MEXICO

JULY THE TWENTY-SECOND, nineteen hundred and eighty-eight, Agualeguas, Mexico, on the road to Elbaro, a Las Terras de Los Gatos Grandes.

It was the last day of the trip to Mexico. Another six hours and Rhoda would have been safely back in the United States of America where she belonged. Instead she was on the ground with a broken ankle. She was lying down on the hard stubble-covered pasture and all she could see from where she lay was sky and yellow grass and the terrible tall cages. The cats did not move in the cages. The Bengal tigers did not move and the lionesses did not move and the black leopard did not move. My ankle is torn to pieces, Rhoda thought. Nothing ever hurt this much in all my life. This is real pain, the worst of all pains, my God. It’s karma from the bullfight, karma from the cats, lion karma, oh, God, it’s worse than wasp stings, worse than the fucking dentist, worse than anything. I’m going to die. I wish I’d die.

Then Saint John was there, leaning over her with his civilized laconic face. He examined her ankle, turned it gently back into alignment, wrapped it in a strip of torn cloth. A long time seemed to go by. Rhoda began to moan. The Bengal tigers stirred in their cage. Their heads turned like huge sunflowers to look at her. They waited.

Dudley stood beside the fence. The lion was sideways. He was as big as a Harley-Davidson, as wide as a Queen Anne’s chair. Dudley kept on standing beside the flimsy fence. No, Dudley was walking toward her. He was walking, not standing still. My sight is going, Rhoda decided. I have been blinded by the pain.

“Now I’ll never get back across the border,” she moaned. She pulled on Saint John’s arm.

“Yes, you will,” he said. “You’re a United States citizen. All you need is your driver’s license.”

He carried her to the porch of the stone house. The caretaker’s children put down the baby jaguar and went inside and made tea and found a roll of adhesive tape. Saint John taped up Rhoda’s ankle while the children watched. They peered from around the canvas yard chairs, their beautiful dark-eyed faces very solemn, the baby jaguar hanging from the oldest boy’s arm. The youngest girl brought out the lukewarm tea and a plate of crackers which she passed around. Saint John took a bottle of Demerol capsules out of his bag and gave one to Rhoda to swallow with her tea. She swallowed the capsule, then took a proffered cracker and bit into it. “Yo soy injured,” she said to the child. “Muy triste, no es verdad?”

“Triste,” the oldest boy agreed and shifted the jaguar to his left arm so he could eat with his right.

Then Dudley brought the station wagon around and Rhoda was laid out in the back seat on a pillow that she was sure contained both hookworm larvae and hepatitis virus. She pulled the towel out from under the ice chest and covered the pillow with the towel, then settled down for the ride back through the fields of maize.

“Well, Shorty, you got your adventure,” Dudley said. “Old Waylon didn’t raise a whisker when you started screaming. What a lion.”

“I want another one of those pills, Saint John,” she said. “I think I need another one.”

“In a while,” he said. “Wait a few minutes, honey.”

“I’ll never get back across the border. If I don’t get back across the border, Dudley, it’s your fault and you can pay the lawyer.”

“You’ll get across,” Saint John said. “You’re a United States citizen. All you need is your driver’s license.”

It is nineteen eighty-eight in the lives of our heroes, of our heroine. Twelve years until the end of the second millennium, A.D. There have been many changes in the world and many changes in the lives of Rhoda and Dudley and Saint John since the days when they fought over the broad jump pit in the pasture beside the house on Esperanza. The river they called the bayou was still a clean navigable waterway back then, there was no television, no civil rights, no atomic or nuclear bomb, no polio vaccine. Still, nothing has really changed. Saint John still loves pussy and has become a gynecologist. Dudley still likes to kill things, kill or be killed, that’s his motto. Rhoda still likes men and will do anything to get to run around with them, even be uncomfortable or in danger.

Details: Dudley Manning runs a gun factory in San Antonio, Texas, and is overseeing the construction of Phelan Manning’s wildlife museum. Saint John practices medicine on Prytania Street in New Orleans, Louisiana. His second wife has just left him for another man to pay him back for his legendary infidelities. She has moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and is fucking an old hunting buddy of his. She was a waitress in Baton Rouge when Saint John aborted her and fell in love. A bartender’s daughter, a first-class, world-class, hardball player. Saint John has met his match. He is licking those wounds and not in top shape in nineteen eighty-eight. Rhoda Manning is in worse shape. She is fifty-three years old and she has run out of men. That’s how the trip to Mexico began. It began because Rhoda was bored. Some people think death is the enemy of man. Rhoda believes the problem is boredom, outliving your gonads, not to mention your hopes, your dreams, your plans.

Here is how the trip to Mexico began. It was two in the afternoon on a day in June. Rhoda was in her house on a mountain overlooking a sleepy little university town. There was a drought and a heat wave and everyone she knew had gone somewhere else for the summer. There was nothing to do and no one to go riding around with or fuck or even talk to on the phone. Stuck in the very heart of summer with no husband and no boyfriend and nothing to do. Fifty-three years old and bored to death.

She decided to make up with Dudley and Saint John. She decided to write to them and tell them she was bored. Who knows, they might be bored too. Dudley was fifty-six and Saint John was fifty-eight. They might be bored to death. They might be running out of things to do.

Dear Dudley [the first letter began],

I am bored to death. How about you? Why did I go and get rid of all those nice husbands? Why did I use up all those nice boyfriends? Why am I so selfish and wasteful and vain? Yesterday I found out the IRS is going to make me pay twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of extra income tax. My accountant’s computer lost part of my income and figured my tax wrong. So now I am bored and broke. How did this happen to me? I think I have been too good and too sober for too long. Let’s get together and get drunk and have some fun. I miss you. Where is Saint John? I bet he’s as bored as I am. I bet he would like to get drunk with us. I heard that beastly woman he married was up in Boston fucking one of his safari club buddies. Is that true? I’m sorry I’ve been so mean to everyone for so long. It was good to see you at Anna’s funeral. You looked great. Considering everything, we are lucky to be alive. Write to me or call me. Your broke and lonely and undeserving sister, Rhoda Katherine.

Dear Saint John [the second letter began],

Let’s get Dudley and go off somewhere and get drunk. I’m tired of being good. How about you? Love, Rhoda.

In five days Rhoda heard back from Dudley. “Hello, sister,” the message said on the answering machine. “It’s your brother. You want to go to Mexico? Come on down to San Antonio and we’ll go to Mexico.”

Rhoda stood by the answering machine. She was wearing tennis clothes. Outside the windows of her comfortable house the clean comfortable little town continued its easygoing boring life. Why did I start this with Dudley? Rhoda thought. I don’t want to go to Mexico with him. Why did I even write to him? My analyst will have a fit. He’ll say it’s my fascination with aggression and power. Well, it’s all I know how to do. I wrote to Dudley because he looked so great at Anna’s funeral, so powerful and strong, immortal. The immortal Eagle Scout who lived through polio and scarlet fever and shot a lion, ten lions, a thousand lions.

Now Saint John will call me too. I shouldn’t do this. I have outgrown them. I have better things to do than go down to Mexico with Saint John and Dudley. What else do I have to do? Name one thing. Water the fucking lawn? I can get out the sprinklers and waste water by watering the lawn.

Rhoda slipped on her sandals and walked out the door of her house into the sweltering midmorning heat. She set up the sprinklers on the front lawn and turned them on. Then reached down and began to scratch her chigger bites. Fucking Ozarks, she decided. Why in the name of God did I come up here to live in this deserted barren cultural waste? What in the name of God possessed me to think I wanted to live in this little worn-out university town with no one to flirt with and nowhere to eat lunch?

She pulled the last sprinkler out from under the woodpile and set it on the stone wall of the patio. Scientific method, she was thinking. Germ theory. I’ll go down there with them and the next thing I know I’ll have amoebic dysentery for five years. Saint John will bring his convertible and I’ll get skin cancer and ruin the color of my hair and then Dudley will get me to eat some weird Mexican food and I’ll die or spend the rest of my life in the hospital.

Rhoda stared off into the branches of the pear tree. She was afraid that by watering the lawn she might make the roots of the trees come up to the surface. World full of danger, she decided. How did I come to believe that?

She reached down to pick up the sprinkler. Her index finger closed down upon a fat yellow and orange wasp who stuck his proboscis into her sweat glands and emitted his sweet thin poison. “Oh, my God,” Rhoda screamed. “Now I have been bit by a wasp.”

An hour later she lay on the sofa in the air conditioning with a pot of coffee on the table beside her. Hot coffee in a beautiful blue and white Thermos and two cups in case anyone should come by and a small plate holding five Danish cookies and an ironed linen napkin. She was wearing a silk robe and a pair of white satin house shoes. Her head was resting on a blue satin pillow her mother had sent for her birthday. Her swollen finger was curled upon her stomach. She dialed Dudley’s number and the phone in San Antonio rang six times and finally Dudley answered.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Watching the boats on the lake. Waiting for you. Are you coming down? You want to go or not?”

“I want to go. Call Saint John.”

“I already called him. He’s free. Gayleen’s up in Boston, as you noted. When do you want to go?”

“Right away.”

“How about the fourth of July?”

“I’ll be there. Where do I fly to?”

“Fly to San Antonio. We’ll drive down. There’s a hunting lodge down there I need to visit anyway. A hacienda. We can stay there for free.”

“How hot is it?”

“No worse than where you are.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been so mean to you the last few years.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it was mean as shit. I’ll make it up to you.”

“Let me know when you get a flight.”

“A wasp bit me.”

“You know what Kurt Vonnegut said about nature, don’t you?”

“No, what did he say?”

“He said anybody who thinks nature is on their side doesn’t need any enemies.”

“I miss you, Dudley. You know that?”

“You know what a wedding ring is, don’t you?”

“No. What?”

“A blow job repellent.”

“Jesus,” Rhoda answered.

“You know what the four most feared words in the United States are, don’t you?”

“No. What?”

“I is your president.”

“Jesus. Listen, I’m coming. I’ll be there.”

“I’ll call Saint John. He’ll be glad.”

Rhoda hung up the phone, lay back against the satin pillow. My rubbish heap of a heart, she decided. I’m regressing. Well, they are my oldest compadres. Besides, where else will I find two men my own age who are that good-looking and that well-preserved and that brave? Where else will I find anybody to go to Mexico with in the middle of the summer? My ex-husbands are all snuggled down with their wifelets on little trips to Europe. Thank God I’m not sitting somewhere in a hotel room in London with someone I’m married to. About to make love to someone I’ve fucked a thousand times.

Well, I wouldn’t mind having one of my old husbands here this afternoon. Yes, I must face it. I have painted myself into a corner where my sex life is concerned. I should get up and get dressed and do something with my hair and go downtown and find a new lover but I have run out of hope in that department. I don’t even know what I would want to find. No, it’s better to call the travel agent and go off with my brother and my cousin. Mexico it is, then. As Dudley always says, why not, or else, whatever.

Rhoda slept for a while, resigned or else content. When she woke she called Saint John at his office in New Orleans and they made their plans. Rhoda would fly to New Orleans and meet Saint John and they would go together to San Antonio and pick up Dudley and the three of them would drive down into Mexico. She would leave on July second. A week away.

During the week Rhoda’s wasp sting got better. So did her mood. She dyed her hair a lighter blond and bought some new clothes and early on the morning of July second she boarded a plane and flew down to New Orleans. She took a taxi into town and was delivered to Saint John’s office on Prytania Street. A secretary came out and took her bags and paid the taxi and Saint John embraced her and introduced her to his nurses. Then a driver brought Saint John’s car around from the garage. A brand-new baby blue BMW convertible with pale leather seats and an off-white canvas top. “Let’s take the top down,” Saint John said. “You aren’t worried about your hair, are you?”

“Of course not,” Rhoda said. “This old hair. I’ve been bored to death, Saint John. Take that top down. Let’s go and have some fun.”

“We’ll go to lunch,” he said. “The plane doesn’t leave until four.”

“Great. Let’s go.”

They drove down Prytania to Camp Street, then over to Magazine and across Canal and down into the hot sweaty Latin air of the French Quarter. Tourists strolled along like divers walking underwater. Natives lounged in doorways. Cars moved sluggishly on the narrow cobblestone streets. Saint John’s convertible came to a standstill on the corner of Royal and Dumaine, across the street from the old courthouse where one of Rhoda’s lovers had written films for the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission. “Do you ever hear from Mims Waterson?” she asked.

“No,” Saint John said. “I think he went back to North Carolina.”

“If I hear North Carolina I think of Anna.” They hung their heads, mourning their famous cousin.

“Anna,” Saint John said, and moved the car a few feet farther down the street. “She was a strange one.”

