Mexico - 14. Chapter 14 of 16

After a half-hour’s drive, the two younger detectives were snoozing snugly. The round detective slouched against his larger partner, and the Aztec leaned comfortably against Mark. Arkin shifted nervously besides me. He seemed overly alert, as if on watch. First, he fiddled with the stations on my radio, to find music he liked. Then he opened and inspected my empty glove compartment. He did this several times, as if expecting a rabbit to appear. Next, he pushed the cigarette lighter in and waited for it to pop. When it didn’t, I had to explain, “Es rota. Broken. Yo no fumo.”
He mimed a cigarette, and I repeated “No,” while shaking my head.
He immediately opened the dashboard ashtray, as if to prove me wrong. But instead of finding butts, he discovered loose change. The kids had missed that, and I’d forgotten all about it.
“Los niños... no toman... el poco dinero,” was the best I could explain.
Arkin released the ashtray from the dashboard and sorted through the coins more comfortably. Most were ordinary nickels, dimes, and quarters I kept for parking meters, but Arkin examined each as if it might be a collector’s piece. There were also a couple of dollar coins I’d stashed. Arkin delighted in them. He took the shiniest one, returned the ashtray to the dash, and started flipping Sacagawea over his knuckles. I wanted to ask if he did magic tricks but couldn’t think of any of the words.
After a while, from just behind Arkin, Mark asked, “Don’t you have police cars?”
Arkin twisted to face Mark, but he didn’t understand.
“¿Qué?” he questioned.
“¿No tiene... automóviles... de policía?” Mark tried.
“Sí,” Arkin replied cheerfully.
“Don’t you use them? ¿No... use... estos?”
Arkin shrugged. “Solemente cinco,” he said, holding up five fingers. “Y mucho old,” he added.
I shook my head sympathetically, and Mark probably did, too. But I couldn’t really see him. Still, maybe encouraged, after a polite wait, he asked, cautiously, “Why are you taking the rifles?”
Arkin turned to him again and grinned, “If we find boys, we shoot.”
He raised his finger to his head. Made a small exploding sound. Faked dead. Then, resurrected, grinned.
“I think he’s kidding,” Mark said, quietly. But we weren’t sure. Arkin clearly understood us but just kept grinning.
We drove on. Arkin played with the radio again, I guess because it no longer offered what he wanted. Finally, he shut it off, then, absently, began to sing.
There was no reason I’d recognize the song. I couldn’t figure out the melody and definitely didn’t understand the words. For a while, Arkin sang, flipped the Sacagawea coin, and stayed alert.
The day was increasingly hot. It must have been ninety outside. It had been hot the day before, but Mark and I had spent part of the afternoon on the beach. And in the car, we had five sweating bodies.
Soon, Arkin started talking. Alternating between jokes, half in Spanish, that I could never quite catch the punch lines to, and questions about America. Mark and I told him all kinds of things, though we were never sure how much he understood. He’d ask a question. Mark and I would answer. Then Arkin would start a joke before we’d really finished. And before he’d stopped laughing at that, he’d ask us something else.
So we listened to Arkin. Listened to the wind. I slalomed pot-holes and watched bugs skid and splatter on my windshield. It was all educational.
In something over an hour, we reached our turnoff, the San Francisco sign. Soon, we were driving more slowly, along a half-familiar road.
“We went through town,” Mark told Arkin.
He nodded. So we drove through town. It seemed as empty as it had been that morning.
Once we left there, I started watching the odometer. I was pretty sure we hadn’t gone more than a mile last night before pulling over
“You remember those trees?” I asked Mark.
“Something like them,” he said. Several hundred yards later, he told Arkin, “We’re looking for a single tree -- a weird one.” Then he added, almost quizzically, “But it’s not here.”
We drove a little further.
“The thing I remember,” Mark said, “is a kind of gully. It’s where we pulled off. The shoulder was flattened. And that’s where the weird tree was. And there was scrub, and open fields, and there should be broken glass.”
He was talking more to me than to the detectives. The young guys were both awake now. They’d started moving as soon as the car slowed down.
“The problem is,” Mark went on, now explaining to Arkin, “that last night, it was nearly dark when we pulled in. And this morning, we were thinking about other things. I mean, we were still in shock. Barefoot and bleeding.”
I tried as best to translate when I needed to, but Arkin seemed to understand, and he explained it to the detectives. Still, like me in Spanish, they all seemed to understand more English than they could speak.
“It’s my fault,” I told Arkin at one point. “Mark wanted to mark the place. But I didn’t think we’d ever come back.”
Arkin sadly shook his head. “No usted watch TV?”
Everyone laughed.
When I hit two miles from town, I said, “We’ve definitely gone too far.” We went a little further, and then, with Arkin’s permission, I turned the car around.
“This shouldn’t be so hard,” Mark insisted. “It’s what? A two mile stretch? And there’s nothing out here but fields. There should at least be crushed grass from where we pulled over...”
“And from when their car pulled over...” I added.
“And you’d think that someone would have dropped something...”
Nada. Still, when we hit a plausibly familiar site, Arkin had me pull over. We all got out as he and los detectivos inspected. Squatting. Squinting. Meticulously sifting sand.
“This isn’t it,” Mark said.
I agreed.
But the detectives spotted broken glass and eagerly showed it to us.
“This looks like bottle glass,’ I offered.
Mark looked. It was faintly green. “Possibly Coke bottle.”
The detectives nodded and tossed it back on the ground.
We got back in the car. Continued to creep along the narrow road.
“Here?” Arkin would ask.
Mark and I would look.
“No.”
“Here?”
We’d look.
