Mermaids on the Golf Course: Stories Page 12

The cell had one barred window, a bed, and a bucket in a corner.

  “At four!” Andrew said to his escort of two, pointing to his wristwatch. “To telephone.”

  They might not have heard him. They were chatting about something else, like old friends, and after turning of locks and sliding of a couple of bolts, Andrew heard them strolling down the hall, and their voices faded out and were replaced by a moaning and muttering much closer. Andrew looked around, half expecting to find another person in the cell with him, in a corner or under the bed, but the drunken or demented voice was coming from the other side of a brick wall that formed one side of the cell.

  A crazy, boastful laugh came after a stream of angry-sounding Spanish.

  The town drunk hauled in to sleep it off, Andrew supposed. Andrew sat on the bed. It felt like rock. There was one sheet on it, maybe to protect the blanket, a more valuable item, from being pressed too hard against the coarse wire that was the bed’s surface. He felt thirsty.

  “Ah—waaaaah!” said the nonstop voice in the next cell. “Yo mi ’cuerdo—’cuerdo—woooosh-la! Oof!”

  Of all strange things to happen, Andrew thought. What if it were all a show, all pretense, as in a film? Why hadn’t he told the officer at the desk about the three (or four?) men he had seen yesterday, apparently photographing the boy who had been shot today, laughing even, as the boy drew the pan of milk back from the kittens? Were those men of significance? Was someone filming a “candid” movie, and could he even be part of it? Could there be a hidden camera filming him now? Andrew glanced at the upper corners of his unlit cell, and became aware of the smell of old urine. He himself stank of nervous sweat. All he needed now was fleas or lice from the blanket. He snatched the blanket from the metal bed, and took it to the only source of light, the barred window opposite the brick wall. He didn’t see any lice or fleas, but he shook the blanket anyway and a thin cockroach fell out. Andrew stepped on it, with a feeling of small triumph. The floor was of rather pretty gray stone slabs. This might have been a home once, he thought, because the floor was handsome, as was the stone floor in the big room in front. The red brick wall between him and the mumbling inmate had been recently put there. Reassured somewhat about the blanket, Andrew lay down on his back and tried to collect himself.

  He could explain himself in one minute to an English-speaking person at the Consulate. If that didn’t work, Mexico City was only about two hours away by car. A man from the Consulate could get here by six or so. And though Andrew had a New York address just now, his sister was next door in Houston, Texas. She could find a Spanish-speaking American lawyer. But surely things wouldn’t get that bad!

  Andrew gave a tremendous sigh and closed his eyes.

  Hadn’t he the right to a glass of water? Even a pitcher of it to wash with?

  “Hey!—Hey!” he yelled, and banged on the door a couple of times. “Agua—por favor!”

  No one came. Andrew tried the yelling and banging again, then gave it up. He had a response only from the drunk next door, who seemed to want to engage him in conversation. Andrew glanced at his watch, lay down again, and closed his eyes.

  He saw the fallen boy, the spreading red on his white shirt, the dusty green of the plaza’s trees. He saw it sharply, as if the scene were six yards in front of him, and he opened his eyes to rid himself of the vision.

  At four, he shouted, then shouted and banged more loudly. After more than five minutes, a policeman said through the square aperture:

  “Qué pasa?”

  “I want to telephone!”

  The door was opened. They walked to the desk in front, where the desk officer sat, in shirtsleeves now, with his jacket over the back of his chair. The air seemed warmer than before. Andrew repeated his request to telephone the American Consulate. The officer dialed.

  This time the Consulate answered, and the officer spoke in Spanish to a woman, Andrew judged from the voice he heard faintly, then to a man.

  “I must speak to someone in English!” Andrew whispered urgently.

  The officer continued in Spanish for a while, then passed the telephone to Andrew.

  The man at the other end did speak English. Andrew gave his name, and said he was being held in a jail in Quetzalan for something he did not do.

  “Do you have a tourist card?”

  “Tourist card,” Andrew said to the desk officer, not having memorized his number, and the officer pulled a manila envelope from a desk drawer and produced the card. Andrew read the number out.

