Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

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.