Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (15 page)

I had some trouble finding the right map and finally in seeing it, distracted, too, by the blast of California mambo from the radio; and it was then, while I was trying to hold the book up in a way to get more light, that something fell out of it.

“Let me see your lighter a minute, Pablo.”

“What? What is?” He turned the radio down, just a bit. Sometimes he got quite excited if he heard his name.

What had fallen from the book was a map of Mexico, a map which had evidently been put there by the book’s previous owner. One may say this because it was obvious the map was not a part of the guidebook; it was not of the same school of map making as were the maps in the guidebook. It was like something from another era, not handmade but somehow in that spirit: highly individual. It was large, but not as large as the ones given out by the gasoline stations—nor was it square; when opened, it was about eighteen by twenty-four inches, and was scaled 1:25.

The paper was extraordinarily thin—Bible paper, but much stronger, like rice paper or bamboo—and it was hazed with the slightest coloration of age which seemed to give a faint iridescence to those soft colors. They were Marie Laurencin colors, and it was like that as well, a map for a child, or a very nice woman.

“Where we are at this time?” asked Emmanuel, in a shout above the radio. Emmanuel was a year or two older than Pablo, and about one degree less self-centered.

I had looked at the map a few minutes without attempting the analogy, just tracing electric-blue rivers to cerulean seas, as they say, but I did know where we were, of course; and, almost at the same time, I saw where it might be interesting to go.

“Make a right,” I said.

“A right, man,” said Emmanuel. “Make a right.” They had a habit of repeating and relaying things to each other for no apparent reason.

Pablo gave a sigh, as of pain, as though he had known all along that’s how it would be, and he lurched the car around the corner, sliding it like a top over the soft red dust, and up went the radio.

I continued to look at the map. We were going due west, and the map showed that about twenty miles ahead, on this same road, was a little town called Axotle. The road ran through the town east-west and then joined a highway, and this seemed to be all there was to it. But holding the lighter quite close, I had seen another road, a narrow, winding road, as thin as the blood vein of an eye, leading south out of the town. It seemed to go for about twenty-five miles, and on it there were two other towns, Corpus Christi and San Luiz, and there the road stopped. A blood-vein, dead-end road, with a town at the end of it; that was the place to go all right.

Pablo drove like a madman, except that he was quite a good driver actually. He was supposed to be upset, though, about not having found the kind of car he wanted to drive in Mexico. His story—or rather, his-story-through-Emmanuel, since Pablo himself didn’t do much talking—was that he had a Mercedes at home and had been looking for a certain kind of car to drive in Mexico, a Pegaso, perhaps, but had finally bought this car we were in now, a ’55 Oldsmobile, which had three carburetors and was supposed to do 145 on a straightaway, though, of course, there weren’t too many of those.

“Man, this old wagon,” he kept saying, “I dunt dig it.”

But he drove it like the veritable wind, making funny little comments to himself and frowning, while Emmanuel sat beside him, wagging his closed-eyes head, shaking his shoulders and drumming his fingers along with the radio, or else was all hunched over in twisting up sticks of tea and lighting them. Sometimes he would sing along with the radio, too; not overdoing it, just a couple of shouts or a grunt.

We pulled in then at a Gulf station for gas. We were about halfway to Axotle now, and I was looking at the map again, outside the car, standing under the light of the station, when it suddenly occurred to me to check with the more recent map of the guidebook to see if perhaps the town had been built up in the last few years; it would put me in an embarrassing position with my new friends if we drove to the end of the line, only to smash headlong into a hot-dog stand. So I got out the guidebook and found a map of the corresponding region—quite detailed it was—and that was when the initial crevice of mystery appeared, because on this map there was
no
road leading south out of Axotle; there was only the east-west road which joined the highway. No road south and neither of the towns. I got a map then from the service station. It was a regular road map about two feet square, and was supposed to show every town with a population of 250 or more . . . and the crevice became the proverbial fissure.

“This is bad, man,” said Emmanuel, when I told him. Pablo didn’t say anything, just stood there, scowling at the side of the car. Emmanuel and Pablo were both wearing dark prescription glasses, as they always did, even at night.

