There was a time when I was not this way. But: was there not such a time for us all? Do we not all claim a moment before which we were not the ruint sons of bitches we have become? Do you want or need to hear of my unfallen state when you have your own? I think not. Let us get on with it. I like a rigorous schedule of mental and physical exercise which cannot be adhered to, and good cotton socks and good leather boots. That is all I need, and the dog. Mysticism is a sport that any good failed scientist of the West can be a good amateur in by simply breathing his normal empirical air and not worrying too much about his (inevitable) failure (at science). I have found a candy bar in my seat on the bus and am looking around to see what might be the consequences of eating it. I feel like I’ve found a case of cigarettes in a penitentiary. The bus is cool and the candy firm. I do not recognize the brand. It is probably Nestle in disguise. Or Coke. Nothing is simple. Capitalist raptors fly at seat level through the people’s bus. I fall on my candy bar like a hero falling on a grenade. It’s not bad, nutty with a bouquet of gasoline and lint.
We had a bus break and I got two chocolate-drink soda things, like the Yoo-Hoo in the States, but these look less, well, homogenous, more cacciatore. When I got back on the bus, one of the switchblade fellows was across my seat, with his feet in the aisle and his eyes slitted open to watch me react. I made a hand gesture that meant nothing, but amused his peers, and sat with a woman I know now to be a nurse. I offered her one of the coagulate Yoo-Hoos and to my surprise she accepted it, and to my further surprise she palmed me a pill, and to my further surprise I downed it, and to my further surprise it made me high in a solid quality oxycodone way. I was sorry to see the last of my runny Yoo-Hoo go. The bus was now winding precariously up into hills, and the livestock was restless, some of it running under the seats, and the tired civility of the folk was degrading into a workaday funk lending less charm to their colorful polyester clothes than you might have perceived had you been, say, a housewife from Oshkosh watching them get on the bus back in Matamoros and not getting on yourself but crossing back over the border in your rental car and sleeping the happy sleep of the well traveled in the TraveLodge with the sleepy-bear logo outside in calming neon and trademark-registered, waking once in the night when your husband suddenly was not beside you but relaxing immediately when he emerged from the bathroom, knowing it was his one nightly relief and that one at his age indicates no prostate alarum unless you are talking to the Cancer Society people, who tend to go overboard, but understandably, you suppose, and the nurse leaned to me as if falling asleep, and in fact had her head on my shoulder for a moment before she said, “Joo can come home me but do not see me your thing.” I nodded vigorously at this suggestion, oddly cheered by her directness, and very suddenly rather depressed by the paucity of my knowledge of Mexico and the paucity of my business being in it. What I knew: the name Zapata, which I was not sure was Mexican; the name Bolivar, ditto; Santa Ana, definite, but a large loser; Cortes wrecked somebody (Peru?) (Where does Pizarro fit in?); Aztec-Mayan mess, some Egyptian-like outfits without mathematics and not sure where they were; one word: perro, dog, but I also thought it might mean but (and I dearly hoped not, because finding a fifty-pound but was going to be at once easier and more complicated than finding a fifty-pound dog); and that Trotsky had been assassinated in Mexico City, which I got, with an ice ax, which I did not get. That was the sum of Mexico as I sat going home with a nurse in my quest for a large Chihuahua. All in all, it was a fair fix. If I kneecapped the first switchblade boy off the bus with my Yoo-Hoo bottle it might command the respect of the others. Then I could make a dignified retreat to the pill-filled lair of my wanton health-care professional and have a very nice evening at home. I could relish her want of material overcomforts, her spare rooms free of the blued noise of TV, her hard mattress, one sheet, two cups, two plates. Her red table and matching yellow chairs. Her one strand of beads, her butt.
If she saw me it. I could go out late for two more Yoo-Hoo, who knew. The world was opening up at this pinched lost end of it, opening up about a centimeter, but opening up.
We de-bused and the knife brigade came out, too, but were stopped by a vigorous look from the nurse, and one of them muttered Strega or something and they took off arunnin’. There was one other thing I knew about Mexico: some of the villages are inhabited by the dead. This I knew. Instinctively at first I hoped this village was not one of them, but then thought maybe that would be perfect, whatever that means, and what I think it means is you catch yourself in a dread common emotion and momentarily revolt: who in his right mind would prefer a village of normal Mexicans to one of the dead, on a purely anthropological basis, or perhaps forensic basis; the pill and the Yoo-Hoo had me going, and I put my arm around the nurse and we walked homeward looking like Mickey Rooney and a new wife. The thing is, I was feeling like Mickey Rooney with a new wife, and what I do not know about the emotions of Mickey Rooney is considerably less than what I do not know about those of Zebulon Pike, so we are on pretty firm ground. Mickey Rooney is the fifty-pound Chihuahua of actors, and that will do.
As casually as I could, I asked the nurse as we neared her place, “Is this a dead village?”
“Berry dead,” she said.
Inside, it was exactly as I had pictured it, except for the presence of a complex and shining Cuisinart on the red table. The nurse turned to me and blinded me in a rush of cinnamon and chocolate tones. I had no chance to show her my anything. I felt vaguely unfaithful somehow to Mrs. M. and specifically furious with myself for such a sloppy emotion. I owed Mrs. M. nothing and certainly had repaid Tod a thousandfold for the use of his lost trike. How, I wondered, supine on a hard, comfy pallet looking at a moonlit countryside outside a window I expected a zombie to window-peek us through any minute now, for we were gloriously naked and ashine with exertion, my health-care professional resting her head on the hollow of my neck, how could a grown man’s casual ride on a borrowed tricycle come to haunt so much of his life?
“Aches ’n’ pains?” my nurse said.