I walked back to the cottage. Meyer said, “Would it be possible for you to stop smirking?”
“You have a foul manner today, Meyer.”
“Let’s give up on the whole thing, Trav. What the hell good are we doing? We can’t tell Harl any of this. She was on a gay adventure, full of plans and excitement and fun. Until the tragic accident. Let’s rehearse it. I don’t want to know any more about it. I knew that girl. She was a quiet, calm, decent kid. So she tripped and fell into this damned septic tank, and we don’t have to follow her any further into it, do we?”
“Can I tell you one thing I want to know?”
“You get compulsive about these things.”
“The sergeant found a boy who saw a man that afternoon back up in those mountains with Bix. Everything we’ve learned thus far tells us she was in no shape to drive down a six-lane highway across Kansas at high noon. But somebody let her bring a car down that mountain, or try to, at dusk. Is it any different than pushing her off a bridge? And with Harl, which would fester the longest, pure accident, self-destruction, or contrived murder? I think it’s something we ought to know before we leave this place.”
I watched him work it out. Finally he grunted and rubbed his eyes.
“So, I won’t get off just yet. I’ll ride to the next stop. But I don’t think I’ll like it any better than the whole ride up till now.”
Eleven
AFTER A hotel lunch, a few miles out of the city on the Mitla road we came upon El Tule, and Meyer said that he wanted to be a tourist for a few minutes, and look at the biggest tree in the world.
It was not far from the highway, a hundred yards perhaps. It dwarfed the old church nearby. I was astonished to see how rich and vital and green it was. Seemed to be of the banyan family. Elephant-gray bark. Glossy dark leaves. There was a low iron fence all the way around it. The trunk was maybe a hundred and fifty feet in circumference. It made better than an acre of shade.
Meyer stood absolutely still, staring up into the cool green shadowy places beyond the giant lower limbs. When he turned smiling toward me, I knew that the tree had restored his nerves and composure.
“At the time of Christ,” he said, “nobody was giving this tree a second look. It was just an ordinary little tree.”
“It looks as if it has decided to stay around awhile.”
“And I am going to come back here,” he said, “and I am going to paint myself blue, and I am going to live up there in the top of that tree forever.”
“Come on, Meyer. Ya vamonos.”
The knowledge of the huge black beard on Jerome Nesta simplified the search.
“El americano con una barba negra y grande. Un escultor. ”
Ah, yes. I have seen him. Yes, he goes often to the ruins. Also to the Museo de Arte Zapoteca, near the plaza and central market. No, I do not know where he lives.
We found an American student at the small museum. He was an archeology major from the University of New Mexico, an exchange student working on the continuing excavation and restoration program at the Mitla ruins. His name was Burt Koontz, and he was out in the rear courtyard, carefully washing and brushing the fragile shards of an old broken vase. He was burned to the rough red shade of roof tiles. He wore a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, and G.I. boots.
“I know Jerry. I mean as much as I guess you can get to know him. They let him come in and make sketches. He’s been sketching some of the old stone heads. I haven’t seen him around the last few days though. Maybe even a week. I couldn’t say for sure.”
He told us, as he worked, that he had been curious about Nesta. He was big and he moved carefully, as if he were convalescing from a serious illness. A Mexican girl always came with him. Young, but not pretty. One of those broad, stocky ones with the same kind of Indio face you see in the old carvings. She would sit with infinite patience under one of the trees and wait for him, then get up when he came out, and follow him, a few steps behind, usually carrying one of those baskets they take to the market.
He had the impression that Nesta was living over toward the south side of town, up one of those steep dirt streets to the left of the main road as you come in.
So Meyer and I trudged up and down a lot of steep little streets, and met with varying degrees of suspicion, indifference, and secret amusement. But with the help of pesos and persistence, we finally found the place, on Calle Alivera, halfway up the hill. There was a pink house that seemed to be crumbling away. There was a walled courtyard with a broken gate. In the courtyard were mounds of litter, a couple of dozen small noisy children, and some women squatting around a pump, several of them nursing the future members of the gang.
We had a twelve-year-old businessman who led us across to a room in a far corner with a door that opened onto the roofed gallery that extended along the side of the courtyard. It was a dark little room. There was a cement and plaster fireplace-stove built into one corner. There was a raised platform along the opposite wall, where pallets could be placed for sleeping. The little room was entirely empty. I could not get it through the boy’s head that I wanted him to speak slowly and clearly. So I had to make him repeat everything over and over until I thought I had the general idea.
The wife of the Americano was Luz. They had lived here many weeks. Then they had gone away. Three days ago. Four. Maybe they were married, maybe not. It was the same. They were poor. For marriage the priests and the government charge too much money, so one waits. The Americano had little Spanish. Luz had been married to a baker and had three sons. The baker and the three sons had died of enormous pain in the belly. Luz had the pain but had not died. The Americano seemed often sick. The room was five pesos a week. Maybe the Americano had sold his… I could not understand what it was that Nesta was supposed to have sold. He said it so many times he was getting discouraged and angry before I caught on. It was a gigantic head made of wood, taller than a man. The senor worked on it each day. It was a very curious thing. It was very ugly.
As near as I could tell, the giant head had been carried away by the senor and another big Americano, with great difficulty. And the tools and the cooking pots and the clothing and the beds. They all went away in a heap-di-row. In a what? Heap-di-row. What? Heap-di-row! Again, please? Heap-dirow! Heap-di-row!
He was close to tears with frustration. So I brightened his face with pesos. Once again as we crossed the courtyard the children fell silent, stopped all movement, and stared at us. The women pulled the edges of serapes together to hide the sleepy suck of small mouths.
And then, twenty-four miles back to Oaxaca, feeling glazed and unreal. When you stack into one day the biggest oldest tree in the world, a gigantic ugly wooden head, a magical disappearance in a heap-di-row, and a page with the corner turned down in the Book of Becky, it is time to start searching the hedgerows for Alice and that well-known rabbit.
I had been counting on a therapeutic Sunday siesta, one which might have lasted right through to Monday breakfast. But when we got back to the hotel, there was a message to call Enelio Fuentes and a number where he could be reached. He was at a party at something that sounded less than interesting, called the Commercial Club. I tried to beg off but he insisted. It was atop a great big new farm equipment agency building set back off the Oaxaca Puebla highway a mile or so beyond the city limits. He had said to drive around in back and go up the stairs in back. The cars were varied and impressive, parked back there.
When we walked out onto the gigantic roof, I saw why he had insisted. That part of it was called the Beach Club. There was a gigantic swimming pool with some kind of infernal device that created pretty good waves which broke on a realistic slope of sand beach. The high wall beyond the pool was painted to resemble a seascape. There were areas of lawn, small trees, fountains, cement sculpture, big bright beach umbrellas. There were several bars, and there were waiters in red coats, and there was a good trio working hard in the waning day. There were tennis courts and badminton courts, and the whole happy busy place was aswarm with jolly tanned Mexican businessmen with the same stamp of success as Enelio, but generally smaller and heavier, and the entire scene was bubbling and dancing with platoons of the vivid young girls that Enelio variously described as either cheeklets or crumpets. There seemed to be a difference, but I could not identify it.