They say you are never old in your dreams. You stay young and dressed as you were when you were thirty, the high noon of your appeal. At night they all come back, the clients I once had in their magnificent houses just as they were in 1940 or 1952. The whiskey flows, the banter is sharp and sexually compressed, and sunlight pours over majestic lawns and driveways. They have no idea who I am and they care even less. For them I am garbage, a paid executioner. But the women among them feel their insides move. It’s the way of animals and drunks; at high noon everything looks beautiful and new.
Past midnight, I could hardly stand and a boy from one of the cantinas escorted me home. We sang a song together on the way and he told me that I wasn’t the drunkest drunk he had come across that week. He took me up to my room and left me dark of mind on the bed. I lay there all night in my clothes and dreamt that I was searching for my own tomb in a refugee camp in a forest. The tombs were made of wood and shaped like sleds, their outsides painted brightly. Briefly I woke and thought I heard gunshots from the town—either that or the Zapatistas had contented themselves with firecrackers. I couldn’t remember where I had been the evening before or what I had done. Cactus ice cream, I thought, and that was all I thought. It rained all night. The ghosts came into the garden and spoke in half a dozen languages. Topsy Perlstein came speaking Nahua and dancing the cancan. Far out in the darkness nightclubs from the past blared their horns and for a while I could hear the sounds of Coney Island rides.
In the morning the owner made me breakfast on the terrace. She told me that late in the night someone of Dolores’s description had arrived at the hotel and taken a room on the ground floor, but that she had left early for Yautepec. I asked what the name had been.
“Zinn.”
“That’s quite a name,” I said.
“She can have whatever name she likes. It’s a free country.”
It was still raining, but lightly now. Thunder simmered on the horizon. On the slopes near the hotel stood strange desiccated trees with dark-red coin-size seedpods hanging from the branches while izote flowers had burst into life as if overnight. The poetry of the earth is never dead.
Yautepec was an hour away. It seemed to be lost among endless valleys, like a place that has been mislaid by generations of madmen, and getting there was like riding on a fairground machine, the road rising and dipping and turning the stomach. It will be the last place I’ll ever go, I kept thinking. But I’d go to get a last view of the eyes I liked so much. Yautepec would be the last destination in which to find a criminal. On a field just outside its center, a thirty-foot-high pole had been erected for the ritual of the flying dancers who, with whistles between their teeth, rotated around the poles on colored ropes. These voladores had already started, and so I got out there and watched the flyers whirling around the pole on their ropes while a fifth dancer sat on the pole and hit a small drum.
I walked through the town in my straw hat with a flower in its band, a bottle of tequila in hand, in the vast confusion of the chinelos, with the rain thundering down around me. The costumed brass bands and the men in brocaded hats shaped like inverted pyramids. I felt at home. Why shouldn’t I have felt at home, since when all is said and done I don’t have one? There are men with homes and men without them. The latter are the diviners and madmen. And now I was surrounded by hundreds of masks that imitated the long-nosed faces and curled beards of the conquerors of centuries ago, of the men who looked like me. A thousand replications of my own face. They gyrated by shuffling and jerking their shoulders so that the cascades of beads and fringes and false pearls shook up and down in a sexual motion and eventually I was dancing among them, holding my cane in one hand, abandoned and freed, and as uncool and uncalculating as my prior life had been cool and calculating. I watched as dogs dragged small clusters of intestines through the mud from the market nearby and boys with axes hauled blocks of ice through the rain. But soon the skies cleared; the afternoon was bathed in a returning heat and a soaring sun. In the covered market where the exhausted revelers recovered at the tables of cantinas and restaurants, they were butchering pigs. Day turned to night while I sat there and the Carnival became an episode from the distant past. I was alone at the end of the road and there would be no more labyrinths, and I was perfectly happy among strangers. I had always been amid strangers, anyway, moving among them with a few quips and never really arousing their respect.
As night came down I walked out to the canal or stream that ran past the market, its high banks covered with broken glass. People had passed out in the street and lay there looking up at the sky without any visible regrets. The street curved alongside the embankment and its surface was wet. I tapped my way along it until the noise had receded a bit. Eventually I sat on the embankment amid confetti that plastered the road along with crushed piñatas. I thought I could see a Ferris wheel in the distance, all the locals in Stetsons with their girls standing about in the radiance of its lights. If it didn’t exist it was all the same to me. Cries and music, girls being whisked around in the Ferris wheel chairs. The confetti looked like snow, the dogs with guts in their jaws like swift reptiles. I set my now-empty bottle of tequila down in the grass next to me.