“No, man,” I said, “this is
good.
They’re ghost towns . . . you dig? That will be interesting for you.”

Emmanuel shrugged. Pablo was still frowning at the car.

“Ghost towns,” I said, getting into the backseat again. “Sure, that’s very good.”

Then, as we got under way, Emmanuel turned to sit half-facing me, his back against the door, and he began to warm toward the idea, or was perhaps beginning to understand it.

“Yeah, man, that is very
good.
” He nodded seriously. “Ghost town.
Crazy
.”

“It is very good, man,” he told Pablo, while the radio wailed and the car whined and floated over the long black road.

“What is this, man,” Pablo demanded then in his abrupt irate way, half-turning around to me, “this goat town?”

“Goat town! Goat town!” shouted Emmanuel, laughing. “That’s too much, man!”

“Man, I dunt dig it!” said Pablo, but he was already lost again, guiding his big rocket to the moon. And I lay back on the seat and dozed off for a while.

When I woke up, it was as though I had been on the edge of waking for a long time; the car was pitching about oddly, and I had half-fallen from the seat. The radio was still blasting, but behind it now was the rasping drone of Pablo’s cursing. And I lay there, listening to that sound; it was like a dispassionate chant, a steady and unlinked inventory of all the profane images in Spanish. I assumed we had gotten off the road, except we seemed to be going unduly fast for that. Then I saw that Emmanuel had his hands up to his mouth and was shaking with laughter, and I realized that this had been going on for some time, with him saying softly over and over, “Man, dig this . . .
road!
Dig this . . .
road!
”

So I raised up to have a look, and it was pretty incredible all right. It was more of a creek bed than a road, but occasionally there would be an open place to the side . . . a gaping, torn-off place that suggested we were on something like a Greek mountain pass. And then I saw as well, dishearteningly so, why we were going fast; it was because every now and then one of the side pockets stretched right up to the middle of the road, so that the back wheels would pull to that side, spinning a bit, as we passed over it. And, as we passed over it, you could see down . . . for quite a long way.

“What do you think it’s like to the side?” I asked.

Emmanuel finally controlled his curious mirth long enough to turn around. “What do
I
think it’s like?” he asked. “Man, it’s
lions and tigers! And
. . .
big . . . pointy rocks!
Why? What do
you
think it’s like?” And fairly shouting with laughter, he handed me another joint.

“Goats,”
said Pablo with grotesque snicker. “There are the goats there.”

“All right, man,” I said, and lay back with a groan to express my disquiet.

Pablo snorted. “Man, I’m swingin’!” he said, reassuringly.

Emmanuel broke up completely now and laid his head down laughing. “Pablo’s swingin’!” he cried. He could hardly speak. He had to hold onto the rocking dashboard to keep from falling to the floorboards. “Ma-a-an, Pablo is . . . too . . . much!”

It was too much all right. I lay there smoking, my thoughts as bleak as the black rolling top I stared at, though gradually I did discern, or so it seemed, a certain rhythm and control taking hold of the erratic pitching of the car, and the next time I sat up the road, too, seemed in fairly good shape.

The moon had come out and you would get glimpses now and then of things alongside—strange dwarf trees and great round rocks, with patches of misty landscape beyond. It was just about then that the headlight caught a road sign in the distance, a rickety post akimbo with a board nailed to it (or maybe tied with a strand of vine) across which was painted, crudely to be sure,
“Puente,”
which, in these circumstances, would mean toll bridge.

“Crazy road,” I heard Pablo say.

There was a bend in it just after the sign, and the glow of a kerosene lamp ahead—which proved to be from the window of an old tin shack; and in front of the shack there was a barrier across the road: a large, fairly straight tree limb. Beyond it, vaguely seen, was the small, strange bridge.

When we had stopped by the shack, we could see that there was someone inside, sitting at a table; and, after waiting a minute while nothing happened, Pablo jerked his head around at me.

“You make it, man,” he said, handing me his billfold, “I can’t make these greaser.”

