A Deadly Shade of Gold (26 page)

She was only about a hundred yards from the obscure entrance to the isolated clearing. She stopped when she saw the car coming. She looked small, lost, displaced in time and space. I went on by her, turned around in the road and came back through my own drift of dust. I stopped beside her. She leaned on the closed door and gave a gagging cough.

Then she looked at me with a hideous remnant of flirtatiousness, like the grin on a cholera victim, and said in a trembling voice, "Did you... want to give me a ride?" Her glance met mine and slid away, utterly humble.

"Get in."

She slid in, wary and apologetic and self-effacing. As I started up I told myself that something would have broken her sooner or later. She would have come up against something that couldn't be teased, cajoled or seduced. The ones with no give, the ones with the clear little porcelain hearts shatter. And in the shattering, some chips and splinters are lost, so that when, with great care, they are mended, the little fracture lines show.

Did she, for God's sake, think she was going to be immune forever? The blackness is always a half step behind you, hand raised to touch you on the shoulder. Sam learned that. Carlos learned it. Nora learned it. Little golden girls cannot stay ignorant forever. But when you break a pretty thing, even if it is a cheap pretty thing, something does go out of the world. Something died in that clearing. And she would never fit together as well again.

I pulled over and stopped abruptly, short of the ridge where the village would be in view. She had ridden with her head bowed, her small fist and marked wrists cradled in her lap.

I got out and said, "You can take it from here."

She raised her head slowly and looked at me through the sheaf of spilled blonde hair, her face
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crinkled and puzzled, like a child wondering whether to cry.

"Why?" she said. Here lip was badly swollen where she had gnawed it in her terror.

"Because you have to play these games with real blood and real people."

"Who are you?"

"Sam was my friend a long time ago," I said. "The woman on the boat was real. The knife was real. The blood was real. Sam died on that boat. It was just your turn to die a little."

"I'm just sick now. I'm just terribly terribly sick."

"So is Carlos."

She coughed into her fist. "You say crazy things. I don't mean to hurt anybody. You want to hurt people. You wanted to hurt me. God, I feel destroyed! What does that make you? Does that make you so great, scaring the wits out of me?"

There was no real defiance. It was just a reflex, an habitual attitude, accompanied by that horrid little smirk I had seen before. Her glance moved swiftly away again, reminding me of the way a spiritless dog cringes when inviting a caress. She would have to learn how to imitate defiance.

There wasn't any of the genuine article left. It had crawled off into the brush behind the clearing to die and rot. I wondered if she could sense how it was all going to be for her from now on.

The jackals can always sense that kind of vulnerability. Imitations of defiance amuse them. They travel in packs. They would hand her around. She wouldn't last very well.

There was no answer I could give her. I began walking toward the village. After fifty feet I looked back. She was still on the passenger side. At the top of the ridge I looked back again. She was behind the wheel. A little later I heard the car start and come toward me. I played a little game, with a flavor of penance. As the car came up behind me, I listened for a sudden change in the motor noise, and I was poised to dive clear. If there was that much spirit left, maybe she wouldn't be jackal meat after all. Maybe there was a toughness I hadn't reached. The red car went by me, slowly, as far over on the other side as she could get it. She gave me a single empty look and went on, clutching the wheel at ten after ten, the blonde hair blowing in the dusty wind.

I went right to the Tres Panchos. It was a little after five. There were a half dozen fishermen in there, smelling of their trade. The juke was playing the bass pasodoble of the bull ring. I leaned into a corner of the bar, and made Mustache understand with bad Spanish and gestures that I wanted a glass of ice and a bottle of tequila anejo.

"Botella?" he asked. "La Botella?"

I reached and took it out of his hand. Twenty pesos. He shrugged and watched me pour the glasses and shrugged again and walked away.

I motioned him back and had him get himself a shot glass. I filled it from my bottle. I held my glass up and said, "Drink to me, my friend. Drink to this poisonous bag of meat named McGee.

