"How you making it, boy?" Enelio asked.

"All... all three of them. Jesus! All three of them. I just can't... can't start to believe it's true."

"Who did it, Jerry?"

"I don't know! There wasn't anybody here. I didn't see anybody. I came in, calling Della on account of I wanted to know where to put the stuff."

"What Stuff?"

'The stuff I brought back from town. It was my turn to go in. n.o.body felt like coming along. Luz was doing washing, and Mike was going good on a painting, and Della had a headache."

"You drove the jeep to town?"

"Yes, sir."

"What time did you leave here?"

"I don't know. Maybe a little before ten. I bought fruit and radishes and beans, and a kilo of masa for Luz to make tortillas. I guess I was gone most of an hour probably."

"How soon after you got back did the police come?"

"I don't know. Like two minutes."

"Jerry, can you think of any way we could pin it down, what time you got back here, man?"

"I don't know how I can."

Enelio got up and went over and spoke to the doctor for a little while. They walked over near one of the sheds and the doctor indicated a dark stain on the dust and stones. Enelio came back and sat on the bench beside Nesta. "Did you see anything unusual or hear anything unusual on your way out of town or on the highway?"

"I can't remember anything."

"Nothing interesting at all?"

"Oh, wait a minute. There was something. Right near the edge of town, where the railroad tracks are, there was an old truck pulled over and the engine was on fire, and people were running around yelling, and they were throwing dirt on it and a man was beating at it with a blanket."

Enelio said, "You are one lucky fellow. The cops saw it too and stopped for a minute. They were just putting the fire out. So they were, like you said, a minute or two behind you."

"What difference does it make?"

"This wasn't robbers, Jerry. n.o.body touched a pocket or a purse. From the blood over there, it had to have happened at least twenty minutes before the police got here, according to the doctor here."

Jerry stared at Enelio. "Would these d.a.m.n fools think I'd kill my friends?"

"That's what most people kill. Their family or their friends. Very few people kill strangers. I got to tell what you said to the sergeant."

I sat where Enelio had been. "How come you and Luz moved in here with Mike and Della?"

He looked at me, puzzled. "Who are you?"

"My name is McGee. I've been trying to locate you. I found where you had been living, out at Mitla."

"Why have you been looking for me?"

"Just to see what you might know about Bix Bowie."

"Bix got killed in an accident."

"I know. And Carl Sessions died of an overdose. So the only ones left to talk to are you and Minda and Rocko."

"Why should anybody know anything about Bix? Minda, maybe. It happened after everybody had split."

"A girl named Gillian saw you in Mitla and told a friend. Gillian talked to you and she said you weren't very friendly. She asked you where Rocko was and you said you didn't know."

"I didn't and I don't. I was the last one to split. I had to get the h.e.l.l away from Rocko. I got pretty sick there. I had to try to get clean. I'm not in real good shape yet. I get this ringing in my ears, and I get shaky, and my eyes blur sometimes. I have real bad nightmares, but I don't hallucinate any more. Luz took care of me when I was real, real bad. I don't even know how I got to Mitla. It was all part of a bad trip. She pulled me out of a ditch and got some friends to help her get me under a roof. I had the idea Rocko was trying to kill me, you know, like paranoia, and I had to cut out. Jesus! Why would anybody kill Luz? You know she had a beautiful smile? When she smiled... I tell you it was something else."

"Was it better here than it was in Mitla?"

"Oh sure. I ran into Mike out at the ruins and we started talking, and I took him back to the place and showed him the big timber head I've been working on. So he came out to see it and he liked it. I mean there are too many people around just talking about doing something. I told him I was trying like h.e.l.l to work, because it had been too long. I leveled with him. I said I had been on things that didn't do me much good, but now I was clean and I was going to stay clean. I said it was lonely, me not being able to talk much of Luz's language, and he told me about his free place, and how there was room, and Della might like having another woman around to share the scut work. So why not? We got a guy to help and we loaded the big head on his jeep and packed and came here. Luz was pretty weird about Della for a little while, until she got used to her. Then they started to get along. But... they haven't... didn't have much time to get acquainted. Oh G.o.ddammit all anyway! It's such a lousy waste. Della was pregnant. That's why she was having headaches."

