Please Write for Details (25 page)

Something was going to happen and he could not imagine what it would be. It was just a terrible Something.

And it happened in Mexico City on Saturday night, the twenty-second of July. The activities of the day had begun in a most dissatisfying way. Bitsy slept late. Mary Jane approached Park in the lobby at about eleven o’clock.

“Park, honey, there’s two boys staying down at Las Mañanitas, and a friend of theirs at the Marik and the friend has to get up to Mexico City today. So we thought we’d all go
in a bunch, and we sure can’t fit in my little bug, so we thought if you aren’t using your wagon.”

“Just during the day?”

“Well, no. We’re all going to stay on and barge around here and there and come back real late. I don’t know what time it would be.”

“I’ve got a date with Bitsy tonight.”

She looked uncertain and said, “I guess maybe there’s some little mixup about that. Because we planned this whole thing last night and Bitsy didn’t say anything, so I guess she thought it wasn’t definite or something.”

“Well, if I’ve been canceled out, there’s no reason why I can’t come too, I guess. What time do we want to leave?”

“I … I guess that would be all right,” she said. And then she laughed. “I swear, Park, if you keep tagging along all the time, you’re like to get wore down to a nub.”

He stared at her coldly, and had the insane desire to kick her in the stomach. “Maybe if I grease the wheels on my wheel chair, doll, I’ll be able to keep up.”

“Now don’t you go getting all scratchy, Park. I didn’t mean anything like that.”

“With your permission then, I’ll tag along.”

“Let’s get out of here right after lunch then.”

He could detect no reaction when Mary Jane told Bitsy he was joining the group. No pleasure and no displeasure. The girls dressed up for night life in the capital. Furs and gloves and fragile pumps. They drove down into town and picked up the boys. Their names—the ones they collected at Las Mañanitas—were Tab and Wally. Park knew he’d have difficulty telling them apart. They were the approximate size of the average telephone booth. They had big brown muscles and big white teeth. They had brown brush cuts, lazy eyes, and a tender honeychile drawl. As soon as they picked up the third one at the Marik, Park knew that he would never be able to tell the new one—Chris—from the other two.

He gathered that they were Texas Aggies, that the boys and the girls had twelve or thirteen thousand mutual friends, and that after a few weeks of muscular dissipation, they were heading back to Texas to harden themselves up for the football season with some exotic kind of manual labor that apparently had something to do with the oil fields. Park could not imagine why they had to be hardened. They looked as if they could
snap chains with their biceps and dent oak with their massive fists.

So they went up and over the mountains. Bitsy was between Park and Chris or Tab or Wally. Mary Jane sat in back between the other two. Bitsy sat for about ten minutes. From then on she knelt, facing the rear. And the hulk beside her was swiveled around. They all talked at once.

“… and you remember that ole B. C., the way he strayed off and he got jumped that time over in Piedras Negras. He was doing just fine he said, until somebody come up behind him and peeled his head with a hunk of pipe. They threw B. C. in the little ole jail they got there, and the next day they put him to scrubbing a street with a raggedy old broom and him with a tequila head like a bongo drum …”

“… bought that chute and had Dobie take him up and he jumped out. Scared the pure hell out of Dobie on account of Gus said it felt so good falling he waited long as he could before he opened …”

“… married her when she was just thirteen damn years old, believe me …”

“… after he got up about eleven times and got knocked down again, he stayed right down there and he looks up and says …”

“… not enough left of that Ferrari to make you a bushel basket load, man …”

Park sighed inwardly and drove the mountain road to the city. Once there it turned into the usual situation, a state of almost complete disorganization which, curiously, duplicated the pattern of other evenings so closely that the disorganization itself seemed to be planned with some subtle end in view. There was the usual routine of the old dear friend who was supposed to be in town. This involved many phone calls, some of them to Texas, several taxi rides, because it was simpler to leave the car parked near their base of operations, the Continental Hilton. Eventually it was discovered that good old so-and-so had left last week for Acapulco. The search was interspersed with pauses for refreshment. After that came an interval of serious drinking, and then another wide-ranging search for some special restaurant that nobody could quite remember the name of. And the inevitable decision, what the hell, let’s have another drink and go eat at the Hilton. And finally came another vague hunt for
that place that had that hell of a good floor show that Dutch told us about.

