George Mills Part 23

"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 a.s.s 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 Bienvenidos to the border towns! 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 p.r.o.nounced 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."

"What for? Why'd he do that?"

"He saw my condition," she said.

"Are you tired?" Mills asked. "Do you want me to take you back?"

"Not at all."

They pa.s.sed the church where the priest who had been to Chicago heard confessions in English. And stopped for a light on the corner where the nightclub was situated. It was on a narrow street with much traffic. A boy came up to the driver's window and offered to watch their car.

"No," Mills said. "We're not parking."

"No," the boy said, "till the light changes."

"Maybe we ought to start back," Mills said when they were driving again. "It's pretty late."

"No," she said, "I'm enjoying my joy ride."

"You had a long trip yesterday. All the way from a different country."

"If you're tired I'll drive."

"No," Mills said. "That's all right."

"Let me. I feel like driving."

"You'd better not."

"Pull over. If you're afraid you can go back in a cab."

"Please, Mrs."

"I want to," Mrs. Glazer said. "My pill is wearing off and I'm beginning to feel uncomfortable. It would distract me." She was kneading her thighs and legs with her hands, taking her flesh and squeezing as if she would wring water from it. "If only I could get the knots out," she said.

"I'm turning back," Mills said.

"I told you no," Mrs. Glazer said. "I don't want to. If you insist on driving you may, but I won't go back. I was crazy more than a decade, shut up when I could have been traveling. What's the good of being rich anyway? I never got anything for my money but the best care. In the end I simply grew out of my madness anyway. Now I'm dying. That watchman saw it with a flashlight. I don't want the best care. That's why I came to this place. That's why I chose you to bring me. Perhaps it will be like the last time. Perhaps I'll grow out of my cancer too. Don't you dare dare turn back." turn back."

"You're the doctor," Mills said gloomily.

"I am," she said, "yes. Don't sulk, Mills. Look at the countryside." They had left the city and entered the desert.

"It's the idea of the pain," Mills said when they had driven perhaps five more miles.

"Did you say something?"

"It's the idea that somebody only three feet away has pain. It fills up the s.p.a.ce. It's all you can think about so it's all I can think about too. I can't stand it if I know my wife has a headache. I get mad at her for telling me."

"I'll take my pill," she said.

"You took one before we left the motel. It isn't four hours."

"What do you think will happen? Do you think I'll become addicted? Turn around," she said. "There's nothing here."

In the city, children were sleeping on the sidewalks. They lay solitary, curled as dogs on the pavement. A small girl lay on her back, her arms thrown out behind her head. She looked like someone floating in a pool toy.

"G.o.d is good," Mrs. Glazer said.

"Sure."

"He really is. He's a genius. He creates the poor and homeless and gives them a warm climate to sleep it off in. Shall we wake them? Shall we give them money?"

"They're street kids. They'd have their knives in me as soon as I shook their shoulder."

"I want you to go back," she said. "Give them twenty pesos each."

Mills left the motor running. He woke the children and put money in their hands while Mrs. Glazer sat in the back seat and looked on through the rolled and dusty windows.

It was how they spent their first days in Mexico. Mills gave Mrs. Glazer's money away. Considerable sums. As much, he estimated, as the rental car would cost, or his motel room. Often as much as a hundred pesos to an individual beggar. They crossed themselves before their benefactress's deputy with beggars' grat.i.tude, conferring the lavish, sinister blessings of the down-and-out. It was not his money. It was not their benediction. And he had a sense of proxy encounter, a delegate notion of agented exchange. At first he followed their responses in a dictionary, nervously had them repeat themselves when he did not understand, and scrupulously relayed their thanks in English equivalencies, rendering the tone and degree of already hyperbolized requital, hoping to suggest to the woman that the poor and homeless were on to her.

"The starving woman thanks you on behalf of her five starving children, and wishes you to know that every bite of their first meal in four days will be dedicated to the honor of your gracious self."

"Hmph," Judith Glazer said.

"The legless cripple is profoundly moved by your generosity, and says that he will direct the nephews who carry him to his post every morning and pick him up again in the evening to take him up the steps and into the church so that he may light candles for your continued health and good fortune."

"Tell him," Mrs. Glazer said evenly, "don't try to thank me."

"The impaired wino sends his and his Saviour's compliments, and resolves to pledge himself to a new life in partial repayment for the three dollars."

She had him take her into poorer and poorer sections of the city, abandoning the busy street corners and entrances to the fashionable shops and restaurants, the hotels and museums where beggars congregated to groan their appeals against the chipper discourse of the rich, driving with her into the narrow barrios, the blighted box board and charred, tar paper slums, places where the beggars had only each other to importune, raising the ante of their already stretched humility to outright, outraged fantasy.

And now she had him lower the car windows. And now she had him open the doors.

They looked on the big, late-model American car with as much astonishment and fear as if it had been a tank. Children backed against the jagged, chicken wire frames they used as doorways and called their adults to witness the strange new avatar, the queer incarnation, sudden in the roadless, streetless jumble of singed, mismatched shacks as a visitation of angels or government.

Seeing it was only a lone man, a lone woman, they lost their alarm and began to push forward.

"This is crazy," Mills said. "Let's get out of here."

"Sound the horn," Mrs. Glazer said. "Let them know we're here."

"They already know we're here."

Mrs. Glazer raised herself from where she was slumped in the back seat and leaned forward. She reached over Mills's shoulder and pressed the horn.

"Oh boy," Mills said.

"Don't get out. They can come forward and you can hand the money out to them."

