by Robert Stone
Headlong into the intersection Mackay ran. Cars swerved and skidded to a halt around him. Scattering pensioners and pigeons in Verdi Square, he kept on, faster and faster; increasing speed with every block. For neither the first nor the last time then, he wondered just how far he would run and where it was that he thought to go.
PORQUE NO TIENE, PORQUE LE FALTA
La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha,
Ya no puede caminar
Porque no tiene, porque le falta
Marijuana par’ fumar.
—A song of the revolution
THE WORDS came on the wind, an old woman’s voice.
“Ayeee! Es-cor-pee-o-nays!”
He was lying in a smelly hammock under the concrete veranda with a thermos jug of Coke and alcohol balanced on his bare belly; when he understood the words he raised his head and pushed back the brim of his baseball cap.
“Escorpiónes!”
His children were running through the dry brush between his house and the beach. In the fiery sunlight their speeding forms were brown blurs topped with the flax of sun-bleached hair He saw at once that they had not been bitten.
Doña Laura, the landlady, was calling to them from the roof of her house, where she had been hanging out black and white washing, warning them of the dangers of the brush. Doña Laura lived in fear of scorpions. She had lived among scorpions all her life and never been stung. Twice an hour she warned Richard and Jane away from them.
“No, no, no, no,” Doña Laura shouted. “Escorpiónes!”
He could picture the word in her mouth, shaped on the dry lips, shrilled from strained corded muscles in a brown throat.
Escorpiónes.
The day was clear and the mountains at all points of the bay glowed bright green, but far out to sea dark low clouds approached, discoloring the surface of the distant ocean. Before long there would be heat lightning and rain. He took a drink from the thermos, closed his eyes and shuddered. Swallowing made the sweat on his chest run cold.
His children shouted, safe on the dry white sand.
The changing color of the sea made him uneasy. In the past months he had developed an odd passion for constancy; he liked things to stay as they were. When it was light he did not want it to grow dark, in spite of the beauty of the ocean sunset, and when it was dark he did not care for dawn to come and reveal his existence and position. But the time of year for constancy had passed and he was learning to live with the rains.
As he watched the clouds darken the reefs beyond the bay, a blue shape rose furiously from the clear unclouded shallows and slapped over the surface like a flung slate toward the darker waters. He could see the winged shadow it cast.
He sat up, straddling the hammock, and squinted after it.
“Marge,” he called out.
After a moment his wife came out and stood beside him. She had pinned her light hair back behind her ears; the strands of hair on her neck were wet with perspiration. The white bikini she had made from a sheet was pasted to the curves of her body. There was tortilla dough on her hands.
“There’s a manta off Guardia rock.”
It seemed to take her a moment to understand. She turned slowly toward the bay with a faint polite smile and leaned forward over the patio wall, resting her elbows on the tile.
He watched her while she watched the water: she was alert from the shoulders forward; the rest of her body was lazily distributed in a balanced sprawl as though she had tossed it behind her. He had taken to observing her dynamics since she had caught the plague, in the course of which disorder her belly had become swollen and her long limbs wasted and spare. She and both of the children had suffered from the same disease—it was a variety of the local dysentery—and in its grip Marge and Jane and Richard had each commenced to dwindle away. Upon recovery, their flesh returned, and he had watched his wife regain the natural opulence of her body with dispassionate satisfaction. It was a visual diversion.
“Sure as shit,” Marge said.
She had seen the creature rise.
Fletch considered Marge’s response with distaste. It was a drag the way everyone had come to talk like a cowboy. Everyone called each other “hoss” and chuckled “haw haw,” country style. Goldang. It was Fencer’s influence. Fencer was a cowboy number.
“Fencer saw a manta ray while he was out swimming,” Marge said. “He was out by the rocks when he saw this big mother coming at him about twenty yards away. Started swimming for it with the wingspread bearing down on him. He says it was like the manta was trying to embrace him. A love trip, you know? Like this big slime thing was consumed with affection for Fencer and wanted to wrap him up and take him home. Fencer had his air gun. He says that would have been sad to have gut shot the thing and watch its poor fish face wrinkle up all disillusioned and die.”
