Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

by Budd Schulberg

  They were discussing at this moment a subject of considerable importance, an issue, in fact, that was beginning to divide their entire village. Was it true that Angel Chavez had had his way with the supposedly virtuous Elena Cruz?

  “Of course it is true,” Chucho insisted. “Only a fool would doubt it. In another eight months Elena Cruz will be fat as a sow before slaughter, you wait and see.”

  “But what makes you so sure?” said Lupe, who was far more indignant about this case than he usually was about such things, perhaps because it was public knowledge in the village that Lupe could never take his eyes off Elena, and that she had slapped his face when he pinched her a little too intimately during the last fiesta. “I suppose you were there when it happened? I suppose you saw it with your own eyes?”

  “No, I did not see it with my own eyes,” Chucho admitted. “But it was described to me by Pablo Rojas who got it from Juan Montoya who heard it from Jesus Tavarez whose aunt Josefina does claim to have seen it with her own eyes.”

  Officer Gonzales did not let Chucho and Lupe know that he was observing them, for that is not the way a smart detective works, but he was edging toward them along the bar. He was unable to speak Arabic but at least he was clever enough to try and catch a word here or there. And he was quite sure he had heard these two foreigners mention something about Salina Cruz. Salina Cruz was a little port on the west coast and he had been saying to his friend Armando García just the other day, “If those Arabs try to blow up an Israeli freighter, it will be either Mazatlán or Salina Cruz.”

  Sargento Armando García. Well, if these two little fellows turned out to be what he thought they were, he might get his promotion too. He ordered another drink and rolled the title around on his tongue. Sargento Rodolfo Gonzales. It sounded pretty good. “Have another drink, Sargento?” he said to himself. “Thank you, don’t mind if I do. It’s nice to have a chance to talk with you fellows with no stripes on your sleeves. Keeps me in touch with what the rank-and-file are thinking.”

  He bit into another limón to cool the flames of the tequila that leaped in his chest. And once I’m a sargento, what’s to stop me from becoming a lieutenant? Just get in with the right people and do my job well.

  He bit into another lemon. Teniente Rodolfo Gonzales. That would give Sargento Armando García something to worry about. “Well, García, I’ve been going over your record. I’m frank to tell you I’m disappointed in you. Being a sargento doesn’t give you the right to loaf, you know. And I’ve been hearing things about mordita. As your old friend, but now your superior officer, I’m giving you a little warning to watch your step.”

  He had another drink and edged closer to his suspects. He couldn’t understand a thing they were saying but they were still talking about Salina Cruz.

  “I don’t care what she told you when you tried to pinch her at the fiesta,” Chucho was saying. “Elena Cruz is not the innocent little flower she pretends to be.”

  “If you’re saying I’m not as good a man as Angel Chavez,” said Lupe, who was tottering precariously between conviviality and belligerence, “come out and say it to my face so we know where we stand.”

  And once I’m a captain, Officer Gonzales was thinking as he stared into his empty glass, what is to prevent me from becoming Chief of Police? All I need to do is build up a following, promise to make the sergeants lieutenants and the lieutenants captains …

  The bartender filled his glass again. Rodolfo picked it up and smiled. Among the notables at the president’s palace for the Grito last night was Mexico’s popular chief of police Gonzales …

  “I am not saying that you are not as much of a man as Angel Chavez,” Chucho said tactfully, if somewhat inarticulately. “I am merely saying that you were more inclined to respect Elena Cruz’s maidenhood than certain others I could mention.”

  And once I am chief of police, thought Officer Gonzales as he put his glass down, then I am somebody. My hat is in the ring. I might run for governor. Or even presidente. After all, look at Cardenas and Camacho. They were just poor Indians who did not have even as much of a start as I have.

  Officer—Sergeant—Lieutenant—Captain—Chief-of-Police—Governor—President Gonzales had one more drink, straightened his uniform and staggered up to Chucho and Lupe with the dignity the moment demanded of him.

  “In the name of the Republic of Mexico, I hereby place you under arrest,” he said. Then with Chucho in one hand and Lupe in the other he marched them out of the Puerta del Sol.

