Once he got to the Paseo de la Reforma heading out toward Chapultepec, he was able to play the chicken game at each traffic circle-at Colon, Cuauhtemoc, Independencia, Diana. To play the game properly, you get into five-abreast traffic and accelerate to fifty as you enter the traffic circle, then all go screaming and swaying around the monument in the middle and find room to peel off and out of the group and exit from the circle at the street you want.
Meyer had opened his eyes: They were too far open. I tried to take his mind off the chicken game by telling him bits of lore-such as the fact that Chapultepec means Grasshopper Hill. But all he could say, watching the traffic inches away, was a barely audible "Dear kindly Jesus." He said it several times.
We popped out of the flow at Diana, sped across the bow of several buses, and gradually slowed down as we went along Mariano Escobedo. The driver turned into the hotel entrance, stopped abruptly, hitched around to face us, looked at his watch, and with a big grin said in semi-English, "Twenny-toos minootis!"
"I'll just sit right here for a while," Meyer said. But a large young man garbed like an Ecuadorian admiral handed us out and got us and our luggage into the incoming flow. My first look at the Camino Real. Twenty-five million dollars worth of it. Seven connected buildings, the tallest only five stories. Entrance lobby the size of a football field, paved with little oblongs of gleaming hardwood, each piece smaller than the end of a pack of cigarettes. Bold colors, daring architecture, startling vistas, all of it a maze of shops and bars and lounges, fountains and pools and restaurants, stairways and corridors and carpeted luxury. Seven hundred and something rooms and suites.
The reservation was in order, the bellhops brisk, and after a very short elevator ride and a very long walk, we were deposited in a pair of interconwcting singles on the third floor of a bedroom wing. Drinks came swiftly. I unpacked. I heard Meyer's voice raised in sonorous melody, and wandered into his place and found him in his giant tub, his drink on the broad marble encircling slab, the black pelt on chest and shoulders foamed with soap.
"About those last lions," he said. "Too damned fat and sleepy and indifferent. Send the boys out to get some lean and hungry lions. How can we put the fear of God into those Christians unless we use faster lions?"
"Anything else?"
"Who catered that last orgy? There were only three dancing girls apiece. An austere orgy is no orgy at all."
"I'll make a note of it."
"And get me my fiddle."
"So soon? We haven't put out the last fire yet."
He hoisted his glass. "Here's to primitive, backward Mexico. Here's to hardship."
I left him there, paddling happily, soaping and singing, and went back into my room and looked up Ron Townsend's number in the oversized phone book. The hotel operator told me I could dial direct. There was a little gadget on the phone. Push the gadget and dial.
A girl answered and I asked for Ron.
She had a good voice, husky and very personal. She got my name and came back and said, "Hang in there while waterboy gets the soap out of his eyes, friend."
He came on the line, properly enthusiastic. He is a young partner in a Miami advertising firm. He was born and partially raised in Cuba. He is the agency expert in Mexico and doing well. I had made a good recovery for them some time ago when a secretary, unbonded, took off with enough cash out of the safe to sting them pretty good. He was delighted to learn Meyer was with me, and apologetic about having a date he couldn't break. But he said he could stop off on the way, so in thirty minutes or so he joined us at the bar in the Camino Real which he favored, named Azulejos, bringing with him the voice on his phone, a young girl at least five ten, suitably spectacular, and clad in minileather fastened with big brass chains and galoshes snaps. Her name was Miranda Dale and she had just finished a bit part in a West German motion picture they had shot at Mazatlan, on Mexico's west coast.
I told Ron our problem, and the girl listened to it with a pretty and sympathetic show of interest. I asked him if he could recommend a useful and influential contact in Oaxaca, and he came up with one named Enelio Fuentes and wrote it on the back of his business card and slid it across to me. He said Enelio was an old friend, had a big VW agency and other business interests scattered around the State of Oaxaca. But he couldn't help with a name in Culiacan. He said he would phone Fuentes and tell him to take care of me if I had to look him up.
