by Mike Bond
Murphy woke again as the bus decelerated then halted to pick its way through the potholes and ruts of the Playa del Carmen turnoff. It drove down Playa’s long straight avenida to the sea. Everything looked the same but there was nothing he remembered. The bus turned round in the Autotransportes del Caribe station and waited, rumbling softly.
“There’s time,” the old man said. “We’ll get a banana!”
“I don’t want a banana.”
“Quick! Come!”
He followed the old man out into the chilly onshore breeze. The avenida dipped down to the beach with the sound of waves crashing against it. To the right the half-lit ferry dock; across the horizon Cozumel was a string of far bright lights.
The old man gave fifty pesos to a boy at a bicycle stand for a clump of bananas. “Why should I let you pay? he said to Murphy. “He would only overcharge you.”
“Out here, four o’clock in the morning, he should.” Murphy gave the boy a thousand pesos. The boy looked up at him, shocked.
“When you kill your love for one person,” the old man said, “you kill it for everybody. I learned that when I was a boy like him, and the Mexicans killed my parents, and it has taken me many years to learn to love them and my mother and father too. He was right, Christ was. Love is the only way.”
30
THE DAWN was clotted with black floating flakes, the air pungent with burning plastic and rotten garbage where a line of trucks was waiting to enter the Cancún dump. Clouds of swallows careered through the violet air, feeding on flies, the birds’ bodies drumming like hail against the bus windshield. Half-naked children walked barefoot and old men rode burros or bicycle carts among tattered plastic, shattered glass, broken concrete, dead swallows, coils of rusty wire, and shards of derelict cars abandoned on the roadside. On the far, circling strand gray resort hotels were strung like half-illumined pearls.
Near the bus station a jugatería was already open; Murphy had two large orange juices, sweet rolls from a panadería, then in an early bar coffees and tequila. The sun had risen and heat was filling the streets. He took Avenida Tulum to a side street that became a path through brush to another street that he walked up and down but could not see the place he wanted. Three streets further he found a tile-roofed blue adobe office building that was the right shape, but its color was wrong. He knocked on its carved mahogany door. Jasmine flowers and dead bees lay on the steps. A bicycle passed, wheel squeaking; a jet rumbled over, gaining altitude. A sleepy-faced woman opened the door.
“Is this Nacimiento’s office?”
“Sí. But he’s not here yet.”
“The Nacimiento that sells insurance?”
“The one. You want to wait?”
The low front room was painted the same light blue as the outside adobe and smelled faintly of bug spray and perfume. There was a large modern black desk with two telephones, a brass lamp, and family photos. On the blue wall was a Mexicana calendar of a beach with palms. At a second, smaller desk a computer hummed softly. “Can I get you some coffee?” she said. She had black hair and carmine lips and nails, wore a brown suit that emphasized her hips.
He drank the coffee and read Excelsior. She refilled his cup. The coffee made him need to piss but he did not ask her if he could use the servicios. A car stopped outside; its door shut and Nacimiento came in. “Buenas días,” he said, shook Murphy’s hand.
“The señor wants to buy insurance,” the woman said.
Small and compact, his hair combed back, in a light green suit, Nacimiento stood like a welterweight. “How did you know to come here?”
“I’ve been here before.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“A friend and I − three years ago. You found him a passport.”
Nacimiento shook his head. “I remember that, but not you.”
“We had a big sailboat out at Isla Mujéres. You got him a French passport, a good one.”
Nacimiento’s eyes widened. “That wasn’t you.”
“It’s just the beard. I’ve been on the road.”
Nacimiento took his arm, “Have you been in cárcel? Sit down.”
“I’ve been sitting all night. I’m in a rush. I need a US driver’s license, any state, but current. Dependable.”
“If it weren’t dependable I wouldn’t sell it to you.”
“I know that. That’s why I’m back.”
Nacimiento stood thinking, rubbing his palms. “Probably I can. Give me two hours?”
Murphy looked round, could not see a clock. “It’s nine-fifty,” Nacimiento said.
