I pulled the door shut, set the scarred brown bag at the foot of one of the beds.
She lit a cigarette, ran both hands back through the black hair she had just loosened. Her face had a faintly grainy look and lines I had never noticed before ran from the childish, tilted nose down to the corners of the heavy, swollen mouth.
“Kyle, we left too fast. We should have taken all identification off him.”
“I couldn’t have touched him.”
The cigarette bobbed as she spoke. “I could have.”
“Don’t worry about it. He may never be found. That was a deserted road. Even if he floats, who’d stop and look over the edge and see him?”
“I’m not worrying. It would just have been smarter.”
“Let’s not talk about him.”
“All right, Kyle. We get our tourist permits in the morning, don’t we?”
I looked in the phone book. The Mexican consul was located in the Pan-American Building. That was the next to the last hurdle. The last hurdle was customs inspection on the Mexican side of the bridge. I had let it go too long without a plan. I had a vague idea that a twenty-dollar bill would get us through without the brown bag’s being opened. But it was a risk.
As I was wondering what to do, she said, “I want to tell you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“I didn’t plan that with Ralph from the beginning.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I was going to make myself forget him. He always made me feel cheap and dirty. He always laughed at me.”
“I told you that it doesn’t matter.”
“After that night in Harrisburg, I woke up thinking about him, so I went down and called him.”
“Just like that.”
“I thought you ought to know how it happened.”
“How much did you tell him?”
“It was over the phone. I had to hint. But he understood right away that we’d left with money from the bank. In Lake Charles when I told him how much it was, his eyes nearly dropped out.”
“Why didn’t you just take the car keys and go on alone? Isn’t the world full of Becklers? And Camerons?”
“I don’t like to be alone.”
“You’d never be alone long.”
“He laughed at me and made me mad, but always, I could make him do what I wanted him to do.”
“Just like me.”
“I thought that about you. Now I don’t know. You’re changing, Kyle. And you’re learning too much about me. Maybe I like that.”
“I’m learning about you. There’s nothing to you. Greed, and a lot of it. And a psychopathic preoccupation with sex. And a selfishness so monumental that it isn’t even selfishness any more. It’s like a new and special kind of disease.”
“But I’m what you want, Kyle. After today, I know that you’ll never let me go, will you?”
“There’s only one way I’ll let you go.”
She knew what I meant. Her eyes seemed to break against mine, and she looked quickly away. “Don’t change too much, Kyle.”
“We’re wasting time. Think of how we’re going to ge this money across the border, through customs.”
“Is that going to be a risk?”
“No. The man just opens the suitcase, looks at the money, closes it again, and stamps our papers.”
“Will they open everything?”
“How do we know they won’t?”
“Don’t they take things across borders by hiding them right in cars somehow?”
We talked about it for a half hour. Her idea still seemed the best. I brought the back seat in. I pried out the tacks that held the burlap across the springs. It was a tight fit to get all the money in around the springs. We rolled up a lot of it and inserted it in the springs themselves. We made a bundle of the discarded padding to dispose of on the following day. I retacked the burlap, using the lug wrench as a hammer, and carried the seat back out and wedged it into position. It would have to do. Our attitude was what was going to determine how thorough the search was going to be.
She said, when we were through, “Now you’re going to learn something else about me, Kyle. Maybe you won’t like it.”
“What new talent is this?”
“I saw a package store a little way back. Get Scotch, Kyle. The best they have.”
I brought it back to her. I stretched out on my bed and watched her. She sat on her bed, facing me, a thick bathroom tumbler in her hand, the bottle on the floor by her feet. She drank with metronome regularity. Splash an inch or so into the bottom of the glass. Hold it for a long time. Toss it off. Reach for the bottle. Repeat. She looked across me and out through the wall.
After a half hour of it, I said, “Do this often?”
She moved her head rather than her eyes, turned her head slowly until she looked directly at me. “Not often.” Her voice was faintly slurred.
