She wore a wine red hotel blanket gathered closely around her. She laughed and said, “It would take you hours to find where I hid my clothing, dearest.”
She dropped the blanket to the porch floor. “What is that quaint Americanism you people use? Peekaboob?”
I flapped a weak and frantic hand at the switches until I hit them back the way they were and we were in darkness. Well, shucks. And puh-shaw, fellas.
“That’s right,” I said, as she found me, locked on, and strained close. “Exactly right. Peekaboob. Very quaint old saying.”
Ten
I SAT out on the cottage porch in the Sundaymorning clang-bang of church bells and rooster announcements. Blue-gray smoke of breakfast fires hazed the morning bowl of the city.
Meyer came tentatively around the corner and looked up at me on the porch. Dopp-kit dangled from one hairy finger.
“Yoo-hoo,” he said.
“Yoo-hoo to you, too, my good man.”
“I didn’t see her car, so I thought… ”
“Come, on up. You live here, Meyer. Remember?”
So he came up onto the porch, started to say something, and changed his mind and went silently into the cottage. He came out in a few minutes and sat in the other chair.
“McGee, I thought that you had gotten back and somehow managed to send her on her way, implausible as that may seem. But I can see from the… the wear and tear… that she stayed for a while.”
“She went tottering out of here about forty minutes ago, Meyer. She claimed she could walk to her car unaided.”
“But… how do you feel?”
“Vibrant, alive, regenerated, recharged.”
“I… I’m sorry I let her talk me into moving out for the night, Travis. But I guess you know you can’t argue with that woman. She doesn’t listen. And after all, it was your personal problem and-”
“Stop apologizing, my good man. No trouble at all. Quite a pleasant night. Active, but pleasant. Now if you would pick me up and take me up to breakfast, we can begin the long day.”
We went back to Los Pajaros trailer park. The office and store were closed and locked. We left the rented car outside the gates and walked in. In the space numbered twenty, a Land Rover was parked under a tree with dusty leaves, near the travel trailer of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Knighton. The Rover was battleship gray, dusty and road-worn, with tools and gas cans strapped abroad.
He was sitting at an old table, typing with two fingers at respectable speed, apparently copying from,ycillow handwritten sheets. She was hanging some khaki shirts on a line to dry. They both stopped working as we approached, staring with an air of expectant caution. They could have been brother and sister, slat-thin young people, deeply sun-weathered, small statured, with colorless eyes, mouse hair, that elusive pinched and underprivilaged look around the mouth that seems typical of slum people, swamp people, coal mine people, and mountain people. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, and she had a plastic clothespin in her mouth. “Good morning!” I said.
He took off the glasses and she took out the clothespin. “Howdy” he said, in a voice more appropriate to a seven foot cowboy. “‘Morning,” she murmured.
“Sorry to bother you. My name is Travis McGee. This is my friend Meyer. The manager said you were acquainted with a man who stayed here for a while, right over there in number seventeen. His name is Rockland.”
“Why do you want to talk to me about him?”
“I thought you might have some information that would help us locate him, Mr. Knighton.”
“Why do you want to find him?”
“To ask him about a girl who came into Mexico with him.”
“Afraid you’re wasting time, Mister McGee, covering ground already covered. I think he should have told you he was already here over two weeks ago.”
“Who was here?”
“That girl’s father. What was his name, hon?”
“McLeen,” she answered softly.
“This isn’t about the McLeen girl. This is the girl we’re asking about.” I moved over to the table and handed him the picture.
He looked at it, tilting his head, squinting one eye. “I don’t want to tell you something that isn’t true. Maybe could you tell me this one’s name?”
“Bowie. Beatrice Bowie. She was called Bix.”
He was quick. “Was called. Then I wouldn’t be breaking news, would I? You know she’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“But you want to ask about her? You related to her?”
“No. Friends of her father. He’s unable to travel. He wants to know what things were like for her down here, before she died. They were out of touch.”
His wife had hung up the shirts. She came over to the table to look at the photograph. “Never knew she’d been such a pretty one,” said Mrs. Knighton.
“We don’t want to interrupt your work.” Meyer said.
Knighton studied us in turn. He shrugged and stood up, hand out. “I’m Ben. This here is Laura. Hon, you want to bring us out some of that coffee?”
“Surely,” she said. “We take it black with a little sugar.” We both nodded acceptance, and she responded with a thin smile and went into the travel trailer. The three of us moved over to the cement picnic table and benches that were, with the fireplace, part of the permanent installation at each site.
“Set,” Ben Knighton said. His wife brought coffee, poured it and sat with us. They were comfortable people. He explained that he was on a sabbatical year from Texas Central University, and it was nearly over, and they had to leave in a few days.
He was obviously fond of young people, and he was also well acquainted with the drug scene on campus. It was natural that they would be curious about the five young people who had arrived in the camper back in April.
“Some of them dabble a little, without knowing the least damn thing about what the direct effects and the side effects might be. And some of them turn into heavy users. So you give them what help you can, what help they’ll take from you. After a while you learn the categories. There’s the predators who get their kicks out of, turning the weaker kids on and taking monetary advantage or sexual advantage of them, or both. And some of the kids are such victims natural born, they seem to be looking for their personal predator. You can tell when a kid is so susceptible he is too far gone before you can manage to get to him. There’s a faculty expression. D.T.O.D. Down The Old Drain. Black humor, but so true. They slip through your fingers. I watched them, those five. Rocko is a predator, and one merciless son of a bitch.”
“Ben!” she said.
He smiled at her. “Honey, I’ve been writing this novel for a year. I have to talk like a novelist, don’t I?”
“But you don’t have to sound like the dean of men.”
“Rocko seemed clean as far as I could tell. He hit the bottle sometimes, which is a good indication he was clean. And he is one mean drunk. Jerry, the one with the black beard, I’d label a semi-predator. He was on something, and getting closer to getting hooked on it every week. That’s the way the predators turn into victims. The guitar player, Carl, was already way down the old drain. The blond girl, Bix, didn’t look much like her picture any more. She wasn’t too many steps behind Carl. The McLeen girl seemed to be on stimulants of some kind. She was burning herself up.”
Mrs. Knighton shuddered. “That Carl used to sit over there under that tree and think he was playing the guitar. But there weren’t any strings on it. And when the wind was from that direction, you could hear his long dirty fingernails rattling on the wood where the strings should have been.”
“Cats tire of crippled mice that can’t scamper any more,” Ben said. “Sessions left, and then one day the girls were gone. But there was a fresh supply available in town and they used to bring them back. They’d stay three or four days sometimes and then they’d leave. Rocko and Jerry weren’t a pair anybody’d want a permanent home with. Rocko was mostly bluff though. See those two tanks fastened there to the yoke of our house trailer? Gas tanks. Cooking gas. Twenty gallons each. That camper had been jacked off the truck and was on blocks. One day after Jerry had left, too, and Rocko was there alone, he drove back from town and found out somebody had pried open a little locked hatch in the back of the camper and stolen his bottled gas. He went storming around to all the sites, fussing about whether anybody saw the theft. He came over here, ugly, loud and mean. I was adjusting the fan belt on the Rover. I kept working and told him I didn’t know a thing about it. I guess he thought I should stand at attention when spoken to. So he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up and spun me around, and I came right around with the lug wrench I was using, and rang it off the top of his skull.”