Gringos (2 page)

“What's the occasion?”

“I don't know. They all seem to be going to Progreso.”

We had difficulty raising Emmett. He lived in a sturdy trailer, the Mobile Star by name, all burnished aluminum, very sleek, but no longer mobile, at the rear of the park. The wheels were gone, and it rested on concrete blocks. He had bought it here,
in situ,
some years ago, from another American. This was his home now. He didn't like hotel rooms and he didn't like the feudal bother of maintaining a house in Mexico, with servants running underfoot and a parade of vendors coming to the door. This way he could live in an exotic land and at the same time withdraw into his own little American box.

We knocked and called his name. No answer. I knew he must be on the grounds because his air conditioner was humming, or rather his evaporative cooler, which didn't pull as many amps as a real air conditioner, with a compressor. It didn't cool as well either if the air was at all humid.

We set off to look for him, and then he opened the door. “All right. I'm here. I heard you. You have to give people time to get to the door. I can't be at the door one second after you knock.” You would think we had caught him upstairs in the tub. He was touchy about his poor hearing. He had heart problems, too, and the worst kind of diabetes, where they cut your legs off and you go blind. His sixth or seventh wife, a local woman, had recently left him.

I said, “How's the single life, Emmett?”

“It's killing me.”

Louise presented him with his Christmas gift, a clip-on bow tie, and then apologized several times because she had nothing for me. She and Emmett prepared the food. He liked his bacon burnt. I stirred the maple flavoring into a can of corn syrup. It turned out well enough though I believe I could have gotten a more uniform blend if I had first heated the syrup. The dinner was good—salty and sweet and puffy and greasy all at once. A few pancakes were left over, but nobody ever leaves strips of crisp bacon lying around, nobody I know.

We sat back and Emmett poured us each a
copita
of brandy. He talked about his new medicine and how effective it was. Soon, to my alarm, our chat drifted into a confessional.

Louise said, “I've really found myself here. I could be happy here keeping a herd of milk goats. Rudy hasn't quite found himself yet.”

Emmett said, “My life is over, for all practical purposes. I no longer have enough money to keep a woman.” He looked back on his long bright empty days in Mexico and said he had lost his honor over the years. He hadn't noticed it going. Small rodents had come in the night and carried it away bit by bit on tiny padded feet. The best I could do in this line, the most I was willing to do, was to say that I hoped to be more considerate of other people in the coming year. Louise gave me a cold look. Being a facetious person I got no credit for any depth of feeling.

She kissed Emmett on top of his bald head and popped his suspenders and went out for a swim in the pool. This trailer park had all the amenities. There was a lull. She had a way of leaving people speechless in her wake. We had already gone over my trip to Texas. A retired couple had come down here to spend the winter touring the ruins in their motor home, a huge thing, of the
Yamato
class, with about ten feet of overhang behind the rear wheels. After a week or two of it, they longed for home but had no stomach for driving the thing back. I was hired for the job. They insisted on taking the coastal route, which they thought would be a straight and simple shot, but the road was all broken up from the pounding of oil rigs and sugar-cane trucks and farm combines. At Tampico there was a storm, and we had to wait five hours for the Pánuco ferry. Water was running a foot deep in the city streets. The
Yamato
plowed right through it. We had to stop every few hours and let the fat spaniel do his business on the roadside. Or not do it, as the whim took him. He wouldn't be coaxed or hurried.

But they were nice people and paid me well and even gave me some clothes, this green resort attire. In Dallas I bought an old Chevrolet Impala and drove it down to Belize and sold it. You can always unload a big four-door Chevrolet or Ford there, for service as a taxicab. They know what they want. You can't force a sale. Then I came back to Mérida by bus.

Emmett pulled the curtains and began moving about in a stealthy way. I knew more or less what was coming. He brought out a shoebox, inside of which, wrapped in a towel, was a Jaina figurine.

“What do you think?”

I looked it over. “It's a nice piece.”

