Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  But the professor wasn’t done, not yet. He caught up to Fitz as he was heading for the front door, his voice gone high in his throat, shouting, “The walls, what is this on the walls?”

  Fitz swung round on him, calculating—he’d had enough, but the professor outweighed him and had the force of moral certainty on his side. Still, for all that, Fitz had been pushed to the limit. He was ready to take a punch for Tim, to give as good as he got come what may—expulsion, a broken jaw, a lawsuit—but in the end he just answered the question. “Mandalas,” he said.

  “Mandalas?” The professor’s eyes jumped behind his glasses. His face twitched. His mouth hung open on a set of graying Soviet-patched teeth.

  “Drug parties,” the wife’s voice keened in the background. “They had drug parties here, Marty, just like the Wheelers said—”

  “Mandalas?” the professor repeated. “What in hell are mandalas?”

  “India,” he said. “Tibet. Look it up in the encyclopedia.”

  The professor was right there, right in his face. “Are you getting smart with me? Because if you’re getting smart with me—” A breeze came up then, mercifully, to cool the sweat on Fitz’s brow and under his arms, sweat he’d worked up for Tim—and for this man, this jerk he’d never seen before and would never see again. “I mean, do you have any idea what it’s going to cost to, to—”

  Fitz cut him off. “No,” he said, “I don’t. I told you, I’m just a student.” And he turned and walked out the door and down the stone steps to where his car was waiting, thinking of one thing only: Mexico.

  It was overcast and muggy the day they finally stuffed the last of their things in the car, humping up and down the stairs like coolies, Fitz going back up six times alone to check if they’d left anything behind. “Aren’t you glad now you never got that cat?” he said to Joanie as she settled into the front seat with the picnic hamper in her lap and Corey established himself in back with his comic books, baseball cards and the dollar and twenty-five cents’ worth of Milky Ways, jawbreakers, candy buttons and red licorice sticks he’d been allowed to select at the corner store especially for the trip—and as a reward for his final report card, which was all A’s and A minuses across the board. The reference was to the kitten Joanie had seen in the pet store window back in March and decided she couldn’t live without, even attempting to enlist Corey on her side (who, to his credit, seemed indifferent to pets of any kind except tropical fish, his entire tank of which had gone belly up two weeks back because of some malfunction of the heater, which solved that problem). Fitz had talked her out of it, emphasizing the destructiveness of the animal’s claws and the reek of the litter box—“You really want shit in a box under the sink with summer coming on? I mean, think of the flies alone.”

  Now she said, “We could have taken it to my mother’s.”

  “Your mother’s? I’ve got to clue you—we’ve got a five-or six-day drive ahead of us, if we really push it, and the last thing I want is to get hung up at your mother’s house because you know she’s going to talk us to death and insist we spend the night.” He slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, in high spirits, bringing up the cat only because it amused him to imagine it curled up in the lap of some other young housewife in another building in another neighborhood altogether. They were free. All the details, major and minor, had been settled, and if he’d forgotten anything it was too late now. “Mexico, here we come!” he cried, putting the car in gear and lurching away from the curb.

  “What’s wrong with visiting my mother?” she asked. “What if we did spend the night?—it’d save us on a motel room.”

  “No way.” He gave her a smile, dodged round a fat man who suddenly flung open the door of a parked sedan and set one fat foot out on the pavement. “Didn’t we say we need to make miles, drive straight through as long as we can stand it?”

  “Sure,” she said, crossing her legs and patting at her hair where the breeze through the open window whipped a loose strand across her lips. “I’m not disagreeing with you, Fitz. I want to get there as badly as you do—and Corey does too.” She swiveled in her seat to face their son. “Right, honey?”

  No answer from the backseat. Corey had his comics, comics he’d been hoarding for just this moment, and there was no distracting him, not yet anyway.