“Usually alone?”
“Always. First time with somebody watching. It isn’t very pretty, is it?”
“They say it indicates a sense of inadequacy. Don’t tell me you feel inadequate.”
“A good word, Kyle. Inadequate.”
“What sets you off?”
“Are you going to make me talk?”
“I think you should talk.”
She pondered that for a long time and then gave a drunken nod. “Set off by something Ralph said this morning, outside the cabin.”
“What did he say?”
“It was about Harry. He said Harry was marrying a little Irish girl. Planning on a big family. That set me off.”
“Why should it?”
“Harry did something to me. When I think about it I want to drink like this. And the hell of it is, I hate kids. Always have. Runny noses.”
“You’re not making much sense.”
“Harry wanted me for fun and games. That’s all. He made it clear. I angled him into marrying me, so he got even. He got a big kick out of it. Should have heard him laugh, Kyle. He had some hold on the doc. It was just supposed to be appendix. So he had me fixed like a setter bitch. Tubes tied. He told me he was doing humanity a favor. He told me that the only thing I’d breed would be a monster, anyway. Laughed and laughed.” She gave me a wide, ghastly grin. Never before had she smiled so broadly. Death’s-head eyes above that smeared grin. “And the hell of it is, I hate kids. So why should it worry me? It makes life simpler.”
It brought her into sharper focus. I felt something toward her, for the first time, that was remarkably close to tenderness. I watched her go steadily through the Scotch. The next time she spoke, I couldn’t make out the words. Suddenly she stood bolt upright, as though she had heard some terrible warning signal. The glass slid out of her hand and bounded, unbroken, on the rug. She folded slowly over the foot of my bed, face down, too close to the edge. There was no footboard. She rolled off and I heard the thud of her head against the rug as she landed. I sat up. All I could see between the beds were her legs from ankle to knee.
I lay back and thought of how utterly unprepared I had been by environment and background to cope with this sort of woman. Shawn had known how. Beckler had known how. They had treated her with a perfect understanding of what she was. I not only had had to learn, over many weeks, just what she was, but I also had had to learn that such people actually existed.
After a time I got up, lifted her onto her bed, and undressed her. She had a rag-doll slackness and her skin was cool and clammy. She breathed heavily through her mouth. I covered her over, took a long shower, went to bed. Her heavy breathing disturbed me and it was difficult to get to sleep. Maybe part of it was being afraid to go to sleep, afraid of what dreams would bring, afraid to see Beckler crawling toward me, up the shale slant of the hill.
But the only dream that awakened me was of the stained glass eyes of the disciple at the Last Supper. It was three o’clock. Her breathing was more normal. I got up and had a cigarette and a glass of unpleasant-tasting water from the bathroom tap. I
looked out the front window at the car sitting there. The red neon by the office made bloody highlights on the hood and the edge of the roof.
The next time I awakened it was bright daylight. Her bed was empty and the shower was making a metallic sound against the metal stall. The bathroom door was open. By the time she stepped out of the shower I was half through shaving.
I looked at her reflection in the mirror in front of me. “Feel bad?”
“Not too bad.”
“Considering.”
“The back of my head hurts.”
“You fell on it.”
“I told you about it, didn’t I?” she said, looking at me through the opening in the towel with which she was scrubbing her dark hair dry. The swelling of her lips had gone down.
“Maybe you hadn’t planned to.”
“I don’t like people to know about it.”
She left the bathroom and I finished shaving. By the time I came out she was dressed, sitting at the dressing table and fixing her hair, bobby pins between her lips.
“Will we come back here, Kyle?”
“No. We see the consul, go to the bank, and cross.”
“Could he turn us down?”
“Only if they’re watching for us, have descriptions, have found out in Syracuse the names we’re using.”