Enelio sauntered back and said, "Jerry, they want to investigate further, but because the time you got back checks out and because they can't find any kind of a weapon, you ought to be okay."

"One of them was looking at one of my sculptor's mallets."

"And he would like to cry because it was such a nice thing for somebody to use, but there would have to be blood. Blood and skin and hair. And fantastic strength. But they have to take you in anyway."

"Why?"

"Your tourist card is no good. Got money to get home?"

"h.e.l.l no."

"So they hold you and ask the American Emba.s.sy to make arrangements."

"Look, I forgot the card ran out! I didn't even think about it. I don't want to sit in any Mexican jail."

"n.o.body sitting in one wants to be there."

I took Enelio aside. "I want to talk to this kid, alone and in the right relaxing surroundings. Any way to keep him out?"

"Want to pay for his trip to the States?"

"If it'll help."

"Want to give a little gift to the police welfare fund?"

"Like?"

"Five hundred pesos?"

"Sure."

"Then let them keep him overnight and we'll see what we can do tomorrow. Tomorrow they are maybe going to be happy to get rid of any little problems. Newspaper people will be here today from Mexico City. This will be one big stink. The Tourist Bureau will be very ogly about it. This is supposed to be such a nice safe country, eh? But always there are d.a.m.n fools going off into primitive places where los Indios are still d.a.m.n savage. No Spanish at all. Cruel land and cruel people. Canoe trips. Hiking. Go see the interesting Indios and get your interested throat cut, and get thrown naked into an interesting river, man. So that is one thing, and that is something else. One and a half million cars cross the border and stay for a time. G.o.d knows how many more go over into border towns for the day. It is a big industry. Come to beautiful Oaxaca and get a big hit on the head. Travis, my friend, to get this bearded boy with the sad eyes loose, I must make some little kind of guarantee all will be well. You think everything will go well?"

"I'll know better after I talk to him. If I don't like the vibrations, he better go back in."

Meyer came over to us and said, "Come take a look at something." He took us over to a s.p.a.ce against the adobe wall beyond a wooden shed. The wooden sculpture stood there. A head five feet high, carved and gouged and sc.r.a.ped out of old gray beams that had been bolted together. It was the same sort of Zapotecan face of the ancient carvings in stone. It had the same cruel, brooding look of lost centuries and forgotten myths. It was the size and weight and texture of the old timbers that gave it impact. There was no neck. It sat solidly on the great hard width of jaw. It could have been just a kind of self-conscious trick, but somehow he had given it a presence that made you want to speak softly.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Enelio said slowly.

Jerry Nesta came up behind us, a man in uniform with him. He said, "I had to find hunks of metal and make the tools. I kept them sharp by rubbing them on stone. I kept thinking of the whole 1 figure, and the way he would stand, so the head would carry the look of the whole figure. I thought of it as being something that would stand at the corner of an old temple, looking out. Not a priest or a soldier, but one of the laborers that built all these ruins and died building them. Like maybe the priests decided those unknown people should have a statue, but not out of stone. Mike thought it was... said it was..."

He turned away. Pretty soon they put him in a car and took him in. They left a car and two men to keep watch over the place. As we drove away, the silent people were still under trees, looking toward the place of murder.

Thirteen.

THE HOURS spent on the Coyotepec Road had taken too big a piece out of Enelio Fuentes' available time, and he said we would have to delay the exploration of the unmarked road until later.

He drove us into the center of town. The girls from Guadalajara had planned to spend the morning shopping and have a late lunch on the veranda at the Marques, where we were to join them if we got back in time. Otherwise we would see them after the siesta time. But it was too early for lunch. Enelio said he might as well clean off another square foot of his desk and see us later. We let Meyer off near the big camera store on Hidalgo and Enelio took me around the zocalo to drop me in front of the hotel. There was, by some freak of chance, a parking s.p.a.ce available, so he braked and swung in.

"Moment.i.to, my friend." He sat with his big hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead, frowning.

"One thing I did not know. I did not know I would be so busy, so many things would happen to keep me busy. So what. I have done, I have made you two hombres into tourist guides and taxi drivers for the three little crumpets. I had been telling my conscience, why not? What man could not have pleasure to be with the tiny little flock of bright birds? But I forget. You are here on a sad and serious kind of business, eh? My G.o.d, that blood on that dusty ground is enough to wake me up. What I am saying, if they are a burden, arrangements can be made."

