Absent Company Read online

  The bus stopped briefly at almost every village in the central highlands, most consisting of only a small arrangement of adobe huts. At each of these stops he heard the same.

  “Mala gente,” warned an old man tapping at the window.

  “Mala gente,” screeched a lady in a dirt-brown dress from her front door.

  Mala gente, the bad people, who were reported to occupy the next village down the road. He heard the same thing at each succeeding village.

  “Oh, no, señor; not this village. It is the next village. Mala gente. Mala gente!”

  There was an old Mexican folk remedy for people talking bad about you: sew up a toad’s mouth with green thread, then leave it on the person’s doorstep. Cliff wondered how the local toad population was holding up. Bob thought it was a wonderful idea.

  The morning was sweltering; Cliff stripped down to his T-shirt by noon. He tried to convince Bob to remove his heavy knit shirt; the boy was embarrassed as only an eight-year-old can be, and his obstinacy unaccountably infuriated Cliff.

  A grimy arm reached through the open window and shoved a taco into his face. “Taco, señor?” Cliff pushed it away. The taco swung back. “Taco, for the boy?” Cliff slapped at it angrily. Bob had had three tacos so far that day; Cliff was at a loss about controlling his eating. The boy didn’t have to say a word to get back at him.

  The windows on his side of the bus were full of arms and hands bearing mangoes, baskets, small souvenirs, as if some great, desperate beast had latched onto the bus.

  A young boy peered from under a worn shawl. “Mala gente,” in a high-pitched voice.

  Cliff had watched the dark stranger at each of their stops. The man always remained in his seat, staring straight ahead. None of the other passengers seemed to want to have anything to do with him. At first Cliff thought they were just ignoring him completely, but then noted the way people subtly edged from his vicinity. The bus was quite crowded, but there were vacant seats all around the man. Even the outstretched arms bearing merchandise stayed away.

  Cliff couldn’t peel his eyes away from the man, his posture, his dress. He could see at least two sweaters beneath the heavy wool poncho. Yet the man wasn’t perspiring at all. The stranger didn’t seem to be affected by anything.

  “Mala gente! Mala gente!” The old Indian woman babbled to herself as she delivered their linen. Cliff started to reply but she had already headed down the walk. He wondered if any of the tourists had done something to offend her.

  Bob sat outside their motel room, “bored” again. Cliff had tried to ignore him: unpacking, rearranging his shirts in the small bureau, looking through the stack of souvenir Spanish publications he could but half-comprehend. But he always found himself returning to the front window, pulling back the curtains and staring at the boy.

  He’d never have agreed to taking Bob in if he hadn’t felt safe. Until Marion, he had never found anyone ready to accept him, even in his most distant, taciturn moments. “It shows character,” she’d laugh, poking his stomach with her forefinger.

  He had discovered he could love a child only in the abstract. Bob was every bit as distant, as taciturn as he, maybe more so, and Cliff didn’t find the boy very likeable.

  “Good people” loved and cared for children. And he had always wanted to be a “good” person. He was not a cold man, Marion had known that.

  He went to his bureau to pull out a heavier shirt; the room had suddenly felt much cooler to him.

  That night he found himself staying up watching Bob sleep. After a few hours Bob’s snoring became visible to Cliff, cold puffs clouding the air above the boy’s face.

  The first person Cliff saw the next morning was the stranger. The man was sitting in an open air, rundown little restaurant with cloth-covered tables and brown Indian waitresses. Flies were buzzing around outside the place and most of the patrons were drenched in sweat. But the stranger was cool, felt cold to the eye. Sitting in the grey shade of the café in his dark poncho he seemed like an arctic shadow.

  As he watched Cliff approach him from the plaza only his eyes showed any signs of light, like sun reflected off twin orbs of ice.

  Cliff was exhausted from only two hours’ sleep the previous night, and he was in a bit of a hurry, worried that Bob would wake up soon and come looking for him. For some reason he did not understand, Cliff took a chair at the stranger’s table. But then he found he could hardly look at the man, and found it necessary to watch the other patrons, the passers-by, even the dogs wandering the streets.

