by Todd Downing
Angerman gazed at him concernedly. “Mr. Rennert has told me what happened. I am sorry. I am very sorry.”
The linguist’s attitude towards Angerman was in marked contrast with that of Dr. Lincoln. “Thanks, Jarl. I’ll be all right now.”
Rennert inquired as to the nature of the wound.
“The bullet,” Dr. Lincoln answered, “struck the trapezium, between the bases of the thumb and the second metacarpal. It did considerable damage to the bone. But not permanent, I hope, unless complications set in.” He turned to Angerman and said almost curtly: “I haven’t much time to spare. I must make my morning calls. Where’s the affidavit Torday wants signed?”
Although he must have been aware of the hostility, there was no expression at all in Angerman’s eyes or on his face as he returned the older man’s gaze. He produced the documents and within a few minutes they had been signed and attested. With thoughtfulness and every evidence of deference, Angerman steadied the paper on the flat chair-arm while Radisson signed. When the latter got to his feet, with the remark that he was going to return to his apartment, Angerman held the door open for him.
“Rennert,” Dr. Lincoln beckoned, and led the way into the living-room. Abstractedly he took his driving a table on which reposed his hat and instrument case. He spoke in an offhand manner: “I see by the morning paper that the death of Campos yesterday has caused quite a stir. I wondered if you had mentioned to anyone that I was there—and was carrying my daughter’s mirror?”
“Why, no, Doctor, I never gave it another thought.”
“Good. Would you mind not saying anything about it? I don’t know what kind of investigation the Mexican police are making. But I cross over into Mexico almost every day, and it would be embarrassing to be detained and questioned.”
Rennert frowned. “Of course I’ll say nothing. But I fail to see any reason why you need worry.”
“Oh, I’m not worrying. But—” Dr. Lincoln gently smoothed the gloves about his long fingers. “I might as well be frank with you, Rennert. I had in mind the man you’re with this morning—Jarl Angerman. He knows that I have frequently urged Dr. Torday to dispense with his services. I consider him unscrupulous. He might welcome the opportunity to strike back at me. I hope you’ll be on your guard while you’re with him.”
“Thank you,” Rennert said evenly, “I shall be on my guard.” He made up his mind quickly. “Doctor, since you have brought up the subject of that bull-fight, I wish you would explain the remark you made when Campos was gored.”
Dr. Lincoln regarded him steadily. “Just what did I say?”
“You said, ‘That’s three!”’
“Oh. I meant that was the third accident”—he stressed the word—“which had happened to men who witnessed the railway wreck on the Campos hacienda three and a half years ago.”
“Charles Bettis was one.”
“Yes. Dr. Torday himself was the second. Exactly a year ago last night another car tried to force his into a ditch. In his condition the slightest jar would be fatal.”
“I never heard that. So Professor Radisson was the fourth.”
Dr. Lincoln put on his hat. “Radisson was the fourth. There aren’t many more of us.”
III
The steel-grey car sped smoothly past the long even rows of orange trees which paralleled the highway and abutted on the road which led past Rennert’s house.
Jarl Angerman lifted a hand and stated: “A good grove.”
“Yes.” Rennert brought his thoughts back. “One of the best in the vicinity. It belongs to Dr. Torday, I understand.”
“Yes. A whole section of land. Bounded on three sides by the highway, the road and by your house. You should own it, Mr. Rennert. It would even out your farm.”
“I’d like to, of course. But I don’t suppose it’s for sale. And if it were the price would be beyond me. I’ll have to be content with my modest acreage.”
“It is not good,” Angerman said sententiously, “to be content.”
“Well, maybe not. But it’s a lot more comfortable than being fired with ambition.”
“But you are ambitious, Mr. Rennert. You do not think so now, but you will see. You will want more land. Every morning when you get up you will look at those orange trees. You will say, ‘I wish they were mine.’ You have never lived on a farm?”
“This is my first experience.”
