Dress Her in Indigo

by John D. MacDonald

  We passed a sign as we approached the city, asserting that there were eighty thousand people therein. We skirted an edge of it, and climbed steep grades, then, in lowest low, ground up the long, steep, divided driveway to the parking area at the top, and the portico over the entrance to the Hotel Victoria.

  The modern hotel, five stories tall, stretched along the top of a ridge, looking out across all of the city. Down the slope, in random array, beyond a huge swimming pool, were individual bungalows, each with carport, each landscaped with brilliant flowers and flowering vines. Rough stone steps and walks and stone driveways wound down through the bungalow community, all of it behind a guarded security fence.

  The bungalows had girl-names instead of numbers, and they put us in Alicia. There was one large, tiled, plain room, simply furnished, two double beds, a bath, a dressing room, and a small porch in front overlooking the panorama—a porch with a tin table and poolside chairs. Alicia was two hundred and fifty pesos a day for two. Twenty dollars. I had explained to Meyer the quick easy McGee system for keeping track of the pesos. A fifty-peso bill is a four-dollar bill. A ten-peso bill is an eighty-cent bill.

  Meyer stood on the porch and looked at the city and the mountains and the blue, blue sky. He looked at the flowers. He sniffed the flavors of the summery air. Then he turned to me and said, “I would have this handy little magic wand and I would take one little pass at you. Kazam! Suddenly you are Miranda Dale, looking at me like she looked at Ron Townsend.”

  “Didn’t all those legs make you feel insecure?”

  “And so did the age of the child. But this is the sort of place where I could try to overcome minor obstacles.”

  “You are a hairy, over-educated, lecherous old man.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere, McGee. It’s eleven-fifteen. What now?”

  “Our wheels.” We took a cab down into the city. The Hertz office was on a side street near the zocalo—the public square. The man was pleasant enough, but had absolutely no record of any reservation. He would have a lot of nice cars soon. Maybe in a week. He said he felt desolated by being unable to serve me. I said I would like to give him a four-dollar bill to ease his desolation. It was not to spur him to greater effort on my behalf, I said, because I was certain he would give me every possible help. It was a token of my understanding. He said there was, in truth, a car, but it would be a pity to rent it to me, because I obviously was used to better, and deserved better. It had been many, many kilometros and needed small repairs and was unclean. A boy with a Le Mans psychosis brought it around.

  It was a Ford Falcon, from the Guadalajara assembly plant. Made in Mexico by Mexicans. Pale green. Four doors. Standard shift. It had been thirty-five thousand kilometers, and had been grooved on both sides by near disaster. And it had been traveling some very dusty roads. I signed for it. I took it on a test run, with Meyer copiloting, using the street map they had given us at the airport. Either the Ford engineers have decided Mexicans are a smaller race, or the cars shrink in the dry climate. With the seat as far back as it would go, my knees were on either side of the edge of the steering wheel, and unless I remembered to swing the right knee out of the way, each time I shifted into high I gave myself a sharp and painful rap on the inside edge of the kneecap. When we hit the first potholes I found the front shocks were gone. The front end hit the frame with a metallic thunk, and then a rumbling chatter.

  So I asked directions, and found the Ford garage about seven blocks west of the zocalo. It was then a little past noon. The boss man took it for a turn around the block and came back shaking his head, and said I could have it at four.

  We walked to the central square, along narrow sidewalks on narrow streets. The plaster-over-stone fronts of the two-story residences and shops formed a solid wall along the walkway, and they had been painted and repainted with pure strong pigments. One blue wall brought Meyer to a stop. Maybe it had been painted and patched fifty times. Layers had cracked, peeled, faded. It was all the shades of blue there are.

  “Fix that with transparent epoxy,” he said, “peel off a rectangle eight feet long and five feet high, frame it in rough-cut cypress with a white stain, and take it to any decent gallery—”

  “And somebody will tell you their little daughter could do it better.”

  “The creative act is in selecting which rectangle to frame. It is very damned beautiful, Travis. And that talented daughter is a rotten kid.”

  Buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, and the ubiquitous popping and snorting of the Mexican plague—the motor scooter. So we went out of the sun heat into the cool shade of the gigantic trees of a splendid zocalo. It had its ornate circular bandstand in the middle, a criss-cross of wide walkways and a perimeter walk past gaudy riots of flowerbeds. Traffic circled it counterclockwise. There were men, women, children selling serapes, shoeshines, chewing gum, straw baskets and straw animals, black pottery, fresh flowers and wilted flowers, serapes, cigarettes, fake Indian relics, silver jewelry, junk jewelry, firecrackers, aprons, serapes, ice cream, soft drinks, and hot tacos stuffed with God only knows what kind of meat. And serapes.

  There was evident poverty, beggars with twisted limbs, sick children, stray mongrels, but there was a sense of great life and vitality, of enduring laughter. We found an empty bench. Meyer sat and saw everything, soaked it up, and smiled and smiled. And it was Meyer who spotted a little group on one of the diagonal paths, carrying purchases from the public market, walking toward the largest hotel that fronted on the zocalo, an old ornate stone and plaster structure with a sign proclaiming it as the Hotel Marqués del Valle. There was a long, narrow roofed porch across the front of it, a couple of steps up from sidewalk level. Fat cement columns supported arches that held up the overhanging bulk of the hotel. The porch was two tables wide and about thirty tables long, about half of them occupied, with white-coated waiters hustling drinks and food.

  It was a group of four young men and three girls. The college-age men were wearing faded Mexican work shirts, bleached khakis. Two of the men and one of the girls were barefoot, and the others wore Mexican sandals. The girls wore shorts with bright cotton Indian blouses, and the boys were extravagantly bearded, long-haired. This, as Meyer pointed out, was clear indication they had been in Mexico for a long time. The government had long since closed the border to what were called “heepees,” so the shorn locks and whiskers had to be regrown south of the border.

  We got up and followed along. The waiters pushed two tables together for them. Meyer and I took a table about twenty feet from them, which was as close as we could get. The tempo of the public square was diminishing visibly. Shops were closing. It was siesta time, and not until two-thirty or three would the town begin to stir again. Only the serape salesmen along the sidewalk stayed in business, holding up the rough-woven gaudy wools, trying to catch the tourist eye, the tourist interest. And a dirty, big-eyed child roamed from table to table, trying dispiritedly to vend her “cheeeklets.”

  The young seven were a closed circle, totally indifferent to everything and everyone around them, relating and responding to one another. Too many for any initial contact. So I looked at the menu. Meyer had to trust me. The waiter was very patient with my verbless Spanish, and I was equally patient with his rudimentary English. So I managed to find a good solution—chicken enchiladas covered with Chihuahua cheese and baked. He said they had no Dos Equis, but if we wanted a dark beer, Negro Modelo might please us. And it did, and we were into the second bottle before the enchiladas came, bubbling hot in oval steel dishes.

  After some thoughtful mastication, tempered with the dark beer, Meyer said, “Offhand, what are the immigration laws?”

  “I’ll just leave you here, and you can take your chances.”

  “I’ll send you a card every Christmas.”

  Another student couple had appeared, a huge boy with a small head and a sensitive delicate face, and the blond silky hair and beard style of the Christus. He was with a small wiry black girl with a skin tone li
ke dusty slate, sporting an African blouse and a tall tightly kinked African hairstyle through which she had bleached several startling amber-gold streaks.

  “Wish me luck,” I told Meyer, and with beer in hand went ambling over to their table. There was one extra chair.

  “Join you for a couple of minutes?”

  They looked up at me with a quick, identical wariness, and looked away again, and kept talking as if I was not there. Bad tactics. Should have asked the stranger to go away.

  So I sat down, smiling blandly, and cut into their conversation, saying, “I am not on vacation, kids. I am not looking for fun and games. I am not drunk. I am not fuzz.”

  She stared at me with a hot, dark-eyed hostility and said, “Did you catch the strange word, darling? This fellow seems to have some sort of in-group syndrome.”

  “Fuzz,” the boy said thoughtfully. “Wasn’t there some sort of quip about that we never understood, Della?” Boston accent.

