SURGEON SUED WHEN BREAST SLIPS
I KILLED MY BABY, CRIB-DEATH MOM SOBS
NEW CANCER CURE FOUND BY MEX DOCS
They were right They could not prepare him for America. Nothing could prepare him for America. They had prepared him for much but they had not prepared him for the hate. It was as if he had never left the dangerous streets, the gun-haunted hills, the ugly free-fire zone of the Middle East. There was a war here too. The old men in the hotels that stank of disinfectant and had bugs that bit you in the night — as at home. The black men, in angry knots on the street corners: the young ones looked like tough young Hanafis in a Sunni area. Solitary old Negroes, who moved so slow you’d think they’d seen their own death waiting at the end of the block. The women, both inviting and hostile. Could they all be whores? Painted like Baghdad harlots for sure, thrusting their hips and breasts and fat mouths at you. Yet they were brittle with a kind of fear too. But worst of all he saw were the white men.
Masters of this world? Rulers, emperors? Conquerors of the moon?
He’d never seen masters so sullen and wan. It is worse to suffer dishonor in this world than death, the Kurds say. Kurdistan or death, the Kurds say. Life passes, honor remains, the Kurds say.
No white American could say such things. They were like the corrupt old Ottomans — America a tottering Ottoman empire, as Byzantine, as greedy, as muscleless. American men sweated because they were so fat. They did not seem to own their own streets but merely to lease them at exorbitant rates. God willed nothing for them, because God could not see them.
Or maybe it was the weather, or maybe it was the city. Whatever, the air seemed blue in the cities he passed through — blue with rising smoke, with rising steam, blue with the nighttime hues of huge lamps, blue with hate. At any moment it would break apart and the groups would begin to hunt each other in the streets. Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran, Tabriz: it had happened a hundred times in his part of the world, all the hate swirling madly until one red day it burst, spilling across the pavement. And it would happen here. Surely that was the message in all this. He saw no Jardis.
America had lost her Jardis. Sent them away, pushed them, driven them, murdered them, blasphemed them, for whatever mad reason.
In his travel he saw no Jardi — not the posture which had seemed to him in the mountains the very essence of America, which had been perhaps only the very essence of Jardi. Jardi always pushed them on.
But Jardi had betrayed him.
Jardi, Jardi: Why?
His head ached. Jardi’s crime mocked him.
Jardi, you were my brother. Jardi, I loved you. You had honor, Jardi, you could not do such a thing.
Jardi, why? Who reached you, Jardi, who took you from us, who turned you against us? You would have died, Jardi, rather than betray us.
You once gave life, Jardi. You gave life to my son, Apo. Why would you then take it, my brother?
“Little Rock, folks. Municipal Station, ’bout ten minutes. Check the luggage rack overhead now.”
The passengers stirred.
Ulu Beg looked out the window: in a mean blue city again.
“’Bout motha-fuckin’
MAGIC ENERGY PILLS RESTORE VITALITY
REDFORD TO DIRECT STREISAND
U.S. MUST SHOW SPINE, SAYS JOE DANZIG
10
Trewitt felt as if he were at an audience with Lyndon Johnson. This huge old man who carried a nickel Peacemaker in his holster, who never sweated through his mummified skin, who had hands like hams and eyes like razor slits and spouted laconic Texas justice, hellfire and brimstone: these
Vernon Tell was a supervisor in the U.S. Border Patrol, Agent in Charge of the Nogales, Arizona, station, and he was trying to explain to Trewitt and Bill Speight, who were sitting in his office under the weak fiction of being investigators for the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms interested in an automatic- weapons violation, just how little there was to go on in the case of the death of his two officers, 11 March last. He wore gigantic yellow-tinted Bausch & Lomb shooting glasses and had the shortest crewcut Trewitt had ever seen. Trewitt blinked in the heat, trying to sort it all out. Evidently a climax in the conversation had been reached, for now the bulky old cop and Bill Speight rose. Trewitt felt the situation squirming out of control and wanted urgently to have it in his fingers again — if it had ever been so in the first place — but he felt himself rising too, drawn by Vernon Tell’s creaky magnetism, and by the desire to demonstrate to a creep like Speight that he wasn’t confused.
The old officer turned to him suddenly and said, “You in Vietnam, son?”
Trewitt, startled, felt he was being tested.
“No, sir,” he said.
“Well,” said Tell, whose forest-green uniform was crinkleless even though the air conditioning in his office was on the fritz and both Trewitt and Speight had wilted in their clothes, “reason I ask is most nights it’s like Vietnam out there.” He gestured to his window, through which, in blazing, cloudless radiance, could be seen a representative vista of the Southwest, miles and miles of scrub and desert and mountains and, incidentally, as Trewitt could see, a Dog ’n’ Suds. “They come with dope and guns and they come just plain illegal. They come in planes and in Jeeps and on foot. It can get pretty wild and woolly.”
“I’m sure it’s a tough job,” said Trewitt ineffectually.
“This-a-way,” said Tell.
He took them down a glossy hall under the gaze of various official portraits and through a double set of green doors. Beyond lay a gate, which the old cop swiftly unlocked. This led into another hall and into an atmosphere that rose in thickness and discomfort in direct proportion to their penetration of it. Cells, empty, flanked them, but there was still another destination: at the end of the hall two uniformed men sat in a prim little office.
“How’s our boy today?” Tell asked.
“’Bout the same, sir.”
“These gents come all the way from the East to see him.”
Another door opened, a room, half cell and half not, a private little chamber. In the cell a single Mexican boy lounged on the cot, slim and sullen.
“This is what we drug up,” said Tell. “His name is Hector Murillo. He’s sixteen, from a village called Haitzo about a hundred miles south of Mexico City. Any of you speak Spanish?”
Trewitt and Speight shook their heads.
“We think Hector came over that night. The others are dead in the desert, or back on their side of the border, or got clean away. But from the tracks on the site, we know at least seven men went across. One of them, the man who did the shooting, in boots. We’re still trying to track the make on the boots.”
“What’s his sorry story?” asked Bill Speight gruffly, mopping his face with a sodden handkerchief. Speight looked gray in the heat and his hair clung in lank strips to his forehead. Upstairs he’d been spry and folksy but the heat had finally gotten to him.
“Funny thing, he hasn’t got one. We just found him wandering half-dead from thirst and craziness in the mountains a week after the shootings. Says he can’t remember anything. Hector.
