Chapter Twenty-Seven
Doc picked up the obnoxious chiming phone and said, “So sorry, we’re busy. We’re on our way to the beach.”
“Sounds busy all right. For this I wake up at the dire crack of noon?” said Harvey Recht.
“Like I care whose crack you’re waking up at. And probably drooling on. Que onda, Harv?”
“That lead I thought I might have? Well it leads to one place. And one guy. Your man’s boss. In fact, maybe everybody’s boss. The only one with any control over your nabber, the only one able to get hold of him for discussion. That worth taking thirty seconds of your valuable muff-diving time to talk to an old friend?”
“Wow, man. I don’t know what to say.”
“As usual. And there’s a minor snag.”
“As usual.”
“Big boss man is currently doing forever to life in the most maximum security prison in the country.”
“So…I bring the file, you bake the cake?”
“So I’ll keep poking at this awhile. But here’s the thing. The man you want to talk to is called El Ojo.”
“Thanks, Harv. What do you need from me?”
“I ask only your love, admiration, and compulsion towards unsecured loans.”
“I’m sorry, you’ve reached a number that’s about to be disconnected.”
After swimming and frolicking with the girls and noshing on Noe’s shrimp quesadillas, Doc was in an expansive mood. He stared around the Mismaloya cove, listening to the lilting accordian of a strolling band on the sand, and streteched in his canvas beach chair. The river wound into the big surf, the jumble of palapa restaurants evoked Robinson Crusoe technology, the “Night of the Iguana” set towered above, the pirate movie castle rode above sparkling waves. He swished his drink around inside a coconut and sighed. “This might actually be the most impossibly romantic place I know.”
Primo looked around at what he considered an expensive version of normality. “Sorry, to me it looks backward, primitive.”
“Spoken like a born Primitivo.”
“Not born,” Primo objected, “Baptized.”
“Ah, so you were a Catholic before converting to anti-capitalistic materialism?”
“Everyone alive is a Catholic,” Blanca insisted, “Or the word is meaningless. Some people just don’t realize it.”
Primo rolled his eyes. “Ah, Catholic Mexicanas. Don’t you get tired of the guilt?”
“Guilt can be forgiven. We’re in for some frightening confessions when we get back.”
Amparo nodded her head emphatically. “Padre Venacio will be unrelenting. We might as well start doing Rosarios and Credos right now, ‘Mana.”
“Interesting,” Doc said, “So you see the role of the church as releasing you from guilt, not making you feel guilty?”
“Of course,” Amparo said, “It isn’t the church that makes it wrong to fornicate with gringos and communists; everyone knows how wicked that is. After confession I always feel wonderful, like I could go straight to heaven.”
“Would you call that liberation theology, Primo?” said, straight-faced.
“I will tell you what I would call it sometime when doing so would not make anyone mad enough to cheat me of the chance to contribute to the world’s store of wickedness.”
Doc smiled, “And forgiveness, don’t forget.”
“Amen,” said Blanca.
“Jesus.” Primo threw up his eyes.
“Trust writers to blaspheme over lunch table,” Blanca imitated some classic acerbic nun, “But I’m afraid I agree with him about this restaurant, Doctor. I remember it was always a treat when my papa would take me into the city on business and we’d go to Denny’s for a milkshake. It was magic to me when I was little, so clean and slick and efficient and exotic. I always felt sophisticated and modern there. But you probably wouldn’t feel that way just going into a Denny’s in your country.”
“Well, no. It’s all just glamour. And glamour is relative.”
“Relative to what?” Primo wanted to know.
Amparo asked, “Is there a Denny’s in Vallarta?”
“God no,” Doc groaned, “Bad enough they have a Hard Rock Cafe.”
“Really?” Amparo bubbled, “Oh, can we go? It would be such fun to see.”
“It’d be more fun to go listen to your confessions, I think,” Primo mused.
Blanca signed, “Do men care for nothing but rumors of their manhood?”
Looking at Blanca, Doc realized she had found the Big Loophole. And the girls were frolicking in it. You go screw up ,then dump it all off at church each week. Just don’t get caught with too big a lead-off and you’ll be able to get to heaven. Christianity, he thought, is like having a license to sin.
