Free Bear and His Daughter by Robert Stone Page A

squawk.
    “Especially for you, Willie Wings,” Fencer said. “Sorry.”
    Fletch shook his head.
    “Oh now this really is a lot of shit,” he said.
    “Too bad you can’t make your own world,” Fencer said. “But you got to live the world the way it is, I hate to tell you. If I made the world and the firmament, I wouldn’t have no Pancho Pillows in it. But there he is, Virginia, sorry about that.”
    “Now this…” Fletch began.
    “If Pancho had come on us back in Corbera,” Fencer went on, “he’d have wanted into your life. If he’d seen we was all together—and that Willie Wings was around—he’d have been just overjoyed. He’d have suggested a picnic.”
    “And you’d have been sorry quick,” Willie Wings added. Willie had turned morose.
    “Pancho’s a body snatches” Fencer told them. “That’s my theory. A body snatcher and an agent and one of the world’s worst bummers.”
    “He’s been known to wear a badge,” Willie said. “He showed a friend of mine one once.”
    “Sure as shit,” Fencer said. “I’ve seen him appear on the border and the score went bad. I know for a fact he was around that bad Lee Oswald fella in Mex City. When Miss Liz Taylor lost something up in P.V., they went to Pancho Pillow to get it back.”
    “You want to freak the cats in Mexicali?” Willie Wings asked Fletch. “Bop over to the One-Eyed Indian Bar and tell them ‘Pancho Pillow’s in town!’ Man, you’ll dig them choke and turn gray and their knees’ll knock together. That’s what they think of Panch in Mexicali.”
    “Fuck him, is all,” Fencer said. “Forget him. Let’s go see the volcano.”
    They drove over a plateau surrounded by brown peaks. The wind had a taste Fletch had forgotten. It was late in the day; the light was fading in the sky and the peaks cast long conical shadows over the dun sand.
    They came to the dirt track. Fencer eased the car off the highway and followed it. The track ran in shadow and Fletch was aware of the mass of the volcano rising above them. Bursts of smoke came at the windshield like yellow flak.
    Fletch watched Willie and Fencer in the peculiar light.
    “I dig the high windies, man,” Fencer said. “I love it up here.”
    There was no life to be seen. Not even goats grazed on the sulfurous pasture. There were no bird calls, not even a buzzard in the sky. The smoke grew thicker.
    “Hang in, Fletch,” Fencer said. “We get out in half a mile.”
    Their faces were caked with dust. Willie’s parrot had begun to make faint cooing noises.
    Fletch turned in his seat and looked with longing at the descending track behind them.
    “Maybe,” he said at length, “maybe … we could come to an understanding.”
    Fencer smiled. “That’s what we’re up here for.”
    “I didn’t really have to come up,” Fletch told them, “but as it is, I did. I could have avoided this. There was plenty of places I could have gotten out—I almost did get out, didn’t I? There were plenty of reasons. But, as it is, I stayed in all the way.”
    Fencer nodded. Willie began to hum “The Streets of Laredo.”
    “So if I came all this way, it shows some willingness, doesn’t it? It shows some…” He paused and looked uneasily at the sky. “It shows some trust—how about that?”
    The road ended in a depression of ocher mud veined with cracks. A wall of black volcanic rock faced them, rising toward the peak and sloping downward toward iron-toothed canyons which they could not see. The wind carried only silence.
    “If a man like me can show so much trust to you and Willie Wings, it shows we’ve got something going together; right?”
    “Don’t try to verbalize it,” Fencer said. “You’ll just fuck it up.”
    They got out of the car and stood before a sign that pointed straight upward. The sign said that San Isobel was five kilometers away; it was riddled with bullet holes.
    “If we’ve got this much going,” Fletch told them, “we don’t have to go through