Mermaids on the Golf Course

by Patricia Highsmith

  A second kitten appeared, and as the two kittens hunched and lapped, the boy looked over his shoulder, grinning mischievously, as if to see if anyone were watching him. The plaza and the surrounding walks and streets were quite deserted. A grown cat, so thin its bones made shadows in its fur, galloped from the hotel side of the plaza towards the milk pan, and Andrew heard the boy giggle softly, and saw him scramble to his feet, spilling a little of the milk from the pan he was taking away. Why?

  Andrew pulled on his jeans, shoved his feet into sneakers, and ran out of his room. Within seconds, he was outside the hotel door on the sidewalk. The boy was walking toward Andrew, but at an angle off to Andrew’s right.

  “Porquè—” Andrew stopped, hearing faint laughter from somewhere left of him.

  The boy trotted away, dumping what remained of the milk on the street.

  On his left, Andrew saw a group of three or four men, one with a hand camera of the kind that could make movies. Were they shooting a film? Was that why the boy had to repeat the cat-feeding scene? The men were middle-aged, and looked like ordinary Mexicans, though not peasants. Andrew saw one laugh, and wave a hand in a gesture that might mean “The hell with it” or “Muffed that one again.” At any rate, they turned away, drifted out of Andrew’s sight.

  Back in his room, Andrew removed sneakers and jeans and again lay on his bed on his back. What was the meaning of it? Why were three or four men, one with a camera, out in the hot sun at 2 P.M.? Was the boy an actor or was he a little sadist? Strange.

  Andrew felt that the whole past month had been strange. The girl he was in love with in New York, the girl he had thought would last, had met someone else a month ago. This had so thrown him, he hadn’t been able to attend classes at the Art Students League for two or three days, and he had felt a bit suicidal or at least self-destructive. He had telephoned his married sister Esther in Houston, and she had invited him to come and stay for a few days. He had not talked much to his sister, but she had been cheering. And there was Mexico which he had never seen, so near when one was already in Houston, so he had taken a slow, cheap train south. Everything he had seen was different, fascinating. But as yet Andrew didn’t know what to make of his life, or of his feelings now.

  His nap was ended by the jukebox of the Bar Felipe starting up in a corner of the square, which meant it was around four. The jukebox would play nonstop till nearly midnight. Andrew washed at the basin, dressed again, and gathered his sketching equipment. The hotel lobby was deserted as usual when he walked out, though there were a couple of other guests in the hotel, Mexican men, both very quiet.

  At the Bar Felipe, Andrew treated himself to an iced tea, and kept an eye out for the men or any one of them whom he had seen watching the boy with the kittens. And for the boy himself. None of these came in through the open doors or walked past on the sidewalk. Other customers of Felipe, workmen with tattered sombreros, wearing tire-soled sandals, came up to the bar to drink a bottle of beer or the brightly colored orange drink that seemed very popular, and they all glanced at Andrew, but didn’t stare at him as they had on his first day in town. A dog, thin as a whippet but of indeterminable breed, came up to Andrew’s table hopefully, but Andrew hadn’t ordered any potato chips or peanuts.

  Andrew was pleased with his work of that afternoon. He had sketched two landscapes with color pencils, introducing a lot of purple in the yellow and tan hills. One drawing showed the cluster of tan and pinkish houses that formed the town.

  He dined at a tiny restaurant he had discovered in a side street off the plaza, a place hardly bigger than a kitchen, with only four tables. It catered to laborers, Andrew had observed, plus a couple of men of sixty or so who were unshaven and always slightly drunk. Andrew ordered frijoles refritos, tortillas, and a mug of boiled milk. The smell of peppery meat in the place sickened him.

  The next day repeated the day before it. Sketching in the morning, a light lunch, an orange in his room afterwards. Fruit you had to peel was free of germs, Andrew remembered, and the sweet juice was wonderfully refreshing. Beads of sweat stood on his forehead and seemed to return as soon as he had wiped them away.