Across the street there was a bar of some kind. The plastic tables spilled into the road and under the string of bulbs a single woman sat in costume, drinking a bottle of Fanta. She wore a purple robe with silver hems and her hat was covered with sequins and tassels. She looked like a functionary of the Persian Empire in the time of Khusrow. The mask she wore was bright pink, a man’s face with a gold beard and black-rimmed eyes. She looked over at me and I had the feeling that she was smiling at me. Just then I thought of the words that had been running through my head for years like mental waste but which now served a purpose. My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, shall with their goat feet dance the antic hay.
She raised the beard of the mask and slipped the whole thing upward over her head until her face came into the bar’s lights. It was Dolores, the sorrowful one, and it was true that she had spotted me sitting on the bank.
She lifted the bottle of Fanta and the smile was as brilliantly unexpected as it was familiar. I had no cup to lift in her direction, but I smiled back and for a moment it was as if nothing had happened over the previous days. She pulled her mask back down, walked out into the street, and turned into the market, where the crowd was dancing. For a moment I thought of following her, but I no longer knew what I would be following or why.
Instead, I went to the bar and got my last drop of Sauza.
“Who was that?” I asked the man serving.
He shrugged, in the way of men who tend counters.
“Some woman from the city. They always come to the Carnival. They’re attracted to the violence.”
But what was the violence?
It was a joke. But at the same time I saw what he meant. Guns went off in the dark, that crisp pop that you never mistake for firecrackers. A point of frenzy was being reached, and you could say about such things that they are also the point of greatest contentment. I wanted to ask him what I should do next at my age—walk out into the fields and dance with the rest of them? But his eyes told me what I needed to know and I agreed with the plan. I got up without paying—he didn’t even raise a hand—and wandered into the music and the detonating handguns. I wanted to waltz quietly with someone beautiful, but although I looked for her I couldn’t find her in the melee. Later, in any case, when I was sober, I tried to remember whether I had seen even her face somewhere before in an earlier time. Somewhere at the bottom of a well, in a cinema long ago where a film was playing that no one now remembers. There have been so many of those faces and I never got the opportunity to see them age. That was the greatest sorrow of all, I suppose. I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry.
EPILOGUE
In El Centro, a month later, a sandstorm was blowing by five in the afternoon and the st
reets were reduced to a brown haze. The Kon Tiki’s neons were turned off for the day and the Chinese owners seemed not to recognize me. I took the same room, however, and by the time I lay down it was almost dark outside. Sand hissed against the windows and spilled under the door into the room. Once again I heard the daughter practicing her violin on the ground floor and once again I agreed to meet Bonhoeffer at the diner on Adams Avenue. It was dark by the time I got there and the place was empty. He sat hunched by the window, bathed in pale-green light from the outside neon, and looked rested and splendidly indifferent to the vagaries of his own job. He had already ordered a milk shake and was doing a newspaper crossword as he sucked on the strawberry-striped straw.
He was the same as always, like something crab-like that will endure unchanged until a moment of sudden extinction. He looked up mildly and all the humor and sarcasm of those murky eyes was ready to roll into action.
“So you’re back.” He pumped the straw into the milk shake and then let it float. “Did you have a nice vacation?”
“I didn’t get any scars, if that’s what you mean. Well, maybe one or two. Mexico City was better than last time.”
“Oh? I thought it was drowning in smog.”
“It might be. But smog isn’t the worst thing in life. Come to think of it, though, I didn’t see any smog at all. It was like Virginia in spring.”
“Never been to Virginia,” he said.
I sat and he put down the crossword.
“Let’s have two Roadkill Burgers,” he went on. “It’s not really roadkill. Just tastes like it.”
“Roadkill’s all right with me.”
We both got a round of Coors and an ice bucket to go with them.
“Hell of a storm,” he said, as we looked forlornly into the howling sand.
“Wasn’t it storming sand last time I was here?” I said.
“It certainly was. It’s like locusts. You bring it with you.”
“I’m a hell of a visitor to my own country.”
He tipped the edge of the hat he was still wearing.
The burgers came with paper tubs of coleslaw, pickles, and cheese fries. In the green light we looked like two aging chimps eating scraps in a cave. Along the street came rusted Mexican pickups with shadowy occupants scanning the street, the lit-up window that framed the two gringos with their cheese fries and beers.
“I’ve been busy since you left,” Bonhoeffer said. “Though we never identified the ashes. I recorded it as an anonymous death, remains unidentified. It was the best I could do. But I have the address of the man you asked me to give them to, Linder senior. I have it here.”
He pushed a piece of office paper across the table.
“You could go have a talk with him. He probably ain’t the easiest.”
“It’s a nice thing that you did, Mr. Bonhoeffer.”
“Anything to help a man back from the dead.”
I took the paper and read the address: Horseshoe Lane, Glamis.
“It’s on the far side of the lake in open desert, as you know. We tracked him down and it seems he’s a caretaker at a gated community nearby. Or was. The community center said he retired two years ago,” Bonhoeffer explained.
“Is he married?”
