"I buy it."

"How terribly kind!" Bruce said acidly.

"Meyer, I would not like to untie him and have him start making out like we are pine boards and cinder blocks and going into that yelling and grunting bit. So why don"t you just take that same walk again, and take a cab from the square to the hotel, and if I"m not there by the time you think I should be..."

So I gave him five minutes and then untied Bruce. He flexed his hands and went at once to David, turned and asked me where my car was and would I please bring it to the front.

They sat in the back. I heard Bruce coaching him in what to say at the hospital. Bruce told me the turns to take. They talked in low tones. I heard Bruce say at one point, "But really! Somebody is going to have to wait on you hand and foot, and shouldn"t I have that right? Besides, Davey, it was all settled, wasn"t it? And your things are at my place, aren"t they? Be practical, darling!"

They got out. Bruce said he could manage from there on, thank you. He gave me an absent nod, and walked David slowly toward the ambulance entrance.

I managed to get lost and ended up back in town rather than out on the Mitla Road. I got lost because my mind was too busy trying to make order out of too many fragments. I went up the hotel hill and around past the lobby entrance and down the cobblestone drive to the cottage carport.

Meyer hadn"t left any lights on. I stumbled on the steps to the front porch of the cottage, and I heard the legs of the metal porch chair sc.r.a.pe on the cement as he moved. I groped for the other chair and sat down, feeling a few twinges from the tumble along the tile, and wondering if they would turn into morning aches.

"Hoo, boy," I said. "Dandy little village they"ve got here. These sweet kindly folk tear me up, they really do. I"m even beginning to wonder about Enelio Fuentes. He"ll probably turn out to be a retired female wrestler going around in drag."

"Never fear," said Lady Becky from the neighboring chair. "Enelio is muy hombre. I can so certify."

"How the h.e.l.l did you get here?"

"That"s what I like, dearest. A warm welcome."

"Where is Meyer?"

"He"s really a dear man. Did you know that? Oh, I packed him off. I expect he"s settling down for the night in one of the other cottages. Things are thinning out, you know. We had a nice little visit, and he went puddling off carrying his little kit. He"s marvelously tactful and understanding."

"And treacherous."

"I was driving around and about looking for you, darling, and saw him walking toward the zocalo, so I gave him a lift back here. Thought you might spot my car and turn into a ninny and drive away again. So I parked it discreetly. Travis dear, such a lot of nuisance and nonsense for you to hammer poor Bruce about. All you had to do was come to me. I should have told you all the rest of it."

"If I lived long enough to hear it all."

"But darling, you"ll want to hear it from me too, to see if it all matches up, won"t you? So doesn"t it come out to the same thing? You do struggle so. One would think I was quite sickeningly ugly or a horrid bore."

"If you would kindly be ugly or boring, I would be very grateful."

"But I shall be both soon enough! Any day now one ghastly wrinkle will appear, and all of a sudden I shall be... Doriana Gray? Or like that carriage one of your sentimental poets wrote about. Quite suddenly I shall dwindle into a scruffy little old lady in tennis shoes, peering through bifocals, fussing with her hearing aid, who, in a quavery little old voice, will bore everyone with her memories of lovemaking. I am here because I forgave you."

"Thank you very much, Lady Rebecca. But you see, I wrote you down in one of the pages of my life, and now the pages have been turned, and we cannot go back and reread them because... because..."

"Because the book is very long and life is very short. Nice try, ducks. But I did the writing, and all I wrote was a preface. I told you. I was being a horrible show offy person. I shan"t be like that at all. Promise. Besides, you would be cheating me dreadfully. I granted myself a few little moments of climax, dear, but then I nipped the poor struggling things in the bud because, should I let one get truly started, it goes on and on and on, quite unendurably. It is so terribly lasting and intense and exhausting that I have to ration myself carefully. Even so, I go dragging about for days, looking quite puffy and done in. It would be wicked at this stage to deprive me."

I stood up slowly and made a wide circuit of her chair to reach the door. "It may be wicked, Becky. It may be unforgivable. It might even be a shocking lack of courtesy. But I am going to deprive the h.e.l.l out of both of us, and I am going to get a long night"s sleep, alone. Sorry about your pride and all that. Someday I may think back and kick myself. Sorry. Go drive that bubblegum car home. Good night, Lady Rebecca. Bug off, please."

I opened the screen door and reached in and found the switches for the room lights and porch lights and clicked everything on. She stood up and turned to face me, eyes sparkling green through the sheepdog ruff, mouth broadened in a delighted bawdy grin.