Then I asked him how he would go about checking on the Chevrolet truck and camper with Florida plates, registered to a Walter Rockland, and he said he wouldn't even try. In theory you get car papers at the border, and they keep a copy at the place where you enter, and if you leave at some other border town, the stamped papers are supposed to go back to the place where you entered, and then the set is supposed to be sent to Mexico City and filed somewhere, possibly by some branch of the Mexican Tourist Bureau. But that was only theory.
I said we'd be back in Mexico City sooner or later, but right now the most useful thing to do was get down to Oaxaca while there was still a good chance that friends of Miss Bix might be around.
They had to leave. Went across the dim and crowded room. Those long, sweet, taffy-sleek legs, from boot leather to mini-leather, seemed to gather available light and reflect it. Three mariachi types were on the stand, one singing a ballad, and he inserted an improvisation I could not catch. Ron turned, grinning, and called something to the musicians, and there was laughter and applause.
Meyer and I stayed on. He had discovered that tequila anejo conmemorativo, with sangrita on the side, is one of the world's more pleasant drinks. The anejo-the "j" pronounced like a guttural cough-means old. The conmemorativo means a very special distillation. It is drunk straight, pale amber in color, strong, smooth, and clean. The chaser's full name is sangrita de la viuda, which means for some reason I have yet to learn, "little blood of the widow". It is tomato juice, citrus juices, with several varieties of pepper and spices. It changes the taste buds, readies them for the next sip of the tequila. Meyer crooned and beamed and ordered more.
But later his mood changed. "Vulgarity can be many things," he said. "It can be having a good time while en route to where the daughter of an old friend died. Dead young women are a pitiful waste."
We had finished a late dinner. "Tequila shouldn't make you morose," I told him.
"Without it, I would probably be crying," he said.
Three
WE WERE reserved on an early Mexicana flight. It was an elderly Douglas with four genuine propellers and a full load of passengers. Noisy engines, with oil stains on the housings, littered floor, some popped rivets, lots of vibration. My turn at the window seat. Went roaring and clattering down the runway and lifted off. You get conditioned to that steep upward slant of the jets. This thing lifted off and seemed to hang there, fighting for every slow foot of altitude. Lots of time to look down into the streets. At seventy-five hundred feet as a starting place, and with a full load, we did a lot of clawing before we finally came up out of the last of the bright morning smutch and made a long slow turn.
A very plump stewardess in a soiled uniform served us paper cups of coffee and sweet rolls, and she did a lot of bantering with the customers. Then we went between Popo and his sleeping lady, Ixtaccihuatl. The blazing white summits of the dead volcanoes were easily a thousand feet above us, and vivid against the indigo sky. We were close enough to see snow plumes trailing off the cliffs of Ixta in the morning winds.
Then down along the torn and crumpled country, old stone spilled from the spine of the Sierra Madre. A day so clear you could see tiny villages, see the pale narrow marks of burro paths along the ridges. 'Ibo harsh a land to sustain life, but it does. Spaniards could never have taken it from the Indios without all those cute political tricks, turning them against each other. Travel-worn old DC grinding slowly down the side of the rocky world, a tin impertinence making its rackety noise across the stone indifference of the volcanic land. So eat the sweet roll and look down at the world of
a thousand years ago. Mexicana Airlines sells tickets on a time machine.
So we came down into the valley of Oaxacapronounced wuh-HOCK-ah-beginning the descent at the upper end of the valley some twenty miles from the airfield. Green valley encircled by old burned brown rounded hills. It is a plateau valley, five thousand feet high, in the Sierra Madre del Sur, and the Pacific is not far away. Skimmed lower. Saw a broken, abandoned, stone church amid cornfields. Saw a man scratching a groove in brown soil with a wooden plow pulled by slow oxen. Saw village children, bright as spilled flowers. And our pilot set the old crock down with such precise and loving delicacy that there was but one small yelp of rubber, and not the slightest jar:
A neat little terminal, wine warm air, a confusion of greetings and luggage and taxis and hotel vehi cles. The man from our hotel made himself known by pacing through confusion, calling "Veeeek Tory Aaaah! Veeeek lbry Aaaah!"