By that time Park was thoroughly blurred. But his orderly descent into wooden oblivion was marred by one little word that had somehow stuck itself to the inside of his skull. Silly. You, Parker Barnum, are a silly little man. You are silly to be traveling with this herd of muscles on the forlorn off chance of charming one lass with curly copper hair. Your painting is silly. Your job was silly and will be silly. And you made a silly mess of your marriage, old boy.

Perhaps it was in some effort to divert himself from this unpromising line of self-castigation that Park made the decision to at last enlighten these young people by explaining them to themselves. He began in one of the succession of small cabarets. When he had a chance to slip into the conversation he stared at them severely and said, “You all got a bitched-up sense of values, every one of you. All you want outta life is a lotta motion and no significance.” His brain felt keen as scalpels.

They stared at him. “Easy off, professor,” one of the hulks said.

“Conversationally, buster, you all are dead wood, buster. You couldn’t entertain an original idea if it … bit on you. Just a lot of garbage about who did what to who when.”

Mary Jane said, “What have they been putting in his liquor?”

He felt firm and fatherly. He would not be distracted from this important mission. He would awaken them to all the terror and mystery of existence. He selected his next phrasing most carefully. As he got well into it, he suddenly realized that he was out of the conversation again. Nobody was listening. He raised his voice but he could not get their attention. So he let it fade off into a mumble. He leaned over and said the next important things directly down into his glass. It gave the words a hollow and portentous ring. The world rocketed toward oblivion and its prophets went unheard. It was a sad thing. It made his eyes sting.

And suddenly, without transition, he was walking down a broad sidewalk. They were just ahead of him. Abreast, arms locked, singing. Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy. The girls looked tiny by comparison. Mary Jane lifted both feet free of the sidewalk and made running motions. Park trotted along behind them. He had to be heard. It was important. “Hey!” he said. “Hey!”

Suddenly the broad unconscious backs infuriated him. He
paused to let them get ahead, and then went forward at a dead run and slammed his shoulder into the small of the back of the big one on the end. Chris or Tab or Wally.

It staggered the huge boy and he turned around and said softly, “Now you whoa!” They had all turned and they were looking at him.

“You won’t listen!” Park yelled at them.

“Ole buddy, you got a package on, and you’ve run out of anything worth talking. You’ve got took by the wobbles. Now you settle way way down.”

Park had a sudden image of himself battered to bloody ruin by the big calm brown fists, lying broken in the gutter with Bitsy weeping over him. The vision made him want to try again.

So he swung with all his strength at a big square jaw. And missed completely and sprawled on his hands and knees. As he got up he heard one of them say, “This ole boy is getting right repulsive, men.”

“We better should give him a place to rest up.”

“Like with Mike that time?”

One of them grabbed him. “What are you going to do?” Mary Jane demanded.

“Now don’t you fret yourself, doll baby. He’s uglyin’ up the party.”

They hurried him along the sidewalk toward the entrance to an expensive-looking restaurant. “Hey!” Park yelled.

And suddenly one of them had him by the ankles and one by the wrists and he sagged between them, his pants a few inches off the sidewalk.

“A-one,” they said and started to swing him. “A-two.”

“Hey!” Park yelled.

“A-three!” And with an enormous heave he went flying up into the night, the street lights pinwheeling in a dizzy blur. He sensed himself reach the top of an arc and thought he would come crashing down onto the cement, but instead he fell painfully and abruptly and too suddenly onto something hard. He hit his nose when he landed, and banged one knee painfully. He lay there holding his nose.

“You hurt him!” Mary Jane said.

“Doll baby, he landed soft as a feather, didn’t he, Chris?”

“Like in a bed. Come on, you gals.”

“You know,” one of them said, “ole B. C. could most always throw a man twice that high, all by his own self.”