"You know, I thought you might be stuffy and standoffish and difficult. So one does what one can to make it a fait accompli, what?"

She wore a wine red hotel blanket gathered closely around her. She laughed and said, "It would take you hours to find where I hid my clothing, dearest."

She dropped the blanket to the porch floor. "What is that quaint Americanism you people use? Peekab.o.o.b?"

I flapped a weak and frantic hand at the switches until I hit them back the way they were and we were in darkness. Well, shucks. And puh-shaw, fellas.

"That"s right," I said, as she found me, locked on, and strained close. "Exactly right. Peekab.o.o.b. Very quaint old saying."

Ten.

I SAT out on the cottage porch in the Sundaymorning clang-bang of church bells and rooster announcements. Blue-gray smoke of breakfast fires hazed the morning bowl of the city.

Meyer came tentatively around the corner and looked up at me on the porch. Dopp-kit dangled from one hairy finger.

"Yoo-hoo," he said.

"Yoo-hoo to you, too, my good man."

"I didn"t see her car, so I thought... "

"Come, on up. You live here, Meyer. Remember?"

So he came up onto the porch, started to say something, and changed his mind and went silently into the cottage. He came out in a few minutes and sat in the other chair.

"McGee, I thought that you had gotten back and somehow managed to send her on her way, implausible as that may seem. But I can see from the... the wear and tear... that she stayed for a while."

"She went tottering out of here about forty minutes ago, Meyer. She claimed she could walk to her car unaided."

"But... how do you feel?"

"Vibrant, alive, regenerated, recharged."

"I... I"m sorry I let her talk me into moving out for the night, Travis. But I guess you know you can"t argue with that woman. She doesn"t listen. And after all, it was your personal problem and-"

"Stop apologizing, my good man. No trouble at all. Quite a pleasant night. Active, but pleasant. Now if you would pick me up and take me up to breakfast, we can begin the long day."

We went back to Los Pajaros trailer park. The office and store were closed and locked. We left the rented car outside the gates and walked in. In the s.p.a.ce numbered twenty, a Land Rover was parked under a tree with dusty leaves, near the travel trailer of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Knighton. The Rover was battleship gray, dusty and road-worn, with tools and gas cans strapped abroad.

He was sitting at an old table, typing with two fingers at respectable speed, apparently copying from,ycillow handwritten sheets. She was hanging some khaki shirts on a line to dry. They both stopped working as we approached, staring with an air of expectant caution. They could have been brother and sister, slat-thin young people, deeply sun-weathered, small statured, with colorless eyes, mouse hair, that elusive pinched and underprivilaged look around the mouth that seems typical of slum people, swamp people, coal mine people, and mountain people. He wore steel-rimmed gla.s.ses, and she had a plastic clothespin in her mouth. "Good morning!" I said.

He took off the gla.s.ses and she took out the clothespin. "Howdy" he said, in a voice more appropriate to a seven foot cowboy. ""Morning," she murmured.

"Sorry to bother you. My name is Travis McGee. This is my friend Meyer. The manager said you were acquainted with a man who stayed here for a while, right over there in number seventeen. His name is Rockland."

"Why do you want to talk to me about him?"

"I thought you might have some information that would help us locate him, Mr. Knighton."

"Why do you want to find him?"

"To ask him about a girl who came into Mexico with him."

"Afraid you"re wasting time, Mister McGee, covering ground already covered. I think he should have told you he was already here over two weeks ago."

"Who was here?"

"That girl"s father. What was his name, hon?"

"McLeen," she answered softly.

"This isn"t about the McLeen girl. This is the girl we"re asking about." I moved over to the table and handed him the picture.

He looked at it, tilting his head, squinting one eye. "I don"t want to tell you something that isn"t true. Maybe could you tell me this one"s name?"

"Bowie. Beatrice Bowie. She was called Bix."

He was quick. "Was called. Then I wouldn"t be breaking news, would I? You know she"s dead."

"Yes."

"But you want to ask about her? You related to her?"

"No. Friends of her father. He"s unable to travel. He wants to know what things were like for her down here, before she died. They were out of touch."

His wife had hung up the shirts. She came over to the table to look at the photograph. "Never knew she"d been such a pretty one," said Mrs. Knighton.

"We don"t want to interrupt your work." Meyer said.

Knighton studied us in turn. He shrugged and stood up, hand out. "I"m Ben. This here is Laura. Hon, you want to bring us out some of that coffee?"

