Bear and His Daughter

PORQUE NO TIENE, PORQUE LE FALTA

THE WORDS came on the wind, an old woman’s voice.

“Ayeee! Es-cor-pee-o-nays!”

He was lying in a smelly hammock under the concrete veranda with a thermos jug of Coke and alcohol balanced on his bare belly; when he understood the words he raised his head and pushed back the brim of his baseball cap.

“Escorpiónes!”

His children were running through the dry brush between his house and the beach. In the fiery sunlight their speeding forms were brown blurs topped with the flax of sun-bleached hair He saw at once that they had not been bitten.

Doña Laura, the landlady, was calling to them from the roof of her house, where she had been hanging out black and white washing, warning them of the dangers of the brush. Doña Laura lived in fear of scorpions. She had lived among scorpions all her life and never been stung. Twice an hour she warned Richard and Jane away from them.

“No, no, no, no,” Doña Laura shouted. “Escorpiónes!”

He could picture the word in her mouth, shaped on the dry lips, shrilled from strained corded muscles in a brown throat.

Escorpiónes.

The day was clear and the mountains at all points of the bay glowed bright green, but far out to sea dark low clouds approached, discoloring the surface of the distant ocean. Before long there would be heat lightning and rain. He took a drink from the thermos, closed his eyes and shuddered. Swallowing made the sweat on his chest run cold.

His children shouted, safe on the dry white sand.

The changing color of the sea made him uneasy. In the past months he had developed an odd passion for constancy; he liked things to stay as they were. When it was light he did not want it to grow dark, in spite of the beauty of the ocean sunset, and when it was dark he did not care for dawn to come and reveal his existence and position. But the time of year for constancy had passed and he was learning to live with the rains.

As he watched the clouds darken the reefs beyond the bay, a blue shape rose furiously from the clear unclouded shallows and slapped over the surface like a flung slate toward the darker waters. He could see the winged shadow it cast.

He sat up, straddling the hammock, and squinted after it.

“Marge,” he called out.

After a moment his wife came out and stood beside him. She had pinned her light hair back behind her ears; the strands of hair on her neck were wet with perspiration. The white bikini she had made from a sheet was pasted to the curves of her body. There was tortilla dough on her hands.

“There’s a manta off Guardia rock.”

It seemed to take her a moment to understand. She turned slowly toward the bay with a faint polite smile and leaned forward over the patio wall, resting her elbows on the tile.

He watched her while she watched the water: she was alert from the shoulders forward; the rest of her body was lazily distributed in a balanced sprawl as though she had tossed it behind her. He had taken to observing her dynamics since she had caught the plague, in the course of which disorder her belly had become swollen and her long limbs wasted and spare. She and both of the children had suffered from the same disease — it was a variety of the local dysentery — and in its grip Marge and Jane and Richard had each commenced to dwindle away. Upon recovery, their flesh returned, and he had watched his wife regain the natural opulence of her body with dispassionate satisfaction. It was a visual diversion.

“Sure as shit,” Marge said.

She had seen the creature rise.

Fletch considered Marge’s response with distaste. It was a drag the way everyone had come to talk like a cowboy. Everyone called each other “hoss” and chuckled “haw haw,” country style. Goldang. It was Fencer’s influence. Fencer was a cowboy number.

“Fencer saw a manta ray while he was out swimming,” Marge said. “He was out by the rocks when he saw this big mother coming at him about twenty yards away. Started swimming for it with the wingspread bearing down on him. He says it was like the manta was trying to embrace him. A love trip, you know? Like this big slime thing was consumed with affection for Fencer and wanted to wrap him up and take him home. Fencer had his air gun. He says that would have been sad to have gut shot the thing and watch its poor fish face wrinkle up all disillusioned and die.”

“Fencer can’t possibly swim faster than a ray,” Fletch told her.

“What would it do if it caught you?” Marge asked. “Flap you to death? Butt you? Eat you?”

“We’ll find out when one catches Fencer;” Fletch said.

“Hey now, where are they?” She meant the children. She had caught their voices and cocked an ear to the wind.

“They’re on the beach. Doña Laura’s watching them.”

The bay had gone dark; the clouds came overhead, heavy with rain. Heat lightning flashed out to sea. On the north headland, Fletch could see the villa where Sinister Pancho Pillow lived etched in the sky’s sickly light; the hillside against which it stood had turned dark green.

Fletch became unhappy. He reached under the hammock, took his makings from a cedar box and began to roll a joint. Marge sat down beside him and for a few minutes they turned on and watched the storm gather. Marge drummed on her thighs, leaving a film of flour on the tanned skin.

“Fencer’s coming, you know,” Marge said.

Fletch extinguished the joint and lay sidewise on the hammock with his head beside the swell of Marge’s hip.

“Why?”

Marge looked down at him, blank-eyed.

“Well, to take you up to the volcano. You said you wanted to see it. He wants to take you.”

“I never said I wanted to see the volcano. I mean, I can see it from here.” The volcano was behind them, rising from the sierra. Fletch did not turn toward it.

“Fencer asked you just the other day. You said you wanted to go very much.”

“No such conversation took place,” Fletch told her.

The rain seemed to hang back. They sat in silence watching the clouds until they heard a car turn off the coast road. Fletch waited motionless until Fencer’s ‘49 Buick rolled up before the house.

Fencer was in the front seat beside Willie Wings; he was smiling happily at them, dangling one bare arm along the dusty surface of the car door. Fencer’s Buick was painted with thick blue and gold loops like the stylized waves of a Hokusai seascape.

“I don’t want to see the fucking volcano,” Fletch said.

“I bet you go,” Marge told him.

Fencer and Willie Wings got out and walked toward them. Fencer was wearing his white duck pirate pants and his Pima Indian necklace with a Maltese cross soldered to the chain. He wore his yellow hair like General Custer.

Willie Wings shuffled along beside him carrying a parrot in a cage. Breathless from the morning’s methedrine, he was addressing the bird. His face and the bald crown of his head were red and sweaty.

