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chapter 31
It was mid afternoon when we got back to La Placita, our bonnie glen of the afternoon before. We had another meal in the palm-thatched restaurant, and then paused only long enough to buy oranges in the market place before continuing on our way down the coast and into the unknown. For once MacClayne didn't bother me with questions about the road ahead. Perhaps he was beginning to have more trust in my judgment about the accessibility of this region. We set out walking and hoping to get a ride.
This small isolated valley had dazzled us the afternoon before, and already we were leaving it. We had to get on with our pilgrimage to the fabled city, but there wasn't any schedule we had to keep. What's the rush? I felt like saying, but didn't. MacClayne was a traveler, addicted to the road, and I was beginning to see that his principal interest was what he might find in the next valley. That was how he'd spent his last thirty years--living his own Odyssey, presumably searching for the next bonnie glen.
We were still within sight of the village when we paused to inspect a roadcut which exposed a layer of volcanic ash.
"Quaternary," I said. "Probably deposited during the last 10,000 years."
"Not that long ago, is it? Geologically speaking," MacClayne said. "Could it happen here again?"
"I'm sure it will. Within the next ten thousand years or so."
"Then we'd better be moving on," he said. "We wouldn't want to be caught in an eruption."
There didn't seem to be any volcanoes in the vicinity and I wondered where this ash could've come from. Anyway, I could easily have spent a few hours studying this outcropping, but MacClayne had a short attention span when it came to looking at roadcuts.
A distant figure was approaching us from behind. It turned out to be a bicycle rider, and when he caught up with us, we waved a greeting. He dismounted, and his face lit up when he looked at me.
"Sind Sie Deutsch?" he asked me, apparently thinking he'd found a fellow countryman.
"No, soy de California," I replied. I could have answered in English, which he was just as likely to understand, but I'd heard that Europeans look down on Americans who speak only English.
The cyclist responded in Castilian Spanish, and we began to exchange a traveler's itinerary of where we'd each been and where we were going. He was from Germany, and he'd gone to Alaska to begin his bicycle journey. He was peddling to Patagonia.
"¡Muy lejos!" I said.
"Do you speak English?" MacClayne finally interjected.
He did, and we continued in English for a while, but not for too long, because Patagonia was waiting.
"Patagonia," I said, after the fellow had remounted his bike and gone on. "And we think we've got a long journey ahead of us."
"That's for sure," MacClayne said. "What did he say to you at first?"
"He just asked me if I were German."
"And you understood him."
"Only those few words," I said. "I guess I learned them from a movie or something. I don't speak German. You know that. You saw me reply in Spanish."
"I'm not accusing you of anything."
"No, I understand that."
"You seem to know German. That's an intellectual accomplishment, and I don't understand why you deny it."
"I'm not denying anything," I said.
MacClayne looked at me strangely.
"Excuse me," I said. "I need to sit down."
"Are you okay?"
"Yes! I'm fine." I sat on the grass by the roadside, my face in my hands. My head was swimming.
"Americaner?" The words were ringing through my mind like a line of a song that sticks in one's head. "Americaner? Aber Sie können Deutsch verstehen."
Those were the words of the British major, the one who'd presided over the interrogation one night in that Niflheim of lost sailors and marines.
"Are you okay?" MacClayne was asking. His voice was distant, almost coming from another world. With great effort I turned my face upward and saw his vague form towering above me.
Why do you keep pretending you don't know me? I wanted to say. Night after night you just stand there and say nothing to defend me while your shipmates accuse me of being the German torpedoman. Why don't you speak up and tell them who I am?
"Americaner? Americaner?" I could almost see the British major. I needed to tell him I was American, and I struggled for the words. One by one they came to me, and I assembled them into a sentence: "Ja, Ich bin Americaner!" I almost said that aloud, but no, I sensed there was something horribly wrong with that line.
Then I felt something sharp, and I realized the bird was nudging me with his beak. "Cuauhtémoc," I said in a voice that barely reached a whisper, and I hugged him. Everything started to clear up and I opened my eyes to the sun-lit landscape around me.
"Maybe you'd better lie down," said MacClayne. He'd spread his jacket on the grass for me.
"Thanks, I'll be okay now."
MacClayne eyed me skeptically. "For a minute I thought you might be having a heart attack."
"Me? I'm too young for that!" I almost smiled.
"It can happen to a teen-ager. Were there any chest pains?"
"No. None at all," I protested. But I could see MacClayne looked worried. Should I tell him? For a week now, I'd been wanting to share my bizarre dream with him. I'd even wondered if the two of us might be having the same dream. Perhaps he could clue me in on something that could unlock the mystery, make it stop happening.
"There might be a doctor in the village," he was saying. "You wait here and I'll go--"
"No, it's nothing physical. Nothing medical," I said. "It was a dream, sort of a flashback to a nightmare I keep having."
MacClayne nodded sympathetically and sat down beside me. "If you care to tell me about it, I'm here to listen."
I hesitated a moment. "Did you know a Major Benson?"
"Someone in San Francisco?"
"No. During the war. When you were in the Royal Marines."
MacClayne shook his head, and of course I hadn't really expected him to have known any such person. But a moment later a look of recognition appeared on his face.
XXX SPELLING CORRECTION-- Tighnabruaich XXX
"Ah! Wait a minute! Yes. He was one of the officers when we were doing a special assault course in Tighnabruaich."