"Surely," she said. "We take it black with a little sugar." We both nodded acceptance, and she responded with a thin smile and went into the travel trailer. The three of us moved over to the cement picnic table and benches that were, with the fireplace, part of the permanent installation at each site.

"Set," Ben Knighton said. His wife brought coffee, poured it and sat with us. They were comfortable people. He explained that he was on a sabbatical year from Texas Central University, and it was nearly over, and they had to leave in a few days.

He was obviously fond of young people, and he was also well acquainted with the drug scene on campus. It was natural that they would be curious about the five young people who had arrived in the camper back in April.

"Some of them dabble a little, without knowing the least d.a.m.n thing about what the direct effects and the side effects might be. And some of them turn into heavy users. So you give them what help you can, what help they"ll take from you. After a while you learn the categories. There"s the predators who get their kicks out of, turning the weaker kids on and taking monetary advantage or s.e.xual advantage of them, or both. And some of the kids are such victims natural born, they seem to be looking for their personal predator. You can tell when a kid is so susceptible he is too far gone before you can manage to get to him. There"s a faculty expression. D.T.O.D. Down The Old Drain. Black humor, but so true. They slip through your fingers. I watched them, those five. Rocko is a predator, and one merciless son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"Ben!" she said.

He smiled at her. "Honey, I"ve been writing this novel for a year. I have to talk like a novelist, don"t I?"

"But you don"t have to sound like the dean of men."

"Rocko seemed clean as far as I could tell. He hit the bottle sometimes, which is a good indication he was clean. And he is one mean drunk. Jerry, the one with the black beard, I"d label a semi-predator. He was on something, and getting closer to getting hooked on it every week. That"s the way the predators turn into victims. The guitar player, Carl, was already way down the old drain. The blond girl, Bix, didn"t look much like her picture any more. She wasn"t too many steps behind Carl. The McLeen girl seemed to be on stimulants of some kind. She was burning herself up."

Mrs. Knighton shuddered. "That Carl used to sit over there under that tree and think he was playing the guitar. But there weren"t any strings on it. And when the wind was from that direction, you could hear his long dirty fingernails rattling on the wood where the strings should have been."

"Cats tire of crippled mice that can"t scamper any more," Ben said. "Sessions left, and then one day the girls were gone. But there was a fresh supply available in town and they used to bring them back. They"d stay three or four days sometimes and then they"d leave. Rocko and Jerry weren"t a pair anybody"d want a permanent home with. Rocko was mostly bluff though. See those two tanks fastened there to the yoke of our house trailer? Gas tanks. Cooking gas. Twenty gallons each. That camper had been jacked off the truck and was on blocks. One day after Jerry had left, too, and Rocko was there alone, he drove back from town and found out somebody had pried open a little locked hatch in the back of the camper and stolen his bottled gas. He went storming around to all the sites, fussing about whether anybody saw the theft. He came over here, ugly, loud and mean. I was adjusting the fan belt on the Rover. I kept working and told him I didn"t know a thing about it. I guess he thought I should stand at attention when spoken to. So he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up and spun me around, and I came right around with the lug wrench I was using, and rang it off the top of his skull."

"Ben doesn"t like people grabbing hold of him," Mrs. Knighton explained with a little air of pride.

"He walked back on his heels with his hands clapped on top of his head. Then he shook himself like a wet dog, and I knew from his eyes he was going to make a try for me, so I walked into him while he was getting organized and popped him again the same way but harder. He went down onto one knee and I told him to stay off my site from then on. I could tell from his color it had made him sick to his stomach. He looked at me and knew I meant it. He went away and I went back to tightening the nuts under the hood. Then he pulled out about two weeks later because Tomas wouldn"t rent to him for another month."

"How bad off was the Bowie girl?" Meyer asked him.

"Bad. Pa.s.sive, dirty, confused. Disoriented." Laura Knighton said, "She seemed withdrawn and dull and listless. Stringy hair and a puffy face and bad color. I"d say she looked fifteen years older than that picture you"ve got. One of the retired couples. .h.i.tched up and moved out because of her. She had... a habit they didn"t take to."

"Don"t get so fastidious, darling, n.o.body knows what you"re trying to say. If that girl was walking slowly across that site over there and had an urge to pee, she"d pull up her skirt and squat wherever she was, unconscious as a dog in a cemetery."