“Nice? It's mint. What do you think it would bring in New Orleans?”

“I couldn't even make a guess, Emmett. I'm out of touch. You know I'm out of the business now.”

He smiled. I was riding the bus these days and living at the Posada Fausto and wearing castoff clothing and still no one believed me.

“You might ask Eli.”

“I bought it from Eli.”

“Well, whatever you do, I don't want to know about it. I really am out of the game. You might pass that word around.”

“I was just curious about the current value. I wanted you to see it. You're not the only one around here with an eye for these things. I don't plan to sell it right away. It's a wonderful investment.”

It was an investment worth about $35 and there was no telling what he had paid Eli Withering for it. The piece was six or seven inches high, a terra cotta figure of a haughty Maya woman, seated tailor-fashion, with earlobe plugs, bead necklace and upswept hairdo. She held a fan or rattle across her body. There was a piece just like this under glass in a Mexico City museum, dated 800 A.D., and it too was a fake, or a fine copy, as we say.

This one was in mint condition all right. An old grave-looter named Pastor had minted it very recently in his shop at Campeche. It wasn't worth much, unless you could find another gullible buyer, but in a sense it wasn't altogether a fake. Pastor had come by a genuine Maya mold from the island of Jaina and he used it to press out and bake a few of these things now and then. Maybe more than a few. He was getting careless. He had left a sharp ridge on this one, untrimmed, where the base of the mold had pressed against the excess clay. The ridge was much too sharp and fresh. Along the back he had beveled off the clay with his thumb, the way you do with putty on a window pane.

Things had turned around, and now it was the palefaces who were being taken in with beads and trinkets. Emmett carefully wrapped it again and put it away in a drawer. I dozed. I had work to do, bills to pay, an overdue delivery job in Chiapas, but not today. Emmett read a detective novel. He and Frau Kobold read them day in and day out, preferably English ones and none written after about 1960. He said the later ones were no good. The books started going wrong about that time, along with other things. I put the watershed at 1964, the last year of silver coinage. For McNeese it was when they took the lead out of house paint and ruined the paint. I forget the year, when they debased the paint.

Poor Emmett. He had been here more than thirty years, perhaps the only person ever to come to Mexico seeking relief from intestinal cramps, and still he thought he could beat a
zopilote
like Eli Withering, a hard-trading buzzard, at his own game. Emmett came from Denver and went first to Tehuacán for the mineral water treatment, then drifted on to Mazatlán, San Cristóbal, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Cuernavaca, Mérida, in that order. It wasn't a natural progression or one easy to understand. Along the way he had been married and divorced many times. He could still call all the wives by name. Now his money was gone, from the family-owned chain of movie theaters in Colorado, or almost gone.

I said nothing about the anonymous letter. It was unlikely that Emmett would write such things, but then sometimes he was out of his head, from all that medication.

Later that evening Louise came by the hotel and gave me some green figs and a handmade card for Christmas. She had tried to give Frau Kobold a little knitted belt of some kind, only to be turned away at the door.

“What's wrong with that old woman?”

“She won't accept charity from strangers. I've told you that, Louise.”

“A Christmas gift is not charity.”

“No, but that's her way. I wouldn't worry about it. Just leave her alone.”

She walked around inspecting my room. She pulled the curtain and looked into the closet, which was so shallow that the coat hangers hung at a slant. She asked if she could use my bathroom. When she came out she said, “I didn't really have to go but I wanted to see how you had organized your bathroom. I wanted to check out your shaving things and your medicine cabinet.”

“Well? What did you think?”

“I knew you wouldn't have much stuff. I knew it would be neat and noncommittal. Where are all your Mayan things?”

“I don't have any.”

“You must have one or two things. Some keepsakes.”

“No, I'm not a collector.”

“You just dig things up and sell them.”

“I used to. A little recovery work, that's all. People make too much of it.”

“Rudy says you're not really a college-trained archaeologist.”

