"Look here." Moor pointed. "Urea thirteen. Normal is fifteen to twenty-two. Is that serious, do you think?"
"I'm sure I don't know."
"And traces of sugar. What does the whole picture mean?" Moor obviously considered the question of intense interest.
"Why don't you take it to a doctor?" "I did. He said he would have to take a twenty-four-hour test, that is, samples of urine over a twenty-four-hour period, before he could express any opinion. . . .
You know, I have a dull pain in the chest, right here. I wonder if it could be tuberculosis?"
"Take an x-ray."
"I did. The doctor is going to take a skin reaction test. Oh, another thing, I think I have undulant fever. ... Do you think I have fever now?" He pushed his forehead forward for Lee to feel. Lee felt an ear lobe. "I don't think so," he said.
Moor went on and on, following the circular route of the true hypochondriac, back to tuberculosis and the urine test. Lee thought he had never heard anything as tiresome and depressing. Moor did not have tuberculosis or kidney trouble or undulant fever. He was sick with the sickness of death. Death was in every cell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.
Moor talked with boyish eagerness. "I think I need an operation."
Lee said he really had to go.
Lee turned down Coahuila, walking with one foot falling directly in front of the other, always fast and purposeful, as if he were leaving the scene of a holdup. He passed a group in expatriate uniform: red-checked shirt outside the belt, blue jeans and beard, and another group of young men in conventional, if shabby, clothes. Among these Lee recognized a boy named Eugene Allerton. Allerton was tall and very thin, with high cheekbones, a small, bright-red mouth, and amber-colored eyes that took on a faint violet flush when he was drunk. His gold-brown hair was differentially bleached by the sun like a sloppy dyeing job. He had straight, black eyebrows and black eyelashes. An equivocal face, very young, clean-cut and boyish, at the same time conveying an impression of makeup, delicate and exotic and Oriental. Allerton was never completely neat or clean, but you did not think of him as being dirty. He was simply careless and lazy to the point of appearing, at times, only half awake. Often he did not hear what someone said a foot from his ear. "Pellagra, I expect," thought Lee sourly. He nodded to Allerton and smiled.
Allerton nodded, as if surprised, and did not smile.
Lee walked on, a little depressed. "Perhaps I can accomplish something in that direction. Well, a ver. . . ." He froze in front of a restaurant like a bird dog: "Hungry . . . quicker to eat here than buy something and cook it." When Lee was hungry, when he wanted a drink or a shot of morphine, delay was unbearable.
He went in, ordered steak a la Mexicana and a glass of milk, and waited with his mouth watering for food. A young man with a round face and a loose mouth came into the restaurant. Lee said,
"Hello, Horace," in a clear voice. Horace nodded without speaking and sat down as far from Lee as he could get in the small restaurant. Lee smiled. His food arrived and he ate quickly, like an animal, cramming bread and steak into his mouth and washing it down with gulps of milk. He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.
"Un café sólo," he called to the waitress as she walked by, carrying a pineapple soda to two young Mexicans in double-breasted pinstripe suits. One of the Mexicans had moist brown pop-eyes and a scraggly moustache of greasy black hairs. He looked pointedly at Lee, and Lee looked away. "Careful," he thought, "or he will be over here asking me how I like Mexico." He dropped his half-smoked cigarette into half an inch of cold coffee, walked over to the counter, paid the bill, and was out of the restaurant before the Mexican could formulate an opening sentence. When Lee decided to leave some place, his departure was abrupt.
The Ship Ahoy had a few phony hurricane lamps by way of a nautical atmosphere. Two small rooms with tables, the bar in one room, and four high, precarious stools. The place was always dimly lit and sinister-looking. The patrons were tolerant, but in no way bohemian. The bearded set never frequented the Ship Ahoy. The place existed on borrowed time, without a liquor license, under many changes of management. At this time it was run by an American named Tom Weston and an American-born Mexican.
Lee walked directly to the bar and ordered a drink. He drank it and ordered a second one before looking around the room to see if Allerton was there. Allerton was alone at a table, tipped back in a chair with one leg crossed over the other, holding a bottle of beer on his knee. He nodded to Lee. Lee tried to achieve a greeting at once friendly and casual, designed to show interest without pushing their short acquaintance. The result was ghastly.
As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless.
Allerton was appalled. "Perhaps he has some sort of tic," he thought. He decided to remove himself from contact with Lee before the man did something even more distasteful. The effect was like a broken connection. Allerton was not cold or hostile; Lee simply wasn't there so far as he was concerned. Lee looked at him helplessly for a moment, then turned back to the bar, defeated and shaken.
Lee finished his second drink. When he looked around again, Allerton was playing chess with Mary, an American girl with dyed red hair and carefully applied makeup, who had come into the bar in the meantime. "Why waste time here?" Lee thought. He paid for the two drinks and walked out.
He took a cab to the Chimu Bar, which was a fag bar frequented by Mexicans, and spent the night with a young boy he met there.