“If you can, how much?”
“You know better than ask me that − what was it last time, two grand, when we thought it’d be three?”
“Eighteen hundred. Instead of twenty-five. You remember that.”
Nacimiento smiled. “It really was you. You’re not the same man. A license, quick, even for you, it’ll cost five.”
“Too much.”
“Times have changed. We’re not the same little town. You want something that’s been hot so long they pull you in first time you show it? For five hundred you get one so clean the owner still thinks he has it. All you have to do is change the picture.”
“You get me a clean one, before noon, change the picture for me, I’ll go five.”
Nacimiento patted Murphy’s arm. It still hurt, the broken bone, Murphy noticed. “Get some photos,” Nacimiento said. “Go to the bus station on Avenida Uxmal − there’s a booth. Four color photos.”
On the way he stopped in the brush to piss. It spattered off the dry soil, ants scurrying round it. On Avenida Uxmal the sidewalk was clogged with tourists − Americans with sombreros and loud voices, pot bellies, Bermuda shorts and sunburns; French and Germans all young and slender, the men unshaven and the women’s long hair bleached by sun and tangled by salt and wind. There were schoolchildren in white and black uniforms, boys in rags holding out their hands. The Avenida was six lanes of buses, trucks, jitneys, Volkswagens, and campers; their fumes blued the air and blended with the bright odors of gardens and fruit stands, the greasy tang of fried chicken, the sewery breeze from the Bay.
The angular, bruised face in the mirror of the photo booth was not his but simply a disguise. When he got home he’d discard it. The photos, too: four identical views of a tense, tanned man with a short beard, the cheeks sunken and the cheekbones far too high, the eyes receded, as if only to see out of and never into.
He took a taxi to the Hotel zone, tennis clubs and glossy cars, doormen, palm boulevards, and flashes of sea between shiny condo towers; in the Flamingo Mall he bought Levis and an ACA shirt and jacket and Nikes, a carry-on bag, underwear and socks, changed into the new clothes and put the ones Lovejoy had bought in the bag. He bought a cheap tennis racket and a can of balls, and opened the can and put them in the bag, then a beach towel that said, “I lost my −” with a picture of a cherry – “in Cancún”, then a painted wooden fish with a green head, orange fins, maroon tail, a blue belly with a swan painted on it and a surprised look in its oval black-and-white eye. He bought shaving cream and a razor, toothbrush and comb, and shaved and brushed his teeth in a men’s room reeking of urine, where a slim attendant paced, coughing quietly. He bought a cheap blanket and a kaleidoscopic shirt to fill out the carry-on bag, went upstairs and had a quarter pounder with cheese, fries, and a coke at McDonald’s, bought a USA Today and a Newsweek and jammed them into the bag. He walked back to town through the traffic and harsh sea wind, scuffing the bag against palm trunks, rubbing his new Nikes in the dust.
“He doesn’t look much like you,” Nacimiento said.
It was an Arizona license, a reddish-haired man with a self-effacing smile and arched brows, ears too big and nose too little.
“Lamar P. Bultz,” Nacimiento said. “That’s who you are.”
The name sounded funny with Nacimiento’s accent. “Where’d you get it?”
“One of
the guys working the dance clubs got it late last night. This Lamar P. Bultz, he’s still sleeping it off at the Sheraton or somewhere − you’ll be home before he knows it’s gone.”
“If it’s no good, I’m coming back –”
“Never you worry.” Nacimiento took Murphy’s photos to the desk. With a drafting knife he cut carefully around the picture of Lamar P. Bultz and peeled it from the license. He cut one of Murphy’s photos to match, beveling the cut so no edge showed. He glued it lightly on the back with plastic glue and ran a slight coat of glue around the edge, and laid it in place. From a back room he brought a hairdryer and cling film, heated the license and laminated a new layer of plastic over it. Holding it along the edges he waved it to cool it off. He counted the twenty-five twenties Murphy gave him and put them in his right jacket pocket. “You memorize the birthday and address, that stuff. So you know who you are − in case somebody asks.”
