Now when I try to conjure my essence as a young man, I see myself waking up one morning to the overpowering odor of cow dung, with not a clue in the world where I am, or how I got there. As I lie there in my sleeping bag, holding my nose, trying to put it all together, the sun pops out from behind a pair of chocolate-colored mountains, flares across a great desert valley, glints through some wood slats and hits me smack in the eye. After regaining my sight, I find myself lying in a sidetracked cattle car, in a vast field of green tomatoes.
Slithering out of my sleeping bag, I heave it and my backpack from the rail car, leap to the track, and start beating the dried dung off them with one of my boots. That done, I stagger down the embankment, squat by an irrigation canal, and splash water on my face. Only then do I rise, shade my eyes from the sun, and scan the lightening horizon. IMPERIAL VALLEY AGRO, says a sign round a metal water tower in the distance. And it all comes back. Only three days before, I recall, I left San Francisco on my trip around the world backwards.
A few moments later, I step out on the road beside the tracks and start hitchhiking.
My first ride is a mile down the road in a battered green Chevy driven by an eighty-year-old Mexican irrigator with a white Pancho Villa mustache. My second is into the town of Brawley (no relation) with a family of date pickers. But my third ride is solid glamour: a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a palomino gold paint job, a Hollywood–City of the Stars license-plate frame, and a California State Bar Association decal in the rear window.
I sprint through a billowing cloud of white dust to catch it. But by the time I reach it the cloud has blown away, leaving the Caddy miraculously dustless, and lustrous, in the sunshine.
Smiling courteously, I lean in the window. The couple inside turns and smiles back. The woman’s smile is perfunctory, professional, but the man’s is enormous, shark-toothed, dazzling. She’s a tall, suntanned blonde in her late thirties, a knockout in white high heels, black capri pants, a white low-necked cashmere sweater. The guy, who looks to be in his late forties, is wearing a pair of grey slacks, a long-sleeved black shirt and a grey fedora. He is tall and thin and very dark, with an eagle beak, a Clark Gable mustache, and extraordinarily heavy-lidded eyes. The pair of them look a bit bigger than life. But hey, they’re just what you might expect, riding out here in the California desert, in a car like that, in the year 1964.
They’ve got a Los Angeles Rhythm & Blues station on the radio, “The Johnny Otis Show.”
Johnny Otis, bop bopbop . . .
Johnny Otis, bop bopbop . . .
“Where you headed, honcho?” the driver wants to know.
“Short-term or long-term?”
“Why don’t you just lay it out for me, man?”
“Well, my immediate goal is Mexico, but eventually I want to go all the way around the world backwards.”
“What do you mean by backwards?”
“It’ll take a while to explain.”
“Cool,” he says, smiling brilliantly. “Hop in, buddy. You’re a man after my own heart.”
Truth is, the idea of traveling around the world backwards was something that occurred to me as a sudden inspiration, before I left San Francisco, and I wasn’t exactly sure myself of what I meant by it. It just seemed like an interesting theme for my journey, the meaning of which might sort itself out as I went along. I also imagined (correctly) that my varying replies to the inevitable question would be an interesting conversation opener with people who picked me up along the way. Now, from the perspective of fifty-something years, I realize that my whimsical notion of going around the world backwards was in fact a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, the meaning of which is symbolic rather than factual: By going around the world backwards, I hoped to find myself somewhere along the way.
So anyway, the driver’s girlfriend scoots over, I swing open the door and settle beside her in the front seat. Instantly my pulse jumps. I try not to stare, but I cannot prevent myself from gaping in wonder. Her face is an adolescent fantasy, her body instant cheesecake. I can’t place her scent, but it smells marvelous, smells . . . warm. She is warm. I can feel her body heat right through my Levi jacket. And her forehead is beaded with perspiration.
Little Eva is on the radio now, singing, “Come on, baby, do the Loco-Motion.”
“Tell me,” says the driver, easing back out into traffic, forgetting – to my great relief, since I’ve temporarily run out of inventive explications – to ask me what I meant about going around the world backwards, “what’s the best way to Guaymas and points south?”
“Well,” I say, “the guy who gave me my last ride? He says there’s two ways. You can cross the border at Mexicali and take Mexican National 2 to Santa Ana. Or you can take U.S. 89 to Nogales, and Mexican National 15 straight down.”
“Don’t be coy, man, just tell me the fuckin’ way.”
“Okay, the guy said you ought to stay on the U.S. side as long as you can. You lose nearly half a day by taking the Mexican route.”
“Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?”
“But you already knew all about it, Sam,” the woman puts in. “You swore last year you’d never take that Route 2 again.”
Her voice is soft and melodious, slightly breathless, her accent cultivated, mid-Atlantic. She’s an actress, of course.
“I did?”
“You know you did.”
“Just testing,” he says.
“You’re always testing.”
“That’ll be enough of that.”
“Bit of a bore, actually.”
“Hey, I don’t want to hear anymore shit from you, Chicken,” he says, jabbing a long finger into her face.
The gesture seems so overblown and uncalled-for that I’m not sure whether to take it seriously or not. I take my cue from the woman: She ignores it.
