Stanley Elkin - George Mills

The old man was horrified. “The kid? Not the old woman? The kid? How much you give him?”

“A buck.”

“Sure,” the old man muttered, “he’ll go to the Midas Muffler and get twenty-three point eight pesos for it. Here,” he said, “ take thirty-seven. I jam shame for my people.” He put the number into George’s hand.

“What about the car? You think he’d do anything to the car?”

“No no,” the old man reassured him, “the machine will be fine. You bribed him good.”

Mills made Judith Glazer’s arrangements with the receptionist and returned to the car. The old man was with him, watching him as he unlocked the automobile. “I already gave you your five pesos,” George said. “What do you want now?”

The old fellow shook his head. “You could have done all this over the phone,” he said tragically.

“Is that what you do? Give advice?”

“I am a tout,” he said proudly. “I saved you two hours. It cost you less than a quarter.”

“Yeah, well, when I come back with the lady I work for don’t expect any more.”

“Don’t come back,” he said earnestly, touching George’s arm.

“What?”

“Don’t come back. This is not a good place. For rich gringos. ”

Mills, who was only a delegated gringo, and for whom wealth and international travel and the perks of life, sleeping in motels and eating out, were merely assignments, was not so much offended as surprised by the old tout’s warning.

“You listen to him, Misters,” the boy said who had watched his car. “Father Merchant is the wisest tout in all Mexico.”

“He didn’t have such terrific things to say about joo,” George said.

“Father Merchant knowing my heart,” the boy said sadly.

Mills opened the car door. “Uhn uh, uhn uh,” Father Merchant said. “Always is it too hot. Crack the window of the side of the passenger three inches, and the window of the side of the driver two, to force the circulation of the air. Carry the towel with you to protect yourself when you touch metal surfaces.” Mills looked at the wisest tout in all Mexico. “ Es verdad, ” he said. Mills started the engine and began to back out of the space. The old man walked beside the car, trying to hand a card to him through the open window. Mills stepped on the brake and put the car in neutral.

“Please,” he said.

“Nightspot,” said Father Merchant, and gave George the card. “ Institute de Cancer too sad. No cover, no minimum. Very refine. Intimate. No clip joint. Sophisticate. Tell them who sent you, they let you sit ringside, close enough to stick your finger up the pony’s asshole. Go, señor. Take the señora. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” Mills started to back out again. “Father Ixtlan Xalpa Teocaltiche hears confessions in English. Thursday before 6:00 A.M. mass. He’s been to Chicago. Church of the Conquistador Martyrs.” Mills was out of the space and pulled hard on the wheel to turn into the street. The old man called to him through cupped hands. “On Sundays, at the bullfights? Sol y sombre? Shady side is not always the best choice. You could freeze your nuts off if it’s a cool day.” Mills could see him now in the rear mirror. “ Don’t drink the water! ” the old tout shouted.

They sat by the small pool in deep lounges, idly watching children play Marco Polo. The kids had driven most of the grownups out of the water, making it impossible for anyone to swim with their excited thrashing and sudden, abandoned lunges that obliterated the pool’s invisible lanes whenever the child who was it moved away from the coping and plunged, eyes shut tight, toward the voices that answered “Polo” in response to his honor-blind “Marco.”

Mrs. Glazer seemed rested, looked better. Mills remarked on this. “It’s my sunburn,” she said. “It covers the jaundice. Oh, Mills,” she said, “I’ve been to the lobby. It’s more hospital here than motel. The guests bring their nurses. Some arrive in ambulances. I saw one with New Jersey plates. Have you looked at the room service menu? The salads and entrees have been approved by the clinic’s nutritionist. Monks openly solicit money to pray for the remission of your cancer. Urchins show you the candles they’ll light if you’ll give them some dinner.

“And everyone’s so hopeful, Mills! As if the decision to come here, break with their doctors, defy science and throw themselves into all the desperate optimisms of last resort were measures in the cure. I myself have not been unaffected. Why, we’ve not been here two days yet and already I’m feeling better than I have in weeks. A little, a little I am. Oh, Mills,” she said, “how are we to know what is so and what is just psychology?”

“From the blood tests,” Mills said, and his charge glanced at him.

“Yes,” she said. “Well, what do we do now?”

“Maybe you should rest.”

“No. No, I’m not tired.”

“Do you want to eat something?”

“I’m not hungry. I’m raring to go. What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what? What is it?”

“A Mex at the clinic gave me a card.”

“A card?”

“The address of some nightclub.”

“A nightclub? Oh, I don’t think I’m up for a nightclub. Oh,” she said, “a nightclub, a border town nightclub. Exhibitions, you mean. Burros and girls. Fetishists. Consenting adults. I don’t think so, but I’m feeling well enough to spare you. You go, Mills. Take the car.”

“No,” he said, ashamed he had spoken. “I don’t want to go.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “The motel has a caretaker service. All I have to do is notify the desk. Someone checks the room every fifteen minutes. Go on, go ahead. I don’t expect you to be always on duty. Go, you’ve the urge.”

“No. Honest,” Mills said, “I don’t have any urge. It was a joke. When you said you were raring to go. It was a joke.”

“Because I won’t think less well of you, you know. People are curious about what they think of as depravity. The act means nothing. The curiosity’s at least as depraved as anything the girl will do with the beast.”

“I never put it in any animal,” Mills said, hurt. “I ain’t never licked instep or spanked ass or sniffed panty. I never gave pain or asked for it. It never came up.”

“Well I have,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Nearly all those things. What difference does it make?”

“You have?”

“I was a madwoman eleven years.”

Which was when it came up. Welcome to Mexico, he thought. Bienvenidos to the border towns!

They drove, at the woman’s discretion, through Ciudad Juarez, Mrs. Glazer in the wide back seat murmuring the turns, calling their routes, demanding the sights. She pronounced herself dissatisfied with Twelfth of August Avenue, the long main street, all appliance stores and tire shops, and asked that Mills show her the clinic. Somehow he found his way back to the low stucco buildings of that morning, and drove into the parking lot. A watchman stopped them. “All close,” he said, “ finito. ”

“Should you give him a tip?”

The man poked his flashlight through the open window into the back of the car.

“Hey,” Mills said, “turn that off. You’re shining it in the lady’s eyes.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s his job, Mills.”

George turned to look, following the tight white beam that lay across his shoulder like a rifle. Judith Glazer sat prim as a confirmation girl, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes lowered. She looked like someone in a tumbril. Inexplicably, the guard crossed himself.

“Give him money,” Mrs. Glazer said. “He may be an old lover.”