“Look at Fletch, Godfrey,” Willie Wings enjoined the parrot. “You see Fletch over there?”

Fletch turned away and lowered the brim of his cap over his eyes. He felt colder at that moment than he had ever felt in Mexico.

“It’s a good day,” Fencer declared, striking a posture before them. “Here we are and Willie Wings has his parrot.”

“Can you say ‘Fletch’?” Willie Wings asked the parrot. “Say ‘Come see the volcano, Fletch.’”

“Willie’s been tryin’ to train Godfrey to sit on his shoulder” Fencer said, “but it don’t never work. So he just carries him around.”

Willie Wings scratched at his denims with a free hand and shook the cage.

“Godfrey’s literary, that’s what his trouble is. I’m not saying he’s verbal but he’s literary. He’s like Fletch.”

Willie’s clear gaze swept the scene. Fletch remained under his hat.

“Godfrey and Fletch and Mrs. Fletch are all literary and that’s a handicap.” Willie turned from them, marched away ten steps, wheeled and approached talking.

“Which isn’t to say I don’t have my own literary side except I haven’t got the technical training in Paris and Bucharest of higher poetics before the crowned heads of Europe which is what Godfrey and Fletch and Marge think they have over me.”

He stopped and smiled on his parrot with broken teeth.

“Oh you doll, Godfrey! You pseudo-intellectual.”

“We got beer in the car,” Fencer said. “Let’s haVe a beer, Willie Wings.”

Willie set the parrot down and went to the car to wrestle the beer from the trunk.

“Willie had another bad scene with that Chinaman grocer” Fencer said as they watched him. “Pretty soon oP Hong won’t sell us no more beer.”

Marge shook her head.

“I thought you took his crystal, Fencer,” she said. “He’s really too much now and then.”

Fencer looked sad.

“Willie gave up crystal. He handed me what he had and made me swear I’d only give him what he really needed. But he got some more somewhere and he’s shooting it again. I think maybe he got it from Sinister Pancho Pillow.”

“His mind is running off its reel,” Fletch said. “He’s going to end up in a speed museum.”

“I got a deep personal esteem for Willie Wings,” Fencer told them. “My friends don’t appreciate that. He’s an avatar.”

Fletch said nothing.

“Well he’s certainly a very good driver,” Marge said.

“He’s a lot more than that,” Fencer said. “Aw, just look at him with animals.”

Fletch savored the imaginary cold under his hat brim. He considered Willie Wings’s relationship to animals and Fencer’s relationship to Willie Wings.

“Remember Willie’s dog?” Fencer asked. His eyes sparkled with humorous affection. “Remember Ol’ Crush?”

Marge laughed, joining in the mood of nostalgia. “Oh, God,” she cried, “Ol’ Crush.”

Fletch recalled the days when Willie’s mind had been clearer and he had been a dealer in the Haight. He had maintained a German shepherd named Old Crush, although according to Willie it was an Alsatian and had been trained to kill in French. Willie, in those days, had been more political and would have no traffic with German killer dogs; Old Crush had been raised by anti-fascists, and attacked at the command “Mort aux vaches.”

When a deal was consummated Willie Wings and the customer would turn on together, and when everyone was suitably high Willie would introduce Old Crush from an adjoining room.

“Don’t betray the slightest sign of fear,” Willie would advise his guests, “or he’ll tear you to pieces.”

Willie Wings set the case of beer down on the patio and stood before them panting.

“I hear you had more trouble with Mr. Hong,” Marge inquired.

Willie rolled his eyes. “Don’t think Orientals can’t sense dharma strength,” he said. “When Hong sold me that beer, we lived out the Eon of the Void together, and he fought me every step of the way.” He picked up the caged parrot and shook it. “Didn’t he, Godfrey?”

“Hong is afraid of you,” Marge explained, “because he thinks you’re crazy. He’s afraid of Fencer, too.”

“That reminds me,” Willie Wings said. “Let’s go see the volcano. Let’s take Fletch.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Fencer said. “Let’s go, Fletch.”

The rain broke suddenly, Fletch sat silently, listened to it for a while, and lifted his hat.

“Well,” he said, sitting up, “I do want to go up there and see it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Willie Wings sang. “There are fire flowers up there, Fletch. Along the rim. Black rock and fire flowers.”

“But … I don’t think I want to go today.”

Willie Wings stared at Fletch in horror.

“I don’t like it, Fencer,” he said. “I didn’t like it before and I don’t like it now.” He looked at Marge and Fletch in turn. “Why not? I don’t understand. What is this, some kind of literary mood? Some kind of balky bolting? Some kind of not doing what the guys have come to do?”

“This would be the best time to go,” Fencer said.

“It isn’t that I don’t want to see the thing,” Fletch explained, “because I certainly do…”

He made what seemed to him an intense effort to conclude his statement but found himself unable to do so.

“Well, good,” Fencer said. “Let’s go, hoss. Let’s have a joint and go.”

Fencer had the joints under his belt. He produced them with astounding grace and speed; they shot from hand to hand like flaming arrows. Fletch took his tokes one after another, feeling that it was somehow against his will. It occurred to him that he did not have to go with Fencer and Willie Wings to the volcano but that he was very high.

“That’s all I want,” he said after a while.

“Too much,” Willie Wings cried.

They all had another joint and washed the grass sediment down with cold beer.

“I lust after that mountain,” Fencer said. “I’ve got to get up there.”

The rain stopped. Within seconds the wet leaves of the vanilla trees beside the patio were drying.

“Marge,” Fletch said, “do you want to go?”

“No,” she said.

Fencer and Willie Wings watched her.

“Why not?”

“I’ll stay down here with the kids. I have to.”

She leaned against the wall. A small lizard ran between her sandaled feet.

Fletch stood up and looked at the ocean.

“If I had said I was going,” Marge told him, “and Fencer and Willie Wings had come to take me, I would go.”

“Right,” Fletch said.

“Man,” Fencer said, “we’ve got to get up there. We’ve got to leave now while it’s light.”

