Wally McLeen beamed upon us. “Isn’t it great? See, from up here you look over into the next valley too. Pretty strategic place. These holes here, these were tombs. The big shots got buried at the highest place. They bust into every one they can find because there’s gold jewelry in some of them. Now look back at the whole thing. Gold, sacrifices, underground passages, astronomy, brain surgery, it blows my mind thinking about it.”
He wore a market shirt of coarse unbleached cotton, a pale blue beret acquired from God knows where, burgundy-colored walking shorts cinched around his comfortable tummy by a belt with a lot of silver knobs affixed to the leather, and market sandals. His goatee was coming along nicely. He carried a bag woven of yellow fiber, shaped like a two-handled market bag. He had flip-up sunglasses fastened to his thick eyeglasses, and the cycle was turning his previous angry red to a red-brown, with some pink patches on forehead and nose where the early burns had peeled.
“When Minda comes back, I want to show her all these places, Trav, on account of I know she’ll flip. I remember when she was a little kid, one summer at the lake she found an arrowhead and I read to her all about the Indians, and you’d be surprised how much she remembered, a little kid like that. Just turned five years old. They can bolt another seat on that Honda and we can travel all over this part of Mexico.”
Meyer had moved around into position, so that we were both facing him.
“But that won’t work out so good, Wally,” I told him.
“Sure it will!”
“For a while. But then sooner or later the cops are going to find that village kid that saw you dump the camper into the ravine, and find out what you did to Rocko, and start adding things up and nail you for Mike and Della and the Mexican woman, too. So you better aim that bike for the nearest border crossing, Wally.”
It is like that lousy frog routine I had to do in high school biology lab. You hook up the battery and touch the wires to the right place and that slimy dead leg makes jumping motions.
He stared at me and he stared at Meyer. And his mouth hitched up into a weak little smile and then opened into an O. Not a big O. About twice the size of the one you use to whistle. It went through the same pattern again.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Too long, Wally.” Meyer said sadly. “You took too long finding the right way to play it. Too much was happening in your head. You froze. You had too much to add up.”
“I… I’ve got to wait for Minda! You can understand that. I’ve got to wait for her to come back here!”
It was hard to believe it, looking at him, even though it had come through as clear as a ten page confession.
“Wally,” I said, “I can understand the thing with Rockland, sort of. You’re over the edge. You found out too much. Those three-Sessions, Nesta, Rockland-they turned your little girl on, and they banged her, and they degraded her, and something went wrong then in your head, Wally. This is a hell of a long way from the weekly Kiwanis meeting and the shopping center stores. What you did to Rockland means you’ve been taken sick. It means you’ve got to go into town and tell people about it and get help, because there was Mike Barrington and there was Della Davis and there was Luz.”
“I know. That went wrong. I mean I wouldn’t feel bad about it if I got Nesta too, because I thought it might have to be that way. I went in from the back, over the wall. The jeep was there when I went by, but when I came back to look for him I found it was gone. I should have waited for him to come back. But I got scared. I have to get him, you know. And I will. I made a vow. I’ve been working it all out. Mike and Luz were so close together, I got her before she could take a step, after he went down. But the nigger bitch could run like the wind. If she hadn’t stumbled and fallen, she would have been out the gate and gone.” His voice was small and thoughtful, the words half lost in a small warm wind that gusted and died.
“What did they do to you… or Minda?” Meyer asked.
The shadow of the buzzard angled across the stony earth between us. Silent, awkward tableau. Wally McLeen bent over and picked up a small triangular shard of Zapotecan pottery. He looked at it with care and flipped it aside.
“I like the ones with designs,” he said. “I like to think of them out here, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, scratching little designs in the clay to make the pots prettier. Funny thing about that. This morning, maybe an hour ago, over there down the slope of the hill, I found a piece that reminded me of an ashtray Minda made for me in the first or second grade. She made the same kind of wavy lines in the clay. I’ve got it here in the bag.” He opened it and peered down in, reached in.
My alarm system went off too late. He yanked out some kind of a weapon, swinging it so swiftly I could not see what it was. From where he stood, his first choice was a backhand slap at Meyer. He should not have been able to reach him, but he did. There was the sickening solid thonk of a hard object striking the skull. Meyer went down in a bad way-a boneless sloppy tumble. There was no interval, no half-step, no attempt to break the fall. In a fluid continuation of the same motion, McLeen took a forehand shot at me and I sprang back, leaning back at the same time, and even so felt the wind of it across my upper lip, heard its whistling sound. He stood nicely balanced, slightly crouched as I moved back cautiously. Meyer had rolled over twice, down the slope, slowly, but it took him to a steeper slant and he rolled more rapidly for perhaps fifteen feet before the upper half of his body dropped into one of the small open tombs. He was wedged there then, the legs spraddled, toeing in, the substantial bottom turned toward the blue sky.
The weapon was at rest. I could see what it was. He held a hardwood stick about two feet long, gray with age, greased with much handling. A leather thong, heavy, tightly braided, was fastened to the end of the stick. The end of the thong was fastened to a crude metal ring that had somehow been affixed to a stone, round, polished, irregular, a little smaller than a peach.
He came at me with a little rush of quick light steps, bouncy and balanced. I feinted to run down the slope, then dodged and ran uphill, angling away from him. The feint had been a mistake. He missed my head by an inch. I realized I had seen smallish portly men like Wally McLeen moving very lightly and quickly and well on many dance floors in years past. Long-waisted men like Wally, and with the same short, hefty legs.
“I bought this in a stall in the public market,” he said. “One of the kids told me it was a fake. But it’s just like the soldiers used to use. It’s tricky. You have to practice with it. The handle is limber. See? So all you need is good wrist action. I practiced on trees. You have to get the range right.”
“Let me go help Meyer. Please, Wally.”
“You can’t help him. He’s dead. Or dying.” When again he came bouncing toward me, I spun and ran up the slope all out, thinking to get far enough away from him so that I could circle around and go down toward the temple. But as I started down the other side I took a quick look back and saw that he was only thirty feet behind me, moving too well. There was a crumbling, unrestored wall to my left and I angled toward it, snatched up a chunk of rock and turned and hurled it at him. He scrambled to the side and it gave me enough leeway to pick up another jagged piece and, in too much haste, overthrow him. He backed away quickly.
With more time, I was able to pick up one of better size and heft. I turned it to fit the hand, and took my best shot. He was fifty to sixty feet away. I put it’on a good line, right toward the middle of his face. He moved just his head. He moved it quickly to the side and just as far as was necessary.
A rock fight. Too many years since the last one. I might be able to get away from him, but that wasn’t enough. I had to get to Meyer, and I had to get to him soon. I didn’t like the choices. If I picked some good rocks and charged him, trying to get close enough to chunk him, he was going to have just as good, or better, a chance to bust my skull as he had with the three in the old compound on the Coyotepec Road. He was too good with that thing, and he could make it whistle.