“Make love?” I said in a silly voice.
“Yes,” he went on, “I wonder about American girls, I haven’t known them well, but they are so free with these things, with lovemaking. I wondered why this is.” I saw that he was perfectly serious. It was still an intrusive, stupid question. I told him I made love to avoid answering personal questions.
The next day he asked if I would help him with some repairs on the mural in the upstairs hall. It was a picture of the Velez family on horseback; Tonio was about sixteen. It had faded and was badly chipped—bad paint in the first place, Claude said. He was perfectly civil as we worked. He had a scaffold constructed, and he mixed paint himself. I spent hours on end, for most of a week, repairing the leaves, the legs of Tonio’s horse, the long skirt of his mother, the blue sky. Behind the family young girls with gardenias in their hair were skipping along; a miniature General Velez, like an elf, peeked out of a bush at them. Toward the top of the mural, flowering orange trees filled the canvas like stars. Doves, parrots and parakeets, hanging like flat ornaments, contrasted with the pheasants and plump round quail that pranced along on the ground. The pose of the family was similar to the one done in tile on the first floor of the hacienda. Guests loved the mural, and they all traipsed by to visit with me and commend me for my work. Little by little I pieced together stories of Tonio’s family I had never heard before. His father was an infamous general, one of the last caciques of Mexico, dictator of the state. It had taken a virtual shutdown of public services to force him out. And he was known to love young girls. Once I heard this—it was hardly surprising, though I had never actually seen him myself—I couldn’t keep my eyes off his portrait. He seemed about to burst his clothing. Behind him, the teenage Tonio was slim and elegant, a blond, blue-eyed European, a nobleman in a pagan land. The mother was garish in brilliant blue, her hair an unnatural red.
Bruni came over to see how I was doing and said the mural looked great. He said he knew that the General and his wife had asked Claude to do something about it, and that he would be sure that they understood that it was “Tonio’s friend” who had done such a patient job of repairing it. (Claude had said only that it was “satisfactory.”)
I walked Bruni back to the parrot-green Tecoluca pickup. “Tonio’s corridas,” I asked. “How are they going? How is he doing?”
I was amazed when Bruni said that he talked to Tonio at least once every week. “He’s a hero,” he bellowed to me as we stood by the truck. “You don’t know just how good he is, do you?” He stooped down to hug me. I was wearing jeans and a halter top, and his big hand on my bare back made me uncomfortable. He made a show of kissing me loudly on each cheek, and as he did so, he dipped his hand into my pants and slid along the sweaty skin as far as he could reach. I was so surprised I didn’t say anything; he withdrew his hand and got into the truck. That sonofabitch, I thought. He was supposed to be looking after me while the matador was gone. In his way, he was. He asked if I needed money and he cleared the matter of the bar bill. But he knew how my keep was earned. He was a slimy bastard and he just had to remind me.
I withdrew from the sightseeing, the card playing, the endless story-telling of the hotel. I stayed to myself in my room, taking a brisk swim in the early afternoon when the other guests went to lunch and then to siesta. At night I went out to the hot pool after the hotel was dark and quiet. Sometimes I saw Claude on his way to see his pet doe, or going up the walk to the little hut he had built himself above the gardens. He had a house on the side of the hotel where the orange groves were, but he seemed to favor his perch. One night I saw, as he was walking by, that he was wearing a cloth, wrapped like what I guessed was a sarong. He was wearing sandals, and carried a walking stick. Suddenly I saw him an entirely new way, not as the nagging, shrill manager who was always scolding the help, nor as the cold distant man who obviously looked down on me and couldn’t be bothered to get to know me. I saw him as a stranger in this land, as much as I was, and he was a whole history of exotic places. He had been born in Vietnam of a French father and a Chinese mother—one of the guests had told me that. He had lived in North Africa, in France, in the South Pacific—I had heard him telling stories to the guests. How had he ever ended up in so unlikely a place? What was there here to keep him?
