Meyer tried him on the other names. Carl Sessions, musician. Jerry Nesta, sculptor.
Wally McLeen said he might have met them and talked to them, but he didn’t remember those names. He had asked everyone about Minda. He had shown them her picture. And he had added up the little crumbs of information. She had gone alone to Mexico City. She would be back one day. He would wait. If, instead, she showed up in Youngstown, a friend would cable him. He looked at his watch. Some of his new young friends were expecting him. He said he would look us up and let us know if he learned anything interesting, anything that might make that poor girl’s father feel better.
Enelio Fuentes appeared promptly at two, and he had Sergeant Carlos Martinez with him. Martinez, a squat, broad man with very dark skin and several gold teeth, was in civilian uniform. We all got into Enelio’s car, a new Volkswagen squareback sedan, custom-painted a strange metallic purple. Enelio took the wheel. Meyer and the sergeant sat in the back. Siesta traffic was light, and Enelio wasted no time scooting north to Route 190, the Pan American Highway, where he turned right on the road toward Mitla. About a mile beyond the city limits he turned left on State of Oaxaca Route 175, and began streaking across the flats at astonishing speed toward the lift of the high brown mountains.
“I didn’t know these things had so much snap,” I said, speaking loudly over the sound of wind and engine.
“They don’t. We put a Porsche engine in this one, race tuned, man. Heavy duty springs and shocks. Disc brakes. I can make Mexico City from Oaaiaca In five and a half hours. Hey, how do you like it? See? One eighty kilometros which is… a hundred and ten.”
When we hit the first curves and began climbing, I was able to relax. Roaring along the straights proves nothing. On the curves he proved the nice mating of man and machine. He found the right track around every curve. He was showing off and enjoying himself, and it was a pleasure to watch. But it certainly was one hell of a road. It was very narrow asphalt and the climb grew steeper and steeper, with switchbacks, cuts, and no banking on the turns, and not a sign of a guardpost. Ahead I would get glimpses of our road halfway up the next mountain, a little man-made ledge with a rock wall on one side and mountain air on the other. Sometimes I could see where we had been, and it was like an aerial view of a road.
We met two buses hurtling down the mountains, and passed one old truck grinding its way up in low-low-low, radiator steaming. The sergeant told Enelio we were getting very near the place. Enelio slowed down and soon found a place to pull off the road, on the outside of a curve where the car was visible from both directions. We got out and chunked the doors shut. The silence was enormous, the air thin, chilly and very pure:
We followed the sergeant about a hundred and fifty yards further up the road to the next curve. He sat on his heels and pointed at a black rubber skidmark on the asphalt. The mark ran off the asphalt and he pointed to some small bushes with broken branches. The branches dangled and the leaves had turned brown. It was easy to see where the car had come back onto the asphalt. We walked back down the slope and saw where she had gone across into the wrong lane and off the road. He pointed to the yellow paint marks on the rock wall and, a hundred feet further, to some oddly shaped skid marks on the road, like gigantic commas. He made a fast circular gesture with his hand, fingers down, like somebody stirring something in a bowl. Then he made a thrusting gesture with his hand toward the precipice indicating how it had shot out over the edge. Giving me a broad golden grin, he said, “Too fassss!”
Yes indeed. It was vivid. She lost it on a downhill curve to the left, maybe because the curve was sharper than she had anticipated. She fought for control but went across at a long angle and hit the stone cliff, bounced off it into a spin, and shot backwards or forwards-it didn’t matter which-over the edge at maybe a forty-five degree angle, and maybe a hundred feet short of the next curve, also left-hand, where the purple tiger was parked.
The sergeant led me to the brink and pointed down. I could not see what he was pointing at. He spoke to Enelio. Enelio shaded his eyes and looked. “Hey, I see it. Travis, you see those three little bushes that grow out of the edge of shale down here, near that round rock? Okay, now about ten feet to the right of the three bushes, and a little way back up the slope…”
I saw it. A few smears of yellow paint on sharp edges of rock, and a twinkling of broken glass among the rocks, and a gleaming piece of twisted chrome trim. So that’s where it hit first, but the next bounce had to take it out of sight of where we were.
The sergeant walked us down past the purple car, and pointed down at an angle toward the valley floor. From there it was easy to spot the car, or what had been a car. If you took one of those matchbox toy cars and put it on top of the charcoal and cooked steaks for a whole party, then retrieved the little car and stepped on it with your heel, you’d have a pretty good imitation of what was lying in the valley.
“How did they ever get the body?”
“They came down from the other side. There’s our road over there. That’s where the bus was when they saw the flame when she hit. You can see from here it’s not as steep to get down, or as far.”
“How was identification made?”
“By Madame Vitrier.”
“That’s in the report, Enelio. I mean what condition was the body in?”
He questioned the sergeant. Finally he turned back to me and swallowed in a sickly way and said, “She was half in and half out of the car, charred from the waist up, and chopped up pretty bad, man. There was a silver chain on her ankle Madame Vitrier identified, and a red shoe that was hers, fifty feet maybe from where they found the car and the body. Didn’t find the other shoe.”
“Why was she way up in these mountains? Enelio, this damned road must climb four thousand feet in fifteen miles.”
He turned and pointed. Through a notch in the hills we could see the far valley and the smoke misted shimmer of the city. “Five thousand feet above the sea. Up here we are… maybe eight thousand and a half? Yes. Ten, twelve kilometers more and we are at the top. The puerto, like the gate or the pass. At Relon. Ten thousand, two hundred and seven. I remember from the sign. Little houses here and there. Mountain people. Very sweet. Very cruel. Ah, this is one evil road, Travis. Every year two, three, four vehicles go over. Most of the time everyone dead. Six years ago a bus with eighteen persons. Why would she come up here? Maybe for the same reasons when I was… seventeen? Yes. On an English motorcycle. Early, early in the morning, I went down this crazy road, man. I was yelling. It was a great excitement. It was speed and death and terror. It was a rhythm, Travis McGee. Lean into one curve, lean into the other. Fantastico! Like when it is the very best of sex, like the mountains are all part of the body of a great brooding woman. Way down, near the bottom, somehow the wind got under the goggles, blew them crooked, one eye covered, one eye in the wind, so the tears were running. I think there was a little stone I did not see. Zam! I am turning in the air. Smash into trees. Fall. Broke this wrist. See? It is never quite straight again. Blood running out of my hair. Hey I walked down the road, holding this broken wrist like so. I walked with a big grin and I was singing, and they came out of the huts and dtared at the crazy fellow. I had been to visit death, my friend, and had a taste of it and I was alive and I would live forever, and finally see death again and say, ‘Remember me! You had me once, old woman, and you let me go!’” He grinned, picked up a stone, threw it over the edge. A truck came grinding and popping and grunting by us, and he waited until it went up around the corner Bix had missed and he could be heard again. “I think it was something like that for the girl. When you are young you drive up the mountains and you drive back down again.”