“But you are still living in a hotel. You do not know what it is to be a part of the land. To want to grow and not be able to because somebody has put up a fence. It is like clothes that are too tight. I know. I was born on a farm in Minnesota. A little farm. I could not stand it.” He glanced sideways at Rennert and his eyes were friendly. “Do you understand what I mean? You were in the Customs Service. You quit. Maybe it was for the same reason that I quit the farm. You felt, the day you left, that you had got out of harness?”
“That describes my feelings very well.” Rennert was thoroughly puzzled. Was all this merely a buildup for an attempt to sell him some land?
There was a dogged persistence about Angerman. “Then you will have the same feeling on a farm unless you make your land grow and grow and break down fences. You will see that I am right. Now you are loafing?”
“Yes. My house isn’t finished. None of my trees will bear fruit for another season. Most of them not for two or three. I must say that I’m enjoying the chance to loaf.”
Angerman shook his head almost severely. “You will get tired of that. You will want to be busy. You are not married?”
And so their talk went as Angerman drove expertly, at the exact maximum of speed permitted by law, through Brownsville’s broad clean streets and towards the International Bridge over the Rio Grande. Rennert found himself talking freely of his days in the Customs Service, of experiences which stood out in bold relief in his memory. Angerman attended gravely, prodding him gently with questions.
There was no delay at the bridge, for Customs officials of both nationalities recognized the car and waived examination.
They were in Mexico, passing between the low plaster walls of the shops and bars which Rennert knew, into squalid alleys where he had never penetrated, where dust and adobe emitted the peculiar noisesome exhalation of Mexico warmed by the sun.
Rennert thought he knew now why he had been brought along.
He was on his guard.
6
Dust of Mexico
I
Dust was a shroud that clung to the steel-grey car and billowed in its wake along the dusty road. Thin, stately columns of dust moved in the distance, disintegrating and forming again. Along the horizon mirages played, and in the hot blue sky vultures wheeled in lazy spirals. It was a land stillborn of heat and thirst, Rennert thought fancifully, and dust and mirage and vulture were the sinister emanations of its corpse.
“Beautiful!” Angerman spoke as if to himself. “It is beautiful. I see it every day and I always think it is beautiful.” He was gazing ahead with a gleam that was almost ecstatic in his blue eyes.
“It’s beautiful,” Rennert agreed, “if one can escape from it, as we can. But look at it closely and you’ll see the bleached bones that show how cruel it can be.”
Angerman raised a hand from the wheel and tensed his fingers. “The desert is powerful and so it must be cruel. It has scared men off. The Indians. The Spaniards. The Mexicans. They have left it alone, as it was on the day of Creation. But some day men will come to it and conquer it. Some day coal and oil will be gone and they will have to come. Our children and our grandchildren, Mr. Rennert, will drive along here and see factories and foundries and mills. They will hear motors humming.”
It was his belief, he explained, that solar heat would eventually be converted into cheap energy and take the place of mineral fuel. That industrial centres such as Pennsylvania and Lancashire, the Ruhr and the Saar would be abandoned for the Tropics. That Northern Mexico would become one great city.
It was curious, Rennert reflected, how f
requently the visionary crops up in men of cold or gross exteriors. Yet there was nothing really chimerical about Angerman’s simply expressed predictions. Shortly before there had been a demonstration in Washington of an engine run entirely by sun-power.
Long before he expected it, Rennert saw the twinkling blue waters of the Gulf appear among the undulating sand-dunes and, starkly outlined against them, a fence of heavy wire, higher than a man’s head. Where it crossed the road in front of them was a gate and a small square box of a house. Over the gate was a huge sign, bright yellow letters splashed on white. Tonatiuh. And the flaming Aztec emblem of the sun.
A man ran from the shack to swing open the gate. He stood aside and as the car passed raised his right hand in salute. An American of the hard-bitten border breed, he had at his side a holster from which protruded the butt of a revolver.
The car leaped forward, down a gravel road which swerved in a regular arc towards the shore. Rennert watched the green roofs of buildings and the tops of small palms loom against the water.
