The crowd had already begun to laugh, but it caught itself, and a hush fell over the place. The absence of sound made Pancho stop and gulp for breath as if sound had taken the place of oxygen in his world. He read the message again, this time to himself. Then he climbed through the ropes and went slowly up the aisle toward the officers, swinging his megaphone as he walked.
THE BREAKING POINT
“WELL, HONEY, THEY’RE HERE all right,” Brad said. “I just ran into Fefe in town. Says the fellow he took out yesterday got five sails. We’ve got a date with those babies in the morning.”
Martha looked up from the hotel bed and the magazine she was reading and stared at him. She saw a big man who had once been handsome, who had once been her lover and for a long time now had been her husband. She saw a ruddy complexion that women considered attractive and that derived almost in equal parts from outdoor living and indoor drinking.
“You saw Fefe, and you also saw the bottom of a glass,” she said.
“Oh, Christ, are you going to start that again?”
She felt the same way about it, but the pattern that enclosed them would not let her rest. “I’m not starting it. You started it when you broke your neck to get into town to have that first drink. In the hotel twenty minutes, and you can’t wait to go into town and get stinking.”
She hated that word. She always used it when she felt like this.
“I’m not stinking. Four, five drinks with Fefe—you call that stinking?”
She watched him take his shirt and pants off and stretch out on the bed. “Not stinking,” he mumbled. “Uncle Brad doesn’t get stinking that easy. Just sleepy. Little sleepy, tha’s all.”
Martha said nothing. She had decided to drop the case. It wasn’t the charge she would have liked to convict him on anyway. She knew what the charge really was. It was the fishing in the morning. It was the fact that he never even bothered to ask her if she felt like going fishing in the morning. Their first day back in Acapulco after five years, after the long cruise, maybe she felt like just lounging around the hotel. Maybe she felt like strolling through town, noting the changes, or looking up the people who had been most hospitable to them on their honeymoon. But Brad would never know. Brad would never ask her. Brad would just go on being Brad, the big spoiled boy, the son of the chairman of the board, who never grew up, who thought everything was put there for his amusement—the sailfish, the native ports, Martha …
He was lying on his back with his mouth slightly open, his breathing punctuated by the familiar sound of his snoring. If she were to come into a dormitory of a thousand sleeping men, Martha felt sure she would recognize that snoring. How many nights had it disturbed her reading? How many early mornings had its monotonous insistence penetrated sleep? How many nervous hours had she listened to it, and how many mornings had it provided the sound track for her first sight of the new day?
The rhythm of his snoring was broken by a violent snort. He is like a bull, she thought, with no more romance or even human passion in him than the stud bulls we’ve seen on ranches. He never asks me if I want to make love, he never asks me if I want to go fishing, he never asks me if I want to go to the bullfights; no, he just holds up two tickets—“They soaked me two hundred pesos apiece for these but I’ve got ‘em!” And then, at the bullfights, there was always that business of the horses … Oh, she knew her Hemingway; she knew that the business of the horses is neither good nor bad, is not important, is merely a necessary, momentary unpleasantness that should not distract one from the real issue—the integrity with Which the torero is preparing his bull for death. But Brad there, laughing at the jerky movements of that skinny horse’s leg after the bull had refused to take the point of the pica for his answer, laughing and telling her to take her hands away from her face. My God, how close are sympathy and selfishness, she thought. When I cry for the horse, the innocent bystander crushed to earth, I cry for myself, trembling against the impact of the dark beast.
Once, after a particularly cruel bullfight, she had refused to speak to him for the rest of the afternoon. And up in the hotel room before dressing for dinner, the time he always liked, she would not give herself to him—not so soon after the business of the horse.
