Weep for Me (17 page)

He signed them and showed us where to sign them.

“They will tear off the duplicate card when you cross. Welcome to Mexico. I hope your trip will be enjoyable.”

And that was all. My knees felt weak as we went down in the elevator. I hadn’t realized how much I had dreaded walking up to the counter and having someone ask us to wait a moment, and then turn to find the door blocked by someone in uniform.

We walked to the bank, on the other side of the street nearer the river. For $1,000 they gave us 8,620 pesos.

As we walked back to the car, through the busy streets, I kept thinking that it was all some sort of trap. They had let us have the tourist cards. They were watching us. They knew we could not escape.

We drove to the bridge. American customs gave us declaration forms to use on returning. I paid the man on the middle of the toll bridge a half dollar. At the far end of the bridge was a small shabby frame building on the right. Mexicans in brown uniforms were ordering people with bundles out of a bus. A man directed me into a parking area beyond the building. A boy ran over and carried our bags in and put them on a long table in the shade of the porch. A man started opening the bags, ruffling through the clothes, snapping them shut, sticking on seals.

He said, “You will go inside, please. The boy will put the bags back in the car.”

We went inside. A man was using a broad-bladed knife to spread overripe avocado pulp on tortillas. A fat, bored man held out his hand. “Automobile papers, please.”

I gave him the registration. He sat down and typed three copies of an automobile permit, handed me one carbon. “Do not lose.
Adiós. Buen viaje.
Means good trip.”

He turned a liquid eye on Emily, stared frankly and appreciatively at breasts and flanks.
“Buen viaje, señora,”
he repeated.

“Thank you,” she said. We went out. The bags were back in the car. I tipped the waiting boy a peso. I drove into Matamoros, down streets with the high blank tan house walls on either side.

“My luck,” she said softly. “You’re my luck.”

“We want Mexican Route One-o-seven. Look for it.”

“Couldn’t you feel it? Couldn’t you feel that big, high, wonderful feeling that we were licking them all? Kicking them all in the mouth?”

“Look for the route.”

We drove around the public square once before we found it. The bandstand stood empty, sagging, heat-struck in the middle of the square. Nobody stirred in the sun. A sleepy soldier with a shiny helmet stood outside a public building. As we went by slowly and Emily stared at him, he whistled dutifully.

Matamoros had a sodden, broken, abandoned, down-at-the-heel
look. A dog with most of its hair gone in patches ran almost under the wheels. I wrenched the wheel and cursed it.

We found 107. Two hundred miles to Victoria. I had filled the tank in Harlingen, where we had eaten the night before. A few miles out of town we had to stop at a small guardhouse. A bronze-faced boy stared solemnly, uncomprehendingly at the tourist cards and auto permit and waved us on.

The road arrowed through desert. Some scrub grew near the road. There was a great deal of cactus. The heat was dryer than before. More bearable. Wild horses wheeled, raced off across barren flats, kicking up powdery dust. Vultures wheeled in a slow circle over something not yet dead, something we could not see.

“How about the money?” she asked.

“We’ll have to put it back in the suitcase and lock it in the back end before we get to Victoria. Well look for a place.”

We went through the rough narrow streets and around the right-angle corners of a small town and then dipped down to a river. The river was only thirty or forty yards wide and the small ferry could handle only two passenger cars at a time. It was headed to our shore with two cars aboard, and it moved slowly because it was powered by two small men who walked in turn to the bow, nipped onto the stationary cable with metal tools, and trudged heavily toward the stern. A bright red pickup truck appeared on the opposite shore.

I turned off the motor to keep the car from overheating as we waited. The shabby ferry seemed barely to move in midstream. It was a tiny fragment of time, a piece of my life, a moment imbedded in heat and strangeness the way a bright tile is pressed into moist concrete.

All my impressions were suddenly more vivid. I gave a sidelong glance at the stranger-woman beside me. It was much like those tiny intervals of lucidity that come during the delirium of high fever. What was I doing here—I, Kyle Cameron—here with the woman, with the
money, with the sharp-lined memory of murder, with regrets and strange hungers so perfectly balanced that somehow I had ceased to exist?