“Well, he's right about that. All I know is that the older stuff is usually at the bottom.”

“You know, I was looking at you today in the truck and you look better at a distance than you do up close. I mean most people do but in your case the difference is striking.”

“I'm sorry to let you down.”

“That's all right. Can you see anything out of this window?”

“Not much. Just a wall back there and a little courtyard below. A pile of sand and a broken wheelbarrow.”

“If I lived here I would have a room with some kind of view.”

“I did have one, up front, but I had to move out. I couldn't get any sleep. The women wouldn't leave me alone. They were out there at all hours of the night throwing pebbles against my window.”

“Uh huh. Don't you wish.”

“You say that but here you are.”

“Not for long. I'm way behind on Rudy's tapes. I've still got a lot of typing to do tonight.”

YOU PUT things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck. On the way out I looked in on Frau Kobold. I threaded a needle for her. She was no seamstress but she did do a little mending. “You forgot my cakes,” she said. I told her, once again, that when I was out of town she should get Agustín, the boy, to fetch her cakes. “Agustín doesn't show the proper respect,” she said. We had been through this before. It was true, she and her husband had once been in Fox Movietone News, but how was the boy to know that? He was polite. What did she expect of him?

I stopped at the desk and gave Beatriz some money, and she promised to see that these confounded cakes were picked up and delivered. She and Fausto were listening to a soap opera on the radio. Fausto said they should put the story of his life on one of those shows and call it “Domestic Vexations” (
Vejaciones de la Casa
). He was suffering from a heaviness of spirit, an
opresión,
he said, because of troubles at home with his wife, all caused by her wicked sister, a
chismosa
, who had nothing better to do than spread poisonous tales.

I was feeling fine myself, back now in my honest khakis, all cotton, stiffly creased and starched hard as boards. I sent them out to a woman who knew just the way I liked them finished. West of town there was a clearing or series of clearings in the dense scrub thicket that covers Yucatán. It was a garbage dump where I changed my oil, adding my bit to the mess. Wisps of greasy smoke rose here and there from smoldering trash. Fumaroles from Hell. The air was so foul here that the rats couldn't take it. A city dump and not a rat to be seen. I parked on a sandy slope and while the oil was draining I shot grease into the fittings. Then I let the truck roll back, away from the oil puddle, so I could lie on my back in a relatively clean place and replace the drain plug and the filter. I poured oil into the filter before screwing it on, to prevent dry scuffing on start-up. It was a little trick I had picked up from a cab driver.

A car drove up. Doors slammed. I saw legs and heard American voices.

“What is this guy doing out here?”

“All by himself.”

“Long-bed pickup with Louisiana plate. Some kind of sharecropper.”

“With a stupid accent. Like Red.”

“I've seen that truck before.”

“Wait, don't tell me. I believe this guy is—
working on his car!
”

“That's all those cotton-choppers do. Day and night.”

“They listen to car races on the radio.”

I slid out from beneath the truck. A gang of hippies had piled out of an old Ford station wagon. They called themselves The Jumping Jacks, which name was stuck across the rear window, in letters made from strips of silver tape. The letters had an angular, runic look. The number of these clowns varied. I made them out to be seven this time, three males and four females, though they were hard to count, like the
chaneques
(chanekkies) in the woods. Anyway, a full load for the old Ford Country Squire.

Back in October at Tuxpan they had stolen three ignition wires from my truck. I saw them there on the waterfront as I was going into a café. When I came out they were gone and my wires were gone and a newsboy told me the gringo
tóxicos
in the Ford
guayin
, the station wagon, had been under my hood. I hadn't seen them since, but the car was unmistakable—cracked glass, no wheel covers, a red sock stuffed in the gas filler spout. Once black, the wagon was now streaked and blotched. They had painted it white with brushes, using some kind of water-based paint. A lot of it had peeled off in long curls. It was the only paint job I had ever seen blow away.