“Not strange, just different from us. Gifted. Talented, and besides, her father was mean to her. Her death taught me something.”

“And what was that?”

“To be happy while I’m here. To love life. Tolstoy said to love life. He said it was the hardest thing to do and the most important. He said life was God and to love life was to love God.”

“I don’t know about all that.” Saint John was a good Episcopalian. It bothered him when his cousins said things like that. He wasn’t sure it was good to say that God was life. God was God, and if you started fucking around with that idea there wouldn’t be any moral order or law.

“I thought we’d go to Galatoire’s,” he said. “Will that be all right?”

“That’s perfect. Stop in the Royal Orleans and let me work on my face, will you? I can’t go letting anyone in this town think I let myself go. I might have to come down here and scarf up a new husband if something doesn’t happen soon with my life.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Writing a travel book. Anna’s agent is handling it for me. It might make me some money. At least pay my bills and get me out of debt.”

“Will you write about this trip? About Mexico?”

“If there’s anything I can use. Okay, there’s the garage and they have space. Go on, Saint John, turn in there.” He pulled into the parking lot of the Royal Orleans Hotel. The hotel was filled with memories for both of them. Secret meetings, love affairs, drunken lunches at Antoine’s and Arnaud’s and Brennan’s. Once Rhoda had spent the night in the hotel with a British engineer she met at a Mardi Gras parade. Another time Saint John had had to come there to rescue her when she ran away from her husband at a ball. He had found her in a suite of rooms with one of her husband’s partner’s wives and a movie star from Jackson, Mississippi. Rhoda had decided the partner’s wife should run off with the movie star.

“The wild glorious days of the Royal Orleans,” Rhoda said now. “We have had some fun in this hotel.”

“We have gotten in some trouble,” Saint John answered.

“What trouble did you ever get in? You weren’t even married.”

“I was in medical school. That was worse. I was studying for my boards the night you had that movie star down here.”

“I’m sorry,” Rhoda said, and touched his sleeve. Then she abandoned him in the hotel lobby and disappeared into the ladies’ lounge. When she reappeared she had pulled her hair back into a chignon, added rouge and lipstick, tied a long peach and blue scarf in a double knot around her neck, and replaced the small earrings she had been wearing with large circles of real gold.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Wonderful,” Saint John said. “Let’s go.” She took his arm and they walked down Royal Street to Bourbon and over to Galatoire’s. Their cousin Bunky Biggs was standing outside the restaurant with two of his law partners. “Saint John,” he called out. “Cousin Rhoda, what are you doing in town?”

“She’s taking me to Mexico,” Saint John said. “With Dudley.”

“Oh, my Lord,” Bunky said. “That will be a trip. I wish I was going.”

“He’s taking me,” Rhoda said, very softly. It was all working beautifully, the universe was cooperating for a change. Now it would be all over New Orleans that she and Saint John were off on a glorious adventure. Bunky could be depended upon to spread the word.

“What are you going to do down there?” Bunky said. “There’s no hunting this time of year.”

“We’re going to see some animals,” Saint John said. “To have some fun.” He was saved from further explanation. At that moment a delivery truck pulled up across the street and a tall black man emerged from the back of the truck carrying a huge silver fish. The man was six and a half feet tall. He hoisted the fish in his arms and carried it across the narrow crowded street. A small Japanese car squeaked to a stop. An older black man wearing a tall white hat opened a door and held it open and the fish and its bearer disappeared into the wall. We live in symbiosis with this mystery, Rhoda thought. No one understands it. Everything we think we know is wrong. Except their beauty. They are beautiful and we know it and I think they know it but I am far away from it now and get tired of trying to figure it out. Forget it.

The maître d’ appeared and escorted them inside.

The restaurant was crowded with people. The Friday afternoon professional crowd was out in force. Women Rhoda had known years before were seated at tables near the door, the same tables they might have occupied on the day she left town with the poet. People waved, waiters moved between the crowded tables carrying fabulous crabmeat salads and trout meunière and trout amandine and pompano en papillete and oysters Bienville and oysters Rockefeller and turtle soup and fettucini and martinis and whiskey sours and beautiful French desserts and bread pudding and flán.

“I should never have left,” Rhoda exclaimed. “God, I miss this town.”

Two hours later they emerged from Galatoire’s and found the blue convertible and began to drive out to the airport.

“Dudley’s been looking forward to this,” Saint John said. “I hope we don’t miss that plane.”

“If we do there’ll be another one along.”

“But he might be disappointed.”

“What a strange thing to say.”

“Why is that? Everyone gets disappointed, Rhoda. Nothing happens like we want it to. Like we think it will.”

“Bullshit,” Rhoda said. “You’re getting soft in the head, Saint John. Drive the car. Get us there. You’re as rich as Croesus. What do you have to worry about? And take off that goddamn seat belt.” She reached behind her and undid her own and Saint John gunned the little car and began to drive recklessly in and out of the lanes of traffic. This satisfied some deep need in Rhoda and she sat back in the seat and watched in the rearview mirror for the cops.

The plane ride was less exciting. They settled into their seats and promptly fell asleep until the flight got to Houston. They changed planes and fell back asleep.

Rhoda woke up just before the plane began its descent into San Antonio. She was leaning against the sleeve of Saint John’s summer jacket. My grandmother’s oldest grandson, she thought. How alike we are, how our bodies are shaped the same, our arms and legs and hands and the bones of our faces and the shape of our heads. Apples from the same tree, how strange that one little grandmother put such a mark on us. I was dreaming of her, after she was widowed, after our grandfather was dead and her hair would stray out from underneath its net and she gave up corsets. Her corsets slipped to the floor of her closet and were replaced by shapeless summer dresses, so soft, she was so soft she seemed to have no bones. Her lovely little legs. “Tell me again the definition of tragedy, I always forget.” In my dream she was standing on the porch at Esperanza watching us play in the rain. We were running all over the front lawn and under the rainspouts, barefooted, in our underpants, with the rain pelting down, straight cold gray rain of Delta summers, wonderful rain. How burning we were in the cold rain, burning and hot, how like a force, powerful and wild, and Dan-Dan standing on the porch watching us, worrying, so we were free to burn with purpose in the rain. In the dream she is calling Dudley to come inside. Saint John and Floyd and I may run in the rain and Pop and Ted and Al but Dudley must come in. She holds out a towel to wrap him in. He was the sickly one, the one who had barely escaped with polio. And yet, he was stronger than we were. He was stronger than Saint John, stronger than Bunky Biggs, stronger than Phelan even. How could being sick and almost dying make you strong? Gunther told me once but I have forgotten. It was about being eaten and fighting, thinking you are being eaten and becoming impenetrable. Anna seemed impenetrable too but she turned out not to be. Rhoda shook off the thought. She got up very gingerly so as not to wake Saint John, and wandered down the aisle to the tiny bathroom to repair her makeup. She went inside and closed and locked the door. She peered into the mirror, took out her lipstick brush and began to apply a light peach-colored lipstick to her lips. A sign was flashing telling her to return to her seat but she ignored it. She added another layer of lipstick to her bottom lip and began on her upper one. How did being sick when he was little make Dudley so powerful? What had Gunther said? It was some complicated psychological train of thought. Because a small child can imagine himself being consumed, eaten, burned up by fever, overwhelmed by germs, taken, as children were taken all the time before the invention of penicillin and streptomycin and corticosteroids. Before we had those medicines children died all the time. So Dudley must have lain in bed all those terrible winters and summers with Momma and Doctor Finley holding his hand and waged battle because they begged him to live, because they sat with him unfailingly and held his hand and gave him cool cloths for his head and sips of water from small beautiful cups and shored him up, because they won, because he won and did not die, he became immortal. Nothing could eat him, nothing could make him die.

Rhoda blotted the lipstick on a paper towel. So, naturally, he likes soft-spoken blond women who hold his hand and he likes to take small sips of things from beautiful cups and he likes to hang out with physicians. He is always going somewhere to meet Saint John, they have hunted the whole world together. It is all too wonderful and strange, Rhoda decided, I could think about it all day. It’s a good thing I don’t live near them, I would never think of anything else.

She put the lipstick away and took out a blusher and began to color her cheeks. The plane was descending. The sign was flashing. He loves the battle, Gunther had said. And he thinks he will always win.

“He never gets sick,” Rhoda had said. “They were jaguar hunting in Brazil and three people died from some water they drank and Dudley didn’t even get sick. Everyone got sick but Dudley.”

“He can’t lose,” Gunther said. “Because your mother held his hand.”

“Sometimes they lose,” Rhoda said. “My grandmother lost a child.”

“But Dudley didn’t lose.”

“He thinks he is a god.”

“What about you, Rhoda? Do you think you are a god?”

“No, I am a human being and I need other human beings and that is what you are trying to teach me, isn’t it?”

“I don’t have any plans for you.”

“So you say.”

Rhoda finished her makeup and returned to her seat just as the stewardess was coming to look for her. “I’m sorry,” she said, and slipped into the seat beside her cousin. He was shaking the sleep from his head. “We slept too long,” he said. “We must have drunk too much at lunch. Don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He squinched his eyes together, squirmed around. “It’s okay,” Rhoda said.

“Where have you been?”

“I was in the rest room. I figured out Dudley. Want to hear?”

“Sure. Put on your seat belt.”

“He has to kill or be killed.”

“What does that mean?”

“He hunts to keep from dying because he was sick when he was a child.”

“Rhoda.” He gave her his bedside look. Indulgent, skeptical, maddeningly patronizing.

“Never mind,” she said. “I know you don’t like psychiatry.”

“Well, I’m not sure it applies to Dudley.” Rhoda gave up, began to leaf through an airplane magazine. Outside the window the beautiful neighborhoods of San Antonio came into view, swimming pools and garages and streets and trees and trucks, an electric station, a lake. The modern world, Rhoda decided, and I’m still here.

Dudley was waiting for them, standing against a wall, wearing a white shirt and light-colored slacks, beaming at them, happy they were there. They linked arms and began to walk out through the airport, glad to be together, excited to be together, feeling powerful and alive.

They stopped at several bars to meet people Dudley knew and danced at one place for an hour and then drove in the gathering dark out to the lake where Dudley’s house sat on its lawns, filled with furniture and trophies and mementos of his hunts and marriages. Photographs of his children and his wives covered the walls, mixed with photographs of hunts in India and France and Canada and the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and Africa and Canada and Tennessee. Rugs made from bears were everywhere. Four rhinoceros heads were on one wall. Jaguar, tigers, lions, cougars, mountain sheep. He should have been a biologist, Rhoda thought. He wouldn’t have needed so much room to hang the trophies on.

They cooked steaks on a patio beside the lake and ate dinner and drank wine and played old fifties music on the stereo and went to bed at twelve. Rhoda had an air-conditioned room on the second floor with a huge bearskin rug on the floor and a leopard on the wall. She cleaned her face and brushed her teeth and put on a gown and fell asleep. At three in the morning she woke. Most of the lights in the house were still on. She wandered out onto the sleeping porch and there were Dudley and Saint John, stretched out on small white enamel beds with a ceiling fan turning lazily above them, their long legs extended from the beds. If I had one chromosome more, she decided. One Y chromosome and I’d be out here on this hot sleeping porch in my underpants instead of in an air-conditioned room in a blue silk dressing gown. I’m glad I am a girl. I really am. They are not as civilized as I am, not as orderly or perfect. She turned off the lights they had left on and went back into her room and brushed her teeth some more and returned to bed. She fell into a dreamless sleep, orderly, perfect, civilized.

When she woke Dudley was in the kitchen making breakfast. “You ready to go to Mexico?” he asked. He handed her a tortilla filled with scrambled eggs and peppers. “Did you bring your passport?”

“No, I didn’t think I needed it.”

“You don’t. It’s all right. Well, we’ll get off by noon, I hope. I have to make some phone calls.”

“Where exactly are we going, Dudley?”

“To see a man about a dog.” They looked at each other and giggled. It was the thing their father said when their mother asked him where he was going.

“Okay,” Rhoda said. “When do we leave?”

It was afternoon before they got away. They were taking a blue Mercedes station wagon. Rhoda kept going out and adding another bottle of water to the supplies.

“How much water are you going to need?” Saint John asked. “We’ll only be there a few days.”

“We can throw away any we don’t want,” she answered. “But I’m not coming home with amoebic dysentery.”

“Take all you want,” Dudley answered. “Just leave room for a suitcase and the guns.”

“Guns?”

“Presents for Don Jorge. You will like him, Shorty. Well, Saint John, are we ready?” They were standing beside the station wagon. Saint John handed him the small suitcase that contained their clothes. In a strange little moment of companionship they had decided to pack in one suitcase for the trip. Dudley had pulled a dark leather case from a closet and each of them had chosen a small stack of clothes and put them in. They stuck the suitcase in the space between the bottles of water. Dudley put the gun cases on top of the suitcase. They looked at one another. “Let’s go,” they said.