  “What are you being held for?” asked the American voice.

  “I witnessed a shooting outside my hotel.” Andrew described what had happened. “I reported it and—now I’m being accused of it. Or suspected of it.” Andrew’s throat was dry and hoarse. “I need a lawyer—someone who can speak for me.”

  “Your occupation, sir?” asked the cool voice.

  “Painter. Well, I’m a student.”

  “Your age?”

  “Twenty-two. Is there someone in this area who can help me?”

  “Not today, I’m afraid.”

  The conversation dragged maddeningly on. The Consulate could not possibly send a representative until tomorrow noon. The slant of the man’s questions gave Andrew the feeling that his interrogator was not sure whether to believe him or not. The man told Andrew that he was being held on suspicion, and that there was a limit to what the American Consulate could do at a moment’s notice. Andrew was asked if he possessed a gun.

  “No!—Can I give you the phone number of my sister in Houston? You can call her collect. She might be able to do something—faster.”

  The man patiently took her name and telephone number, repeated that he was sorry nothing could be done today, and as Andrew stammered, wanting to make sure the man would telephone his sister, the desk officer pulled the telephone from Andrew’s grasp and came out with a spate of Spanish in a good-natured, even soothing tone, added a chuckle and hung up.

  “Noon tomorrow,” the desk officer said to Andrew, and turned his attention to some papers on his desk.

  Had the desk officer told the Consulate that he had been drunk and disorderly? “Can you not ask Señor Diego of the Hotel Corona to come here?”

  The desk officer did not bother replying, and gestured for the policemen to take Andrew away.

  Andrew asked for water, and a glass was brought quickly. “More, please.” Andrew held his hands apart to indicate the height of a pitcher.

  The pitcher arrived a few minutes after Andrew was back in his cell. He washed his face and torso with his own wet shirt, letting the water fall on the stone floor. He was angry, and at the same time too weak to be angry. Absurd! He lay on the bed half awake and half asleep, and saw a series of visions, lots of people rushing (as he had never seen them) along the sidewalks of the plaza, and the grinning mouth, the big white fangs, the bulging eyes of the Aztec god he had sketched a few days ago near Mexico City. The atmosphere was menacing in all these half-dreams.

  Supper arrived around six, rice with a red pepper sauce in a metal bowl, another bowl of beans. The rice dish smelled as if the bits of meat in it were tainted, but he ate the rice and beans for the strength they would give.

  Andrew spent a chilly night, curled in his blanket. He was still cold at ten in the morning. At a quarter to noon, he clamored for the door to be opened. After several minutes, a different policeman from the ones Andrew knew arrived and asked what he wanted. Andrew said he was expecting a man from the American Consulate now, and said he wanted to speak to the “Capitano” at once, meaning the desk officer. All this was through the square in Andrew’s door.

  The policeman strolled away without a word, and Andrew didn’t know whether he was going to be ignored or whether the policeman was going to return. The policeman returned with a second policeman, and they opened his cell door.

>   The desk officer had gone off to lunch, and Andrew was not allowed to use the telephone.

  “I waited until twelve as I was told!” Andrew said, feeling that his Spanish was improving under his difficulties. “I demand—”

  The two men took his arms. Andrew squirmed around to look at the wide open door again, hopefully, but it was empty save for the figures of two police guards standing facing each other, or rather leaning, in the doorway.

  “You wait in your cell,” said one policeman.

  So Andrew was back in his cell. He had thrown up his breakfast of watery chocolate and bread hours ago, and now there was a smelly plate of something on the floor by his bed. He picked up the plate and tried to throw its contents through the barred window, but half of it fell on the floor.

  “Ah—tee-eee—ta—coraz—zón . . .” sang the idiot in the next cell. “Adiós, mujeres . . . des al . . .”

  Very likely he’d have to wait out the siesta period till four! Andrew uttered the worst curse he knew in English. The fact that he had the strength to curse cheered him. He would telephone his sister at four. He fell on his bed, not caring if he slept or not, wanting only the hours to pass until four.

