I'll turn him loose up at the logging show, Hub says, turning his yellow grin toward Joon the Goon.
Be careful, Joon says, grinning herself, that you don't get mixed up and turn loose your cheese sandwich and eat the gopher. Yeah, Sherree says, ree-ally – like she can – and goes out to wait for the bus. Caleb says Yeah, ree-ally. Mom says Here comes the bus Quiston get your assignment sheet Caleb where's your shoes! Hub says he will be careful, thanks for breakfast, see y'all this evening…
I don't know what I'll say, first period oral assignment – Tell What You Did For Your Mother On Mother's Day.
TRANNY MAN OVER THE BORDER
– hibiscus blooms fall with heavy plops, lie sprawled on the sunny cobblestones and cement benches like fat Mexican generals, scarlet-and-green parade uniforms, gawdy and limp, too hot and tired to rise back to the rank of their branches. Later, perhaps. Now, siesta…
"Not good!" yells the gray crewcut American from Portland with his fifty-year face running sweat and his new Dodge Polaro sitting behind a tow truck outside the Larga Distancia Oficina. "Not three thrown in less than five thousand miles!"
Yelling from Puerto Sancto, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona, where he'd bought his last transmission after buying his second in Oroville, California, where he'd paid without much complaint because it is possible to strip the gears with the hard business miles he'd put on it, but a tranny again in Tucson? And now, less than a week later? The third blown?
"Not good at all! So listen up; I'm gonna jerk the thing out and ship it back first train your direction. I expect the same promptness from you garage boys, right? I expect a new transmission down here in time for us to make the festival in Guadalajara one week from tomorrow! There's no excuse for this kinda workmanship I can tell you that!"
What he didn't tell the garage boys in Tucson was that he was pulling a twenty-four-foot mobile home.
"I been a Dodge man ten years. We don't want a ten-year relationship to blow up from one fluke, right?"
He hung up and turned to me. Next in line, I had been his nearest audience.
"That'll get some greasemonkeys' asses smoking in Tucson, won't it, Red?" He leaned close, as if we had known each other for years. "They aren't a bad bunch. Fact is, I hope I can find me a mechanic down here with a fraction the know-how as those Arizona boys."
Reaffirmation of Yankee superiority left him so flushed with feeling for his countrymen that he chose to overlook the stubbled look of me.
"What's your name, Red? You remind me of my oldest boy a little, behind that brush."
"Deboree," I told him, taking his hand. "Devlin Deboree."
"What brings you to primitive Puerto Sancto, Dev? Let me guess. You're a nature photographer. I saw you out there after those fallen posies."
"Way wrong," I told him. "It isn't even my camera. My father sent his along. He came to Sancto last year with my brother and me, and nobody took picture one."
"So Dad sent you to bring back the missed memories. He musta been a lot more impressed than I been."
"Wrong again. He sent me to bring back jumping beans."
"Jumping beans?"
"Mexican jumping beans. When we were down here last year he met a mechanic who also grew jumping beans. He bought a hundred bucks' worth of this year's harvest."
"Jumping beans?"
"Five gallons. Dad's going to give one bean away with each quart of his new ice cream, to publicize the flavor. Not Jumping Bean – Pina Colada. We run a creamery."
" 'Debris,' huh?" He gave me a wink to let me know he was kidding. "Like in 'rubbish'?"
I told him it was more like in Polish. He laughed.
"Well, you remind me of my kid, whatever. Why don't you join me in the Hotel Sol bar after your call? We'll see if I remind you of your old man.
He winked again and left, roguishly tipping his fishing cap to the rest of the tourists waiting to contact home.
I found him under a palapa umbrella by the pool. His look of confidence was already a little faded, and he was wondering if maybe he shouldn't've also had a good U.S. mechanic come with the transmission – pay the man's way now, fight it out with the Dodge people later. I observed some of these Mexican mechanics were pretty good. He agreed they had to be pretty good, to keep these hand-me-downs running, but what did they know about a modern automatic transmission? He pulled down his sunglasses and drew me again into that abrupt intimacy.
"You can take the best carburetor man in the whole country, say, and turn him loose in an area he isn't qualified in, and you're going to have troubles. Believe me, numerous troubles…"
This truth and his drink made him feel better. The grin returned and the ungreased whine of panic was almost oiled out of his voice by his second Seagram's and Seven-Up. By the bottom of his third he was ready to slip 'er into whiskeydrive and lecture me as to all the troubles a man can encounter along the rocky road of life, brought about mainly by unqualified incompetents in areas where they didn't belong. Numerous troubles! To steer him away from a tirade I interrupted with what I thought was a perfectly peaceful question: How many did he have with him? One eye narrowed strangely and slid over my backpack and beard. With a voice geared all the way back into suspicion he informed me that his wife was along and what about it.
I gaped, amazed. He thinks that I meant how many troubles meaning his wife or whoever meaning I'm trying to cast some snide insinuation about his family! Far out, I thought, and to calm him I said I wished my wife and kids were along. Still suspicious, he asked how many kids, and how old. I told him. He asked where they were and I said in school -
"But if I have to wait much longer for these jumping beans I'm going to have them all fly down. Sometimes you have to skip a little school to further your education, right?"
"Right!" This brought him close again. "Don't I wish my woman'd known that when my kids were kids! 'After they get their educations' was her motto. Right, Mother, sure…"
I thought he was going to get melancholy again, but he squared his shoulders instead and clinked his glass against mine. "Decent of you and your brother to take a trip with your old dad, Red." He was glad I had turned out not to be some hippy rucksack smartass after all, but a decent American boy, considerate of his father. He twisted in his chair and called grandly for the waiter to bring us another round uno mas all around, muy goddamn pronto.