“And you honcho, what’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” I say, smothering a grin.
“You speak the lingo?”
“Pretty good.”
“How come?”
“My dad’s people speak it. Originally, they’re from Mexico, so I picked it up from them.”
“How you fixed for money?”
“Not so good.”
“I pride myself on my ability to read character,” Sam says, reaching into the glove compartment, pulling out a marijuana cigarette,lighting up. “Consider yourself on retainer until further notice.”
“You serious?”
“Never say anything I don’t mean.”
“Well thanks a lot,” I say. “Glad to be of service.”
“Don’t mention it. You smoke dope?”
“I don’t turn it down.”
“Try this stuff, man, you’ll like it.”
“Nice,” I say, after a puff or two.
“One of my clients gave it to me, in lieu of payment.”
“Here,” I say, handing it to the woman.
“The name’s Maggie,” she says, dragging deeply, her breasts swelling spectacularly under the cashmere. “Maggie Wells.”
Without vanity, she says it. Although it’s clear that she expects me to recognize it. Which I don’t. But I do recall the face from somewhere, some TV drama or something back in the ‘Fifties. Those great smoldering dark eyes, so unusual in a true blonde, and those jutting cheekbones, the puffy bruised-looking lips and flaring nostrils.
“Mine’s Eddie. Eddie Brawley,” I say, but I’m not sure she catches it.
“How you get a name like Brawley,” Sam wants to know, “if you’re Spick?”
“Long story,” I say. “You sure you want to hear it?”
“I am exhausted,” Maggie says, yawning, stretching provocatively. “We left Malibu at five this morning.”
A few minutes later her head falls on my shoulder and she’s fast asleep.
“Don’t get your balls in an uproar, man,” says Sam, when he catches my anxious look. “I ain’t the jealous type.”
But I’m not convinced. It’s all a bit too sudden. I do not know what to make of these people. All sorts of paranoid fantasies cross my mind.
“If you see Rosamary,” sings Fats Domino, “tell ‘er I’m comin’ home to stay.”
In El Centro, Maggie rolls into the back seat and Sam turns left on Highway 80, heading east. Just past Meloland and Date City the vivid green fields of winter fruit and vegetables come abruptly to an end, and the ribbon of blacktop, running along the bright blue waters of the American Canal, slices clean through a region of enormous white sand dunes toward Midway Wells, Winterhaven and the Colorado River.
“This is where they make all the Foreign Legion flicks,” I say, but Sam does not seem particularly interested. What he’s interested in, apparently, is hearing his own voice.
“Lemme tell you a story, man; you are not gonna believe this one….”
What he needs is a sounding board, and I, the hitchhiker, am it. For hours he wheels his great long Cadillac across the desert, telling tales. In a hoarse confidential tone, he tells them, as if the telling itself were somehow illegal or unethical.
All my life people have come to me this way, to bend my ear. It was just as true then as it is now. They make confessions to me they wouldn’t tell their best friends. There is apparently something about me that encourages them to open up. What it is exactly, I haven’t a clue. Anyway, the fact is, I do not normally enjoy hearing these confessions, even though — as a writer — I should latch right onto them and use them in my work. Yet the truth is they make me feel rather uneasy, as if I’m entrusted with someone’s very precious and fragile possessions. Also, I instinctively mistrust anyone who opens himself up to strangers. It’s a natural reflex of the Mexican in me: “Never turn your back on a man who talks too much,” my father used to say.
But this dude sure can spin a yarn. I cannot deny him that. A brilliant raconteur, he dares to begin his stories in the middle or the end and flesh them out later with intricately woven flashbacks. Or he will cut them off just before the climax and then suddenly take them up again in the middle of another story, merely to increase suspense. He tells them in no apparent order, chronological or otherwise, but eventually a pattern emerges. It’s the story of his life:
“So, Sam the Man? He finds himself rounding the corner of Hollywood and Vine. The city is basking in the first golden rays of the sun, but Sam, he cannot say the same for his wallet, see. The morning itself is holding him up. Then, just when things seem bleakest, up pulls Vito Palermo the Mafia Don in a brand-new Continental. ‘Hey, goombah,’ he says, ‘how’s about helpin’ me count some loot?’ End of story. It’s all a game. Already things are looking up….”
A few miles outside of Yuma, he suddenly yawns and quits talking, right in the middle of one of his stories, and guides the Caddy to a slow smooth stop by the side of the road.
“How’s about a spell at the wheel, honcho?”
“Why not?”
He rousts Maggie out of the back, and we all step out to stretch our legs. Then Sam and Maggie trade seats. Apparently, they are no longer speaking.
I slip behind the wheel and we start off again.
“Wake me up in Tucson,” says Sam, and falls right off. His snoring is like everything else about him: loud and unabashed, with a music of its own.
Although I can be as affable as my Irish ancestors, I sometimes find myself unaccountably affected by the natural reserve of my Mexican side. Which is perhaps why I feel a bit shy right now…. alone in the front seat with a movie star. Anyway, Maggie seems lost in her own thoughts, so we drive all the way across the Yuma Desert and the Painted Rock Mountains before we say a word.