  That night Chucho and Lupe found themselves cooped up in a small damp cell in the city jail.

  “I wonder what we have done to be treated like this?” said Chucho.

  “Perhaps there is some law against speaking Nahuatal in the city of Mexico,” suggested Lupe, who knew more about the ways of the world than his younger friend.

  That night three unfriendly guards, two in uniform and one skinny fellow with a skinny moustache and a skinny civilian suit came to Chucho’s and Lupe’s cell. The one in street clothes asked them if they were Arab terrorists. When the two melon-sellers shook their heads, because they did not understand the question, the skinny one nodded to the two burly uniforms, who began beating them, unemotionally, as if they were beating stubborn burros. Lupe and Chucho were too confused to cry out. They accepted the physical abuse just as the burros do—as part of the timeless process of life and death that begins with pain and ends in pain.

  Finally, when the thin one and his two hard-bellied assistants could not beat a satisfactory answer out of Lupe and Chucho, they gave up in disgust and slammed the metal door behind them. Chucho and Lupe attended each other’s cuts and bruises as best they could. Lupe had lost one of his front teeth. He didn’t have too many to begin with, and it had been one of his favorites. Chucho found it for him on the stone floor of the cell, wiped the blood off it and handed it back to his companion. “Perhaps the bruja can put it back for you,” Chucho tried to console him.

  “If we ever get home,” Lupe said. “If we ever get out of this crazy house.”

  “Is it possible that we are not allowed to sell our melons in the city without permission?” Chucho asked. His head was aching and a purple lump was swelling over his left eye where the biggest of the two uniforms had hit him and then hit him again with his huge right fist.

  Lupe nodded, with his hand over his hurt mouth. “In the city, anything is possible. In our village we live by the old laws. We do not have to write them down. Everybody knows them. But the city is full of people who are strangers to each other, so they can keep changing the laws as they please.”

  Young Chucho’s head was pounding in confusion. “Tonight let us pray to our Lord Tepotzteco that they make a new law that will let us go home.”

  But the following night the skinny man in the skinny grey suit returned with the two brutes in uniform. Again the little plainclothesman urged Lupe and Chucho to confess the obvious, that they were Arab terrorists whose plans to sabotage an Israeli freighter had been overheard by Officer Gonzales. And when Lupe and Chucho shook their heads, not so much in denial as in inability to understand what these city devils were talking about, the beatings were even worse than the night before. Another tooth was gone from Lupe’s modest but precious collection, and after the angry trio slammed the iron door behind them, Chucho was so dizzy he could not stand up. He sat on the hard bunk holding his swollen head and praying to Lord Tepotzteco louder than he had ever prayed before.

  “Lupe, maybe they are going to kill us,” Chucho moaned. “Maybe there is a new law in the city that they kill people from the mountains who come down to sell their melons in the public market of the capital.”

  Feeling the bloody spaces where his teeth had been, Lupe said nothing because he did not want to admit how little he knew about the ways of the capitalinos and that he knew no more than Chucho did as to what was going to happen next.

  On their third night in this damp and smelly jail, Lupe and Chucho expected another visit from th
e skinny grey suit and the two sloppy uniforms, but to their surprise nobody came except an old guard who brought them a bowl of watery tortilla soup. By this time they had stopped asking questions of each other. They were like burros who endured beatings and indignities each day as if that were what they were born for.

  On the morning of the fourth day two guards who did not beat them, but only shoved them along, brought Chucho and Lupe to an office where a spruced-up and eager Officer Gonzales was waiting to bring his spy ring before the police court. There he delivered the speech that he had rehearsed before the mirror in his room, complete with dramatic gestures and repeated references to Father Hidalgo, Benito Juarez and the Great Revolution of 1910.

  “But these look like nothing more than a couple of little Indians from the mountains,” said the judge, after allowing Gonzales to reach his eloquent peroration.