I almost gasped in surprise at hearing the man was real.
"Tighnabruaich, on the Kyles of Bute," MacClayne added. "That's in Scotland. A training camp where they sent us. Yes, there was an officer by that name.
"He spoke German?" I said.
"I wouldn't know. He might have. I believe he was in military intelligence."
It often amazed me the way MacClayne seemed able to recall names, facts and even trivia from decades past.
"But what's Major Benson got to do with this?" he wanted to know.
"Major Benson was in my dream."
MacClayne looked taken aback. "I must have mentioned him to you at some time."
"I don't think so," I said. "You've told me very little of your war memories. You don't even write about them."
MacClayne looked away, focusing his gaze on a distant hill across the valley.
"The major seems like a very decent person," I said. "A fatherly type. Kind and considerate. But I wonder what he was really like."
"A bastard."
I smiled to myself. That's what MacClayne always said of officers. He hated every last one of them and I could hardly have expected any other response.
"Well, maybe I shouldn't say that," MacClayne corrected himself. "I didn't know him personally. He was an officer. I was an enlisted man. We belonged to different worlds."
I nodded.
"Years later I saw him again. That was in 1944, after we lost our ship." MacClayne took a deep breath and let it out. "They'd just brought us back to Britain, and were questioning us, those of us who survived."
"What were they trying to find out?"
"Nothing. They just wanted something to put in their report. When a ship is lost they have to give some explanation."
"And that was Major Benson's job?"
"I'm not sure."
"He wasn't the one who questioned you?"
"I only got a glimpse of him. I don't know what he was doing there. Maybe they called him in to interrogate the prisoner. The German torpedoman."
"So the German was captured?" I said.
"I have no idea. It was all rumors and speculation. For all I know, he might have gotten away."
For some moments I sat there in stunned silence. And again I wondered if the two of us might be having the same dream. I'd heard of such a thing, but it seemed so ridiculous that I couldn't bring myself to ask.
"So what does he do in your dream?"
"Huh?" I didn't realize MacClayne was talking to me.
"Major Benson. What does he do or say?"
"He talks to me in German, and sounds very sympathetic. But he's really trying to trip me up, corner me."
"What seems to be his object?"
"To prove that I understand German. And according to his logic, if I understand German, then I must be German, and if I am German, then I must be the guy who sank the ship."
"You remember what he said? His exact words?"
"Of course I do. How could I forget?"
"I take it he speaks German well?"
"Fluently. And his accent is excellent."
MacClayne was again giving me that strange look. "Then I take it you know something about German accents?"
"Only in my dream!" I said. "Only in that dream!"
"I'm only trying to get the facts straight."
My head was starting to swim again. I hugged Cuauhtémoc tightly, and the dizziness passed.
"It wasn't my intention to disturb you. . . . I'm sorry if I . . . Is there anything I can do? . . ." MacClayne was saying.
He seemed slightly disconcerted. Perhaps he was as surprised as I was to discover how closely the content of my dreams fit his memories. I wanted to ask more, but somehow I'd heard enough for now and couldn't handle any more. Not right now.
"I feel like walking," I said, and stood up, a bit unsteadily.
"Maybe we should go back to the hotel in Aquila so you can rest up a bit."
But I insisted that I was fine, and we continued on our way. I began to feel better as we strode along.
There was hardly any traffic. It was a while before we got a short ride which took us out of the small valley and a few kilometers into the hills beyond. Most surprisingly, the good road continued, and after the ride ended, we still found ourselves walking on a blacktop surface. In fact, this road wasn't merely good, the asphalt was fresh, shiny black. Brand new!
"So this is our road to Lázaro," said MacClayne.
"And we expected a horse trail!"
"If it continues, we'll get a smooth ride."
"Talk about luxury!" I said. After a pause I added, "It's also an insult to the pristine environment of this wilderness."
MacClayne sighed. "I guess that's the price of luxury."
I glanced around and noted that the road builders had done a pretty clean job. Except for the road itself, there appeared to be none of the wanton damage to the environment that so often results from such projects.
"It serves a purpose," I said. "Therefore it's less evil."
"We must forgive that which is useful."
We chatted and sometimes laughed as we walked; Cuauhtémoc clucked contentedly. It was hard to believe that only an hour ago I'd been fretting over that dream stuff. That subterranean bunker bar and Major Benson. At this moment I felt I'd left it back in the valley; it was behind me now and I couldn't image it ever happening again. We were stepping into a world of new adventures.
Mountains rose on the left and the ocean surged on the right. We could hear the distant crashing of the breakers, though only faintly, but we couldn't see much of it because of the dense brush.
We took our time, pausing to inspect an outcropping of limestone, then we investigated seed pods on some of the bushes. They were legumes, members of the pea family, apparently varieties of mesquite and acacia. Under the soft green leaves were sharp thorns as long as my little finger.
An occasional nopal cactus also grew here and there. Large trees were rare, but we came to a small grove of three or four with trunks a meter in diameter. Thick vines hung like gnarled ropes from their upper branches.
"They look like what Tarzan used to swing on," I said, and stepped up to give one a try.
MacClayne and Cuauhtémoc watched while I pulled at a thick vine. Did I hear something snap? I wasn't sure, but the vine looked old and perhaps even rotten. I pictured it breaking, dropping me to the ground and maybe even bringing heavy dead limbs crashing down. No, better not, I decided. We continued on.