  “I’m just saying,” she went on, “it would be nice to see my mother, at least for a couple of hours, a pit stop, lunch, dinner, whatever—”

  “We’re going to Mexico,” he said, “not Long Beach Island. Mexico, baby!” And he began singing “La Cucaracha,” just as they all had that night in Tim’s office, only altering the verse to drop the reference to marijuana because Corey was in the car and Corey had ears, comics or no. When he got to it, when he got to “Porque no tiene, porque le falta / Marijuana que fumar,” he substituted “Dinero para caminar.” And then he turned to look over his shoulder and asked Corey if he knew what that meant and Corey said he didn’t.

  The car sailed on down the road, practically driving itself, and if a few spatters of rain began to tap at the windshield, what did it matter? They were on their way and there was no stopping them now. “Money, Corey,” he said. “The cockroach, he doesn’t have the money to travel.”

  He let that ride a minute, the almost-new tires hissing now on the wet road and the traffic falling away behind them as he tapped the accelerator and felt the big V-8 engine surge beneath him. Then, thinking of Tim, thinking of Peggy, thinking of tamales and white sand beaches stretching as far as you could see and whatever else they had down there, he said, “But we do—we sure do.”

  Part II

  Zihuatanejo/Millbrook, 1962–1963

  1.

  The drive was an adventure, the adventure of her life, because she’d never been to the South or Texas or Mexico either, and they got through it with a minimum of trouble (if you except two blown tires and the six-hour delay in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, while a mechanic with an accent so thick he might as well have been speaking a foreign language replaced their water pump). She and Fitz took turns behind the wheel, with the intention of driving straight through so as to save on motels, one of them sleeping while the other drove in a fugue of radio static, blistering sun, inverted nights and sudden downpours, but in the end they wound up stopping twice out of sheer exhaustion—and for showers, merciful showers. When Corey wasn’t buried in his comic books, he kept up a nonstop monologue about all the tropical fish he was going to catch in the jungle streams—firemouths, platys, swordtails—and all for free when they cost like fifty cents apiece in Boston—and snakes too. Did she know they had coral snakes in Mexico? With poison so potent it paralyzed your lungs so you couldn’t breathe, which was like drowning on dry land? Neurotoxin, that was what it was called. And they had scorpions too, including one kind that was six inches long, and wasn’t that cool?

  It was. Just to see Corey so excited made everything cool, despite the heat that hammered them all the way down through the South and the Gulf Coast till half the time she was glued to the seat with her own sweat. Fitz was cool too, everything behind him now, exams, papers, his students, and when he wasn’t fiddling with the radio or quoting On the Road (“I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found”) he was humming or singing off-key renditions of Johnny Hartman, Sinatra, Nina Simone, tapping out the rhythm on the steering wheel. Once they crossed the Mason-Dixon line, it was “Camptown Races” and “Dixie” and “Ol’ Man River,” and she joined in till the sound of their voices intertwined beat back the roar of the open windows. The road was blinding, mesmeric. Everything came at her in a blast of sensation, everything new every time she opened her eyes, and they didn’t even think about the two doses of the sacrament Tim had pressed on them before he left because they didn’t need them, or not yet, not till they got there.

  They left the car at the airport in Monterrey, and no, they didn’t have time for sightseeing, not even for the cathedral the guidebook w
as pushing or the limestone caves Corey was fixated on, because they were in a hurry now, a mad anticipatory rush to get to the Catalina Hotel—Tim’s hotel—slip into their bathing suits, pick coconuts and just let go. The flight was on a Mexican air service nobody had ever heard of, but it was cheap, and if she had any reservations she just strapped herself in and swallowed them. There was the rattling dual-propeller airplane, the pilot who smiled through the heavy brush of his mustache as if this plane and this sky were the funniest things in the world, then the patchwork of the mountains and finally the dense green vision of Zihuatanejo and the blue transparency of the sea that hugged it close.

