eager to please my pals, I couldn't see myself doing this.

It was getting dark. There was no one here I wanted. I gassed up at the intersection in town and headed inland, up the valley of the Usumacinta River. The road was paved for a mile or two then became washboard gravel. It was so rough that you could drive for miles on a flat tire and not know it. This was the dry season, so called, and the archaeologists were stirring again. In my experience it just rained a little less at this time. Damp season would be more like it. There was no moon. It wasn't a night for pyramid roosting.

When you see steel drums you're getting close to Refugio's trading post and salvage yard. He counted his wealth in fifty-five-gallon drums. They lay scattered along the road and in the woods all around his place, rusting away and more or less empty, but still holding the residue of various acids, solvents, herbicides, pesticides, explosives, corrosives, all manner of petrochemical goo.

His people had heard me coming and were assembled outside to see who it was. The floodlight was on; dogs were barking. Small children jumped on my bumpers, front and back. A teenaged boy named Manolo was waving his arms. This was Refugio's son. He wigwagged me in around the old tires and plastic pipes to an aircraft carrier landing. The crowd parted to make way for Refugio—relatives, cronies, employees. He had the paunch of a
patrón
now but still he moved like a bowlegged and cocky little third baseman. The sleeves of his short-sleeve shirt hung well below his elbows. Around his thick neck he wore a Mayan necklace of tubular jade beads, with a heavy silver cross at the bottom.

“Jaime!”

“Refugio!”

We went into an
abrazo
there under the floodlight, with bugs swirling around us.

First I got the gifts out of the way. Some
futbol,
or soccer, magazines for Manolo, and a three-speed hair dryer for Refugio's wife, Sula, and a box of iodized salt. She was afraid of getting a goiter, like her mother. Refugio dredged up half the shrimp from the bucket with his hands and began shouting orders to Sula and the kitchen staff. This many
camarones
were to be boiled at once. Then peeled and chilled and served to him and him alone in a
coctel grande,
with
mayonesa
and green sauce. The rest could be fried with garlic and served up with a lot of rice. That would do for the rest of us.

He shooed everyone away, and we went to his office. It was like the waiting room of a cut-rate muffler shop, with an old brown plastic couch and some odd bits of automotive seating. Refugio sat at his desk, with Ramos at his feet, son of the late Chino, bravest dog in all Mexico. Refugio never would admit that old Chino tucked his tail when he heard thunder. I stretched out on the couch. Manolo brought me a cold bottle of Sidral, an apple-flavored drink, and a wet towel and a dry towel to refresh myself with. He showed me his Christmas present, which was a thirty-three-piece wrench set, all nicely chromed. Manolo had turned out to be a fine boy, from a brat. He was an only child, and Sula couldn't bear to wean him until he was four years old. He was a biter. He bit his playmates and threw rocks at strangers until he was twelve. Now here he was, a fine young man of sixteen.

Refugio turned on the air conditioner in my honor, though it wasn't very hot. The lights dimmed, as for an electrocution. It was only a small window unit but it put a strain on his generator.

“How is the bennee?” he asked me.

“Business is bad, Refugio. Life is hard for a gringo in the Republic these days. I'm selling hammocks on the street now.”

“¡No! Qué desgracia!”
He laughed and drummed his hands on the desk. “And the Doctor?”

This was Doc Flandin.

“I don't see him much anymore. He stays in his big house.”

“His tobacco pipe is drawing well?”

“Oh yes.”

Mexicans don't smoke pipes and they find them amusing.

“Still he throws his head back? So?”

“Not so much. He's not tossing his old white locks about these days.”

“He works hard on his book, no?”

“So he says.”

“It will be a hundred pages?”

“More like a thousand.”

“No! This is one of your jokes!”

“I speak the truth.
Las mil y una.
”

He laughed and pounded the desk again. “No! What a miracle! So many leaves! Who could ever read them all?”

Not me. I went along with Refugio on that. Short was good in a book.

Then he became solemn and said, “My name is in this book, you know. Refugio Bautista Osorio. On many leaves.”