Maggie says it: “Smoke?”
“Sure,” I say, and she rolls us a fat one.
We smoke silently, passing it back and forth. When it’s done, we turn and smile at each other.
“Yeah,” she says, shaking her head.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding.
After that I figure we’ve established a kind of rapport, though we speak not another word for the rest of the journey, and she sleeps most of the way.
At 6:00 P.M. we cross the Mexican border.
A warm, pleasant evening in late spring with the sun hovering just over the bleached brick buildings, the wind-burnt willows and jagged desert foothills of Nogales. The Avenida Juárez crowded with commercial traffic: pushcart vendors hawking their wares, battered old pickup trucks and ranch wagons revving their engines, huge international semi-trailers spewing diesel smoke. Sidewalks spilling over with an amazingly motley and varied humanity: Mexican Indians in bare feet and long Apache hair, peasants in sandals and straw hats, red-faced Arizonians in baseball caps or flower-print dresses, ranchers in cowboy boots and black Stetson hats, railroad men in bibbed overalls and striped caps, local gangsters in grease-stained zoot suits.
It’s good to be in the land of my ancestors. My pulse jumps to catch the Latin beat. Yet I could die of humiliation to see my part-race so, in dark and squalid contradiction to that scrubbed and white behemoth to the north.
Sam parks the Caddy on a side street.
“Watch the wagon for me, will you, honcho,” he says, “while me and the little missus rustle us up a hotel for the night.”
Maggie does not take kindly to his humor. And he resents her lack of appreciation. They ignore each other as they head off down the street, but they manage to create a sensation anyway. Sam has a way of swaggering, loose-limbed, cocksure, with his fedora pulled down over his eyes, which catches the attention of passersby. Maggie on the other hand is so slinky and silky that she appears to glide down the street. Her movements, like her accent, are slightly stylized. Yet the more I am around her, the more I come to believe that she is really like that. The style originated in her training as an actress, perhaps, but by now it’s second nature. I am no longer an objective observer, however, for already I’m a little in love.
Shortly after they disappear into the crowd, I notice a twenty-dollar bill that has slipped out of Sam’s pocket onto the backseat. I think about it for a moment and decide that under certain conditions twenty dollars could mean the difference between life and death. I’m about to reach for it when it occurs to me that Sam may have planted it there on purpose, as some kind of test.
The Hotel Paraíso, where we find accommodations for the night, is a newish, three-story cinder block building located on the extreme southeastern edge of Nogales, across the street from an abandoned wool warehouse. Out back there is a surprisingly well-tended little cactus garden with a fishpond, a bed of colorful desert flowers and a couple of “honeymoon cottages.” The rear of the property looks out onto the open desert. It’s protected on three sides by a thickly planted windbreak of juniper and tall old cottonwood trees with silvery leaves.
Sam rents the honeymoon cottages for the night. We all have a siesta and a shower, and about nine o’clock Sam comes around to my cottage and lets himself in. He is dressed for dinner in a tan lightweight suit, an open-neck black shirt and a Panama hat, and he looks like a million bucks.
“Lemme explain the deal,” he says. “Someone’s gotta be my bags at all times. Whether it’s in the hotel or when we’re out on the road. I got cameras. I got travelers’ checks. I got some cash. No offense, but my experience is that your people will steal. So, I want you here with the bags till we get back. Then you can run and grab a bite. All right?”
“No problem,” I say. I am too proud to mention my own ravenous hunger, or the fact the room service could send out a meal in a jiffy.
So, I sit in their cottage till late that night. I try to keep my mind off food by drinking lots of water, and by going through their things. But by ten o’clock I am reduced to pilfering Maggie’s barbiturates, just to kill the hunger pangs.
There are other items that I find: Two of the bags are open and full of personal effects like maps, clothing, cameras and toilet articles. But another bag – by far the largest and heaviest – is kept double locked. I deduce that the loot is in this bag, and there is much more of it than Sam has admitted. It even occurs to me that I might steal the bags and disappear with them into the desert.
Toward midnight Sam comes in alone, fuming: “Fuckin’ cunts. They’re like niggers, man. Give ‘em an inch and they take a fuckin’ mile.”
Again, the queasy, uneasy feeling: Why is this guy confiding in me? What’s he got up his sleeve?
Sam throws himself down on the bed and reaches for his dope. And there’s something about the way he moves on the bed that increases my queasiness.
I find you in the hotel bar, Maggie, seated alone, sipping a margarita through a straw, listening to Bobby Rydell singing “The Cha ChaCha” on the jukebox.
I sit down beside you and ask the bartender if the kitchen is closed yet. It is, he says, but there’s a place down the road that stays open till two in the morning.
“Care to come along?” I ask.
“Why not?” you say, stepping down off the bar stool. You are barelegged, wearing a peasant blouse and a red skirt, and you stagger slightly when you hit the floor, rustling your skirt. But your recovery is so smooth and nonchalant it might have been taken for a graceful little parody of tipsiness, rather than the thing itself.
“Oh, you haven’t got any money, have you?”