When Mills didn't move she reached for her purse and undid the clasp. Hands and arms like the feelers of sea creatures groped toward her through the car's opened doors. Mills, frightened, pulled out his pesos and started to cram them into the first hand he saw. "No," she said, "just one note. Just one! one! Here," she said, "give me." She pulled the notes out of his fist and, selecting the smallest denomination, pushed it into one of the outstretched hands. Then, inspired, she smiled, dropped the rest of the money into her lap, and took some loose change from her purse. She held out a handful of coins to them, ten-centavo pieces, twenty. "For all of you," she said. " Here," she said, "give me." She pulled the notes out of his fist and, selecting the smallest denomination, pushed it into one of the outstretched hands. Then, inspired, she smiled, dropped the rest of the money into her lap, and took some loose change from her purse. She held out a handful of coins to them, ten-centavo pieces, twenty. "For all of you," she said. "Para todos. Para todos de usted." She sat back in her seat, lightly tapping the thick pile of bills in her lap, her gold and diamond rings loosely spinning on her thin fingers. She looked on serenely while the Mexicans talked to each other in whispers. Then, with great effort, she moved out of the car toward them, holding out the last of her change, perhaps six or seven cents.

He thought they would both be killed, but the Mexicans only drew further away from the car, their mood nervous and apprehensive and lined with a sort of amus.e.m.e.nt. A woman indicated the two Americans and shook her head. Then they all did, making the high signs and hand signals of aloof contempt, the shrugs and semaph.o.r.es of all touch-temple allowance. "Help me back into the car," she said, disappointed.

Mills was determined that they wouldn't try that that again. again.

Meanwhile she continued to avoid the treatments.

George drove her to the clinic each morning and called for her again at noon. It was she who sent him away. "There aren't enough chairs," she'd explain. "These people are waiting to see the doctors. You'd only be taking up the seat of someone terminally ill." But when he returned he would find her sitting where he'd left her, or rummaging through a table of Mexican magazines. "Oh, Mills," she said, "waiting rooms are the same all over the world. Only the names of the film stars in the periodicals are different, or the wall hangings in the legislative chambers. These hemlines are shorter, but I believe I saw this salad in the Sunday pictures section of the Post-Dispatch. Post-Dispatch."

"What did the doctor say?"

"Oh, I haven't seen the doctor yet. I was about to but this little girl-she couldn't have been more than six-arrived with her parents. I gave them my place."

She'd had her tests, the blood profiles and X-rays and urine a.n.a.lyses she had first had done in St. Louis, as well as a cancer immunological test which was not performed in the United States. It was patented, the Mexicans told her.

"Of course, I don't really buy buy any of it," she told him in the car. "But I believe that dreams come true." any of it," she told him in the car. "But I believe that dreams come true."

She suggested they go out again that night on another alms spree.

"You're tired," Mills said.

"Yes," she admitted, "I'm very weak."

"Look," he said, "if it's all that important to you I'll go myself."

"No," she said.

"Don't you trust me? You think I'd keep the money?"

"I trust you dandy. It wouldn't mean much unless I went. All right," she said, "we won't plan anything. We'll wait and see how I feel this evening."

She felt terrible that evening. She couldn't even get out of bed. Mills knew she'd made a mistake to bring him. He had no touch with pain. He had fears and misgivings about everything he did for her. At the height of her pain and nausea he thought she should try to eat something, that food might confuse the beast in her gut. He wasn't sure but he thought it was probably a good idea. He wanted to phone the clinic but officially she hadn't been a.s.signed a doctor yet. He couldn't remake her bed properly, and thought he should call Housekeeping to have them send someone while he carried her to the room's other bed, but she objected to having anyone else in the room.

He spoke to her, but it took so much effort for her to talk he cringed when she answered. He said nothing, and she thought he'd left her. The pain had affected her vision. "I'm here," he said, "I haven't gone anywhere. You mustn't talk," he said. "You've got to save your strength." He watched her thrash in the bed, the sheets and covers and pillows in such disarray he could not straighten them without causing her pain. He moved her back into the other bed. He wondered if he should call St. Louis. It was after two in the morning. They'd be alarmed. He knew they'd blame him for everything that happened. He was no nurse. He recalled how peacefully Mr. Mead had died, the old sailor slipping beneath his death as casually as one enters tepid water. He decided she should be in a hospital and said so. Groaning, she shook her head. "They're equipped for this stuff," he said.

"No good," she managed. She'd already explained why. She was afraid they wouldn't give her her pain pills when she wanted them, that they'd withhold them. She wanted Mills to give her a double dose now, two large, oddly shaped blocks of morphine like tiny bricks. It would have been the strongest dose she'd had yet. He broke a tablet in two and fed the halves past her impaired vision. He called the front desk and got on their caretaker service, although the caretaker had already left on his 2:00 A.M. rounds.

"You have only one?"

"The guests are either sleeping or already in the hospital this time of night."

"Get in touch with him. Send him by."

Suddenly she was worried about the expense. There was an extra charge for this amenity. It was the middle of the night, they had you over a barrel. "Shh," George said. She wanted him to cancel the order, she became quite hysterical about it. He hadn't, he told her, made one.

"I heard you."

They lost each other in explanations.

"I'm hungry," she said, and he told her that was a good sign, but he didn't think he should give her anything too heavy. "Feed a cold and starve a cancer," she said lucidly.

The morphine was beginning to ease her. She dozed off. The caretaker waked her when he knocked on the door. It was the kid from the parking lot, the one he'd given a dollar to watch the car.

The boy glanced at Mrs. Glazer. "She fine, man." he said. "See joo in fifteen minuteses."

Strangely, the boy seemed to have rea.s.sured her. "Ask him," she said, "if he thinks I should have something to eat."

"Him?"

"He's the caretaker. He sees dozens of patients. Ask."