Except for the decaying leaves and branches on the ground, everything was green. Even the thorn bushes were covered with verdant foliage which hid their spiked branches. But could this be what they called jungle? I'd expected to see large stands of tall trees, not just an occasional one or two here and there. And the cactus didn't seem to belong in a jungle.
"It doesn't look like anything I've seen in a TV documentary."
"You don't think this is a rain forest?" said MacClayne.
"We're not being rained on."
An orange and black spider as large as my hand came walking down the road. I say walking rather than crawling because it was so big.
"Beautiful, isn't it," MacClayne said, and stopped to admire it.
I eyed it skeptically. I never found much beauty in spiders, and this one didn't seem like a cute, cuddly kitten to pet or have crawling around inside my shirt. I picked up Cuauhtémoc before he could investigate the arachnid.
The afternoon was wearing on and it wouldn't be too long till sunset. We began thinking about a place to camp, preferably on the beach. The problem was that with all this brush, we couldn't even see the beach most of the time, let alone get to it. Eventually we came to an arroyo.
"What happened to the road?" MacClayne said.
We were standing on the bank of a ravine, and this was where the pavement inexplicably ended. Below us was a creek bed, and there was no bridge across. The stream wasn't wide and it appeared to be only ankle deep, hardly a serious barrier for anyone on foot. But perhaps this was as far as vehicles got.
"There's tire tracks that seem to go across," I said.
"Let's look for a campsite. We can figure it out in the morning."
A narrow path led down along the creek, and we decided it might take us out to a beach where we could camp. We set out through the thicket of sticker bushes, presumably mesquite and acacia. Their sharp thorns were long, they jabbed like Cuauhtémoc's spurs and reached out into the path to tear at my clothing.
Ocean waves crashed like bombarding naval gunfire in the distance. A few cattle grazed in a clearing we passed. They were Brahmans, the only kind of cattle I'd seen anywhere in Michoacán. They seemed to thrive in the brush.
We continued on for some time.
Up ahead, silhouetted against the sky, were tall, slender coconut palms. The ocean was louder now. Finally we reached the grove of towering palms. It was enclosed by a wooden cattle fence which was thickly inter-grown with thorn bushes that made it a formidable obstacle. We found an opening and squeezed through. The ground inside had been cleared of brush, and the palms were aligned in rows, apparently having been planted that way. There must have been fifty or perhaps even a hundred trees; they appeared to be well tended.
Till this moment, coconut trees were something I'd only read about in stories set in the South Pacific, mostly books relating battles of World War II such as Guadalcanal Diary. My uncle Rolf had been one of the US Marines who fought at Guadalcanal, and he'd also told me of it. Those were among the stories I'd grown up with. Many of those battles were fought in coconut groves, presumably much like this one. Snipers concealed themselves in the foliage at the crests. I stepped up to a palm and felt it with my hand. The bark was reasonably smooth. Then I eyed the crest high above me and wondered how a sniper could sit in such a place and shoot a rifle.
"Just look at those coconuts," MacClayne was saying. There were clusters of them at the top.
"I read that South Sea islanders climb these trees to pick the coconuts. I always wanted to try that myself."
"Here's your opportunity."
I chose a suitable tree and began my ascent, but I got less than a meter above the ground. I couldn't get a good grip and I kept sliding back down. Apparently there was a technique to this that required some training. Maybe I'd try again later.
"Let's go out on the beach," MacClayne said.
"Where is it?"
"I think we're right next to it."
From one side of us came the sounds of the ocean, and there it was, separated from the grove we were in by another stretch of cow fence intergrown with the thorn bushes. Here too, we found a small gap which we climbed through, and stepped out onto a rocky beach.
The sun hovered close to the horizon, glowing red now. But we didn't have time to watch it set; we had to find a camping place. There was plenty of driftwood for a fire, so we could have camped out here. But the breakers were terribly noisy, deafening.
We returned to the grove. It was much quieter inside; the dense mesquite made a good sound muffler. Piles of branches lay here and there. We could camp near one and use it for firewood.
MacClayne tried to knock coconuts down by throwing sticks at them. He did manage to hit one, but it didn't drop. So we scrounged for windfalls. MacClayne found one which had some milk in it, but there wasn't much white meat. We looked for more, but suddenly we realized it was getting hard to see. There were still a few minutes of twilight left, and we quickly picked out our campsite, right next to a large pile of branches.
The pile consisted not only of branches but also of palm fronds and even small logs of mesquite. All of these were dry, apparently having been cut some time ago. MacClayne watched as I selected a bunch of leaves and twigs, carefully arranged them into a small structure, and then lit the fire with a single match. Within minutes, our campfire was burning brightly.
Cuauhtémoc was scratching furiously at the ground where I was about to sit. Then he moved on, diligently working his way around the campfire, then gave lengthy attention to our wood pile. From time to time he'd find something which he'd attack with his beak, pecking it furiously.
"What's he doing?" MacClayne said.
I shook my head. "I've never seen him work like that before."
"Digging for roots, perhaps?"
"Must be," I said.
In spite of the light from our fire, the area close to the ground where Cuauhtémoc was working was in dark shadows, and I couldn't make out what he was finding. We watched him for a while; he seemed to be doing a very thorough job.
"He sees in the dark," MacClayne observed.
"Cuauhtémoc has excellent night vision," I said, "and he's something of a night owl. That has always puzzled me because chickens are reputed to go to bed with the sun."