  “That may be the way they are disguised, Your Honor,” said Officer Gonzales. “But they didn’t fool me for a minute. They were talking Arab and making plans to blow up a Jewish ship in Salina Cruz.”

  The judge frowned, and asked the prosecutor if a representative of one of the Arab embassies could be called as a witness to clarify the situation. But one was not so easily available. While Lupe and Chucho prayed and simply existed in their small cell, the judge was told that none of the Arab entities in the capital, neither Egypt nor Saudi Arabia nor even Yemen and Kuwait would send anyone to intercede for or against Lupe and Chucho. Apparently they all reasoned that if indeed the Mexican authorities had apprehended a pair of Arab agents, it would be wiser for them not to get involved. And if they should prove not to be Arab agents, or even Arabs, then it was clearly none of their business.

  At the end of the week, when Lupe and Chucho were sick, but literally sick of tepid tortilla soup, and beginning to wonder if the fates had sentenced them to life imprisonment in this terrible place, they were suddenly brought back to the court again. Since no Arab official would come forward, the judge had subpoenaed a refugee from Iran who was a lecturer on Moslem culture at the University of Mexico.

  While Officer Gonzales waited expectantly, the bearded Arab professor appeared. When he gave Lupe and Chucho the traditional Islamic greeting, they stared at him blankly. When he proceeded to ask them a series of questions in Arabic, they stared at him in total confusion. “Where does he come from?” they asked each other. It sounded neither Spanish nor gringo. “Maybe he speaks Mayan or Zapotecan,” Lupe said. They had heard these languages from the south were very different from their own.

  “Your Honor,” said the expert on Islam from the university, “I have no idea what they are saying, but most definitely they are not speaking Arabic.”

  The judge gave Officer Gonzales a look and sent for an interpreter from the Instituto del Indios. The Indian interpreter questioned Lupe and Chucho in Mayan, Zapotecan, Tarascan, Mixtecan, and finally in Nahuatal.

  “They are farmers from a village in the municipio of Tepotzlan,” the interpreter explained. “I am happy to say that in the remote mountain villages of Morelos, Nahuatal is still a living language.”

  “Let them go free,” the judge announced. “And Officer Gonzales, you will stand trial for false arrest.”

  When Chucho and Lupe reached their village that evening after their long climb home, they went immediately to the hut of Emilio Lopez, the mayordomo of their barrio, to report what had happened.

  “We have sold all our melons, but alas we have nothing to show for it,” Lupe said. “When we asked for the money they took from us in the jail, we were told their records showed we had no pesos in our pockets when the policía brought us in. Alas, it is not safe for any of us to go down into the city of Mexico ever again. It seems they have declared war on us. As soon as they hear us talking our own language, they drag us off to jail, beat us and rob us.”

  That same evening, after a five-minute trial, Officer Gonzales paced the dark and lonely streets of Villa Obregón, the quiet suburb to which he had been exiled. With the horselaugh of Sargento García still ringing in his ears, he was soberly meditating upon the evils of tequila and the injustice of the world.

  THE

  BARRACUDAS

  The trim, sound, fifty-footer Lorelei was holding her own in the churning waters of the Gulf. Rolling from trough to trough, she creaked and groaned and refused to come apart at the seams. Gerald Millinder was watching his wife and the skipper. They’re actually enjoying the storm, he was thinking. He tried not to seem alarmed.

  Captain Alan Banks looked back over his shoulder to reassure him from the wheel. “Don’t worry, sir, she’s not splittin’ in two. She’s plenty of boat. I’ll sneak her into the Marquesas Keys before sundown.”

  The skipper was lank and hard and the skin was weathered tight over the strong sculpturing of his face. Every move he made was capable, confident, almost cocky. Millinder, with his rather delicate face and a bicycle-tire of fat at the belt-line, was ready to hate him for his leanness and his grinning disregard—if not relish—of danger.

  “Isn’t Al wonderful?” Madge said.

  Instead of answering, Millinder tried to smile for his wife. She was a strong, handsome woman of thirty who had had three children and eight demanding but not really unhappy years with Gerald. These she carried lightly, for she still bore a startling resemblance to the Wellesley lacrosse player who had made a lasting impression on some Smith and Barnard teams, and eventually on young Gerald Millinder.

