“I say yes. Okay.”
“Without knowing, even! You remember at the place coming into Mitla at the right side, how I saw the mos’ lovely color shawl and cried out to all to look? There is no such color in the market here. I must have, Meyer. I must go and buy it in Mitla or it will be gone forever and never, never will I see another one.”
“So we will all go to Mitla. Right, Travis? No problem, ladies.”
“Please, wissout Elena,” said Elena. She put the back of her fist in front of a gigantic yawn. “You three are going. I am sitting and then up above sleeping, I think.”
“Okay,” I said. “Wissout McGee too, if you don’t mind.”
They didn’t mind. They took a cab up the hill to the hotel after I told Meyer to look for the Falcon keys on my bureau. We watched the people, few and slow-moving in the time of siesta.
“Asking one favor too? Okay?”
“Sure, Elena.”
“Maybe one little swimming in the so beautiful pool as before we were?”
I agreed. She went up and came down quickly with a little blue airline bag. We strolled over to the cab row on the post-office street and took a cab up to the hotel. She changed first in our cottage named Alicia, and came out in a narrow bikini that was a froth of rows of crisp horizontal white ruffles, and by the time I got up to the pool she was swimming, wearing a swim cap covered with vivid plastic daisies. People were baking in the sun, and except for some children in the shallow end, we had the pool to ourselves. She was an unskilled and earnest swimmer, rolling and thrashing too much, expending too much effort and trying to hold her head too high. I told her a few things that would help, and swam beside her. She learned quickly and was very pleased with herself and kept at it until she was winded and gasping. We climbed out and she pulled the cap off and said, “Now enough I think. Okay?”
We walked back down to Alicia, among the cottages below and beyond the pool, and I unlocked the door for her and sat on the porch while she went in to change. I heard the clatter as she closed the blinds.
“Tuh… rrrravis? Por favor, ayudarme? Thees dombo theeng is es-stock.”
So if something is es-stock, one must go in and un-ea-stock it for the lady. She was between beds and bath, back toward me, still in bikini, and she looked over her shoulder and indicated the snap or fastening or whatever at the back of the bikini top was es-stock.
So I went to her. She pulled her long dark hair forward and stood with head bowed. She held the bikini top against her breasts with her hands. There were two snaps hidden by ruffles. I put a thumbnail under one and it popped. I put a thumbnail under the other and it popped and the two straps fell, dangling down the side of her rib cage. She stood without moving. It was a lithe and lovely back. Droplets of water stood on her back and shoulders. Crease down the soft brown back. Pale down, paler than her skin, heaviest near the vertical furrow. The bikini bottom came around her just a little above the widest part of her hips, leaving bare that lovely duplicated tender concavity of the girl-waist, leaving bare two dimples in the sunhoneyed brown, half a handspan apart, below the base of her spine.
So the response is an acceptance, a dedication, a tenderness expressed by very slowly, very precisely, very carefully placing the male hands upon the slenderest part of the waist, thumbs resting against the back, aimed upward, parallel to the center division of the back, edges of the hands resting against that soft shelf where the hips begin to bloom. She shivered at the touch, then lifted her head and leaned back against me. I bent and kissed the top of her shoulder, close to her throat, felt the dampness of some tendrils of hair which the swim cap had not completely protected. She was breathing very steadily, audibly, deeply, and her eyes were heavy and almost closed when I turned her around and kissed her on the mouth.
“But… they might come back here,” I said. She gave a little shake of her head and spoke through soft blurred lips. “No, no. She will taking Meyer to the Marques to see dresses she bought. She trying them on for him, no hurry. Ah, she bought one hell of a lot of dresses, that sister mine.” So you go over and bolt the door, and the room is golden with the sun through the tiny cracks of the closed slats. She wants to be looked at, yet is at the same time shy. She is avid and timorous. She is experienced to a small degree, yet unsure. There is a musky-sweet, pungent scent of herself in her heat, distinctively her own. She has a secret inward smile when the pleasure is good for her. She has a long strong belly and rubbery-powerful hips and thighs, yet there are no feats of astonishing muscle control, no researched ancient trickeries, and that is a sweet and simple relief. Approaching climax her body heats and her breasts swell and her mouth sags. She deepens her strong and heavy beat and her eyes roll wild in the dim room, as if in panic, and she rolls her head from side to side and has the look of listening; and of being afraid of what is rolling up out of the depths of her, and then she is into all of it, making a very small and very sweet whimpering, and holding tight, like a child on a high scary place.
Siesta is sweet when the light is gold, and when the vivid young face on the pillow looks into yours, beside her, inches away, and smiles the woman-smile older than time, her exhalations warm against your mouth, as with slow fingers she traces your brows, lips, and the shape of cheek and jaw. There is nothing more es-stock. It has all been unfastened, all turned loose, with a guile that was so sweetly planned it could not be denied, even had there been any thought of denying it. Elena, you are the Mexican afternoons forever.
Fourteen
AT ELEVEN On Wednesday morning Enelio Fuentes brought Jerome Nesta to our cottage at the Hotel Victoria. Nesta acted sullen, uncommunicative. He wore the same clothes, but otherwise I would not have recognized him.
Enelio said, “They gave him a choice with the big bushy beard. Take it off himself, or they’d strap him down and take it off with a dull knife. The haircut was done by a jailor with no talent, eh?”
“Have your laughs,” Nesta mumbled. The area where the beard had been was blue-white and nicked in a half dozen places. His scalp shone pale through a half inch of black bristle. Without the beard he looked older. I remembered he was twenty-six. He looked thirty. There were deep lines bracketing his mouth. Also, without the beard he looked almost frail. His hands were big and heavily callused from the work with the mallet.
“One thing they forgot,” Enelio said. “Out in the open if you stay upwind from him, it’s not bad. In the car you keep the window open and stay close to it, very important. In this room, this size, he is impossible. It cannot be endured.”
“Screw yourself,” Nesta, muttered, eyes downcast I went into the dressing-room closet and picked some tan slacks I’d never liked much, and the white sports shirt that had been, despite all instructions, starched, and some laundered jockey shorts and socks which had seen dutiful valiant service. I handed him the bundle and said, “Go in and scrub.”
“Screw yourself,” he said again.
“Enelio,” I said, “can you give this thing back to the law, or don’t they want him either?”
“As a favor to me, they’ll give him his same cell back.”
“Then take him along. Thanks for your trouble. I don’t need to talk to him. Not right now. Not this way. When they fly into Miami, I’ll have him picked up there.”
“For what?” Nesta asked.
“We’ll think of something,” I said.
“How about air pollution?” Meyer asked.
“Dade County loans able-bodied prisoners to Collier County for road work,” I said. “Sheriff Doug Hendry’s people give a short course in manners and personal hygiene.”
Nesta looked at me, then at Enelio. It was a quick, flickering glance of appraisal. Without the beard he had the con look, the loser look. He had been there before, and knew he would be back there again, and it didn’t make too much difference whether it was going to be a valid rap. He had the cronkey look, that flavor of upcoming trouble that alerts any cop anywhere. I don’t know what it is. It is a combination of facial expression, posture, gesture-and the experience of the cop who sees the stranger and sees that indefinable thing he has seen so many times before. The animal behavior experts report that something similar exists in those wild animals who have some form of community culture. Certain individuals will be run off by the others, will be killed, or will be left to roam alone.