“Right,” Fletch said. He picked up the thermos of Coke and alcohol and walked to the car. He felt curiously cold in the sunlight.

The inside of Fencer’s car was stifling. Fletch sat down between a tire and some empty gasoline cans. The car smelled of gasoline and the steaming rotten upholstery.

Fencer and Willie got in. As the car pulled away, Fletch watched his wife go inside and close the door.

“When we get up there, Fletch,” Fencer said, “you’ll see it’s a great place for a poet. Then I won’t have to describe it for you anymore.”

“When Fletch sees it,” Willie Wings said, “he can describe it for us. Because being a poet he can describe things better than we can.”

He turned around to face Fletch.

“Fletch has had too many things described to him. It’s time he had something of his own to describe.”

Fletch looked out the window at the rows of banana trees.

“Who is he talking about, Fencer? Is he really talking about me?”

“You know that better than I do, Fletch,” Fencer said. “Sounds like he is.”

They drove along the coast highway between the plantations and the beach. Just outside the village, where the police post was, the Indians were lined along the road in their Sunday suits, holding palm fronds and flags. Five men in silver-studded vests stood behind the crowd with instruments at the ready — two trumpeters, a tuba player; a drummer and a cymbalist. People in the crowd held lengths of a banner reading BIENVENIDOS PADRE URRIETA!

Fencer and Willie Wings saluted the crowd as they drove by. Fencer salaamed and Willie Wings, his fingers joined to suggest the Trinity, dispensed papal benedictions.

“Diablo,” someone shouted.

Fletch crouched down beside the tire in a position from which he could see only the crests of palm trees and the sky.

After a while they turned inland, following the straight plantation roads through armies of coconut palm. At the turn where the road curved upward into the sierra, they started a covey of vultures from the jungle. The birds flapped about the car windows in alarm.

“Hong won’t sell me tarot cards,” Willie Wings said. “He told me no, absolutely refused to sell me them, won’t have me near them.”

“He probably doesn’t have tarot cards,” Fletch said. “He’s a grocer.”

“I know what Hong has,” Willie said heatedly. “I know every thing about him.” Willie was popping pills; he turned to Fencer in a fury. “Listen, Fences how can he be a poet? He don’t live the conscious life. He lives unawares.”

“You reckon there’s truth in that?” Fencer asked.

“No,” Fletch said. “I live the conscious life.”

Fencer smiled at him in the rear-view mirror.

“You hear that, Fencer?” Willie Wings shouted. “You hear what he said?”

Fletch stared at the moist flushed surface of Willie’s head and felt a thrill of fear.

“Everyone has a potential level of consciousness,” Fencer said kindly. “There’s a vein of deep perception in all beings. The thing is to bring it out.”

“Fletch’s perception is dead,” Willie Wings declared. He began to assemble a joint of his own. “Like a dead nerve in a tooth.”

They were leaving the low ground. Palms gave way to occasional live oak, Spanish cedar and euphorbia; vines covered the road. They ascended a green spiral, and at the turns Fletch could see the bay below.

He said nothing, but when Willie Wings presented the next joint he accepted it. His perception, he reminded himself, was not dead but throbbed within his lax and ill-used body, a secret agent. Crouched low in the back seat, he stared dully toward the mass of the sierra and tried to consider the action.

They were taking him up to the volcano. When the moment came, he promised himself, he would act appropriately.

The smell of thick-fleshed green things was suffocating. The wind that resisted their climb was heavy and sweet.

“I was once the only white bellhop in Chattanooga,” Willie Wings told them when the joint had been consumed. “Years and years ago at the start of my career. I worked in an eight-story hotel. You see me, right? Youthful in those days, with glossy black hair that indicated my Cherokee blood. Braided uniform, kind of like the staff drape at the Hotel Dixie on Forty-two Street when the bus depot was up there. Only it’s an eight-story hotel in Chattanooga — take it off the stationery.

“Now I couldn’t begin to lay on you the parts of the human heart I witnessed there. Forget the microcosm — it was more than that. Eight stories high.

“You know, don’t you, that I saw lots of shit to appeal to the prurient interest? I saw every variety of sexuality known to the Eastern masters. Dig it! In each and every room was a viewee thing — sometimes it was a little hole, sometimes it was more complicated, because this was in the great age of hotels.”

Fletch listened with growing panic. While Willie Wings paused to do a speed item, he raised his thermos and drank. He tried to do so in absolute silence, and huddled even lower in the seat so that he would not be seen. Willie caught him all the same.

“Fencer!” Willie cried, so loudly that the bird beside him set up a squawk in anxious imitation. “Look at Fletch with that lush! Look at him suck on it.”

Fencer smiled tolerantly. “Fletch is just relaxing.”

“Don’t get so juiced I can’t tell you, Fletch — I’m talking about Chattanooga! I’m talking about that eight-story hotel!” He raised his clenched hand as though he were wrestling with angels.

“Every notion that could be acted upon with the human body was acted upon under my eyes, baby. My nights were rich — they were cloying. But — listen to this, Fletch — of all those fleshy games I saw played, the most spectacular beyond any shadow of a doubt was played by one man! One solitary, ordinary-looking citizen in a room by himself! I have never again seen anything like it.”

Willie Wings paused to catch his breath. He rubbed his hands together.

“So…” he sighed, and a drawling self-deprecation came into his voice, “so waal you could say it was just a cat playing with himself.” He leaned his head on the seat as though overcome. “But let me tell you,” he said softly, “let me tell you, buddies — he really played with himself.”

When Willie Wings settled back, exhausted, Fletch saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

Fencer was flushed with affection. When he spoke it was with difficulty. “Oh God, Willie. Oh, Willie.”

Willie Wings sat with eyes closed, nodding.

“Oh, Willie,” Fencer said.

“Yeah,” Willie said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Fencer sought Fletch in the rear-view mirror.

“Fletch,” he said gently, “can’t you get with us?”

“Jesus Christ,” Fletch said. He said it quite involuntarily.

Willie Wings, his reverie shattered, turned and glared.

