I could have reported to Enelio—but knew I would not—that a back can be effectively scrubbed in a tiled shower stall, and that there is no real need for a special brush and special soap. Also gin over ice is cold and pleasant and goes with a hot shower in a very Sybaritic way. I could have reported that soon I came to believe that I would live forever, and even sang a little.
Good steaks came down the hill from the hotel, and when we were done we put the cart outside at the end of the porch, turned off the lights and sat comfortably and quietly and had coffee and looked at the stars. Wally had the grace to phone at that time, and I went in and took it in the dark, sitting on the turned-down bed.
“Trav? This is Wally. I just found your note in the box a little while ago. What’s it about? Have you … have you heard something about Minda?”
“I wish I had, Wally. No. This is something else.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Meyer and I would like to have a chat with you when it’s convenient, Wally.”
“What about?”
“We think it’s a good idea to pool everything we’ve all learned up to this point. What do you think?”
“Well … I guess it couldn’t do any harm.”
“When would be a good time? Now?”
“Oh, not now. I’m going with a bunch of the kids up to Monte Albán to see the ruins by moonlight again. Say, how about tomorrow morning? Have you ever seen the ruins at Yagul? It’s only about ten miles down the Mitla Road, and there’s a sign where you turn off to it.”
“I saw the sign the last time we were out that way.”
“I’m getting turned on pretty good by these ruins. I mean they are sort of timeless, and your own troubles don’t seem to mean so much. They don’t really know much about Yagul. It’s so quiet there, you can sit and … contemplate things. I was planning to go out early. I’ll be there all morning. Why don’t you and Meyer come out any time tomorrow morning? It will be a good place to talk. I think a place that is very, very old and peaceful and dead is a good place for really talking, don’t you?”
“Sure, Wally. We’ll see you there.”
As I talked I had heard her close the door and click the night lock. I had heard a tock of heels on tile, then felt a dip of the bed as she sat on the other side. Whisk-whisper of nylons, then slap-pad of bare feet. Zipper-purr, rustle of fabric, click of snaps. Dip of bed again. I hung up. Hand on my shoulder to urge me around and pull me down to a mouth that fastened firmly and well, while a hand plucked at the tied belt of the robe I had put on after showering. Voice making a tuneless little contented ummming sound, way back in the strong round throat.
“This you want?” she whispered. “Turn some bad day to good things?”
“This I want.”
“This you have, Tuh-rrrravis.”
“You are fine.”
“Sank you ver’ motch. You are doing some thing in Mexico … how you say?… peligroso?”
“Dangerous? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”
She held me tightly and made a small growling sound in her throat. “Some person hurting you, Elena will fix. Tear out some eyes. Cut out some tongue. Breaking all bones, verdad?”
Something came flickering in through the back door of my mind, but by then everybody had become too busy to notice, and so the thought sat patiently out there in the back entryway until somebody had time to notice it.
I got around to noticing it when she lay purring into my throat, tickling weight of long heavy dark hair fanned across my chest. I eased the blanket up over her without awakening her. The thought that had come into the back of my mind was a memory of how the primitive warriors of history dreaded being handed over, alive, to the women of the enemy tribe. There had been a very convincing savagery in Elena’s threats about what she would do to whoever harmed me.
Rockland had gone to Eva Vitrier’s estate in La Colonia, and he had managed to take Bix Bowie away in Bundy’s car. Bundy had been wickedly pleased to learn that Eva could become emotionally involved, infatuated, with a girl she saw on the street and contrive to invite the girl and her friend into her home. The two girls had been her guests for a long time. It would seem plausible that they might tell Eva Vitrier some of the rancid highlights of their vacation in Mexico, the same things Nesta had told Meyer.
So sooner or later Mrs. Vitrier would reveal, calculatingly or accidentally, her desire for the Bowie girl. In view of Bix’s passivity about being used in physical ways, perhaps an actual affair had begun. Safe to assume that Minda McLeen would be opposed, and also fair to state there was very little she could do about it. So the note to Harlan Bowie about coming to get Bix may have come from Minda. Perhaps the girls quarreled over Eva’s attentions to Bix, Minda demanding that Bix leave, Bix refusing. So Minda left.