“Afraid not.”
“I’ve got some.”
“Thank you, but I’d like some company too.”
“Any company?”
“Yours, in particular.”
“Must stay out till Sam’s asleep. Had a bit of a row.”
“Nothing serious, I hope,” I say, guiding her out of the hotel.
“Oh, it’ll blow over in a day or two. I’m not even cross at him anymore. It’s Sam now. He’s cross because I was cross. If you know what I mean.”
“Sort of.”
“Rather enjoys his little fits of anger, you see. Part of his act.”
“What act?”
“You know, the tough-guy act.”
“Could’ve fooled me. But he sure can tell a story.”
“Bit tiresome, actually, once you’ve heard them a few times. I’ve never understood Sam’s romance with the underworld. Sometimes I think he’s suffering from a case of arrested development, like some of his clients. And I tend to get onto him about it, from time to time.”
“So that’s what it was all about.”
“What?”
“Today.”
“Oh, no. It was over you, actually.”
“Me?”
“To be perfectly frank with you, Eddie, I didn’t want him to pick you up.”
“Why not?”
“It was just once too often, that’s all.”
“You mean he does this a lot?”
“Oh, God yes. Must have his entourage, you see. Likes a good thick plot. The more confusion the better. Collects people the way you might collect potted plants. Some of the most unsavory types. And he just loves having them on.”
“Pardon me?”
“You know, always trying to find the weak point, always trying to keep one off balance. Tries it on me all the time. But you won’t let him intimidate you, will you, Eddie?”
“Well,” I say, laughing as if it is the remotest possibility in the world, “I’ll try not to.”
“His bark is far worse than his bite; I can assure you of that,” you say, and you are serious. There is something about you, Maggie, which seems valid and guileless, despite everything. “And anyway, you don’t fit the mold.”
“What mold?”
“You know, the types he picks up.”
“Well, thank you very much,” I say, but she doesn’t appear to catch my irony.
“No, you’re not like all the rest, are you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re cute,” you say, leaning on my arm. “Nice.”
For a guy who woke up in a cattle car not long ago, I am doing all right. But I have by no means dropped my guard: What do these people want from me? What are their true intentions?
We march down the dusty road through the desert for a kilometer or so till we find an open-air restaurant on the main highway. It caters to truck drivers and busloads of workers fresh from the fields of California, and everyone makes a big fuss over you, Maggie. The Mexican food is good, the beer is cold, and I can fend off the more importunate of curious onlookers with occasional blasts of foulmouthed Spanish.
“Some appetite you’ve got there,” you say, when I’ve come to an end of my mountainous serving of tacos, rice and beans.
“Been a while since I last ate.”
“Gathered as much.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not quite what you say you are. Are you, Eddie?”
“Not quite. But then again, I guess none of us are.”
“Suppose not. But you know, I sometimes wonder if my entire history isn’t just written smack across my face.”
“It’s a beautiful face.”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?”
“I saw you a couple of times on TV, Maggie. You were great.”
“Was I? Well, yes, I suppose I was. Never seemed to get anywhere, though. Now here I am pushing forty.”
“Jesus,” I say. “Could’ve fooled me.”
We stroll back to the hotel arm in arm, under a million twinkling desert stars. And you insist that we sing “It Happened in Monterey” together, in the style of Frank Sinatra, at the tops of our lungs.
At your cottage you kiss me good night on the mouth.
“You’re a good sport,” you say.
In the morning you and Sam are still barely speaking. You lie in the backseat of the Caddy, sometimes sleeping, sometimes smoking, sometimes reading an Agatha Christie mystery. Sam takes the wheel and all the way across the Sonora Desert the rap continues, just as seamless and beguiling as ever:
“…. So, the Di Giovanni clan they finally catch up with my old man, see? Slip a pair of cement shoes on his feet and dump him off the Santa Monica Pier. And my ma goes like bananas. They strap her in a strait jacket and haul her off to the loony bin. End of story. It’s all a game. At the ripe age of thirteen, Sam becomes The Man. . . .”
The higher Sam gets, and the more deeply involved in his interwoven stories, the wider and sharkier his grin gets. It’s a devastating grin, at once cynical, mocking and exultant, and it has the continual effect of making me feel nervous and ill-at-ease. Also, Sam leans too close when he wants to pursue a point, and he touches me on the knee too often.
I begin to develop paranoid thoughts: The macho talk is all a front. The dude is a closet queen and you, Maggie, are his shill. Yet even paranoia does nothing to diminish the fascination I feel for Sam. I have never met anyone remotely like him. He’s so big, so loud, so brash, so aggressive and overwhelming as a personality that I become aware of a kind of shrinking within myself, a retreat of my manhood. I realize that the dope is coloring my perceptions, but there seems little I can do to prevent it. And it does no good trying to laugh at Sam for foolishly running off at the mouth, for revealing his most intimate secrets to a stranger, because I cannot deny that the rendition itself is marvelously exciting.
I begin to sweat. I get the shakes. Maggie, you recede into the background. It’s just you and me, Sam, in the saddle of that great palomino, galloping across the Mexican desert…. I gaze longingly out the window, daydreaming of escape….