I took the affidavits I had arranged in Syracuse, attesting to our dates of birth, places of birth, and transferred them from my suitcase to the inside pocket of my rayon cord jacket. I clipped sunglasses over the rimless glasses and looked at myself in the mirror. Walter C. Marshall, American citizen. Tourist. His ears stuck out and there were tired lines around his mouth. Because of loss of weight, the jacket was baggy. Mr. Walter C. Marshall and Marian, his dark young wife in the too tight skirt.
The consul’s office was on an upper floor of a building in the heart of town. A big drugstore occupied most of the ground floor. We went up in a small, slow elevator. My shirt was sticking to my back. Her blouse was darkened at the armpits.
We walked in and stood at the high counter that extended across a small office, dividing it in half. We took blanks from the pile and filled them out. A girl was typing busily by the windows. A quiet, dark-haired man glanced over the blanks, asking a few routine questions. The girl typed out two tourist cards.
He signed them and showed us where to sign them.
“They will tear off the duplicate card when you cross. Welcome to Mexico. I hope your trip will be enjoyable.”
And that was all. My knees felt weak as we went down in the elevator. I hadn’t realized how much I had dreaded walking up to the counter and having someone ask us to wait a moment, and then turn to find the door blocked by someone in uniform.
We walked to the bank, on the other side of the street nearer the river. For $1,000 they gave us 8,620 pesos.
As we walked back to the car, through the busy streets, I kept thinking that it was all some sort of trap. They had let us have the tourist cards. They were watching us. They knew we could not escape.
We drove to the bridge. American customs gave us declaration forms to use on returning. I paid the man on the middle of the toll bridge a half dollar. At the far end of the bridge was a small shabby frame building on the right. Mexicans in brown uniforms were ordering people with bundles out of a bus. A man directed me into a parking area beyond the building. A boy ran over and carried our bags in and put them on a long table in the shade of the porch. A man started opening the bags, ruffling through the clothes, snapping them shut, sticking on seals.
He said, “You will go inside, please. The boy will put the bags back in the car.”
We went inside. A man was using a broad-bladed knife to spread overripe avocado pulp on tortillas. A fat, bored man held out his hand. “Automobile papers, please.”
I gave him the registration. He sat down and typed three copies of an automobile permit, handed me one carbon. “Do not lose. Adiós. Buen viaje. Means good trip.”
He turned a liquid eye on Emily, stared frankly and appreciatively at breasts and flanks. “Buen viaje, señora,” he repeated.
“Thank you,” she said. We went out. The bags were back in the car. I tipped the waiting boy a peso. I drove into Matamoros, down streets with the high blank tan house walls on either side.
“My luck,” she said softly. “You’re my luck.”
“We want Mexican Route One-o-seven. Look for it.”
“Couldn’t you feel it? Couldn’t you feel that big, high, wonderful feeling that we were licking them all? Kicking them all in the mouth?”
“Look for the route.”
We drove around the public square once before we found it. The bandstand stood empty, sagging, heat-struck in the middle of the square. Nobody stirred in the sun. A sleepy soldier with a shiny helmet stood outside a public building. As we went by slowly and Emily stared at him, he whistled dutifully.
Matamoros had a sodden, broken, abandoned, down-at-the-heel look. A dog with most of its hair gone in patches ran almost under the wheels. I wrenched the wheel and cursed it.
We found 107. Two hundred miles to Victoria. I had filled the tank in Harlingen, where we had eaten the night before. A few miles out of town we had to stop at a small guardhouse. A bronze-faced boy stared solemnly, uncomprehendingly at the tourist cards and auto permit and waved us on.
The road arrowed through desert. Some scrub grew near the road. There was a great deal of cactus. The heat was dryer than before. More bearable. Wild horses wheeled, raced off across barren flats, kicking up powdery dust. Vultures wheeled in a slow circle over something not yet dead, something we could not see.
“How about the money?” she asked.
“We’ll have to put it back in the suitcase and lock it in the back end before we get to Victoria. Well look for a place.”
