'You mean Louie, the gym instructor. No, this is another one. Louie has decided all that sort of thing is very wrong and he tells me that I am going to burn in hell, but he is going to heaven.'
'Serious?'
'Oh, yes. Well, Maurice is as queer as I am.' Joe belched. 'Excuse me. If not queerer. But he won't accept it. I think stealing my typewriter is a way he takes to demonstrate to me and to himself that he is just in it for all he can get. As a matter of fact, he's so queer I've lost interest in him. Not completely though. When I see the little bastard I'll most likely invite him back to my apartment, instead of beating the shit out of him like I should.'
Lee tipped his chair back against the wall and looked around the room. Someone was writing a letter at the next table. If he had overheard the conversation, he gave no sign. The proprietor was reading the bullfight section of the paper, spread out on the counter in front of him. A silence peculiar to Mexico seeped into the room, a vibrating, soundless hum.
Joe finished his beer, wiped his mouth with the hack of his hand, and stared at the wall with watery, bloodshot blue eyes. The silence seeped into Lee's body, and his face went slack and blank. The effect was curiously spectral, as though you could see through his face. The face was ravaged and vicious and old, but the clear, green eyes were dreamy and innocent. His light-brown hair was extremely fine and would not stay combed. Generally it fell down across his forehead, and on occasion brushed the food he was eating or got in his drink.
'Well, I have to be going,' said Joe. He gathered up his bundles and nodded to Lee, bestowing on him one of his sweet politician smiles, and walked out, his fuzzy, half-bald head outlined for a moment in the sunlight before he disappeared from view.
Lee yawned and picked up a comic section from the next table. It was two days old. He put it down and yawned again. He got up and paid for his drink and walked out into the late afternoon sun. He had no place to go, so he went over to Sears' magazine counter and read the new magazines for free.
He cut back past the K.C. Steak House. Moor beckoned to him from inside the restaurant. Lee went in and sat down at his table. 'You look terrible,' he said. He knew that was what Moor wanted to hear. As a matter of fact, Moor did look worse than usual. He had always been pale; now he was yellowish.
The boat project had fallen through. Moor and
Williams and Williams' wife, Lil, were back from Ziuhuatenejo. Moor was not on speaking terms with the Williamses.
Lee ordered a pot of tea. Moor started talking about Lil. 'You know, Lil ate the cheese down there. She ate everything and she never got sick. She won't go to a doctor. One morning she woke up blind in one eye and she could barely see out the other. But she wouldn't have a doctor.
In a few days she could see again, good as ever. I was hoping she'd go blind.'
Lee realized Moor was perfectly serious. 'He's insane,' Lee thought.
Moor went on about Lil. She had made advances to him, of course. He had paid more than his share of the rent and food. She was a terrible cook. They had left him there sick. He shifted to the subject of his health. 'Just let me show you my urine test,' Moor said with boyish enthusiasm. He spread the piece of paper out on the table. Lee looked at it without interest.
'Look here.' Moor pointed. 'Urea thirteen. Normal is fifteen to twenty-two. Is that serious, do you think?'
'I'm sure I don't know.'
'And traces of sugar. What does the whole picture mean?' Moor obviously considered the question of intense interest.
'Why don't you take it to a doctor?' 'I did. He said he would have to take a twenty-four-hour test, that is, samples of urine over a twenty-four-hour period, before he could express any opinion. . . .
You know, I have a dull pain in the chest, right here. I wonder if it could be tuberculosis?'
'Take an x-ray.'
'I did. The doctor is going to take a skin reaction test. Oh, another thing, I think I have undulant fever. ... Do you think I have fever now?' He pushed his forehead forward for Lee to feel. Lee felt an ear lobe. 'I don't think so,' he said.
Moor went on and on, following the circular route of the true hypochondriac, back to tuberculosis and the urine test. Lee thought he had never heard anything as tiresome and depressing. Moor did not have tuberculosis or kidney trouble or undulant fever. He was sick with the sickness of death. Death was in every cell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.
Moor talked with boyish eagerness. 'I think I need an operation.'
Lee said he really had to go.
Lee turned down Coahuila, walking with one foot falling directly in front of the other, always fast and purposeful, as if he were leaving the scene of a holdup. He passed a group in expatriate uniform: red- checked shirt outside the belt, blue jeans and beard, and another group of young men in conventional, if shabby, clothes. Among these Lee recognized a boy named Eugene Allerton. Allerton was tall and very thin, with high cheekbones, a small, bright-red mouth, and amber-colored eyes that took on a faint violet flush when he was drunk. His gold-brown hair was differentially bleached by the sun like a sloppy dyeing job. He had straight, black eyebrows and black eyelashes. An equivocal face, very young, clean-cut and boyish, at the same time conveying an impression of makeup, delicate and exotic and Oriental. Allerton was never completely neat or clean, but you did not think of him as being dirty. He was simply careless and lazy to the point of appearing, at times, only half awake. Often he did not hear what someone said a foot from his ear. 'Pellagra, I expect,' thought Lee sourly. He nodded to Allerton and smiled.
Allerton nodded, as if surprised, and did not smile.
Lee walked on, a little depressed. 'Perhaps I can accomplish something in that direction. Well, a ver. . . .' He froze in front of a restaurant like a bird dog: 'Hungry . . . quicker to eat here than buy something and cook it.' When Lee was hungry, when he wanted a drink or a shot of morphine, delay was unbearable.
He went in, ordered steak a la Mexicana and a glass of milk, and waited with his mouth watering for food. A young man with a round face and a loose mouth came into the restaurant. Lee said,