The voices began to dwindle. He lay and held his nose. He heard the the song fading. “… all the livelong day. The eyes of Texas are upon yoooooou …”

He got up onto his knees. The sidewalk was below him. He realized they had thrown him up onto the marquee of the fashionable-looking restaurant. It was about ten by twenty, with a knee-high rail of ornamental grillwork around it. They were walking into the distance. Not one of them looked back. Both girls had pulled their knees up so that they swung free between the boys. The song was swallowed and lost in the traffic roar of Reforma. He heard an excited gabble of Spanish under the marquee. Park sat cross-legged. His nose bled. Tears ran down his face. The left knee was ripped out of his trousers.

In some inescapable way, this was the ultimate humiliation. No tragic battered figure in the gutter. No exchange of blows. Not even any anger. Anybody wants to ugly up the party, they get thrown up onto a shelf and abandoned. And there’s nobody in the whole wide damn world that gives one damn whether you live or die. Nobody. This is the comic end. All the paths, all the chances, all the choices, all the decisions, and so you took the exact ones at every little crossroads, actually the only ones, which could place you at this terminal point, weeping, abandoned and drunk, a dreary Chaplin huckster perched on a marquee at midnight in Mexico City, propelled to this ludicrous perch by Texas beef. Where did I ever go? he thought with a puzzled expression. What ever happened to me?

And he became aware of a persistent voice saying, “Halloo, sir. Halloo, sir! Halloo, sir!”

He hunkered over to the edge and looked down. There was a gasp and stir of interest from the clot of people who stood down there, their faces upturned. He estimated that he was at least fifteen feet above the sidewalk level. The boys had indeed been both powerful and precise.

A man in the middle of the group smiled up at him with an air of nervous reassurance. He wore a white dinner jacket with a red flower in the lapel, and had the look of a headwaiter.

“Good evening, sir. You will come down now, sir.”

Parker was wary of being pushed around. “You will go to hell, sir.”

“But, sir, that is not for sitting. It is forbidden to climb to that place except perhaps for a parade.”

“I did not climb up here.”

The smile faded slightly. “But how else could …”

“I took a big run and jumped.”

“Now, now, sir. It is impossible that …” Somebody tugged at his arm and there was a hurried conversation in Spanish. The man looked up again and ran the tip of his tongue along one half of a small black mustache. He swallowed and said, “I did not have complete information. It does not seem to be a thing easy to believe, sir. But my doorman explains that you were … hurled up onto that place.” He swallowed again. “As a ball.”

“Yes. It’s a game. You know. A sport. It isn’t widely known yet.”

“There is blood at the nose, sir. I recommend you come down.”

“I am not going to come down.”

The man had another consultation with his doorman. “My doorman reports that you were hurled up onto that place by three enormous, angry men who went away singing, accompanied by two young women, also singing. It is a matter for the police, sir. You will come down and we will telephone them at once.”

“I am not concerned about the police. And I do not wish to discuss this further. I want to stay exactly where I am.” And he hunched himself away from the edge. For a long time he ignored the calls, with their note of pleading, and then he moved to the edge and looked down again.

“What do you want now?”

“Ah, sir, I appeal to you. This is a nice place. Many Americans come here. The food is truly excellent, sir. We will welcome your patronage at some other time. But now it is not desired to have a disturbance. The police do not have ladders I am told. And there is no way to ask the firemen to come quietly. They enjoy the sirens, sir. Our guests will be alarmed. You will come down, sir.”

“No.”

“I shall send strong waiters and kitchen people up to bring you down, sir.”

“The minute the first head shows over the edge of this thing, sir, it will get kicked in the chops.”

“That is rude, sir!”

“That’s the way it has to be, old buddy.”

“Then it must be the firemen, sir. But I inform you it will also be the police. There will be much trouble for you, sir.”

“On what charge?”

“Trespass, one would think, sir.”

“When I was
thrown
up here? Nonsense!”

“If you were acquainted with the police here, sir, you would know that they will think of something. Perhaps inciting a riot. Or an indecency of exposure. Are you still bleeding, sir?”

“I think so. I haven’t been paying attention.”

“You are at least drunk.”