  Gradually, then all at once, the silence of the siesta period fell outside his window. Not a footstep sounded, not the twitter of a bird. It was the sun’s time, and the time lasted nearly four hours while life cowered in little rooms like his, in shade anywhere. Andrew was lying on his back with a wet towel across his forehead, when he heard the tink of metal on cement. With nervous energy, and out of curiosity, he got up to see what might be moving outside.

  The boy was there, in the same clothing, in the same place, and with the same pie tin of milk. And here came one kitten shakier than yesterday. And there was the boy’s smile over his shoulder, quick and furtive.

  Andrew’s sun-bleached brows drew closer together as he stared. Now—yes, now the boy was sliding the pan back from the kitten who had been joined by the second kitten, and the boy set one foot under him, ready to rise with the pan.

  There was a crack like a gunshot, not loud, but shocking in the silence.

  The boy sagged at once, the pan made a little clatter and the milk spilled. The kittens lapped greedily. And here came the galloping older cat, the skinny brindle, as before.

  A film, Andrew thought, still staring. Then he saw a red spot on the boy’s shirt. It spread downward along the boy’s right side. A plastic paint container that the boy had opened? Was the camera turning? The boy did not move.

  Andrew got into his jeans and sneakers with crazy speed and left his room. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked left, expecting to see the camera crew again, but the corner there was deserted. No one was in sight, except the boy.

  Andrew wet his lips, hesitated, then took a couple of steps in the direction of the boy, looked again to his left for the camera crew, then went on. The blood, or whatever it was, had reached the sidewalk and was flowing towards the street gutter. One of the kittens was in fact interested in it.

  “Hey!” Andrew said. “Hey, boy!” Andrew stretched a hand out, but did not touch the boy’s shoulder. The boy’s eyes were half open. Andrew now saw the bullet hole in the white shirt.

  He trotted towards the Bar Felipe, thinking that Felipe would be more easily aroused than the hotel proprietor, who seemed to close himself behind a couple of doors at the back of the hotel during siesta time.

  “Hey!—Felipe!” Andrew knocked on the closed wooden doors of the bar. “Open!—Por favor! Es importante!” After a few seconds, Andrew tried again. He banged with his fist. He looked around the square. Not a shutter had opened, not a head showed at any window. Crazy!

  “Qué quiere?” asked Felipe, having opened his door a little. He wore only pajama trousers and was barefoot.

  “Un niño—herido!” Andrew gasped, pointing.

  Felipe took two cautious steps on to the hot sidewalk, so he could see along the plaza’s side, and at once jumped back into the shade of his doorway, waved a hand angrily and said something which Andrew took to mean “Don’t bother me with that!”

  “But—a doctor—or the police!” Andrew pushed against the doors which Felipe was trying rapidly to close, then heard a bolt being slid on the other side. Andrew trotted back to his hotel.

  The hotel desk was deserted. Andrew banged his palm a couple of times on the little bell on the counter. “Señor Diego!”

  There was nothing to stop him from using the telephone behind the counter, but he didn’t know the police number and didn’t see a directory.

  “Señor Diego!” Andrew went to the closed door to the left of the counter and knocked vigorously.

  He heard a grumbling shout from behind the door, then house-slippered footsteps.

  Señor Diego, a middle-sized man with gray in his hair and mustache, looked at Andrew with surprise and annoyance. “What’s the matter?” he asked, pulling his cotto
n bathrobe closer about him.

  “A boy is dead! Out there!” Andrew pointed. “Didn’t you hear the shot? A couple of minutes ago?”

  Señor Diego frowned, walked a few paces across his lobby, and peered through the open doors of the hotel. The boy was quite visible from here. The three cats, the two kittens and the older cat, were still lapping at the blood, but with less enthusiasm, as the blood was drying or not flowing any longer. “Bad boy,” Señor Diego commented softly.

  “But—we telephone the police?”

  Señor Diego blinked and seemed to ponder. It was the first time Andrew had seen him without his glasses.

  “The police or a doctor!—Or we carry him in?”

  “No!” Señor Diego gave Andrew a scathing glance—as if he detested him, Andrew felt—and moved towards the door of his living quarters. Then he turned and looked at Andrew. “The police will find him.”