"It does seem unusual."
Eventually the bird finished up and came back to perch on a small log by my side. I shared bits of an orange with him. The evening was mild. MacClayne and I sat on the bare ground by the blazing fire, enjoying the pleasantly muffled sound of the ocean. A breeze rustled gently through the coconut palms above us.
As people traditionally do around campfires, we told stories and exchanged experiences. MacClayne recalled his days in the Canary Islands, and told of his escape from the rain and cold of Scotland. He suddenly stopped in mid sentence, then said, with a twinkle, "This is almost February, isn't it?"
"Almost," I said wryly. "In just another two or three months."
"My countrymen will be holding what we call Burns' Suppers to honor our national poet with dishes of haggis."
"Exactly what is haggis?" I said. "I've heard you mention it so often in your stories and poems."
"It's a horrid, beastly, meat pudding baked in the paunch of a sheep and containing liver, lights, kidneys, and probably even the wool and tusks. But of course everyone who can afford it consumes so much whisky that nobody knows the difference."
"They have a dish like that here in México too," I said. "Menudo. It's a soup they make out of boiled sheep's intestines, and it's considered a great delicacy. In fact they had some at don Pablo's the week before you arrived."
"How did you like it?"
"I didn't stay for supper that night."
MacClayne chuckled sympathetically.
"Do they read poetry at a Burns' Supper?" I asked.
"They do. They do. More than you'd ever want to hear."
"In that case," I said, "with oranges filling in so nicely for the haggis, this might be an opportune moment to honor Robert Burns with a recital of his verses."
MacClayne knew those poems well, some by heart, and he began with Tay a Moos, reciting it in Broad Scots:
Wee, sleekit, coo'ring, tim'rous beastie,
oh what panic's in thy breastie.
. . .
Cuauhtémoc sat by my side, cocking his head from side to side in keeping with the rhythm of the verses as MacClayne recited stanza after stanza.
The poem was among those he'd recited often, and also the one I enjoyed most. It tells of a farmer who has unintentionally ploughed up and destroyed the nest of a field mouse. The ploughman expresses sympathy with the little animal who's now homeless despite her preparations for the coming winter. He then gives some philosophical speculation:
But Moosie, thou art no thy lane
in proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
gang aft a-gley
. . .
"So much for foresight," I said when he finished. "But in those verses I also hear the voice of a man who cared about the well-being of a tiny field mouse. He expresses a reverence for life that's almost Buddhist."
"He was certainly ahead of his time, and very down to earth as well," said MacClayne. "I think he was born in 1759."
"Since we're talking about Scotland, let me ask about terminology," I said. "Do you say Scot or Scotch?"
"Scot. Scotsman," he said. "Scotch is the whisky. They make a big deal that you should never say Scotchman. Yet even Scots themselves do this. In my family if a girl was going with a man the first thing they would ask was 'Is he Scotch?' 'Is she Scotch?' Correct form? Scot, Scotsman. So in a peculiar way it becomes like an in-joke. Though as far as I personally am concerned it merely indicates the general frugality of the intellect. Not mind you that I wish to be mistaken as some kind of a snob."
"Would it be okay if I just said Scotlander?" I said. "It's less confusing."
"Call us what you like. Scotland, to me, and the numerous homegrown liars who write about it do in truth cause nothing but groaning and wailing and gnashing. I remember at a Scottish pub in San Francisco where the Scots congregate on New Year's Eve, I was told to either be hushed in my speech or else outrightly lie when I got on the subject of the boorishness and spinelessness and nobility worship of so many of my jolly country-fellows. When I mentioned John Calvin, well into my cups, and my negative views getting into full voice, they moved away."
I added more wood to the fire, including a log that promised to last a while.
"It is not uncommon in Scotland during normal address for someone to say to you: 'See you tomorrow then, if we are spared.' Can you believe that 'if we are spared' horseshit? Or if you mention in passing the good and rare quality of the sunny day you may get a response like 'Yes. But we will pay for it.'
". . . And in Glasgow," MacClayne was saying, "unless you are a soccer fan and pursue the Glasgow Rangers or Celtics you may well run out of conversation."
I nodded. It's sad, I thought to myself. But isn't it the same everywhere? Well, perhaps MacClayne wanted Scotland to be different.
"They celebrate Robby Burns, but while they are battering you over the head with his greatness there is not one in twenty who has ever read him other than forcibly at school, nor one in two thousand who could recite one of his poems. Ask any one of them where 'O wad some power the giftie gie us' is from, and they will tell you they have to look it up. All they could ever look up is what horse is running in the fifth race and what his jockey's colours are."
I yawned. It was getting late. Even Cuauhtémoc had put his head under his wing and dozed off.
"But enough! Enough! You will forgive me if I say too much," MacClayne said at last. "I guess you know that any mention of the Scottish establishment leaves me with cause for a deep, enormous, stupefying and overwhelming groan."
We had no camping gear, not even blankets. I laid my jacket on the ground, and before going to sleep I said, "See you tomorrow, if we are spared."
Several times during the night I woke up shivering, with Burn's poetry ringing through my head. Each time, I added a few sticks to the fire and went back to sleep. Eventually I was in a dream where I found myself at a poetry recital:
Wee, sleekit, coo'ring, tim'rous . . .
A lad in the uniform of the Royal Marines was reading those lines while I sat huddled at a table in the corner of the chilly bunker. Beside me was Wendy, drinking beer, and across the table sat Major Benson with a good-natured smile on his face.