“Hey, what’s happenin, honcho?”
“Not much.”
“Looked like you drifted off there for a bit.”
“Maybe.”
“You know what, my man?” says Sam. “You’re a good lookin’ kid, but you’re too like . . . sensitivo. Lookin’ a little green around the gills. You know what I’m a sayin’?
“I’ll be all right, I say,” but in my weakness, I feel compelled to check myself, to reconfirm my own masculinity, much as I had done in high school and college with my sexual conquests. And by the time we get to Hermosillo, the sweltering capital of Sonora, I have just about decided I’m going to have you, Maggie, somewhere along the line, just to prove that I can do it, just to cut this big fucker down to size.
Across a wide white plain as flat and featureless as any on earth we sight the blue Sea of Cortéz. At four o’clock that afternoon, we pull into the dusty, nondescript town of Guaymas, Sonora. I stay in the car while Sam and you get out to look for a hotel. You are still not speaking and ignore each other as you did yesterday. You find a modernistico little place at the far end of the beach and signal me to drive down to meet you. I am tempted to drive right past the both of you and straight down the road, but I do as I am bid.
Sam gets us adjoining rooms on the third floor of the hotel, overlooking the sea, and we all have a siesta and a shower. At dinnertime I am left alone with the bags. Sam comes in about midnight and immediately throws off his clothes and falls on the bed. It’s as if the patter that he lays down everyday saps his energy, and he hasn’t much left over at night.
“So, what’re you waiting for, man?”
“Yeah, I guess I’ll go and get something to eat.”
“Unless you got something else on your mind.”
“What?”
“Go ahead,” Sam says, waving me out of the room. “I’m gonnasmoke me some weed and crash.”
I find you at the bar, Maggie, slightly tipsy, and delighted to see me. The hotel kitchen is closed, so we take a stroll down the beach to an open-air restaurant where I gorge myself on tortillas. You are bare-legged again, barefoot, with your espadrilles dangling from your pinky finger. And by now I have convinced myself that I am more than a little in love.
On the way back to the hotel we sit down on a pile of fresh sawdust, near the whale-like skeleton of a half-constructed tuna boat, to smoke some pot. We sit quietly, watching the little curls of waves, the phosphorescence in the water, and the moon as it rises over the Sea of Cortez.
“Come on,” you say, “how about a moonlight swim?”
We strip to our underwear, hang our clothes on the spars of a fishing boat, race across the beach, and plunge into the waves, which we find amazingly warm and sticky with brine.
“Let’s go!” you holler. “Let’s go way, way out!”
We swim all the way to Point Kino and back. When our feet find sand again we come together in the water and kiss. You are slippery in my arms, and taste of salt. I run my hands down the curve of your hips and buttocks. I start to slip your panties down.
“No,” you moan, pressing yourself to me. “No.”
You break away and run for the beach. I sprint after you, kicking spray, and catch you in the shallows. We trip and fall in a heap, kissing again, thrusting at each other instinctively, rolling in the sand.
“No,” you say again.
Is the show of resistance meant to be overcome, or what?
You escape my arms, crawl out of the water, and race for your clothes, your body sleek and undulant in the moonlight.
We dress and smoke some more marijuanaby the fishing boat while our clothes dry.
A couple of times I am tempted to throw you down in the sawdust, but all we do is engage in small talk.
“Suppose you wonder why he trusts you so much,” you say on the way back to the hotel.
“It has occurred to me.”
“Part of the pattern. He does it with everyone, even his law partner. It’s not that he really trusts people. He just likes to throw temptation at them and see how they react.”
“What for?”
“Buggered if I know. All part of the test, I guess.”
“How long have you been together?”
“Not long. Caught me at a weak moment, actually. Hadn’t a clue what I was getting into. Then I suppose it was simply that no one else came along. I have no one to rely on, you see.”
“You can rely on me.”
“Oh, Eddie, you’re sweet. But you’re too young.”
“I’m old enough.”
“Are you? I fancy you are. But you haven’t got any money, have you?”
“I will have, someday. I’m going to be a writer.”
“A writer? Good grief, you’ll never support a woman on a writer’s salary! God preserve us from the arts! I ought to know. And besides,” you say, “I’m sick of stories. Got ‘em coming out of my ears.”
“Are they true, do you think?”
“Never been able to find out one way or the other.”
“Haven’t you got any idea?”
“I can only judge by the way he acts.”
“How does he act?”
“He has fantasies, Eddie. Action, drama, mystery…. part of the hoodlum act. I mean, he likes to pretend he’s this really ethnic Italian, but I happen to know that his mother was a German Jewess. I’ll give you another example of what I mean. He’s got a very lucrative law practice, but probably half his clients are dope dealers who refuse to pay him in anything but cash. Since most of it is untraceable, Sam pockets it without declaring it to the IRS. Every year or so, when his wall safe overflows, he packs a suitcase full of money and carries it out of the country. Deposits it in this secret numbered account he’s got in some Panamanian bank down in Acapulco. He doesn’t really need to do all this, you see. He makes more than enough money above the board, yah? And it’s rather stupid as well, I should think, because eventually the IRS is going to catch up with him. But he loves his ‘caper,’ as he calls it, and he wouldn’t give it up for the world. I think in his daydreams he sees himself as an international wheeler-dealer, a Mafia don or something.”