He had tossed his head then, with a bull’s rage and a bull’s stubbornness, and had roared out into the hall, on his way to the bar, with a familiar threat that disgusted her, that made her want to remove herself forever from the path of his charge. She had stood at the window looking down into the great avenue, her mind already hurrying ahead to her suitcase, her clothes, the note she would leave … but when he came in several hours later, listing slightly with his overload of tequila, and threw himself down on the bed and began to snore, she was still there, trapped like a bird that has come in through an opening it can no longer find.
As she watched and listened to him sleep that other evening she had wanted to blame her failure to leave him on the rigidity of her Boston family tradition, a background that shrank from scandal and the public charge-and-countercharge that delighted tabloid readers. But she knew herself too well to accept this as any more than the hard outer shell of the frailty of flesh and spirit that would not let her act. It was almost an illness, this passivity. The symptoms went back at least twenty years, for she could still remember coming home from first grade and saying, “Mummy, the girl across the aisle from me holds my hand all the time. The whole recess she holds my hand and I don’t want her to.” “But, darling, don’t give her your hand if you don’t like to,” Mummy had said. But of course it was never as simple as that, for Martha didn’t know how to tell the girl—and so that stronger girl had gone on holding Martha’s hand throughout the rest of the term.
It was the same with Brad. She could not get her hand away from his. “Just tell him you’ve had enough,” Martha’s one close friend would tell her. But it was always easier to put off the final break, to wait until the trip was over, to make sure she wasn’t pregnant … and sometimes when she was sure she was ready, Brad would tap some hidden spring of intuition, and, then for a while he would soften to the man she thought she had married. He would bring her the special flowers she liked and be gentle with her—the way only the very cruel know how to be gentle—and so, for a short time she would forget, wanting so much to forget. And by the time his bogus little courtship had worn thin, her determination, fragile as spun glass, would have shattered.
If only he would perform one final act that could set her off, she thought. Yes, she was like the rusty trigger of a gun he had forgotten was loaded. It would take all his strength to bring the hammer down on the striking point. But even as she feared it, she waited for it.
Next morning they reached the docks at eight instead of seven-thirty because Martha had taken too long in the bathroom. Brad had been needling her with a sharp minute hand from the time he awoke. It was her bitter knowledge that an appointment with a fishing boat was the only thing he took seriously. He had had his picture in quite a few magazines as a master of giant game fish. It was the best thing he did.
The boat wasn’t a clean boat, not even by Mexican standards, and the native skipper merely muttered something without smiling when they came aboard. “He’s sore because we’re late,” Brad said. “They like to get out there before the sun’s up too high.”
Martha didn’t say anything. She really didn’t care what effect the extra time had on the moods of his pockmarked Mexican. She was watching the mate. He had a cadaverous face covered by an unkempt beard. Normally he should have been about five feet tall, but a slight hump, or rather a ridge running between his shoulders, bent him over until he was hardly more than four feet high.
They went out past Hornos, the beach that the Acapulqueños frequent at sunset, and Martha could remember her first swim there with Brad when the flaming red sun lit the waters around them with cool fire and the palm trees behind the beach stood out in brilliant silhouette against the purple sky. Had she loved him that evening long ago? She tried to re
member: yes, she had, for his Irish good looks, for his gaiety, and for the elaborate charade of romance he had practiced on her.
She looked over at him now, as if to compare the sham she had briefly loved five years ago with this solid reality who was carefully unwrapping his fishing gear—the Hardy reel he had picked up in England and the O’Brien rod bought two seasons ago in Miami, the rod that had conquered yellowtail off Enseñada, tuna near Guaymas, marlin in the Caribbean, and tarpon in the channels through the mangrove swamps that lie off Key West. He was careless about most of his possessions, but not about this rod.
The boat slowed to trolling speed and Brad paid out his line. The hunchback had a pole for Martha and fixed the base of the rod in the socket of her chair.
“Well, muchacha,” Brad said, “better get the big gaff ready. I feel lucky today.”