“You got the magical-gagical compound?” Saint John asked, as they pulled out of the driveway.

“In the glove compartment,” Dudley answered. Saint John reached down into the box and brought out a little leather-covered bottle that had come from Spain the first time the two men went there to shoot doves, when Saint John was twenty-nine and Dudley was twenty-seven. Saint John held the bottle up for Rhoda to see. “The sacred tequila bottle,” he said. Dudley smiled his twelve-year-old fort-building smile, his face as solemn as an ancient Egyptian priest. That’s what the Egyptians did, Rhoda thought. Had strange bottles of elixir, went on mysterious expeditions and ritual hunts. The Egyptians must have been about twelve years old in the head, about Dudley and Saint John’s age. Remember Gunther told me I was arrested at about fourteen. I don’t think Saint John and Dudley even made it into puberty.

Saint John raised the little vial-shaped leather-covered bottle. He removed the top. Inside the leather was a very thin bottle of fragile Venetian glass. He took a sip, then passed the sacred bottle to Dudley.

“Exactly where are we going?” Rhoda asked. “I want to see a map.” Saint John replaced the top on the sacred tequila bottle and restored it to its secret resting place in the glove compartment. Then he took out a map of Mexico and leaned into the back seat to show it to her. “Here,” he said. “About a hundred and twenty miles below Laredo.”

Then there was the all-night drive into Mexico. The black starless night, the flat fields stretching out to nowhere from the narrow asphalt road, the journey south, the songs they sang, the fathomless richness of the memories they did not speak of, all the summers of their lives together, their matching pairs of chromosomes, the bolts of blue-and-white striped seersucker that had become their summer playsuits, the ancient washing machine that had washed their clothes on the back porch at Esperanza, the hands that had bathed them, the wars and battles they had fought, the night the fathers beat the boys for stealing the horses to go into town to meet the girls from Deer Park Plantation, the weddings they were in, the funeral of their grandmother when they had all become so terribly shamefully disgustingly drunk, the people they had married and introduced into each other’s lives, the dogs they had raised, the day Saint John came over to Rhoda’s house to help her husband teach the Irish setters how to fuck, the first hippie love-in ever held in New Orleans, how they had gone to it together and climbed up a live-oak tree and taught the hippies how to hippie. Their adventures and miraculous escapes and all the years they had managed to ignore most of the rest of the world. The way they feared and adored and dreamed each other. The fathomless idiosyncrasies of the human heart. All of which perhaps explains why it took all night to go one hundred and eighty miles south of the place they left at three o’clock in the afternoon.

First they goofed around in Laredo, then searched for diesel for the Mercedes, then stopped at the border to get temporary visas, then crossed the border into Nuevo Laredo. They drove around the boundaries of Boy’s Town, then went to the Cadillac Bar for margaritas, then had dinner, then found the car.

It was black night when they left Nuevo Laredo and began to drive down into Mexico. “Why don’t we spend the night here and go on in the morning?” Rhoda asked a dozen times. “Why drive into Mexico at night?”

“Nowhere to stop,” Saint John and Dudley said, and kept on going, taking sips out of the sacred bottle, which seemed to hold an inexhaustible supply of tequila. Rhoda was curled up on the back seat using her raincoat for a pillow, trying to think zen thoughts and live the moment and seize the day and so forth. I could be getting laid, she kept thinking. If I had expended this much time and energy on finding a new boyfriend I could be somewhere right now getting laid. I could have called an old boyfriend. I could have called that good-looking pro scout I gave up because of the AIDS scare.

“We were the lucky ones,” she said out loud. “We got to live our lives in between the invention of the birth control pill and the onslaught of sexually transmitted diseases. We lived in the best of times.”

“Still do,” Dudley said.

“There was syphilis,” Saint John added.

“But we had penicillin for that,” Rhoda answered. “I mean, there was nothing to fear for about twenty years. If someone wanted to sleep with me and I didn’t want to, I apologized, for God’s sake.”

“That’s changed?” Dudley asked.

“It changed for me,” Rhoda said. “I’m scared to death to fuck anyone. I mean it. It just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. I guess if I fell in love I’d change my mind, but how can you fall in love if you never fuck anyone? I can’t fall in love with someone who has never made me come.”

“Her mouth hasn’t changed,” Saint John said. “Rhoda, do you talk like that in public?”

“In the big world? Is that what you’re saying? You’re such a prick, Saint John. I don’t know why we let you run around with us. Why do we run around with him, Dudley?”

“I like him. He’s my buddy.” The men laughed and looked at each other and Saint John handed Dudley the tequila bottle and Dudley handed Saint John the salt. They poured the salt on their folded thumbs and licked it off. They shared a lime. They replaced the top and put the sacred tequila bottle away. Nothing had changed. Dudley and Saint John understood each other perfectly and Rhoda sort of understood them, but not quite. “Unless you are both just as dumb as fucking posts and there is nothing to understand.”

“What’s she saying now?”

“I said I want to drive if you are going to get drunk and I want you to stop the car and roll up the windows and let’s sleep until it’s light. I don’t like driving down through this desolate country in the middle of the night. I thought we were going to some hacienda. No one told me I was going to have to spend the night in a car.”

“We’re going,” Dudley said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”

“It’s two o’clock in the morning and you’ve already been lost twice and I don’t think you have the slightest idea where you’re going.”

“You want some tequila, sister?”

“No, I want to get some sleep.”

“You stopped drinking too? You don’t get laid and you don’t get drunk, that’s what you’re telling me?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Then why do you want to be alive?” Dudley shook his head. “Have some tequila, honey. We’ll be where we want to be when we wake up tomorrow. You’ll be glad, you’ll see.”

“Why baby her?” Saint John said. “If you give in to her, she’ll bitch all week.”

“Fuck you,” Rhoda said. She sat up and straightened her skirt and blouse and arranged her legs very properly in front of her. He was right, what was she living for? “Hand me that tequila,” she said. “Is there anything to mix it with?”

“Wasting away again in Margaritaville,” Rhoda started singing. Dudley and Saint John joined in. They worked on country and western songs for a while, which are hard songs to sing, then moved into hymns and lyrics from the fifties and back into hymns and finally, because it was the fourth of July even if they were in Mexico, into God Bless America and oh, say can you see and oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.

“Wait till you see the maize fields in the daytime,” Dudley said. “That’s how they bait the pamplona blanco. Maize fields on one side and irrigation ditches on the other. The whitewings are moving this way, and Don Jorge Aquillar and Mariana have been buying up all the leases for miles around. We’re going to have some hunting this fall. Right, Saint John?”

“Who are Don Jorge Aquillar and Mariana?” Rhoda asked.

“The people we’re going to see,” Saint John said. “Right, Dudley,” he went on. “If enough birds come. I can’t bring my friends down here if the birds are scanty.”

“Jesus, you’ve gotten cynical,” Rhoda said. “Why are you so negative about everything?”

“Why are you picking on me?”

“I don’t know, because I’m sick of riding in this car.”

“Have another drink,” Dudley said. “We’ll be there in a little while. It isn’t far now.” He was right. They went another fifteen miles and began to approach the outskirts of a town. “Agualeguas, 1000 Habitantes,” the sign said. They drove past small adobe buildings, then around a curving dirt road, then past a two-story building and a store and through a darkened neighborhood and went down a paved road and drove another three miles and came to a long brick wall covered with bougainvillea. A tall wrought-iron gate was in the middle of the wall with painted white wooden doves on either side of the lock. Attached to the dove on the right and fluttering in the breeze was an extra wing. Dudley stopped the car and got out and pulled the wing from the dove. It was a billet-doux. “Dearest Dudley,” he read out loud. “I am waiting for you with a worried heart. Ring the bell and we will let you in. Love, Mariana.”

So this is why we couldn’t stay at a hotel in Laredo, Rhoda thought. So this is why we had to drive all night in the goddamn car. Because his new girlfriend is waiting. I should have known. Well, who cares, I signed on for this trip and this is what is happening. Who knows, maybe she has a brother.

Dudley rang the bell and a girl in a white skirt came running out of a building and began to fumble with the lock. Then the gates were open and servants appeared and took Rhoda’s bags and led her to a room with beautiful red stone floors and windows that opened onto a patio. They set her bag on one of two small beds and brought her water and turned down the other bed. Rhoda took off her clothes and lay down upon the small wooden bed and went immediately to sleep. Outside the window she could hear Dudley and Saint John and Mariana laughing and talking and pouring drinks. They never stop, Rhoda thought. Fifty-six years old and still spreading seed. “This is Mariana,” Dudley had said when he introduced the girl. “Isn’t she beautiful, sister? Wouldn’t she make great babies with me?”

When Rhoda woke she was in a hacienda in Agualeguas, Mexico. Bougainvillea, red tile roofs, a parrot in a cage, rusty red stone floors, a patio with a thatched roof and an oven the size of a cave, ancient walls, soft moist air, beside the oven a bar with wicker stools. Above the bar, cages of doves, pamplona blanco and pamplona triste, whitewings and mourning doves, very hot and still. I am still, Rhoda thought, this is stillness, this is zen. A dove mourned, then another and another. The doves woke me, Rhoda decided, or I might have slept all day. It seems I was supposed to come here. It is the still point of the turning earth, like the center, the way I felt one time when Malcolm and I sailed into an atoll in the Grenadines below Bequia and I said, This is the center of the earth, we must stay here forever. Well, we can anchor overnight, he answered, but in the morning we have to push on. No wonder I divorced him. Who could live with someone as work-drugged and insensitive as that. Mother-ridden and work-drugged. My last millionaire. Well, now I’m broke. But at least I’m happy this moment, this morning in this lovely still place with red tiles and thatch and the doves in cages and Saint John and Dudley asleep next door in case I need protection.

The stillness was broken by the sound of a Mexican man putting chlorine in the pool outside Rhoda’s window. She dressed and went out onto the patio to watch. The pool was a beautiful bright blue. The man had put so much chlorine into it that the vapors rose like a cloud above the water. The birch trees beside the pool had turned yellow from the chlorine fumes. They were like yellow aspens, beautiful against the green shrubbery and the red flowers of the bougainvillea. Death is beautiful, Rhoda thought, as long as it isn’t yours. She remembered something. A bullfight poster they had seen in Laredo advertising a bullfight in Monterrey. Let’s go, she had said. I’m in the mood for a bullfight. Of course, the men had answered. They were amazed. When last they messed with Rhoda she had lectured them for hours about going to football games and eating meat.

Mariana came out from the thatched kitchen carrying a tray with coffee and two cups. Brown sugar and cream.

“Will you have coffee?” she asked.

“Con leche, por favor,” Rhoda answered.

“What will you do today? Have they said?”

“We are to go see the fields. And maybe to a bullfight. There’s some famous matador fighting in Monterrey.”

“What’s his name?”

“Guillarmo Perdigo.”

“Oh, yes, with the Portuguese. They fight the bull from horseback. It’s very exciting.”

“Muy dificil?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Your English is so good.”

“I am from Acapulco. I just came here to help my uncle.”

“Dudley said it would be a famous place soon. That everyone will be coming here.”

“We hope it will come true. If the doves come. We have bought up all the leases. We will have a monopoly.”

“And some fun?”

“Oh, yes. That too.” Mariana smiled, poured the coffee, looked away.

“Maybe the shopping clubs will come,” Rhoda said. She watched Mariana, hoping to make her smile. Dudley had told Rhoda that groups of women came down to meet the hunters in Brownsville and Laredo and McAllen. Busloads of women from Shreveport and Baton Rouge came to meet the hunters at the Cadillac Bar and the bars of the Hilton Hotel and the Holiday Inn. It had begun by chance. First the men started coming down to hunt the doves. Then a group of women happened to be shopping in the border towns the same week. There were the bars full of good-looking hunters from all over the United States. So the women went home and told their friends and soon busloads of bored housewives from all over the South were down in the border towns buying up all the Mexican wedding dresses and piñatas in the world and getting laid at night by the hunters.

“That would be nice,” Mariana said. “Do you think I should wake your brother?”

“No. Let sleeping men lie, that’s what I always say.”

“He told me to wake him at ten so he’d have time to see the fields. Carlos is here to drive you.”

“Then wake him up. As long as you don’t make me do it.”