There was another Kyle Cameron back in Thrace, and on this Tuesday morning he had walked to the bank. He was behind his bronze bars, giving the customers that brief, courteous, self-effacing smile. Tomorrow evening he would go to his girl’s house and maybe she would have some of those little swatches of furniture fabric and she would talk eagerly about this color and that, and how they would go with the walls.

But right now he was in his wire cage, between Sam Grinter and Paul Raddmann, and he was teller number six and all was right with his world.

If that were so, then who was this other person who now sat here waiting in a strange land to be pulled across a muddy stream by wiry little men with unreadable faces? If the two were one and the same, and on this morning teller number six had not reported, then what had changed him? The look of young girls when a windy corner snugged their dresses against their hips and thighs? Or the velvet trap beside me, with her whipspring loins and endless greeds? Or something in myself, something that I had never recognized. Some capacity for …

I was suddenly aware of her shaking my arm. “What’s the matter? Can’t you see him motioning to you?”

The ferry took us across, and farther on, beside the road, she watched for cars while I put the money back into the brown suitcase. We had lunch at a place on the corner, in Victoria, where 107 met the Pan-American Highway. It had ebony floors, that little restaurant, and Mexican food, and the stranger-woman with me sat erect, alert, bright-eyed, as she ate enchiladas and licked the bright tomato color from her thin white fingers.

O
n that first night in Mexico we stayed at a small tourist court on the right side of the road not far beyond the village of Tomazunchale. It was in a palm grove in a moist tropical valley. Near the individual cabins were caged small animals. We ate in a round, open-sided bamboo affair that looked like a small bandstand. Monkeys were chained nearby. A fat, torpid, evil-looking parrot hung chained to a perch near our table with its spotted white cloth.

In a plaintive voice, as we were being served, the parrot began to say,
“Recuerda Juero! Recuerda Juero! Recuerda Juero!”
It was a thin, whining, monotonous voice.

“What is he saying?” Emily demanded as the waiter brought her salad.

“His name it is Juero. He is saying remember Juero. You understand. Do not forget to feed Juero.”

“Can’t you make him stop?”

The monotonous voice went on. The waiter looked hurt. “It is all he says. He has no other words. He does not stop until he is fed.”

Three tourist women arrived at that moment and the waiter left to show them to a table. Two of them were matronly, and obviously schoolteachers on summer vacation. The third was a young girl, blonde, fresh-faced, with Jo Anne’s coloring. It was an odd, dull hurt to look at her. Soon I heard her call the heavier woman with glasses “Aunt.”

They made a fuss over Juero, practiced Spanish on the waiter, fed Juero, laughed with delight when a fat hen came scrambling up to peck at the scraps Juero dropped. Once the blonde girl saw me looking at her. She dropped her eyes quickly and I thought I detected a faint flush on her throat. She could not have been over eighteen. She was like a reincarnation of Jo Anne at eighteen.

When we had finished eating, we each had a bottle of excellent Mexican beer, the moisture beaded heavily on the outside of the dark glasses. We walked back through the night to our cabin. We had agreed that in Mexico the money should remain locked in the back of the car. We carried our baggage in the back seat so that there was never any need to unlock the trunk compartment of the car.

She went into the cabin and I stood out in the night for a little while. Some sort of pump or generator chugged heavily not far away. The insect shrillings nearly drowned out the sound of the infrequent cars passing. The caged animals chittered and grunted.

When my arms and ankles began to feel as though little hot needles were being stabbed into them, I opened the screen door and went into the cabin. A twenty-five-watt bulb hung from the middle of the ceiling. She had taken off her blouse and skirt and sandals. She was diagonally across the bed, one leg swinging free, her dark hair hanging from the opposite side, her eyes closed, dark-circled.

Again, as at the ferry, I felt the odd disassociation with time and place, the peculiar unreality. I had always thought of criminals as being a breed apart. A separate race. Now I was learning to know them better. I was learning that probably every one of them had one moment or many in which he said, as more prayer than curse, “Oh, God, can this be me?”

The performance of the criminal act is a form of intoxication, of self-hypnosis. It is accompanied by the pounding pulse, sweating palms, and yet is not vastly different from the games we played as children. Crouched in the shrubbery by the porch estimating the chances of making a dash back to the elm tree to come in safe. The real recognition comes later. It comes when you suddenly realize that no parent is going to come out onto the porch to say that the game is over and it is time for bed. This game goes on forever, and the elm tree is forever out of reach. No matter how much you will it, the game cannot be halted.

