Stranger Than You Think Page 3

  “Last summer just before the aerolito fell,” Galindo explained, “my wife planted some. When the freezer room was finished I needed something for a trial. I saw this magnificent calabaza had come unconnected from its vine. ‘It will spoil,’ I thought, so I put it in the freezer. “¿You like calabaza?”

  I don’t, and I’m sure my mad friend doesn’t, but we both assured him we did.

  “Tell your mother to put it in the oven,” Sr. Galindo said to his offspring who followed us.

  “I never heard of baking one whole,” I protested.

  “You’d need a hacksaw to slice it,” my mad friend laughed.

  “We always bake them whole where I come from,” Galindo explained. “They burst and the seeds fall out. With grated cheese and salsa picante—” He raised eyebrows and kissed his fingertips.

  I knew the rest of the meal would be good anyhow. We had progressed by this time to the hammermill where Sr. Galindo compounded a mash of seeds ranging from rye to kaffir com, with exact amounts of oyster shell, bone meal, fish meal, and vitamins. Some of the latter came from Germany by routes more devious than a shipment of heroin but their presence spelled the difference between profit and loss for Sr. Galindo’s grain-to-meat conversion.

  I wondered what the small boy had wanted.

  Galindo showed some embarrassment. “You know how hard it 4s to get anything fixed in this country. The TV’s been acting up.” He looked at me hopefully. I promised to do what I could—which, without tools, would probably be very little.

  We were admiring a microtome and staining apparatus which augmented the microscope I had donated some years ago. Galindo was explaining to my mad friend the auguries performed over sliced liver in his constant war against the diseases which could wipe him out overnight.

  My stomach had finally reached the conclusion that my throat was cut when the small boy who had taken the calabaza returned with the news that dinner and the ladies awaited.

  But as usual, dinner and the ladies needed several finishing touches so I glanced into the front room where the Galindo brood was acquiring its English in painless, Lone Ranger-sized doses, and immediately knew I was off the hook.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your TV,” I told Galindo. “See how the picture tears and the sound razzes in perfect unison? Something around here’s setting up interference.”

  “The refrigeration—” Galindo began hopefully.

  I shook my head. There were no neon signs within 10 km. I wondered what could be causing the pulsation. But dinner was finally served so I forgot about it.

  Dinner was indeed delicious—young fryers barbecued and drenched in a sauce not so fiery as might be expected from Senora de Galindo’s native state of Tabasco. Galindo ate much bread and salad. He ignored the chicken with an intensity which brought to mind the bitter days when he must have eaten little else. The meal was nearly over when he suddenly remembered and asked, “iy la calabaza?”

  Galindo’s wife shrugged. “Like a rock,” she said.

  “¿After two hours in the oven? ¡How strange!”

  Galindo was buttering a final birote, that Mexican creation which looks like a roll and tastes like bread used to taste, when it happened: There was a muffled explosion, more felt than heard, and the oven door flew open.

  “¡La calabaza!” my wife shrieked, “We forgot to turn off the oven!”

  “Those seeds and pulp will stick like glue,” Mrs. Galindo moaned. She turned off the oven and we settled down for a final round of coffee, still twittering slightly, like poultry after a fox has been flushed from the henhouse.

  The gentlemen retired to another room and discussed the role of the Church in Mexican history. This was interesting for Sr. Galindo was a Mason, while my mad friend was an apologist of such brilliance that I suspected he might someday follow die path of Giordano Bruno. They were nearing the gauntlet and card exchanging stage when we were interrupted from the kitchen.

  “What kind of calabaza was that?” Galindo’s wife asked. We followed her to the now cool oven.

  There were spatters of melted plastic, shattered bits of ceramic, and some extremely miniaturized devices at whose function I could only guess. Intermixed with the whole were rent sections of die covering which had resembled some sort of calabaza. I began to wish I’d seen it after the frost melted away.

  “¡Aja!” Galindo said with something of a twinkle, “You Americans and your fantastic new weapons.”