Knowing Rockland’s past abuse of Bix, knowing Rockland was responsible for her addiction, knowing Rockland was responsible for her death that Sunday evening, what would happen to Rockland if he went back to the Vitrier house? She could very well have mutilated him in exactly the ways I had seen. The flaying and blinding could even be said to be a symbolic expression of her attitude toward male sexuality. And perhaps her wealth enabled her to employ muscle she could trust—muscle that could over-power him, truss him up, leave him alone for her savage attentions, and then dispose of truck, camper, and body in one package.
So then Wally McLeen would be a waste of time. But it was set, so we’d lose nothing by going through with it. I thought of a twelve-second system for opening him up, and knew it would draw a wide dazed blank. He was one of the nice little people you meet on a Honda.
Elena suddenly began to jerk and twitch and make muffled little yelping sounds. I woke her up, and tenderly and gently quieted her down. She said it had been a terrible, terrible dream. I had been broken into tiny bits, and if she could put them together in time I would live. But the little wet pieces kept crawling away in every direction as she tried to reconstruct me.
Sixteen
Thursday was another bright, hot, beautiful morning. I had spent the time after driving Elena to town, sitting at the desk in the room and going through Rockland’s little red notebook. There were Miami and Miami Beach addresses, and addresses all over the country, presumably people who had stayed at the Sultana and who had subscribed to one of Rockland’s services—in one way or another. It would be logical for him to keep such a record.
The notes and reminders were too cryptic to be of any use. Things like “L. 2 Sat aft”; “2 doz, suite 20B”; “$100 Reb in 7th.” As they were chronological, I could get enough hints to figure out when notes were made. He didn’t make many. There was a notation of the cost of new tires in pesos and dollars, made before they got to Oaxaca. And just a few addresses after that, Bundy, the Vitrier estate, the hotel where Bix and Minda had stayed, and one that read, “I. V. Rivereta, Fiesta D, Mex City.” All the rest of the pages were completely blank. On the inside back cover was his social security number.
At breakfast I checked out my twelve-second system with Meyer. “If I start edging up on him, he has time to adjust, assuming he’s our nut, which I doubt. So I will drop it on him suddenly and from considerable altitude, and we will watch his throat and his mouth and his eyes like a pair of eagles, and no man living can make a fast enough recovery to hide every part of it, especially when I come on very amiable and kindly and understanding.”
I told him the approach. He approved. He had watched me do it before. He had seen it work and seen it fail.
So we drove out to the turnoff to Yagul. We could see it a couple of miles north of the main road as we turned off, old stone patterns atop a rounded hill which bore faint traces of the old horizontal terracing. I drove across flats and then up the steep winding road to a wide paved parking area. There was an old sedan there with Mexican plates, and the small Honda. That was all.
As we got out, a large Mexican family came down the worn path from the ruins and started getting into the sedan, arguing a
bout who would sit where. We went up the path. A gnarled little man came trudging out of a shady spot to collect the small government fee and give us our handsomely printed tickets. He went back to his place in the shade, his back against raw rock. From there he could look out across the valley, with all the ruins behind him.
The morning sky was a deep rich Kodachrome blue. A buzzard wheeled in the updraft from the hill slope, making sounds very like a pig. Tall clumps of cactus with big red blossoms grew out of the stony soil. It was indeed quiet. Two buses moved along the valley floor toward Oaxaca, stolid, silent beetles.
We came upon the traditional ball court, a long sunken rectangle with sloping sides of carefully fitted stone, with the high place where the priests sat and watched, and the lower places for the other spectators. Tricky bounces off those side walls. Iron rings set into the stone at either end, now long rusted away. Archeologists believe that the captain of the winning team was beheaded. It was some sort of honor to strive for. It meant a permanent place in the record books. It would keep a team from running away with the league. Perhaps the same theory as the cellar team getting first draft choice.