“Fencer can’t possibly swim faster than a ray,” Fletch told her.
“What would it do if it caught you?” Marge asked. “Flap you to death? Butt you? Eat you?”
“We’ll find out when one catches Fencer;” Fletch said.
“Hey now, where are they?” She meant the children. She had caught their voices and cocked an ear to the wind.
“They’re on the beach. Doña Laura’s watching them.”
The bay had gone dark; the clouds came overhead, heavy with rain. Heat lightning flashed out to sea. On the north headland, Fletch could see the villa where Sinister Pancho Pillow lived etched in the sky’s sickly light; the hillside against which it stood had turned dark green.
Fletch became unhappy. He reached under the hammock, took his makings from a cedar box and began to roll a joint. Marge sat down beside him and for a few minutes they turned on and watched the storm gather. Marge drummed on her thighs, leaving a film of flour on the tanned skin.
“Fencer’s coming, you know,” Marge said.
Fletch extinguished the joint and lay sidewise on the hammock with his head beside the swell of Marge’s hip.
“Why?”
Marge looked down at him, blank-eyed.
“Well, to take you up to the volcano. You said you wanted to see it. He wants to take you.”
“I never said I wanted to see the volcano. I mean, I can see it from here.” The volcano was behind them, rising from the sierra. Fletch did not turn toward it.
“Fencer asked you just the other day. You said you wanted to go very much.”
“No such conversation took place,” Fletch told her.
The rain seemed to hang back. They sat in silence watching the clouds until they heard a car turn off the coast road. Fletch waited motionless until Fencer’s ‘49 Buick rolled up before the house.
Fencer was in the front seat beside Willie Wings; he was smiling happily at them, dangling one bare arm along the dusty surface of the car door. Fencer’s Buick was painted with thick blue and gold loops like the stylized waves of a Hokusai seascape.
“I don’t want to see the fucking volcano,” Fletch said.
“I bet you go,” Marge told him.
Fencer and Willie Wings got out and walked toward them. Fencer was wearing his white duck pirate pants and his Pima Indian necklace with a Maltese cross soldered to the chain. He wore his yellow hair like General Custer.
Willie Wings shuffled along beside him carrying a parrot in a cage. Breathless from the morning’s methedrine, he was addressing the bird. His face and the bald crown of his head were red and sweaty.
“Look at Fletch, Godfrey,” Willie Wings enjoined the parrot. “You see Fletch over there?”
Fletch turned away and lowered the brim of his cap over his eyes. He felt colder at that moment than he had ever felt in Mexico.
“It’s a good day,” Fencer declared, striking a posture before them. “Here we are and Willie Wings has his parrot.”
“Can you say ‘Fletch’?” Willie Wings asked the parrot. “Say ‘Come see the volcano, Fletch.’”
“Willie’s been tryin’ to train Godfrey to sit on his shoulder” Fencer said, “but i
t don’t never work. So he just carries him around.”
Willie Wings scratched at his denims with a free hand and shook the cage.
“Godfrey’s literary, that’s what his trouble is. I’m not saying he’s verbal but he’s literary. He’s like Fletch.”
Willie’s clear gaze swept the scene. Fletch remained under his hat.
“Godfrey and Fletch and Mrs. Fletch are all literary and that’s a handicap.” Willie turned from them, marched away ten steps, wheeled and approached talking.
“Which isn’t to say I don’t have my own literary side except I haven’t got the technical training in Paris and Bucharest of higher poetics before the crowned heads of Europe which is what Godfrey and Fletch and Marge think they have over me.”
He stopped and smiled on his parrot with broken teeth.
“Oh you doll, Godfrey! You pseudo-intellectual.”
“We got beer in the car,” Fencer said. “Let’s haVe a beer, Willie Wings.”