Murphy took a taxi to the airport and booked a window seat on the next flight to San Francisco, Aeromexico at three-thirty, via Mexico City. He bought a book on Mayan ruins and sat waiting in the wide bright terminal. There were blond, tanned families, young couples holding hands, college boys with spiky hair and football shirts, old men sweeping cigarette butts, cigarettes hanging from their lips. There was a smell of jet exhaust and flowers; the marble floor was sticky.
San Francisco International was cold and misty. The customs man glanced at his license and nodded him through. He took a cab from the airport, lines of red tail lights ahead on 101. “Been gone long?” the cabbie called back.
“Couple weeks.”
“Nothing beats coming home, huh?
“Nothing beats it.”
He had the cabbie drop him in North Beach and walked the quiet midnight streets till he was sure no one followed.
San Francisco’s cool windy streets were wet and nearly empty, a few buses wheezing on the upgrades, whores in leotards and fishnets chatting with two cops on a corner, men hand in hand under the tungstens, a bar disgorging laughing couples, a black dog running skinny and scared down a back alley past empty trashcans, once a gull coasting ghostlike downhill above the trolley wires.
He took another cab on Broadway out to the Richmond, got off at Twenty-fifth and Geary and walked down toward Sea Cliff, the trees dripping mist, lines of a song from the cab radio running in his head,
and the only sound that’s left,
after the ambulances go,
is Cinderella sweeping up
on Desolation Row,
in the chill of sea, the rush of surf, and the hesitant rumble of a foghorn rising up from the Golden Gate.
31
25th AVENUE crossed Camino del Mar and narrowed to a lane between two great stone pillars, then swept down around a curve of broad lawns and Edwardian mansions. Between the houses came the boom of waves against the cliffs below. He went up the driveway of a white four-story late Victorian house with tall fluted columns and a great bronze knocker of a lion scowling at the street. The driveway followed the side of the house down to the garage; he climbed the steps beside the garage to a deck that swung out from the kitchen, then down the deck into the garden. Sea mist and rhododendron smells blew up from the sea. Under the back of the deck he popped a window and dropped down on to the floor of the garage.
It was absolutely black. He moved forward, banged his knee on a car bumper, swore under his breath, angled to the left till his hand touched a hanging cabinet. He felt around it to the door, opened it, and fumbled inside. At the back behind cans of polish and oil was a clump of keys. He climbed out of the window and walked back up the driveway to the front door with the scowling lion. He turned the latchkey then the deadbolt; deep inside the house an alarm began to whine.
He ran down the entry hall through the dark dining room, banging his knee on the double door into the sunroom, the alarm loudening its yowl, fifteen seconds and counting, thirty more till it lets go with everything − the old broad next door’ll be fast asleep but this’ll bring him back to life − found the alarm and punched in 32-42-47 but the alarm only whistled more menacingly, ascending through mezzo piano to mezzo forte, and he quickly tried 32-47-42 but fumbled the 7 and had to do it again as the alarm hit forte and suddenly halted; in the ringing silence he could hear the slow bong of the bell buoy off Baker Beach and the steady diesel thrum of a tugboat pushing a sludge barge out to sea.
The phone jangled. He went into the kitchen stubbing his toe on the edge of the freezer and dropped the phone on his foot, knelt and found the receiver. “Yeah!”
“Who’s speaking, please?” It was a black voice, official.
“You call up in the middle of the fuckin night to ask who’s speaking?” He stood rubbing his foot against the other calf. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Is this Mr. Murphy?”
“Who wants to know?”
“This’s ADT Security. Your burglar alarm just registered an entry.”
“Oh, sorry. The lights weren’t on and I tripped over something. Thanks for calling.”
“And you’re Mr. Murphy?”
“Yes.”
“Can you give me your mother’s date and place of birth and maiden name, please?”
“Esther McCreary, Temple, Texas, May 21, 1926.”