We looked at the front of the long temple, at the altars, at the peak of a distant knoll beyond the edge of the temple front wall, and saw, silhouetted against the sky, along with some twisted little trees, a dumpy figure semaphoring its arms at us, and a faint hail came upwind.
We found the stone steps that would lead us up to the temple level. A lot of it was restored. When they restore, they stick pebbles in the mortar between the new courses of stone. The academic mind saying, “See? This is all fake. We stuck it on the way we think it used to be.”
Behind the temple facade there were small courtyards and unroofed stone walls forming a maze of small rooms and corridors. After we came to two dead ends, I found a toe hold and climbed up and picked out the right route toward Wally’s little hill. We came out the back of the temple complex and went up a narrow and winding footpath, puffing a little in the unaccustomed altitude.
Wally McLeen beamed upon us. “Isn’t it great? See, from up here you look over into the next valley too. Pretty strategic place. These holes here, these were tombs. The big shots got buried at the highest place. They bust into every one they can find because there’s gold jewelry in some of them. Now look back at the whole thing. Gold, sacrifices, underground passages, astronomy, brain surgery, it blows my mind thinking about it.”
He wore a market shirt of coarse unbleached cotton, a pale blue beret acquired from God knows where, burgundy-colored walking shorts cinched around his comfortable tummy by a belt with a lot of silver knobs affixed to the leather, and market sandals. His goatee was coming along nicely. He carried a bag woven of yellow fiber, shaped like a two-handled market bag. He had flip-up sunglasses fastened to his thick eyeglasses, and the cycle was turning his previous angry red to a red-brown, with some pink patches on forehead and nose where the early burns had peeled.
“When Minda comes back, I want to show her all these places, Trav, on account of I know she’ll flip. I remember when she was a little kid, one summer at the lake she found an arrowhead and I read to her all about the Indians, and you’d be surprised how much she remembered, a little kid like that. Just turned five years old. They can bolt another seat on that Honda and we can travel all over this part of Mexico.”
Meyer had moved around into position, so that we were both facing him.
“But that won’t work out so good, Wally,” I told him.
“Sure it will!”
“For a while. But then sooner or later the cops are going to find that village kid that saw you dump the camper into the ravine, and find out what you did to Rocko, and start adding things up and nail you for Mike and Della and the Mexican woman, too. So you better aim that bike for the nearest border crossing, Wally.”
It is like that lousy frog routine I had to do in high school biology lab. You hook up the battery and touch the wires to the right place and that slimy dead leg makes jumping motions.
He stared at me and he stared at Meyer. And his mouth hitched up into a weak little smile and then opened into an O. Not a big O. About twice the size of the one you use to whistle. It went through the same pattern again.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Too long, Wally,” Meyer said sadly. “You took too long finding the right way to play it. Too much was happening in your head. You froze. You had too much to add up.”
“I … I’ve got to wait for Minda! You can understand that. I’ve got to wait for her to come back here!”
It was hard to believe it, looking at him, even though it had come through as clear as a ten page confession.
“Wally,” I said, “I can understand the thing with Rockland, sort of. You’re over the edge. You found out too much. Those three—Sessions, Nesta, Rockland—they turned your little girl on, and they banged her, and they degraded her, and something went wrong then in your head, Wally. This is a hell of a long way from the weekly Kiwanis meeting and the shopping center stores. What you did to Rockland means you’ve been taken sick. It means you’ve got to go into town and tell people about it and get help, because there was Mike Barrington and there was Della Davis and there was Luz.”
“I know. That went wrong. I mean I wouldn’t feel bad about it if I got Nesta too, because I thought it might have to be that way. I went in from the back, over the wall. The jeep was there when I went by, but when I came back to look for him I found it was gone. I should have waited for him to come back. But I got scared. I have to get him, you know. And I will. I made a vow. I’ve been working it all out. Mike and Luz were so close together, I got her before she could take a step, after he went down. But the nigger bitch could run like the wind. If she hadn’t stumbled and fallen, she would have been out the gate and gone.” His voice was small and thoughtful, the words half lost in a small warm wind that gusted and died.
