"Yes," said Dean, adjusting his dark glasses, "I wait.
For sure, Victor m'boy."
Presently Victor's tall brother came ambling along with some weed piled on a page of newspaper.
He dumped it on Victor's lap and leaned casually on the door of the car to nod and smile at us and say,
"Hallo."
Dean nodded and smiled pleasantly at him.
Nobody talked; it was fine.
Victor proceeded to roll the biggest bomber anybody ever saw.
He rolled (using brown bag paper) what amounted to a tremendous Corona cigar of tea.
It was huge.
Dean stared at it, popeyed.
Victor casually lit it and passed it around.
To drag on this thing was like leaning over a chimney and inhaling.
It blew into your throat in one great blast of heat.
We held our breaths and all let out just about simultaneously.
Instantly we were all high.
The sweat froze on our foreheads and it was suddenly like the beach at Acapulco.
I looked out the back window of the car, and another and the strangest of Victor's brothers – a tall Peruvian of an Indian with a sash over his shoulder – leaned grinning on a post, too bashful to come up and shake hands.
It seemed the car was surrounded by brothers, for another one appeared on Dean's side.
Then the strangest thing happened.
Everybody became so high that usual formalities were dispensed with and the things of immediate interest were concentrated on, and now it was the strangeness of Americans and Mexicans blasting together on the desert and, more than that, the strangeness of seeing in close proximity the faces and pores of skins and calluses of fingers and general abashed cheekbones of another world.
So the Indian brothers began talking about us in low voices and commenting; you saw them look, and size, and compare mutualities of impression, or correct and modify,
"Yeh, yeh", while Dean and Stan and I commented on them in English.
"Will you d-i-g that weird brother in the back that hasn't moved from that post and hasn't by one cut hair diminished the intensity of the glad funny bashfulness of his smile?
And the one to my left here, older, more sure of himself but sad. like hung-up, like a bum even maybe, in town, while Victor is respectably married – he's like a gawddam Egyptian king, that you see.
These guys are real cats.
Ain't never seen anything like it.
And they're talking and wondering about us, like see?
Just like we are but with a difference of their own, their interest probably resolving around how we're dressed – same as ours, really – but the strangeness of the things we have in the car and the strange ways that we laugh so different from them, and maybe even the way we smell compared to them.
Nevertheless I'd give my eye-teeth to know what they're saying about us."
And Dean tried. "Hey Victor, man – what you brother say just then?"
Victor turned mournful high brown eyes on Dean.
"Yeah, yeah."
"No, you didn't understand my question.
What you boys talking about?"
"Oh," said Victor with great perturbation, "you no like this mar-gwana?"
"Oh, yeah, yes fine!
What you talk about?"
"Talk?
Yes, we talk.
How you like Mexico?"
It was hard to come around without a common language.
And everybody grew quiet and cool and high again and just enjoyed the breeze from the desert and mused separate national and racial and personal high-eternity thoughts.
It was time for the girls.
The brothers eased back to their station under the tree, the mother watched from her sunny doorway, and we slowly bounced back to town.
But now the bouncing was no longer unpleasant; it was the most pleasant and graceful billowy trip in the world, as over a blue sea, and Dean's face was suffused with an unnatural glow that was like gold as he told us to understand the springs of the car now for the first time and dig the ride.
Up and down we bounced, and even Victor understood and laughed.
Then he pointed left to show which way to go for the girls, and Dean, looking left with indescribable delight and leaning that way, pulled the wheel around and rolled us smoothly and surely to the goal, meanwhile listening to Victor's attempt to speak and saying grandly and magniloquently
"Yes, of course!
There's not a doubt in my mind!