"Then," said Laura, "there was that one day she had a blouse on and forgot her skirt or pants or whatever she was going to wear. And the little dark girl came running out and got her by the hand and tugged her back and got her inside and got her dressed the rest of the way. The poor lost thing is dead now, and I can"t help saying it. I think it"s for the best, just as I think the guitar player is better off dead, no matter what sorrow his folks may be feeling for him. They"d have no way of knowing how bad off he got toward the end."

I said, "It would be a help if you knew how we could locate any of the others, Rocko or Jerry or Miss McLeen."

"I wish we could help you," Ben said.

"I did see that truck and the camper that day, dear," she said.

"You maybe saw a blue truck with an aluminum camper body."

"That is exactly what I saw!"

He went into the trailer and brought out a large map of the State of Oaxaca, and also brought along his work journal to pin down the date. In one part of the historical novel he was finishing, a young Mixtec priest from Mitla flees all the way down the long slope of the Sierra Madre del Sur to the Pacific coast a hundred and fifty miles away. He had decided the imaginary priest would follow the dry bed of the Rio Miahuatlan, and so on Tuesday, August 5th, over three weeks ago, they had driven the Rover south along the road to Puerto Angel as far as Ocotlan, and then headed east on a road that was barely more than a dusty trace. Where it was blocked by a rock fall, they had gone ahead on foot. They had climbed a ledge and surveyed the country to the east with a pair of seven power binoculars. When he had gone wandering off, she had picked up a dust swirl far to the east, appearing and disappearing across rolling country. She had steadied the gla.s.ses and identified it as a blue truck with an aluminum truck body or camper on it.

"I was terribly curious about it because it was goIng so fast," she explained earnestly. "Mexicans will drive like maniacs on paved roads, but when they get onto dirt roads they positively creep, because if they break springs or anything in the holes or on the rocks it is so terribly expensive to replace them. And tourists in this country drive very carefully when they get off the paved roads. And anyway, what would there be over there to attract a tourist. I mean it was just so unusual I was interested and I wondered about it. I decided the driver was drunk or it was some terrible emergency."

He showed us on the map where the road had to be, but there was not even a dotted line on the map. It had been headed south, Mrs. Iznighton said. It had to be some road that turned south of 190 somewhere beyond Mitla, maybe as far as the village of Totolapan. Distances, he said, were very deceptive in the dry, high air. "But the chance of it being Rockland?" He shrugged.

We thanked them for the good coffee and the talk. He talked a little bit about his book. We wished him luck.

As we walked out, Tomas, the manager, was unlocking the store and the office. He was delighted to serve us by looking up the date he had copied from the vehicle papers on Rockland"s truck. Yes indeed, the permit had been issued at Nogales on April 10th, and was thus good for yet another month and a half.

As we drove away Meyer made listless agreement with my observation that the Knightons seemed like nice people. He seemed dejected. I knew what was wrong with him. The picture they had given us of Bix Bowie had been vivid, ugly, and depressing. I could not get him to talk. He did not feel like going to Mitla to look for Jerry Nesta. He seemed to want to go back to the cottage at the Victoria, so I skirted the center of town, drove up there. He plumped himself into a porch chair, sighing. I put on swim pants and walked up through the noon sun and swam slow lengths of the big handsome pool, staying out of the way of the young"uns who came squealing down off the diving tower. I dried off in the sun on a towel spread on the fitted stones of the poolside paving. The high alt.i.tude sun had a deep stinging bite to it that went all the way down through all the old layers of Gulfstream tan.

I opened small gates and let the immediate sensory memories of Becky flow into my mind. By rights I should have felt even more surfeited and exhausted than before. But though this weariness was deep, it seemed more gentle, with a spice of male arrogance, of satisfaction, of knowledge of satisfaction given in full measure.

She had been simpler, softer, more feminine somehow. She had been involved more with herself and her own reactions and timings. Before, we had used me, and this time we had used her, first in partial- measures and at last in a final full measure which had been, she said, more than she had wanted to spend.

Later we had talked in a sleepy way of half sentences, and the sound of her shower had awakened me. I slept again, and was awakened by the kiss that was good morning and good-by, sat up to see her standing tall and smiling nicely, dressed in orange linen, white leather hatbox in her hand.

"You were very wicked, darling. I am utter ruin. It will take a week to mend my puffy old face. But I feel b.u.t.tery delicious. And you are very dear. Afterward, remember, we chuckled together at nothing. Just at feeling nice. That is rare and very nice."

"And now you turn the page, Becky?"