“Well why don’t we do him a favor, then?” I ask. It just pops out. I had no intention of saying any such thing.
“What?”
“Why don’t we take it?”
“You’re kidding.”
“What do you think?”
“Still,” you say, “wouldn’t it be something? Serve him right, as well. Oh Lord, what I wouldn’t give to see his face. And I wouldn’t feel a qualm, you know. He bloody well owes it to me. For sitting there listening to him for all these months.”
Later, after you’ve gone off to your room, I can hear you and Sam whispering through the wall.
“You get it on with the kid?”
“None of your business.”
“I make it my business.”
“You’re a nasty business.”
“That’s right,” he says. “I’d like to watch. And then I’d like to fuck you both.”
I am treated to the next installment of the seemingly endless Sam the Man Story in the morning, on the desertGuaymas and Navajoa, while you, Maggie, nap in back:
“So, she walks in the office, man, and instantly I dig she’s been beat for the yolk. I try to figure some way to get her producers on breach of contract, but it’s no good. As a financial proposition, she’s a total loss. As a movie actress, she’s all washed up. End of story. It’s all a game. I take her in out of the goodness of my heart and….”
“I thought the lawyer-client relationship was supposed to be confidential,” you remark, waking from your nap.
“Glad you reminded me of that, Chicken.”
“Must’ve slipped your mind.”
“Won’t let it happen again… if you don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The rules of confidentiality. They apply to you just as they apply to me.”
“Have you been sneaking around again, Sam, sticking your nose where you hadn’t ought?”
“Any more shit from you, bitch, and you go out.”
“Right, you’re the captain of the ship.”
“Believe it.”
“Just keep talking. That’s what you’re good at.”
“It’s when the talk stops. That’s when you gotta look out.”
“Never known it to stop yet.”
A few seconds later, Sam turns off the main highway and heads up a dirt road toward a forest of giant Saguaro cactus trees spread across the lower slopes of a high flat mesa. He drives into the middle of the forest and parks the car.
“Get out,” he says.
“What for?”
“I’m gonna murder you,” he says. “Never mind what for. Get out.”
Reluctantly, you climb out of the backseat. Sam pulls a blanket from the trunk and joins you by the side of the car.
“Come with me.”
“Where we going?”
“I’m gonnahave your ass.”
“Oh no you’re not.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Yeah,” you say, and kick him in the shin with the sharp toe of your high-heeled sandal.
He drops the blanket and slaps your face, hard.
You start to cry.
If you called out, or even looked my way, I would go to your aid. As it is, I figure it’s something between the two of you. Also, there is something ritualistic in your exchange which leads me to believe that there have been other such dramas in the past.
Sam picks up the blanket.
“No, I don’t want to!”
“You don’t know what you want,” he says, dragging you off into the cactus. “I gottashow you what you want.”
“I don’t want this.”
“You do.”
“I don’t.”
“Then I’ll take it.”
You fight him all the way until he gets your panties down. The silence of the desert is so profound that I can hear everything.
Your surrender is magnificent.
As soon as it’s over, though, I can hear you shrieking at him again.
But it doesn’t stop him from doing it again.
Halfway through the second session, I can’t take it anymore. Figure it’s either drop the Caddy in low and disappear with the loot ormasturbate. The thing that tips the scales is I think I hear air escaping. I’d look ridiculous trying to run off with a flat tire.
Later, after I’ve whipped it off and smoked some more dope, I notice that another twenty-dollar bill has dropped to the floor on the driver’s side. I think about it for a while and finally decide to take it. Figure it’s part of my retainer.
Then all of a sudden, I feel very, very high. As high as the sky. I enter the heart of aneagle flying a thousand feet above the desert. I watch the Hollywood couple fighting and frigging in the Saguaro forest, and the Caddy parked on the white dirt road, and the faithful but furtive little retainer inside, groping on the floor for the twenty-dollar bill that the boss has dropped.
“Bullshit,” I say, and get out of the car. I check the left rear tire and find that it has indeed gone flat. I open the trunk, get out the jack and the spare, and set about methodically changing the tire. It seems like it takes me a hundred years. As I’m finishing up, I can hear the lovers coming back through the cactus.
“I hate you, Sam.”
“All I do is show you what you are, Chicken.”
“You make me less than I am. You have a talent for that.”
I put away the flat tire and the jack and climb in behind the wheel.
“Where you goin’, honcho?”
“Mind if I drive?”
“Naw. Thanks for changing the flat.”
“Nothing to it. We’ll have to stop in Navajoa to get it fixed, though. These roads are murder on tires.”
Sam gets in back and goes back to sleep. You sit in front, shamefaced, pretending to look out the window.
I bide my time. About an hour out of Navajoa, Sam wakes up and says he’s gotta take a leak. He gets out, heads down the embankment and unbuttons his pants. I wait till he’s got it out, then step on the gas.