  I started to protest but I knew Sr. Galindo’s faith in the American Way would permit no other explanation.

  One of the older children came from the front room. “La televisión funciona perfectamente,” he reported.

  I had a sudden suspicion that I knew the exact moment when it had started functioning perfectly. “Do you mind if I take two or three of those little things that look like they’re not broken?” I asked.

  “It’s yours.” Galindo smiled. He didn’t have to clean the oven.

  Wishing they were mine, I slipped two of the small things Into my pocket.

  Late that night as we retraced our path over Carretera Federal Número 2 to the border, our wives again discussed the botch look, and what effect it would have on eye makeup.

  “I can see where Galindo owes something of a debt to the U.S.,” my mad friend said.

  “Not half what the world owes him,” I muttered.

  “How come?”

  “You know how in those science-fiction yams you hate so much, some mad scientist always saves the world from destruction?”

  My friend made an interrogatory noise.

  “Sr. Galindo just did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Saved us from invasion.”

  “You write so much of that jazz you’re beginning to believe it.”

  I remembered the unhappy condition of Sr. Galindo’s fryers. “Wasn’t it established several years ago that UHF radiation seems to foul up the compass arrangements in homing pigeons?” I asked.

  “Not in the kind of stuff I read,” my mad friend said.

  “I don’t know much about telemetering,” I said, “But I’ve seen enough around the Saucer Works to know this isn’t ours.” I handed him something scraped from Galindo’s oven. “It isn’t Russian either.”

  “So?”

  “Funny about you mentioning that tide-pool evolution bit today,” I said. “I wonder,” I wondered, “Just how often a binary system like Earth and Moon occurs? It might pose all sorts of conjectures about climatic conditions for anyone unfamiliar with such a system.”

  “What are you running on about?” my mad friend inquired. Green eyes flared suddenly on the roadway and he braked just in time to miss a cow.

  “Let me put it this way: If you dumped a weather station on an unknown planet and got a normal reading for several days, then a sudden drop to 60° below for six months, then in a matter of minutes the temperature climbed into a range that melted your transmitter, wouldn’t you decide that planet wasn’t worth invading?”

  My mad friend placed a stiff forefinger to one nostril and inhaled noisily through the other. But he was very quiet all the way home.

  THE SIGN OF THE GOOSE

  I FELT GUILTY ABOUT LEAVING Shapiro in a bind but a man needs a rest so, after several false starts, we were finally leaving. “Hold it,” I yelled, “Here’s the mailman.”

  “So what?” a wife inquired from the back seat.

  “Anyone,” my mad friend mumbled, “who’d make a remark like that knows nothing of writers.”

  The flimsy brown paper envelope was unstamped but bore the franking of an official communication from the government of a neighboring country. My mad friend pulled away while I opened it. “Do we know a Senora Epifania López Viuda de Fuentes?” I asked.

  Backseat discussion of whether the new botch look could be worn with open-toed sandals continued without interruption. I crumpled the letter and violated California’s anti-litter law. Three blocks later a wife asked, “Who?”

&nbs
p; “Epifania López, Viuda de Fuentes. I think it was.”

  “My aunt.”

  My mad friend braked and wordlessly retraced the three blocks. While he turned around again I rescued the crumpled letter from beneath a muzzled Volkswagen.

  “She’s going to be evicted if we don’t stop by the Recaudación de Rentas.”

  “Really my great aunt. I only saw her once when I was a child.”

  “Back to the subject,” my mad friend said. “In spite of Dogma and Eve, serpents are relatively unintelligent. As villains they’re even less plausible than bugeyed monsters. What d’you think of Sauerbraten?” he continued with his usual change of subject.

  “Then why? More logical that the fruit be offered by a politician. I’ll bet the serpent’s a Hebrew symbol of evil because some polytheistic neighbor worshipped his rat-trapping house snake. Sauerbraten’s fair but the Wiener Schnitzel’s better.”