"Verstehen Sie?" the major was saying, and this time when I woke up, it was his voice ringing in my head: "Verstehen Sie?"
continued in Chapter 32
This small isolated valley had dazzled us the afternoon before, and already we were leaving it. We had to get on with our pilgrimage to the fabled city, but there wasn't any schedule we had to keep. What's the rush? I felt like saying, but didn't. MacClayne was a traveler, addicted to the road, and I was beginning to see that his principal interest was what he might find in the next valley. That was how he'd spent his last thirty years--living his own Odyssey, presumably searching for the next bonnie glen.
We were still within sight of the village when we paused to inspect a roadcut which exposed a layer of volcanic ash.
"Quaternary," I said. "Probably deposited during the last 10,000 years."
"Not that long ago, is it? Geologically speaking," MacClayne said. "Could it happen here again?"
"I'm sure it will. Within the next ten thousand years or so."
"Then we'd better be moving on," he said. "We wouldn't want to be caught in an eruption."
There didn't seem to be any volcanoes in the vicinity and I wondered where this ash could've come from. Anyway, I could easily have spent a few hours studying this outcropping, but MacClayne had a short attention span when it came to looking at roadcuts.
A distant figure was approaching us from behind. It turned out to be a bicycle rider, and when he caught up with us, we waved a greeting. He dismounted, and his face lit up when he looked at me.
"Sind Sie Deutsch?" he asked me, apparently thinking he'd found a fellow countryman.
"No, soy de California," I replied. I could have answered in English, which he was just as likely to understand, but I'd heard that Europeans look down on Americans who speak only English.
The cyclist responded in Castilian Spanish, and we began to exchange a traveler's itinerary of where we'd each been and where we were going. He was from Germany, and he'd gone to Alaska to begin his bicycle journey. He was peddling to Patagonia.
"¡Muy lejos!" I said.
"Do you speak English?" MacClayne finally interjected.
He did, and we continued in English for a while, but not for too long, because Patagonia was waiting.
"Patagonia," I said, after the fellow had remounted his bike and gone on. "And we think we've got a long journey ahead of us."
"That's for sure," MacClayne said. "What did he say to you at first?"
"He just asked me if I were German."
"And you understood him."
"Only those few words," I said. "I guess I learned them from a movie or something. I don't speak German. You know that. You saw me reply in Spanish."
"I'm not accusing you of anything."
"No, I understand that."
"You seem to know German. That's an intellectual accomplishment, and I don't understand why you deny it."
"I'm not denying anything," I said.
MacClayne looked at me strangely.
"Excuse me," I said. "I need to sit down."
"Are you okay?"
"Yes! I'm fine." I sat on the grass by the roadside, my face in my hands. My head was swimming.
"Americaner?" The words were ringing through my mind like a line of a song that sticks in one's head. "Americaner? Aber Sie können Deutsch verstehen."
Those were the words of the British major, the one who'd presided over the interrogation one night in that Niflheim of lost sailors and marines.
"Are you okay?" MacClayne was asking. His voice was distant, almost coming from another world. With great effort I turned my face upward and saw his vague form towering above me.
Why do you keep pretending you don't know me? I wanted to say. Night after night you just stand there and say nothing to defend me while your shipmates accuse me of being the German torpedoman. Why don't you speak up and tell them who I am?
"Americaner? Americaner?" I could almost see the British major. I needed to tell him I was American, and I struggled for the words. One by one they came to me, and I assembled them into a sentence: "Ja, Ich bin Americaner!" I almost said that aloud, but no, I sensed there was something horribly wrong with that line.
Then I felt something sharp, and I realized the bird was nudging me with his beak. "Cuauhtémoc," I said in a voice that barely reached a whisper, and I hugged him. Everything started to clear up and I opened my eyes to the sun-lit landscape around me.
"Maybe you'd better lie down," said MacClayne. He'd spread his jacket on the grass for me.
"Thanks, I'll be okay now."
MacClayne eyed me skeptically. "For a minute I thought you might be having a heart attack."
"Me? I'm too young for that!" I almost smiled.
"It can happen to a teen-ager. Were there any chest pains?"
"No. None at all," I protested. But I could see MacClayne looked worried. Should I tell him? For a week now, I'd been wanting to share my bizarre dream with him. I'd even wondered if the two of us might be having the same dream. Perhaps he could clue me in on something that could unlock the mystery, make it stop happening.
"There might be a doctor in the village," he was saying. "You wait here and I'll go--"
"No, it's nothing physical. Nothing medical," I said. "It was a dream, sort of a flashback to a nightmare I keep having."
MacClayne nodded sympathetically and sat down beside me. "If you care to tell me about it, I'm here to listen."
I hesitated a moment. "Did you know a Major Benson?"
"Someone in San Francisco?"
"No. During the war. When you were in the Royal Marines."
MacClayne shook his head, and of course I hadn't really expected him to have known any such person. But a moment later a look of recognition appeared on his face.
XXX SPELLING CORRECTION-- Tighnabruaich XXX
"Ah! Wait a minute! Yes. He was one of the officers when we were doing a special assault course in Tighnabruaich."
I almost gasped in surprise at hearing the man was real.
"Tighnabruaich, on the Kyles of Bute," MacClayne added. "That's in Scotland. A training camp where they sent us. Yes, there was an officer by that name.