He might have mentioned this, but he’d just noticed Carmen Chacón negotiating the swinging bridge that led customers across the river to the restaurants. She was dressed casually but seemed all business, looking around for somebody or something. Probably a scoop, Doc thought as he called to her, waved her over to their table asked what she was drinking. Carmen nodded at Primo, did a quick scan of the girls lounging in skimpy suits, and said, “Fruit juice, thank you. I only came up here to tell you something you asked me about last night.”
“Well, I certainly appreciate you going to the trouble.”
“As I say, I’m always willing to help women escape enslavement to men. I only ask that you try to minimize fatalities and let me know of anything that might be news. Or scandal.”
“Of course.”
“I mentioned a man named DePilar who would almost certainly know something about the man you’re looking for. Perhaps he could even contact him, deliver him your message.”
“I remember.”
“He is not an easy man to locate. But I have just heard that this evening he will definitely be at a ranchito he owns up the river past Colonia Ramblas, a sort of scenario ranch for his machote image.”
“And we could just walk up and say Howdy?”
“That’s your affair. I’m just bringing you what I heard.”
“Thanks a lot, Carmen. You also just saved me from having to wiggle out of going to the Hard Rock Cafe.” He hauled the condo key out of his pocket, wrapped a handful of cash around it, and handed it to Blanca. “We’re heading back to town. You ladies stay here, enjoy. We’ll see you later at the apartment.”
Amparo had been snoozing in a hammock, but opened her eyes at that news, pouting.
Doc told Blanca, “Sorry. We have business upriver.” Mostly for Carmen’s benefit, he struck a John Wayne posture and said, “Man’s business.”
Blanca looked terribly impressed, “Ahh. So it will involve smoking and drinking and much lying, maybe guns and beatings?”
“Possibly all of that. And more.”
She shook her head in resignation, “Men are so ridiculous. I wish you would turn these things over to us, who could handle them better and safer, while you could just exercise your muscles and look beautiful, like game cocks.”
Doc feigned shock, “So you’re a liberationist?”
“Oh no, I’m far too feminine to be a feminist. And not one of those sissies who want to do a man’s work.”
Carmen looked at her, surprised. She said, “Hmmm. If you like you can ride back with me. You sound like an intelligent girl, in spite of your choice of company. Perhaps we can raise your level of consciousness.”
Amparo, drowsing in a sun-stroked hammock, murmured, “The highest level I can think of is being unconscious.”
“Another Margarita ought to do it, ‘Mana,” Blanca scolded. “Shall I order for you?”
Carmen gave Amparo’s bulging bikini a sidelong look and said, “This one’s on me.”
They could have taken a cab up as far as the pedestrian bridge in Ramblas, but Doc wanted to walk. “It’s like a time machine walking up the Rio Cuale,” he told Primo, “Going back from jetset to stone age.”
Primo looked around and said, “What if we walk the other way?”
“We’ll drown.”
They took the steps down to the river island at Franzi’s where a non-breeding pair of elegantly overdressed not so young men were squabbling loudly in French. The cobbled path led them through twisted tree roots, deliberately charming little shops full of art/junk, past the Elizabeth Taylor Cinema, up to the whoopsy suspension bridge to “Parque Ricardo Burton”. Primo swung by the statue, stared up at the idealized bronze face of John Huston. He turned to Doc with a wordless question.
Doc shrugged, “He’s a movie director. Put this place on the map. Before the movie there weren’t even any roads into here. He gave birth to this town, he and Dick and Liz. Inseminated the whole tourist factory.”
“He must have been a great man to have a large bronze statue like this one.”
“I guess,” Doc said, “But I never trusted him after I found out he was having incest with Faye Dunaway.”
A few blocks later Doc pointed across to the silt banks at the North end of the island. An old arriero was loading sand on the backs of four mules, another was leading three loaded burros up an insane trail to the “Gringo Gulch” area, where a condo complex was under construction. Primo looked at the donkeys and said, “So?”
“Think where we were half a kilometer downstream,” Doc said. “Jetset queens bitching on cellular phones. This guy and his mules could have been here four hundred years ago.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Primo said, looking up at the palaces on the canyon wall. “The rich people’s houses here are much more beautiful than in San Lucas. Are they more expensive?”