“Excuse me then.” Mariana got up and moved in the direction of the men’s rooms. I can’t tell if she’s shacking up with him or not, Rhoda thought. How Spanish not to flaunt it one way or the other. Spanish women are so mysterious, soft, and beautiful. They make me feel like a barbarian. Well, I am a barbarian, but not today. Today I feel as sexy as a bougainvillea. Rhoda sat back. The sun shone down between the thatched roof and the pool. The servants moved around the kitchen fixing breakfast, the yellow leaves fell into the bright blue pool, the carved tray holding the white coffeepot sat upon the wrought-iron table. Rhoda drank the coffee and ate one of the hard rolls and in a while Mariana returned with melons and berries, and the chlorine in the pool rose to the trees and the breeze stirred in the bougainvillea. The still point of the turning world, Rhoda thought. And what of the bullfight? Of the carnage to come? Death in the afternoon. What would it be? Would she be able to watch? It was getting hotter. Rhoda was wearing a long white skirt and a green and white striped shirt tied around her waist. White sandals. She was feeling very sexy, enchanting and soft and sexy. She looked around. There was no one to appreciate it. I’ll just think about it, she decided. It’s beautiful here, very zen and sexy. This is a thousand times better than being at home in the summer, a lot better than being bored.

The servants brought more coffee. Mariana returned. Then Dudley appeared, buttoning his khaki safari shirt. Saint John was behind him, dressed in white duck pants and wearing a cap with a visor.

“Why the cap, Saint John?” Rhoda asked. “Not that I don’t like it. I do, a lot.”

“It’s from the Recess Club’s last outing.” He took off the cap, handed it to her so she could see the design. It was a man and woman locked in an embrace. “A Rorschach test,” he added.

“Fabulous,” Rhoda said. “How amusing.”

“Give me back my cap.” He retrieved it and planted it firmly back on his head. He had decided to be adamant about his cap. Rhoda moved nearer to him and put her arm around his waist. Poor Saint John, she decided. He could never wear that cap in New Orleans. All the trouble he’s had all his life over pussy, he ought to get to make a joke out of it when he’s in Mexico. “I think you’re the sexiest man your age I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said out loud. “I bet the ladies you treat fantasize about you all day long.”

“I hope not,” he said, but he was pleased and looked to Dudley to save him from himself.

“I thought Saint John got in the business to do it in the examining room,” Dudley said. “Saint John, do you do it in the examining room?”

“Only with the nurses,” he said, and they laughed and were relieved.

A driver appeared and they all piled into a four-wheel-drive vehicle and headed out of town toward the maize fields where the whitewing doves were already arriving in small numbers. From July to October more and more would come. Flying from the orange-red tops of the maize plants across the road to the irrigation ditches and then into the bush. It was all there, everything they needed, water and food and cover. All I need, Rhoda was thinking. All any creature needs.

“It will be a great fall,” Dudley said, and opened a bottle of wine and began to pour it into paper cups. “Pamplona blanco bastante, right, Mariana? Right, Pablo?”

“We have a monopoly all along the river and the ditches,” Mariana said. “And twenty-three rooms and three vehicles. Now if Dudley brings us hunters we are happy.” She reached across the seat and touched his knee. I can learn from these women, Rhoda thought.

“A great fall,” Dudley said again. “A great year.” He leaned out the window, admiring the maize and the doves flying back and forth across the road as the vehicle approached the trees.

“I think I’ll come twice,” Saint John said. “Once in August and once in September. Look at that maize, Dudley. This place is going to be spectacular. I’ve counted twenty whitewings since we passed the dam.”

“This place is going to be dynamite,” Dudley agreed.

“I hope we make some money,” Mariana said. “Uncle Jorge has invested very much.”

“I’m coming back too,” Rhoda said. “I know how to shoot. Don’t I, Dudley?”

“Tell us which ones are the pamplona blanco,” he answered. “Start practicing.”

On the way back to the hacienda they stopped at a native market and bought fruit and packages of orange tortillas. The tortillas were such a beautiful shade of orange that Rhoda forgot her vow not to eat native food and began to gobble them up.

“They are also good with avocado on them,” Mariana suggested. “I will find you some when we get home.”

“I like them like this,” Rhoda said, and brushed orange crumbs from her skirt.

“If you get lost we can find you by the crumbs,” Saint John suggested. “Like Hansel and Gretel.”

“If I get lost I’ll be with some good-looking bullfighter who fell for my blond hair.”

“Dyed blond,” Saint John said.

“Sunbleached. Don’t you remember, Saint John, my hair always turns blond in the summer.”

“Rhoda, you never had blond hair in your life. Your hair was as red as Bess’s mane, that’s why we said you were adopted.”

“Is she adopted?” Mariana asked.

“No,” Dudley answered. “She is definitely not adopted.”

It was after one o’clock when they got back to the hacienda. Time to get ready to leave for the bullfight.

“It starts at four-thirty,” Rhoda said.

“They are always late,” Mariana answered. “If we leave here by three we’ll be there in time.”

“Time for a siesta,” Dudley said.

“Siesta time,” Saint John echoed.

There was an hour to sleep. A dove mourned, then another, a breeze stirred an acacia tree outside the window, its delicate shadows fell across the bed and danced and moved. Dance of time, Rhoda thought, light so golden and clear, and Zeus came to her in a shower of gold, clear, dazzling, and clear. Rhoda curled up into a ball and slept on the small white bed. She had not felt so cared for since she was a child. No matter how much I hated them, she thought, they protected me. They would throw themselves between me and danger. Why, I do not know. Taught or inherent, they would do it. How spoiled I am, how spoiled such men have made me.

The bullfight was in Monterrey, a hundred and twenty kilometers to the south and west. Mariana sat up front with Dudley. Rhoda and Saint John rode in back. They drove along through the afternoon heat. Dudley had the air-conditioner going full blast. Mariana had a flower in her hair. They talked of the countryside and what it grew and Rhoda asked Mariana to tell them who she was.

“My father is Portuguese,” she began. “This is not unusual in the towns of the coast. The Portuguese are seafarers. There were seven children in our family. I am the second oldest.”

“I’m the second oldest,” Rhoda said. “We’re the oldest of all our cousins. We used to rule the rest of them. The rest of them were like our slaves.”

“Why does she say things like that?” Saint John asked.

“Because that’s how she thinks.” Dudley handed Saint John the leather-covered tequila bottle. “Whatever she does, that’s the best. If she was the youngest, she’d believe the youngest child had the highest I.Q. She’s the queen, aren’t you, Shorty?”

“We did rule them. You used to boss Bunky and his brothers all around and I used to boss Pop and Ted and Al. We used to stay all summer at our grandmother’s house, Mariana. We had a wild time. I guess those summers were the best times of my life. There were all these children there. Because of that I always thought a big family must be a wonderful thing.”

“Give Mariana some of our Dudley-Juice,” Dudley said. “Give her some magical-gagical compound, Cuz. She needs a drink.”

“It was nice to have the others,” Mariana said. “But we ran short of money.”

“What did your father do?” Rhoda went on.

“He is a builder,” Mariana answered. “A contractor. He helped build the Viceroy Hotel in Acapulco. He will come for the hunts. If you come back you will meet him.”

“How old is he?”

“He is sixty. But he looks much younger. He is a young man.”

“Let’s sing,” Dudley said. “How about this?” He reached for Mariana’s hand, began to sing. “When Irish eyes are smiling, sure it’s like a morn in spring.” I wonder if that stuff works on young girls, Rhoda thought. I wonder if that old stuff gets him anywhere anymore. I mean, it’s clear the child likes him, but it may be for his money. They used to like him for his basketball prowess. No, maybe it was always for money. Why did boys like me? Maybe that was only Daddy’s money. Well, now I’m broke. No wonder I don’t have any boyfriends and have to run around with my brother and my cousin. Rhoda, stop mindfucking. Love people that love you.

“I can’t wait to see this bullfight,” she said out loud. “I saw one on my second honeymoon but I was so drunk I can’t remember anything about it except that my feet hurt from walking halfway across Mexico City in high heels.”

“It’s how she thinks,” Saint John said. He took a drink from the tequila bottle and passed it to Dudley.

“How do you think?” Rhoda said. “What are your brilliant thought processes? Hand me that tequila bottle. Where is all the tequila coming from? When are you filling it up?”

“Doesn’t have to be filled,” Dudley said. “It’s magical-gagical compound. Up, down, runaround, rebound.”

They arrived in Monterrey at four-fifteen, parked the car and found a taxi and told the driver to take them to the Plaza de Toros.

“Lienzo Charros,” Mariana told the driver. “Pronto.”

“I do not think it is open,” he answered. “I don’t think they are there today.”

“It said on the poster they would be there. Guillarmo Perdigo is fighting.”

“We’ll see.” The driver shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth and drove through a neighborhood filled with people. He went down a hill and turned sharply by a stone wall and came to a stop. They could hear the crowd and see the flags atop the walls of the compound.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” Rhoda said. She got out of the taxi and stood waiting by a tree while Dudley paid the driver. Her sandals settled into the soft brown dirt beneath the tree. The dirt moved up onto her toes and covered the soles of the new white sandals. She was being taken, the earth of Mexico was making her its own. The taxi driver waved and stuck his arm out the window and the little party weaved its way down the incline toward a wooden ticket booth beside a gate. Rhoda was very excited, drawn into the ancient mystery and the ancient sacrifice, the bull dancers of Crete and Mycenae, the ancient hunters of France, the mystery of the hunt and ancient sacrifice, and something else, the mystery of Dudley and Saint John. What allowed Dudley to hunt a jaguar in the jungles of Brazil? What allowed Saint John to don his robe and gloves and walk into an operating room and open a woman’s womb and take out a baby and then sew it all back up? What was the thing these men shared that Rhoda did not share, could not share, had never shared. I could never cut the grasshoppers open, she remembered, but Saint John could. I could pour chloroform on them. Poison, a woman’s weapon since the dawn of time. But not the knife. The knife is not a woman’s tool. She shuddered. Women give life. Men take it. And the species lives, the species goes on, the species covers the planet.

She took a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket and tried to buy the tickets but Dudley pushed her hand away and gave the ticket seller a handful of thousand-peso notes. Then they walked across a dirt enclosure to the entrance to the stands. Small boys played beneath the stands, chasing each other with toy pics, charging each other’s outstretched arms. A blindfolded horse was led by, wearing padding and a double rein, a tall white Andalusian horse that looked quite mad. The excitement was very sexy, very intense. Four students wearing shirts that said Stanford University were in front of them on the stairs. They were drinking beer and laughing.

“These guys are just hairdressers,” one student said. He was carrying a minicam video recorder.

“A high school football game,” his companion added. Rhoda felt the urge to kill them. Rich spoiled brats, she decided. If they start filming this on that goddamn minicam, I’m going to throw up. How dare they come and bring that goddamn California bullshit to this place of mystery, this remnant of ancient sacrifice and mystery, this gentle culture and these lithe sexy Spanish men, how dare these California rich boys spoil this for me. She looked at Saint John and Dudley and was very proud suddenly of their intelligence and quietness. Dudley held the arm of the young Spanish girl. Both Dudley and Saint John spoke intelligible Spanish to anyone they met. We are civilized, Rhoda decided. We are polite enough to be here, to visit another world. But those goddamn muscle-bound California pricks. Who would bring a minicam to a bullfight? Fuck them. Don’t let them ruin this. Well, they’re ruining it.

They found seats and arranged themselves. Mariana on the outside, then Dudley, then Rhoda, then Saint John. The music began, terrible wonderful music. Music that was about death, about sex and excitement and heat and passion and drama and blood and death. The music was about danger, sex was about danger, sex was the death of the self, the way men and women tried themselves against death. Ancient, ancient, Rhoda thought. Oh, God, I’m so glad to be here. So glad to be somewhere that isn’t ironed out. “Without death there is no carnival.” A long boring life with no carnival. That’s what I’ve come down to, that’s what I’ve been settling for. And will settle for, will go right back to. Well, fuck safety and security and fuck the fucking boring life I’ve been leading. She put her hand on Saint John’s arm. Reached over and patted her brother on the knee. “Thank you for bringing me here,” she said. “Thank you for this.”

“You want a Coke?” Dudley said. “Do you want a beer or anything? You want a hat?” He motioned to a vendor and the man came over and Dudley bought a black felt matador’s hat with tassels for Mariana and tried to buy one for Rhoda but she refused his offer. “I don’t wear funny hats,” she said, then looked at Mariana. “You have to have black hair to wear that hat. On black hair it looks great.” Mariana pushed the hat back from her head so that it hung down her back on its black plaited cord. Her gold earrings dangled about her shoulders. It was true. She did look nice in the hat.

A vendor passed before them carrying a huge basket full of candy and cigarettes and packages of M&M’s and sunflower seeds. His wares were spread out like a flower opening. It was a beautiful and heavy load and he displayed it as an artist would. Over his shoulder Rhoda could see the Stanford students standing side by side in their muscle shirts rolling film on the minicam and she hated them with a terrible and renewed passion.