"He spoke German?" I said.
"I wouldn't know. He might have. I believe he was in military intelligence."
It often amazed me the way MacClayne seemed able to recall names, facts and even trivia from decades past.
"But what's Major Benson got to do with this?" he wanted to know.
"Major Benson was in my dream."
MacClayne looked taken aback. "I must have mentioned him to you at some time."
"I don't think so," I said. "You've told me very little of your war memories. You don't even write about them."
MacClayne looked away, focusing his gaze on a distant hill across the valley.
"The major seems like a very decent person," I said. "A fatherly type. Kind and considerate. But I wonder what he was really like."
"A bastard."
I smiled to myself. That's what MacClayne always said of officers. He hated every last one of them and I could hardly have expected any other response.
"Well, maybe I shouldn't say that," MacClayne corrected himself. "I didn't know him personally. He was an officer. I was an enlisted man. We belonged to different worlds."
I nodded.
"Years later I saw him again. That was in 1944, after we lost our ship." MacClayne took a deep breath and let it out. "They'd just brought us back to Britain, and were questioning us, those of us who survived."
"What were they trying to find out?"
"Nothing. They just wanted something to put in their report. When a ship is lost they have to give some explanation."
"And that was Major Benson's job?"
"I'm not sure."
"He wasn't the one who questioned you?"
"I only got a glimpse of him. I don't know what he was doing there. Maybe they called him in to interrogate the prisoner. The German torpedoman."
"So the German was captured?" I said.
"I have no idea. It was all rumors and speculation. For all I know, he might have gotten away."
For some moments I sat there in stunned silence. And again I wondered if the two of us might be having the same dream. I'd heard of such a thing, but it seemed so ridiculous that I couldn't bring myself to ask.
"So what does he do in your dream?"
"Huh?" I didn't realize MacClayne was talking to me.
"Major Benson. What does he do or say?"
"He talks to me in German, and sounds very sympathetic. But he's really trying to trip me up, corner me."
"What seems to be his object?"
"To prove that I understand German. And according to his logic, if I understand German, then I must be German, and if I am German, then I must be the guy who sank the ship."
"You remember what he said? His exact words?"
"Of course I do. How could I forget?"
"I take it he speaks German well?"
"Fluently. And his accent is excellent."
MacClayne was again giving me that strange look. "Then I take it you know something about German accents?"
"Only in my dream!" I said. "Only in that dream!"
"I'm only trying to get the facts straight."
My head was starting to swim again. I hugged Cuauhtémoc tightly, and the dizziness passed.
"It wasn't my intention to disturb you. . . . I'm sorry if I . . . Is there anything I can do? . . ." MacClayne was saying.
He seemed slightly disconcerted. Perhaps he was as surprised as I was to discover how closely the content of my dreams fit his memories. I wanted to ask more, but somehow I'd heard enough for now and couldn't handle any more. Not right now.
"I feel like walking," I said, and stood up, a bit unsteadily.
"Maybe we should go back to the hotel in Aquila so you can rest up a bit."
But I insisted that I was fine, and we continued on our way. I began to feel better as we strode along.
There was hardly any traffic. It was a while before we got a short ride which took us out of the small valley and a few kilometers into the hills beyond. Most surprisingly, the good road continued, and after the ride ended, we still found ourselves walking on a blacktop surface. In fact, this road wasn't merely good, the asphalt was fresh, shiny black. Brand new!
"So this is our road to Lázaro," said MacClayne.
"And we expected a horse trail!"
"If it continues, we'll get a smooth ride."
"Talk about luxury!" I said. After a pause I added, "It's also an insult to the pristine environment of this wilderness."
MacClayne sighed. "I guess that's the price of luxury."
I glanced around and noted that the road builders had done a pretty clean job. Except for the road itself, there appeared to be none of the wanton damage to the environment that so often results from such projects.
"It serves a purpose," I said. "Therefore it's less evil."
"We must forgive that which is useful."
We chatted and sometimes laughed as we walked; Cuauhtémoc clucked contentedly. It was hard to believe that only an hour ago I'd been fretting over that dream stuff. That subterranean bunker bar and Major Benson. At this moment I felt I'd left it back in the valley; it was behind me now and I couldn't image it ever happening again. We were stepping into a world of new adventures.
Mountains rose on the left and the ocean surged on the right. We could hear the distant crashing of the breakers, though only faintly, but we couldn't see much of it because of the dense brush.
We took our time, pausing to inspect an outcropping of limestone, then we investigated seed pods on some of the bushes. They were legumes, members of the pea family, apparently varieties of mesquite and acacia. Under the soft green leaves were sharp thorns as long as my little finger.
An occasional nopal cactus also grew here and there. Large trees were rare, but we came to a small grove of three or four with trunks a meter in diameter. Thick vines hung like gnarled ropes from their upper branches.
"They look like what Tarzan used to swing on," I said, and stepped up to give one a try.
MacClayne and Cuauhtémoc watched while I pulled at a thick vine. Did I hear something snap? I wasn't sure, but the vine looked old and perhaps even rotten. I pictured it breaking, dropping me to the ground and maybe even bringing heavy dead limbs crashing down. No, better not, I decided. We continued on.
Except for the decaying leaves and branches on the ground, everything was green. Even the thorn bushes were covered with verdant foliage which hid their spiked branches. But could this be what they called jungle? I'd expected to see large stands of tall trees, not just an occasional one or two here and there. And the cactus didn't seem to belong in a jungle.