“I’m sorry I told you, Fletch, you’re such a drag. I’m really pissed now,” he told Fencer, “and I’m a little sorry about what’s happening.”

“Don’t be,” Fencer said reassuringly. “Don’t regret nothing.”

On the leeward side of the mountains, the land was much drier. Jungle clung to the canyons, but there were broad expanses of brushland grown with mesquite and agave and flowering redbird cactus. Occasionally the road ran past shapeless masses of concrete where half-finished constructions had been trapped by floods from the rain-soaked sierra and left to molder.

Whenever a burro or a longhorn cow went by, Willie Wings, who loved animals, had a good word to say for it.

Fletch rested his head on the tire in a state of deep depression. From time to time, he would attempt to bring himself up with a drink from his thermos, but to no avail. They were, he had noted, only a few kilometers from Corbera, the highest town in the valley — from there the road climbed steadily toward the dirt track that led to the crater. If he was to get out of the car and have no more of Fencer and Willie Wings he would have to do it in Corbera, from where a bus ran to the coast. If he flung himself out of the car, as he now and then considered, they would simply stop and come back for him and he would have to explain to Willie Wings.

Corbera was about ten minutes away; one drove through it completely in five minutes — he had therefore only fifteen minutes to devise a ruse or a confusion in which he might make his escape.

He lay back and considered his prospects — Willie and Fencer had fallen silent. They passed the Purina plant which marked the outskirts of Corbera. Fourteen minutes. Fletch took another drink; the parrot squawked to alert Willie Wings. Thirteen minutes.

Fletch considered the peculiar question of whether there had ever been an element of choice connected with his excursion. One thing was certain: he had not refused to come. He thought this significant.

At the moment when his rational process was most acutely engaged, his thoughts were frighted by the hated voice of Willie Wings.

“Now that man in Chattanooga didn’t claim to be no poet,” Willie told him. “But all by himself in that there hotel room he wailed. He set his consciousness on fire! That was life I was witnessing, Fletch, at my peephole. So when I meet guys like you…”

Fletch stared wide-eyed at the telegraph wires outside. Twelve minutes … Eleven minutes.

Willie Wings had raised both arms above his head like a bouzouki dancer and was waggling his thick fingers over the reddened dome of his head.

“Then I think, Wow, man, how groovy it is to be human! What a beautiful thing to be alive and conscious. And I think of that summer night in the shadow of Lookout Mountain — the cat on his own self and me on my peephole — the two of us there, human and conscious, the perceiver and the perceived, man, and I think that’s the most beautiful night of my life spiritually.”

He turned to look at Fletch, but seeing only the rear window he cried out in alarm. “Fencer! Where’s Fletch?”

Fletch had sunk to the floor and was gripping the tire with both hands.

“Fletch!” Willie called and leaned over the seat to discover him. “You once-born emptiness, you better hide.” He bent himself double over the back to shout in Fletch’s ear. “In spite of you, man, the world is rich!”

Fletch twisted on the thought. He pulled himself upright and took a drink.

Fencer watched him in the mirror. “Stay in it, Fletch. Everything’s gonna be groovy.”

“You fucking repulsive baldheaded rat,” Fletch said to Willie. “Who wants to hear about your lousy life?”

Willie Wings stared in astonishment.

Fencer looked concerned.

“Don’t be an asshole,” he cautioned Fletch. “Don’t overreact.”

The world is rich in spite of me, Fletch thought furiously.

“You creepy bastards! All I know is creepy bastards!” Fletch could not contain himself. “My life is poisoned!”

Willie Wings recovered himself.

“Nobody sounds me,” he declared violently. “No literary poet abuses me! It’s love me — love my thing! I got my own thing, Fencer. I got friends that love me and revere me and protect me from the literary poets that want to destroy me because the literary poets have always wanted to destroy me. I don’t know how many times I been bum-tripped and burned by poets and I hate the bastards!”

“You…” Fletch began.

“You think I can’t protect myself from you?” Willie shouted. “You think I’m defenseless?” He laughed derangedly. “I got a hard desperate side for my own protection,” he told them. “I got a piece!” He began to claw at the inside of his leg, which was where he strapped his pistol.

“Yeah,” Willie Wings said. His eyes were fixed as though confronting some inevitability; his hand was on the concealed holster.

Fencer began to slap at him blindly with his free arm.

“Willie, Willie, that ain’t the way.”

“Whaddaya mean it ain’t the way, Fencer? What’s the way then?”

“The way,” Fencer said, “is to go up the mountain and make it all complete.” He sought Fletch in the mirror again. “Right, Fletch?”

Fletch stared glassy-eyed at the bulge along Willie’s calf where the gun was.

“Let me out,” he said dully. “I get out here.”

They were in the zócalo of Corbera. On the left Fletch saw the veranda of the Hotel Volcánico, on the right the Azteca Cinema was playing Sangre y Plata with Errol Flynn.

“No,” Fencer said. “We got to finish it.”

Willie Wings had regained his composure. “I’ll go along with that,” he said. “Fletch stays.”

There was a wall of peanuts on the north end of the square where the vendors had set up their stalls outside the municipal market. Fletch was suddenly inspired. He thrust himself over the seat and seized the wheel. Fencer hung on and decelerated.

“Let me out,” Fletch told him. “I’ll run us on the peanuts.”

A vendor approached them with a basketful of nuts.

“Cacahuetes,” he moaned. “Cacahuetes?”

Fencer and Willie Wings sat in silent fury.

Fletch gathered up his thermos and prepared to alight. He was trembling.

“Cacahuetes,” sang the peanut vendor.

Without warning, Fencer rammed into gear. Fletch saw the market fall away in a spray of peanuts as he flew into the back seat.

“Gringo!” the stricken peanut man called after them. “Gringo!”

Fletch floundered in the seat. His trousers were soaked in Coke and alcohol.

“Take it easy, Fletch,” Fencer said earnestly. “Show him, Willie.”

“Don’t panic, Fletch,” Willie said. “But the Sinister Pancho Pillow was just pulling up behind us.” He pointed tensely through the rear window.