We went through the rough narrow streets and around the right-angle corners of a small town and then dipped down to a river. The river was only thirty or forty yards wide and the small ferry could handle only two passenger cars at a time. It was headed to our shore with two cars aboard, and it moved slowly because it was powered by two small men who walked in turn to the bow, nipped onto the stationary cable with metal tools, and trudged heavily toward the stern. A bright red pickup truck appeared on the opposite shore.
I turned off the motor to keep the car from overheating as we waited. The shabby ferry seemed barely to move in midstream. It was a tiny fragment of time, a piece of my life, a moment imbedded in heat and strangeness the way a bright tile is pressed into moist concrete.
All my impressions were suddenly more vivid. I gave a sidelong glance at the stranger-woman beside me. It was much like those tiny intervals of lucidity that come during the delirium of high fever. What was I doing here—I, Kyle Cameron—here with the woman, with the money, with the sharp-lined memory of murder, with regrets and strange hungers so perfectly balanced that somehow I had ceased to exist?
There was another Kyle Cameron back in Thrace, and on this Tuesday morning he had walked to the bank. He was behind his bronze bars, giving the customers that brief, courteous, self-effacing smile. Tomorrow evening he would go to his girl’s house and maybe she would have some of those little swatches of furniture fabric and she would talk eagerly about this color and that, and how they would go with the walls.
But right now he was in his wire cage, between Sam Grinter and Paul Raddmann, and he was teller number six and all was right with his world.
If that were so, then who was this other person who now sat here waiting in a strange land to be pulled across a muddy stream by wiry little men with unreadable faces? If the two were one and the same, and on this morning teller number six had not reported, then what had changed him? The look of young girls when a windy corner snugged their dresses against their hips and thighs? Or the velvet trap beside me, with her whipspring loins and endless greeds? Or something in myself, something that I had never recognized. Some capacity for …
I was suddenly aware of he
r shaking my arm. “What’s the matter? Can’t you see him motioning to you?”
The ferry took us across, and farther on, beside the road, she watched for cars while I put the money back into the brown suitcase. We had lunch at a place on the corner, in Victoria, where 107 met the Pan-American Highway. It had ebony floors, that little restaurant, and Mexican food, and the stranger-woman with me sat erect, alert, bright-eyed, as she ate enchiladas and licked the bright tomato color from her thin white fingers.
Chapter Fifteen
On that first night in Mexico we stayed at a small tourist court on the right side of the road not far beyond the village of Tomazunchale. It was in a palm grove in a moist tropical valley. Near the individual cabins were caged small animals. We ate in a round, open-sided bamboo affair that looked like a small bandstand. Monkeys were chained nearby. A fat, torpid, evil-looking parrot hung chained to a perch near our table with its spotted white cloth.
In a plaintive voice, as we were being served, the parrot began to say, “Recuerda Juero! Recuerda Juero! Recuerda Juero!” It was a thin, whining, monotonous voice.
“What is he saying?” Emily demanded as the waiter brought her salad.
“His name it is Juero. He is saying remember Juero. You understand. Do not forget to feed Juero.”
“Can’t you make him stop?”
The monotonous voice went on. The waiter looked hurt. “It is all he says. He has no other words. He does not stop until he is fed.”
Three tourist women arrived at that moment and the waiter left to show them to a table. Two of them were matronly, and obviously schoolteachers on summer vacation. The third was a young girl, blonde, fresh-faced, with Jo Anne’s coloring. It was an odd, dull hurt to look at her. Soon I heard her call the heavier woman with glasses “Aunt.”
They made a fuss over Juero, practiced Spanish on the waiter, fed Juero, laughed with delight when a fat hen came scrambling up to peck at the scraps Juero dropped. Once the blonde girl saw me looking at her. She dropped her eyes quickly and I thought I detected a faint flush on her throat. She could not have been over eighteen. She was like a reincarnation of Jo Anne at eighteen.
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