"Okay. After we find the bar."
It was on the level below the lobby, an upholstered little room hoked up with candles, nets, tridents, glass floats, but dim and pleasant enough. We got our drinks at the bar, took them to a banquette corner. Several tables had been pulled together to seat ten people, five couples-the men big and brown and beefy, and their women smallish, tough, leathery. I needed one glance for the whole story.
"Those are the big game fish buffs," I told Nora. "Names in the record books. Invitation tournaments. Except for the fox hunting crowd, they are the most insular, most narrow and arrogant and self-satisfied bores in creation. If you can't kill fish in proper style, you're vermin. They clutter up Bimini. They ought to be restricted to Cat Cay, where the only ruder people in the world are the Cat Cay dock hands."
"How about the four dark suit types in the corner?"
"Mexican businessmen. Maybe looking for another place to stick up a hotel."
"And those kids at the end of the bar?"
Three towering and powerful young men, and two slim sunbrowned girls, and a huge black dog. "That's tougher. I'd say scuba types, if this was a better area for it. I'll say it anyway. From the way they're dressed, they've got a boat here. Probably came down the coast of Baja California and around to La Paz and cut across to here and will end up in Acapulco. How about the gal clothes?"
"That simple little beach shirt on the blonde is a forty dollar item."
"It would have to be a good hunk of boat. So it's that big motor sailor at the far dock out there. Fifty something feet."
"And the couple just coming in?"
"Ah, the firm tread and the steady eye of shutterbug tourists. Kodachrome and exposure meters, and hundreds of slides of the real Mexico."
She lowered her voice. "And the couple at this end of the bar?"
The woman was dark, hefty and handsome, glinting with gem stones. The man was squat and powerful, with an Aztec face and a gleaming white jacket.
"Just a guess. They're from one of the houses over there beyond the boat basin. Drinks and dinner at the hotel tonight, for a change."
"You're good at that, Trav."
"And often wrong," I said, and went to the bar and brought fresh drinks back.
She sat closer to me and said, "Why do I feel so strange?"
"Because on the other side of the continent it looked easy, Nora. Now all you can see is closed doors, and no way of knowing if any of them will open. Baby, nothing is easy. Life comes in a thousand shades of grey, and everyone except madmen think what they do is reasonable, and maybe even the madmen do too. People don't wear signs, and being dropped into a strange area is like a starfish landing on a strange oyster bed. You don't know which one to open, or if you can open anything. On serial television it's easy. For Superman it's easy. For Mike Hammer it's easy. But real people wander around in the foggy foggy dew, and never get to understand anything completely, themselves included. You put on your heroine suit, honey, and now you feel a little jackass in it. That's good for you. I brought you along as cover. A place like this, a man comes here with a woman, or comes after the fish. With you along they classify me harmless, as I did most of the people in this room. So keep your head close to me and glow at me. You had to come here or you'd never feel right about him, so it's good for you. But remember, we're standing at the plate blindfolded. They give us an unlimited number of strikes, so you swing until your arms get too tired, and hope you don't get hit in the head."
She leaned closer and said, "What kind of a lousy defeatist attitude is that?"
"It's the attitude that keeps me from getting anxious and careless. And dead."
Her eyes looked sick and I knew the vision of Sam dead had flashed in her mind.
"You're in charge," she said.
Table ten overlooked a sunken flood-lighted garden behind the hotel. The food was good. It was almost very good. The individual table lights made little cones of privacy in the expanse of the big mom. Our waiter, Eduardo, was deft and diligent. We lingered long over coffee and brandy, and at ten o'clock we wandered down and sat in deck chairs by the lighted pool. The area had been fogged for bugs, a taint that spoiled the heavy scents of the night blooming flowers.
"Listen," she said.
I heard small music from the boat basin, a deep drone of the faraway generator, a distant competitive chorus of tree toads.
"It's so quiet here," she said.
"It would be good to be here for other reasons." After a little while she said, "Maybe he would have brought me here some day."
"Cut it out, Nora."
"I'm sorry."
A few minutes later she stood up and said, "Goodnight, Trav. I'll try to... keep things under better control."
"Want me to walk you back?"
"No thanks. Really."
"Sleep well, Nora."
I watched her, slim and slow, her dress pale in the warm night, climb the stairs to the sun deck and disappear along the corridor.
After a little while I went back to the bar for a cold Carta Blanca. Aside from a young couple with a honeymoon humidity about them, sitting in the corner, the bar had turned into a men's club. The men at the bar gravely caught conversational fish, found them too small, explained how badly they had handled them, released them without regret. They lost decent billfish to the sharks, had reels bind at the wrong moment, frayed their lines, broke their tips. The occasional fisherman tells of triumphs. The compulsive ones relate only disaster. I listened, and picked up crumbs of information. The hotel owned four sports fishermen. One was hauled for repairs.
"If you don't have your boat down here next time, Paul, the one to sew up is Mario. He'll keep you stern on, beautifully. He anticipates. George was out with him last year when he got that bruising son of a bitch of a blue. What did it go, Harry?"