“You keep the place guarded, I see,” he remarked.
“Yes. We have to. Damn fools come here to gawk. They think we have patients that are mad. They think we are nudists. People will believe any story they hear about a place like this.”
“I know. I’ve got to admit my own ignorance. What kind of patients do come here?”
“Ones who suffer from lung trouble: sinus, asthma. We give them lots of good food and sleep. They swim and lie in the sun. They get well quick. There are not many here now. It is Christmas and they have gone away.” He turned to Rennert. “You like to swim?”
“Why, yes.”
“Then we will swim.”
Rennert was a bit taken aback. “I hadn’t expected to. And I haven’t done any swimming for years. There hasn’t been enough water in places where I’ve lived. So I’m not specially keen about it if you have other business to attend to.”
“My business, Mr. Rennert, is with you. I can attend to it while we swim.”
The buildings, Rennert could see now, were ranged at regular intervals about a crescent-shaped beach, which was protected from the Gulf by a string of sandbars. There must have been twenty of them, each set in its plot of lush green grass and shaded by trees. The road forked, one branch going ahead towards what was evidently a second group of houses, beyond the southern tip of the crescent; the other, which Angerman followed, ending at the rear of a two-storey plaster building.
“The offices,” Angerman said as he parked here, “and the Infirmary.”
They got out, and he directed Rennert along a path of crushed sea-shells toward the front.
“May I ask”—Rennert watched his companion—“about Mr. Wyllys? It might make our meeting less awkward if I knew beforehand what his affliction is.”
It was evident that the question was not a welcome one. A slight frown cut into Angerman’s smooth forehead, and he answered briefly: “Nerves.”
They turned to the right along another broader path which connected the cottages. These were all of a standard design, attractive enough with green paint and curtains at the windows, but with no sign of life about them.
Rennert was impressed by the stillness which lay upon the place, undisturbed except for the gentle rustling of the waves. His gaze roved over the beach that shelved smoothly down to the water. It was probably the sand which gave him a vague and altogether unreasonable feeling of uneasiness. It was yellow and hard-packed, and the Spanish word for sand is arena.
Angerman nodded in the direction of the first house. “That is mine. The second here is Mr. Wyllys’s.”
They went up the steps, and Angerman pressed a bell. The front door was open, but inside a frame of latticed fibre was closed against the sun.
This was opened, and a man spoke in what seemed to Rennert an artificial voice: “Good morning, Jan.”
“Good morning, Darwin.”
“Come in.” Wyllys stood aside.
He was the man whom Rennert had seen outside the bull-ring the day before. He presented a disheveled appearance, in a maroon-coloured dressing-gown and pyjamas. His wiry black hair was tousled, and a lock of it straggled forward over his forehead. Rennert was struck again by the sallowness which underlay his complexion, noticeable even on his unshaven cheeks. His eyes had an oddly lucent quality, as if the pupils were slightly dilated.
Angerman introduced them. Wyllys did not offer to shake hands. His gaze rested for only a fraction of a second on Rennert’s face, then darted back to Angerman’s. “Sit down,” he said nervously.
Rennert did so, depositing his seal on a table. The room was small but comfortably furnished. The walls were of light cream plaster, a dark brown rug covered the hardwood floor. Untidiness was everywhere, in the overflowing ash-trays, in scattered articles of clothing, in newspapers which littered the floor.
“Mr. Rennert is a notary public,” Angerman explained. “He will witness your signature on the affidavit which Dr. Torday told you about.”
Wyllys stood in the centre of the room, rubbing the palms of his hands together and intertwining his long, flexible fingers. “No, he won’t,” he said flatly. “Because I’m not going to sign.”
It was exactly as if a taut wire had been struck and was filling the air with the violence if not the sound of its vibrations. Angerman stood motionless and looked at Wyllys, as he had looked at him across the Matamoros street. His face was set austerely and coldly, the blueness of his eyes was clouded by (Rennert knew he wasn’t mistaken) sadness.