“Hey!” he hollers, with his dick in his hand. “Where you think you’re goin’?”
“He’s got a good question there,” you say, Maggie, laughing, watching your boyfriend recede into the dust.
“Haven’t given it much thought.”
“Mind if I come along for the ride?”
We ditch the car in Navajoa and take a train to Mazatlán. On the way I don’t have much to say. I’m a bit shocked at what I’ve done.
You, on the other hand, you stay high, and it’s hard to tell how you feel, one way or the other.
Arriving in Mazatlán late that night, we check our bags at the station and catch a taxi to the central plaza. As it happens, it’s fiesta time, the feast day of the city’s patron saint, and the town is jumping. That is to say, the rich and middle class of the locality have hired some mariachi bands, tanked themselves up on tequila, and are living it up in the bars that line the beach while the poor – the vast majority of the population – look on in solemn disbelief, or attempt to sell them trinkets.
But you and I, Maggie, we get adopted by a young German-Mexican brewer and his wife almost immediately, and we are swept about the wealthier sections of the town in a whirlwind of party-going. Though the gaiety is frantic, the dancing and drinking wild and abandoned, neither you nor I feel much like partaking. We allow ourselves to be led around, introduced, displayed, chatted to, danced with, without really feeling much. In fact, we are overcome by a kind of fatal inertia, as if we are merely waiting for Sam, or the law, to catch up with us.
Dawn finds us strolling along the public beach, barefoot and hung over. We decide to walk out to the end of the breakwater to catch a little breeze and watch the sun come up out of the Sierra Madre. On the way, we run into a Nahuatl Indian couple from the mountains. They’re sitting on a rock, cross-legged, in native costume. They’ve got a huge pile of marijuana in front of them, and they’re sorting the stems from the leaves. The man smiles at you, and me, and asks if we’d like to sample his wares. I say we would be delighted, but that we don’t have much cash on us. The man says, “No importa,” and proceeds to roll us all a corn husk cigarette stuffed with his best.
We join the Indians on the rock and sit there smoking with them for most of the morning, chatting about this and that: the weather, the boats on the water, the porpoises we can see bubbling in the channel. By noon we are wasted. We can barely stand. But the Indian couple have not once shifted their position on the rock or ceased their skillful culling of the stems from the leaves.
“Bye-bye,” you say.
“For the road,” the Indian says, and solemnly bestows upon you a half-kilo of marijuana in a cornmeal sack.
“Gracias,” I say, and guide you slowly, unsteadily back to the city.
We catch a taxi to the railway station and retrieve a couple of bags, including the one with Sam’s loot. On a lark, we agree to take the first train that comes along, no matter which way it’s going. As it happens, it is bound for Guadalajara. We find a couple of seats in first class, curl up, and we don’t know a thing until the train reaches Guadalajara Central, at eight o’clock that night.
We leave the train, roll ourselves a fat one in the parking lot, and start again where we left off in the morning. This time the first train that comes along is the Colima Express. It’s packed, but we find a space in a third-class car full of Mexican Army soldiers. They’re heading out to evict a band of militant squatters from a rich landowner’s property and are weighted down with combat gear, including loaded M-1 rifles and twelve-inch bayonets.
As the train rolls out of Guadalajara and winds its way into the mountains, the soldiers begin sniffing and exchanging glances.
“¿Quientiene la mota?” they shout. “Who’s got the grass?”
“What’s going on?” you want to know.
“It’s our bag. They smell it.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“We offer them some, if we’re smart,” I say, and send her over to pour a quarter-kilo into the corporal’s kit bag.
“Muchas gracias, señorita.”
“Don’t mention it,” you say in English, flashing your most photogenic smile.
And for a while everything is fine. The soldiers smoke and laugh and joke amongst themselves and break into their K rations and gorge themselves on Hershey chocolate. Someone brings out a bottle of tequila and soon they are singing. The songs get louder and louder, lewder and lewder, and presently the soldiers are ogling you, Maggie, inviting you to come over and ride on their laps.
“Maybe we ought to display a more neighborly spirit,” I say.
“You think that’ll do it, eh? All right, let’s roll a couple of numbers and join the party.”
“Señores, may I have the honor of presenting my wife?”
The gesture serves to defuse some of the sexual tension, but it does nothing to diminish the noise level. In fact, your proximity tends to make them even more rambunctious, and soon they are competing for your attentions by firing their weapons out the windows, and screaming, “¡Muerte a los officiales! Death to the officers!”
And then, to uproarious laughter – “¡Mátalos, mátalos! Kill them! Kill them!”
The conductor comes forward and tries to make them see reason, but when he encounters resistance he withdraws to wire ahead for reinforcements.
When the train pulls into Tuxpán a whole platoon of national police is drawn up on the station platform. We exit from the other side of the car while the train is still in motion and make our way swiftly out of town. Soon we find ourselves walking down a long, straight, white-sand road in the light of a full moon.
“Where we going?”
“Damned if I know.”
“These bags are going to get heavy.”
“You mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have never been higher in my life, Maggie.”