  In their cabin last night she had advanced the theory—with just a little too much enthusiasm, Millinder thought—that men like Al Banks were throwbacks to a more heroic and primitive age, of a breed with Eric the Red, Captain Morgan, Laffite and Bowie. “I wonder if modern women aren’t getting a little tired of brainy men burdening their wives with their thorny intellectual problems,” she had said, and then had caught herself, or rather, the pained look on her husband’s face had caught her. Gerald had had a year of thorny intellectual problems and overwork. It was the first, faint rumblings of breakdown that had led to this cruise—doctor’s orders:

  “Gerald, there’s nothing wrong with you but pressuritis. Too much of this tug of war between artistic conscience and family responsibility. The medicine for you is a month, well let’s say at least two weeks, in a different world, some place that never heard of book-club demands and intellectual integrity and the strain and stress of creative work. You book fellows with your ulcers and your nervous breakdowns—the occupational disease of Homo Intellectualis.”

  “I can’t help it, Lew, it’s a terrible decision. A book club is offering me a hundred thousand dollars for the new book, but there’s a catch in it. They’re asking for certain changes I know in my heart I don’t want to make. But taking a year out to write a novel can be pretty rough on a family. And seventy-five thousand is a helluva lot of money, more than I’ve made out of my last three books put together. I’ve got my kids to think about, and Madge …”

  “I still say go away,” his doctor had told him. “A week or two in the sun. I can give you the address of a place I think you’ll like on the Florida Keys. Don’t worry about a thing but how good the fishing is. I know you’ll say you can’t afford it, but think of it as medicine, and saving hospital bills. Then come home, rested, with a clear mind, and make your decision.”

  So Millinder had splurged at Abercrombie’s, bought himself a long peaked fishing cap and some jeans to knock around in and a light blue fishing jacket and here they were aboard the Lorelei, dutifully “getting away from it all,” just as travel books and practical physicians advise. Only instead of sun there was wind, and instead of fish there were waves, and instead of the second-honeymoon closing of emotional ranks with Madge, there was—well, nothing that Millinder could give a name to, just a nagging interior itch of strain and suspicion. In all their eight years, there had been no real schism, or even any rows serious enough to survive a single good night’s sleep. What they hoped to find a cure for here in the Gulf was their sense of
mutual fatigue, of love’s having been carried away in tiny pieces by problem ants. Although she had had her share of delicate invitations, Madge had always shied away from the more literal forms of infidelity. All she had felt was a kind of private sigh—Oh, maybe it would do her good to go to bed with some nice healthy male she hardly knew, someone who didn’t get love all mixed up with writing problems and the ethics of art.

  Someone, she had thought that morning—not seriously but merely as an example, as speculation—well, like this skipper, Al Banks, a natural, lean-bellied, firm-muscled man, a man who was hard because nature was hard, and who was direct because that’s the way life had been before it got all mucked up with too much civilization: progressive schools and child psychology and her friends’ accounts of their sessions with their analysts and prejudice and social obligations and to what extent Gerald should sacrifice his principles to the needs of his family—Oh, the sea was wonderful, let the wind blow hard in her face forever, let the boat roll, rise, drop, crash back into the sea, the foam-flecked, violent, primordial sea.

  “Gerald—darling—are you all right?”

  Madge was bending over him with a solicitousness that was faintly irritating. Damn it all, he wanted to be wanted—not mothered. He sat up straighter in the fishing chair into which he had retreated in hope that its exposed position in the stern might help to counter his panicky anticipation of seasickness.

  “… all right?” Her voice was part of the wind.

  “Hell, yes.” Gerald tried to give the words a hearty ring, as if in half-conscious imitation of Al Banks. “How much longer till we get there? The Marquesas?”

  “Al says he’ll sneak us in in about an hour and a half. He’s going to try a little short cut into the lagoon. Says he’s never done it before but he thinks he can feel his way.”