“No.”
“Here?”
“No.”
“Here?”
“No.”
“Here?”
“No.”
It got to be a joke. With the detectives all saying, “Here? Aquí? Here?” And Mark and I repeatedly saying, “No.”
“How can you be sure?” Arkin asked us at one place.
“It just doesn’t feel right,” Mark said.
I considered. “He’s right.”
So we went on.
We’d stop, occasionally.
All get out.
Search.
Drive, frustratingly, on.
“Something’s wrong,” Mark explained. “Is there a second road out of town? A fork we missed.
“Drive more,” Arkin instructed.
So when I got near to town, I did another U-turn.
“Again?” Mark asked.
Arkin said, “Sí.”
I pointed to the odometer. “We’ve gone almost twelve miles... trip after round trip... from town. This morning, it was slightly over one mile. I’m positive.”
Arkin looked at Mark for confirmation. Mark hadn’t checked the odometer. He had only his sense.
“It wasn’t this far,” he agreed.
“Go back again,” Arkin said.
So we crawled. Ever... so... slowly.
“What about there?” Arkin asked.
“No scrub,” Mark said.
“There?” Arkin asked.
“No gully.”
“There?” Arkin urged.
“No weird tree.”
“You remember nothing, Prof?” he asked. He rhymed the last word with loaf.
“We told you. There was a gully. And a weird tree. And endless fields. And there should be broken glass...”
I wanted to add that I was getting claustrophobic from the tightly-packed car. And cross-eyed from the repeated squinting into the sun. Not to mention dizzy from not having anything to drink. But all these things were weaknesses. And Mark and I already hadn’t succeeded in fighting off four puny kids.
So we searched. At one point, the detectives -- with their rifles and ammunition -- had me stop so they could get out and talk with a farmer and his young son. The man might have been in his thirties and the kid around eight. They’d been working in the field and must have wondered why we were driving back and forth. But they’d never come near us. Maybe, because of drug traffic, people in that area knew better than ask questions.
When the detectives came back, they reported to Arkin. He explained to us, “You were here.”
“Sí. We know. Sabemos.”
"No,” he went on. “Aquí.” He pointed at the ground.
Mark and I looked around. There were no familiar landmarks. No tree, gully, or scrub.
“We couldn’t have been,” Mark said.
Arkin pointed at the farmer, waiting across the road. “He saw you.”
I looked at Mark. Who shook his head.
“We didn’t see him,” I told Arkin. “We didn’t see either of them. In fact, if we did, we would’ve asked for help...”
“...or asked where the police were,” Mark went on.
I partly translated. But Arkin kept shaking his head, as if we didn’t understand. He was that sure. “He saw you,” he insisted, pointing to the farmer. Who obligingly nodded.
“When?” Mark pushed on
Arkin asked the detectives, “¿Qué hora?”
The round detective checked his notes. I was surprised he’d taken notes. ¿Ocho?” he quizzed the Aztec.
The second detective agreed.
Mark and I didn’t: “At ocho, we were almost in your office,” I insisted.
“At ocho, we were probably at the gas station,” Mark confirmed.
“You can ask the mechanic there...”
“You can ask the officer directing traffic...”
I was definite: “We’d never have made the drive in half an hour.”
Arkin turned again to his experts. “¿Qué hora?” he repeated.
“Ocho,” they insisted.
We all looked across the road, to the farmer and son.
Who were suddenly gone.
Arkin wiped his forehead. “This is no good.”
He shook his head to the detectives.
They wiped their foreheads.
I had a question: “¿Es importante... encountramos... descubrir... el sitio? Is it so important that we find the right place? It was on this road. Está en la calle.”
Mark asked a question: “Do you need it for your report?”
“Or don’t you believe us?” I added.
Arkin considered what we’d said. Finally, he repeated, “The farmer... el granjero... y su hijo... and his son... they see you...”
We persisted. “They couldn’t have...”
“El hombre dece sí. He says yes,” Arkin said.
“We weren’t here,” Mark countered.
“The farmer...”
Mark started to cut Arkin off again. Then he suddenly stopped. “Finish, por favor,” he told Arkin. Excuse. Habla.”
Arkin smiled. “If the farmer see you,” he said, daring the subjunctive, “we can stop now.” He hesitated. “If no...”
He looked at Mark.
He looked at me.
I looked at Mark.
Mark looked at me
The detectives watched us all. And we all knew the truth.
I drew Mark aside.
“We don’t really want them to find the boys,” I said.
“Not if they’re going to shoot them.”
“Maybe the farmer knows one of them,” I suggested. “Maybe his son is one of them.”
Mark thought about this. We both turned to where the farmer and his son had been standing. But they were still gone. And the boy was too young, anyway. But he could have a brother.
“Then why would he even say we were here?” Mark asked. “He’d want us fifty miles away.”
I had to think. “The woman in the market saw us. Other people saw us there. They know that if the police ask, they’ll have to answer. And who knows what other people will tell the police? What they have to say? Like the farmer saying he saw us at eight o’clock.”
“He probably doesn’t even wear a watch,” Mark offered. “Might not even have a better sense of time than we do now.”
We both thought about this. Then Mark said, “We absolutely weren’t here. This definitely isn’t the spot.”
“Probably nowhere near,” I agreed.
“As long as we both know that.”
We turned to Arkin.
“We stop?” he asked.
“Sí,” Mark said, smiling.
“Absoluto,” I added.
Arkin grinned. “Good. We eat.” He grinned again. “I know the best place. Primo.”
And the five of us piled back into the car. As I pulled onto the road again, the farmer and his son reappeared in my rearview mirror.