“I’ve never felt closer to . . .”
“God?”
“Death.”
“Same thing.”
“Of course,” you say, and we laugh together in the silence.
Then the cacti around us melt down and ooze into the cracks in the stone walls beside the road. And suddenly there are a million moons in the sky. The white road stretches away in the white moonlight to infinity. At the end of infinity is a tiny speck that grows larger and larger and becomes a rural policeman riding a mule, with an old Springfield rifle resting on the pommel of his saddle.
We walk straight past him; not even sure he is real.
He isn’t sure that we are real, either. He blinks his eyes, passes his hand over his face, and sniffs the air. He waits till we are fifty meters down the road before he can clear his voice to speak.
“¡Alto!” he shouts. “Stop!”
We just keep right on going. The white road stretches out in front of us again between the cacti and the stone walls, into infinity.
“¡Alto, alto, alto!”
The voice keeps getting smaller and smaller behind us. Finally, it becomes almost pathetic, almost begging us to stop.
“Alto. . .”
Then we hear the report of a rifle shot. The air cracks between us and whistles away into the distance. The cacti quiver in fright and hide among the rocks.
But you and I, Maggie dear, we keep right on walking, one foot ahead of the other, too high to die.
We walk for another hour or so and then an apparition rises in the moonlight before us – a pair of tall conical mountains, one crowned with snow, the other spouting fire.
Without a word between us, we know that this is our ultimate destination.
At the base of the volcano there’s a saw mill, a lumberyard and a small village. We awaken the proprietor of the company store and rent a room for the night. In the morning we find that a stone refuge hut exists high in the mountains, and that it can be rented for twenty pesos a night.
“Sam won’t find us there.”
“Not in a million years.”
We spend the day buying firewood and provisions and arranging with the lumber company for a fifteen-day occupancy of the refuge hut. Next morning, we hire a guide and a couple of donkeys and set out for the mountain. And we don’t stop until we’ve reached the stone house, on a saddle of black rock at nine thousand feet, between the fire and the snow.
We send the guide and the donkeys back to town. We watch the sun go down. We smoke some more dope. We eat. We drink. We have delicious sex. We sleep.
The next day we look at the view. We can see a hundred miles to the north and south. We can see the entire state of Colima, including the coffee plantations on the slopes of the volcano, the coastal banana plain, and the black Pacific littoral.
In the afternoon we make love again, hungrily, and sleep the dreamless sleep of the drugged. We sit up all night smoking dope, not talking, only touching. There is not a sound in the world but our own breathing – sometimes slow, sometimes fast. No people. No machines. No animals. No insects. No plants. No wind. No rain. The air is amazingly balmy and warm.
We stay on the mountain for two weeks, and when we come down I know very little more about you, Maggie, than I did when we came up. Yet I am convinced I know all there is to know.
Your real name is not Maggie Wells. It’s Maya Kovaks. You are one-quarter Mohawk Indian, three-quarters Slovak, and hail from Ottawa, Canada. You have a basically sunny disposition, a great sense of humor, and a special feeling for children, animals, poor folks, Mexicans and Black people. Your education is sketchy, your mental powers unremarkable. You have very little curiosity, and rarely come up with an idea of your own. What you do is – you react. But you react beautifully, instinctively, playing my sounds right back at me, with maybe an inspired little riff of your own at the end. Yet, all appearances to the contrary, you are not a shallow person. In fact, I find you very deep. As deep and empty as the Sea of Cortéz. You’re so empty that you are… profound. You’re like space. You are everywhere and nowhere. You are anything and everything. You’re whatever I want you to be, and I know you were the same for Sam.
I want you sweet, you coo like a dove. I want you salty, you nearly claw my eyes out. I want you soft, you lie there with a smile on your face and I never know when you come. I want you hot, you work me over like the best.
You’re a nature girl, a goddess of love. Why else would they want to make you a movie star? In the end I grow to fear you: Without meaning to, with all the best intentions, you might swallow me up without a trace.
“It was great,” I say, when we catch the train for Guadalajara.
“Yes, it was. I’ll never forget it.”
“Where you headed now, Maggie?”
“Home, I should think.”
“Back to Sam?”
“For a while, perhaps. And you?”
“Hey,” I say. “I’ve barely started.”
“Oh, of course, that’s right. You’re on your way round the world backwards, aren’t you? Well, you know, I’d be happy to share some of his money, love, but I’m afraid he’d kill me if I did.”
“Don’t even think about it,” I say. “I started with nothing, and I’ll probably end up with nothing. It’s all part of the trip.”
“Yes,” you say, laughing. “All part of the trip, isn’t it? I like that.”
“End of story,” I say, laughing back. “It’s all a game.”
In Guadalajara you take a train north, and I start hitching south. With your aggrieved lover Sam in mind, I travel fast, and within a few days I cross over the Guatemalan border.
A quarter of a century later, I will use you as the model for Val Raymond, the faded movie star in one of my lesser novels. I have no idea whether you read it or not. For years I hoped you wouldn’t, but by now I guess it doesn’t matter much, since at ninety-three years old you are either in your dotage, or in your grave.