I had my two prizes. The money locked in the car, meaningless. This woman stretched across the bed. I stood near her head and looked down at her. The soft expressionless mouth, slim throat with hollow at the base, fragile tracery of collarbones slanting toward that hollow. What was that slant of collarbones once called by the English poets? The neckline of Venus. One arm was flung up so that I saw the dark smudge of unshaven hair at the armpit. Breasts slightly flattened by her position. Belly and pelvis and thighs, a composition of long, taut, rounded lines.

I looked down at her and thought that this was indeed a strange animal. A breathing, masticating, digesting, perspiring, warm-scented animal. Hurt it and it cries out. Give it pleasure and it whimpers softly. But it has no more constancy than a cat. No more morality than a mink. Its mind and its heart are dark places that it does not understand. It is never friend, never lover. It is an organism dedicated to self-gratification without thought of loyalty.

She slowly opened her eyes and looked up at me. It was once again that look of dark mockery, unchanged from that moment when I had stood at the drinking fountain and watched her.

“Thinking of that nice bouncy little schoolgirl out there, Kyle?”

“In a way.”

“And making comparisons, I suppose.”

“I was thinking, actually, of how you kept me from going to see Jo Anne’s mother, and wondering why. I can’t see you being jealous.”

“It wasn’t jealousy. I didn’t want you going soft and backing out at the last minute.”

“Because I was going to be useful to you.”

She stretched and yawned. “Kyle, you think too much. Maybe you want too much. Just relax a little. We’re doing fine, aren’t we?”

“But something is missing. Maybe I’ve gone soft. Maybe I need trust, or love.”

“They weren’t in the bargain, Kyle. Remember what
I made you say, and it was hard for you to say it? You did this for me. To be able to have me. If I’m not enough, if you’re having regrets, if that schoolgirl looks better to you, then you’ve made a bad bargain, haven’t you?”

“Call it a bad purchase. In a store where no returns are accepted. All sales final.”

The expression of anger appeared and disappeared so quickly, I could not be certain that I had seen it. Then she smiled in her careful way. “All right, Kyle. In Mexico City we’ll divide it. Every last dime. And we’ll separate, if that’s the way you want it.”

“Damn you!”

“Poor Kyle. You’re trying to think the purchase is bad, and yet you can’t give up the merchandise.”

“I can’t give you up. I suppose you want to hear me say that.”

“You don’t have to say it. I’d know it anyway.”

“But it’s all one-sided,” I said. I felt ashamed at the little whine of complaint in my voice. “You could leave me. You could go with Beckler and it wouldn’t make any difference to you. You need a man. Any man. Any stud. It isn’t fair.”

“No other woman will do for you. Maybe you’d better say that out loud, Kyle.”

“What are you after? Reassurance? Your charms aren’t exactly infinite variety. They’re pretty highly specialized, you know.”

She bounded up toward me as though big springs under her were suddenly released. Her curled fingers reached for my face I caught her wrists, turned quickly so that her knee hit my thighs as she kicked. I levered her wrists so that she dropped heavily to both knees. For a time she glared up at me with pure, perfect hatred, and then, as her eyes glazed into blindness, as her mouth slipped into urgency, I felt the awakened response. And, a bit later, she said, in a strained, twisted, convulsed voice, “Say it, Kyle.”

“No other woman,” I gasped.

We were a pretty pair. A fine young American couple.
As the familiar act cycled up to its inevitable climax, I sensed a new chill area of objectivity, far back in my brain, buried deep. This is what you wanted, Kyle, it said. This is what you sold out for. Enjoy it, because there’s nothing else left for you, no other way in which you can forget, even for seconds, that you are a thief, a murderer, a stained, befouled little man who has lost every right to any sort of respect, either hers or your own.

A dream awakened me that night. I awakened shuddering, full of the creeping horror that nightmare brings. In childhood you screamed and she came to you, smoothing your hair back from your sweaty forehead, murmuring that it was only a dream, that everything was all right, and go back to sleep, darling.