  “But maybe he’s not dead!” Andrew felt torn between an impulse to carry the boy into the hotel, and to leave him as he was for police detectives to determine where the shot had come from. Andrew went behind the counter to the telephone, picked it up, and was looking at the disk of emergency numbers on the telephone’s base, when Señor Diego yanked the telephone from his hands.

  “All right, the police! Then you will see . . .”

  Andrew could not understand the rest.

  Señor Diego dialed a number. Then he mumbled several words into the telephone. “Sí-sí, Hotel Corona. Okay.” He hung up, and shook his head nervously. “Do not move from this hotel!” he commanded, scowling at Andrew.

  Anger flowed through Andrew, and his face felt as if it were going to explode. He went off down the hall to his room, whose door was slightly open still. Do not move from this hotel! Why should he? Andrew let cold water run in his basin. His face looked dark pink in the mirror. He took off his shirt again, wet it, and put it back on. At once he was too cool, even shivering. He had been listening for the sound of a car motor, and now it came. Andrew went to his window, but his eyes were drawn first to the boy in white who lay on the plaza’s sidewalk, in sun and shadow. No cats now. A car door banged shut.

  He heard voices in the lobby, then the creak of a couple of shutters in the plaza. A policeman in faded khaki and a visored cap bent over the boy, touched the boy’s shoulder, then straightened and walked towards the hotel door.

  Two policemen and Señor Diego came into Andrew’s room. Suddenly all three seemed to be talking at once, but quite calmly, as in a dream, Andrew thought. The policemen questioned him calmly. Andrew kept saying, “I heard the shot, yes . . . I was here . . . Just ten minutes ago . . . No, no. Not me, no! I have no gun. I saw the boy fall! . . . Ask Señor Felipe!” Andrew pointed. “I went—”

  “Señor Felipe!” said the oldest of the policemen, who now numbered three, and threw a smile at Señor Diego.

  Andrew knew that he had not made his story clear. But why hadn’t he? What he was saying was quite simple, even if his Spanish was primitive. He watched the policemen conferring. His ears started ringing, he wanted to sit down, but instead went to his window for some air. Three or four people now milled about the fallen boy, not touching him. Curious townspeople had at last emerged.

  “You come with us,” said a mustached policeman, reaching towards Andrew as if to take him by the wrist.

  Andrew was suddenly conscious of the fact that each of the policemen carried a gun at his hip and a nightstick at his other hip.

  “But I can tell you everything here,” Andrew said. “I saw it, that’s all.”

  “But if you shot?” said one cop.

  Another policeman made a gesture as if to shut him up.

  Señor Diego was smiling, murmuring something to the oldest policeman.

  A handcuff snapped on one of Andrew’s wrists as if by magic, and the policemen seemed to be arguing about whether to put the other wrist in the second handcuff or to attach that to a policeman’s wrist, and they decided on Andrew. He was walked out between two policemen with his wrists together in front of him. The boy lay as before, and the people around him now gave their attention to Andrew and the police, who were emerging from the hotel door into the sunlight.

  “My tourist card!” Andrew cried, jerking his arm away from a policeman who had hold of him. In English he said, “I demand to have my tourist card with me!”

  “Hah!” But this same policeman, after a word with a colleague, seemed to agree that they take Andrew back to his room.

  Andrew took his card from the pocket in the lid of his suitcase, and a policeman took it from him, glanced at it with the air of not reading a word, then stuck it in his own back pocket.

  The tan police wagon was a decrepit Black Maria with metal benches inside. Cigarette butts littered the ridged metal floor, along with stains that looked like blood and what might have been dried vomit. The car had no springs, and potholes jolted them up from the benches. The vehicle, though open to the air with its heavy wire mesh sides, seemed to hold heat like a closed oven. The policemen’s shirts became darker with sweat, they took off their caps and wiped their foreheads, talking all the while merrily.