“What did they do to you … or Minda?” Meyer asked.
The shadow of the buzzard angled across the stony earth between us. Silent, awkward tableau. Wally McLeen bent over and picked up a small triangular shard of Zapotecan pottery. He looked at it with care and flipped it aside.
“I like the ones with designs,” he said. “I like to think of them out here, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, scratching little designs in the clay to make the pots prettier. Funny thing about that. This morning, maybe an hour ago, over there down the slope of the hill, I found a piece that reminded me of an ashtray Minda made for me in the first or second grade. She made the same kind of wavy lines in the clay. I’ve got it here in the bag.” He opened it and peered down in, reached in.
My alarm system went off too late. He yanked out some kind of a weapon, swinging it so swiftly I could not see what it was. From where he stood, his first choice was a backhand slap at Meyer. He should not have been able to reach him, but he did. There was the sickening solid thonk of a hard object striking the skull. Meyer went down in a bad way—a boneless sloppy tumble. There was no interval, no half-step, no attempt to break the fall. In a fluid continuation of the same motion, McLeen took a forehand shot at me and I sprang back, leaning back at the same time, and even so felt the wind of it across my upper lip, heard its whistling sound. He stood nicely balanced, slightly crouched as I moved back cautiously. Meyer had rolled over twice, down the slope, slowly, but it took him to a steeper slant and he rolled more rapidly for perhaps fifteen feet before the upper half of his body dropped into one of the small open tombs. He was wedged there then, the legs spraddled, toeing in, the substantial bottom turned toward the blue sky.
The weapon was at rest. I could see what it was. He held a hardwood stick about two feet long, gray with age, greased with much handling. A leather thong, heavy, tightly braided, was fastened to the end of the stick. The end of the thong was fastened to a crude metal ring that had somehow been affixed to a stone, round, polished, irregular, a little smaller than a peach.
He came at me wi
th a little rush of quick light steps, bouncy and balanced. I feinted to run down the slope, then dodged and ran uphill, angling away from him. The feint had been a mistake. He missed my head by an inch. I realized I had seen smallish portly men like Wally McLeen moving very lightly and quickly and well on many dance floors in years past. Longwaisted men like Wally, and with the same short, hefty legs.
“I bought this in a stall in the public market,” he said. “One of the kids told me it was a fake. But it’s just like the soldiers used to use. It’s tricky. You have to practice with it. The handle is limber. See? So all you need is good wrist action. I practiced on trees. You have to get the range right.”
“Let me go help Meyer. Please, Wally.”
“You can’t help him. He’s dead. Or dying.”
When again he came bouncing toward me, I spun and ran up the slope all out, thinking to get far enough away from him so that I could circle around and go down toward the temple. But as I started down the other side I took a quick look back and saw that he was only thirty feet behind me, moving too well. There was a crumbling, unrestored wall to my left and I angled toward it, snatched up a chunk of rock and turned and hurled it at him. He scrambled to the side and it gave me enough leeway to pick up another jagged piece and, in too much haste, overthrow him. He backed away quickly.
With more time, I was able to pick up one of better size and heft. I turned it to fit the hand, and took my best shot. He was fifty to sixty feet away. I put it on a good line, right toward the middle of his face. He moved just his head. He moved it quickly to the side and just as far as was necessary.
A rock fight. Too many years since the last one. I might be able to get away from him, but that wasn’t enough. I had to get to Meyer, and I had to get to him soon. I didn’t like the choices. If I picked some good rocks and charged him, trying to get close enough to chunk him, he was going to have just as good, or better, a chance to bust my skull as he had with the three in the old compound on the Coyotepec Road. He was too good with that thing, and he could make it whistle.
Dress Her in Indigo Page 20