  It being neither a horse nor dog racing day, traffic was light. Twenty minutes later my friend clenched teeth at the transition to the highways of a country which I charitably refrain from naming. “I can’t think of a more unlikely place for German cooking,” he mumbled. “Incidentally, does Recaudación de Rentas have anything to do with rent?”

  I shook my head. “It’s where you pay taxes and water bills and buy sheets of sealed paper whenever you need a copy of your ezcuintle’s birth certificate.”

  “My ezcuintles were all born in Gringoland,” my friend said.

  “It is not possible that my great aunt Epifania be evicted,” a wife said from the rear seat.

  “Why?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “An excellent reason,” my mad friend observed.

  “This will bear investigation,” I said prophetically. “Do you mind?”

  “I faint from hunger,” my friend answered, but he turned. We parked with some difficulty in a thoroughly dug up street.

  Recaudación de Rentas was a long narrow room on the ground floor of the Palacio. We stood before the counter for several minutes. Eventually Recaudacións single occupant finished filing her nails and swayed toward us like a vintage vamp. “Dígame,” she said apathetically.

  “It treats of this matter which I do not clearly understand—” I smoothed the crumpled letter.

  “Ah. First one goes to the Panteon Number Two.”

  “¿May one know where finds itself the Graveyard Number Two?”

  “Any gendarme will advise.”

  “¿May one ask where everyone went?” my mad friend inquired.

  “All gawk at an object which fell on the hill behind Cemetery Number Two.”

  “Egad!” my mad friend groaned.

  I suppose I should have called Shapiro and told him where our lost weather balloon fetched up. But there was no phone handy so we got in the car.

  “At least we can follow the crowd,” my friend said.

  “When do we eat?” a wife asked.

  “Soon,” I said hopefully.

  Four bum steers later we parked at Panteon Number Two. A multitude clambered from mound to headstone to sarcophagus, descending the hill behind the cemetery.

  “What of the UFO?” I asked a plump young man who pushed a three-wheeled-bicycle load of ice cream.

  “Gone,” he said in English. “They’ve even blotted out the tracks where it landed.”

  “Something really came down?” my mad friend asked.

  “About midnight, with a scream like a communist lawyer.”

  A small girl with a large copper coin approached, so we left.

  A toolshed stood in the center of the graveyard. In its doorway sat a thin, pockmarked man in pith helmet, leather puttees, and guaraches. “¿One may perhaps seek information?” I asked.

  “¿How not?”

  I handed him the crumpled letter.

  “Epifania López, widow of Fuentes,” he mused, and riffled through a ledger. “She’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

  “This whole affair has taken on an aspect of unreality,” my mad friend said in English.

  The pockmarked man gave him an apologetic smile. “No spik.”

  “We were under the impression that the lady was dead,” my friend added.

  “She is.” He glanced again at the ledger and memorized a number. Two of our wives got out of the car as we trailed him up the rocky slope. “Two-forty-two,” he mumbled, consulting a small numbered stake. We walked down one row and backtracked another before he stopped. The mound was nearly hidden between a marble atrocity and a granite phallic symbol. Scrabbling through the weeds, the caretaker found a stake with faded typewriting under celluloid.

  “Here’s your aunt,” I called to the wives who were catching up.

  “And the lady is to be evicted?” my mad friend asked.

  “Five years have elapsed and the plot has not been paid for.”

  ‘Where does she go from here?” I asked.

  The caretaker mumbled vaguely and I deemed it best not to pursue the subject.

  “¿How much are the fees?” my wife asked.

  “Two hundred pesos.”

  Which, at 12 ½ to a dollar works out to, uh—

  “Well, let’s see,” my friend said, “A peso’s worth eight cents. Times two hundred—”

  ‘Where’s your slide rule?” a wife asked.

  “Sixteen dollars,” the caretaker said.

  Both wives were looking at me.

  “I could eat the blastoderm out of a nematode,” my mad friend said.

  Resignedly, I reached for my wallet.

  “I am not permitted to accept money.”

  My mad friend slapped a hand to his forehead.