If the hunchback heard the feminine ending, his face gave no sign. They had spent nearly all their winters in Latin countries, and Martha’s Spanish was good enough to cause her to flinch from Brad’s linguistic slips. But Brad took pride in his inability to speak foreign languages. And he was in too good a mood at the moment to care whether he called this deformed native a boy or a girl. There were really only a few occasions, Martha was thinking, when Brad’s humor was so high—when he was starting to fish, when he came in with a fish bigger and gamer than anyone else’s, when he had had more than two drinks but less than six, and when he was undressing for his pleasure before dinner.
“Come on, get on there, baby!” Brad was talking to them somewhere under the sea. “Let’s get a big one for Uncle Brad.”
When nothing happened for a while, the hunchback threw out some chum, live bait of fairly good size, to draw the larger fish. In a few moments a sea gull appeared, maneuvering in over the wake of the boat to dive for the small fish.
“Gaviota,” the hunchback muttered. “Damn gaviota.”
A second gull came in overhead, and then another, coasting or winging easily over the stern. They were a small variety, very white, and Martha enjoyed their grace as they floated overhead.
“Damn gaviota,” the hunchback muttered again. He reached into a paper bag for a small stone—Martha realized that he must have brought the stones along for that purpose—and tossed it up at them. It fell short of the birds.
“Come on, muchacha,” Brad laughed. “Where’s the old pitching arm?”
The hunchback threw again, but his physical disability limited his throw. “I get hands on gaviota”—his English was almost unintelligible—“I—” Instead of a word here, he substituted a terrible cracking sound of tongue against teeth and a quick gesture of snapping down with both fists.
The sudden violence of it, rising out of this wretched little man, made Brad laugh. But it left Martha with a sinking feeling of discomfort.
After a while she felt a tug on her line, pulled her pole back the way Brad had taught her, and then lowered it at the same time she began reeling in.
“You got something there—doesn’t look like too much,” Brad said. He never liked anyone else to catch the first one.
But as the thing she had caught came closer to the boat, it broke surface, flapping its wings wildly and giving forth a shrill wail.
“Damn gaviota,” the hunchback said. “Pull in, pull in.”
Martha could feel the bird pulling against her line, thrashing the water with its wings as it fought for life.
“Here,” she said, quickly handing her rod to the hunchback. “No me gusta.” She tried not to watch while the bird was pulled into the boat. But she had to listen to its screams; and when they suddenly became louder and more frightened, she knew it was held fast in the hunchback’s fierce, sun-blackened little hands. She was imagining what he would do to it—twist its neck or slam it against the side—when she heard the sound of what the hunchback was doing to it. It was not too different from the sound he had made with his tongue against his teeth when he had been pantomiming the act before. She kept her eyes away until she was sure it must be over, and then she turned around, just as the limp white body was flung into the sea.
It floated on top of the water with its wings spread out as if it were in flight. Then she saw the bird suddenly bunch forward in a furious effort to rise from itself.
“Brad, it’s still living! It’s alive! He didn’t kill it!”
“Where’ve you been?” Brad said. “All he did was break its wings and throw it back.”
She watched the stern pull away from the crippled bird bobbing in the boat’s wake. The gull was silent now. Its silence seemed even more terrible to Martha than its shrieking.
“Why does he do that? Does he have to do that?”
Brad laughed. “He hates those things like poison. Says it teaches them a lesson.”
The hunchback was setting her line out for her again. Four or five gulls were over the boat now. “I don’t think I want to fish anymore,” she said.
“What do you want to do?” Brad reprimanded. “Let the muchacha fish for you?”
It was easier, she felt, just to sit there holding the line than to let him ride her all the way. She prayed she wouldn’t catch another one, though. She didn’t think she could stand another one.
She could not take her eyes from the white speck that bobbed in the distance. She could feel it struggling to rise with its helpless wings.
Suddenly Brad let out a cry of joy—“Sailfish!”—and the boat came to life. The hunchback’s face was animated with a gargoyle smile, and even the dark Indian mask that the skipper wore for a face was lit with fisherman’s hope and eagerness for the catch.