About thirty yards behind them was a new Lincoln with California plates. The driver; barely visible, was a fat, dark-skinned man who wore a goatee and dark glasses. A girl in a straw hat sat beside him, and there was a third person in the back.

Fletch stared at them.

“Well there it is, Fletch,” Fencer said. “You panicked. You balked. And you nearly set us up for Sinister Pancho Pillow.”

“And his woman, La Beatriz,” Willie Wings said.

“And La Beatriz. And Pancho’s Odd Buddy.” Fencer whistled through his teeth. “Don’t that show you somethin’ about how the world is set up, Fletch? There you were, acting like me and Willie Wings was a menace, and in the next fuckin’ instant Sinister Pancho Pillow makes the scene.”

Fletch thought of prayer. He addressed a prayer to his perception, which he felt was in danger of obliteration, together with its frail equipage. He beseeched his perception to overcome panic and confusion.

“I have nothing to fear from Pancho Pillow,” he told them. “What do I care if he pulls up behind us?”

“Let us not leave those evils which we got,” Willie Wings said, “and flee to others which we know not of.”

Fencer nodded vigorously. “That’s a relevant quote, Fletch. Hey, man, are they still behind us?”

“They turned off,” Fletch said. “They’re going back to the coast.”

“That’s a feint,” Fencer said. “They’re gonna stay out there behind us somewhere.”

The sloping plains they drove through were bare, although patches of cypress forest rose in the barrancas below them.

They were above Corbera now. Ahead the road ran quite literally to the clouds.

Fencer was rolling a joint while driving. He was one of the few people in Mexico who could do so. Fletch watched him jab the lighted end toward Willie with an impatient gesture. That, Fletch thought, must be why they called him Fencer.

Fletch had resolved to turn on in order to buy time. If he accepted the new joint, it seemed to him that he would not get very much higher than he was. Moreover the forms of order would be maintained, perception stimulated and panic postponed.

Fencer became philosophical. “Paranoids make their own hell,” he told Fletch. “Here you were with just me and Willie and all aggressive and paranoid. Next thing — wham — it’s Sinister Pancho Pillow time. Don’t that make you think?”

“What’s the matter with Pancho Pillow?” Fletch asked. “I mean, compared with you and Willie Wings?”

“Nothin’ wrong with Pancho for the average person,” Willie said. “Plenty wrong for you though, Fletch — you better believe it. Because we’re with you down deep, Fletch. But Sinister Pancho Pillow ain’t with no one and he’d eat you up.”

“Why?” Fletch asked.

“Why?” Willie Wings sighed. “Because you’re his favorite flavor.”

Fletch affected to laugh.

“Oh now this is really a lot of shit,” he said.

Willie looked at him kindly.

“That really is a lot of shit,” Fletch told them. “It’s utter jive. You’re crazy with speed, all of you.”

“I’m afraid Willie’s right, Fletch,” Fencer said. “But we’re all in the same bag, children, because Sinister Pancho Pillow has hunger and thirst for all of us.”

“Not for me,” Willie Wings said. He rattled the parrot’s cage, making the bird squawk.

“Especially for you, Willie Wings,” Fencer said. “Sorry.”

Fletch shook his head.

“Oh now this really is a lot of shit,” he said.

“Too bad you can’t make your own world,” Fencer said. “But you got to live the world the way it is, I hate to tell you. If I made the world and the firmament, I wouldn’t have no Pancho Pillows in it. But there he is, Virginia, sorry about that.”

“Now this…” Fletch began.

“If Pancho had come on us back in Corbera,” Fencer went on, “he’d have wanted into your life. If he’d seen we was all together — and that Willie Wings was around — he’d have been just overjoyed. He’d have suggested a picnic.”

“And you’d have been sorry quick,” Willie Wings added. Willie had turned morose.

“Pancho’s a body snatches” Fencer told them. “That’s my theory. A body snatcher and an agent and one of the world’s worst bummers.”

“He’s been known to wear a badge,” Willie said. “He showed a friend of mine one once.”

“Sure as shit,” Fencer said. “I’ve seen him appear on the border and the score went bad. I know for a fact he was around that bad Lee Oswald fella in Mex City. When Miss Liz Taylor lost something up in P.V., they went to Pancho Pillow to get it back.”

“You want to freak the cats in Mexicali?” Willie Wings asked Fletch. “Bop over to the One-Eyed Indian Bar and tell them ‘Pancho Pillow’s in town!’ Man, you’ll dig them choke and turn gray and their knees’ll knock together. That’s what they think of Panch in Mexicali.”

“Fuck him, is all,” Fencer said. “Forget him. Let’s go see the volcano.”

They drove over a plateau surrounded by brown peaks. The wind had a taste Fletch had forgotten. It was late in the day; the light was fading in the sky and the peaks cast long conical shadows over the dun sand.

They came to the dirt track. Fencer eased the car off the highway and followed it. The track ran in shadow and Fletch was aware of the mass of the volcano rising above them. Bursts of smoke came at the windshield like yellow flak.

Fletch watched Willie and Fencer in the peculiar light.

“I dig the high windies, man,” Fencer said. “I love it up here.”

There was no life to be seen. Not even goats grazed on the sulfurous pasture. There were no bird calls, not even a buzzard in the sky. The smoke grew thicker.

“Hang in, Fletch,” Fencer said. “We get out in half a mile.”

Their faces were caked with dust. Willie’s parrot had begun to make faint cooing noises.

Fletch turned in his seat and looked with longing at the descending track behind them.

“Maybe,” he said at length, “maybe … we could come to an understanding.”

Fencer smiled. “That’s what we’re up here for.”

“I didn’t really have to come up,” Fletch told them, “but as it is, I did. I could have avoided this. There was plenty of places I could have gotten out — I almost did get out, didn’t I? There were plenty of reasons. But, as it is, I stayed in all the way.”

Fencer nodded. Willie began to hum “The Streets of Laredo.”

