Mills nodded. Squatters, he thought, poachers. The old planted immunities and small piecemeal favors. The poor’s special charters and manumissions, their little license and acquittals, all law’s exonerate laxity and stretched-point privilege. He had to make himself low.
“Yeah, well,” he said, “they look like ordinary thieves to me, my way of thinking. I could run them off for you. No charge.”
“You’re very boorish, aren’t you?”
“Nah,” Mills said, “no. I’m pointing out possibilities. I’m looking for the fly in the ointment. That’s how I operate. In a way I’m protecting you. You’d want someone tough, am I right? In this situation you’d need a guy who could set aside his delicate feelings, not someone who starts bleeding at the sight of puke. Lady, I eat puke! And not at no concerts, not at no poetry readings.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Glazer said, considering.
“Sure,” Mills said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Sure,” Mills said. “My God, Mrs, listen to the way I build your confidence. I think I’m your man.” It was exactly what he thought. It was what he thought when he’d first heard her voice, when he’d listened to her prattle. He wanted this job, needed it. He had to make himself low, reserve and brutal syntax in his jaws like chewing gum.
“You just better not die,” Mills warned.
“I don’t intend to.”
“I want to go too,” Mary said from where she’d been listening in the hall.
“Mary!”
“I want to go too,” she said, still concealed.
“Don’t be silly. What about school?”
“Kids can get off if it’s educational. There’s going to be a unit on Mexico. I’d get extra credit. I want to go too.”
“Mary, I’m going down there to get well. I’ll be taking treatments. All the people will be sick there. As sick as Mommy.”
“Let me talk to her, Mrs.” George Mills said, and promised he would bring back a wonderful present for her.
“Oh, presents,” she said disparagingly. “My grandfather buys me all the presents I want. My Uncle Harry does.”
Mills barely glanced at the woman for permission. “Gee, kid,” George Mills said, guarding his protector, “I meant your mommy.”
5
To the poor most places are foreign, all soil not the neighborhood extraterritorial and queer. They cling to an idea of edge, a sense of margin. It’s as if space, space itself, not climate or natural resources or the angle at which a town hangs from the meridian, dictates situation and size, even form, even vegetation. They believe, that is, in a horizon geography, a geology of scenic overlook, the visible locutions of surface like merchandise arranged in a store. For them, Nature, the customs she fosters, seem to exist within serially located parallel lines. Science and history are determined by latitude and longitude, little else. Savannas and rain forests, jungles, seashores, mountains and deserts — those were the real nations.
The people were not strange to him, only their white shirts. Only their artifacts, their basketstraw heritage and adobe being. So much silver — it gleamed everywhere, so accessory he suspected that even the policemen’s badges were made of it — made his soul reel. So much marquetry — even the benches in the public squares and gardens seemed a sort of crocheted wood — gave him a sense of an entire country artisan’d into existence. The sun seemed a feature of the landscape, and he was enough conscious of the tremor-settled streets to suspect the delicate arrangements of the earth he walked upon, and to sense it sensed his steps.
It was all as mysterious and significant as the skinned rabbits and shaved chickens that hung upside down from hooks in the butchers’ shop windows, red and naked as political example.
They had been in Mexico almost four days and Mrs. Glazer had still to receive her first treatment. They had rented a car in El Paso and crossed the Rio Grande to Juarez, Mrs. Glazer insisting they stop for the hitchhikers standing on the Mexican side of the bridge. George handled the money, the blue, red and yellow tissues of currency, soft as old clothes. He signed the insurance forms and answered the border guards’ questions. She gave him her tourist card to carry. He signed the register at their motel while she remained in the air-conditioned car. He settled her in her room and turned down her bed. She had him call Sam before he went to his own room. Standing, he relayed both ends of the conversation to and from the easy chair in which she sat. They had arrived safely, he said. He and the children already missed her, he said. The girls had to do all their homework before they went out. Mary couldn’t have a milk shake till after dinner. Milly wasn’t to make any arrangements for Wednesday afternoon. That’s when auditions for Nutcracker were scheduled, he said. The trip had tired her, he said, and she thought she’d put off her first visit to the clinic till morning.
A boy rose from a camp chair in which he’d been sitting, handed something to an old woman, and came up while George was still parking the car in the lot.
“Joo here for treatments?”
“Do you speak English?”
“Ain’t that English? Joo here for treatments?”
“Information.”
“What informations joo want? Si. Sure. It work. Cure up jore cancers. Fix joo up fine.”
Mills started past the boy.
“Hey,” called the boy. “Joo, Misters. Joo got to take number. I give joo.”
But Mills ignored him.
Two receptionists in nurse’s uniforms sat at registration desks at the back of the crowded room. George went outside to get a number.
“Joo need me to watch jore cars? I watch jore cars,” the boy called after George as he started back toward the clinic. “That ways nothing awfuls happen. Nobody break jore window or puncture jore tires or tear off jore antenna or pour sugars in jore gas tanks.”
George turned around.
“How much?”
The boy grinned at him. “Joo got a Joo.S. dollars on you?” George handed him a dollar.
“Crowded in there? Many peoples?” The boy wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead, pulled at his shirt, pretended to fan himself. “Joo want to rent my chair for a quarter? Sick peoples need to sit down.”
“What’s your number?” a very old man asked him, smiling, when he was again inside. He wore an old-fashioned taxi driver’s cap with a button that said “Official Guide” where the badge number would have been.
“Ninety-five,” Mills said.
The old man’s smile disappeared and his eyes filled with tears. “Ninety-five,” he said feelingly. “You come all this way, all this far from el Estados Unidos, and they give you ninety-five. Tch-tch.”
“It’s all right,” Mills said.
“No, señor! No all right! I jam shame for my people. I jam shame for those two whore daughters of whores who call themselves typists. So slow. Tch-tch. They call themselves train typists? They are train pussies! Customers have to spell out for them all everything. Ninety-five.” The old man spit on the floor. “You be here all week. I get you thirty-seven. Five pesos.”
“No thanks.”
“Five pesos. That isn’t even a quarter.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Sure,” the old man said, “wait. You in good shape. I can seen it for myself. Your tumor ain’t bad. You got all the time in the world.”