Willie set the parrot down and went to the car to wrestle the beer from the trunk.
“Willie had another bad scene with that Chinaman grocer” Fencer said as they watched him. “Pretty soon oP Hong won’t sell us no more beer.”
Marge shook her head.
“I thought you took his crystal, Fencer,” she said. “He’s really too much now and then.”
Fencer looked sad.
“Willie gave up crystal. He handed me what he had and made me swear I’d only give him what he really needed. But he got some more somewhere and he’s shooting it again. I think maybe he got it from Sinister Pancho Pillow.”
“His mind is running off its reel,” Fletch said. “He’s going to end up in a speed museum.”
“I got a deep personal esteem for Willie Wings,” Fencer told them. “My friends don’t appreciate that. He’s an avatar.”
Fletch said nothing.
“Well he’s certainly a very good driver,” Marge said.
“He’s a lot more than that,” Fencer said. “Aw, just look at him with animals.”
Fletch savored the imaginary cold under his hat brim. He considered Willie Wings’s relationship to animals and Fencer’s relationship to Willie Wings.
“Remember Willie’s dog?” Fencer asked. His eyes sparkled with humorous affection. “Remember Ol’ Crush?”
Marge laughed, joining in the mood of nostalgia. “Oh, God,” she cried, “Ol’ Crush.”
Fletch recalled the days when Willie’s mind had been clearer and he had been a dealer in the Haight. He had maintained a German shepherd named Old Crush, although according to Willie it was an Alsatian and had been trained to kill in French. Willie, in those days, had been more political and would have no traffic with German killer dogs; Old Crush had been raised by anti-fascists, and attacked at the command “Mort aux vaches.”
When a deal was consummated Willie Wings and the customer would turn on together, and when everyone was suitably high Willie would introduce Old Crush from an adjoining room.
“Don’t betray the slightest sign of fear,” Willie would advise his guests, “or he’ll tear you to pieces.”
Willie Wings set the case of beer down on the patio and stood before them panting.
“I hear you had more trouble with Mr. Hong,” Marge inquired.
Willie rolled his eyes. “Don’t think Orientals can’t sense dharma strength,” he said. “When Hong sold me that beer, we lived out the Eon of the Void together, and he fought me every step of the way.” He picked up the caged parrot and shook it. “Didn’t he, Godfrey?”
“Hong is afraid of you,” Marge explained, “because he thinks you’re crazy. He’s afraid of Fencer, too.”
“That reminds me,” Willie Wings said. “Let’s go see the volcano. Let’s take Fletch.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Fencer said. “Let’s go, Fletch.”
The rain broke suddenly, Fletch sat silently, listened to it for a while, and lifted his hat.
“Well,” he said, sitting up, “I do want to go up there and see it.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Willie Wings sang. “There are fire flowers up there, Fletch. Along the rim. Black rock and fire flowers.”
“But … I don’t think I want to go today.”
Willie Wings stared at Fletch in horror.
“I don’t like it, Fencer,” he said. “I didn’t like it before and I don’t like it now.” He looked at Marge and Fletch in turn. “Why not? I don’t understand. What is this, some kind of literary mood? Some kind of balky bolting? Some kind of not doing what the guys have come to do?”
“This would be the best time to go,” Fencer said.
“It isn’t that I don’t want to see the thing,” Fletch explained, “because I certainly do…”
He made what seemed to him an intense effort to conclude his statement but found himself unable to do so.
“Well, good,” Fencer said. “Let’s go, hoss. Let’s have a joint and go.”
Fencer had the joints under his belt. He produced them with astounding grace and speed; they shot from hand to hand like flaming arrows. Fletch took his tokes one after another, feeling that it was somehow against his will. It occurred to him that he did not have to go with Fencer and Willie Wings to the volcano but that he was very high.
“That’s all I want,” he said after a while.
“Too much,” Willie Wings cried.
They all had another joint and washed the grass sediment down with cold beer.