“So if I came all this way, it shows some willingness, doesn’t it? It shows some…” He paused and looked uneasily at the sky. “It shows some trust — how about that?”

The road ended in a depression of ocher mud veined with cracks. A wall of black volcanic rock faced them, rising toward the peak and sloping downward toward iron-toothed canyons which they could not see. The wind carried only silence.

“If a man like me can show so much trust to you and Willie Wings, it shows we’ve got something going together; right?”

“Don’t try to verbalize it,” Fencer said. “You’ll just fuck it up.”

They got out of the car and stood before a sign that pointed straight upward. The sign said that San Isobel was five kilometers away; it was riddled with bullet holes.

“If we’ve got this much going,” Fletch told them, “we don’t have to go through with any kind of stunts, do we, Fencer? We don’t have to have sentimental dramas to act out where we’re at.”

Fencer and Willie looked at him sympathetically.

“I mean, we’re all party to the same thing. I proved that by coming up here.”

“You’re sure party to something, Fletch,” Fencer agreed. “But see, we’ve got to go up on the volcano.”

“Literary Fletch,” Willie Wings said.

The path they were to follow led over the rock at the edge of the mountainside. There was no path leading downward.

“It’s gonna be dark,” Fencer said. “That’ll make it harder.”

Fletch saw that they were waiting for him to lead.

He took a drink from the thermos and stepped forward.

“Maybe,” he said, “we could all begin again.”

When he closed his eyes, he saw the formless colors of the mountain. Yellow and black. He tried to raise the thermos again but failed to muster the strength. Opening his eyes, he looked at the steep path for a moment. Then he raised the thermos and hurled it, with surprising force, into Willie’s face.

Ax edges of rock flew up at him as he leaped; the merciless ground tore at his shoes. At times it seemed to him that he was bouncing, gliding over clefts and boulders like a hurdler. He could hear the parrot squawking and Fencer shouting “No!” Once he turned and saw Fencer start after him.

Willie had climbed on a rock and was screaming, waving his pistol. “Don’t you play gingerbread boy with me, you fuckin’ poet!”

Fencer had stopped and was shouting “No!” at Willie. Fletch heard a pistol shot and somewhere a bullet rang against the iron-fibered rock.

When he heard the car engine start up, he ran faster. It was all down, over rank after rank of jagged rock.

After a while, he found the dry bed of a stream and followed it through a dark arroyo. The farther down he went, the more difficult it became for him to see; shadow and rock grew together. After about a mile he could no longer run because the ground was too steep — he climbed downward, facing the rock wall. His knees were bloody but his feet found holds with a sure instinct. At one point a cloud passed over him, leaving him chilled through, and when the cloud had passed he saw that night was coming on the valley below. He could see the last of sunlight play on green waxy leaf in the fingers of rain forest along the lower slope. He found a stretch of smoother rock on which to rest and let the night slip over him. Sounds of a life he had not suspected rustled from the barren ground.

Leaning back against the rock, he tried to shake the colors of the day from his mind. After a while, he discovered the remnant of a joint in his trouser pocket and, having no matches, ate it. The shadows of the valley swayed beneath his feet. In the distance he could see the lights of Corbera, the illumination of the cathedral tower and the wooden bullring.

He began to regret that he had not seen the crater. He deserved to see it, it seemed to him, since he had come all the way and crowned the journey with a masterly escape. Willie Wings and Fencer had sealed him in a box of speed madness that interfered with the spontaneous joys of active living — they were mere circumstances, artifacts. Yet it had been necessary to escape them: the pair were overripe, deracinated by years of smoking grass in the tropics, consumed by maniac ravings and heaven knew what bizarre commitments to serpent-headed lava gods and human sacrifice.

It was humiliating, he thought, to be forced to survive by guile, but in a crisis, could he not bring it to bear? Indeed, it seemed to him, he could.

As the world darkened, Fletch became more and more exhilarated, and for a time he considered retracing his steps and going to the crater after all. But he stayed where he was until the moon rose and then stood up to survey the valley. As he watched, the lights of Corbera suddenly flickered and died — in a few seconds they went on, stayed on for a short time, and died again. Fletch stood waiting, saw the lights return, flicker, disappear. He found the spectacle intensely gratifying. Corbera was a light show.

Heat lightning was flashing over the coast range. Fletch stretched out his arms and with Jovian fingers began to play the illuminations one against the other — with one hand he dispensed lightning for the firmament, with the other darkness for the sons of men. The lightning and the town’s electricity followed the bidding of his fingers with precision.

Fletch cried out joyfully from his Promethean rock.

“I’ll be screwed if I’m not stout Cortés,” he said.

Fletch became, in effect, stout Cortés. When the moon was high enough for him to see his way, he clambered downward, completely unafraid. The fer-de-lance slithering among the rocks, the lurking Gila monsters, the tigers in their caves were fine with him. At intervals he rested, looked up at the peak and saw dark vapors visible against the stars, against Taurus.

I’m all perception, Fletch thought as he descended, all I require is to be left alone by the likes of Fencer and Willie Wings. Revolting to be pursued by epiphenomena.

I am a fortress beset by flying men, he thought. The sleep of reason produces monsters.

Halfway down the slope, he found a trail and followed it; he could smell jungle and black earth below him. In a few minutes he had entered the forest. His passage set off a scurrying among the trees, a sudden silence broken by monkey cries, the din of cicadas and cinches. He felt his presence electrify the night.

“I am the sentient consciousness here,” he said aloud.

He put his hand to a tree and felt hundreds of hard beetle bodies scurry along the surface of the vines. Every now and then lightning flashed above the trees, lighting the grove where he stood and leaving behind his eyes white lighted instants in which unknown creatures stood transfixed on the edge of vision.

Walking on, he found the downward slope still steep, and once, following what he thought to be a trail along a fallen tree trunk, he fell several feet onto soft earth, landed upright, scattering invisible creatures before him.