  Then suddenly Andrew was on the ridged floor. He had almost fainted, had lost his balance, and now the two policemen were hauling him back on to the bench. Andrew had no strength, as in a dream in which he couldn’t escape from something. It’s all a dream, he thought, because of the fever he had. Wasn’t he really lying on his bed in his hotel room?

  The wagon stopped. They all went up a couple of steps into a yellowish stone building and into a large room with a high ceiling, maybe formerly the anteroom of a private dwelling, but which was now unmistakably a police station. An officer in uniform approached an unoccupied desk at the back of the room, beside which hung a limp and faded flag on a tall staff.

  Andrew asked for the toilet. He had to ask twice, had to insist, and insist also that his handcuffs be undone. A police officer accompanied him and stood indifferently near the doorless toilet—a hole in a tiled square on the floor—while Andrew attended to his needs. There was no toilet paper, not even any newspaper scraps on the nail in the wall beside the hanging chain, which produced no water when Andrew tugged at it. It was during these unpleasant moments that Andrew became sure that he was not dreaming.

  Now he was standing before the desk in the large room, with a policeman on either side of him. One policeman narrated something rapidly, and handed the man at the desk Andrew’s tourist card. This was valid for a three-week stay in Mexico, and Andrew was so far well within that limit.

  “Spatz—Andrew Franklin—born Orlando, Florida,” the officer murmured, and continued with his birth date.

  Suddenly Andrew had a vision of his blonde sister Esther, happy and laughing, as she had looked just two weeks ago, when she had been trying to hold her two-year-old son still enough for Andrew to make a sketch. Andrew said in careful Spanish, “Sir, there is no reason why I am here. I saw a boy—shot.”

  “Hererra—Fernando,” said a policeman at Andrew’s elbow, as if performing a detail of duty. The name of the boy had already been uttered a few minutes earlier.

  “Sí-sí,” said the desk officer calmly, then to Andrew, “Who shot?”

  “I did not see—from where the shot came.”

  “It was just outside your hotel window. Ground floor room you have. You could have shot,” said the desk officer. Or was it, “You have shot?”

  “But I have no gun!” Andrew turned to one policeman, then the other. “You have seen my room.”

  One policeman said something to the desk officer about the Bar Felipe.

  “Ahah!” The desk officer listened to further narration.

  Was the cop saying he’d got rid of a gun between his hotel room and the Bar Felipe? The shot must have come from a rifle, Andrew thought. What was “rifle” in Span
ish?

  “The boy had robbed you,” said the desk officer.

  “No! I did not say that, never!”

  “He was a very bad boy. A criminal,” said the desk officer weightily, as if this altered the facts somehow.

  “But I simply wanted to tell his death—to the Bar Felipe, to—” Andrew’s hands were free, and he spread his arms to indicate a length. “With a gun so long—surely.”

  “You saw the gun?”

  “No! I say—because of the distance—There was no one but the boy in the plaza when he—shot,” Andrew finished lamely, exhausted now.

  The desk officer beckoned, and the two policemen came closer to the desk. All three talked softly, and all at once, and Andrew hadn’t a clue as to what they were saying. Then the two policemen returned to Andrew, and each took him by an arm. They were leading him towards a hall, towards a cell, probably. Andrew turned suddenly.

  “I have the right to notify the American Consulate in Mexico City!” he shouted in English to the desk officer who was on his feet now.

  “We shall notify the Consulate,” he replied calmly in Spanish.

  Andrew took a step towards the desk and said in Spanish, “I want to do it, please.”

  The desk officer shrugged. “Here is the number. Shall I dial it for you?”

  “All right,” said Andrew, because he didn’t know the code for Mexico City. He didn’t entirely trust the desk officer, but he was able to stand on the officer’s left, and he saw that the number he dialed corresponded to the number in the officer’s ledger beside EE UU Consulado.

  “You see?” said the desk officer, after the telephone had rung at the other end eight or nine times. “Closed until four.”

  Andrew’s watch showed ten past three. “Then again at four—I try.”

  The officer nodded.

  The two policemen took him in charge again. Down the hall they went, and stopped at a wooden door in which a square had been cut at eye level.

  The cell had one barred window, a bed, and a bucket in a corner.