  Ken was waiting for them on the dirt strip that served as an airfield, lounging in the driver’s seat of the hotel’s Jeep with a book in one hand and a beer in the other. He was tanned the color of a walnut and he’d let his crew cut grow out. The last time she’d seen him he was in chinos and a baby-blue button-down shirt, and now he was bare-chested, wearing nothing but his sunglasses, a pair of athletic shorts and the sandals they called huaraches, as if he’d already gone native. Which he had. They all had. And she and Fitz and Corey would too, just give them time, and wasn’t that the whole point? As soon as the propellers stopped whirling and a pair of dark little men fixed the stairway in place, he sauntered across the field to greet them even as the door swung open and she was hit with a blast of heat that was like no heat she’d ever known, alien heat, Mexican heat that was propped up on a solid wall of sweetness and stench in equal proportions, jasmine, sewage, cookery, rot. Just to take a breath was a kind of synesthesia.

  “Hey, amigo,” he called out, taking Fitz by the hand and pulling him close for a back-thumping embrace. “Bienvenidos a México. This place is the real deal—paradise on earth, and you are going to love it, believe me.” Then he turned to her and swept her up in his arms, whirling her around as if they were on ice skates. “Paradise,” he kept saying in her ear, his breath like a hot salve, “really and truly and veritably!”

  And then it was Corey’s turn. Ken set her down and they were all grinning, everybody, even the Mexicans, and he held out his hand solemnly to Corey for a handshake. “And you know what else?” he asked, his voice riding up the register as if it could scarcely be believed, one marvel after another. “Richie caught a scorpion the size of a tamale last night. You know what a tamale is?”

  Corey shook his head. “Like a hot tamale?”

  “Yeah, exactly: a hot tamale.”

  “How big?”

  Ken stretched out his hands as if he were approximating the length of a prize fish.

  “You mean Richard?” Corey asked.

  Ken shot her a look, still grinning. “Yeah, Richard—isn’t that what I said?”

  “You said ‘Richie.’”

  The smells seemed to intensify, reinforced now by the chemical assault of the airplane fuel. Richard was Ronald’s twin brother and Corey’s closest friend among the other children, and he was Richard, not Richie or Rick, as a way of distinguishing himself from his father, she supposed—and, given that, Ronald had had no chance of being Ronnie or Ron even if he’d wanted to.

  Ken just smiled. “Same difference,” he said, cuffing Corey lightly on the shoulder. “But listen”—his eyes found hers again, then Fitz’s—“the important thing to remember is we’ve got a party to get started here, so where are your bags? And, oh yeah, as far as Spanish is concerned, the most significant term you’re going to need to know in about, oh”—he checked his watch—“fifteen minutes, is ‘margarita.’ Can you say margarita?”

  The hotel sat on a cliff above a crescent of beach and had been built in three rising tiers like a theater with balconies, so that all the rooms shared a view of the coconut palms and the thatched roofs of the beach huts and of the Pacific itself, which rolled on all the way to China in a blaze of roiling light. There was a pool, a bar, a courtyard of saltillo tile and a cable car down to the beach if you didn’t want to negotiate the steps carved out of the dark volcanic rock—and you didn’t, you definitely didn’t, especially when you were tripping, the view from the cable car a whole trip in itself, as Charlie would say.

  It was late in the afternoon when they arrived, the sun still fixed overhead because this was the tropics where it was hot year-round and the houseplants she’d known only as sickly stalks back in Boston could run riot, which was what amazed her most in those first few moments as they pulled up to the hotel: banana fronds broad as shields, the jagged fingers of the palms, flowers sprouting everywhere, and the smells, the smells. No sewage here, no airplane fuel, just a kind of saturate perfume that changed brands and scents every ten steps you took. Ken, her suitcase in one hand, Fitz’s in the other, turned to her after he’d led them into the lobby and said, “Well, what do you think? No worries about set and setting here, huh?”

  She didn’t know what to say. She was overwhelmed.