“I got a good one,” Brad called, fighting it happily. “A good one!”
The hunchback was jabbering at Martha, and Brad shot her an anxious glance, his face red with effort. “Damn it, reel in! Reel in, for Christ’s sake!” he shouted.
Martha had been watching the drowning gull. The hunchback snatched her line from her and began winding frantically to get it in out of the way. But it was too late. The sailfish had drawn Brad’s line across and back under Martha’s and their lines were becoming hopelessly tangled.
No longer able to reel in, Brad gave himself to profanity. “Damn it, that’s the first thing I ever told you! You goddam nipple-head!”
The tangled lines went slack as Brad’s sailfish threw the hook. “He’s gone,” Brad said tragically. “Would’ve hit fifty, maybe sixty pounds …” And his words were a jumble of profanity again.
Because our lines were crossed, I ruined his day, Martha thought. Both lines were in the boat now, and the hunchback was working deliberately to loosen the knotted loops.
It was almost half an hour before they could fish again. The sun was directly overhead, beating down oppressively. A dozen gulls were following them now.
“Gaviota,” the hunchback said. “Damn gaviota.”
Just then several dived for Brad’s line and his pole dipped sharply. “Sonofabitch. Now I’ve hooked one.” He was so exasperated that he couldn’t even reel in. “Here, muchacha, you handle it.” In his defeat, he turned on Martha again. “God damn it, next time I hook into something big, reel in, reel in like I told you.”
The gull that had been hooked left the water and flew up over the boat with the line trailing from its beak. Martha could see it flapping directly overhead, pulling against the hook and crying as the metal point ripped the lining of its throat. As the hunchback reeled it in, it flew around wildly over their heads. Martha screamed, and the gull screamed with her. What a horrible female chorus, she thought.
With a neat gesture, the hunchback reached up and snatched the bird.
“Don’t,” Martha said. “Please don’t.”
“Wait a minute,” Brad said. “Let me have it.”
Thank you, Brad, Martha thought, thank you, thank you. Do it quickly.
Brad took the bird, exactly as he had seen the hunchback do it, snapped its wings in his big hands and tossed it back into the sea.
“That t
he way you do it, muchacha?” he said, laughing.
She watched Brad’s gull flounder and then rise in a series of desperate convulsions. He had not even done this as the hunchback had, through hatred of everything more perfect than himself. It was merely something he had never done before.
She put her fingers to her throat to feel the throbbing. She shut her eyes against the glare on the water. Oh God, she thought, seeing in her mind the image of her dead father, the time has come at last, has come. Dear Father, give me strength …
THE FACE OF HOLLYWOOD
WHEN I FIRST MET Doc he was working in the drug store on the corner, just outside the studio. That is, he was employed there, for he never seemed to be working. Doc treated the place as a sort of salon. He always managed to look more like a man of the world than a hired clerk. He had the dapper, creased appearance of a carbon-copy Man of Distinction. His face was florid and had begun to bulge over his high stiff collar. His eyes were always laughing at everything.
I was sent to the drug store on one of those annoying errands to get a physic for our associate producer, Harry Small.
Doc came forward in a flashy double-breasted suit with a red carnation in his buttonhole.
“I would like some kind of physic,” I whispered.
There are usually two ways to discuss a physic. Either you speak of it in hushed tones, or you stand your ground and blurt it out. But Doc was the kind of man who could lend as much dignity to the peddling of a physic as to the selling of rare manuscripts.
“And may I ask for whom it is for?” he said.
“You just did—it’s for Mr. Small.”
“Oh,” said Doc. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“What’s the diff?” I asked. “Producers need the same physics as the rest of us. Even supermen like Harry Small. Give.”
“Why does he need it?” Doc persisted.
“Listen,” I said, “he’s in the projection room now cutting his new picture. Why don’t you break in and ask him?”
Some Faces in the Crowd Page 8
