Dress Her in Indigo

by John D. MacDonald

  I saw it. A few smears of yellow paint on sharp edges of rock, and a twinkling of broken glass among the rocks, and a gleaming piece of twisted chrome trim. So that’s where it hit first, but the next bounce had to take it out of sight of where we were.

  The sergeant walked us down past the purple car, and pointed down at an angle toward the valley floor. From there it was easy to spot the car, or what had been a car. If you took one of those matchbox toy cars and put it on top of the charcoal and cooked steaks for a whole party, then retrieved the little car and stepped on it with your heel, you’d have a pretty good imitation of what was lying in the valley.

  “How did they ever get the body?”

  “They came down from the other side. There’s our road over there. That’s where the bus was when they saw the flame when she hit. You can see from here it’s not as steep to get down, or as far.”

  “How was identification made?”

  “By Madame Vitrier.”

  “That’s in the report, Enelio. I mean what condition was the body in?”

  He questioned the sergeant. Finally he turned back to me and swallowed in a sickly way and said, “She was half in and half out of the car, charred from the waist up, and chopped up pretty bad, man. There was a silver chain on her ankle Madame Vitrier identified, and a red shoe that was hers, fifty feet maybe from where they found the car and the body. Didn’t find the other shoe.”

  “Why was she way up in these mountains? Enelio, this damned road must climb four thousand feet in fifteen miles.”

  He turned and pointed. Through a notch in the hills we could see the far valley and the smoke-misted shimmer of the city. “Five thousand feet above the sea. Up here we are … maybe eight thousand and a half? Yes. Ten, twelve kilometers more and we are at the top. The puerto, like the gate or the pass. At Relon. Ten thousand, two hundred and seven. I remember from the sign. Little houses here and there. Mountain people. Very sweet. Very cruel. Ah, this is one evil road, Travis. Every year two, three, four vehicles go over. Most of the time everyone dead. Six years ago a bus with eighteen persons. Why would she come up here? Maybe for the same reasons when I was … seventeen? Yes. On an English motorcycle. Early, early in the morning, I went down this crazy road, man. I was yelling. It was a great excitement. It was speed and death and terror. It was a rhythm, Travis McGee. Lean into one curve, lean into the other. Fantástico! Like when it is the very best of sex, like the mountains are all parts of the body of a great brooding woman. Way down, near the bottom, somehow the wind got under the goggles, blew them crooked, one eye covered, one eye in the wind, so the tears were running. I think there was a little stone I did not see. Zam! I am turning in the air. Smash into trees. Fall. Broke this wrist. See? It is never quite straight again. Blood running out of my hair. Hey, I walked down the road, holding this broken wrist like so. I walked with a big grin and I was singing, and they came out of the huts and stared at the crazy fellow. I had been to visit death, my friend, and had a taste of it and I was alive and I would live forever, and finally see death again and say, ‘Remember me! You had me once, old woman, and you let me go!’ ” He grinned, picked up a stone, threw it over the edge. A truck came grinding and popping and grunting by us, and he waited until it went up around the corner Bix had missed and he could be heard again. “I think it was something like that for the girl. When you are young you drive up the mountains and you drive back down again.”

  He turned and questioned the sergeant, listened and then interpreted. I had caught about half of it. “He went on up the road and asked the people about the yellow car. He found a boy who would talk about it. The boy was herding two burros back to the little farm. He’d been in the woods that Sunday, cutting wood and making two big loads for the burros. The yellow car was parked off the road in the late afternoon, about a kilometer this side of Guelatao. The pavement stops there. Beyond that it is gravel and stone all the way to Papaloapan, and from there paved again until it ends on Route 140 on the Gulf of Mexico, south of Veracruz. It can be driven in a Rover or a Jeep or a good truck. No matter. The boy said a big foreigner was leaning against the yellow car, and a young foreign woman was sitting on a stone. He said they spoke greetings and he replied. Because of what the boy said, the sergeant came back with a dozen men and they searched every inch of the slope to be certain the man had not been with her and been thrown clear. They looked in the tops of trees to see if he was wedged there. There was no sign of him.”