“This is a small corrida,” Mariana said. “Three bulls, but the matadors are good. Especially Guillarmo. I have seen him fight. He fought last year in Mexico City. And the last matador is Portuguese. Yes, you are lucky to get to see this. This is unusual for Monterrey.”

“Como se dice in Español, lucky?” Rhoda asked. “No recuerdo.”

“Fortunata,” Dudley answered. “Benedecire and fortunata.”

The music stopped for a moment and the vendor passed by again, this time carrying Cokes and beer in aluminum buckets. He was assisted by two small boys who looked like twins. “Gemelos?” Rhoda asked, and added, “Are they yours?” The vendor laughed and shook his head. He opened a Coke for Rhoda and one for Mariana and beer for the men. The minicam crew from Stanford had turned the camera Rhoda’s way. She held up her hand before her face and waved them away. They kept on filming. “Tell them not to do that to me,” she said to Saint John. “I mean it.” Saint John waved politely to the young men and they turned the camera back toward the arena. Rhoda drank her Coke. The vendor and the twins moved on. The band picked up their instruments. They were wearing red wool jackets with gold buttons and gold trim. “They must be burning up in those uniforms,” Rhoda said. She shook her head. They raised their tarnished brass instruments and the wild dangerous music began again.

“Look,” Saint John said. “At the toriles, the bull pens, you can see the bulls.” Rhoda looked to where he was pointing. She could see the top of a bull beyond a wooden wall, then the horns, then a second bull. They were very agitated. Very large, larger and more powerful and more agitated than she had imagined they would be. The blindfolded horse was led into an arena beside the toriles, a picador in an embroidered suit was sitting on the horse, another leading it. A bull charged a wooden wall, then disappeared out of sight. The door to the arena containing the blindfolded Andalusian horse was open now. The bailiff came in. He was wearing a tarnished gold uniform, riding a tall black horse with a plaited mane. Other men on horseback joined him. The paseo de cuadrillas was forming. Three small boys chased each other with paper pics across the barrera. “We could sit down there,” Mariana said, “if you don’t mind getting blood on your clothes.”

Dudley and Saint John didn’t answer. They were getting serious now, the homage athletes pay each other. “The seats near the arena are barrera,” Mariana added, addressing her remarks to Rhoda. “The torero’s women sit there.” The women exchanged a look. In the bull pen a bull broke away from its keepers. There was a rush to corner it. Rhoda thought of Ferdinand, the old story of the bull that wouldn’t fight. My sweet little mother, she thought, trying to deny all mystery and death for me. Except for the soft passing of Jesus into heaven, she would shield me from all older worlds.

But there are no Ferdinands, put out to pasture if they will not fight. The ones that won’t fight go to the slaughterhouse. My sweet mother, smelling of talcum powder and perfume, reading to me of Ferdinand smelling the flowers. Then she would get up and go into the kitchen and cut the skin from a lamb, as happy as Saint John in the operating room. Contradictions, half-truths. But this is true. Death in the afternoon is real danger, real death.

One of the toreros came up the stairs toward where they were sitting. He stopped in the barrera and spoke to a group of men. Two men stood up and embraced him. They are his father and his brother, Rhoda decided. The torero was tall, and lithe, like a dancer. Beneath his white shirt his skin seemed soft and white. Rhoda wanted to reach out and touch him, to wish him luck.

He sat down between the men he had embraced. The one who appeared to be his brother put an arm around his shoulder. They talked for a while. Then the torero got up as swiftly as he had arrived and left and went back down the stairs. The music grew louder, rose to a crescendo, descended, then rose again. The gates to the arena opened. The alguaciles rode out in his tarnished suit, leading the paseo de cuadrillas. Then the matadors, the banderilleros, the picadors. The mayor threw down the key to the toril. The matador who had come into the stand was wearing a short black jacket now, a montera, a dress cape.

The procession filed back through the gate. The gate to the toril was opened and the bull ran out. The matador, Guillarmo Perdigo, walked out into the arena and the ceremony began. This was no hairdresser, no high school football game, this was the most exquisite and ancient ceremony Rhoda had ever seen. The matador spread his cape upon the ground, squared his shoulders, planted his feet. The bull charged across the arena. The matador executed a pass, then another, then turned and walked away, dragging his cape. The bull pawed the ground, was confused, walked away. The matador turned to face the bull again, spread out his cloak, called to the bull. The bull charged again, and then again. The matador passed the bull’s horns so close to his body, to his balls, to his dick. Rhoda held her breath. It’s amazing, Rhoda thought. Where have I been while this was going on?

Dudley and Saint John had not moved. Mariana was still. A second matador appeared. Then the third. The matadors each did a series of passes, then the picadors came out on horseback and stuck the pics into the shoulder muscles of the bull. Rhoda was sickened by the sight. Fascinated and repelled, afraid for the matador and trying to hate the bull, but there was no way to hate him now since he was outnumbered. She turned her eyes from the bull’s wounds, turned back to the matador who was alone with the bull again. This is so sexy, so seductive, she was thinking, the hips on that man, the softness of his face, of the skin beneath his white shirt. How many years has he worked to learn this strange art or skill? To allow that bull to move its horns so close to his hips, to his dick, then to turn his back and walk away. Still, to torture the bull. Rhoda, don’t fall for this meanness. It is mean. Still, it doesn’t matter, not really, not in the scheme of things. It is how things are, how things have always been. Men learned these skills to protect themselves from animals, to protect their children and their women. And it’s so sexy, so fucking wonderful and sexy. I would fuck that bullfighter in a second, AIDS scare of not. I bet they think everyone from the United States has it. I bet no one in a foreign country would fuck an American now. They probably wouldn’t fuck an American for all the money in the world. Rhoda leaned into the arena. The matador spread out his cape and made four beautiful and perfect passes, then drew the cape behind him and turned his back to the bull and walked away. He walked over to the barrio and was handed an older, redder cape and a sword. He came back out into the arena and displayed the sword against the cape and then prepared the cape for the kill. The bull looked confused, hesitant, worried. Perhaps he smelled his death. He walked away. “Toro,” the matador called, “toro, toro, toro.” The bull pawed the ground, made a fake pass, then moved back. The matador prepared again, spread out the red cape upon the ground, displayed the sword upon it, then moved the sword behind the cape, moved his feet very close together, then waited. The bull charged, the matador stuck the sword between the spinal column, planted it all the way to the hilt, and the bull’s lungs filled with blood and it fell to its knees.

“The sword goes in and severs the spinal column,” Saint John said. It was the first time he had spoken in thirty minutes. “It punctures the lungs and the lungs fill with blood. An easy death.”

“Compared to what?” Rhoda said.

“Anything you can think of.”

“What would be the easiest one?”

“Anna’s wasn’t bad. The shock of the freezing water would cushion the shock of the cyanide.”

“What would be the easiest thing of all?”

“Fifty Demerols. I have a jar at home in case I have a stroke. I don’t want to recover from a stroke.”

“Nor I,” Dudley said.

“Well, you probably won’t have to,” Rhoda said. “You’ll just ruin your liver getting hepatitis down here in Mexico and call me up and ask me to give you one. God, I hope I don’t have to give you a liver.”

“I hope so too.”

“Kidney,” Saint John put in. “They don’t transplant livers.”

The picador ran out onto the dirt floor, took out a silver dagger, delivered the coup de grace. The matador stared at the bull, then turned his face to the sky and walked back across the dirt arena. Rhoda rose to her feet with the crowd. This is what theater was trying to do, she decided. This is what plays aspire to but this is real death, real catharsis, real combat and real battle, and the thing I can not understand and my shrink can not understand. This is not subject to Freudian analysis because this is older than Freud and besides I am not a German Jew. I am from a culture more deadly and cold than even these Spanish people descended from Moors. She looked at the face of her brother and the face of her cousin. They were completely satisfied. She was satisfied. The young men from California were still sitting. They had put their camera away. Even they knew that something had happened. Later, Rhoda thought, they will get drunk and blow it off. Whatever the matador represents they will not allow it in. They are future people, remaking the genes. No second-rate Mexican bullfighter can impress them. Perhaps nothing can impress them. They will just get on a talk show and explain it all away. They are the future, but I am not. Rhoda stood up, extracted some dollar bills from her purse, excused herself, and walked down through the still cheering crowd toward the barrio. She wanted to be near the matador, to breathe the air he breathed, to experience the terrible sexiness of his skin, to look at him. She walked down the steps toward the concession stand underneath the stadium. He was standing with his back to her, his back was sweating underneath the soft white cotton of his shirt, his hair reminded her of a painting she had seen once of a Spanish child, so black it was no color, his neck was soft and tanned and the skin on his shoulders beneath his shirt seemed to her to be the sexiest thing she had ever seen in her life. He turned and handed something to a woman in a yellow blouse. Rhoda withdrew her eyes and walked on down the stairs and stood by a long concrete tub which held beer and Cokes. Two men were selling the drinks. “Un Coke,” she said. “Por favor.” The vendor extracted one from the depths of the icy water and removed the top with a church key. He handed it to her and took her dollar. The blindfolded horse stood against a fence. A few tourists walked toward the stand, two small boys chased each other with make-believe swords, the heat was all around her. She drank the cold sweet drink, felt her body melt into the heat. She stood there a long time. Finally the matador came out of a gate and walked toward two men in black suits who were awaiting him. The men embraced. The matador held one of the men for a long time. They were the same height and their arms slid around each other’s shoulders. The black-suited man patted the matador’s wet shoulder. The matador looked past his friend and saw Rhoda watching him. He met her eyes and received her tribute. I could fuck him, Rhoda thought. If I were still young enough to have hope, I would walk across this twenty feet of earth and hand him a paper with my name on it and tell him where to find me. He would find me. He is young and still has hope. She set the cold sweet Coca-Cola down on the waist-high concrete tub and walked toward the matador. He excused himself from the men and came to meet her.

“Esta noche,” she said. “Donde? Where will I find you?”

“At the Inn of the Sun.” His lips were as soft and full as the skin on his shoulders. His hips were so close to her. The smell of him was all around her.

“I will come there,” she said. “When? At which hour?”

“A los siete. At seven.” He reached out and took her arm. “I was watching you. I knew you wished to speak with me.”

“I am called Rhoda. Se nombre Rhoda Katerina.”

His fingers held her arm. “At seven,” he said. “I will wait for you.” He moved closer. “Will you sit with me now?”

“No, I am with my brother. I will come at seven.” She turned to walk back to the stairs. He walked with her to the first landing. The tourists were watching them. The men at the concession stand were watching them. The children were watching them.

She walked back upstairs and rejoined Dudley and Mariana and Saint John. The afternoon grew hotter. Two more bulls were killed, including one from horseback. Then the corrida was finished. The band put up their tarnished instruments and recorded music began to play from the speakers. Rhoda and Dudley and Mariana and Saint John went out on the street to find a taxi but there was none so they began to walk toward the hotel where they had left the car. I have to ask Mariana how to get to the inn, Rhoda thought. I have to get her alone and get her to help me.

“There is too much violence in the world,” Saint John said. They were walking along the uphill dirt street, following the crowd in the direction of the town.

“Too much violence,” Rhoda answered him. “What do you mean? You’re as bad as those goddamn Stanford boys.”

“You’re all fascinated by your father’s violence,” Saint John said. “Look what it’s done to Dudley.”

“What are you talking about, Saint John? Make yourself clear. Jesus, it’s hot as noon.” They had walked out from the shade of the hill. It was as hot as noon, hotter, for the earth had had all day to soak up heat. Rhoda shuddered, thinking of the earth soaking up the blood of the bulls, blood soaking down into the earth and turning black. The matador’s soft hands, the silver sword, the red cape and blood soaking down into the earth, the heat. I’m too old for him, Rhoda thought. But then, what difference would my age make? Remember when Malcolm gave that speech at the medical college and we went to the party with all the surgeons. The oldest man in the room was the most powerful. God knows how old he was, but he came across the room and took me. Just took me because he wanted me. And I allowed it. I left everyone else that I was talking to and followed him out onto the patio and he said, I want to take you somewhere tomorrow. Where was it he wanted me to go? To see a cadaver or something terrible or grim and Malcolm came and found me and brought me back inside because even Malcolm knew what was going on. So it has nothing to do with age or even violence although violence is one of its manifestations. It’s power that matters, and in this Mexican town on this hot day power is killing bulls and Saint John knows it and is pissed off at the matador and pissed off at me.

“Goddamn, I wish we’d find a taxi,” Saint John said. “I’m not sure this is the way to town.”