  “I don’t recall at the moment, dear.”

  He put on a minstrel show, end-man accent, doing the Sambo thing very badly. “Hey, you all hear ’bout what happen to Jemima?”

  “No!” she said. “Whut happen to ol’ Jemima?”

  “Got herself picked up by the fuzz.”

  “Lordy me! That sure musta stung.”

  “Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck,” I said, unsmiling.

  “Just go away,” Della said. “Be cooperative. Go back to your friend.”

  “If you had to make a guess, why would you say I came over here?”

  They glanced at each other. The boy shrugged. “I guess the most likely thing would be one of those little speeches about tolerance and miscegenation and all that, so that you can pretend to be so terribly understanding and get some queasy little kick out of it, and get some barroom conversational gambits back wherever you come from, and also, let’s see, delude yourself into believing that there is something so awfully swinging about you that you can bridge the communications gap.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He was bright. He was so damned right and so damned wrong, all at once. I rocked the chair back and laughed. They looked startled, then angry, then they fought the temptation to smile, and then they were laughing. She had a piercing giggle, and he had a deep, rhythmic bray. We were being stared at. Finally, when I could get my breath, I said, “My name is Travis McGee. Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”

  “Della Davis,” he said. “I’m Mike Barrington.” His was a large, hard, muscular hand.

  “Equal time?” I asked. He nodded. She had the hiccups. “I’m loaded with a lot of kinds of tolerance and intolerance, and the only time I get defensive is when I identify some kind of tolerance or intolerance I didn’t know I had, or thought was something else. The only people who need queasy kicks are the ones with the sex hangups, and I think I was a little hung up when I was twelve years old, but not lately. I don’t need a new supply of small talk. And if I did, I wouldn’t look for the raw material on a hotel veranda. Anybody who gives it any thought knows that there has always been a communication gap between everybody. If any two people could ever really get inside each other’s head, it would scare the pee out of both of them. I don’t want to share your hopes and dreams, Mike. I just want to communicate in a very limited way, politely, with no stress on anybody.”

  “I guess they aren’t with the mining company after all,” Della said to him. She turned to me. “We noticed you two and decided you weren’t tourists. There’s a mine up in the hills northeast of the city. Okay, Mister McGee, let’s communicate in our limited fashion.”

  “If you two haven’t been here a month, communication ends.”

  “We got here … the second of something. May or June, dear?” she asked.

  “May,” said Mike, “and I change my guess. You’re looking for somebody’s baby darling, so in your nice, personable, reasonable way you can talk baby darling into coming back home to daddy. Or maybe that’s daddy you were sitting with over there. And you locate her—or him—and lay on the tickets, the kind you can’t cash in.”

  “Closer. But that isn’t daddy over there. Daddy is back in Florida because he got nearly, but not quite, torn in half. And baby darling went home already. From here. In a box, early this month.”

  “Oh sure. The one with the country-day-school nickname. What was it they called her, Del?”

  “Hmmm. Dox? Nax? Bax?… Bix!”

  I put one of the prints on the table, facing Della Davis. She pulled it closer. “That one?” I asked.

  “ ’Tis she,” said Della. “We saw her around. You know. Stay here a while and you see everybody. Nod and smile. Didn’t socialize. The group she was in, or better the groups she ran with, we don’t make those scenes. I’ve got nothing for or against, you understand. Freedom is being left alone to do your own thing. Mike is a painter.”

  “Wants to be a painter,” he corrected.

  “And he doesn’t want to talk about it. He gets up early and he works all day and he goes to bed. And I prowl around driving hard bargains for tortillas and beans and rice and thinking up new ways to cook them. So today I got a little check from my sister in Detroit. So we’re living it up. I mean we aren’t here much, so we don’t keep good track. Anyway, she’s dead. What are you after?”

  Mike Barrington said, “If old dads wondered if somebody pushed his baby darling off the mountain, he might send somebody like Mr. McGee to come and snuff around.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t doubt that it was an accident. It was a pretty good police report. They were out of touch since last January, when she came to Mexico. He wants to know what the last six months of her life were like. How she lived and what she thought and how she died.”