  “Ask him if he got any description of the man from the boy.”

  After the sergeant replied, Enelio shrugged and said, “The boy told him that all foreign people looked exactly the same to him, as identical as kernels of dried corn.”

  “Did anybody else see them?”

  “Perhaps. Who knows? These mountain people. They say very little to anyone from the valley, and they say nothing to the police. Look over there. See that place where the top of the smaller mountain seems to be flattened?”

  “What is it?”

  “In this light you can see faint lines running across, below the flat part, like terraces. If we went up there, Travis, and dug where those lines are we would find old, old walls. We would find shards of Zapotecan pottery, maybe splinters of obsidian. Under the soil of the flat top will be stone paving. There could be tombs there, but if there are they will be broken open, because that site is easy to spot. It overlooks the valley. Maybe it was an outpost for soldiers, maybe a place of the priests. There are maybe twenty thousand archeological sites in Mexico. Some say fifty thousand. Maybe five hundred have been investigated by the professionals. Here is how it was. Five, six, seven hundred years ago, these mountain people, who had been led into this place by the priests and the soldiers, they climbed to that place you see, and they made offerings of food, and they worshipped. They built the temples, dug the wells, carried the stones, made the pottery, cut the thatch. But the priests got too far away from the people. They thought they owned the people forever. They lost common understanding. So one day the people went up to the high places and killed the priests and killed the guards and pulled down the temples and never went back. They did not talk about it. They did not have elections. They just got tired of slave life, of catering to the demands of the priests for food and women and children to train, and tired of work that became more meaningless to them. They went up and killed them and put an end to it, and did not talk about it, or make legends, or write about the revolution. These are hard, enduring people. I am proud to have this Indian blood in me. Do you know the kind of men who come out of these valleys? Benito Juárez! Porfirio Díaz! This small place of Oaxaca breeds great men who dream big dreams and then act on them. Hey! Sorry, I am not teaching school here. But listen to the silences here! They never shout, these mountain people. The greeting is adios, said so softly city ears can hardly hear it. Shall we go?”

  And so we went back down that insane road, with Enelio driving conservatively, automatically, far away somewhere in thought and memory. Down to the flats and across to the intersection of the main road. There was a small industry on the right, where men baked adobe brick in rough ovens, then stacked them in the sun, in shades ranging from brown-orange to yellow-gold.

  “Ask him if the American students cause him many problems,” Meyer said. The sergeant talked at considerable length.

  Enelio translated. “Martinez says that as a group they are like all people. Most of them create no problems. But there are always the very few who get drunk and break things, and there are the ones who live foolishly and become sick and require help. Some go into the wrong places with valuable things and become the victims of thieves. Some take drugs and act irrationally. Some act in a very improper way, which upsets the simple people.”

  “Improper how?” Meyer asked.

  “A boy standing in the zocalo, fondling and kissing a half-dressed girl in front of a hundred Mexicans who have come in from the villages for a market day upsets them. But suppose you take some bearded, ragged, dirty kid,
loaded with pot, digging the village scene, just floating and smiling, the village people will treat him with great gentleness and courtesy and consideration. Know why? It is tradition to be very nice to all madmen. The ancient gods have put a spell on them, and to be mad is to have been touched by the gods.”

  “Does he get requests to find specific students?” Meyer asked.

  “He says that the American Embassy makes the request of the Federal Police, and then the information is sent down here. Then the registration list at every hotel and motel and trailer court is checked. If the student is found, he is told to get in touch with the Embassy in Mexico City. If he is not found, then that is reported.”

  “Do they keep a list?”

  I congratulated Meyer for clear thinking. In the city, Sergeant Martinez brought a stack of papers out to the car. It was not a list, but rather a sheaf of faintly imprinted carbon copies of the Embassy requests, about forty of them.

  “He says it is for all of this year up until now,” Enelio explained.