“We can catch a bus,” Mariana said. “If we go this way we will come to the main street and a bus will come by.” They trudged up the dusty street and arrived at a main thoroughfare, and in a few minutes a dilapidated city bus picked them up and took them into town. She told them on the bus. First she told Saint John. “I’m going to meet the bullfighter,” she said. “I’m going to his hotel.”

“Of course you aren’t,” Dudley said. He turned around from the seat in front of her. “No, that’s final.”

“You don’t tell me what to do. I don’t take orders from you.”

“He’s right,” Saint John said. “You can’t go off with those people.”

“Why not? Why can’t I? What do I have to live for that’s so important I’m supposed to be careful? My children are grown. I’m going to his hotel at seven o’clock tonight.”

“You aren’t going off with a Mexican bullfighter,” Dudley said. “That is that. You aren’t going to do that to us, Shorty.”

“Is not a good idea,” Mariana put in. “He would not really expect you to come even if you said you would. Not if he saw you were with men. He would think they would not let you.” She lowered her eyes. “Even American men.”

The bus had stopped at the downtown square. They filed off with the other passengers and found themselves in the middle of a parade which was forming to circle the square. A young girl in a red dancing dress was seated on a throne on a car. Her attendants were around her. A band was getting out its instruments.

“Be a good sport,” Saint John said. “Don’t start something with a matador. Not tonight, please, Rhoda.” He took her arm. They began to walk toward the hotel where they had left the station wagon. “It was such a nice day. Why spoil it?”

“It’s about death,” Rhoda said. “I can’t stand to do nothing constantly but displacement activities, amusements, ways to pass the time, until we get into the ground to stay. What’s happening to us, Saint John? We are getting so old. We haven’t got enough sense to be alive and it’s almost over. We’ll be crippling around with a pacemaker soon. We’ll be completely dried out and ruined and I’ve never slept with a bullfighter in my life and I’ve always wanted to.”

“Stop and get her a margarita,” Dudley said. “Let’s go in there.” They had come to a restaurant on the square and went in and ordered a round of margaritas. They drank to the bullring and the brave matadors and Dudley began to give toasts.

“I’m going,” Rhoda said. “I’m going over there at seven o’clock.”

“Here’s to the girl from the Delta, who never would say you are right, who never gives in, please give in, Rhoda, your brother and cousin are begging and begging you tonight.” Dudley raised his margarita and signaled the bartender to bring them another round.

“Here’s to the girls growing old,” Rhoda raised her glass. She was into it now. “Who think they didn’t get laid enough. Lost their youth and their puberty and their childbearing years being good for Daddy and big brother and fucking Jesus.”

“Rhoda, you’ve had all kinds of husbands and boyfriends. What did you miss out on?”

“Normal relationships. Having one husband and loving him forever. Getting laid on a regular basis. Remember, Saint John, I missed from the time I was thirteen to nineteen. I never got laid during the great primitive fertile years, thanks to no birth control and our Victorian upbringing.”

“So you want to go fuck some Mexican bullfighter in a cheap hotel to make up for not having a normal life?”

“Don’t lawyer-talk me.” Rhoda put down her margarita. She had decided to take it easy and not get drunk. “And you’re not getting me drunk,” she added. “So don’t try that. It will just make me go over there more.”

“He won’t expect you to be there.” Mariana reached out a hand and touched Rhoda’s arm. This woman was so different from her brother. This woman was not careful. It would not be good to hunt with her.

“I want to go and fuck this guy. I’m fifty-three years old. It’s none of anybody’s business. I don’t mess around with your sex lives.”

“Hey, look,” Dudley said. “Here come the musicians.” Three guitarists had come in the door and were gathering around a table. The music began, beautiful, sexy, exciting music. A song Rhoda had heard once coming over a wall at a resort in Acapulco. “I heard that music in Acapulco at Las Brisas once,” she said. “I was having a terrible honeymoon with a man I didn’t love. See, think of the terrible life I have been forced to live because I only liked power.”

The music rose. Dudley motioned to the musicians to come their way. “I was on a honeymoon,” Rhoda went on. “But all I did was get drunk and swim in this pool where you swam over to the bar. It was New Year’s Eve and the musicians on the boats in the harbor played that wonderful music but it was all feet of clay, feet of clay.” Rhoda finished the first margarita and started in on the second. The musicians came nearer. Dudley gave them money. “Let’s dance, Shorty,” he said. “I want to dance with my baby sister.” Then the two of them went out onto the dance floor and began to dance together. My closest, closest relative, Rhoda was thinking. My own big brother. My own hands and legs and arms and face. The gene pool, Jesus, what a fantastic mess.

“Que paso, mi hermano,” she said. “We shall dance a little while and then go and see the bullfighter.”

Dudley was a wonderful dancer and Rhoda loved to dance. He had Rhoda where he wanted her now and he knew it. They drank many margaritas and some wine and danced until the sun was far down below the horizon and seven o’clock had come and gone. “I have to go over to the Inn of the Sun,” Rhoda kept saying. “What time is it?”

“Let me dance with her,” Saint John said. “I never get to dance with Rhoda.”

Sometime later they found a restaurant and ordered tortillas and frijoles and chili with mole verde sauce. They drank sangria and ate the wonderful gentle spicy food. “The food of a thousand colors,” Rhoda said. “The food of orange tortillas and green avocado mashed and red peppers the color of the bull. I have to get over to the hotel, Dudley. I want to change clothes and go and see the matador.”

“Let him wait,” Saint John said. “The longer he waits the more he’ll want you.”

“You’re just saying that,” Rhoda said. But she was in a wonderful suggestive drunken state and so she began to picture herself as she had been at fifteen, sitting in her room for fifteen minutes while her date cooled his heels waiting for her to come down the stairs. Fifteen minutes, LeLe had always insisted. You have to make them wait at least fifteen minutes. Don’t ever be on time. Don’t ever be waiting for them.

When they had eaten all they could eat of the exotic dangerous food, they wandered back out onto the street where the parade had ended and the carnival had begun. There were street vendors selling food and musicians playing, children everywhere, young men and women walking in groups and couples, drinking beer and sangria and calling out greetings. Dudley and Saint John and Rhoda and Mariana walked back to the hotel where they had left the station wagon and took possession of the rooms Mariana’s friends at the hotel had saved for them. There were two large adjoining rooms with big tiled bathrooms and a common sitting room. They carried their small amount of luggage up the stairs and went into the rooms and all fell down on one enormous walnut bed. Dudley was still making up limericks.

“There was a young girl from Brownsville, who always wanted to swill wine, and when they said no, she said, ‘You know where to go,’ and now she is there waiting for them.”

“That’s terrible,” Saint John said.

“There was a young doctor from New Orleans, who always said, ‘I am going to warn you, you’ll get into trouble if you go out with me, for I won’t marry you but I’ll charm you.’ ”

“Worse.”

“There was a young girl from the womb,” Rhoda began. “Who barely got laid from there to the tomb. She said, ‘Well, goddamn, so that’s where I am, who did this to me. I must find a way to blame whom.’ Sinking spell,” she added. “I am having a sinking spell.” She rolled up on the bed, cuddling into Saint John’s shirt.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It will pass.”

A short while later Rhoda made a recovery. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Where’s my cosmetic kit? I have to do something about my face.” She got up and found the small leather kit and carried it into the bathroom. She put the kit on the counter and examined herself in the dark mirror. I’ll have to start all over, she decided. She took out a jar of Charles of the Ritz face cleanser and began to apply it to her face. Then she decided it was going to get all over her hair so she dug around in the bag until she found a shower cap and she put that on. She went back into the room and opened the suitcase and took out a clean blouse and disappeared back into the bathroom. Dudley had gone downstairs to procure a bottle of wine and some glasses. Saint John and Mariana were propped up on the bed having a conversation about whitewing dove hunting and how to get the birds to come to Laredo instead of Brownsville.

Now Rhoda decided to take a bath in the stone bathtub. She took off all her clothes and wrapped herself in a towel and took her clothes back out to the room and hung them over the back of a chair. “Don’t mess these up,” she said. “They’re all I have to wear.”

“He won’t expect you to come,” Mariana said, in a voice so low only Saint John could hear her.

“Don’t talk about it,” Saint John said. “Don’t say anything. So tell me, how much land has your uncle leased? Has he got it all, all along the irrigation ditches?”

“Yes,” she said. “Para ustedes solamente. All of it. All the land.”

Rhoda ran water in the tub and washed the tub out. Then she filled the tub with hot water and got in. What was I going to do? she was thinking. Oh, yes, I’m going over there and see the matador. LeLe will have a fit. She’ll die of jealousy. If Anna was alive what would Anna say? Anna would say, Rhoda, you are drunk. Rhoda giggled, the thought was very heavy, the thought would sink the hotel. That’s why you got cancer, Anna, she decided. From always thinking shit like that just when I was about to have a good time. Rhoda examined her legs as they floated in the water. They didn’t look very good anymore. There was something wrong with the quality of the flesh, with the color of the skin. I hate my fucking body, Rhoda decided. I just fucking hate growing old. There isn’t one single thing about it that I like. She got out of the tub and wrapped the towel around her and went out into the room.

“We should give all our money to young people,” she said. “It is wasted on people as old as we are.”

“What’s wrong now?” Saint John asked.

“The skin on my legs looks like shit. I mean, the flesh. The flesh looks terrible. There’s something wrong with it. It’s mottled looking. I hate myself. I hate getting old, Saint John, it sucks to hell and back.”

Dudley came in the door with a tray. A Mexican boy was behind him with the glasses. There was fruit and cheese and champagne and Dudley opened the champagne while the young boy tried not to notice that Rhoda was wearing a towel. She picked up her clothes from the chair and took them into the bathroom. Dudley brought her a glass of champagne and she drank it. Then she sat down at the bathroom stool and began to put on makeup.

Saint John turned on the radio beside the bed. Wild music began to play. United States music. It was a broadcast from Tom and Jerry’s in Nuevo Laredo. They were interviewing people who had come there to party all night. The music rose and fell and the people who were being interviewed told where they were from and what they had come to find in the border towns. It was funny. It was hilarious. The people were drunk and the broadcast was from Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican side so the interviewees were saying anything they wanted to say. It was amazing to hear people telling the truth on the radio. “I came down to get laid.” “I came down to get drunk and let it all hang out.” “I came down to find chicks.” “I came down to find some guys to party with.” “I came down to get away from it all.” “It’s cheap here.” “You can find a party, you can have a good time.” And so on.

Rhoda was getting back into a wonderful mood. The champagne had erased time. Her face was starting to look mysterious and beautiful. The bathroom was beautiful and mysterious. There were baskets of beautiful colored towels. There was a tile wall of fine blue and white figured tiles, each one different, each one made by hand. Everything in the room had been made by hand. The wicker stool was high and comfortable. The lights were soft. Rhoda applied more rouge, added some blue eye shadow, then a small single line of silver. She was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world. She thought of the matador pacing around the lobby of the hotel waiting for her. Waiting and waiting, thinking she wasn’t going to come. Then she would appear. Fresh and lovely, his dream come true.

Dudley came into the bathroom and filled her champagne glass. He kissed her on the cheek. “I’m about ready to go,” Rhoda said. “As soon as I finish my face.”

“You’re sure you want to go there?”

“I am sure. I have to have experiences, Dudley. I can’t live my whole life in a straitjacket.” She peered into the mirror, a deep line furrowed her brow. She was not quite as beautiful as she had been a moment before. “Don’t back out on taking me. You said you’d take me. You promised me.”

“I’ll take you. We’re going to see the matador. El matador.” He was serious. He was playing the game. He wasn’t making fun of her. One thing about Dudley, Rhoda decided. He never makes fun of me. Their eyes met. Yes, they were going to take the world seriously. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth ruling in case they were ruling it.

“What’s going on in there?” Saint John called out. “I thought we were going to the Inn of the Sun God to see a matador. You better hurry up before I go to sleep instead.”

“Let’s go,” Dudley said. “Come on if we’re going.”

It was eleven o’clock when they left the hotel and walked back to the square to look for the matador’s inn. The fiesta was in full swing. The cafés were full. Mariachi music was playing. Music was coming out of the doors of the cafés. Drunks were falling off of benches on the square. People had been drinking all day. The car with the throne perched on top was parked sideways on a curb.

“Where is the Inn of the Sun?” Rhoda kept asking people.

“Keep going,” someone said, “you will come to it.”

“I’m just going over there,” Rhoda kept saying. “I may not stay.”

It was a square brick hotel on the corner of a street two blocks off the square. There was a lamp over a desk in the lobby. The light was dim and no one was behind the desk. They went into the lobby and waited. “Anybody here?” Rhoda called out. Dudley and Saint John didn’t say a word. Mariana cuddled into Dudley’s arm. A sleepy-looking man came out a door and asked what they wanted.

