“Police!” someone shouted. “Call the police!”
Mackay remembered the mounted policeman bearing down on him in the park years before. His impulse was toward flight. He imagined a summoned policeman coming down the stairs. He imagined his own panic-stricken flight to the dead end of the platform. He saw himself shot down.
Burning with fear and outrage, Mackay hurled himself up the stairway and shoved his way, bloody-handed, through the crowd. The people nearest him snarled in terror as he passed.
“Police!” someone else shouted. Mackay shook off a hand on his arm. Someone punched him from behind. The crowd seemed monstrous, like the mob in a Brueghel crucifixion. A driven creature, with fists and elbows, he cut his way up to the light.
Headlong into the intersection Mackay ran. Cars swerved and skidded to a halt around him. Scattering pensioners and pigeons in Verdi Square, he kept on, faster and faster; increasing speed with every block. For neither the first nor the last time then, he wondered just how far he would run and where it was that he thought to go.
PORQUE NO TIENE, PORQUE LE FALTA
La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha,
Ya no puede caminar
Porque no tiene, porque le falta
Marijuana par’ fumar.
THE WORDS came on the wind, an old woman’s voice.
“Ayeee! Es-cor-pee-o-nays!”
He was lying in a smelly hammock under the concrete veranda with a thermos jug of Coke and alcohol balanced on his bare belly; when he understood the words he raised his head and pushed back the brim of his baseball cap.
“Escorpiónes!”
His children were running through the dry brush between his house and the beach. In the fiery sunlight their speeding forms were brown blurs topped with the flax of sun-bleached hair He saw at once that they had not been bitten.
Doña Laura, the landlady, was calling to them from the roof of her house, where she had been hanging out black and white washing, warning them of the dangers of the brush. Doña Laura lived in fear of scorpions. She had lived among scorpions all her life and never been stung. Twice an hour she warned Richard and Jane away from them.
“No, no, no, no,” Doña Laura shouted. “Escorpiónes!”
He could picture the word in her mouth, shaped on the dry lips, shrilled from strained corded muscles in a brown throat.
Escorpiónes.
The day was clear and the mountains at all points of the bay glowed bright green, but far out to sea dark low clouds approached, discoloring the surface of the distant ocean. Before long there would be heat lightning and rain. He took a drink from the thermos, closed his eyes and shuddered. Swallowing made the sweat on his chest run cold.
His children shouted, safe on the dry white sand.
The changing color of the sea made him uneasy. In the past months he had developed an odd passion for constancy; he liked things to stay as they were. When it was light he did not want it to grow dark, in spite of the beauty of the ocean sunset, and when it was dark he did not care for dawn to come and reveal his existence and position. But the time of year for constancy had passed and he was learning to live with the rains.
As he watched the clouds darken the reefs beyond the bay, a blue shape rose furiously from the clear unclouded shallows and slapped over the surface like a flung slate toward the darker waters. He could see the winged shadow it cast.
He sat up, straddling the hammock, and squinted after it.
“Marge,” he called out.
After a moment his wife came out and stood beside him. She had pinned her light hair back behind her ears; the strands of hair on her neck were wet with perspiration. The white bikini she had made from a sheet was pasted to the curves of her body. There was tortilla dough on her hands.
“There’s a manta off Guardia rock.”
It seemed to take her a moment to understand. She turned slowly toward the bay with a faint polite smile and leaned forward over the patio wall, resting her elbows on the tile.
He watched her while she watched the water: she was alert from the shoulders forward; the rest of her body was lazily distributed in a balanced sprawl as though she had tossed it behind her. He had taken to observing her dynamics since she had caught the plague, in the course of which disorder her belly had become swollen and her long limbs wasted and spare. She and both of the children had suffered from the same disease — it was a variety of the local dysentery — and in its grip Marge and Jane and Richard had each commenced to dwindle away. Upon recovery, their flesh returned, and he had watched his wife regain the natural opulence of her body with dispassionate satisfaction. It was a visual diversion.
“Sure as shit,” Marge said.
She had seen the creature rise.
Fletch considered Marge’s response with distaste. It was a drag the way everyone had come to talk like a cowboy. Everyone called each other “hoss” and chuckled “haw haw,” country style. Goldang. It was Fencer’s influence. Fencer was a cowboy number.
“Fencer saw a manta ray while he was out swimming,” Marge said. “He was out by the rocks when he saw this big mother coming at him about twenty yards away. Started swimming for it with the wingspread bearing down on him. He says it was like the manta was trying to embrace him. A love trip, you know? Like this big slime thing was consumed with affection for Fencer and wanted to wrap him up and take him home. Fencer had his air gun. He says that would have been sad to have gut shot the thing and watch its poor fish face wrinkle up all disillusioned and die.”
“Fencer can’t possibly swim faster than a ray,” Fletch told her.
“What would it do if it caught you?” Marge asked. “Flap you to death? Butt you? Eat you?”
“We’ll find out when one catches Fencer;” Fletch said.
“Hey now, where are they?” She meant the children. She had caught their voices and cocked an ear to the wind.
“They’re on the beach. Doña Laura’s watching them.”
The bay had gone dark; the clouds came overhead, heavy with rain. Heat lightning flashed out to sea. On the north headland, Fletch could see the villa where Sinister Pancho Pillow lived etched in the sky’s sickly light; the hillside against which it stood had turned dark green.
Fletch became unhappy. He reached under the hammock, took his makings from a cedar box and began to roll a joint. Marge sat down beside him and for a few minutes they turned on and watched the storm gather. Marge drummed on her thighs, leaving a film of flour on the tanned skin.
“Fencer’s coming, you know,” Marge said.
Fletch extinguished the joint and lay sidewise on the hammock with his head beside the swell of Marge’s hip.
“Why?”
Marge looked down at him, blank-eyed.
“Well, to take you up to the volcano. You said you wanted to see it. He wants to take you.”
“I never said I wanted to see the volcano. I mean, I can see it from here.” The volcano was behind them, rising from the sierra. Fletch did not turn toward it.
“Fencer asked you just the other day. You said you wanted to go very much.”
“No such conversation took place,” Fletch told her.
The rain seemed to hang back. They sat in silence watching the clouds until they heard a car turn off the coast road. Fletch waited motionless until Fencer’s ‘49 Buick rolled up before the house.
Fencer was in the front seat beside Willie Wings; he was smiling happily at them, dangling one bare arm along the dusty surface of the car door. Fencer’s Buick was painted with thick blue and gold loops like the stylized waves of a Hokusai seascape.