Around the first part of May, then, after we’d discussed it, I went and had a talk with Arthur Gold about going to Mexico. Mr. Gold encouraged it. He said the drives were stepping up. Now that they had what they called evidence on Mr. Shepherd from the hearing, it was paperwork and only that, before criminal charges came. With an indictment the federal men would take his passport. Really Mr. Gold was unsure why they hadn’t done so already. He said Mr. Shepherd should go now, while he still could.
I hated to ask it, but inquired whether it would be wise for him just to go on down to Mexico and stay put. Mr. Gold allowed that he and Mr. Shepherd had discussed this already, some time ago. It wouldn’t do any good. The federal investigators can pull him right back here, once they have indicted. Mr. Gold said there were many examples. A man escaped from Ellis Island by stowing away on a ship, and they tracked him down all the way to France. They’ll go to the ends of the earth to haul back people they’ve declared unfit to be Americans. It makes no sense. Like hateful letters from people declaring they’ll never read Mr. Shepherd’s books. Why not leave the book where it is and get on with the day? I didn’t see how they could take another pound of flesh from this poor man, when all he’d done in life was work at making others content. Mr. Gold said with due respect, a lot of men without one mean bone in them are currently sitting in Sing Sing prison. And now the Congress was voting to make treason laws bind in cold war as they do in a shooting war. Meaning, some would hang.
Well, that lit a fire under me. I went on and booked the tickets and made the plans. Mr. Gold advised reserving the tickets under a different name, the film stars do that regularly. Then simply give the right name when you show up. I chose Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross. Mr. Shepherd was tickled with that. He began to take interest. He stopped smoking all the time and went outside more. They opened the swimming pool in Montford after two summers closed for the polio, and he started to go there often. He’d loved swimming as a boy. I would walk to the pool with him sometimes just to sit and watch, for he was changed in the water, shiny as soap, and could hold his breath like I don’t know what. I want to say a fish, but that isn’t right. He’d go the whole pool, one end to the other not coming up. I asked him about it, and he said his childhood was that exciting: he learned to hold his breath for entertainment.
The flight was on the Compañia Mexicana de Aviación. In Mexico City, on the way to the train station, we got caught up in an awful traffic jam. Suitcases between us in the taxicab and the sweat rolling down, for we had to keep the windows closed, the city entire smelled of tear gas. The driver told Mr. Shepherd a riot had been going for days, working men, and police trying to break it up. Mr. Shepherd said good, they’ve still got fight in them here, and while we sat stuck there he told a story of long ago, his school years in Washington. The homeless veterans making a riot for their war pay. He said it smelled like this. The army used gas and guns against people living in tents, Americans. And those folks still yet bold enough to give it heck, fight back or die trying.
We took the train to Veracruz, then a bus, and a ferry. Like the sailors with Columbus, I felt we’d soon come to the edge and plop off. Mr. Shepherd said his mother used to complain Isla Pixol was so far from anything, you had to yell three times before Jesus would hear you. That I believed. The hotel in town was old as Moses, its elevator nothing but a cage on a chain. The boy that carried our suitcases into it claimed it was the oldest in all the New World, and I believed that too.
First off, Mr. Shepherd hired a car to take us out to the old hacienda where he had lived. The old place lay in ruins, but he didn’t seem disappointed. He went back many more times, often alone. I found my way around the little town and shopped for trinkets to bring my niece and the babies. One day Mr. Shepherd came back with a man who had supper with us, the two of them slapping one another’s shoulders, saying “brother” and “the devil.” Each unable to believe the other was still alive. Leandro was his name. There were others in the village, evidently, who remembered the boy with no inkling he now walked the earth as a man of repute, or even as a man.
All Mr. Shepherd wanted to do was dive in the water. I wanted no part of that, but to hear him tell it, the ocean was heaven and all the fish angels. He had a diving mask he’d bought in town, and needed nothing else, he’d stay out the day entire and come back sunburned. I thought he would grow some gills. More and more he returned to the fishes, leaving the world of people, it seemed. One evening he came to dinner with a calendar and showed me a day he’d circled, some two weeks off. He wanted to stay until then. Well, that meant changing our return, no small thing. I wasn’t very pleased. I’d begged time off unpaid from Raye’s, and they would be happy to replace me. I asked if he meant to change it again after that. Like a child putting off the bedtime. He said no, that was the day, after the full moon. That meant something to him.
On our last day, he got himself set to go out to his beach and wanted me to come. I didn’t mind sitting on the shore with a book. I’d done so before. But once there, he began to act peculiar. A slew of little boys came by, and he told them in Spanish he’d pay them money to come watch him dive, just to see how long he could stay under. These fellows looked like they’d take his coin to watch him whistle Dixie if that’s what he wanted, so off we all did troop down a path through the bushes.
The place he meant to go diving was a little cove with cliffs behind it and a strip of shore growing smaller by the minute, as the tide came up. The morning was getting on, and he seemed impatient to go in the water. The tide was still low but coming in right fast, eating up that little beach as it came. I wondered how long he’d expect me to stay there. I don’t know what he said before wading in. I paid no heed. Probably I was a little put out with him. I had my book. But after a while I looked out at the water and didn’t see him. I waited. Then counted to fifty, then one hundred. I didn’t see any way he could have left the cove. And it struck me: he’s drowned. Those little boys knew it too, standing in their group, for they were not looking at the water anymore, but at me. They seemed to think it was up to me now, to fix what had gone wrong.
Did I scream? That isn’t my way, so I don’t think so. I’m sure I stood up, threw down the book, and moved about. I remember thinking I couldn’t go in the water because it would wreck my shoes. So it hadn’t soaked in yet, that life had set down here before me a far worse thing than wrecked shoes. Or anything else I’d thus far known. It’s true I lost a husband in the flood of the French Broad River in ’16, Freddy Brown, and that broke a young girl’s heart. But this was worse. My heart had grown older, with more in it to break. I can’t put words to that afternoon. He would know words for the feelings I bore, but I only knew the feelings.