"No burden, amigo. They are a good contrast."

"You are certain? Good!" He grinned and winked. "I tell you, those sisters they are ver' pozzled by you two. I am old and good friends with Lita a long time. They tell her the pozzlement and she whispers it to me. These girl on vacations, McGee, they are having a beautiful time. But what soch pretty ones want on a vacation is the chance to say yes or say no. They do not know what it will be. Much depends on the asking, eh? But they look back on a vacation, they can say, well, I am sorry or I am glad I said yes, or I am sorry or I am glad I said no. Margarita thinks Meyer is one of the great men of our time, and Elena is beginning to think maybe she is ogly, or she is using the wrong toothpowder. I tell you one thing, with these girl, if you do not know the new Mexican working girl, maybe you are afraid they are wanting a permanent thing, hunting for keeps. Forget it. This is a vacation. They take care of themself pretty good, and they were upset with me I should find dates with Americans before they met you, because the Americans they meet, they are too much interested in one thing only. Do as you please. I just say they are pozzled. But if you ask, if they say yes, I tell you it will be one h.e.l.l of a distraction from this serious matter you are doing here. No, I do not want answers or conversation, please. See you later on, my friend."

And he went swinging out, putting the fear of the hereafter into a bevy of bicycles and motor scooters. I claimed a table for four on the hotel porch. Though it was nearing the busiest time of day, it was not as crowded as usual. There were far fewer of the college young. It was time to head home, sort the gear, and head back to school. I could overhear the tourist conversations, and quite a few of them were exchanging very lurid and distorted versions of sudden death on the Coyotepec Road. One beflowered matron was explaining loudly to her friends as she walked by that some hippie had shoved a knife into five fellow drug addicts and had been killed resisting arrest.

Suddenly Wally McLeen scurried up and plopped into one of the empty chairs. "Remember me, Travis? Wally McLeen? G.o.d, wasn't that a terrible thing that happened! Did you hear about it? Two wonderful kids were killed this morning..."

"Mike Barrington and Della Davis. And a Mexican girl."

"Their skulls were crushed. Absolutely crushed. I knew those two kids. Not well, of course, because they didn't come into town often. They knew my Minda, just casually. They were very nice to me, actually, because they knew I was tying sincerely and honestly to keep from making any emotional judgments about a white boy and a black girl living together. I mean it is rough enough for any young couple to make it, even when they have the same heritage, isn't it? But you have to respect genuine emotion wherever you find it, I say. No one could be with them without seeing that they were in love and were so terribly anxious to make it work. Now the difference in race doesn't seem important at all, does it? Dying is the same for everyone. I understand that they think a boy named Jerry Nesta did it while deranged by narcotics. Do you remember when either you or Meyer asked me about Jerry Nesta and Carl Sessions? I since found out that they were in the same little group that came down together, that my Minda was in! Did you know the Sessions boy died?"

"We heard about it."

"From drugs, I understand. Well, if they were using drugs, I'm certain that's the reason Minda left the group the first good chance she had. Even if we couldn't communicate, I know she Tespected her body too much to abuse it with narcotics, but I will have to accept the very real possibility that she uses marijuana and probably LSD. I've been trying them from time to time, without really very much effect. But I have had some periods of a new kind of selfawareness, a sort of spiritual feeling of kinship with all living things and all of history. Knowing the effects gives me a better chance to relate to Minda when she comes back here, I think. I thought that Jerry Nesta might have known when she was coming back or where to get in touch with her, so I'd been looking everywhere for him. Do you know, I rode my Honda right past that place twice this morning, where it happened, once on my way to the airport- and once on the way back!" His eyes looked goggly behind the thick lenses.

"Wally, Wally. A Honda yet."

"I got one, a rental, as soon as I got here. It was pretty hairy for a while, those trucks and buses, but now I'm getting quite confident with it."

"And those beads, Wally?"

"Well... they're from the market. They're made of the vertebrae from the backbones of little fish, stained with vegetable coloring."

"And that is, or will be, a goatee?"