  Behind her, one of the hotel staff, a teenager who didn’t look to be much older than Tommy Eggers, was helping Fitz and Corey with the rest of their things, the light fracturing around them so it was as if they were onstage in some fantastic play and she was here, in the audience, trying to find the words to describe what she was feeling. And then the words didn’t matter because here came Fanchon in her bikini, her skin glistening from the pool, to wrap her in her arms.

  Within minutes she was in the pool herself, her clothes hastily shucked in the room she’d barely had time to glance at (four walls, double bed, ceiling fan, a cot for Corey), and everybody was gathered round, the whole crew, laughing, chatting, smoking, drinking. They might have been back at Tim’s on a Saturday night, but for the pool and the heat and the high hot Mexican sun. And the margaritas, an example of which had magically appeared in her hand. Propping herself up on the coping of the pool, her hair gloriously wet and trailing over her shoulders, her legs kicking lazily in the cool embrace of the water, she sipped her exotic slushy drink that was sweet and tart all at once, almost like a whiskey sour, only better, and when that one was gone, there was another to replace it, and another, and before long she was singing a ditty she made up on the spot, with a little help from Carmen Miranda: “I’m Chiquita Margarita and I’m here to say, margaritas are good for you in every way.” And then Alice took it up and Rick Roberts’s wife, Paulette, and Susannah Eggers too and they were all belting it out, making up the verses as they went along, and what the hotel staff must have thought—or the kids, for that matter—nobody really knew. Or cared.

  At some point dinner was served poolside, a kind of fish and shrimp stew you sopped up with tortillas and washed down with cold Mexican beer. The talk, at least at first, was of the project, which was unconstrained now by any consideration other than pushing the boundaries to see what lay beyond them. They’d decided that people would rotate their trips so that on any given day a third of the group would be doing the sacrament, a third acting as guides, and the remaining third recuperating from the previous day’s trip and writing up their experiences. There were thirty-three adults present that summer, meaning that on any given day ten or so would be tripping, and the lifeguard tower on the beach was reserved for those who wanted to withdraw from the scene and go deep with or without a guide. Climb up into the tower and it was yours, though most people preferred the palapas along the beach, where they could stretch out in the sand and feel the thump of the surf radiate through every fiber of their being, and wasn’t that the true heartbeat of the earth?

  “Your choice,” Ken told her and Fitz. “Freedom, it’s all about freedom.”

  And then Tim was there, wearing a pair of bathing trunks and nothing else because nothing else was needed. “Glad you kids could make it,” he said. “Of course, if you’d got here last week like everybody else you’d have known all this already, because, really, we’re making up the rules as we go along. But welcome to Freedom House.”

  Fitz, who was sitting on the tiles beside her chaise, his arms cradling his knees and a beer dangling from two fingers, grinn
ed up at him. “IFIF, right?”

  “Right. Internal freedom all the way.”

  “External too,” Ken said, hovering over them with a margarita in one hand, a beer in the other, “because guess what—Kellard and Mortenson and all the rest of the drones are three thousand miles away.”

  “Where they belong,” Fitz said.

  Tim eased himself down on the patio, crossed his ankles and took a sip of his own margarita, of which there seemed to be a limitless supply. “I say good riddance. But really, can you imagine that stiff Mortenson in a bathing suit?”

  “No way,” Fanchon said. She was standing there beside her husband, her hip pressed to his, one arm draped round his waist and her hand casually inserted in the waistband of his trunks. “He is a real limp dick.”

  Everyone laughed at this, liberated now, not a care in the world, and what awaited them back at Harvard wasn’t worth thinking about, not until this long paradisiacal summer played itself out and they all went deeper than they’d ever gone before, at which point it might not even matter anymore. She didn’t have a job. She didn’t have an apartment. What she had was this, the tropical night that trilled and resonated with the sounds of hidden things, magical things, frogs, cicadas, monkeys and the long sweet release of group laughter.

  She thought of the pills then, the two pills Tim had given them for the trip down, and she leaned into Fitz and whispered, “You want to, you know, take the sacrament? Wouldn’t that just cap things off, wouldn’t it be great, I mean, our first night here?”