  The stranger seemed a black sculpture. He leaned forward, as if to say something, tilted his head back, as if signaling Cliff to move closer. But Cliff could not let himself get any closer; his body would not allow it.

  The man stared, eyes unblinking, and passed his left hand in front of Cliff’s face, as if he were waving “hello”.

  Cliff’s face seemed suddenly numb with cold, his eyes squinted shut, instinctively protecting themselves as if they’d been blasted by a winter gust. He thought it must be some sort of anxiety attack, a nervous effect. Then he felt a sensation as if a sheet had been lifted from his face, his skin again being exposed to the Mexican heat. Water dripped down out of his eyebrows; he pictured hairs losing their coatings of frost.

  The stranger settled back in his chair, looking past Cliff, into the distant mountain peaks.

  “Is there … something I can do for you, sir?” Cliff stammered, unable to take his eyes off the stranger’s blank looking face.

  But the stranger didn’t answer.

  “I’m … I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on here. Do you speak English?”

  One of the emaciated stray dogs wandered closer to their table, obviously seeking some scraps. Cliff watched the stranger shift his eyes a fraction to register this new presence.

  Cliff started to pet the dog, then stopped in mid-reach, feeling a sensation near his fingertips, as if they were dipping into cool butter. He watched, spellbound, as the dog sank first on to his haunches, then, his front legs collapsing, on to his snout. The oddest thing, as if the dog were winding down in slow motion, running out of gas.

  He touched the dog with his foot; there was no response.

  Cliff looked up at the man, squinting, because suddenly the sun seemed to be in his eyes; he couldn’t make out the man’s features because of the glare. The head was a solid black oval. But then Cliff discovered he could see the mouth, and the wide shallow U of the scar making the false smile over the unsmiling lips.

  Moments later the café owner was standing over Cliff, alternately apologizing for the dead dog beneath the table, screaming at everyone within earshot for allowing such a thing to happen at his establishment, and suggesting pointedly that perhaps Cliff, after all, had something to do with the animal’s presence. Soon a crowd had gathered, all arguing conflicting points of view in rapid-fire Spanish.

  When things had quieted down, Cliff couldn’t find the stranger anywhere.

  Cliff sat in a Mexican cowhide chair, looking past the bed where Bob was napping, and out the window at the rain clouds piling up in the sky, the gold and red sunset turning the distant mountains into black cut-outs. The clouds themselves, then the trees, people passing in the street outside had all become silhouettes before he finally broke out of his reveries, stood, and began moving around in the room.

  Cliff sat awkwardly in the bus that day, his body tense with expectation. He felt the stranger watching him, the dark eyes cooling the back of his neck. Occasionally he glanced down at Bob, who stared out the window. The boy’s quiet made him uneasy. Cliff was afraid of being exposed now, afraid that Bob would discover how he really felt. The silence made him wonder if Bob already suspected.

  This leg of the trip had been essentially dull. Miles of pine trees baking in the hot sun; it seemed they should just curl up and die. As the bus swung around the mountain curves they could look back on the hazy, dusty Mexican valley, and above the haze, in the clear upper air, the snow ca
p of Popocatepetl. The driver had shut off the engine and coasted part of the way, an unnerving habit of his, since he’d had to round some of those curves at high speed in order to mount the short rises. Cliff had found himself gasping in the mountain air. Occasionally they passed ruins of old haciendas and Cliff had been reminded of the age of the place, the history marked here, where Zapata had ridden with the Indians, and where Cortez had traversed the highlands.

  The natives seemed unimpressed, and the tourists too washed out from the heat to pay much attention. Most of them, Cliff and Bob included, were scheduled to be in Cuernavaca the next day; they were saving their enthusiasm.

  The boy was unhappy, always had been. Just look at him now, Cliff mused, tossing and turning in the clinging sheets, struggling with any number of demons he could only guess at, since Bob certainly wasn’t one to share his dreams, or anything else, with anyone. Marion had just begun making progress with him, getting him to open up a little with her, when she was killed in the accident.