"It doesn't look like anything I've seen in a TV documentary."
"You don't think this is a rain forest?" said MacClayne.
"We're not being rained on."
An orange and black spider as large as my hand came walking down the road. I say walking rather than crawling because it was so big.
"Beautiful, isn't it," MacClayne said, and stopped to admire it.
I eyed it skeptically. I never found much beauty in spiders, and this one didn't seem like a cute, cuddly kitten to pet or have crawling around inside my shirt. I picked up Cuauhtémoc before he could investigate the arachnid.
The afternoon was wearing on and it wouldn't be too long till sunset. We began thinking about a place to camp, preferably on the beach. The problem was that with all this brush, we couldn't even see the beach most of the time, let alone get to it. Eventually we came to an arroyo.
"What happened to the road?" MacClayne said.
We were standing on the bank of a ravine, and this was where the pavement inexplicably ended. Below us was a creek bed, and there was no bridge across. The stream wasn't wide and it appeared to be only ankle deep, hardly a serious barrier for anyone on foot. But perhaps this was as far as vehicles got.
"There's tire tracks that seem to go across," I said.
"Let's look for a campsite. We can figure it out in the morning."
A narrow path led down along the creek, and we decided it might take us out to a beach where we could camp. We set out through the thicket of sticker bushes, presumably mesquite and acacia. Their sharp thorns were long, they jabbed like Cuauhtémoc's spurs and reached out into the path to tear at my clothing.
Ocean waves crashed like bombarding naval gunfire in the distance. A few cattle grazed in a clearing we passed. They were Brahmans, the only kind of cattle I'd seen anywhere in Michoacán. They seemed to thrive in the brush.
We continued on for some time.
Up ahead, silhouetted against the sky, were tall, slender coconut palms. The ocean was louder now. Finally we reached the grove of towering palms. It was enclosed by a wooden cattle fence which was thickly inter-grown with thorn bushes that made it a formidable obstacle. We found an opening and squeezed through. The ground inside had been cleared of brush, and the palms were aligned in rows, apparently having been planted that way. There must have been fifty or perhaps even a hundred trees; they appeared to be well tended.
Till this moment, coconut trees were something I'd only read about in stories set in the South Pacific, mostly books relating battles of World War II such as Guadalcanal Diary. My uncle Rolf had been one of the US Marines who fought at Guadalcanal, and he'd also told me of it. Those were among the stories I'd grown up with. Many of those battles were fought in coconut groves, presumably much like this one. Snipers concealed themselves in the foliage at the crests. I stepped up to a palm and felt it with my hand. The bark was reasonably smooth. Then I eyed the crest high above me and wondered how a sniper could sit in such a place and shoot a rifle.
"Just look at those coconuts," MacClayne was saying. There were clusters of them at the top.
"I read that South Sea islanders climb these trees to pick the coconuts. I always wanted to try that myself."
"Here's your opportunity."
I chose a suitable tree and began my ascent, but I got less than a meter above the ground. I couldn't get a good grip and I kept sliding back down. Apparently there was a technique to this that required some training. Maybe I'd try again later.
"Let's go out on the beach," MacClayne said.
"Where is it?"
"I think we're right next to it."
From one side of us came the sounds of the ocean, and there it was, separated from the grove we were in by another stretch of cow fence intergrown with the thorn bushes. Here too, we found a small gap which we climbed through, and stepped out onto a rocky beach.
The sun hovered close to the horizon, glowing red now. But we didn't have time to watch it set; we had to find a camping place. There was plenty of driftwood for a fire, so we could have camped out here. But the breakers were terribly noisy, deafening.
We returned to the grove. It was much quieter inside; the dense mesquite made a good sound muffler. Piles of branches lay here and there. We could camp near one and use it for firewood.
MacClayne tried to knock coconuts down by throwing sticks at them. He did manage to hit one, but it didn't drop. So we scrounged for windfalls. MacClayne found one which had some milk in it, but there wasn't much white meat. We looked for more, but suddenly we realized it was getting hard to see. There were still a few minutes of twilight left, and we quickly picked out our campsite, right next to a large pile of branches.
The pile consisted not only of branches but also of palm fronds and even small logs of mesquite. All of these were dry, apparently having been cut some time ago. MacClayne watched as I selected a bunch of leaves and twigs, carefully arranged them into a small structure, and then lit the fire with a single match. Within minutes, our campfire was burning brightly.
Cuauhtémoc was scratching furiously at the ground where I was about to sit. Then he moved on, diligently working his way around the campfire, then gave lengthy attention to our wood pile. From time to time he'd find something which he'd attack with his beak, pecking it furiously.
"What's he doing?" MacClayne said.
I shook my head. "I've never seen him work like that before."
"Digging for roots, perhaps?"
"Must be," I said.
In spite of the light from our fire, the area close to the ground where Cuauhtémoc was working was in dark shadows, and I couldn't make out what he was finding. We watched him for a while; he seemed to be doing a very thorough job.
"He sees in the dark," MacClayne observed.
"Cuauhtémoc has excellent night vision," I said, "and he's something of a night owl. That has always puzzled me because chickens are reputed to go to bed with the sun."
"It does seem unusual."
Eventually the bird finished up and came back to perch on a small log by my side. I shared bits of an orange with him. The evening was mild. MacClayne and I sat on the bare ground by the blazing fire, enjoying the pleasantly muffled sound of the ocean. A breeze rustled gently through the coconut palms above us.