  “And,” said Della with an acid sweetness, “I suppose she was always a very good girl.”

  “Kept her room neat,” I said, “got good grades, remembered names, thanked the hostess, brushed her teeth, and said her prayers. I guess he’d like to know who the hell she was.”

  “None of them know who we are,” Mike said. “Or care much, really. Hang in there with an image they can live with, and they love it. You don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who you are.”

  “So who was Bix Bowie?”

  “A girl who died young,” Della Davis said.

  “If I had to guess why,” Mike said, “and understand I’m not knocking her, I’d say she was probably turned way on. She was high and she was flying, and she was coming down the mountain without knowing if she was there or she was dreaming it, and it turned out she wasn’t dreaming it. In a dream, when you hit bottom, you wake up. The thing about Mexico, the stuff that’s on prescription in the states, here you can buy it in any drugstore. All you have to know is the name of what you want. Little lists circulate. The right names for Thorazine, Compazine, oral Demerol, Doriden, reserpine, Mardil, Benzedrine, other amphetamines. And in the public market, at the herb stalls, you can buy a kilo brick of very good, strong pot. It’s all a big lunch counter. You mix them up in brand new ways and wait and see where and how it hits you. If you like it, you try to find the same combination again.”

  She put her wiry black hand on his and said, “That used to be the name of your game, sweetheart.”

  “There’s a better high,” he said, smiling into her eyes. “I don’t ever have to come down off this one.”

  She gave me a bawdy wink, which somehow was not bawdy at all, and said, “Like the old saying, man, I changed his luck.”

  “It needed changing,” Mike said.

  “Was she any kind of hooked?” I asked them.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Mike said. “I didn’t know her. It’s unfair to make guesses. Maybe one of those damned cows came clumping onto the road and she swerved and lost the car. But it’s fair to say she was some kind of user, because it was users she was with, mostly, but I don’t know how much or how often, or even what.”

  “Those seven over there at that table. Would any of them know more about her?”

 
; Della leaned back and made a careful inspection. “I just don’t know. If any of them, it would be the girl facing this way, with the round face and the reddish hair and the big sunglasses, and the skinny fellow sitting on her left. I think they’ve been here the longest.”

  “Got a name for either of them?”

  “Mike, isn’t that the girl they call Backspin?”

  “Yes. God knows why.”

  I used my little notebook to refresh my memory. “Here are the names of the ones she came into the country with back in January. Stop me if I come to anyone you know. Carl Sessions? Jerry Nesta? Minda McLeen?”

  “Whoa,” Della Davis said. “Little bit of a dark-haired girl. She and that Bix were usually together. Strange-acting girl. Haven’t seen her around lately. But that doesn’t mean anything. Mike, darling, that horrible bore of a man with the funny hat. Wasn’t his name …?”

  “McLeen. I went to the public market last week with Del and he introduced himself. Said he was looking for his daughter.”

  “He still around?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Walter Rockland?”

  They both looked blank, both shrugged.

  “They came down in a Chevy pickup, blue, with a new camper body on it.”

  She looked at Mike. “Rocko?” she asked.

  “He says the name is Rockland, and the truck fits. Mr. McGee, is he a little older than the rest of the bunch? Husky?”

  “That fits.”

  “Then Miss Bix came down here in bad company if she came with that one,” Della said. “That one is one mean honkey son of a bitch. That one is a smart ass and a hustler. When did we have that fuss with him, honey?”

  “About the fourth of July, I think. The day after the fourth.” They took turns telling me about it. They’d gone to visit a couple they knew, who were living in a travel trailer at the trailer park over near the Plaza de la Danza. Rocko’s camper was in a nearby site. Evidently someone had pried open a little door in the side of the camper and stolen his little tank of bottle gas. He came over to the travel trailer in an ugly mood, acting as if it was the fault of the friends of Mike and Della for not seeing it happen. Mike told him to take it easy. Rocko looked the situation over and told Mike he didn’t need any advice from him or his spade chick. They were standing outside the travel trailer. Mike swung on Rocko and missed, and Rocko tagged him as he lunged forward off balance.