"Four ten and a bit. Three hours, twenty minutes. Six thread. George swears by Mario. Pedro is second best."
"But Pedro's mate is a cretin entirely."
They got into a travelogue then. Fishing around the world. Zane Grey in Australia. Tarpon in the Panuca River as compared to tarpon in Boca Grande pass. They told each other stories of tragic disaster.
I like to fish. I like to fish absolutely alone, wading the flats, or casting from shore into the tide patterns. And when I catch something I like to eat it as soon as possible. I spent my slave time popping my shoulder muscles and bursting my blisters on tuna the size of Volkswagens. I gave it up, much the same way I gave up climbing trees, driving motorcycles, dating actresses and other equivalently boyish sports.
I tuned them out, and leaned on the padded rail of the little bar and tried to relate myself to time and place. They haul you too far too fast, and unless you can think of the distances, unless you know distances from the brute process of walking them, sore-footed, scared and hungry, every place you go becomes a suburb of every other place.
The screaming machines had whipped me from Florida to California and down into Mexico, and the soul tried to follow along at its own pace, tracking me down. This was an ancient tropic coast backed by cruel mountains, and La Casa Encantada was an implausible oasis, Americanized by fish money. The people in the village of Puerto Altamura-a thousand of them? Fifteen hundred?-would find it even less plausible than the tourists could imagine. For all the years the generations of them, in the dust and the mud and sea smell, had lived and worked and died in this coastal pocket, the young always dreaming of going far away, and few of them making it.
Then suddenly, down the beach, appeared the big hotel and the new homes of los ricos. What could make Puerto Altamura so attractive to people that they should come incredible distances? Fishing? But fishing was a brute dangerous business of nets and gambles and bad prices and the unpredictable and hostile sea, a fact of life. It brought in new money. Dozens of villagers had a new kind of employment. Insane touristas would walk into the village and buy things foolishly, and click click their cameras at the most ordinary and ugly and familiar thin
gs.
But, on the whole, the change was less than the sameness. The old things continued, sin and salvation, sickness and death, work and school and fiesta, drinking and violence, drowning and dancing, politics and pesos. The sprained bus came waddling in three days a week, and the old ice plant clattered, and the trucks limped and groaned out over the bad road with the unending harvest of fish.
One thing was obvious to me. From what Sam Taggart said, he had spent an appreciable amount of time here. He had become a residente. He would be known. It was inescapable that he would be known, and known well. He said there had been trouble. So people would not want to talk. I had to find some way of unwinding it, of following the single strands to the marks he had left on this place and these people.
From the shadowy corner came the sound of the bride's febrile chuckle, and soon they walked out, obsessed with the legality of it all, the permissive access, and all the fishermen at the bar turned slow heads to appraise the departing ripeness of her, and all seemed to sigh.
I signed my chit and went to my room. Amparo had turned the bed down. Nora slept beyond the closed door. Or lay restless and heard me come in, and wondered what would happen to us here, among the flowers and fishermen.
Nine
I SLEPT heavily, and longer than is my habit. Nora was not in her room. It bothered me. There was a quality of impatience about her which could get us in trouble, or slam all the doors before we could even begin.
I dressed quickly, but as I left the room, I saw her coming along the corridor in swim suit, pool coat and clogs, towel and swim cap in her hand, the ends of her dark hair damp. Her weight loss had not changed the impact of those excessively lovely legs, so beautifully curved, so totally elegant.
For over two years, she had told me, she had made upwards of fifty dollars an hour modeling those legs for fashion photography in New York, had lived meanly, saving every dime, and then had gambled the savings on opening the shop in Fort Lauderdale. She was Jersey City Italian, her father a stone mason, and she had driven herself a long hard way and made it on her own terms, acquiring along the way that gloss and poise which hid her origins.
She had a curious attitude toward those perfect legs. They had been a valued property, like inherited shares of stock. She was grateful to them, pleased with them, and utterly indifferent to any admiration from others. Too many lenses had stared at them, too many studio lights had been moved to illuminate them properly. The George Washington Bridge was a memorable sight. It carried traffic. Her legs were memorable. And they carried her around.
"I've been up forever," she said. "And I'm absolutely starving. Are you going to breakfast now? Tell Eduardo I'm practically on my way. It's a lovely pool. A lot of boats went out early. You were right about those kids on the motor sailor. They're checking tanks and things. Isn't it a gorgeous morning? I won't be long. What will I put on? What are we going to do?"
"Walk to the village. Skirt instead of shorts, I'd say. Flat heels."
By the time we reached the public square, we had adjusted to the rich odors of the town. The brown kids had flocked around us, demanding pesos, dollars, dimes, two beets, neekles, and in the face of smiling, polite refusal, had accepted the rejection cheerfully enough, somehow passed the word to other hopefuls, and let us go our way. The slightest unbending, the smallest gift, would have made any future trip to the village one vast annoyance.
