Gringos (10 page)

“You're not even listening to me.”

“Yes, I am. The green sofa. I tell you what. I've got some things to do. Let me know when you've finished the paper and I'll read it and think it over.”

“You're too kind. How much do I owe you for the delivery job?”

“No charge.”

“I saw that mud on your truck and all those branches caught up underneath. You've been out ransacking temples again, haven't you? You never did really stop. On top of everything else you're a liar.”

On top of all my other defects, too many to be recorded on a single page. I had meant to ask her if Bollard brought cat treats when he came calling, as I had done, but I let it go.

MEXICAN HOMES as a rule are closed off to the world by high blank walls of yellowish masonry, topped with broken glass to discourage
escaladores
, or climbing burglars. The gardens and fountains and other delights are hidden, as in an Arab city. Each city block is a fortress. But on the Paseo Montejo in Mérida there are two-story houses standing detached with their own lawns and tropical shrubbery. The Paseo is a shady boulevard where the sisal millionaires once lived, a short version of St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and a very un-Mexican street.

Doc Flandin lived on the near end of it in a fine white house with a wraparound porch and a little round tower on top, a cupola. Izamál, it was called, or place of the lizard. Doc had come late in life to this luxury, when he married Nan. She had the money.

Mrs. Blaney admitted me this time, making a show of checking her watch. This was to let me know that formal luncheon appointments are one thing and drop-in calls quite another.

“Don Ricardo will see you in his bedroom. Can you find your way? Just follow the music.”

“I think I can find it.”

I was wandering around in this house before Lucille Blaney had ever set foot in Mexico. I had met Eric Thompson, the great Mayanist, in this very room, with its cold tile floor and grand piano. No one played the piano, but the lid was always propped up on its slender stick. Sir Eric, I should say. He called Flandin Dicky. It was Eric this and Dicky that. I still cringe when I remember how I talked so much that day, trying to show off my piddling scraps of knowledge.

The music came from an old wind-up phonograph. Doc was listening once again to Al Jolson singing “April Showers.” I found the old lizard upstairs in his bed, a big canopied affair made of dark oak. The posts and beams were carved with a running fretwork design in the Uxmal style. The room was long and sunny. There were casement windows and a fireplace and a balcony. He allowed Al to finish, then lifted the arm from the thick black record.

“Do you mind if we eat here?”

“No, of course not.”

“It would be nicer by the pool, but this way we can have some privacy. Lucille has the ears of a jackrabbit.”

“You're no match for that woman, Doc. Nan could handle her, but you can't. She's got your number.”

“Well, I can't kick her out now.”

“No, it's too late in the day for that.”

The maid, Lorena, served crabmeat salad in avocado halves. I told Doc about my run to Ektún, the death of Dr. Ritchie and how that Refugio had asked about his book and his tobacco pipe. He found that funny. He and Refugio had some running joke about the pipe that I wasn't privy to. A little reminder that they had worked together before I came along.

“Was Ritchie one of these trotters or joggers?” he asked me. “Some exercise nut?”

“I don't know. You couldn't do much jogging at Ektún.”

“He was not really a good field man, you know.”

“No? He had a good reputation.”

“Look at all the staff support he had. If I had been set up like that in my sixties, I would have accomplished great things. I would have shown them a thing or two.”

“You've done all right. You found the Seibal scepter. That should be enough for one man. Nobody can do very much. Then there's your book.”

“They won't acknowledge that I've done anything.”

“I saw you in church on Christmas day.”

“Well, why not? I'm an old sinner.”

“No, I approve. It's just that I hadn't seen you in church before.”

“But I was never a public and obstinate sinner. No one can say that.”

“No.”

“A love for truth too. I've always had a love for truth and that in itself is a sign of grace. Did you never hear that?”

“I don't think so.”

“I'm dying, Jimmy. You're talking to a corpse.”

“What?”

“It's prostate cancer. I'm waiting for the biopsy report from Dr. Solís, but that's only a formality. I wanted you to know. We won't talk about it. I've arranged for Father Mateo to say some masses for me.”

“Have you seen Soledad Bravo about this?”

“No, I haven't consulted any witch doctors, thank you.”

“When do you get the report?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“We don't have to talk about it for three hours, but you can't say something like that and then just drop it.”

“There's nothing to be said or done. You can't beat the slowworm. Sometimes he's not so slow.”

“L. C. Bowers beat it. He went up to the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, and they cut it out. That was what, three years ago, and he's still walking around.”

“Bowers had some lesser form of the thing.”

Doc's diseases had to be grand, too. He had never shown much sympathy for the sick, not even for Nan when she was dying, believing as he did that illness was largely voluntary. Giving way. Then whining. He took no medicine himself and he seemed to think that Nan had killed herself through a foolish addiction to laxatives and nasal sprays.

And Soledad Bravo was no witch doctor. She was a modest lady who practiced folk medicine in her home on Calle 55, just down the street from me. She was a
curandera
, who could deliver babies, remove warts and pull single-rooted teeth, no molars, and she could put her ear to your chest and look at your tongue and your eyes and feel around under your jaw, then tell you what was wrong and give you a remedy. It might be something old-fashioned like arnica or camphorated oil, or it might be some very modern drug, or some simple dietary tip. She kept up with things. Soledad had a gift. She got results. What more can you ask than to be healed? I wouldn't go to anyone else.

“That little round cap you're wearing,” I said. “Does that have something to do with your condition?”

“No, but it keeps the vapors in. Vapors were escaping from my head.”

“Why not let them escape?”

“I don't care to discuss the cap. My death is imminent and I have some important instructions for you.”

“This is not the razor blade deal again, is it?”

“The what?”

