I told Ron our problem, and the girl listened to it with a pretty and sympathetic show of interest. I asked him if he could recommend a useful and influential contact in Oaxaca, and he came up with one named Enelio Fuentes and wrote it on the back of his business card and slid it across to me. He said Enelio was an old friend, had a big VW agency and other business interests scattered around the State of Oaxaca. But he couldn’t help with a name in Culiacan. He said he would phone Fuentes and tell him to take care of me if I had to look him up.
Then I asked him how he would go about checking on the Chevrolet truck and camper with Florida plates, registered to a Walter Rockland, and he said he wouldn’t even try. In theory you get car papers at the border, and they keep a copy at the place where you enter, and if you leave at some other border town, the stamped papers are supposed to go back to the place where you entered, and then the set is supposed to be sent to Mexico City and filed somewhere, possibly by some branch of the Mexican Tourist Bureau. But that was only theory.
I said we’d be back in Mexico City sooner or later, but right now the most useful thing to do was get down to Oaxaca while there was still a good chance that friends of Miss Bix might be around.
They had to leave. Went across the dim and crowded room. Those long, sweet, taffy-sleek legs, from boot leather to mini-leather, seemed to gather available light and reflect it. Three mariachi types were on the stand, one singing a ballad, and he inserted an improvisation I could not catch. Ron turned, grinning, and called something to the musicians, and there was laughter and applause.
Meyer and I stayed on. He had discovered that tequila anejo conmemorativo, with sangrita on the side, is one of the world’s more pleasant drinks. The anejo-the “j” pronounced like a guttural cough-means old. The conmemorativo means a very special distillation. It is drunk straight, pale amber in color, strong, smooth, and clean. The chaser’s full name is sangrita de la viuda, which means for some reason I have yet to learn, “little blood of the widow”. It is tomato juice, citrus juices, with several varieties of pepper and spices. It changes the taste buds, readies them for the next sip of the tequila. Meyer crooned and beamed and ordered more.
But later his mood changed. “Vulgarity can be many things,” he said. “It can be having a good time while en route to where the daughter of an old friend died. Dead young women are a pitiful waste.”
We had finished a late dinner. “Tequila shouldn’t make you morose,” I told him.
“Without it, I would probably be crying,” he said.
Three
WE WERE reserved on an early Mexicana flight. It was an elderly Douglas with four genuine propellers and a full load of passengers. Noisy engines, with oil stains on the housings, littered floor, some popped rivets, lots of vibration. My turn at the window seat. Went roaring and clattering down the runway and lifted off. You get conditioned to that steep upward slant of the jets. This thing lifted off and seemed to hang there, fighting for every slow foot of altitude. Lots of time to look down into the streets. At seventy-five hundred feet as a starting place, and with a full load, we did a lot of clawing before we finally came up out of the last of the bright morning smutch and made a long slow turn.
A very plump stewardess in a soiled uniform served us paper cups of coffee and sweet rolls, and she did a lot of bantering with the customers. Then we went between Popo and his sleeping lady, Ixtaccihuatl. The blazing white summits of the dead volcanoes were easily a thousand feet above us, and vivid against the indigo sky. We were close enough to see snow plumes trailing off the cliffs of Ixta in the morning winds.
Then down along the torn and crumpled country, old stone spilled from the spine of the Sierra Madre. A day so clear you could see tiny villages, see the pale narrow marks of burro paths along the ridges. ‘Ibo harsh a land to sustain life, but it does. Spaniards could never have taken it from the Indios without all those cute political tricks, turning them against each other. Travel-worn old DC grinding slowly down the side of the rocky world, a tin impertinence making its rackety noise across the stone indifference of the volcanic land. So eat the sweet roll and look down at the world of a thousand years ago. Mexicana Airlines sells tickets on a time machine.
So we came down into the valley of Oaxacapronounced wuh-HOCK-ah-beginning the descent at the upper end of the valley some twenty miles from the airfield. Green valley encircled by old burned brown rounded hills. It is a plateau valley, five thousand feet high, in the Sierra Madre del Sur, and the Pacific is not far away. Skimmed lower. Saw a broken, abandoned, stone church amid cornfields. Saw a man scratching a groove in brown soil with a wooden plow pulled by slow oxen. Saw village children, bright as spilled flowers. And our pilot set the old crock down with such precise and loving delicacy that there was but one small yelp of rubber, and not the slightest jar:
A neat little terminal, wine warm air, a confusion of greetings and luggage and taxis and hotel vehi cles. The man from our hotel made himself known by pacing through confusion, calling “Veeeek Tory Aaaah! Veeeek lbry Aaaah!”
So soon we were off in a VW bus, the other passengers two stone-faced ladies with blue hair, large satchels, and guidebooks in German, and one young Mexican couple. The girl was in a smart travel suit of painful newness. The boy looked everywhere except at her. New gold rings gleamed.
We passed a sign as we approached the city, assorting that there were eighty thousand people therein. We skirted an edge of it, and climbed steep grades, then, in lowest low, ground up the long, r4teep, divided driveway to the parking area at the top, and the portico over the entrance to the Hotel Victoria.
The modern hotel, five stories tall, stretched along the top of a ridge, looking out across all of the city. Down the slope, in random array, beyond a huge swimming pool, were individual bungalows, each with carport, each landscaped with brilliant flowers and flowering vines. Rough stone steps and walks and stone driveways wound down through the bungalow community, all of it behind a guarded security fence.
The bungalows had girl-names instead of numbers, and they put us in Alicia. There was one large, tiled, plain room, simply furnished, two double beds, a bath, a dressing room, and a small porch in front overlooking the panorama-a porch with a tin table and poolside chairs. Alicia was two hundred and fifty pesos a day for two. Twenty dollars. I had explained to Meyer the quick easy McGee system for keeping track of the pesos. A fifty-peso bill is a four-dollar bill. A ten-peso bill is an eighty-cent bill.
Meyer stood on the porch and looked at the city and the mountains and the blue, blue sky. He looked at the flowers. He sniffed the flavors of the summery air: Then he turned to me and said, “I would have this handy little magic wand and I would take one little pass at you. Kazam! Suddenly you are Miranda Dale, looking at me like she looked at Ron Townsend.”
“Didn’t all those legs make you feel insecure?”
“And so did the age of the child. But this is the sort of place where I could try to overcome minor obstacles.”
“You are a hairy, over-educated, lecherous old man.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, McGee. It’s eleven-fifteen. What now?”
“Our wheels.” We took a cab down into the city. The Hertz office was on a side street near the zocalo-the public square. The man was pleasant enough, but had absolutely no record of any reservation. He would have a lot of nice cars soon. Maybe in a week. He said he felt desolated by being unable to serve me. I said I would like to give him a four-dollar bill to ease his desolation. It was not to spur him to greater effort on my behalf, I said, because I was certain he would give me every possible help. It was a token of my understanding. He said there was, in truth, a car, but it would be a pity to rent it to me, because I obviously was used to better, and deserved better. It had been many, many kilometros and needed small repairs and was unclean. A boy with a Le Mans psychosis brought it around.