He walked for well over an hour with what he experienced as animal grace. When he came out of the woods, he found a dark shed beyond a wooden gate; open sewerage was somewhere near at hand. Continuing, he roused an enormous pig that grunted at him savagely — as he hurried on, pigs roused themselves in alarming numbers from the adjoining grounds. He found that he was atop a steep rise above the center of Corbera — the lights were on; he could hear music from the jukeboxes in the Calle Obregon.

The road was on the other side of the pig shed. Fletch followed it downhill toward the market, where intermittent paving and open street lights began.

He found the central square almost deserted. A few old Indian women selling beer dozed beside their stalls. Flags and tricolor pennants swung on the wind honoring the anniversary of the revolution.

The lights and the music were all on the Calle Obregon. Fletch made for it, walking tensely under the colonnades, expecting the lights to go at any moment. He kept his hands clenched to control his conductivity.

Calle Obregón was swarming with soldiery. Men in khaki uniforms were lined up in front of the cathouses drinking beer and clustered in the doorways of the open-fronted bars. Twenty jukeboxes sounded together.

Fletch went quickly. Two military policemen with carbines slung over their shoulders passed him with glances of grave suspicion.

The La Florida bar was where Fletch always went in Corbera. He admired the pastoral murals, which were true art naif, and the section of earth floor around the bar. That night he found it crowded with cavalrymen, all drunk to the point of silence. He entered as quietly as possible and ordered a rum. As he drank it, a small boy approached with an electric shock machine.

The cavalryman nearest Fletch cursed softly, beckoned to the boy, and put fifty centavos in his hand. Then he gripped the metal handles, planting his feet firmly, legs apart, knees bent. Without looking at his customer, the boy turned the crank, and the soldier, his jaw set, his eyes half closed, received the current. The others watched him without expression. After a few seconds, the soldier’s uniform shirt began to crackle and his hair to stand upon its roots. The machine glowed and the soldier’s face twitched and his chin rose as though his head were being torn from his body. The boy turning the crank never glanced at him.

Fletch did not know very much about electricity but he admired the machine. The generator box was painted bright blue, and on it was the picture of a clenched fist emitting bolts of lightning, over the word Corazón! in pink letters. He suspected that the machine might be somehow involved in Corbera’s fits of chiaroscuro.

The cavalryman had huge reserves of Corazón! and continued to hang on. Fletch took his drink to another electric spectacle, the jukebox in the back.

The jukebox, enormous and bright with shifting, laminated light, had scores of jungle moths fluttering around it. From time to time a moth would touch against the hot plastic surface and spin to the floor with singed wings. Around the foot of the box was a brilliant litter of burnt and dying moths.

Fletch had settled down in back when he saw Pancho Pillow seated at a nearby table. Pancho Pillow was smiling; he was accompanied by La Beatriz, who was also smiling, and by his Odd Buddy, who was not.

The sight of Pancho Pillow was so little suited to Fletch’s mood that it took him a short time to remember that the strength of his perception had rendered him at peace with the world.

He carried his rum to Pancho’s table.

“God save all here,” he said.

The sight of Fletch seemed to send both Pancho Pillow and La Beatriz into spasms of delight. They laughed uproariously and La Beatriz pinched Pancho on the belly.

“Fletch!” Pancho cried. “Fletch, my friend to be! Sit down and drink with us.”

Fletch sat down. La Beatriz affected to gaze on him with nymphic passion. Pancho’s Odd Buddy watched the soldiers at the bar.

“I’ve been sad all day,” Pancho said merrily. “We saw you today in the company of hoodlums.” Pancho wore a brush mustache and had many chins. His light brown hair was combed straight up from his forehead. “We all wondered — what is a poet doing with hoodlums?” He made his little eyes twinkle confusion.

“That Fences” La Beatriz said with distaste, “that Weelie Weengs! Eeee!” She flung her hand before Fletch’s face as though she were trying to shake something off her fingers.

“I was taking the day off,” Fletch said. “I woke up this morning and I said to myself, Today I’ll do something less literary.”

“You don’t want to know Fencer and Willie Wings,” Pancho said. “They’re bummers.” He leaned forward and spoke softly. “My theory is they work with the body snatchers.”

Fletch savored his drink.

“I have nothing to fear from Fencer and Willie Wings,” he said. “They can’t affect me in the essentials.”

“Ah,” Pancho said, “you can’t cheat an honest man. Before W. C. Fields it was an Arab proverb, and you’d think the Arabs should know.” He put his hand on Fletch’s shoulder; then withdrew it. “But it’s not true.” He cupped his hands, turned them upside down and shrugged. “No, it’s not true. My life hasn’t been easy and I’ve cheated many honest men. It’s just as untrue as it sounds.”

Fletch laughed for quite a while. “What could they possibly cheat me out of?” he asked.

“What do Weelie Weengs and Fencer say about Pancho?” La Beatriz asked him. “They make up goodies on him?”

“Yes,” Pancho said. “I was…” His hand fluttered in the air.

“You were too modest to ask,” Fletch suggested.

Everyone laughed together.

“Well, actually, Pancho,” Fletch said, pronouncing his auditor’s name with difficulty, “they didn’t say anything.”

Pancho and La Beatriz hooted.

“Oh, come on, man,” they said, in melodious unison.

Pancho Pillow’s Odd Buddy turned to Fletch for the first time. Fletch saw that the two sides of his face did not match.

“They didn’t tell you that one time me and Pancho drove from Belize to Jalapa with them in the trunk?”

Pancho intervened. “It was in a good cause,” he assured Fletch.

Fletch drank his rum. He was content.

“I love Mexico,” he told them. “You can take some fantastic rides here.”

“What a poet!” Pancho Pillow exclaimed.

“Lord Byron,” La Beatriz said.

The boy with the Corazón! machine approached and Pancho’s Odd Buddy watched him eagerly, ogling the metal handles. He was reaching in his pocket for change when Pancho leaned forward to restrain him.

“Don’t, Idaho,” he said.

“What the hell,” his Odd Buddy said protestingly.

“For me, Idaho,” Pancho pleaded. “I don’t want to watch.”

The boy looked at them in disgust and went outside.