“I lust after that mountain,” Fencer said. “I’ve got to get up there.”
The rain stopped. Within seconds the wet leaves of the vanilla trees beside the patio were drying.
“Marge,” Fletch said, “do you want to go?”
“No,” she said.
Fencer and Willie Wings watched her.
“Why not?”
“I’ll stay down here with the kids. I have to.”
She leaned against the wall. A small lizard ran between her sandaled feet.
Fletch stood up and looked at the ocean.
“If I had said I was going,” Marge told him, “and Fencer and Willie Wings had come to take me, I would go.”
“Right,” Fletch said.
“Man,” Fencer said, “we’ve got to get up there. We’ve got to leave now while it’s light.”
“Right,” Fletch said. He picked up the thermos of Coke and alcohol and walked to the car. He felt curiously cold in the sunlight.
The inside of Fencer’s car was stifling. Fletch sat down between a tire and some empty gasoline cans. The car smelled of gasoline and the steaming rotten upholstery.
Fencer and Willie got in. As the car pulled away, Fletch watched his wife go inside and close the door.
“When we get up there, Fletch,” Fencer said, “you’ll see it’s a great place for a poet. Then I won’t have to describe it for you anymore.”
“When Fletch sees it,” Willie Wings said, “he can describe it for us. Because being a poet he can describe things better than we can.”
He turned around to face Fletch.
“Fletch has had too many things described to him. It’s time he had something of his own to describe.”
Fletch looked out the window at the rows of banana trees.
“Who is he talking about, Fencer? Is he really talking about me?”
“You know that better than I do, Fletch,” Fencer said. “Sounds like he is.”
They drove along the coast highway between the plantations and the beach. Just outside the village, where the police post was, the Indians were lined along the road in their Sunday suits, holding palm fronds and flags. Five men in silver-studded vests stood behind the crowd with instruments at the ready—two trumpeters, a tuba player; a drummer and a cymbalist. People in the crowd held lengths of a banner reading BIENVENIDOS PADRE URRIETA!
Fencer and Willie Wings saluted the crowd as they drove by. Fencer salaamed and Willie Wings, his fingers joined to suggest the Trinity, dispensed papal benedictions
.
“Diablo,” someone shouted.
Fletch crouched down beside the tire in a position from which he could see only the crests of palm trees and the sky.
After a while they turned inland, following the straight plantation roads through armies of coconut palm. At the turn where the road curved upward into the sierra, they started a covey of vultures from the jungle. The birds flapped about the car windows in alarm.
“Hong won’t sell me tarot cards,” Willie Wings said. “He told me no, absolutely refused to sell me them, won’t have me near them.”
“He probably doesn’t have tarot cards,” Fletch said. “He’s a grocer.”
“I know what Hong has,” Willie said heatedly. “I know every thing about him.” Willie was popping pills; he turned to Fencer in a fury. “Listen, Fences how can he be a poet? He don’t live the conscious life. He lives unawares.”
“You reckon there’s truth in that?” Fencer asked.
“No,” Fletch said. “I live the conscious life.”
Fencer smiled at him in the rear-view mirror.
“You hear that, Fencer?” Willie Wings shouted. “You hear what he said?”
Fletch stared at the moist flushed surface of Willie’s head and felt a thrill of fear.
“Everyone has a potential level of consciousness,” Fencer said kindly. “There’s a vein of deep perception in all beings. The thing is to bring it out.”
“Fletch’s perception is dead,” Willie Wings declared. He began to assemble a joint of his own. “Like a dead nerve in a tooth.”
They were leaving the low ground. Palms gave way to occasional live oak, Spanish cedar and euphorbia; vines covered the road. They ascended a green spiral, and at the turns Fletch could see the bay below.
He said nothing, but when Willie Wings presented the next joint he accepted it. His perception, he reminded himself, was not dead but throbbed within his lax and ill-used body, a secret agent. Crouched low in the back seat, he stared dully toward the mass of the sierra and tried to consider the action.