“Very well,” I said, “you rotten little Fascist spic.” And as I got out of the car I heard him explaining it again to Emmanuel: “Man, I can’t make these greaser.”

Inside the shack, the lamp was full up; but, with the chimney as jagged and as black as a crater, I couldn’t see too much of the room’s appointments—only a shotgun leaning against the wall near the door, the barrel so worn and rust-scraped that it caught the yellow light in glints harder than brass. But I could see him all right—bigger than life, you might say, very fat, his sleeves twisted up, playing with cards. There was a bottle half filled with tequila on the table. I remember this because it occurred to me then, in a naïve, drug-crazed way, that we might have a pleasant exchange and finish off with a drink,

“Good evening,” I said (with easy formality), then followed it up with something colloquial like, “what’s the damage?”

He was squinting at me, and then beyond, to the car. And I recall first thinking that here was a man who had half lost his sight playing solitaire by a kerosene lamp; but he was something else as well, I realized, when I took it all in: he was a man with a
very
sinister look to him. He was smoking a homemade cigar, gnarled and knotted enough to have been comic, except that he kept baring his teeth around it, teeth which appeared to have been filed—and by humanity at large, one might presume, from the snarl with which he spoke, as he finally did:

“Where are you trying to go?”

“Corpus Christi,” I said.

It occurred to me that it might be less involved, not to say cheaper, if I didn’t divulge our full itinerary.

“Corpus Christi, eh?” He smiled, or it was something like a smile; then he got up, walked to the door, glanced at the car, spat out some of his cigar, and walked back to the table. “Five dollars a head,” he said, sitting down again.

“Five dollars,” I said, more in a thought aloud than a question, “Mexican dollars.”

He made a sound, not unlike a laugh, and took up the cards again.

“You think you’re Mexican?” he asked after a minute, without raising his head.

I had to consider it briefly. “Oh,
I
see—you mean, ‘a-fool-and-his-money . . .’ that sort of thing.”

“You said it, my friend, I didn’t.”

“Yes. Well, you’ll give me a receipt, of course.”

“Receipt?” He laughed, spitting and wiping his mouth on his arm. “This isn’t Monterrey, you know.”

I hesitated, determined for the moment, in the responsibility to the rest of my party, not to be so misused; then I put my hands on the edge of the table and leaned forward a little. “I think you’ve probably picked the
wrong
crowd this time, Pancho,” I said.

Whereas, actually, it was
I
who had picked the wrong party, for he laid his head back laughing with this—and an unpleasant laugh it was, as we know.

“Pancho,” he said, getting up, “that’s funny.” Still laughing and wiping his hand across his mouth, his eyes half shut so that I couldn’t quite see where he was looking, he walked around the table. “That’s very funny,” he said.

And you can appreciate how for a moment it was like a sequence in a film, where someone is supposed to be laughing or scratching his ear, and suddenly does something very aggressive to you—except that I stepped back a little then, and he walked on past me to the door . . . where it seemed my show of apprehension had given him not so much a fresh lease as a veritable deed on confidence.

“
You
don’t need a receipt,” he said, turning from the door, his eyes still two smoked slits, “you can trust me.” Then he flicked his cigar with an air and gave his short, wild laugh, or cough, as it were. But when he faced the car again, he sobered quickly enough. And Emmanuel and Pablo were sitting there, peering out, frowning terribly.

“What have you got inside?” he asked, and his tone indicated this might be the first of several rare cards he intended.

Somehow I felt it would not do to involve my friends, so I started reaching for the money.

He kept a cold, smoky silence as he watched me count it out. Then he took it, leaning back in the smug, smiling, closed-eyes strain against cigar smoke and the effort of pressing the loot deep into his tight trousers.

“Yes,” I said. “Well, thanks for everything.”

He grunted, then stepped out and raised the barrier. I started to get into the car, but he said something and turned back into the shack, motioning me with him.

“Wait,” he said, as a quick afterthought, and from one dark side of the room he came up holding a cigar box.

“You want to buy some good marijuana?”

“What?”

“Marijuana,” he said, letting the word out again like a coil of wet rope, and proffering the lid-raised box for my inspection.