Wyllys’s gaze fell, beaten down by that relentless scrutiny. He opened his mouth, ran his tongue over his lips, and repeated, “I’m not going to sign it,” this time with a wheedling softness.
Angerman said gravely: “You must sign it, Darwin.”
“I’m not going to.”
Angerman sighed deeply. There was something incongruous in the heavy rise and fall of his chest and in the rasping exhalation of his breath. “I am sorry. I do not want to have to do this.” He did not turn his head. “Please go outside, Mr. Rennert.”
Rennert got up, hesitated. “Perhaps I’d better stay.”
“Go outside.”
Rennert glanced at Wyllys. “What do you say, Mr. Wyllys?”
The latter did not look at him but at Angerman. There was a twitching of the muscles about his eyes. “Yes, yes,” he said with a trace of sibilance. “Go on. You must do as he says.”
Rennert walked out upon the porch. He heard the outer then the inner door being closed, the window lowered and the shade drawn. No sound came from within.
He went to the steps, sat down and lighted a cigarette. Nothing in the prospect had changed. The sun still spread its dazzling sheen over water and sand and grass, giving colours of the paining lemon-yellow intensity of a Van Gogh canvas. The lulling quietness persisted. There was a thin film of perspiration on Rennert’s forehead. The board upon which he rested was uncomfortably warm. Yet he had to repress a shiver. It was the recoil of his whole healthy being from what he knew was going on inside. Or what he thought was going on.
Four or five minutes passed.
The door opened and closed and the flooring echoed hollowly under a heavy measured tread. Rennert felt the wood sag under him as first one shoe and then another came down. The shoes were of white ventilated canvas, huge, square-toed, and soled with thick slabs of rubber.
“Now,” Jarl Angerman said with satisfaction, “we can go for a swim.”
Rennert rose and faced him. Angerman was gazing out over the sea, a far-away brooding look in his eyes. His features were smooth and symmetrical, but were losing their austerity.
“My hat and seal,” Rennert said, “are inside the house.”
“Leave them. We will come back.”
“Is there any reason to come back?”
“Yes, Mr. Wyllys will sign that paper.”
“He changed his mind?”
“Yes, he changed his mind.”
“Then why not
get it over with now?”
“We must let him rest. He does not feel well now.” Their eyes met.
Rennert flicked away his cigarette. “I understand,” he said thoughtfully.
“I knew”—Angerman’s voice was level—“that you would understand.”
He did not speak again until he held open the door of the first cottage. “This is your house, Mr. Rennert, as they say here in Mexico. The door is not locked, you see. We do not have to lock doors here in Tonatiuh. I will go now to the office and get you a bathing-suit. We keep them for visitors.” He eyed Rennert’s body and gave his size accurately. “I will bring one to fit you.”
Rennert was left to look at wood carvings. They were everywhere in a room which was similar to Wyllys’s in design and furnishing, but clean and orderly. There were statuettes of men and women, many Mexican, done with scrupulous attention to detail. Masks lined the walls. There were book-ends, picture-frames, ashtrays, paper-weights, knives. On a pedestal in a corner stood the uncompleted torso of a man, mutilated of head and limbs. Chisel, hammer and knife were beside it.
A hobby, evidently, which Angerman pursued without stint. And a man’s hobbies are always revelatory.
“Thanks,” Rennert said, when Angerman came in smiling and handed him a black suit. “I’ve been admiring your work. It’s excellent.” The other showed his delight.
“They are not much. The Mexicans do much better. I learned from them.”
They went into the adjoining bedroom, almost monastic in its simplicity.
“You’ve spent a great deal of time in Mexico, I judge,” Rennert said as he started to undress.
“Four years. Here and in other places. I was capataz, foreman, of an hacienda once. At first I did not like the country. I got impatient with it. Now I could not leave it.”
Rennert brushed dust from the collar of his coat. “You know the Mexican saying: ‘When the dust of Mexico settles on a human heart, that heart can find rest in no other land.’”
“That is true. I would be happy to live on that hacienda where I worked. And die there.”
