So he sped off. It was after five. Meyer grabbed a table. I went inside to the men’s room and scrubbed my hands and face and neck and arms, and looked at myself in the mirror and saw I was still wearing that stupid smile. It is the smile of the survivor. A man walks away from the pile of tinsel junk that was once an airplane, and which for some unknown reason failed to explode and failed to burn, and he wears that smile. I wiped the wallet off and dropped it into the mail box. Meyer had a cold Negro Modelo waiting on the table for me.
“I’m trying not to think,” he said. “I don’t want to do any thinking, please.”
“So don’t.”
“But the stinking wheels go around in my head. I keep remembering that day aboard the Flush, and trying to say something to Bix that would make it easier for her, somehow, to accept Liz’s ugly death, and those beautiful deep blue eyes of hers were absolutely bland and indifferent, no matter what polite thing her mouth was saying. There was a… a challenge there. Something like that. I wanted to try to reach her and get some reaction, some genuine reaction, no matter how. To say or do some… ugly thing, to shock her awake maybe. Travis, I wonder if there are people in this world who are appointed by the gods to be victims, so that they bring out the worst in everybody they touch. And the perfect victim would have to be surpassingly lovely, of course, to be most effective. I keep wondering if she was the catalyst, not Rockland. And maybe, that day, if I hadn’t become irritated at being unable to get any reaction, if I had tried harder.”
“Meyer, Meyer, Meyer.”
“I know. I have this thing, like the disease of kings. A bleeder. The internal wounds do not clot well. All my life is remorse. If I had done this, if I had done this…”
“And if your aunt had wheels she’d have been a tea cart.”
“Where are we, Travis? Just where the hell are we?”
“In Oaxaca. The Chamber of Commerce motto is ‘Stay One More Day in Oaxaca.’ ”
“Perhaps I do not care to.”
“A pity to spoil a nice girl’s vacation just when it is shaping up, Meyer.”
“Now Travis.”
“My God, when you get the shys you look just like Howland Owl.”
“Well… she is quite young, and… and, dammit, McGee, anything that pleasurable has to be shameful, sinful, and wicked. I am a lecherous old man, shaken by remorse. We should go home.”
“So we can go back to Lauderdale, land of the firm and sandy young rump, home of the franchised high-starch diet, and appraise the cost and the seaworthiness of all the playtoys that churn up and down the waterway, and criticize the way they are being handled. And we can wonder who did what to whom and why, and wonder why we didn’t stay just a little bit longer and find out.”
“Or not find out.”
“Somebody wasn’t in it for the money. Somebody wasn’t worried about little incriminating items in the wallet. So Rockland has been dead in that aluminum hot box since August seventh, and I think maybe whoever did it parked the truck on the rim, worked on him for a long, long time, then rolled it over, pried dirt down on it, piled brush on it, and went away. It was a punishment which somebody devised to fit the crime. It was a very sick mind at work. Very sick and very savage.”
“As with Mike Barrington, with Della Davis, with Luz?” Meyer asked. “As with my travel clock which is now junk?”
“Mr. Nesta? You had what we’ll call an exploratory session with him. Do you buy him?”
“No. Not for that. Maybe, without the alibi, for what happened on the Coyotepec Road. Hallucination, violence, amnesia. But not what… was done to Rockland. It’s fallacious to try to assess what any human- being is capable of, naturally.”
“You know, Meyer, my friend, what has put us into cerebral shock is knowing that Rockland was probably capable of doing to others just what was done to him. He was the sweet guy who led Bix Bowie out into the cornfield. He was the charmer who did the one thing that would finally destroy Carl Sessions. And he-possibly-set Bix up to fly off the mountain.”
Meyer shrugged, massively, slowly, expressively. He wore that inexpressibly mournful look of the giant anthropoid, of the ape who knows there is not one more plantain left in the rain forest.
“There’s Bundy.” he said without conviction. “We don’t know if Bundy told us the whole story, and… Forget it. It was a stranger. It was somebody who took a dislike to him, for some strange reason.”
Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison came up behind me and pressed my shoulder affectionately. “Travis darling! How lovely to see you again, dear.” I came to my feet, feeling as clumsy and oppressed as the big-footed kid who has to come into the living room to meet mother’s bridge friends. I mumbled the presentation of Meyer. She had a friend with her, a sunburned youth of sufficient inches over six feet to be able to look me right in the eye. He was rawboned, shy, with cropped blond hair and a face and manner from the midwest farm belt.
“I want you to meet Mark Woodenhaus,” she said. “Isn’t that a precious name?” The boy suddenly looked even more sunburned. “He’s been working out in a primitive village doing some kind of sanitation thing with the… what is the name of it, dear?”
“The Friends’ Service Committee, ma’am.”
“And I found him trudging down the highway all hot and dusty and carrying a monstrous dufflebag because he couldn’t spare bus fare. It’s volunteer work isn’t it, dear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And I truly believe that parasites like myself should take every chance to express their deep gratitude to marvelous young men like Mark, don’t you, Travis?”
“The best is none too good,” I said. I could not see through the dark lenses of her glasses very well, but thought I saw a significant wink. “Would you like to sit with us?” I asked her.
“Oh, thank you so much, but I think not. We have some errands to do, don’t we, Mark darling? Some bits of luxury for those poor young people slaving away out there in. the bush. So nice to see you, really. Do hope you’ll be about for a time, Travis. Come along, Mark.”
She looked, as one might well say, smashing. Vibrant and saucy and a-hum with improbable energies. Happily predatory, she scurried along in her lime yellow slacks beside the gangly, unsuspecting prey, with his plowjockey stride. The solid and shapely behind swung in graceful clench and cadence, and as I watched it disappear down the long aisle between the evening tables, I remembered, out of nowhere, an ancient incident, and remembered the tag line because of its aptness.
I’d been out in the placid Gulf of Mexico off Manasota Key in a small boat with a good and longtime friend named Bill Ward. We were trolling slowly for anything interesting and edible. But there was no action. A gull came winging by, and in the silence, out of boredom, Bill aimed a forefinger at it and said, quietly, “Bang!” At that precise instant the gull, spotting a small meal on the surface, dropped like a stone. Bill, eyes and mouth wide in amazement, turned toward me, inadvertently aiming the lethal finger at me. “Don’t aim that thing at me,” I told him.
“And there you sit,” Meyer said, “steeped in jealous envy.”