I had to remind him. Some years back, fearing a stroke, he had given me a package of single-edge razor blades. Should he be struck down and incapacitated, unable to move, I was to sneak into his room at night and slit his wrists with one of those blades. Others would string him along, he said, but he knew I would do it. This, I think, was intended as flattery. I still carried those Gem blades around in my shaving kit.

“Oh no, there's no question of paralysis with this thing,” he said. “I have some morphine tablets that will do the job when the time comes.”

“I came over here thinking I would hear that your book was finished. Now you tell me this.”

“The book is coming along, don't worry. I'm still at it. Answering a lot of questions that nobody has asked. If I had had any decent staff support, the thing would have been finished long ago. But you know, I made a late discovery. Working fast suits me. It reads better. I learn to write on my deathbed, you see. The schoolboys won't like it but by God they'll have to take notice this time. Oh yes, I know what they say. ‘What can you expect? He's French! Brilliant but unsound! I can't keep up with him! This old flaneur has too many ideas! Too many theories!' It's my brio, Jimmy, that they can't stomach. My verve. It sets their teeth on edge. I know how these drab people think and I know exactly what they say about me.”

It was worse than that. They didn't say anything. The academics, or schoolboys, as he called them, didn't even take the trouble to dispute his theories. The papers he submitted to scholarly journals were returned without comment. He was never invited to the professional conclaves, other than local ones that the Mexicans sponsored. Mexicans weren't quite as rigid as the Americans and the English and the Germans in these matters of caste.

It seemed to me that he deserved better treatment. Perhaps not complete acceptance, or the centerfold spread in
National Geographic
that he so longed for, but something, a nod in the footnotes even. His great find, the manikin scepter at Seibal, was widely published but never attributed to him. And it was Flandin, with two or three Mexicans, who had argued years ago that it was the Olmecs and not the Mayas who had invented glyph writing and the bar-and-dot numeral system and the Long Count calendar, when American and English scholars—Thompson himself—refused to hear of such a thing. Being prematurely right, and worse, intuitively right, he got no credit for it. Rather, it was held against him. His field work was good and his site reports were, in my lay opinion, well up to professional standards. No brio here; they were just as tiresome to read as the approved ones. His crank claims and speculations made up only about twenty percent of his work but it was a fatal sufficiency. Or say thirty percent to be absolutely fair.

“When do I get to see the glyph chapter?”

“In good time. Camacho Puut is looking it over now. But we're not going to talk about the book.”

I wondered what we were going to talk about. Lorena brought us a pot of coffee and some strawberries in heavy yellow cream. Doc asked her if she would go to his office and bring back his—
pistola
—I thought he said. Lorena was puzzled, too, and then seemed to work it out. Doc spoke fluent Spanish, but it was incorrect and badly pronounced.

“I'm worried about Camacho Puut,” he said. “I do believe the old fellow is taking some dangerous narcotic drug.”

“Oh come on. The Professor?”

“You weren't here. He was sitting right there. I was reading my revised prologue to him and his head was lolling and he could hardly keep his eyes open. It's none of my business if he wants to kill himself with dope but I do think he might consider his family and his own dignity. What about Alma? Have you seen her?”

“I saw her this morning.”

“Is she doing any better?”

“About the same.”

“Don't say anything but I'm leaving her a small annuity. A little something to help with the rent.”

“She won't accept it.”

“I'm rigging it up so she'll think it came from Oskar's work. But keep it under your hat.”

“Did you ever work with Oskar Kobold?”

“No, never. We hardly spoke. He was an artist of the first rank, I grant him that, but he couldn't get along with anybody. An awful man. He treated Alma like a mule.”

“I can't imagine her putting up with that.”

“Well, she did. She wasn't hard then. Just a little pale Southern lily with a love for those travel books of John Stephens.”

Lorena came back and yes, it was the
pistola
he had asked for. Gun, holster, belt, the whole business coiled up on a wooden tray. She held it forward, not wanting to touch it. Doc said, “
Por mi amigo Jaime,
” and so she served it up to me, a .45 automatic on a platter.

Until very recently he had worn this big-bore pistol openly around town, and he always carried it in the bush. At our campsite, just before turning in at night, he would fire it twice into the air. This was an announcement to anyone who might be in the woods nearby.
Here we are. We're armed and we're not taking any crap
. Or sometimes I fired my shotgun, or Refugio his army rifle, an old Argentine Mauser with a bolt handle that stuck straight out.

I slipped the pistol out of the holster. Most of the blueing was gone, and there was a lot of play in the slide. It still looked good. The 1911 aeroplanes and the 1911 typewriters were now comic exhibits in museums, but this 1911 Colt still looked just right. It hadn't aged a day. The clip was crammed from top to bottom with short fat cartridges. I shucked a couple of them out.

“You'll weaken the spring,” I said. “Leaving it fully loaded like that.”

“Damn the spring. Put them back. I like it full.”

So, he was disposing of his things.

“This is for me?”

“No, no, not the gun. That's for Refugio. I want you to see that he gets it. My binoculars too, if I can ever find them, and all my field gear. I'm putting some stuff together in boxes for him, but the pistol is the main thing. You know how he admires it.”

Not the gun
. So. I was to get something else. He was clearing the small bequests out of the way first. I saw where this was leading, I was staggered. Flandin is going to leave me this big white house. There was no one else. Nan was gone, as was his first wife, and the blind sister in Los Angeles. Mrs. Blaney, an old friend of Nan's, was here on sufferance. I didn't see Doc as much of a public benefactor. It was unlikely that he would endow an orphanage or set up a trust to provide free band concerts for the people of Mérida. All his old cronies were gone except for Professor Camacho Puut, who, properly, would get the library and the relic collection. That left me. I had served him well. My reward was to be Izamál.