I called out his name before I could think why I was doing so. He padded over by the pool and squatted on the side of it. “So this is where you are at night,” he said, as if he had been looking for me!
“Oh yes,” I told him. “This is the part of the day I love the most, the dark. I like to listen to the bamboo clacking, and there are creatures that make noises in the bushes. I think this must be Shangri-la!” I heard myself and I thought: Stop being hysterical! Claude looked almost handsome in the faint light from a yellow bulb some way off, and the moon.
“But Shangri-la would not be in the tropics,” he said. I felt embarrassed, and wanted him to leave, but he said, “I was working at the Hilton in Mexico City, and General Velez asked me to come out here and put his hotel in order. He had had it for some time, and it was losing money. He knew it was a matter of thievery and bad management, and I said it might take a year. I did what I came out here to do, but I have been here nearly six years. It is, as you say, the quality of the place. This is the very place where the tropics begin—a change of continents, we are a hundred miles below the Tropic of Cancer. It is a place of wild rich abundance. So I built my little house above the gardens in a nest of ferns and shrubs. When I am there, I am completely away from the silly Americans. I am king of the tropics.”
He laid down his stick and sat on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water. I clung to the ledge, wondering if I were dreaming this strange encounter. He went on, talking about how he liked high places, telling me about the red tiled roofs of Moroccan houses, of how the cats there stretch and sun themselves. I said nothing. I was mesmerized. I had thought him such an ugly man, puffy and yellow and sly.
I asked him to tell me more about North Africa, though it seemed a silly thing to talk about, considering where we were. I sensed that he was fond of the memories he had of the region, and that he would be less friendly if our talk were more personal. He told me he had spent some time in Algeria, too, and he talked about the seacoast, and the long spines of mountains, the resorts where the French came to ski. He talked slowly, as if he were translating from French. I wanted him to talk all night; all he said seemed important to me, knowledge I hadn’t known I needed. I was struck with the luck of my landing here, to hell with his distinctions, it was Shangri-la. For the first time since Tonio left, I felt sensual, my pores were open. I was no longer suspended, waiting for his return, but was launched on a legitimate journey of my own into this tropical heart. I thought of Claude taking me around the gardens, teaching me the names of plants, holding my hand—
He was saying something about Berber music. He stopped mid-sentence, and I thought he must have realized how inattentive I was. How could I tell him how wonderful his voice was! How I loved his stories. He reached over and touched my earlobe, and the tiny gold hoop I was wearing. “In so many villages where I have lived or travelled, when girls are young, their mothers put a hot needle through their ears, and then insert little hoops like these.”
I pulled myself up to sit on the ledge. I was wearing only the bottom of my suit. My breasts were so white.
“You’re pretty,” he said rather matter-of-factly. “It’s so seldom that you see an American who doesn’t eat too much.”
I took a deep breath. “Claude, I’ve seen you going up to your little house on many evenings. I’ve heard you playing music, faintly, from here. I’ve hoped you would stop and talk to me. You didn’t know I was here, did you?” I was lying; I had always held my breath for fear of discovery, I hadn’t had the least interest in Claude. Now, though, I thought it cunning to reveal myself. Seduction came from confession. He came into the water, took a few long strokes to the othe
r side, returned, and heaved himself out. His dripping belly was soft and fleshy. I was suddenly mortified. I felt he had tricked me, to prove what I was like. He had said nothing to make me think he wanted me, and I had acted as if any conversation might end in sex. His soft flab repulsed me. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I fell back into the water, into the dark. I heard, rather than saw, as he padded away, up to his retreat. Shortly I heard music, something percussive and unmelodic.
I had learned that Huastecans did not like to go out at night except when it was to see the brujo in secret meetings. Maybe it was their fear of snakes, or of el tigre, which might kill them. (Once they had eaten the flesh of cats, and drunk their blood.) There was something to learn from such people, who stretched back for centuries. It was this simple maxim: Stay home at night.