And drink to little broken blondes, and a dead black dog, and a knife in the back of a woman, and a knife in the throat of a friend. Drink to a burned foot, and death at sea, and stinking prisons and obscene gold idols. Drink to loveless love, stolen money and a power of attorney,
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mi amigo. Drink to lust and crime and terror, the three unholy ultimates, and drink to all the problems which have no solution in this world, and at best a dubious one in the next."

He beamed without comprehension, and said, "Salud!" We drank and bowed and I filled the glasses again.

I know that for a long time there was a respectful area of emptiness around me, even when the place had filled up. The Mexicans respect the solemn, dedicated, brooding borracho, and have an almost racial empathy for the motives which can send the soul of a man crawling down the neck of a bottle to drown. I know there was a purchase of another bottle. But from there on, memory is fragmented by a vast paralysis of the cerebral cortex.

Chopped bright fragments of memory endure. McGee dancing-the feet very deft very tricky, so that I could look down with awe and watch them perform on their own. McGee, the soul of generosity, buying drinks for multitudes of friends. McGee leading a choral group in a song so heartbreaking it made him weep-Somewhere Over the Rainbowwwwwww...

And then a hilarious and giggling and cooperative process of getting the unwieldy bulk of McGee up a narrow staircase, some of the sweet gigglers pushing from behind, and some ahead pulling him by the hands. Light of two yellow flames. Great blundering sprawl into a rickety clatter of bed, huge McGee guffaws-McGaw guffees?-mingling with the soprano jabbering, laugh-squeals, clothes-tugging. Later, in a heavy sweet humid blackness, awakening to incomprehensible effort, a half-dream of holding someone, of trying to overcome, together, a great steady remorseless beating, of trying to still and silence something as implacable as the sea itself. Texture of dense hair, not clovery, thick with perfume, taint of kerosene. A sticky chomping next to my ear. Thin smell of spearmint mingling with the rest. Guilt. Then a strange awareness of a sour justice in it. This will cure that.. This will end that. This will atone for that....

I awoke into suffocating heat, to barbed needles of light which went through my eyes and into my brain, to a mouth dry as sand, clotted teeth, and a headache that seemed to expand and contract my forehead with each heartbeat as though it were a red balloon a child was trying to inflate. Tequila hangover, in a gagging density of perfume, under a tin roof, on the sweat-damp sheets of a village whore. She stood naked beside the bed, bending over me, looking at me with melting concern, the heat in the room making her look as if she had been greased.

"Leedle seek?" she said.

"Oh God. Oh God."

She nodded and shouldered into something pink and went out the door. When she came back she had a tin pitcher of ice water, a jelly glass, and some ice wrapped in a towel. I drank water until my belly felt tight as a drum. Then I lay back and chewed ice, with the chilly towel across my forehead and eyes, wondering where she had gone. She came back and took the towel off my face and handed me a half glass of reddish brown liquid.

"Drink fast," she said, making the gesture of tossing it off.

I did so. I think one could achieve the same result by drinking four ounces of boiling tabasco sauce. I sprang up. I roared and paced and wept. I sweated and gasped and wept and held my throat. I ran back to the bed and opened the towel and stuffed my mouth with ice and chomped it up like Christmas candy.

When the worst of it was over, I subsided weakly on the bed. Felicia had watched the whole performance calmly, standing leaning against the door frame, her arms folded. As I became aware of my headache again, I realized it was not quite as bad. I mopped my face with the cool towel.

The cure reminded me of an ancient joke. A man has all his teeth pulled and new plates put in immediately. The dentist tells him they'll be uncomfortable for a while. Two weeks later he runs into the dentist. He is hobbling along on two canes. The dentist asks him what happened. He explains that he had gone fishing with his wife and she had fallen out of the rowboat. In diving overboard to rescue her, he had misjudged distance, and caught himself in the groin with an oarlock. He says, "You know, for about forty seconds there, Doc, my teeth didn't bother me a damn bit."

She went over to her dressing table, opened a box, and came back with my watch and wallet. It was five of eleven by my watch.

She said, "Every goddam peso is there, Trrav. "

She went over and filled the wash basin, laid out soap and towel and comb. She tossed her pink wrapper aside, searched one of the cardboard wardrobes and pulled out that orange shift I had seen her in before and pulled it on. She gave a couple of casual swipes at her hair with a brush, painted her mouth, yawned and said, "I am downstairs, okay?"