  The drunk jumped the median. Cliff couldn’t have known. It could have happened to anyone. Suddenly the front of the other car filled his windshield. When he looked over at her, the blood streaming from her nose, her hair, matting above that dark place … Bob was screaming, crying in the back seat. Cliff found himself shouting at him.

  And looking at her, beginning to scream himself, he knew that he had been daydreaming at the time—Marion’d always been amused by his little trances—but damn, he’d been daydreaming! The drunk hadn’t been travelling that fast. They could have made it.

  Bob knew that, too; Cliff was sure of it. But the boy had never said a word. The boy had finally settled down, his thumb at his lips in a peaceful, babyish gesture, the rising moon turning his dark hair almost silver, and bleaching out his face so that he looked more like an old man lying there twisted up in the bright sheets. Cliff could hold him, if only Bob could be like that all the time. He yearned to be able to hold the boy tightly against his own body, inseparable. Awake it was impossible; the boy would anger him. But Cliff remembered the times those barriers had frayed a bit: Bob leaning against him as they climbed aboard the bus, asking him for help picking out clothes, wanting Cliff to do things for him he already knew how to do. Cliff had lived alone most of his life. He hadn’t even been used to the marriage yet when they adopted Bob. He still woke up mornings believing he was single until he rolled over and found Marion there, and he realized at her funeral that he never had become used to her presence in his life. He wasn’t likely to get used to Bob either; it would continue like this, unfinished, as long as they both lived.

  He was outside walking briskly away from the inn before he realized he’d even made some sort of decision. The night air felt somehow strange to him, as if the air itself were warm, but too thin, too spread out to transfer any of its heat to his body. The air was full of shadows, silhouettes. The back of his neck began to shiver, the hairs on his arms prickling.

  The stranger was sitting on a bench in the darkness; even though only his profile was visible, Cliff recognized him immediately. It was almost as if the man had been waiting for Cliff to leave the room. Cliff stopped, momentarily startled by the stranger’s sharp profile: the hooked nose, the pouting lips, double chin.

  “Cold …”

  The word came from the direction of the bench, although he hadn’t actually seen the man’s lips move. He stepped impulsively closer to the bench. The man had turned his face slightly and the resemblance to his own profile was gone.

  The man made no move to rise, and Cliff didn’t have any intention of stepping closer to the negative-like figure.

  “You want me to do something …”

  “I don’t think …” Cliff wasn’t sure if that last had been a question, or a statement.

  “You want me to do something about … Bob …”

  “What? How did you know my son’s name? You couldn’t know.”

  Cliff halted, tried to catch his breath. The man just sat there unmoving, his dark form not even wavering against the light. “I don’t understand. This … this has to stop!” Cliff said, suddenly on the verge of tears.

  Someone was laughing in one of the bars down the dusty street. A man on a bicycle passed between them, but neither Cliff nor the stranger lost concentration, Cliff’s gaze and the stranger’s imagined gaze locked, unbreakable.

  “Cold …”

  “Stop it, dammit!” Cliff began walking away, following the cyclist down towards the village, already thinking about getting drunk. “Oh, just do it! Do it, for God’s sake!” he said, almost absentmindedly, not thinking about the words, just wanting the man to go away, Bob to go away. Then, whispering back over his shoulder, “Please …”

  Cliff stopped halfway down the road and turned around. He watched as the stranger rose slowly to his feet and began moving steadily towards the inn and the room where Bob was sleeping. The wind was beginning to pick up; a small dust devil of leaves, grit, and small pebbles swung past the stranger and down the road a few feet from where Cliff was standing. But the stranger’s poncho did not stir, hung draped like clothing on a sculpture. Cliff turned and ran to catch the cyclist, unaccountably wondering how he might beat the rickety bicycle in the race to the village.

  Cliff didn’t return to the inn until the next dawn. He walked into a sunny, well-kept room. The maid had been there, the beds made, bureau straightened. There was no sign of his son. The boy’s clothes were missing from the closet. It was as if the boy had never existed.

  What had the man done? But Cliff wouldn’t allow himself to think about the logistics involved.

