“Ben doesn’t like people grabbing hold of him,” Mrs. Knighton explained with a little air of pride.
“He walked back on his heels with his hands clapped on top of his head. Then he shook himself like a wet dog, and I knew from his eyes he was going to make a try for me, so I walked into him while he was getting organized and popped him again the same way but harder. He went down onto one knee and I told him to stay off my site from then on. I could tell from his color it had made him sick to his stomach. He looked at me and knew I meant it. He went away and I went back to tightening the nuts under the hood. Then he pulled out about two weeks later because Tomas wouldn’t rent to him for another month.”
“How bad off was the Bowie girl?” Meyer asked him.
“Bad. Passive, dirty, confused. Disoriented.” Laura Knighton said, “She seemed withdrawn and dull and listless. Stringy hair and a puffy face and bad color. I’d say she looked fifteen years older than that picture you’ve got. One of the retired couples hitched up and moved out because of her. She had… a habit they didn’t take to.”
“Don’t get so fastidious, darling, nobody knows what you’re trying to say. If that girl was walking slowly across that site over there and had an urge to pee, she’d pull up her skirt and squat wherever she was, unconscious as a dog in a cemetery.”
“Then,” said Laura, “there was that one day she had a blouse on and forgot her skirt or pants or whatever she was going to wear. And the little dark girl came running out and got her by the hand and tugged her back and got her inside and got her dressed the rest of the way. The poor lost thing is dead now, and I can’t help saying it. I think it’s for the best, just as I think the guitar player is better off dead, no matter what sorrow his folks may be feeling for him. They’d have no way of knowing how bad off he got toward the end.”
I said, “It would be a help if you knew how we could locate any of the others, Rocko or Jerry or Miss McLeen.”
“I wish we could help you,” Ben said.
“I did see that truck and the camper that day, dear,” she said.
“You maybe saw a blue truck with an aluminum camper body.”
“That is exactly what I saw!”
He went into the trailer and brought out a large map of the State of Oaxaca, and also brought along his work journal to pin down the date. In one part of the historical novel he was finishing, a young Mixtec priest from Mitla flees all the way down the long slope of the Sierra Madre del Sur to the Pacific coast a hundred and fifty miles away. He had decided the imaginary priest would follow the dry bed of the Rio Miahuatlan, and so on Tuesday, August 5th, over three weeks ago, they had driven the Rover south along the road to Puerto Angel as far as Ocotlan, and then headed east on a road that was barely more than a dusty trace. Where it was blocked by a rock fall, they had gone ahead on foot. They had climbed a ledge and surveyed the country to the east with a pair of seven power binoculars. When he had gone wandering off, she had picked up a dust swirl far to the east, appearing and disappearing across rolling country. She had steadied the glasses and identified it as a blue truck with an aluminum truck body or camper on it.
“I was terribly curious about it because it was goIng so fast,” she explained earnestly. “Mexicans will drive like maniacs on paved roads, but when they get onto dirt roads they positively creep, because if they break springs or anything in the holes or on the rocks it is so terribly expensive to replace them. And tourists in this country drive very carefully when they get off the paved roads. And anyway, what would there be over there to attract a tourist. I mean it was just so unusual I was interested and I wondered about it. I decided the driver was drunk or it was some terrible emergency.”
He showed us on the map where the road had to be, but there was not even a dotted line on the map. It had been headed south, Mrs. Iznighton said. It had to be some road that turned south of 190 somewhere beyond Mitla, maybe as far as the village of Totolapan. Distances, he said, were very deceptive in the dry, high air. “But the chance of it being Rockland?” He shrugged.
We thanked them for the good coffee and the talk. He talked a little bit about his book. We wished him luck.
As we walked out, Tomas, the manager, was unlocking the store and the office. He was delighted to serve us by looking up the date he had copied from the vehicle papers on Rockland’s truck. Yes indeed, the permit had been issued at Nogales on April 10th, and was thus good for yet another month and a half.
As we drove away Meyer made listless agreement with my observation that the Knightons seemed like nice people. He seemed dejected. I knew what was wrong with him. The picture they had given us of Bix Bowie had been vivid, ugly, and depressing. I could not get him to talk. He did not feel like going to Mitla to look for Jerry Nesta. He seemed to want to go back to the cottage at the Victoria, so I skirted the center of town, drove up there. He plumped himself into a porch chair, sighing. I put on swim pants and walked up through the noon sun and swam slow lengths of the big handsome pool, staying out of the way of the young’uns who came squealing down off the diving tower. I dried off in the sun on a towel spread on the fitted stones of the poolside paving. The high altitude sun had a deep stinging bite to it that went all the way down through all the old layers of Gulfstream tan.
I opened small gates and let the immediate sensory memories of Becky flow into my mind. By rights I should have felt even more surfeited and exhausted than before. But though this weariness was deep, it seemed more gentle, with a spice of male arrogance, of satisfaction, of knowledge of satisfaction given in full measure.
She had been simpler, softer, more feminine somehow. She had been involved more with herself and her own reactions and timings. Before, we had used me, and this time we had used her, first in partial- measures and at last in a final full measure which had been, she said, more than she had wanted to spend.
Later we had talked in a sleepy way of half sentences, and the sound of her shower had awakened me. I slept again, and was awakened by the kiss that was good morning and good-by, sat up to see her standing tall and smiling nicely, dressed in orange linen, white leather hatbox in her hand.
“You were very wicked, darling. I am utter ruin. It will take a week to mend my puffy old face. But I feel buttery delicious. And you are very dear. Afterward, remember, we chuckled together at nothing. Just at feeling nice. That is rare and very nice.”
“And now you turn the page, Becky?”
“Yes. But I shall turn the corner down. One of the special pages that I go back and look at sometimes. Take good care, lamb.”
When she got to the door I said, “You are…”
She turned, waiting for the rest of it. “Yes?”
But how to tell her she had achieved her aim in life? And wouldn’t she be aware of it anyway? “You are completely Becky.”
“Hmm. Rather nice that. Some are totally barmy. And I am completely Becky. Really no other way to say it, is there? Keep well, luv.” She waggled her fingers at me, slammed the door smartly, and soon thereafter rammed the Lotus up the slope with thunderous verve.