As people traditionally do around campfires, we told stories and exchanged experiences. MacClayne recalled his days in the Canary Islands, and told of his escape from the rain and cold of Scotland. He suddenly stopped in mid sentence, then said, with a twinkle, "This is almost February, isn't it?"
"Almost," I said wryly. "In just another two or three months."
"My countrymen will be holding what we call Burns' Suppers to honor our national poet with dishes of haggis."
"Exactly what is haggis?" I said. "I've heard you mention it so often in your stories and poems."
"It's a horrid, beastly, meat pudding baked in the paunch of a sheep and containing liver, lights, kidneys, and probably even the wool and tusks. But of course everyone who can afford it consumes so much whisky that nobody knows the difference."
"They have a dish like that here in México too," I said. "Menudo. It's a soup they make out of boiled sheep's intestines, and it's considered a great delicacy. In fact they had some at don Pablo's the week before you arrived."
"How did you like it?"
"I didn't stay for supper that night."
MacClayne chuckled sympathetically.
"Do they read poetry at a Burns' Supper?" I asked.
"They do. They do. More than you'd ever want to hear."
"In that case," I said, "with oranges filling in so nicely for the haggis, this might be an opportune moment to honor Robert Burns with a recital of his verses."
MacClayne knew those poems well, some by heart, and he began with Tay a Moos,
Wee, sleekit, coo'ring, tim'rous beastie,
oh what panic's in thy breastie.
. . .
Cuauhtémoc sat by my side, cocking his head from side to side in keeping with the rhythm of the verses as MacClayne recited stanza after stanza.
The poem was among those he'd recited often, and also the one I enjoyed most. It tells of a farmer who has unintentionally ploughed up and destroyed the nest of a field mouse. The ploughman expresses sympathy with the little animal who's now homeless despite her preparations for the coming winter. He then gives some philosophical speculation:
But Moosie, thou art no thy lane
in proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
gang aft a-gley
. . .
"So much for foresight," I said when he finished. "But in those verses I also hear the voice of a man who cared about the well-being of a tiny field mouse. He expresses a reverence for life that's almost Buddhist."
"He was certainly ahead of his time, and very down to earth as well," said MacClayne. "I think he was born in 1759."
"Since we're talking about Scotland, let me ask about terminology," I said. "Do you say Scot or Scotch?"
"Scot. Scotsman," he said. "Scotch is the whisky. They make a big deal that you should never say Scotchman. Yet even Scots themselves do this. In my family if a girl was going with a man the first thing they would ask was 'Is he Scotch?' 'Is she Scotch?' Correct form? Scot, Scotsman. So in a peculiar way it becomes like an in-joke. Though as far as I personally am concerned it merely indicates the general frugality of the intellect. Not mind you that I wish to be mistaken as some kind of a snob."
"Would it be okay if I just said Scotlander?" I said. "It's less confusing."
"Call us what you like. Scotland, to me, and the numerous homegrown liars who write about it do in truth cause nothing but groaning and wailing and gnashing. I remember at a Scottish pub in San Francisco where the Scots congregate on New Year's Eve, I was told to either be hushed in my speech or else outrightly lie when I got on the subject of the boorishness and spinelessness and nobility worship of so many of my jolly country-fellows. When I mentioned John Calvin, well into my cups, and my negative views getting into full voice, they moved away."
I added more wood to the fire, including a log that promised to last a while.
"It is not uncommon in Scotland during normal address for someone to say to you: 'See you tomorrow then, if we are spared.' Can you believe that 'if we are spared' horseshit? Or if you mention in passing the good and rare quality of the sunny day you may get a response like 'Yes. But we will pay for it.'
". . . And in Glasgow," MacClayne was saying, "unless you are a soccer fan and pursue the Glasgow Rangers or Celtics you may well run out of conversation."
I nodded. It's sad, I thought to myself. But isn't it the same everywhere? Well, perhaps MacClayne wanted Scotland to be different.
"They celebrate Robby Burns, but while they are battering you over the head with his greatness there is not one in twenty who has ever read him other than forcibly at school, nor one in two thousand who could recite one of his poems. Ask any one of them where 'O wad some power the giftie gie us' is from, and they will tell you they have to look it up. All they could ever look up is what horse is running in the fifth race and what his jockey's colours are."
I yawned. It was getting late. Even Cuauhtémoc had put his head under his wing and dozed off.
"But enough! Enough! You will forgive me if I say too much," MacClayne said at last. "I guess you know that any mention of the Scottish establishment leaves me with cause for a deep, enormous, stupefying and overwhelming groan."
We had no camping gear, not even blankets. I laid my jacket on the ground, and before going to sleep I said, "See you tomorrow, if we are spared."
Several times during the night I woke up shivering, with Burn's poetry ringing through my head. Each time, I added a few sticks to the fire and went back to sleep. Eventually I was in a dream where I found myself at a poetry recital:
Wee, sleekit, coo'ring, tim'rous . . .
A lad in the uniform of the Royal Marines was reading those lines while I sat huddled at a table in the corner of the chilly bunker. Beside me was Wendy, drinking beer, and across the table sat Major Benson with a good-natured smile on his face.
"Verstehen Sie?" the major was saying, and this time when I woke up, it was his voice ringing in my head: "Verstehen Sie?"
continued in Chapter 32
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