We wandered, looked at the stalls, then sat on a bench in the square, where the inevitable pigeons pecked at the walks and the scrub grass. There were beads of perspiration on Nora's upper lip. We watched the people. Aside from the very few bureaucratic types in the ubiquitous dark suits, the men wore khaki and twill and denim, clean, faded with many washings. The women, the older ones, wore either skirts and white blouses, or shapeless cotton dresses. The young girls wore the bastard American clothes of the catalogue houses, the pastel pants to mid calf, brief tops and halters. They moved in flocks, chittering, slanting their dark glances. I had located the post office, the police station, the public market. These were handsome people, trim and muscular, with the broad faces, dusty black hair, liquid tilting eyes of the Indio blood. Not too many hundreds of years ago they had roamed these coasts in their dugout canoes, leaving mounds of shells at their camping places, weaving complex fish traps of tough reeds.
I thought of using the post office as a possible approach. Looking for an old friend. Yes indeed. Good old Sam Taggart. He still around here? But it seemed clumsy.
A young priest walked by us and glanced over and said, "Good morning!"
"Good morning, Father," Nora said meekly. I recognized him as the same one who had been on the Tres Estrellas flight. I watched him head toward the church on the other side of the square and disappear into the dark interior. And I had a little idea worth developing.
"Are you Catholic?" I asked Nora.
"If I'm anything. Yes. I don't work at it. But it sort of builds up... and then I go to mass. Twice a year, maybe. I had an awful lot of it when I was a kid. When I was sixteen I had a brother who died, terribly. Some kind of cancer. Big horrible lumps all over his body. He got immune to the drugs. Way down the street they could hear him screaming when he had to be moved, for dressings and keeping him clean. I wore my knees out and my beads out, praying for God to take him to end that agony. He was a sweet boy. He was the best of us, really. But he lasted and lasted and lasted, until you wouldn't think he had the strength to scream like that. But he did. Almost to the end. Why should a kid endure such torture? By the time he died, my religion was dead too. I had terrible fights with my family about it. But I wouldn't pray to anything my brother's death had proved didn't exist. Are you religious at all, Trav?"
"I think there is some kind of divine order in the universe. Every leaf on every tree in the world is unique. As far as we can see, there are other galaxies, all slowly spinning, numerous as the leaves in the forest. In an infinite number of planets, there has to be an infinite number with life forms on them. Maybe this planet is one of the discarded mistakes. Maybe it's one of the victories. We'll never know. I think the closest we can get to awareness is when we see one man, under stress, react in... in a noble way, a selfless way. But to me, organized religion, the formalities and routines, it's like being marched in formation to look at a sunset. I don't knock it for other people. Maybe they need routines, rules, examples, taboos, object lessons, sermonizing. I don't."
"By the time I was twenty I saw that it was kind of shallow to blame God for what happened to my brother. I didn't go back to the church. The hold was broken by then. I go sometimes. It's kind of sweet. Nostalgic. There's a girl there I used to be, now it's the only way I ever find her again." She sighed. "How did we get onto this?"
"Check me on the routine. Any talk you have with a priest is privileged information, isn't it?"
"Up to a point. I mean if a person confessed a murder, the priest would have to tell the police. What are you getting at?"
"That priest might know some things that would help us."
She looked startled, and then she comprehended. "But... how could I go about...."
"Ask for his help in a confidential matter. Wouldn't that keep him quiet?"
"I suppose it would."
"'Tell him you were in love with the man, that you lived in sin with him and he left you and you have been searching for him for three years. I have the idea these village priests know everything that goes on. And he speaks English."
"It would feel so strange... to lie to a priest."
"I hear it's done frequently."
"But not this way" She looked in her purse. "I have nothing to cover my head."
We went to one of the sidewalk stalls. She picked a cotton scarf. It was ten pesos, then five, then four, and finally three pesos fifty centavos, sold with smiles, with pleasure at the bargaining.
She gave me a tight-lipped and nervous look, and went off toward the church. I watched her go. Blue and white blouse in a diamond pattern, narrow whit
e skirt, with a slit at the side to make walking easier, blue sandals. I saw her go up the worn steps, stop and tie the dark blue kerchief around her head, then disappear into the interior, through the pointed arch of the doorway.
I went back to the bench. The broad leaves of a dusty tree shaded me. Lizards flicked across the fitted stones of the pathways. A strolling dog eyed me in unfriendly inquiry. Two small boys wanted to shine my shoes. Two black and white goats stopped and snuffled among wind-blown debris. A fat brown man with one milky eye came smiling over and, with fragmentary English, tried to sell me a fire opal, then an elaborately worked silver crucifix, then a hand tooled wallet, then a small obscene wood carving, and then, in a coarse whisper, a date with a "friendly womans, nice, fat." He sighed and plodded away. I had the feeling I was the object of intense scrutiny, of dozens of people wondering how best to pry some of the Yankee dollars out of my pocket.
I knew it would not have been that way before the hotel was built. But now the village had begun the slow transformation to the eventual mercilessness of Taxco, Cuernavaca, Acapulco. Too many Americans had shown them how easy it could be. Greed was replacing their inborn courtesy, pesos corrupting their morals. The village cop, agleam with whistles, bullets and buckles, strolled by, whapping himself on the calf with a riding crop.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 05 - A Deadly Shade of Gold Page 11