"Okay. I guess I was a damn fool."

She shrugged. "Pretty dronk, Trrav." She gave me a broad merry smile. "Almost too dronk for the love." She went out and closed the door.

Getting dressed was sad and enormous labor. A man in the grip of the remorses is a pitiable thing. You think of all the promise you once had, and what has become of you. A hundred different versions of yourself sit in the audience and applaud ironically. Your own body disgusts you. Alcohol is a depressant-physically and emotionally. And that final fermentation of the maguey seems to uncork the bottom-most cask, where you have been hiding the black despairs of all the years.

When I found the inside staircase and went down, I was glad to see that only Mustache and Felicia were there. As I trudged toward the bar, Mustache uncapped a bottle of beer and set it on the bar with a flourish. He knew a glass would be superfluous. I held the bar with one hand and tilted it up with the other, and set it down when it was empty. I stopped him from opening another one.

Felicia took me by the wrist and tugged me over to a table. I told her I had to get back to the hotel. She said we had to talk first.

She sat opposite me and looked at me with a certain somber speculation. "One man from Garcia loves a hotel girl. I hear a thing. I wonder something. You go in there? Kill a dog?

Almost kill some man too?"

"Me? No."

"Yesterday your skinny woman is in the red car with the Heechin rubia. Then you are alone in the red car. And one time you are in the car with your skinny one. And one time Heechin is alone, eh?"

"So?"

She slitted the anthracite eyes. "Felicia is not stupid. It is about Sam, eh? These things?"

"Felicia, those men who hurt you, they had a white car?"

"Ah, such a beautiful car, si."

"How was Sam going to get to the States from Los Mochis?"

"He gets to Ensenada by little airplane, it is easy from there, Trrav. Many ways."

"Where no one will look in that heavy case he had?"

"Many ways. For a man who has some Spanish and some money." She closed her strong coppery fingers around my wrist. "The hotel girl says one thing. There is one bad man at Garcia.

One killer, eh? Miguel, I think. You are trouble to Garcia, maybe they send him. Cuidado, hombre."

"Why would they think I'm trouble?"

"The rubia could think so, eh? Too many questions, maybe? One thing. You have trouble, Trrav, you have friends here. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Miguel is most sad of the dog. His dog, Brujo."

"What does Miguel look like?"

"Tiny small skinny man with a sad face. Maybe forty years. Very quick."

"And he worked with Sam on the Garcia boat?"

"Ah, you know it too! On that boat, La Chispa Very pretty. But not using it now a long time.

Months, maybe. Garcia use it every day almost, long ago, many people, fishing, drinking, music.

Nobody to run it now, unless Miguel." She patted my hand. "Have care, amador. Come back to Felicia."

"I think we are leaving soon."

She concealed a sharp look of disappointment with an almost immediate impassivity. She nodded. "Maybe this is not a good place for you."

I trudged the seven hundred miles to the Casa in my dirty shirt, feeling unwell. I had the cold sweats, and the residual twitches of alcoholic poisoning. And I had the guilts. You think that you have laboriously achieved adult status. Then you prove there must be an incurable streak of
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adolescence. I knew that Nora would be wild with worry. When I went to the desk for my key I had the impression everybody knew exactly where I had been all night. Arista seemed blandly contemptuous.

He said, "At the lady's request, sir, I made flight arrangements for you. But you would have had to leave here at ten-thirty by bus. It is now too late. Please let me know if you want this arranged again for tomorrow. It is a considerable inconvenience to me when such plans are changed."

"Aren't you being paid to be inconvenienced, Arista?"

"In the case of valued guests, I would say yes." For a moment I debated pulling him over the counter by the front of his spotless jacket, and running him down his front steps. But the effort would joggle my head.

"What kind of guest am I, Arista?"

He smiled. "We have discovered a small difficulty in the reservations. We shall require that your rooms be vacated by tomorrow, sir. I trust you will be able to settle your account in cash?"

"Or you will call the village cop?"