He laughed unhappily and felt his chin. "Guilty. I don't know what the boys would say back home. But it's like... a protective coloration, Trav These kids, if they peg you as a square, they are absolutely cruel and merciless. That's the part I don't understand yet, the cruelty. The very first evening I was here a boy made an absolute a.s.s of me, just for sport, I guess. I'd been up and down this veranda all day and all over the zocalo and the market, asking every kid I saw if they knew Minda McLeen. I had just flown down from Mexico City that morning, a Thursday morning. And this young man asked me if I was the one looking for Minda, and he took me back into that bar lounge there, to one of those circular booths. The place was absolutely empty. He was very mysterious about it and very cautious. He said he might know Minda and he might know where she was, and she might be in some kind of a jam, and so what was it worth to me to have him see what he could do to get her out of the mess she was in and turn her over to me. I must say I was suspicious. We finally made a deal that if he'd bring me some proof, like a note from her, I would give him five thousand dollars, and then give him five thousand more when he brought Minda to me. But he just never showed up again. It was a game, a story to tell about how he blew my mind. It's hard to forgive him, but I think I can."

"So the beads and the Honda and the goatee are just a disguise, so they won't try so hard to put you on?"

"Oh no! It's more sincere than that. I mean they'd see through that in a minute. Why, last night there must have been thirty or forty kids milling around this porch at midnight having a good-by party. Most of them went out this morning. And I was genuinely part of it, Trav. They talked to me freely. They knew I was trying to find Jerry Nesta, and one girl told me that he was in bad shape and living in some Mexican hovel in Mitla, hitting up the tourists for money to live on. But I thought he might have some crumb of information about where my Minda is and what day she planned to come back here. Do you think they would let me talk to him at the jail?"

"Why not?"

"But isn't he in isolation or anything?"

"No. He was able to prove he was here in town when it happened. He came back in the jeep and found the three of them dead."

"Then why would he be in jail? Answer that, will you?"

"Because his tourist card ran out and he's an indigent, Wally."

"Oh. Then what everybody is saying about him-"

"Is inaccurate."

"How do you know so much about it, McGee?"

"I dropped in. A social visit, but I got there too late."

"Oh. Well, I suppose I better try to see Nesta then. Well... thanks again." He got up. "And if you happen to hear anything about my Minda, anything at all, I'm right here in the hotel. Room twelve. You can leave a note in my box. I would appreciate it so much."

He'd been gone maybe two minutes when Meyer, with a straw bag full of little gift-wrapped items, sat down at the table and said, "Guess who nearly ran me down?"

"Wally McLeen on his Honda."

"If I didn't like you, McGee, I'd find it very easy to hate you. So you saw him. Okay, what struck me about him? What item?"

I tried the beads, then the goatee, but he smugly said no. "The best thing, the unforgettable thing was what I saw as he thundered by, jaw clamped. They glittered in the sun. Old-fashioned bicycle clips, by G.o.d, with his trousers neatly furled and held in place thereby."

"I envy you that vision," I said. I reported our conversation. I found that Meyer wanted to know more than I thought worth telling. He made me go back twice to the fellow who had conned Wally with the wild tale about Minda, and try to tell it in Wally's words.

"Whoa! Let me up, or at least tell me what you're after."

He gave me his most infuriatingly smug Buddha smile. "I would hate to think that a certain lady of n.o.ble blood romped you into permanent semiconsciousness, old friend. Nor would I like to believe that yesterday's lazy sun cooked the protein in your head. So why don't you take it from the top all by yourself, with one little clue. Just imagine that the fellow who wanted to peddle Minda to her father was named Rockland." And when he spoke again, several minutes later, he said, "Your face is all aglow with a look of rudimentary intelligence. Now try it out loud."

"McLeen said he'd been here since the first. So he could have arrived on the last day of July. That was a Thursday. It was the day that Rockland stayed away from the little nest on Calle las Artes all day long and part of the evening, and came back and asked for a loan of three thousand and made Bruce Bundy suspicious by not being sour about being turned down. So all of Rockland's troops had deserted him, and he had been tossed out of the trailer park, and he was trying to hustle a sizable piece of money anywhere he could find it. So maybe he spent a lot of time that same Thursday trying to establish contact with Minda McLeen. He would know where she was, but that house is a fortress, the Vitrier house. And neither girl would be very anxious to see Rockland for any reason, I'd a.s.sume. But let's say he did get in touch, or find out how he could get in touch later."

"You're recovering nicely." Meyer said.