So soon we were off in a VW bus, the other passengers two stone-faced ladies with blue hair, large satchels, and guidebooks in German, and one young Mexican couple. The girl was in a smart travel suit of painful newness. The boy looked everywhere except at her. New gold rings gleamed.
We passed a sign as we approached the city, assorting that there were eighty thousand people therein. We skirted an edge of it, and climbed steep grades, then, in lowest low, ground up the long, r4teep, divided driveway to the parking area at the top, and the portico over the entrance to the Hotel Victoria.
The modern hotel, five stories tall, stretched along the top of a ridge, looking out across all of the city. Down the slope, in random array, beyond a huge swimming pool, were individual bungalows, each with carport, each landscaped with brilliant flowers and flowering vines. Rough stone steps and walks and stone driveways wound down through the bungalow community, all of it behind a guarded security fence.
The bungalows had girl-names instead of numbers, and they put us in Alicia. There was one large, tiled, plain room, simply furnished, two double beds, a bath, a dressing room, and a small porch in front overlooking the panorama-a porch with a tin table and poolside chairs. Alicia was two hundred and fifty pesos a day for two. Twenty dollars. I had explained to Meyer the quick easy McGee system for keeping track of the pesos. A fifty-peso bill is a four-dollar bill. A ten-peso bill is an eighty-cent bill.
Meyer stood on the porch and looked at the city and the mountains and the blue, blue sky. He looked at the flowers. He sniffed the flavors of the summery air: Then he turned to me and said, "I would have this handy little magic wand and I would take one little pass at you. Kazam! Suddenly you are Miranda Dale, looking at me like she looked at Ron Townsend."
"Didn't all those legs make you feel insecure?"
"And so did the age of the child. But this is the sort of place where I could try to overcome minor obstacles."
"You are a hairy, over-educated, lecherous old man."
"Flattery will get you nowhere, McGee. It's eleven-fifteen. What now?"
"Our wheels." We took a cab down into the city. The Hertz office was on a side street near the zocalo-the public square. The man was pleasant enough, but had absolutely no record of any reservation. He would have a lot of nice cars soon. Maybe in a week. He said he felt desolated by being unable to serve me. I said I would like to give him a four-dollar bill to ease his desolation. It was not to spur him to greater effort on my behalf, I said, because I was certain he would give me every possible help. It was a token of my understanding. He said there was, in truth, a car, but it would be a pity to rent it to me, because I obviously was used to better, and deserved better. It had been many, many kilometros and needed small repairs and was unclean. A boy with a Le Mans psychosis brought it around.
It was a Ford Falcon, from the Guadalajara assem bly plant. Made in Mexico by Mexicans. Pale green. Four doors. Standard shift. It had been thirty-five thousand kilometers, and had been grooved on both sides by near disaster. And it had been traveling some very dusty roads. I signed for it. I took it on a test run, with Meyer copiloting, using the street map they had given us at the airport. Either the Ford engineers have decided Mexicans are a small race, or the cars shrink in the dry climate. With the seat as far back as it would go, my knees were on either side of the edge of the steering wheel, and unless I remembered to swing the right knee out of the way, each time I shifted into high I gave myself a sharp and painful rap on the inside edge of the kneecap. When we hit the first potholes I found the front shocks were gone. The front end hit the frame with a metallic thunk, and then a rumbling chatter.
So I asked directions, and found the Ford garage about seven blocks west of the zocalo. It was then a little past noon. The boss man took it for a turn around the block and came back shaking his head, and said I could have it at four.
We walked to the central square, along narrow sidewalks on narrow streets. The plaster-over-stone fronts of the two-story residences and shops formed a solid wall along the walkway, and they had been painted and repainted with pure strong pigments. One blue wall brought Meyer to a stop. Maybe it had been painted and patched fifty times. Layers had cracked, peeled, faded. It was all the shades of blue there are.
