Robert Butler - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Stories

The roads were very bad, even here, and we had to slow almost to a stop for the big potholes, again and again, but all along the ride there were new hotels going up. We could not go more than half a mile without seeing another hotel with the men barebacked and languorous on the open floors, just the frames of the rooms constructed and the ocean visible through them, and the men were carrying a bucket or smoothing a wall with a trowel or just standing around, happy to be in the shade of a room with its walls open to the sea.

Finally I saw a landmark that the guidebooks had told me about, three huge rocks hunched into the water not far offshore, and one of them had a great arch through it, like a pair of hip boots standing out there with no man in them. Mismaloya was nearby. Then we passed a large hotel, a finished hotel, and we descended a little hill and the road that cut down to the beach ran along a concrete wall that contained the site of still another hotel under construction and the road was rutted and scruffy and instinctively I said to Vinh, “They’re still building.” It was an apology for the weeds and the ruts and the dog peeing against the wall, and then we stopped at the back edge of the beach.

“Here you are,” Esteban said, and he sprang from the cab and circled the car, opening our doors, and even before we could step out, the vendors were swarming around and Esteban was talking to them, waving them away, but not too far. The vendors in white clothes were draped in rugs and silver jewelry and a man was motioning us to a stack of inner tubes for rent. A dog drifted by with skin sores and I concentrated on the beach, the waves coming up, but to our left was another little river running down the mountains, and the surf at this beach, too, was smeared with brown.

I looked around and thought that this had been a big mistake, that I would lose face, as the Chinese say, with Vinh. Of course he was right. This place was not ready for the kind of pleasures that even I had come to expect. Not that if it had all been perfectly beautiful — immaculate — Vinh would have thought any better of it. Then it would have been just like television, slick and irritating to him in a different way. And as I thought these things, a ruckus of men’s voices started behind me. I turned and Vinh was holding his hand out as if to brush Frank away. In Vinh’s other hand was his wallet and he said, “I’ll handle this one.”

Frank said, “I’m not a Spec-Five anymore, Major. I make good money.”

“I’m sure you do,” Vinh said. “But it was I who suggested coming down here.”

“We can split it.”

Meanwhile Esteban was smiling at them both and smiling at me and smiling at Eileen and in between he was shooting little glances at the vendors, holding them off until he could finally get his own money and leave.

“I’ll tell you what,” Vinh said. “I’ll pay this time and you pay for the cab going back.”

Frank flipped Vinh a sort of funny half-salute. “Roger that. You pay the man and I’ll secure the beach.” At this he turned, and while Vinh was making change, Frank took Eileen by the arm and they moved past me, Eileen hopping a few steps to take her shoes off as she walked.

Vinh joined me and he held my elbow to guide me through the uneven footing of the sands and Esteban called after us, “It’s to your left. You must wade across the mouth of the river and then follow the seawall to the old dock.”

Vinh turned his face to me. “Did you get that?”

“I’ll find it,” I said.

We all four of us stopped at the water’s edge for a moment and the vendors were orbiting us. Frank and Vinh sort of pulled together near the water and kept their faces out to sea and they flipped their elbows when the silver-plate Indian masks and the VIVA MEXICO throw rugs and the iguana head T-shirts came too close. I myself was tempted by the T-shirts. Why not? They had a large green iguana head, and they made me smile. But then I wondered when Liz and Dick had disappeared from the T-shirts. How many years had it been that the lovers had stopped being an inspiration to the world? I mean “inspiration” in the same way that the late-night television ads would say that Elvis Presley, forever captured on three cassettes or two CDs, is an inspiration. But it was a little sad to me, how things that seem so important can come to an end. Even before Richard Burton was dead, there was no love between these two lovers who had crept over the bridge to each other in Gringo Gulch.

I watched Frank lean near my husband and say, “I wish everybody would just back off.” This was spoken in a lowered voice, as if he was trying not to let someone hear who might be offended. This was a surprise, coming from Frank, and it made me wonder who he was talking about. The vendors? They hardly spoke English and their feelings wouldn’t be hurt by this anyway. He wasn’t talking about Eileen and me, because it would be “they,” not “everybody.”

I looked at Vinh to see if he was puzzled, but he didn’t seem to be. He nodded. It must have been a continuation of some earlier conversation. I suddenly wanted very badly to know what it was all about. I’d been distracted for this whole trip, I realized. These two men had what Sam Donaldson on the news would call their own agenda. I stepped nearer, hoping for more words. Señora, silver. Silver, senora, real silver. I flapped my elbows at this sound and Vinh said something I couldn’t catch, casting the words out to sea, and Frank nodded and then Vinh said, “If only one could find a clear betrayer.”

“The marchers,” Frank said.

“Too many of them. It’s like hating a whole race. And if we were winning, no one would have listened to them.”

I’d come too near. Frank glanced over his shoulder and he smiled and nudged Vinh and said, “It’s time to pull out, Major.”

Vinh turned, too, and he said, very deliberately, being a good husband, “This is nice here, Gabrielle. The sun feels good. I’m ready for a walk and some cinema history.”

“What’s our heading?” Frank said.

Eileen was beside me now and she motioned off to our left, across the narrow river mouth and past a long line of food stands near the shore and down to the end of the beach and then, beyond, along a low seawall running beneath a little hill thick with trees. And in the distance, just before the shore turned, I could see a tall pole in the center of a broken concrete dock and just behind it were two levels of terrace, broad stone walls.

“I see it,” Frank said. “Shall the men walk point?”

“Of course,” I said, and I heard myself sounding a little bit sharp, though I had not meant it that way. I just wanted them in front of me. I wanted to watch them.

So the two men went ahead and we all took our shoes off and waded across the river, the rocks smooth underfoot and the water rich and thick with its mountain stew, and I tried to stay close to them. We waded around a little gaggle of boys casting nets in the rushing water and Vinh went on about who to blame. “I tried to make it Mr. Thi u. He was such a grasping fool. But we didn’t lose the war because our gold was in some Swiss bank.” Frank stumbled a bit and Vinh’s hand went out fast to catch his elbow. “I’m okay,” Frank said, snatching his arm away, and then without a pause, “I still think it’s the goddamn marchers. They hated our guts.”

We came up out of the water and our calves were pasted with leaves. And there was a wonderful smell that I’d smelled when we first got out of the taxi but which only now did I really notice — wood fires, food cooking on wood fires. There were maybe a dozen food stands, permanent-looking ones with frames of timber and tin roofs. A boy came down from one of them with a handful of long pointed sticks, each skewering a whole fish.