  Meyer went through them swiftly, with minor pauses, and then stopped at one and showed it to me. Request to locate Carl Sessions, age 22, five foot eleven, one hundred and forty pounds, fair complexion, blond hair. Request contact Mr. Lord at the American Embassy, Extension 818. It was dated the ninth of June. There were some notations and numbers written on it in red ink. Enelio asked the sergeant to explain the notations, then interpreted for us.

  “They couldn’t find this boy and they made a routine report. Okay, on July seventh, on a Monday morning, the boy is found dead in a doorway on Arteaga Street, in a bad section over beyond the public market. There wasn’t anything left in his pockets, probably taken by kids who thought he was drunk. If his clothes hadn’t been so ragged and dirty, they would have taken those too. A doctor took a blood sample. There were needle marks on his arms and thighs. Some were infected. He was badly undernourished. The cause of death was an overdose of an opiate. They found out he had been sleeping in a little place he had made out of cardboard boxes in the back of one of the market stalls. The owner of the stall had locked some of the boy’s stuff up for safekeeping. There was a guitar case with a guitar and some personal papers in it. They found his name from the papers.”

  He asked Martinez another question, listened, and then said, “A lieutenant called the Embassy in Mexico City and reported it. An embassy employee flew down and took care of the details. The body was sent by air freight to the boy’s sister in Atlanta, Georgia.”

  I was suddenly aware of the way I was being studied by Sergeant Carlos Martinez. It was the cop look, flat, narrow, hard, and thoughtful. I didn’t need any translator for that one. We showed an interest in two young travelers, and both of them were dead. Cops do not believe in coincidence. It offends their sense of orderliness. They find it hard to believe, for example, that every DWI they arrest has had exactly two beers.

  We all thanked him for his time. Enelio shook his hand in that special way which inconspicuously transfers a folded bill from pocket to hand to hand to pocket.

  As we drove away I said I wanted to replace the gift.

  “Hey, you are pretty fonny, McGee. What time is it? Five o’clock already! Hey, Meyer and me will leave you off at the car, and by the time you get up to the Hotel Victoria, hombre, you will find us sitting at a shady table by the swimming pool looking at the lovely little birds in their wet little bikinis, and you will be one drink behind.”

  Eight

  There were indeed some delicious little morsels making energetic use of the giant pool, getting the last of sun and water and squealing games of tag before the shadows of the mountains moved in and the evening chill began.

  The drinks were good, and Enelio was sufficiently well known to get very earnest service. For a time Meyer scribbled on the back of an envelope, pausing to squint into the distance and think. When I asked him what he was doing he said he would show me in a couple of minutes.

  Finally he handed it to me and said, “Timetable. If I screwed up anything, let me know.” I held it so Enelio could read it also.

  Jan. 10 Five cross into Mexico at Matamoros in camper.

  Mar. 25 (approx) $13,000 + sent to Bix in Culiacán, Sinaloa.

  Apr. 24 Rocko w/camper checks into Los Pájaros.

  May 25 (approx) Bix & Minda move from Los Pájaros to room in Hotel Ruiz.

  June 9 Official request to locate Sessions.

  June 30 (approx) Bix and Minda move to Mrs. Vitrier’s guest house.

  July 5 Rocko beats up Mike Barrington.

  July 7 Sessions found dead.

  July 10 Camper permit & tourist cards run out.

  July 23 Rocko leaves Los Pájaros, by request, moves in with Bruce Bundy.

  July 30 (approx) Bix & Minda quarrel & Minda goes to Mexico City.

  Aug. 1 Before dawn, Bundy stops Rocko from leaving with loot.

  Aug. 1 Minda’s father arrives, looking for her.

  Aug. 2 Bundy lends his yellow British Ford to unknown person called George.

  Aug. 3 Bix killed.

  Aug. 4 Mrs. Vitrier identifies body.

  I said, “Meyer, it makes it look a lot neater and more orderly than it is.”

  Enelio took the envelope and frowned at the timetable, and then said, “No sense to one thing here, men.”

  “Such as?”