  Andrew was asleep when he heard the clink and scrape of various closures on his door being undone. Ten past four, he saw by his watch, and he got up from the bed, blinking.

  “You come,” said a policeman.

  Andrew followed the one policeman to the front room again. The desk officer was on the telephone now. Andrew had to stand for several minutes while the officer made a few calls one after the other, one a personal call: the officer was asking about somebody’s baby, and spoke about a dinner next Saturday night. At last the desk officer looked at Andrew.

  “Spatz Andreo—you are to leave this building, leave your hotel, leave the United States of Mexico—for your safety,” he said.

  Andrew was puzzled, but leaving this building sounded pleasant. “I am free?”

  The desk officer sighed, as if Andrew were not completely free of suspicion, or even guilt. “You have my orders,” he murmured.

  Andrew had nothing of his own in the cell, so he did not need to go back. “The señor from the American Consulate—”

  “No one from the Consulate is coming.”

  Had the Consulate telephoned? Andrew thought it wise to ask no more questions.

  “You will leave the country within twenty-four hours. Understood?” The desk officer handed Andrew his tourist card and a square of paper which he tore from a block and of which he had a carbon copy. “Please give this paper to the Mexican border police or the passport control at the airport before eighteen hours tomorrow.”

  Andrew looked at the form, which had his name, tourist card number and 18:00 written in with a pen. It was an order to leave, but in the list of “reasons” nothing had been indicated.

  “Adíos,” said the desk officer.

  “Adíos,” Andrew replied.

  Two policemen, one of whom drove the wagon, took Andrew to within two streets of the Hotel Corona, and asked him to get out and go straight to his hotel. Andrew started walking. He was aware that he looked filthy, and wavering from weakness he might appear drunk also, so he avoided the eyes of a couple of the townspeople—a woman with a basket of laundry on her head, an old man with a cane. They both stared at him. Had he imagined that the old man had nodded and smiled at him?

  “Señor!” said a small boy on the sidewalk near the hotel door. This was a greeting, the boy had smiled shyly, and dashed on at a run.

  Señor Diego was standing behind the counter in the hotel lobby when Andrew entered.

  “Tardes,” Andrew said in a weary voice, and waited for his key.

  “Buenas tardes, señor,” replied Señor Diego, laying Andrew’s key on the counter. He nodded slightly, with the hint of a smile.

  A contemptuous smile? Did Señor Diego know already, having been informed by a telephone call from the desk officer, that he had to leave the country in twenty-four hours? Probably. “Can I have a bath, please?”

  He could. Señor Diego went at once to the bathroom, which was down the hall from Andrew’s room. Andrew had had a couple of baths there; one paid a little extra, that was all. Andrew unlocked his room door. The bed was made. Nothing seemed changed. He looked into the top of his suitcase and saw that his folder of traveler’s checks was still there. His billfold was still in the inside pocket of his jacket in the closet, and he looked into it: several thousand pesos still, and maybe none at all had been removed.

  Andrew took clean clothes with him into the bathroom. The humble but tidy bathroom looked luxurious. He soaped himself, washed his hair, cleaned the tub with a scrubbing brush he found in a bucket, then soaked his jeans, shirt and underpants in more hot water, soap and cleaning powder, and rinsed his hair at the basin. Life had its sweet moments! And goddamn the Consulate! A fat lot of help they’d been!

  Or, Andrew thought a moment later as he pulled on clean Levi’s, had the American Consulate rung up this morning, said or threatened something unless the police station made itself clear? Andrew decided to keep his resentment or his gratitude to himself until he learned something definite.

  He hung his damp clothes on hangers at the window in his room, and put some old newspapers on the tiled floor below them. Andrew did not know what attitude to take with Señor Diego, whether to consider him friend or foe or neutral, because certainly he hadn’t been helpful yesterday when the police had come and taken him away. Andrew decided to be merely polite.

  “Señor Diego,” he began with a nod. “I leave tomorrow morning. On the first bus for Mexico City. So—I should like to pay you now.”