I began to look forward to the visits of the American rancher Michael Sage. He had come by one day to say he had heard Velez was gone, that I was at the hotel, and he had brought me some magazines his wife no longer wanted. I got fairly drunk with him, in the bar. He stayed a few times and had supper with me, though he complained that the price was much too high. He was a tall, fair man, as I imagined baseball players to look, and he didn’t interest me in any special way, but he was company. After the odd little encounter with Claude I welcomed Sage’s visits, tried to be enthusiastic, especially if Claude saw us together.
I told Sage one day, “I’ve just got to get out of here.” I didn’t mean forever, I explained. I just thought I ought to go back to Texas, maybe, and see if it was as I recalled. Sage said he flew to San Antonio once or twice a year. The implication was I might go with him some time. “Does your wife like it here?” I asked.
He scowled. “Certainly not the country,” he said. “She stays in Tampico most of the time.”
“I see,” I answered. In a way I probably did. Sage’s casual visits were those of a dissatisfied husband. The idea drove me off. “Yes,” I said, a little loudly. “I think I’ll go home some time soon.” I’d have to ask Bruni about some money.
Before I had time to think it through, my brother Kermit called. He was thoroughly annoyed; it had taken him a whole day to get through. He supposed I wouldn’t be there for the funeral, he said, but Dad was dead.
I had to collect my father in my mind before I could respond; when was the last time I had even thought of him? “How?” I asked.
The connection was terrible. “Off a rig,” I heard Kermit say. He had fallen off a rig.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. It was so stupid, nobody could do that.
“Well, they’ve got him in a box,” Kermit yelled. “Believe it.” Then he hung up.
Chapter 9
“OH, I HOPE he really did fall,” Sherry said, startling me. Her face was an open plea not to pursue the implication. She had come along to the airport to meet me. My brother did not put himself out too much for anyone. Sherry told me there hadn’t really been a funeral, only the interment, a cortege of three. I could imagine my sister-in-law between Kermit and my mother, holding an elbow on each side, the good-woman wife, long-suffering, sturdy and shy. I couldn’t imagine how life with Kermit had been for her. Not good would have been my guess. Yet he had come up in the world marrying Sherry, who came with a widowed mother Ann—a pleasant woman—and her house.
Sherry said there had been a woman at the funeral home; they had seen her against the back wall when they were at the casket. A dark woman with a lot of hair, caught in a loose rope at the neck. “I went back and asked her how she knew Bud. She wouldn’t talk to me. She had looked so sad, and in a moment she looked frightened and then very hostile. I touched her and she bolted. God knows who she was.” Sherry seemed uncomfortable. I suspected she had told me the story to get it over with, but what was I supposed to do?
I soon realized they had not thought I would come. They looked at me as if I had grown horns and a tail, that native-Texan look of suspicion. I sat with them, hunched over the kitchen table, looking for something to say.
“Guess it’s going to snow.” That was big brother Kermit’s contribution. He was thinner than I remembered, hollow-chested. Something wasn’t agreeing with him. Supposedly he wanted to be a doctor. I asked him how it was going, and he just looked at me. Stupid question.
My mother seemed beyond it all. Her thinness, unlike Kermit’s, had a certain elegance to it. Through her silky green shirt the deep clefts above her collarbone lay like craters on a relief map. Her cheekbones were newly prominent, rouged, a fresh asset on a woman who had always gone around with her head tucked down. She even wore a string of pearls, surely fake. I wished for them to be real, plucked from the ocean, one at a time, by naked boys.
Little Tommy, almost exactly the age of my affair with Tonio, leaned on his knees and banged two fists in front of him. Sherry put a bowl of tapioca in front of him and began sliding plates of cold food onto the table. “Isn’t anybody hungry?” she entreated.
“Looks like your dad had himself a woman friend,” my mother said. I squirmed in my chair. Nobody would be happy to learn there had been a Mexican mistress, but what could they say in front of me?
