“I hit the sack pretty early.”
“You know, it’s kind of strange seeing an American man with a girl like that. What I mean is, you see an American and you expect to see him with an American girl, and some cute well-dressed kids, and lots of expensive luggage. They have a kind of permanent look. Know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I figure these European girls don’t have the same slant on things as our women. They’ve got a healthier attitude in some ways, it looks to me. I mean, they’ll try anything if their husband — or whoever’s looking after them — gives them the green light.”
Beecher pretended to miss Pusey’s insinuation; every moment was bringing them closer to Tangier, and he hoped to get there without sharpening Pusey’s suspicions. “Yes, they’ve got a lot of spirit,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.” Pusey grinned. “They’ll try anything.” He glanced at Beecher. “There’s some nice hotels between here and Tangier. I noticed ’em yesterday.”
“Yes,” Beecher said quietly. The land stretching out beside them was flat and dry, scattered with vineyards and orange groves. The highway was shaded by tall lines of willow trees, and the sun fell in dappled pattern on the smooth gray highway. There was more traffic as they drew closer to Tangier. The roadsides streamed with people, most of them burdened with loads of straw and firewood. In the fields men were threshing by hand. The Berber women wore hats like tasseled cartwheels, and blouses of coarse fabric decorated with red and white stripes.
Beecher almost felt sorry for Pusey. He could see Pusey’s guilty and fearful needs as clearly as if he were looking at them under a microscope; betrayal seemed to have sharpened his vision to a merciless efficiency. This was part of the maturity Don Julio had talked about; an effortless, instinctive ability to sense decay behind masks of seemingly sweet and healthy flesh. It would be more pleasant in some ways to be dumb and blind; it would be far easier to live with the Puseys of the world, Beecher thought, if you didn’t see them so clearly.
Now he decided it was time to put a chisel against one of Pusey’s numerous cracks, and swing a sledge at it.
He settled himself comfortably and lit a cigarette. “You’re from Blue Island, Illinois, you say?”
Pusey looked at him sharply. “You know the town?”
“I’m in Chicago quite a lot. I’m with the Air Force, and we do a good deal of procurement work out there.”
“The Air Force, eh?” Pusey grinned slightly. “I wouldn’t have guessed it, mister.”
“No?”
They drove on for moments in silence, but Beecher noticed that the knuckles of Pusey’s small hairy hands were standing out sharply on the wheel. “You in some kind of secret job?” Pusey asked him at last.
“No, I’m in procurement.”
“Well, what are you doing in Morocco?”
“We’re closing out our bases. Nouasseur, Sidi Slimane, the works. It’s all going. A billion dollars down the drain. I guess you know what that means.”
“Well, I don’t follow out that stuff too carefully.”
“You don’t!” Beecher looked at him sharply and disapprovingly. “Goddamn it, I can’t understand you civilians.” Here would be an area of sensitivity and fear, he knew; Pusey was the sort to cringe before badges and uniforms. He undoubtedly belonged to a police athletic league, and carried an honorary sheriff’s or constable’s card in his wallet: a toady to the symbols of his fears. “Do you realize what this withdrawal means?” Beecher went on, in the same stem and shocked voice. “Don’t you understand we’re losing our first line of defense against the Russians? You civilians gripe about taxes, but do you think about the officers who’ll have to fly their jets an additional thousand miles because of this snafu in Morocco?”
“I guess I should keep up on these things,” Pusey said. His cheeks were turning pink.
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Beecher said. “What line did you say you’re in?”
“The car business. I have an agency in Blue Island.”
“That’s odd.”
“How do you mean odd?”
“My wife had a notion you were in the stocking business. But sometimes her English plays tricks on her.” Beecher smiled at Pusey. “She thought you wanted to sell her some nylons.”
Pusey laughed shrilly. “Gosh, no!”
Here was the dark fearsome jungle in his soul, Beecher thought; the threatening and poisonous mystery of women. Pusey’s wife wouldn’t leave her doctor; oh, no! Those migraines and gas attacks were probably a chastity belt she buckled on every time she thought of Pusey’s hairy little hands.
Pusey cleared his throat with obvious difficulty. “We might have mentioned something about stockings. We were just kind of chatting along. I asked her if she’d like a cup of coffee because she seemed kind of upset or something―like she wanted directions maybe. You know how you’ll offer to help a woman out?”
“I guess there’s a touch of the Boy Scout in all of us,” Beecher said.
“That’s it.” Pusey nodded vigorously. “Lot of these foreigners don’t give a damn. Never offer a lady a seat, push through doors in front of them, it’s terrible.”
“It’s all a matter of breeding,” Beecher said.
“Exactly what I say.” Pusey held the tip of his nose between thumb and forefinger, as if to control its rhythmic twitchings. “I know just what you mean.”
“I thought you would,” Beecher said, smiling.
They drove on in silence. It wasn’t victory, he knew; it was a stalemate. He had humiliated and frightened Pusey by probing at his fears. And this would make him dangerous. Whether he believed Beecher’s story or not, Pusey would strike back at him for lifting the damp rock from his soul, for exposing his wriggling little guilts and inadequacies. Beecher felt a moment of kinship with the young prostitute Pusey had turned over to the police in London. He was grateful to her in an oblique fashion; the little blonde chippie, in her tears and bitterness, had shouted the warning to him about Pusey. But it was Pusey himself who had hung the leper’s bell around his scrawny neck. This need for self-exposure must reflect the Creator’s tidy and amusing law of compensation, Beecher thought; He was responsible for Pusey, but He was also responsible for the unhappy people who must come in contact with him. So to protect the innocent, the Puseys were sent into the world equipped with an automatic and fool-proof warning system; the things they relished, and the things they were compelled to boast about were guaranteed to alert people as instantly as a snake’s rattle. The poor little bastard didn’t have a chance, Beecher thought, with some honest pity.
Soon they came to the outskirts of Tangier. The street signs were still printed in three languages, Arabic, French, and Spanish, a reminder of the days when the city had been operated as a free port. Now that was all over, Tangier had become respectable in Beecher’s time. The smuggling was under some control, and the fragile tendrils of tax and money laws had been stiffened by lashings of sticky Moroccan red tape.
The Soco Chico had turned into a rendezvous for tourists slung with cameras, and indifferent Arab peddlers in nylon shirts and sunglasses, whose merchandise consisted almost exclusively of fountain pens, watches, American cigarettes, and guitars made of turtle shells. Hashish was about as mysterious as aspirin; it could be bought in most drugstores.
They drove past beautiful beaches with sand that was as fine and soft as cake flour, and ahead of them stood the white clustered skyscrapers of Tangier. The wind was off the sea, and swimming wouldn’t be any good today, Beecher knew; the sand would blow against bare bodies like a million tiny flails, swept along with stinging force by the steady rush of the levanter. He was pleased by the calm irrelevance of his thoughts. His heartbeat was about a steady seventy, he guessed.