“I am looking for the torero, Guillarmo Perdigo,” Rhoda said. “Is he staying here?”

“He was here,” the proprietor said. “With his family. But he is gone now. He has been gone for a while.”

“Will he be back?”

“I do not know. Perhaps in the morning. Perhaps not.”

“Thank you,” Rhoda said, and turned and led the way out of the inn and back out onto the street. They walked back to the hotel and went up to their rooms and told each other good night. Saint John was sleeping on a pull-out bed in the sitting room. After a while Rhoda got up and went into the room and got into the bed with him. “I’m lonely as shit,” she said. “I want to be near you.”

“Get in,” he said. “It’s okay. I love you. You’re our little girl. Are you okay?” He reached over and pulled the cover up over her shoulder. He patted her shoulder. He patted her tired worn-out head. Her used-to-be-red, now sunbleached, hair which was not standing up very well under the trip to Mexico.

“No,” she said. “I drank too much and besides I wanted to go and meet that bullfighter. I wasn’t really going to sleep with him, Saint John, I just wanted to get to know him.”

“But you might catch something, Rhoda. Kissing is worse than intercourse for some of the viruses. You should see what I see every day. It’s really depressing.”

“I never think of you getting depressed.”

“Well, I do.”

“I really wanted to go over there and meet him.”

“We went there.”

“No, you got me drunk to keep me from going.”

“I was afraid for you, Rhoda. I love you.” He patted her shoulder. He felt old suddenly, very old and far away from the world where he and Rhoda and Dudley had been alive and hot and terrible.

“I miss my children,” Rhoda said. “I am lonesome for them.”

“I know you are,” Saint John said, and kept on patting until Rhoda settled down and was still.

“Thank God,” he said out loud and moved his hand and went to sleep beside her.

In the morning they drove back to the hacienda. No one mentioned the matador or having gone to the inn to look for him. Rhoda folded her arms around herself and thought about the softness of his shoulders and his black eyes seeking out hers across the concrete concession stand. Win some, lose some, she was thinking. Outside the windows of the station wagon the hills were purple in the early light. I love this country, Rhoda decided. Any place that can produce a man like that is okay with me. Oh, God, I wish Anna were here. I could call up Anna and tell it to her and she would say, What a wonderful story. What a lovely encounter. Remember when she fell in love with that tennis player that summer in New Orleans and he fell in love with her? Some enchanted evening, only it was afternoon at the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club right after they moved to the new club and the next day she showed up at my house at about eight in the morning so excited and horny and borrowed my makeup because she had been up all night making love to him in his apartment on Philip Street. God, what a summer. What a hot exciting world. It’s true, we got to live in the best of times. Now they have to have rubbers and spermicides and be scared to death of catching things. We weren’t afraid of anything. Oh, God, Guillarmo’s back and arms are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. I would like to see him fight bulls from now till the dawn of time.

“Rhoda?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right back there?” It was Dudley speaking. Saint John was asleep beside him in the front seat. Mariana was asleep beside Rhoda.

“Let’s stop and get something to eat,” Rhoda said. “I didn’t have any breakfast.”

“We’ll be at the hacienda soon. Can you wait till then? I don’t think there’s anywhere to stop between here and there, except maybe a native market.”

“No, it’s all right. I forgot. I forgot where I am.”

“I want to take you to a special place this afternoon. To meet some friends of mine.”

“Sure.”

“They’re Americans who live down here. The man’s from Austin and his wife is from Ireland. You’ll like them. They have a really interesting place. An animal farm. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Where do they get the bulls?”

“For the fights?”

“Yes.”

“They raise them. It’s quite an art, to keep the bloodlines pure and keep from overbreeding them. I’ll take you sometime to one of the ranches where they are raised.”

“I want to go back to Monterrey and see another bullfight.”

“I bet you do.”

“Okay, Dudley. Well, I’m going back to sleep.” She closed her eyes. Went into a fantasy of meeting Guillarmo on an island off the coast of Spain. Having babies with him. Raising bulls.

They got back to the hacienda in Agualeguas at noon and had lunch and packed up and said their farewells to Mariana. Mariana was wearing a new gold bracelet with the teeth of a saber-toothed tiger embedded in the gold. Does he carry that stuff around with him in the glove compartment? Rhoda wondered. I mean, does he just have it ready in case he gets laid or does he go out at night and buy it? Maybe the fairies deliver it. God, what a man.

“I wish you could stay another night,” Mariana said. “The rooms are free.”

“We have to get back,” Rhoda said. “Saint John and I have to catch a plane tomorrow. Look, Mariana, could you get me a poster of that bullfight we saw yesterday? I mean if you see one or if you get a chance.” Rhoda held out a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep this in case you see one and buy it and send it to me.”

Mariana refused the money. “I’ll send you one if I am able to find it.” The women’s eyes met. “Well, come back,” Mariana added. She took Rhoda’s hand. I love Mexico, Rhoda decided. I adore these people. I wish they’d all cross the border. This lovely tropic heat, the bougainvillea, Guillarmo’s shoulders, blood on the arena floor.”

“I’ll come back,” she said. “When the doves are here.” Then Dudley embraced Mariana and Saint John embraced her and Rhoda embraced her and they got into the station wagon and drove off.

“One more thing we need to see,” Dudley said as he turned onto the asphalt road. “One more thing to show Shorty.”

“What is that?” Rhoda asked.

“The cats,” Saint John said. “Dudley wants you to see the cats.”

It was two o’clock in the afternoon when they left the hacienda. They turned onto an asphalt road leading northwest to Hidalgo and Candela. A few miles outside of Candela they left the main road and followed the course of a stream until they came to a fence and a gate. Dudley stopped the car and got out and spoke into a microphone attached to the gate. In a few minutes a boy came on a bicycle and opened the gate with a combination and held it while they drove in.

A well-kept road made of crushed stone led uphill between acacia and scrub birch trees. Dudley drove the station wagon carefully up the road. The road grew steeper and he shifted into second gear. Rhoda was leaning up into the front seat now, trying not to ask questions. They had all slipped once again into their childhood roles. Dudley, the general and pathfinder. Saint John, the faithful quiet lieutenant. Rhoda, lucky to be there, lucky to get to go, interloper.

“You may see a lion along here,” Dudley said. “Don’t be surprised if you do. They get loose. Dave Hilleen and I had to shoot one last month. Hated to have to do it.”

“A lion,” Rhoda said. Very softly, very quietly. “He’s kidding, isn’t he, Saint John?”

“No, he’s not,” Saint John said. “You’ll see.”

The road wound down a small hill, then across a wooden bridge. The bridge covered a creek that crossed and recrossed the road.

“There’s a springbok,” Saint John said. “Oh, there’s the herd.” Rhoda looked and there beneath the trees was a herd of twenty or thirty African springbok. Their tall sculpted horns rose like lilies into the low hanging limbs of the scrub brush. They quivered, then disappeared like a school of fish.

“My God,” Rhoda said. “How lovely. How divine.”

“There are kudu and sheep and deer,” Dudley said. “We’re hoping to get some rhino in the fall.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, he’s not,” Saint John put in.

“They’ll love it here,” Dudley said. “It’s exactly like parts of central Africa. Only safer and there is hay. It’s conservation, Shorty. Someday, this may be the only place these creatures live. The African countries are destroying their herds. They’re being hunted out and their preserves raped. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

“Do you hunt them?”

“Very little. We sell them to zoos. Sometimes we trade them for cats.”

“All right. I’ll bite. What cats?”

“You’ll see,” Saint John said. “Wait till you see.”

“Cats that circuses can’t train. Ones that go bad. The one Dave and I shot was an old lion that went bad. Ringling Brothers paid us to take him.”

“Who does this belong to?” Rhoda asked. “Who pays for all of this?”

“It pays for itself. Dave paid five thousand to shoot the lion. He was scared to death. I didn’t think he was going to pull the trigger when it charged. Jesus, I never saw a man get so white. Afterwards he said to me, I was scared to death, Dudley. How do you do that in the wild? Just like you did it here, I told him. It’s him or you. It took him two shots.” Dudley was talking to Saint John now. “One glanced off the ear and one went in an eye, ruined the head. I shot for the heart and lung when I saw his first shot miss. Old Dave. I never saw a man go so white.”

“Who started all this?” Rhoda asked. “Who does this belong to?”

“These are nice folks here,” Dudley said, suddenly stern. “They’re friends of mine. Be nice to them and try not to talk too much.”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m always nice to everyone.” Saint John sniggered, and Rhoda started to tell him to go fuck himself but for some reason she didn’t feel like making Saint John or Dudley mad at her right that minute.

They had come to the top of a rise. A Caterpillar tractor with a grader blade was parked beside the road. Two Mexican boys sat underneath an umbrella drinking from a stone jar.

A house was at the end of the road. An old stone house like something out of a nineteenth-century English novel. It was three stories high with turrets and a tower. In the field behind the house were structures that looked like huge greenhouses. They were tall cages, sixty feet wide by eighty feet long. There were three of them, at intervals of forty feet, constructed of steel bars three inches thick. Swings were suspended from the ceiling beams and some of the cats were sitting on the swings. A leopard, Rhoda thought. That’s a leopard. And that’s another one. She was struck dumb. Now she did not have to try to be quiet. Nothing could prepare you for this, she decided, no words could prepare anyone for this.

Dudley drove the car up to the house and parked it. Children appeared on the back porch. The caretaker’s children. A tall girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, a boy a little older, a smaller girl, an even smaller boy. They were dark-skinned and dark-haired but did not look like Mexicans. “Are they Mexican?” Rhoda asked.

“Of course.”

“They don’t look it.”

“Their mother is Italian. Where’s your momma?” Dudley called out. He opened the door and got out. “Hand me that sack of rolls,” he added. They had stopped at a bakery in Anahuac and bought sweet bread and raisin loaves for the children. Dudley handed the sack to the oldest girl. The boy smiled and held out an animal he was wearing on his arm. “Baby jaguar,” the boy said. “They are all gone for the day, gone hunting with Redman.”

“We just came by to see the cats,” Dudley said. He patted the jaguar. He got back into the car. “We’ll be back to the house. I want to show my sister the cats.” Rhoda was half in and half out of the car. Now she got back in and shut the door.

“The momma killed the other one,” the boy said. “We are raising this one on a bottle.”

“We’ll be back,” Dudley said. He put the car in gear and backed out of the parking place. The children arranged themselves on the porch stairs, the boy held up the baby jaguar, flies buzzed around the porch and the car, the ground was dry and yellow. Rhoda sat on the edge of her seat. Behind them was a fourth cage. It was full of very large cheetahs, at least three cheetahs. “That cage isn’t big enough for the cheetahs,” Dudley said. “We have to do something about it. We didn’t know we were going to have so many. The cougar need better cages, too. There are fourteen cougar now. Too many, but everyone keeps sending them and no one wants to hunt them.”

“Embarrassment of riches,” Saint John muttered. Dudley ignored him and drove the car from the driveway and out into the field where the cages rose like monuments in the hazy blue sky. We will get bogged down in the field, Rhoda thought. The car will stop and we’ll have to get out. Why do the men in this family always have to drive cars into fields? Why do I always end up driving on a field or in a ditch? Why can’t we stay on the road like other people? Don’t talk. Don’t say a goddamn word. If you object it will just make him do it more. You can’t stop Dudley by telling him not to do something. Just be quiet and it will soon be over.

“How do you like it?” Dudley said, and laughed. He began to circumnavigate the cages. Tigers were in the first one. At least five tigers, four gold and white striped tigers and one black tiger lounging on top of a concrete shelter. As they passed the cage Rhoda saw that a sixth tiger was inside the shelter, a huge black tiger twice as large as the others, taking up the coolest, most protected spot in the concrete shelter. She shuddered, tried to take it in. Dudley drove on. In the second cage were Bengal tigers, with faces as big as car windows. Three Bengal tigers sitting together on swings looking at her with their huge heads. In the third cage were lions. A lioness and three young cubs. Dudley drove down to a fourth cage, which could not be seen from the house. Jaguars were in that one. There were more cages in front of the house, protected by shrubbery and trees.

“What are in those?” she asked quietly.

“Leopards and cougar and some more lions,” Dudley said. “We have three lionesses with cubs now and the ones in the pasture.”

“What pasture?” But then she knew. Dudley had stopped the station wagon beside a flimsy-looking forty-foot-high fence. Inside the fence was a huge lion. Behind him in the tall grass were two lionesses with their cubs. The lion turned his head their way. Dudley rolled down the automatic windows and opened the sun roof. “Aren’t they gorgeous, Shorty?” he said. “Aren’t they something?”