  Señor Diego reached for Andrew’s note in a pigeonhole behind him, and he added the item of the bath with a ballpoint pen. “Sí, señor. Here you are.—You are looking better now!”

  Andrew smiled despite himself, as he pulled limp pesos out of his billfold. He watched Señor Diego count his money, then get some change for him from a locked drawer under the pigeonholes. “Gracias. And—the boy out there—” He went on, “He is dead?” Andrew knew he was dead, but he had to say it, in the form of half-question, half-statement.

  Señor Diego’s eyes grew small and sharp under his graying brows, and he nodded. “A bad boy. Muy malo. Someone shot him,” he finished softly, with a shrug.

  “Who?”

  “Quién sabe? Everyone hated him. Even his family. They threw him out of the house long ago. The boy stole. Worse!” Señor Diego pointed to his temple. “Muy loco.”

  Señor Diego’s tone was friendly now, man to man. Andrew began to understand, or he thought he did. Someone with a grievance against the boy had shot him, and maybe the whole town knew who, and maybe the police had had to find someone to take the blame or at least be suspected for a while, to keep up a show of justice. Or perhaps, he thought, if he hadn’t been naive enough to insist on reporting the shooting, the body would have simply lain there for hours until somebody removed it. Now Andrew understood Felipe’s pushing him out of his bar, not wanting to hear what he had to say. The town had had to shut him up.

  “Yes,” Andrew said, putting his pesos into his billfold. “A bad boy—with the little cats.”

  “The little cats! With people—shopkeepers! A thief! He was all bad!” Señor Diego spoke with fervor.

  Andrew nodded, as if he agreed absolutely. He went back to his room, and slept for several hours.

  When he woke up, it was dark. The Bar Felipe’s jukebox played a mariachi song with xylophone, guitars, and an enthusiastic tenor. Andrew stretched and smiled. He smiled at his good luck. Twenty-four hours in a Mexican jail? He had read about dirtier jails, worse treatment in jails in books by Gogol, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn. He was ravenously hungry, and knew the little restaurant off the plaza would still be open, if Felipe’s jukebox
was playing. Andrew put on his cotton jacket against the evening cool. When he dropped his key on the counter, one of the men guests in the hotel said good evening to him, looked him in the eye, and gave him a friendly smile.

  Andrew walked towards the little restaurant whose jukebox music he could hear before he reached the corner where he had to turn, the music overlapping for a few seconds with that from the Bar Felipe. There was no table free, but the young woman who served, who Andrew thought was the daughter of the woman who cooked, asked one man to move to a table with his friends, to whom he was talking anyway. Andrew was aware of more glances than on former evenings, but these glances seemed more friendly, as if the men knew him now, as if they were not merely curious about a gringo in the town.

  “Salud!” A man of about fifty bent over Andrew’s table, extending a hand. In his left hand he held a small, heavy tequila glass.

  Andrew swallowed some of his first course of stuffed green peppers, put his fork down, and shook the man’s thick hand.

  “Un tequila!” said the man.

  Andrew knew it would look rude to refuse. “Okay!—Gracias.”

  “Tequila!” the man commanded.

  “Tequila!” echoed the others. “Andre-o!”

  It was “Andre-o!” again when the tequila arrived. In a discreet way, the dozen men in the restaurant toasted him. The young woman waitress suggested a special dish, which she said was ready in the kitchen. It turned out to be a substantial meal. When Andrew pulled out his billfold to pay, the waitress said:

  “No, señor.” She wagged a finger and smiled. “You are invited tonight.”

  A few of the men laughed at Andrew’s surprise.

  At a quarter to eight the next morning, Andrew’s bus, which had been half an hour late, rolled away from the plaza on the road to Jalapa, where he would board a larger bus. The town of Quetzalan looked sweet to him now, like a place he would like to return to one day. He smiled at his recollection of a man and woman, American or English tourists he had seen getting off the bus one afternoon in the plaza: they had gazed around them, conferred, then got back on the bus. Andrew shied away from the memory of the dead boy, though the vision of his white-clad body came now and then, quick and brief as a camera flash.