time to follow up. We ought to be in the country with him." "Well, let's drive out away." "No, we can't. I have to see the lawyer. But I can't bear to lose the time. Now, now, we could be getting home. We could start to enter him to his quarry." By this she meant his first introduction to lizards. Not the giant variety with the high frill of which she had shown me pictures, the game we were after, but littler lizards. And furthermore Caligula had to become accustomed to a horse or burro; these giant lizards were in almost inaccessible parts of the mountain, far from roads, and we couldn't lug Caligula the whole long difficult way. I felt Thea maybe ought not to hurry the divorce too much. She might not be getting a good deal. I didn't want to ask about the details, and I figured probably she had been an heiress long enough to look after things for herself. What could I tell her of that? Besides, I didn't care to find out in its entirety about the trouble between her and Smitty, and had I asked she would have told me. So I laid off the topic, and we used the spare time to take color pictures of Caligula on my arm infront of the cathedral; until mounted officers who appeared to gallop Rout of the gates of a ministry drove us off the plaza. They were tough with me. I understood them to say the bird was dangerous, and they shouted that they wanted to see my papers. They were more deferential to Thea, but with lady-killer smiles they anyway made us go. Thea still intended to sell illustrated articles about Caligula to the National Geographic or Harper's. She knew a writer in Acatia who would help us; and she kept notes in a little book which was a very classy affair of red leather with a gold pencil attached. At any time at all she'd take it out on her knees and write with bent neck, a few words to a page, while, as she paused to think or remember, she moved her hand like someone in the process of shading a drawing. I studied her so well I even noted that the creases at the joints of her fingers were much like my own. "Darling, what town was that in Texas where he wanted to go after a jack rabbit?" "Around Uvalde, wasn't it?" "Honey, no. Could it have been?" She took my thigh with her hand. Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells. We sat under a tree on a wrought-iron chair. As I looked at the clear skin of her breast I felt its heat as actual as the heat of her hand through the thin cloth of my trousers. I assumed we'd get married when the divorce came through.
CHAPTER XVI
And strange it is That nature must compel us to lament Our most persisted deeds.
--Antony and Cleopatra
We found Thea's house ready. If it was her house. Perhaps it was Smitty's. I thought I'd find out in due time. There was no rush about it. The towers and roofs of town appeared and then were hid many times in knots of mountain and back of cliffs of thousands of feet before the descending road became a street and we arrived in the cathedral square, or zocalo. There we parked, and, the way to the villa being narrow, we had to walk. Even normally we'd have been met by a gang of kids, beggars, loafers, hotel-touts, and so forth, but the eagle on my fist brought out a mob from the shops and bars and from the awning" covered market just below the cathedral. A lot of people recognized Thea and sounded off with yells and yelps, whistles, picked-up sombreros, and in this turbulent escort that raised a dust around us we climbed a few hundred yards above the zocalo on the pointy stone terraces, to the gate of the villa. "Casa Descuitada," I read on a blue tile under the branches of pomegranate trees--Carefree House. We entered, and the cook and houseboy met us. Mother and son, they stood a good distance apart, both with bare feet on the red stone of the porch, she by the kitchen and he by the bedroom door. In her shawl she carried an infant, and at the sight of the bird, even in his hood, started to back into the kitchen. We took the bird