“Much less. They’ve sold out to the package deal, the time share condo. That’s where that sand is going. Cement for a yuppie warren. They’re fucking up the golden goose. The time shares just hasten the process. Selling to people who think you can own a hotel room.”
Primo looked at the hill and the new construction a long time. He said, “But isn’t that really the way life really is?”
Doc stared. “Condos are the way life really is?”
“There is so much time, so much space. We share it. Move with the seasons, someone else will move where you were.”
“Is that the noble savage talking, or the bolshevik bravo?”
“I don’t know. It just seems more sensible than everyone owning everything, locking it up when they leave, getting buried with it. Marx is saying everybody owns everything. Sometimes I wonder if anybody owns anything.”
“You know how sometimes there’s a fine line between the real profound and the real simple-minded?”
“Isn’t that the truth? You know what fascinates me most about you people, what I see here and in Los Cabos? Privacy. You can go inside and lock a door. All the children even have their own rooms, their own money, their own things. Your thoughts are your own.”
“Funny, I come to Mexico for privacy I can’t find in the states. You can find lonely beaches or deserted places here.”
“To be alone? But I wouldn’t be alone there. Everything would be looking at me, and I would be…well, acting out a part to suit the world. The sun looks at me like a father’s eye and I have to be proud or ashamed.”
“Then you must never feel lonesome. Paranoid, maybe, but never lonesome.”
“That makes no sense to me. The “right to privacy” makes no sense to me either. I think of that, being alone with my thoughts, doing as I please, and it seems like a dream to me, very exciting. Then I think of it again and it seems terrifying; a horrible, empty joke.”
“Not many people have sense enough to be afraid of freedom. I never thought that privacy might be scary, too.”
“What is so private? What do you have to hide?”
“Why do you wear pants?”
“So that’s all it is? Like private parts?”
“You’ll notice nobody in the world runs around with their dorks hanging out. Nobody shits in public if they can help it. Nobody screws in front of other people.”
“Certainly, they do. My parents didn’t go into another room at night. There was no other room. No other bed. What you think is so secret is just part of life.”
“I have secrets nobody wants to see. I keep them private for their sake as much as my own. Privacy is freedom.”
“I feel a lot freer not needing privacy. Americans seem like such lonely people. And you’re the most alone of any I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, I’m all I’ve got. It’ll just have to do for now.” They walked in silence for a few minutes, then Doc said, almost under his breath. “I wouldn’t mind finding somebody to make me fell less alone. I’d even give up a little privacy.”
They kept walking up river, through the grubby colonias that housed the tourism workers. As soon as they were above the foot bridge, where cars could no longer pass, things got a lot more rustic in a hurry. The valley opened up to farms, huts of cane nailed to boards with bottle caps to keep the nails from splitting it. Scrawny horses and cattle foraging, territorial pigs snuffling at them, chickens tearing around in constant concern. Primo seemed to be moving at a different gait, had swung behind Doc into single file. “I have to admit,” he said, “I am moving back in time. To my own past. And it feels good here.”
“Can’t take the country out of the boy,” Doc intoned.
“Once an Indio, always an Indio,” Primo answered.
They rounded a bend to a sudden widening of the valley. In front of them, up above the road, was a mansion, ranchero style. It had gardens and a fence of nopales, chickens and horses mooched around the place. But Doc noticed it was also very defensible. It looked like a set for a Revolution film. They sat down and waited for a movie star to come riding up on a white stallion, wearing the ridiculous sombrero and fancypants suit of a charro. And after a while, one did. It was obviously DePilar and just as obviously, as Primo pointed out, “Of course, he’s a ‘Cente fan.”
Doc nodded, thinking that at least he now knew what mythology was happening. Vicente Fernadez, equal parts Johnny Cash, John Wayne, and Willy Nelson…perhaps Mexico’s biggest cultural image. “Radio Paraiso” in Vallarta probably played “Por Tu Maldito Amor” every two hours, and they weren’t even a cowboy station. And this guy was way into it.
“We’ll be lucky if he even lets us in to talk,” Doc said.
Primo said, “A gringo and an Indio? We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t just shoot us right here.”