“Fine, Mr. Murphy. Thank you very much.”
“No, I thank you. What if it hadn’t been me?”
“That’s what we’re here for. Have a good night.”
He put on all the lights and walked like an amazed peasant from room to room. In the living room he stood with his hands on the silken fabric of the couch back and stared at the ebony grand, the Pinchon of apple blossoms and the Seine hanging over the mantel, the endless meaningless books, the blood-red Kerastans on the gleaming oak floor. The ocean wind wailed down the chimney, stirring the ash; he went back to the front door and closed it.
The kitchen smelt shut-in and faintly of spices. Wreaths of mist dashed across the glass. He ate some pistachio ice cream and took a bottle of Dunphys upstairs and lay on the bed looking at the flat white ceiling, went out on the bedroom deck and opened the hot tub. It was swirling steadily, the water a little low but hot. He went back into the dressing room, rolled a joint, took off his clothes, and sat in the hot tub smoking and drinking the Irish whiskey while the mist flitted past like all the ghosts of history finally liberated from their graves.
“I DRINK WATER ALL DAY as you said, Doctora. Still she’s dying.”
“You’ve boiled guava root and mashed it for her?” Dona undressed the baby.
“As you said, with ashes of Tusub cam vine.”
Dona took a cloth and soap from her pack, poured water from a jug and began to wash diarrhea from the baby. “In Flores this could be stopped with a bottle of Kaopectil from the pharmacy.”
“You cannot get it, this miracle bottle?”
“We’ve lost two people this month trying to buy from pharmacies. The only way is to take it from the soldiers.”
The baby wrinkled her shrunken face and whimpered. “If I had milk,” Dona said, “I’d nurse her.”
“To make milk you first need a man, Doctora.”
“If there’s milk anywhere, Roseta, I shall send it.”
“If there’s never any milk how should it suddenly appear?”
“If we take some from the soldiers.”
Roseta waved her hand at the flies around the baby’s face, and to Dona it seemed also a dismissal. “You must drink more water,” she repeated, shouldering her pack and rifle. You must take more bone and tooth from your own body so your daughter may grow someday to feed her own frail calcium into her own daughter’s mouth.
“Turn down the lantern, por favor,” Roseta said, “when you go.”
The moon three days past full hung in the middle of the sky. Dona moved up through the village to the last hut and knocked.
“Sí!” An old man’s voice.
She went inside
. There was a single candle, a thatched wall with a crucifix. “How is it?” she said.
“It was clear all the way to Concepción, compañera. Though some may have come since.”
“Could you see any tracks?”
“It was too dark.”
“And above?”
“One helicopter, very high, going south.”
“No sound of guns?” She watched the old man’s face in the faint candlelight, exhaling softly when his face did not fall and he did not say, “Sí, to the west”, or “to the north”, or anywhere.
“No, compañera, no sound of guns.”
“Roseta doesn’t know Bautisto’s dead. No one must tell her now, the baby’s too sick.”
“The baby will soon die, compañera.”
The moon gave enough light to see the trail as she followed it up out of the village and crossed a steep range then down through thinning pines to the candlelit huts of Concepción perched on an eroded slope over a stream where stones rumbled and clattered. She entered an unlighted hut, rested her Galil by the door and dropped the pack from her shoulders. “God, I grow old.”
“Your body doesn’t show it.”
“It feels it.”
“Come, let me feel it.”
“Stop, Martín. I have no stomach for it.”
His hands clamped her waist, the hammock creaking as he pulled her to him, the pen in his pocket jabbing her breast, her face full of itchy beard as he kissed her eyes and cheeks and the tip of her nose, his mouth opening like a hairy peach against hers. He unbuttoned her shirt, his calloused hand flattening her breast. She backed away, buttoning her shirt. “I don’t want it, Martín.”
“Dona, it’s life –”
“I want nothing to do with life.”
“Life’s just who you love.”
“I don’t love anybody!” She reached out in the darkness, took his hand. “It’s soon time.”
