The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [218]
was a woman who opened a mouth of intelligence on you; she seemed to look at me severely; I thought, at first, because I had taken Smitty's place. Her name was Nettie Kilgore and she turned out to be not bad at all, only sometimes impatient in look, and something of a lush. She didn't care a hang about Smitty. Well, I'd known plenty of grotesque people before, but none who had made it their life's specialty. The foreign colony of this town represented Greenwich Village, or Montparnasse, or the equivalent from a dozen countries. There was a Polish exile, there was an Austrian with a beard, there was Nettie Kilgore; there were a pair of writers from New York, one named Wiley Moulton, the other, his friend, simply called Iggy; there also was a young Mexican, Talavera, whose father owned the taxi service and rented out horses. A man who sat near Iggy turned out to be the second husband of Iggy's first wife. His name was Jepson and he was the grandson of an African explorer. Well, all this was new to me, and so it went. While Thea and I, fresh from bed, sat side by side. It was curious amusement and didn't much touch me. I was nearly as much entertained by the kinkajou Hilario had in a cage and I fed it potato chips. This large-eyed little animal. I felt flattered when people assumed I was the eagle's master. Of course I said, "Oh, Thea is his real boss," but people seemed to feel that only a man could cope with a bird of that size. All except the handsome brown strong young chap, Talavera, who said he knew how good Thea was with animals. I didn't altogether care for his contribution to the conversation, though I have to admit he looked to be in a different class from the rest of this gang. I couldn't get over their queemess. The person who sat next to him seemed to have a kind of bony crest to the middle of his head, and the back of his hand was like the instep of another man's foot--white, thick, and dead-appearing. Then Nettie Kilgore. Then Iggy, red-eyed. Then a man I secretly named Ethelred the Unready--like Grandma Lausch or Commissioner Einhorn, I would sometimes do that, give a name. Then Wiley Moulton, the weird-story writer. He was big-bellied and long-haired; his face was sort of subtle, with brown lids; his teeth were small and tobacco dyed; his fingers seemed all back-bent at the last joint. There was hard work in some of these people, that they made the most partial little good climb around in tremendous mountain ranges of opposition to prove itself. "So you're going to catch these monsters with your bird?" said Moulton. "Yes, we are," said Thea quite calmly. It was a great thing about her that she could not be swayed to make small changes of plan or views in order to get on with people. "I don't like monkey games," she always said. "It has been done," I observed. And now again the public band in the zocalo, just below, began to pound and smite, so the air quivered with the ragged march. It was nearly twilight. Young people promenaded, but in rapid time, so you felt flirtation and desperate flying, both. Firecrackers jumped in the air. A blind fiddler played and howled, with dance-of-death scrapes, serenading the tourists. Then the cathedral started to ring the bells, the deepest voice of that big, crusted sadness. So with this noise the conversational people were silenced for a time; they drank their beer or knocked off their shots of tequila with tastes of salt licked from the thumb in the stylish Mexican way and bites of lime. Thea wanted Moulton's help with the articles; when you could hear your own voice again she asked him about that. "I'm not in that line now," he said. "I make more by sticking to Nicolaides." Nicolaides was the editor of the pulp magazine Moulton contributed to. "I had a bid to go up and interview Trotsky last month and I let it go because I'd rather write for Nicolaides. Besides it takes all the strength I've got to turn out the installments." I felt that Moulton had in store all kinds of words and in fact would say anything. Anything! He only waited for the conversation to give him the