“You’re in your element here, Fletch,” Pancho said. “Not everyone is. Myself, I’m at home throughout the Spanish-speaking world.”

Fletch nodded. “I am in my element here,” he agreed. “That’s true.”

“I was born in Tunis,” Pancho confided. “Hispano!” He breathed deeply and beat twice on his chest. “Superficially French in culture and outlook — a man of the world and a great traveler. But in the soul I’m Hispano, that’s where it’s at.”

“Everyone should have a souly country,” Fletch said.

“I admire simplicity of heart,” Pancho said. “I despise hypocrisy and deceit, so I have no use for politics.”

He looked at Fletch in admiration.

“I myself am poetical. My view of life, my way of looking at the world, is poetical. If I wasn’t a businessman, that would be my groove.” Pancho seemed to grow emotional.

“Listen to me, Fletch, we can use some poetry in our lives. Let’s really get together — nothing superficial. I have a story to tell — the story of Pancho Pillow — it’ll wipe you out, man. No bullshit. Let’s have lunch, Fletch. Just you and Marge and me and Beatriz and Idaho. We’ll have a picnic. We’ll go up to the volcano.”

The lights went out. There was silence for a fraction of a second, and in that splinter of time Fletch had covered the distance between Pancho and the open doorway. He was not quite in the street when the chorus of groans broke. La Beatriz screamed.

“Adiós, you fuckin’ monsters,” Fletch shouted indignantly.

“Fletch!” Pancho Pillow cried. “For Christ’s sake!” His voice was sheer desperation.

Monsters, Fletch thought. Flying men. The street down which he ran was packed with drunken invisible soldiers. Men walked about striking matches and falling down in the road. The military police approached with their flashlights; Fletch huddled in the doorway of the cinema to let them pass. As he ran across the square, they turned their lights on him and shouted.

Fletch laughed. Never in his life had he so appreciated modern technology. Fine, he thought, bring the jungle to the folks.

At the market café, they had lighted hurricane lamps. A few trucks were parked outside, and the first in line was an International Harvester pickup truck loaded with chickens. A man in a Stetson was inspecting the carburetor. He was very drunk and singing to himself.

Fletch approached and asked him, with elaborate courtesy, for a ride to the coast. The man turned to him and crooned the refrain of his song, to illustrate the futility of all ambition. Fletch offered to hold his flashlight and offered twice the reasonable price for a ride, so when the truck started through the dark streets he was safely aboard. As they passed the square, Fletch could see Pancho Pillow’s Lincoln cruising like a baffled predator.

“Fuck ‘em all,” Fletch told the driver.

“Fuck,” the driver agreed. He was so drunk it seemed impossible to think of him driving down the mountains. A little girl in braids was nestled in the space behind the seat, asleep. When the wind and the noise of the engine permitted, Fletch could hear the chickens in the back of the truck.

The man in the Stetson drove much too fast and his clutch seemed to be slipping badly. Halfway down to the coast, as they sped past banana trees, he began to sing again.

“You warned me over and over,” he sang,

You kept warning me about the woman

That she wasn’t a good woman for me

You gave me so many warnings

So many warnings

That I thought you had gone loco

But the warning you should have given me

Was the one you didn’t give me

That you were a thieving betrayer

Just as bad as her

So now it’s me that’s gone loco

And I got a warning for you!

At times, Fletch sang with him. It was still dark when they reached the coast road, but the moon was very bright and Fletch could see the breakers beyond the beach.

He got out, paid the driver and walked along the beach toward his house, guided by the dark mass of the bay headlands. He was still walking when the sun came up over the volcano and woke the birds and lit the sea to pink and pale green beyond imagining. Now and then he passed men sleeping on the sand.

His house, when he came to it, was silent, although he could hear Doña Laura awake next door. Willie Wings was sprawled on the hammock before the doorway, quite awake and watching him blankly. The parrot lay prone and stiff in its cage, covered with a second skin of white dust. The morning flies had started to gather on it.

Fletch went past Willie Wings and inside. His children were asleep on their cot in the kitchen, but he heard faint voices from the bedroom. He got down on his hands and knees and crept silently over the tiles toward the bamboo curtain that divided the house.

Lifting the curtain slightly, he saw Marge and Fencer together on the mattress, naked. Marge’s long tanned body entwined Fencer’s like a constricting serpent. Fencer was clutching her around the thighs as though he were afraid she would fall. Their faces were together.

“I wish he hadn’t bolted,” Fencer was saying.

It occurred to Fletch that he could not be certain that Fencer had not heard him come in.

“You know, like he just bolted. It looked for a while like we were really going to get something going together. I thought, by God, it’s gonna work, we’ll go up there and turn on and we’ll groove and we’ll break down the verbal barrier. But he bolted.”

“Well, my God,” Marge said, “it was pretty stupid of Willie Wings to shoot at him. For Christ’s sake, he’s so paranoid anyway.”

“Willie’s a fanatic,” Fencer said. He ran his hands over Marge’s backside. “I’m kind of a fanatic too.”

She took his long hair in her hands and pulled it round his neck and kissed him.

“You super-romantic shithead,” she said.

Fletch lay still on the tiles trying to hold his breath and watched them do it. When his ribs began to hurt, he turned over and slid across the cool floor to the doorway. It took him nearly five minutes to crawl out — a masterpiece of silence.

When he was outside, he picked up one of the weights he had bought to keep himself in condition and lay down with it. Lying on his back, he held the weight at arm’s length for quite a long time. Sweat welled from his body. Then he lowered the weight and looked at the sky.

“Willie Wings,” he said to Willie Wings, “I went up that mountain, right? You were there, you saw me do it, right?”

“Yeah,” Willie said. “Not all the way. But you went up the mountain.”

“Right,” Fletch said. “I went up.” He leaned his head back to look at Willie. “I went up. And you should have been there to see me come down, man. Because that was really something else.”

Willie Wings watched him for a little while.

“Fletch, babe,” he said. “I had you wrong, brother. You really are a poet.”