  “He couldn’t have stayed in the trailer park after the permit and cards ran out. You have to show your car papers when you check into any trailer park. They put the date and so forth on their records. The police are very fussy about car permits. They check the books. So then their papers were still good on July twenty-three … which means this first date is wrong, when they came in.”

  “No, Enelio. It was pretty well checked.”

  “Okay. Then sometime before April twenty-four, they went up to the border and got everything new again. New car papers, new tourist cards. I think … maybe seven days from the border down here to Oaxaca. So the date on everything could be April seventeen, eh? Good until October sixteen. You can look in the office at Los Pájaros. They will have the permit number and the place of entry. It is not so necessary to go to the border to get the tourist card new. It is not supposed to be done, but it can be newed … renewed in Mexico City, if there is a little gift to the right clerk. But not for a vehicle. One must go to the border. Where were they? Culiacán? Shortest way is up to Nogales.” He grinned at us. “And I know why they went there. Pretty stupid thing to do.”

  “How could you know?” Meyer asked.

  He tapped the side of his head. “Very smart fellow, this Enelio Fuentes. Sessions died from drugs. Okay. Sonora has a lot of poppies growing. The crude opium—it’s called goma—is sold in one ton lots to the little factories where they reduce it to heroin. I think the biggest operations are in Sinaloa. And some very rich men there in fine houses, you believe me. What was stupid was having money sent to Culiacán. But maybe not. How was it sent?”

  “Bank draft.”

  “Dumb stupid, man! A few years ago, okay. Now the Mexican Narcotics Bureau is pretty smart. They find out who is making a deal. Then they tip their people on our side of the line. So they get searched and, okay, suppose there’s four kilos of heroin. Tell them they are going to be tossed into a Mexican jail for ninety-nine years. Scare them all to hell. Then take three kilos, and a big bribe to let them keep one, then tip the customs men on your side of the line. They get … what’s the damned word … saw-hammered?”

  “Whipsawed.”

  “So a bank draft is like hanging out a sign. I wonder what the hell happened.”

  Meyer said, “I can’t see Bix Bowie as a smuggler of narcotics.”

  “So? That sister probably couldn’t see little brother Carl stone cold dead in the market, man, full of old needle holes.”

  I asked him, “Could anybody go to Culiacán and buy heroin?”

  He shrugged. “For double the going price, and never seeing the face you buy it from. Why not? Double the going price
is maybe one tenth the wholesale price in the states. One hondred and thirty thousand dollars, U.S., is … one million, six hondred twenty-five thousand pesos.”

  “In a very dirty business,” Meyer said.

  Enelio laughed. “Sure. But don’t you know how the whole world thinks about dirty business? Everybody says, ‘Oh, I know it is a bad, bad thing. But it is going to happen anyway. I can’t stop it all by myself. So as long as somebody is going to do it, it might as well be me.’ Meyer, I like you. You could not do bad things. Me, I do terrible things, believe me.”

  “Oh, so do I, Enelio. Unspeakable things.”

  Enelio made a sad face. “But for me, instead of involving money, always it involves women. That is my burden.”

  He looked at his watch. He said he had to go and change and go out. We thanked him for everything. He said he would phone us tomorrow, and maybe we could find something amusing to do.

  The pool was shadowed, and most of the birds had flown. A batch of American youngsters in their late teens came whooping down from the hotel, smack-diving into the pool. Brown little girls, rangy boys, firm young flesh.

  “You have to understand that all these kids are in revolt against the establishment,” Meyer said in earnest imitation of Wally McLeen.

  “Oh for chrissake, Meyer!”

  “I found Wally quite touchingly simplistic. And that is a very funny tourist hat he wears.”

  I yawned. “And they translate ancient tablets inscribed three thousand years before Christ and find out that way back then the young were disobedient, had no respect for the old ways, and everything was going to hell in a handbasket.”

  “Spoken like a true member of the establishment.”

  “Old friend, there are people—young and old—that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it’s revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from the scripture by an old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can’t see it all that way bore hell out of me.”