  “One must go to Recaudación, taking the name, date, and plot number.” He scribbled necessary data on the back of the crumpled letter. “It would be well to hurry,” he added. “The graveyard locks itself at seventeen hours.”

  Walking at the maximum permitted men with wives, we returned to my friend’s auto and bounced our way back. “The average snake,” my friend continued, “has little intelligence. For reasons having nothing to do with theology, he’s in an evolutionary blind alley and will never be smarter than a moderately precocious rutabaga.”

  “I knew you were a theologian but when did you become a herpetologist?”

  “Satan’s evil knowledge can often be turned against him.”

  There are times when I believe my mad friend could have jansenized St. Ignatius Loyola. We arrived again at Recaudación. There were now twelve girls in the office, filing nails, applying lipstick, knitting, reading the lonely hearts ads in Confidencias. One was typing an answer. The sole secretario finally deigned to notice us.

  “We would like to pay the necessary fees for the tomb of Sra.—” I consulted the letter again.

  “¿Another five years or in perpetuity?”

  “That depends on how much it costs,” I hedged.

  “It’s costing me malnutrition,” my mad friend mumbled.

  “One hundred and fifty pesos for five years. Two hundred a la perpetuidad.”

  “I wouldn’t go through this again for four dollars.”

  He X-ed a square in a form and copied the name and plot number from the crumpled letter. He took my name, address, age, marital status, place of birth, nationality, native tongue, and occupation.

  “What about political affiliation?” my mad friend asked.

  “As a government employee I naturally belong to the Revolutionary Institutions Party,” the secretario said loftily.

  My friend sighed.

  “And now the receipt, if you please.”

  “¿What receipt?”

  The secretario controlled himself. “For the two hundred pesos,” he said raggedly, “Didn’t you stop at the cashier’s office first?”

  My friend and I looked at each other. “I’m dying,” he moaned.

  “And I’m dieting.”

  “Over there,” the secretario said tiredly. “And you’d better hurry.”

  We sprin
ted up an iron, fire-escape-like stairway to the Palacios 2nd story. “Recaudación sends us for a receipt for two hundred pesos,” I panted.

  Counting audibly, a middle aged lady finished knitting a row then began a receipt in triplicate. I reached for my wallet and extracted two $10 bills.

  “National currency,” the lady said firmly.

  “Quick!” my mad friend yelled. We dashed downstairs, across the patio looking for a place to buy some funny money. The casa de cambio across the street was closed. The next money changer was four blocks away . . .

  “I’m too exhausted to be hungry,” my friend wheezed as we sprinted back with a fistful of tattered, inflation colored paper.

  A small eternity later we were again rattling toward Panteon Number Two. The crowd had thinned by this time and I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t as yet called Shapiro. “Funny how these stories grow,” I said, remembering the ice cream vendor, “As if a weather balloon could make a noise coming down!”

  “In nordic countries the saucer is invariably noiseless,” my friend explained, “but Latins cannot tolerate the existence of silence. Nor, apparently, can my stomach.”

  Several wives descended from the car and followed us. We stood around the mound, each thinking his own thoughts. By now Aunt Epifania was definitely part of the family.

  “A small marble stone would look nice,” a wife said.

  My fingers closed convulsively over my billfold. “Hasn’t Aunt Fannie any issue of her own?”

  “How much would a headstone cost?”

  “A chemise and two pairs of alligator pumps with matching handbags ought to handle the down payment.”

  There was no answer.

  “Verily, life is for the living,” my mad friend muttered.

  “I wonder where that caretaker is.”

  I was still wondering when an elderly lady attracted our attention by descending the graveyard’s upper reaches with a recklessness hardly proper for her years and widow’s weeds. Hopping from mound to mound, She skittered downhill knocking wreathes and headboards askew. “¡Ay Dios, señor!” she babbled, clutching at my lapels and snagging a stray wisp of beard. “There is fresh digging and a hand extends itself from the ground, making perfectly the sign of the cross!”