At that time the G.I. students patronized Lola's during the daytime and the Ship Ahoy at night.
Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the juke box. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs, and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep.
There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in at certain times.
Several days after his pick-up in the Chimu, Lee was sitting in Lola's, reading aloud from Últimas Notícias to Jim Cochan. There was a story about a man who murdered his wife and children, Cochan looked about for a means to escape, but every time he made a move to go, Lee pinned him down with: "Get a load of this. . . . 'When his wife came home from the market, her husband, already drunk, was brandishing his .45.' Why do they always have to brandish it?"
Lee read to himself for a moment. Cochan stirred uneasily. "Jesus Christ," said Lee, looking up.
"After he killed his wife and three children he takes a razor and puts on a suicide act." He returned to the paper: "'But resulted only with scratches that did not require medical attention.'
What a slobbish performance!" He turned the page and began reading the leads half-aloud:
'They're cutting the butter with Vaseline. Fine thing. Lobster with drawn K.Y. . . . Here's a man was surprised in his taco stand with a dressed-down dog ... a great long skinny hound dog at that.
There's a picture of him posing in front of his taco stand with the dog. . , . One citizen asked another for a light. The party in second part don't have a match so first part pulls an ice pick and kills him. Murder is the national neurosis of Mexico."
Cochan stood up. Lee was on his feet instantly. "Sit down on your ass, or what's left of it after four years in the Navy," he said.
"I got to go."
"What are you, henpecked?"
"No kidding. I been out too much lately. My old lady. . . ."
Lee wasn't listening. He had just seen Allerton stroll by outside the door and look in. Allerton had not greeted Lee, but walked on after a momentary pause. "I was in the shadow," Lee thought.
"He couldn't see me from the door." Lee did not notice Cochan's departure.
On a sudden impulse he rushed out the door. Allerton was half a block away. Lee overtook him.
Allerton turned, raising his eyebrows, which were straight and black as a pen stroke. He looked surprised and a bit alarmed, since he was dubious of Lee's sanity. Lee improvised desperately.
"I just wanted to tell you Mary was in Lola's a little while ago. She asked me to tell you she would be in the Ship Ahoy later on, around five." This was partly true. Mary had been in and had asked Lee if he had seen Allerton.
Allerton was relieved. "Oh, thank you," he said, quite cordial now. "Will you be around tonight?"
"Yes, I think so." Lee nodded and smiled, and turned away quickly.
Lee left his apartment for the Ship Ahoy just before five. Allerton was sitting at the bar. Lee sat down and ordered a drink, then turned to Allerton with a casual greeting, as though they were on familiar and friendly terms. Allerton returned the greeting automatically before he realized that Lee had somehow established himself on a familiar basis, whereas he had previously decided to have as little to do with Lee as possible. Allerton had a talent for ignoring people, but he was not competent at dislodging someone from a position already occupied.
Lee began talking—casual, unpretentiously intelligent, dryly humorous. Slowly he dispelled Allerton's impression that he was a peculiar and undesirable character. When Mary arrived, Lee greeted her with a tipsy old-world gallantry and, excusing himself, left them to a game of chess.
"Who is he?" asked Mary when Lee had gone outside.
"I have no idea," said Allerton. Had he ever met Lee? He could not be sure. Formal introductions were not expected among the G.I. students. Was Lee a student? Allerton had never seen him at the school. There was nothing unusual in talking to someone you didn't know, but Lee put Allerton on guard. The man was somehow familiar to him. When Lee talked, he seemed to mean more than what he said. A special emphasis to a word or a greeting hinted at a period of familiarity in some other time and place. As though Lee were saying, "You know what I mean.
You remember."
Allerton shrugged irritably and began arranging the chess pieces on the board. He looked like a sullen child unable to locate the source of his ill temper. After a few minutes of play his customary serenity returned, and he began humming.
It was after midnight when Lee returned to the Ship Ahoy. Drunks seethed around the bar, talking as if everyone else were stone deaf. Allerton stood on the edge of this group, apparently unable to make himself heard. He greeted Lee warmly, pushed in to the bar, and emerged with two rum Cokes. "Let's sit down over here," he said.
Allerton was drunk. His eyes were flushed a faint violet tinge, the pupils widely dilated. He was talking very fast in a high, thin voice, the eerie, disembodied voice of a young child. Lee had never heard Allerton talk like this before. The effect was like the possession voice of a medium.
The boy had an inhuman gaiety and innocence.
Allerton was telling a story about his experience with the Counter-intelligence Corps in Germany.
An informant had been giving the department bum steers.
"How did you check the accuracy of information?" Lee asked. "How did you know ninety percent of what your informants told you wasn't fabricated?"