  If the other tourists on the bus to Cuernavaca noticed Bob’s absence they said nothing to him. Cliff looked everywhere for the stranger, not only on the bus, but in the crowds along the highway, in the small towns, even trying to imagine the man in other clothes, in false beards and moustaches. But there was no sign of him. By the time they’d reached the outskirts of the city he had begun to relax, almost ready to actually enjoy his vacation. He began daydreaming of moving, finding a new job, perhaps even dating again. For the first time since her death Cliff began to wonder if perhaps there might be another woman for him out there, perhaps even someone like Marion.

  The Estrelle de Oro bus dropped him off at the terminal on Ave. Morelos at Calle Veracous. He caught a red and white city bus on Morelos, riding down to Aragon y Leon, where he registered at Casa Marilu, Aragon y Leon, No. 12, plain but clean just as the guidebook had described.

  He ate a late lunch at the restaurant Mary & San Miguel: soup, omelet, frijoles, and salad, twenty pesos.

  He spent the afternoon wandering the streets, visiting the square Jardon Juarez, vowing to return Sunday evening for the regular band concert held there, shopped the markets, passed Rajon, then Hidelgo, stopping at each dealer in pre-Columbian art, both the authentic and the faked antiques.

  He had always been fascinated by the freakish look of these figures, the hysterical eyes and protruding tongues, the fearsome gods in their stiff headdresses. If spirits did live in this world, Cliff was convinced this would be how they looked.

  It was strange how many times the new “antiques” would cost just as much as the genuine, old ones. But then, they were made in the same way by the same kinds of people. And it made an ironic sense too, that new gods would be valued the same as the old.

  The old woman wore several shawl rebozos in a rainbow of color, no doubt selling them to tourists right off her back. But her main line was the artefacts, old and new arranged side by side on her little table.

  Cliff felt gregarious. “Sso, how’s business, señora?” He grinned.

  “Mucho trabajo, poco dinero, señor.”

  He drew a blank momentarily. He knew mucho meant much, and that last phrase was little money, but he couldn’t remember the meaning of trabajo.

  “Much work, little money, mister.”

  Cliff looked down gratefully at the small boy who had walked up beside him, then shiver
ed involuntarily as he caught just a glimpse of the boy’s profile. You want me to do something about Bob … The dark hair, the fleshy face.

  The little Mexican boy stared up at Cliff quizzically, blinking his dark eyes. He had several boxes of Chiclets thrust forward in one grimy little hand.

  Cliff shakily pulled out a coin, accepted a box of Chiclets, and stood there staring at it as the boy ran down the street.

  “Mala gente! Mala gente!” the old woman screamed.

  Cliff looked up at her, startled. She seemed to be looking slightly past him, her lips tight, the cords standing out in her neck.

  He swung around in time to see a shadowy figure turning into the crowd, disappearing almost immediately. The faces of the people were bright, the colors in their clothing standing out distinctly.

  He held the woman’s arm so she would not bolt from him. “What did he look like?”

  She stared at him in bewilderment.

  “Mala gente … that means more than one. Were there more than one?” She opened her mouth soundlessly.

  “Woman, were there two?”

  The old woman pulled loose, stumbled back against the adobe behind her, then began scrambling up the street, muttering hoarsely, “Mala gente … mala gente … mala gente …”

  For two days he wandered bar to bar drinking, watching out for the dark stranger, checking out carefully every small beggar who happened to stumble his way. He developed a cold which threatened to evolve into something worse, giving him an excuse to try the old Mexican cure of Mescal drunk hot with lemons. He seemed to have developed a taste for pulque as well, a milky fermented drink made from the juice of the agave. It had an unpleasant smell and a sour taste, but it provided a sensory distraction.

  He tried the herb seller at one of the street markets, hoping the man might sell him some tree bark, plant, or seed from ancient times designed to cure what was ailing him. After all, the man had herbs for headaches, bleeding, love, and lost virginity; why not a herb for him, for “sons, shadows, and cold,” as he had explained to the man, gesturing wildly.