“My God,” she said. Dudley got out and walked over to the fence. “Hello, Waylon,” he said. “Long time no see.” The lion roared, a long deep rattling in the throat. Dudley turned his back to the lion and walked away.

“Don’t worry, Shorty,” he said. “He wants me but not badly enough to do anything about it today.” Rhoda could hear him but she was only looking from the deepest part of the back seat. She had tried looking at the lion out the window but it was like staring over a precipice. Still, she could hear every word Dudley said, every sound of the world, suddenly she could hear every nuance, every blade of grass.

“Don’t talk to him,” she said. “Don’t do anything else. Get back in the car.” Dudley turned back to the lion.

“Get in the car,” Rhoda called out. In a very soft voice. “Roll up those windows. Get in the car and get me out of here. Saint John, roll these windows up.”

“The windows wouldn’t stop him,” Saint John said. “If he wanted to get in the car he could do it.”

“Well, drive it then,” Rhoda said. She called out the window in the loudest voice she could muster: “Dudley, get in the car. Get in this car and get me out of here. I don’t like it. I don’t like that lion. Or those cats. Get me out of here.”

“I thought you were into violence now,” Saint John said. “Bullfighters and blood and all that.”

“Not when I’m part of the ring. Roll the windows up, Saint John, this is madness. That fence isn’t big enough to stop a dog, much less a lion. Get Dudley back in the car. Let’s get out of here. I don’t like it here.”

Dudley spoke to the lion again. “You want me, don’t you, Waylon. Show Rhoda what you need.” He turned his back to the lion again and began to walk away from the fence. The lion moved toward the fence.

“Oh, shit,” Rhoda said. “I’m driving off, Dudley. I’m leaving you here. Roll those windows up, Saint John. Roll them up this minute, do you hear me?”

“It’s okay,” Saint John said. “You’re okay.”

“I am not okay. I am scared to death.” Rhoda pulled herself into a ball in the very middle of the back seat. She considered climbing into the trunk, but there was no trunk, it was a station wagon.

Dudley turned back to the lion. “Old Waylon,” he said. “He hates me but he doesn’t know why. You don’t know why, do you, Waylon? Except you know I’m not afraid of you.”

“Get in the car,” Rhoda yelled. “Get in the car this very minute. Roll those windows up. Oh, God, why did I come down here to fucking Mexico in the middle of July. Have they closed the window yet? Please close the window, Saint John. Dudley, close the goddamn sunroof and get back in the car and get me out of here. I have had all I can take of these goddamn terrifying unbelievable cats. I don’t want to see them anymore. Take me to that house.” He was still standing by the lion. “It’s bad karma,” Rhoda continued. “It’s terrible karma to have these animals here. They should not be here. They should be dead or else back where they came from, where the Indians or Chinese or Africans or whatever can kill them themselves. If they lived where I lived I’d kill them all tonight. Get back in the car. Leave that lion alone.” The lion bounded for the fence. Dudley laughed. Saint John got back in the car.

“Start the car,” Rhoda said. “Saint John, start the car.”

“Not yet. Go on up to the house if you’re scared.”

“Hell no.”

“They can’t get out, Rhoda. Oh, I guess the lion could get over the fence, but he doesn’t really want to.”

“Okay, I’m going. I can’t take any more of this.” Rhoda opened the car door. She looked toward the house. The children were standing on the stone steps holding the baby jaguar. “I’m going to the house,” she said. “Fuck being out here with these goddamn lions.” She stepped down on the grass, shut the car door, and began to run. “Don’t get so excited,” Dudley yelled. Don’t get them excited, she thought he said.

“Watch out,” Saint John called. “Watch your step.” Rhoda sprinted toward the house, which seemed a mile away. She ran faster and stepped into a gopher hole and turned her ankle and went sprawling down across the dry yellow grass. Pain shot up her leg, then something was on top of her. It was Saint John. He knelt beside her and began to feel the bones in her foot. “Get me into the house,” Rhoda was yelling. “Carry me into that house and lock the door.”

Rhoda lay on a filthy horsehair sofa in the parlor of the stone house. One-half of the sofa was covered with the skin of a mountain sheep. Her broken foot lay propped on the sheepskin. By her side was a marble table with a statue of Mercury, wings on his feet. Saint John had gone into the kitchen to call the hospital in Laredo. Dudley was outside the window helping the young girls feed the jaguar. I am lying on this sofa catching ringworm, Rhoda decided. The worms are going into my ankle through my wound and into the soles of my feet from where that dreadful little abandoned jaguar shit upon the floor. The children will have ringworm too. They will be bald and dead from the bad karma in the place. Live by the sword, die by the sword. There’s no telling what will happen now. I don’t even know if Saint John is a good doctor. Being my cousin doesn’t make him good enough to set my foot, even if we do think our genes are superior to everyone else’s in the whole fucking world. “It hurts,” she called out. Then yelled louder. “My goddamn foot is killing me, Saint John. Please come give me something for my foot.”

Dudley stuck his head in the open window. “What’s wrong, Shorty? What’s wrong now?”

“My foot is broken. And I want to go to the hospital. I don’t want to wait another minute. It’s your fault for not taking me to the house when I asked to go. I didn’t know we were going to see these lions. Who said I wanted to go see a bunch of real lions? That fence wouldn’t hold a lion for a minute if it wanted to get out. It could get out and kill everyone in the place.”

“We’re going in just a minute,” Dudley said. “As soon as Saint John gets off the phone.”

“Then hurry up,” she said. “It’s killing me. It’s about to kill me, Dudley.”

Saint John entered the room carrying a glass of water and a bottle of Demerol pills and stood by while she swallowed one. The water will give me amoebic dysentery, she decided. But I can’t help that for now. “Where did the water come from?” she asked. “What kind of pills are these?”

Then the pain was better and finally stopped, or, at least, Rhoda didn’t have to suffer it any longer. They carried her out to the station wagon and laid her out in the back seat beside a box of frozen pamplona blanco and two cases of German wine and the guns. Saint John borrowed an embroidered pillow from the children and arranged it underneath her head and propped her injured foot on a duffel bag and then Dudley made long elaborate farewells and they drove off down the line of caged animals. The panthers scurried around their cages. The lionesses flicked their tails. The lion cubs played with their paws. The Bengal tigers turned their stately faces toward the car like huge Indian sunflowers. The kudu pricked up their ears, they moved like leaves before the wind. The peacocks flew up to the fence posts. The Mexican guards waved and opened the gate. Dudley returned their wave and drove on through. Then he reached down into the glove box and took out the secret leather-covered tequila bottle and passed it to his cousin.

“When was the first time you two ever went hunting together?” Rhoda asked drowsily.

“When Saint John was ten and I was eight,” Dudley answered. “Remember, Saint John, Uncle Jodie lent us his four ten and that little rifle, that twenty-two, and we went bird hunting, across the bayou behind the store.”

“We were quail hunting,” Saint John added. “We scared up a covey but we missed and then you shot a rabbit. Back where Man’s cabin used to be.”

“We skinned it and Babbie cooked it for us that night for dinner.” They leaned toward each other in the front seat of the car, remembering.

“I took my old harpoon out of my dirty red bandanna,” Saint John began singing. “And was blowing sweet while Bobby sang the blues.”

“Blowing soft while Bobby sang the blues,” Rhoda corrected sleepily from the back seat. “Not blowing sweet.” She sank back down into the Demerol. The hunters looked at each other and shook their heads. A hawk high above them in the air spotted the car and was blinded by the reflection of the sunlight in his eyes.

“From the coal mines of Kentucky,” Saint John started again. “To the California hills, Bobby shared the secrets of my soul.”

A few days later Rhoda was back in her own house, safe from spotted fever and hookworm and amoebic dysentery and adventure. Her ankle was in a cast. She had a pair of rented crutches and a rented wheelchair. She had a young girl from the nursing school who was coming by in the mornings to fix her breakfast. She had an old boyfriend who taught history who was coming over in the afternoons to cheer her up. She had accepted an offer to teach Latin during the fall semester, replacing a young man who had gone crazy in the summer and run off to California without telling his department chairman. He had sent a note. “I can’t bear their wretched little faces,” the note said. “What do they need with Latin?”

The department chairman had called Rhoda and asked her if she could fill in. He had gotten her on the phone the day after Dudley had delivered her to her house. “Yes,” she had said. “I will teach your class. I need some order in my life.”

Now she sat in the wheelchair on the patio and watched the robins picking up seeds on the freshly mowed lawn. Her hands lay on her legs. She thought about her boring boyfriend. She thought about the sweet little nursing student who was fixing her such boring sweet little meals. She thought about lying in the back of the station wagon all the way home from Mexico and Saint John’s hopeful, grating, off-tune voice singing the collected works of Kris Kristofferson and the collected works of Willie Nelson.

She thought of Dudley and how long they had all managed to live and how strange that they still loved each other. We know each other, she decided. Nothing has to be explained. No questions asked. I wish them well. Even if they do think it is all right to fuck around with a bunch of lions and tigers and risk their lives and keep on hunting when it is the twentieth century and for a long time men have dreamed they could evolve into something less dangerous and messy and bloody. Still, there was that bullfight.

The sun came out from behind a cloud and flooded the patio. Rhoda sank deep into herself. Moved by the light.

She considered her boyfriend, who did good dependable useful work in the world and how boring and pointless it was to make love to him. With or without her foot in a cast she had no passion for the man. Her chin fell to her chest. We are not making progress, she decided. This is not progress.

I will go back with them in September. To kill the beautiful and awkward pamplona blanco and pluck them and cook them and eat them. Anything is better than being passionless and bored. There’s no telling who might be down there this fall. No telling what kind of gorgeous hunters might shut me up for a few hours or days and make me want to buy soft Mexican dresses with flounces and rickrack and skirts that sweep around my ankles. Bullfighters are waiting and blood on the arena floor. Blood of the bull and fast hot music and Mexico. “I should have left a long time ago,” she began humming. Progress is possible, she decided. But it’s very, very slow.

Several weeks later, when her ankle had healed enough that she could walk, she drove downtown to the travel agency to buy her ticket back to San Antonio. At the corner of Spring Street and Stoner she changed her mind and went to her old hippie psychiatrist’s office instead. She parked the car and went in and asked the receptionist to make her an appointment. Then she went home and began to write letters. It was a cool day. The first cool day in months. The light was very clear. The trees were just beginning to turn their brilliant colors. Fall was coming to the mountains. Life was good after all. Peace was possible. Ideals were better than nothing, even if they were naïve. Here I go again, Rhoda thought, one hundred and eighty degrees a minute. She stuck some paper in the typewriter and began to write the first of the know-nothing letters. The proto-wisdom papers of the fall of 1988.

Dearest Dudley [the first letter began],

We have been the victims of Daddy’s aggression all our lives. The pitiful little victims of his terrible desire for money and power. All he understands is power. He doesn’t have the vaguest idea how to love anyone and neither do you and I. We must save ourselves, Dudley. Don’t go back to Mexico and drink tequila and run around with lions. Come up here and visit me and we will sit on the porch and drink coffee and try to think of things to do that are substitutes for always being in danger. We could play cards. I will play cards with you for money, how about that? I don’t know anything now. I don’t know where to begin.

We need to talk and talk and talk. Please come.

Love, Rhoda

Dear Saint John,

Don’t go back to Mexico and catch amoebic dysentery. Come up here instead. We don’t need to kill things in order to eat. All we need to do is stay alive and work and try to appreciate life and have a good time.

Come on up. Dudley and I are going to revive card games. We are going to play poker and drink a lot of coffee and I’ll make biscuits for breakfast.

We’ll have new times instead of old times.

Love, Rhoda

P.S. I’m sorry about that bullfighter. I really am.

P.P.S. I had this vision of the three of us huddled together on the floor at Esperanza sucking on each other for sustenance and love. Trying to get from each other what we couldn’t get from the grown people. All those terrible years—our fathers at the war and our mothers scared to death and the Japs coming to stick bamboo splinters up our fingernails and you and me and Dudley trying to mother and father each other. Life is not easy for anyone. That’s for sure. I don’t think we really understand much yet and may be losing the little that we used to know. We don’t need Mexico, old partner. We need something to hold on to in the dark and someone to remind us of where we really are. We are spinning in space on this tenuous planet. I won’t let you forget that if you won’t let me.

Love and love again, me.

Rhoda sealed the letters into envelopes and addressed them. Then she got into the car and drove down the hill and deposited them in the box at the post office. She was in a good mood. She even remembered to think it was miraculous that man had learned to write, not to mention invented a system to get letters from one place to another. Not to mention taming horses and fighting bulls and living to grow up. Every now and then someone grows up, she decided. I’ve heard about it. Why not, or else, whatever.