"Actually we didn't, and we got sucked in on a lot of phony deals. Of course, we cross-checked all information with other informants and we had our own agents in the field. Most of our informants turned in some phony information, but this one character made all of it up. He had our agents out looking for a whole fictitious network of Russian spies. So finally the report comes back from Frankfurt—it is all a lot of crap. But instead of clearing out of town before the information could be checked, he came back with more.
"At this point we'd really had enough of his bullshit. So we locked him up in a cellar. The room was pretty cold and uncomfortable, but that was all we could do. We had to handle prisoners very careful.
He kept typing out confessions, enormous things."
This story clearly delighted Allerton, and he kept laughing while he was telling it. Lee was impressed by his combination of intelligence and childlike charm. Allerton was friendly now, without reserve or defense, like a child who has never been hurt. He was telling another story.
Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face.
An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down over the ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips.
Lee did not enjoy frustration. The limitations of his desires were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar, something he had learned as an animal learns, through days and years of experiencing the snub of the chain, the unyielding bars. He had never resigned himself, and his eyes looked out through the invisible bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door, for the frayed collar, the loosened bar . . . suffering without despair and without consent.
"I went to the door and there he was with a branch in his mouth," Allerton was saying.
Lee had not been listening. "A branch in his mouth," said Lee, then added inanely, "A big branch?"
"It was about two feet long. I told him to drop dead, then a few minutes later he appeared at the window. So I threw a chair at him and he jumped down to the yard from the balcony. About eighteen feet. He was very nimble. Almost inhuman. It was sort of uncanny, and that's why I threw the chair. I was scared. We all figured he was putting on an act to get out of the Army."
"What did he look like?" Lee asked.
"Look like? I don't remember especially. He was around eighteen. He looked like a clean-cut boy.
We threw a bucket of cold water on him and left him on a cot downstairs. He began flopping around but he didn't say anything. We all decided that was an appropriate punishment. I think they took him to the hospital next day."
"Pneumonia?"
"I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't have thrown water on him."
Lee left Allerton at the door of his building.
"You go in here?" Lee asked.
"Yes, I have a sack here."
Lee said good night and walked home.
After that, Lee met Allerton every day at five in the Ship Ahoy. Allerton was accustomed to choose his friends from people older than himself, and he looked forward to meeting Lee. Lee had conversational routines that Allerton had never heard. But he felt at times oppressed by Lee, as though Lee's presence shut off everything else. He thought he was seeing too much of Lee.
Allerton disliked commitments, and had never been in love or had a close friend. He was now forced to ask himself: "What does he want from me?" It did not occur to him that Lee was queer, as he associated queerness with at least some degree of overt effeminacy. He decided finally that Lee valued him as an audience.
Chapter 3
At was a beautiful, clear afternoon in April. Punctually at five, Lee walked into the Ship Ahoy.
Allerton was at the bar with Al Hyman, a periodic alcoholic and one of the nastiest, stupidest, dullest drunks Lee had ever known. He was, on the other hand, intelligent and simple in manner, and nice enough when sober. He was sober now.
Lee had a yellow scarf around his neck, and a pair of two-peso sunglasses. He took off the scarf and dark glasses and dropped them on the bar. "A hard day at the studio," he said, in affected theatrical accents. He ordered a rum Coke. "You know, it looks like we might bring in an oil well.
They're drill
ing now over in quadrangle four, and from that rig you could almost spit over into Tex-Mex where I got my hundred-acre cotton farm."
"I always wanted to be an oilman," Hyman said.
Lee looked him over and shook his head. "I'm afraid not. You see, it isn't everybody can qualify.
You must have the calling. First thing, you must look like an oilman. There are no young oilmen.
An oilman should be about fifty. His skin is cracked and wrinkled like mud that has dried in the sun, and especially the back of his neck is wrinkled, and the wrinkles are generally full of dust from looking over blocks and quadrangles. He wears gabardine slacks and a white short-sleeved sport shirt. His shoes are covered with fine dust, and a faint haze of dust follows him everywhere like a personal dust storm.
"So you got the calling and the proper appearance. You go around taking up leases. You get five or six people lined up to lease you their land for drilling. You go to the bank and talk to the president: 'Now Clem Farris, as fine a man as there is in this Valley and smart too, he's in this thing up to his balls, and Old Man Scranton and Fred Crockly and Roy Spigot and Ted Bane, all of them good old boys. Now let me show you a few facts. I could set here and gas all morning, taking up your time, but I know you're a man accustomed to deal in facts and figures and that's exactly what I'm here to show you.'
"He goes out to his car, always a coupe or a roadster—never saw an oilman with a sedan—and reaches in hack of the seat and gets out his maps, a huge bundle of maps as big as carpets. He spreads them out on the bank president's desk, and great clouds of dust spring up from the maps and fill the bank. "'You see this quadrangle here? That's Tex-Mex. Now there's a fault runs right along here through Jed Marvin's place. I saw Old Jed too, the other day when I was out there, a good old boy. There isn't a finer man in this Valley than Jed Marvin. Well now, Socony drilled right over here.'
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