“I know. Mine too. You and me and Chino. The doctor will make us all famous.”

I told him about the Servel refrigerator and how the jet had been changed to use propane gas. I had found it in the port town of Sisal and cleaned it up. He summoned Manolo and another boy and told them to unload it and connect it to his gas bottle and light the burner.

“¿Cuántos?”
he asked me.

I wrote “$150” on the palm of my hand and showed it to him.

“Ni modo.”
No way. He made a quick slicing move on one index finger across the other. Too much. Cut your price in half. But he was only playing around. When a price really upset him, he called on St. James and the Virgin both in a whisper.

My pricing policy was simple. I doubled my money and then rounded that figure off in my favor. This refrigerator had cost me around $70, so my price was $150. My terms were cash on delivery, payment in full,
no acepto cheques
.

Refugio took a thermometer from the drawer and held it up. “I will place this in the box, and if the red line gets down to fifty in one hour, then we will talk about the value.”

“There was no talk of fifty degrees before.”

“Two hours. What can I do? You are my friend.”

“All right. If you put that thing in the
congelador.
” The freezing compartment, that is.

“Gringos are so hard.”

He wanted to barter and first he offered me an old hospital bed that cranked up and down. Then he dragged a wooden box across the floor, a hand grenade box with a rope loop at each end. It was there that he kept his
antigüedades
. He brought out a mirror, slightly concave, made of a wooden disk and shiny bits of hematite. Some Mayan queen had seen her face grow old in it.

“Worth more than two hundred.”

“Yes, but not to me. I'm finished with that. No more relics.
Término
.”

“That is what you say. Look. Fine orange ware.” It was a ceramic cup.

“No, I'm serious.”

Next a baroque pearl shaped something like a fish. Eyes and mouth and fins had been incised on it.

“No.”

“And what do you say to this?”

At first I thought it was a piece of green obsidian and then I saw it was a carved lump of beautiful blue-green Olmec jade. The figure was a hunchbacked man with baby face and snarling jaguar mouth. Very old, even for Olmec. The nostril holes were conical. They had been drilled with wet sand and pointed stick, rather than with the later, bird-bone, tubular drill. I had no feel for Olmec art—more pathology than art—but I knew this weird little man was valuable. I knew a collector in St. Louis who would pay $7,500 for this thing, maybe $10,000. If a man wants something and you're any kind of salesman, you'll make him pay for it.

I knew that Refugio knew it, too, and would never trade it for an old icebox.

He said, “Green, see, the color of life. Dead rocks are brown.”

“Where did you get this?”

“Who knows?”

“Tres Zapotes?”

“Who can say?”

“They make these things up at Taxco now, out of chrysolite and serpentine. On bench grinders.”

“They don't make that one at Taxco. Look it over.
Impecable
. If you can scratch it with your knife, I give it to you.”

“No, it's not bad. As a favor to a friend then. I'll trade you even.”

“Ha! That is what you hope and pray to God for!”

What he wanted me to do was take a photograph of it and show the picture around in Mérida and New Orleans, put out some feelers. I had no intention of being a broker in the deal but I humored him and took a couple of shots with my 35-millimeter camera. He posed it beside the Sidral bottle to show the scale. The camera flash made him jump and laugh, as always.

Manolo reported that he couldn't get the Servel to do anything. I advised patience. The cooling to be gotten from a small flame and no moving parts was magical but slow. I reminded Refugio of his old kerosene refrigerator, which took three days to make mushy ice, if you didn't open the door. It was one of the earliest frost-free models.

“Turn it upside down for a bit, Manolo,” I said. “Then try it again. Make sure it's level.” I had heard somewhere that this headstand treatment did wonders for a balky gas refrigerator, though it seemed that any clots in the system would have been dislodged on the ride down.

Sula brought in the giant shrimp cocktail. The
camarones
were piled high in a soup bowl. Refugio squeezed limes over them and spooned mayonnaise and
salsa verde
on them. I asked him about the Ektún dig. What was all this about a Toyota clutch?