Kermit took me to the grave. It was almost dark. We stood beside the fresh dirt, uncertain of each other in our new half-orphaned state. (So what’s any different, I thought.) I stole glances of him. His skin, like mine, showed the tracks of old acne, but I had never noticed before. His hair was long, it fell across his forehead. I slipped my hand into his. His arm hung slack. For a moment I thought he was refusing me, his hand gimpy like a flap off his sleeve. Then he gently closed his hand around mine.
“There was a young man from Boston, he bought himself an Austin—”
He was grinning.
“There was room for his ass, and a gallon of gas,” I added, and together we finished the limerick: “But his balls hung out and he lost ‘em.”
I knelt and took up a handful of the fresh-turned dirt. I had always thought dirt was warm, raw like this, but it was cold and damp.
He had liked limericks. That was what we remembered of him.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“He died on a Monday night. We had just had him over for dinner—Sherry keeps saying that, over and over, as if I need reminding, as if it mattered, it made something okay. He hadn’t eaten six bites. He was white-faced, except for his blotchy nose. Once I saw him clutching the edge of the table. I didn’t know what to make of it. Sherry was clearing the plates, Ann was up getting coffee, and I blurted out, ‘See a doctor, anybody can see you’re in pain.’ He said he’d been having trouble pissing—he apologized to Ann for the slip—and that he was tired. Too many night shifts at the well, he said. He went away, I swear, like a tired old dog.” It hadn’t been surprising to hear that he was dead. The dispatcher called Kermit from work. Bud had fallen off a rig. Nobody knew what he was doing up there, he wasn’t a derrick hand anymore. The hand who had seen it said it looked like Bud was reaching for something, like he had stepped out to take it.
“Everyone said he was sober,” Kermit said. “They decided on an autopsy. There had to be a reason, you know? An autopsy can’t explain an accident. He was getting old, his judgment was bad, he was weary. But he did have a kidney stone like a fist in his bladder, and get this, he had a perforated bowel. A swallowed toothpick. Hell, he died of pain to save the wait.”
“What did he do? For something to do? Kermit, I don’t remember!”
Kermit understood what I was asking. “He watched TV. He read Louis L’Amour.”
Relief flooded me. “Oh yes.”
“I think he played poker once in a while.”
“I hadn’t written him in so long.”
“I gave him the card you sent us from Acapulco last year. He thought it was terrific, like you’d won the lottery.”
“What did you think? What do you think of me?”
“Abby, when I’m ou
t of the house, I don’t even think about my wife, my kid. Just whatever it is I’m doing.”
“Is it so hard, school?”
“It’s a lot of work, and I’ve got such a long way to go. It’s not that tough. It’s—life. Shit, you know.”
“What does Mom say about Bud?”
“Nothing. I think it was a relief. One less thing for her to think about. Which leads me to say I don’t think she cares what you’re doing. Whatever that is.”
“Getting by. Life, you know.”
“So what is it with this guy?”
“I live on his ranch.”
“Why?”
“It’s an easy life. Sometimes it’s interesting. I like him a lot.” I thought about the jaguarundi on the chain at the guardhouse. Tonio said they were rare, these cats, yet he’d seemed to take it for granted that one showed up because he wanted it to. The cat clawed anybody who came close, but Tonio could stroke her russet flanks and make her purr.
I wondered if, being young, the cat had forgotten freedom: long jumps, the smell of prey. I missed the ranch already.
“I meant something else, dopehead. Don’t take this wrong. Why you?”
“Luck. I knew his cousin, we went to see him fight, he said I could stay.”
“No shit. That doesn’t explain anything.”
“It’s all I know.”
I wanted Kermit to understand other things, more important. “Once I went to the ranch on the bus. Ten hours from Mexico City. This marvelous thing happened. We stopped high in the Sierras at two or three in the morning. Ten thousand feet above sea level, and I suddenly stared up into the sky so close, so full of stars, they looked like they would rain down on me, and then I looked out on mountains, ridge after ridge like ocean waves—” I stopped for breath, amazed at the words pouring out of me, the vividness of the memory. “Thrown out among the mountains, infinitesimally small, were the twinkles of fires, like fireflies.”
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