“No idea. He doesn’t have a telephone. Hard to be married without one, I’d say.”
“A loner on his own. That’ll be fun.”
“I’d go about it carefully if I were you. Loners have bad tempers.”
“I should know,” I sighed.
“Take him a bottle of whiskey. It might soften him up.”
“It might soften us both up.”
We ate in silence for a while and I couldn’t help looking out into the empty street. I hated El Centro, but I wasn’t sure I knew every reason for why I hated it. There were too many. But hadn’t I liked it before? I couldn’t remember.
“What if I didn’t solve anything in the end? It was a trail that went nowhere. Just clues that led to other clues and then faded away. But I made enough money to buy a small boat. That’s the one good thing that came out of it.”
“A boat?”
“A small catamaran. I bought it outright from a guy I know in Popotla. Now I can go fishing in my spare time. I’ll probably die out there, of course. Like in The Old Man and the Sea.”
“More than likely.”
Then he rubbed his eyes and asked me about the man out in the desert.
“That’ll be my closure,” I said.
“You can’t know what he’ll say, however.”
I thought about that lobster hole I knew called Popotla. There was an abandoned arch by the road, a home furnishing business set up by the peasants nearby. That would be my place from now on. Just behind the surf, in view of Popotla teenagers selling their plaster Virgins and cattle skulls, there among them would be me, seated at my usual place, eating small tortillas, watching both them and the scarlet rock pools at the bottom of the cliffs. I’d read through the Baja Sun until it was time for a sundowner. On and on until the big sleep.
But meanwhile I considered that Bonhoeffer was right and I thought about it when I was back at the Kon Tiki, speculating as to how I was going to drive out in the morning to the Glamis hot springs on the far side of the Salton Sea. There was a Horseshoe Lane and he lived somewhere on it, within walking distance of the Glamis North Hot Spring Resort. It was a corner of the desert I didn’t know, one of those unincorporated encampments where loners and dropouts went to escape the things they hated about our beautiful way of life.
The next day I got to the sea at about seven. The day was nothing like the previous evening. The brightness had returned. I had a coffee and doughnut in Niland and bought a bottle of whiskey for the road. In the passenger seat beside me, I placed a small suitcase filled with what remained of Dolores’s money. Then I drove out to look at the long canal that cuts north–south through the desert. It’s one of the strangest things you can ponder there.
The canal went directly from Slab City all the way to Glamis, and I drove alongside it with the mountains to my right and the sea to my left. The smattering of shacks and trailers on the way, with bits and pieces of hippy art cowering among the mesquites, made me wonder if old Linder came down here for his Saturday nights. Glamis had to be even more godforsaken.
So it turned out. A place with roads with names like Gas Line and System and—incredibly—Spa. It looked at first like an industrial installation or an abandoned air force base, aquafarms spread out to the left of the road, and the badlands rising up beyond the canal and Gas Line Road into peaks the color of milk chocolate.
There were only about three or four roads in Glamis, and Horseshoe Lane was easy to find. It indeed curved like a horseshoe, and within it was a trailer park with eight or nine vehicles parked behind low bushes. I left the car under a few palms on the far side of the dirt road and walked across into the trailer park. In reality, it was just a handful of trailers and a small outhouse. The wind blew hot off the mountains; small desert-willows posted by the road hissed as they were battered and the dust came and went.
Two children were playing ball on the road and I asked them where Linder lived. They pointed to a trailer that overlooked the scenery. But, they said, old man Linder was down by the canal. You could see him if you looked hard enough.
“What’s he doing down there?”
“He goes fishing every morning.”
“There’s fish in the Coachella?”
“No, sir.”
I looked down toward the Coachella Road. It was open desert between here and there, and sure enough there was a tiny human figure motionless by the canal.
I waved from the road, but he wouldn’t have been able to see me. There was nothing for it but to walk down there myself, taking the suitcase and the bottle of whiskey with two paper cups.
; I struck out over the burning gray sand where fan palms and creosotes stood curiously dark against a shrill sky. The tiny blue flowers of the smoke trees had begun to burst forth. A track went down to the canal, and near where it petered out over the dark-green water, an old man sat in overalls maintaining an ancient fishing rod and a line that disappeared into the scum-rimmed depths below.
He must have heard me, because his head was already half-turned, and he watched me from the corner of one eye. He was a desert gnome made of wire and thorns, a human tumbleweed in a plaid shirt, with a can of tobacco and a pipe laid in the sand beside him. I decided the best thing would be to sit down next to him after asking permission.
“Got a problem with your leg?” he said as my shadow fell against him.
“I’m getting on all right.”
“You from El Centro?”
“Not really. But I was there last night.”
“So what’s in that suitcase?”
“Candies.”
He smiled and turned back to the green water. The sun fell harshly into his eyes, but they didn’t flinch.
Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 20
