You know, I have a dull pain in the chest, right here. I wonder if it could be tuberculosis?"
"Take an x-ray."
"I did. The doctor is going to take a skin reaction test. Oh, another thing, I think I have undulant fever. ... Do you think I have fever now?" He pushed his forehead forward for Lee to feel. Lee felt an ear lobe. "I don't think so," he said.
Moor went on and on, following the circular route of the true hypochondriac, back to tuberculosis and the urine test. Lee thought he had never heard anything as tiresome and depressing. Moor did not have tuberculosis or kidney trouble or undulant fever. He was sick with the sickness of death. Death was in every cell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.
Moor talked with boyish eagerness. "I think I need an operation."
Lee said he really had to go.
Lee turned down Coahuila, walking with one foot falling directly in front of the other, always fast and purposeful, as if he were leaving the scene of a holdup. He passed a group in expatriate uniform: red-checked shirt outside the belt, blue jeans and beard, and another group of young men in conventional, if shabby, clothes. Among these Lee recognized a boy named Eugene Allerton. Allerton was tall and very thin, with high cheekbones, a small, bright-red mouth, and amber-colored eyes that took on a faint violet flush when he was drunk. His gold-brown hair was differentially bleached by the sun like a sloppy dyeing job. He had straight, black eyebrows and black eyelashes. An equivocal face, very young, clean-cut and boyish, at the same time conveying an impression of makeup, delicate and exotic and Oriental. Allerton was never completely neat or clean, but you did not think of him as being dirty. He was simply careless and lazy to the point of appearing, at times, only half awake. Often he did not hear what someone said a foot from his ear. "Pellagra, I expect," thought Lee sourly. He nodded to Allerton and smiled.
Allerton nodded, as if surprised, and did not smile.
Lee walked on, a little depressed. "Perhaps I can accomplish something in that direction. Well, a ver. . . ." He froze in front of a restaurant like a bird dog: "Hungry . . . quicker to eat here than buy something and cook it." When Lee was hungry, when he wanted a drink or a shot of morphine, delay was unbearable.
He went in, ordered steak a la Mexicana and a glass of milk, and waited with his mouth watering for food. A young man with a round face and a loose mouth came into the restaurant. Lee said,
"Hello, Horace," in a clear voice. Horace nodded without speaking and sat down as far from Lee as he could get in the small restaurant. Lee smiled. His food arrived and he ate quickly, like an animal, cramming bread and steak into his mouth and washing it down with gulps of milk. He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.
"Un café sólo," he called to the waitress as she walked by, carrying a pineapple soda to two young Mexicans in double-breasted pinstripe suits. One of the Mexicans had moist brown pop-eyes and a scraggly moustache of greasy black hairs. He looked pointedly at Lee, and Lee looked away. "Careful," he thought, "or he will be over here asking me how I like Mexico." He dropped his half-smoked cigarette into half an inch of cold coffee, walked over to the counter, paid the bill, and was out of the restaurant before the Mexican could formulate an opening sentence. When Lee decided to leave some place, his departure was abrupt.
The Ship Ahoy had a few phony hurricane lamps by way of a nautical atmosphere. Two small rooms with tables, the bar in one room, and four high, precarious stools. The place was always dimly lit and sinister-looking. The patrons were tolerant, but in no way bohemian. The bearded set never frequented the Ship Ahoy. The place existed on borrowed time, without a liquor license, under many changes of management. At this time it was run by an American named Tom Weston and an American-born Mexican.
Lee walked directly to the bar and ordered a drink. He drank it and ordered a second one before looking around the room to see if Allerton was there. Allerton was alone at a table, tipped back in a chair with one leg crossed over the other, holding a bottle of beer on his knee. He nodded to Lee. Lee tried to achieve a greeting at once friendly and casual, designed to show interest without pushing their short acquaintance. The result was ghastly.
As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless.
Allerton was appalled. "Perhaps he has some sort of tic," he thought. He decided to remove himself from contact with Lee before the man did something even more distasteful. The effect was like a broken connection. Allerton was not cold or hostile; Lee simply wasn't there so far as he was concerned. Lee looked at him helplessly for a moment, then turned back to the bar, defeated and shaken.
Lee finished his second drink. When he looked around again, Allerton was playing chess with Mary, an American girl with dyed red hair and carefully applied makeup, who had come into the bar in the meantime. "Why waste time here?" Lee thought. He paid for the two drinks and walked out.
He took a cab to the Chimu Bar, which was a fag bar frequented by Mexicans, and spent the night with a young boy he met there.
At that time the G.I. students patronized Lola's during the daytime and the Ship Ahoy at night.
Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the juke box. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs, and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep.
There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in at certain times.
Several days after his pick-up in the Chimu, Lee was sitting in Lola's, reading aloud from Últimas Notícias to Jim Cochan. There was a story about a man who murdered his wife and children, Cochan looked about for a means to escape, but every time he made a move to go, Lee pinned him down with: "Get a load of this. . . . 'When his wife came home from the market, her husband, already drunk, was brandishing his .45.' Why do they always have to brandish it?"
Lee read to himself for a moment. Cochan stirred uneasily. "Jesus Christ," said Lee, looking up.
"After he killed his wife and three children he takes a razor and puts on a suicide act." He returned to the paper: "'But resulted only with scratches that did not require medical attention.'
What a slobbish performance!" He turned the page and began reading the leads half-aloud:
'They're cutting the butter with Vaseline. Fine thing. Lobster with drawn K.Y. . . . Here's a man was surprised in his taco stand with a dressed-down dog ... a great long skinny hound dog at that.
There's a picture of him posing in front of his taco stand with the dog. . , . One citizen asked another for a light. The party in second part don't have a match so first part pulls an ice pick and kills him. Murder is the national neurosis of Mexico."