Dress Her in Indigo Read Online Free PDF Page B

looked at the city and the mountains and the blue, blue sky. He looked at the flowers. He sniffed the flavors of the summery air: Then he turned to me and said,
    "I would have this handy little magic wand and I would take one little pass at you. Kazam!
    Suddenly you are Miranda Dale, looking at me like she looked at Ron Townsend."
    "Didn't all those legs make you feel insecure?"
    "And so did the age of the child. But this is the sort of place where I could try to overcome minor obstacles."
    "You are a hairy, over-educated, lecherous old man."

Page 14
    "Flattery will get you nowhere, McGee. It's eleven-fifteen. What now?"
    "Our wheels." We took a cab down into the city. The Hertz office was on a side street near the zocalo-the public square. The man was pleasant enough, but had absolutely no record of any reservation. He would have a lot of nice cars soon. Maybe in a week. He said he felt desolated by being unable to serve me. I said I would like to give him a four-dollar bill to ease his desolation. It was not to spur him to greater effort on my behalf, I said, because I was certain he would give me every possible help. It was a token of my understanding. He said there was, in truth, a car, but it would be a pity to rent it to me, because I obviously was used to better, and deserved better. It had been many, many kilometros and needed small repairs and was unclean.
    A boy with a Le Mans psychosis brought it around.
    It was a Ford Falcon, from the Guadalajara assem bly plant. Made in Mexico by Mexicans. Pale green. Four doors. Standard shift. It had been thirty-five thousand kilometers, and had been grooved on both sides by near disaster. And it had been traveling some very dusty roads. I signed for it. I took it on a test run, with Meyer copiloting, using the street map they had given us at the airport. Either the Ford engineers have decided Mexicans are a small race, or the cars shrink in the dry climate. With the seat as far back as it would go, my knees were on either side of the edge of the steering wheel, and unless I remembered to swing the right knee out of the way, each time I shifted into high I gave myself a sharp and painful rap on the inside edge of the kneecap. When we hit the first potholes I found the front shocks were gone. The front end hit the frame with a metallic thunk, and then a rumbling chatter.
    So I asked directions, and found the Ford garage about seven blocks west of the zocalo. It was then a little past noon. The boss man took it for a turn around the block and came back shaking his head, and said I could have it at four.
    We walked to the central square, along narrow sidewalks on narrow streets. The plaster-over-stone fronts of the two-story residences and shops formed a solid wall along the walkway, and they had been painted and repainted with pure strong pigments. One blue wall brought Meyer to a stop. Maybe it had been painted and patched fifty times. Layers had cracked, peeled, faded. It was all the shades of blue there are.
    "Fix that with transparent epoxy," he said, "peel off a rectangle eight feet long and five feet high, frame it in rough-cut cypress with a white stain, and take it to any decent gallery-"
    "And somebody will tell you their little daughter could do it better."
    "The creative act is in selecting which rectangle to frame. It is very damned beautiful, Travis.
    And that talented daughter is a rotten kid."
    Buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, and the ubiquitous popping and snorting of the Mexican plague-the motor scooter. So we went out of the sun heat into the cool shade of the gigantic trees of a splendid zocalo. It had its ornate circular bandstand in the middle, a criss-cross of wide walkways and a perimeter walk past gaudy riots of flowerbeds. Traffic circled it counterclockwise. There were men, women, children selling serapes, shoeshines, chewing gum, straw baskets and straw animals, black pottery, fresh flowers and wilted flowers, serapes, cigarettes, fake Indian relics,