"Fix that with transparent epoxy," he said, "peel off a rectangle eight feet long and five feet high, frame it in rough-cut cypress with a white stain, and take it to any decent gallery-"
"And somebody will tell you their little daughter could do it better."
"The creative act is in selecting which rectangle to frame. It is very damned beautiful, Travis. And that talented daughter is a rotten kid."
Buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, and the ubiquitous popping and snorting of the Mexican plague-the motor scooter. So we went out of the sun heat into the cool shade of the gigantic trees of a splendid zocalo. It had its ornate circular bandstand in the middle, a criss-cross of wide walkways and a perimeter walk past gaudy riots of flowerbeds. Traffic circled it counterclockwise. There were men, women, children selling serapes, shoeshines, chewing gum, straw baskets and straw animals, black pottery, fresh flowers and wilted flowers, serapes, cigarettes, fake Indian relics, silver jewelry, junk jewelry, firecrackers, aprons, serapes, ice cream, soft drinks, and hot tacos stuffed with God only knows what kind of meat. And serapes.
There was evident poverty, beggars with twisted limbs, sick children, stray mongrels, but there was a sense of great life and vitality, of enduring laughter. We found an empty bench. Meyer sat and saw everything, soaked it up, and smiled and smiled. And it was Meyer who spotted a little group on one of the diagonal paths, carrying purchases from the public market, walking toward the largest hotel that fronted on the zocalo, an old ornate stone and plaster structure with a sign proclaiming it as the Hotel Marques del Valle. There was a long, narrow roofed porch across the front of it, a couple of steps up from sidewalk level. Fat cement columns supported arches that held up the overhanging bulk of the ho tel. The porch was two tables wide and about thirty tables long, about half of them occupied, with white-coated waiters hustling drinks and food.
It was a group of four young men and three girls. The college-age men were wearing faded Mexican work shirts, bleached khakis. Two of the men and one of the girls were barefoot, and the others wore Mexican sandals. The girls wore shorts with bright cotton Indian blouses, and the boys were extravagantly bearded, long-haired. This, as Meyer pointed out, was clear indication they had been in Mexico for a long time. The government had long since closed the border to what were called "heepees," so the shorn locks and whiskers had to be regrown south of the border.
We got up and followed along. The waiters pushed two tables together for them. Meyer and I took a table about twenty feet from them, which was as close as we could get. The tempo of the public square was diminishing visibly. Shops were closing. It was siesta time, and not until two-thirty or three would the town begin to stir again. Only the serape salesmen along the sidewalk stayed in business, holding up the rough woven gaudy wools, trying to catch the tourist eye, the tourist interest. And a dirty big
-eyed child roamed from table to tatile, trying dispiritedly to vend her "cheeeklets."
The young seven were a closed circle, totally indifferent to everything and everyone around them, relating and responding to one another. Too many for any initial contact. So I looked at the menu. Meyer had to trust me. The waiter was very patient with my verbless Spanish, and I was equally patient with his rudimentary English. So I managed to find a good solution-chicken enchiladas covered with Chihuahua cheese and baked. He said they had no Dos Equis, but if we wanted a dark beer, Negro Modelo might please us. And it did, and we were into the second bottle before the enchiladas came, bubbling hot in oval steel dishes.
After some thoughtful mastication, tempered with the dark beer, Meyer said, "Offhand, what are the immigration laws?"
"I'll just leave you here, and you can take your chances."
"I'll send you a card every Christmas."
Another student couple had appeared, a huge boy with a small head and a sensitive delicate face, and the blond silky hair and beard style of the Christus. He was with a small wiry black girl with a skin tone like dusty slate, sporting an African blouse and a tall tightly kinked African hairstyle through which she had bleached several startling amber-gold streaks.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 11 - Dress Her in Indigo Page 3
