The Ultimate Good Luck (12 page)

“Maybe I’m not a very nice person. You know?” He tried to catch her eye. “Maybe something ruined me.”

“I don’t know,” Rae said. “I don’t know what you are. But God knows I wouldn’t want to violate you.” She walked out of the room.

In the spring, Rae drove up to St. Ignace and came back with two registered Airedales she said she was going to breed because she’d always wanted a dog and now seemed like a good time. She hired a mason from town to lay a concrete slab twenty yards from the trailer. She had a chain-link fence built and a wood shelter put up and moved the dogs out of the basement where she had kept them and into the cage to wait for the female to come into heat while she read books about it.

In September, the female hadn’t come in, and Rae began sleeping late and driving nights up to Petoskey taking any kind of J.C. classes she could get. In October, he caught his first two months working days, but Rae wouldn’t come back from Petoskey sometimes until after two. The dogs would wake him up barking, and he could see the lights go on out in the enclosure, hear the gates clank, and hear her talking to the dogs in a sweet, coaxing voice. He would lie in the bed and sing a song, trying to stay awake until she came in, feeling like he missed her but that she was a long distance away, almost out of reach, so that when she came inside from the dogs he would always be asleep.

In late November, he went back working nights, and Rae began staying over in Petoskey, driving up on Tuesday and coming back Wednesday night, staying, she said, with a woman she met in her economic history class. They had stopped making love in the summer, after she got the dogs, and he had begun to feel as far back as then like he was running a skein out, but that he could stand it. He thought, sitting out in the frozen night in the Scout, drinking coffee and whisky out of a hot-flask and watching the empty ice huts speckling the bay in the winter moonlight, that the only dangerous lie to being in love was that it was permanent. And once you knew that, love didn’t make you miserable, and you were safe from falling off too deep. In the best world it was a losing proposition, but even that could be satisfactory if you didn’t insist on making up the loss, since you could erase yourself by mistake in the process. And he wanted to avoid that. He knew love’s limits, and that was the key to everything.

On the sixth of December he drove into the yard before 5:00
A.M
., when it was still dark in the orchard. The light was left on in the kitchen and in the dog cages, and the car was gone. In the kitchen there was a note taped to the window above the sink. It said: “Dear Warden, Just too dark in your woods. Love, R.” He took the paper off the window and put it on the sink top and read it again. He had on his green state-issue parka with the silver badge, and shining out of the glassy darkness of the window, he thought he looked good enough and up to things, even though he felt just at that precise moment like a man falling, all out of attitude and disposition, from somewhere he didn’t remember toward someplace he couldn’t see. He walked back outside and across the frozen yard to the kennels. Both pens were empty and the spotlight over the gate was left on to warm the air. He looked inside the shelter but the dogs weren’t there. The concrete had been scrubbed and ice had formed in the depressions, and the dog smell had gone thin in the cold. He walked back inside and went into every room in the trailer, turning on lights and opening closets. He turned on the radio in the kitchen to get the weather. He had the idea he should go in the basement and check the pipes and the water heater in case it snapped off cold. But when he got down the stairs where it was still and moist he turned on the bulb and looked at the water heater white and shining in the corner as if it were alive, and something seemed odd to him about it, something obstinate and repelling. He went back out to the Scout, opened down the gate, got the AR-16 out of the case, and went back to the basement and down the steps. He stopped at the bottom riser and chambered the first round, put his arm through the sling, flattened his back against the wall, found the water heater in the irons, and opened up on it like a range dummy, hitting it all over, blowing the fixtures off the top, blowing the brass medallion out and back inside the tank, and blowing the heater all the way off its base into the soft cement wall behind it. When he finished he turned off the light, put the gun back in the Scout, went inside, and ate some toast and stood watching the light grey up. When he’d washed the dish, he went back
down and turned off the gas and the water in the basement, came back and took off his shirt, pulled out the phone, did sixty pushups, and got in bed.

And he thought, lying there in his pants, what was his father’s favorite thought, that every move was a necessary move, an emblem of something that needed to be fixed or set right in the everyday scheme of things, like a hand needing to come off, and what Rae had done was try to spark her luck the best she could by making a move. He didn’t blame her for it, and even though it left him feeling for that moment like he was alone and falling someplace he couldn’t see, like a dream in the dark, it didn’t make him unhappy as an idea. The best thing you could do was to take events one at a time, in order, and hope one event by itself wouldn’t cut you up too bad.

At eleven o’clock he woke up with the radio blasting Johnny Paycheck all over the trailer. He put on his parka, got the dead-dog crate out of the Scout, and brought it inside and shoveled the pieces of the water heater in it. He made coffee and stood in the living room with the door open, in the cold foggy light, listening to the furnace loading up and clicking, trying to keep the trailer warm, the flies buzzing at the windows, then took the crate out beyond the kennels into the snow and weed stubble and dumped it. Fog was expanding off the snow and clouding up into the alders at the top of the orchard. He took the box back to the Scout, shut the kennel gate, went inside and changed his uniform, and drove in to Eastport the way he dreamed he would when he had been asleep.

Q
UINN WANTED THE MONEY
put away fast. Money gave him nerves. It was too important to fuck with. He got down on the bathroom floor and cut the grouting with his clasp knife. He took out six tiles and scooped a cavity in the dirt and laid in the four bundles of hundreds taped in sandwich bags. He raked the dirt back to level, packed it with his shoe heel, reset the tiles, and grouted them with Ipana he had bought in the Centro. He got up and turned the shower out onto the floor and let the water drain. He checked the tiles behind the toilet grail where he had the pistol. The paste there was moist and the tiles gave easily but not too easily that the moza would disturb them. The tiles were his own idea. He liked them.

Rae was sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap, the empty Varig bag on the floor. She looked confused and stoned. The room was dim and smelled like DDT. The moza had come and made the bed, but he hadn’t noticed it until now. It was stupid to miss things. He was dropping habits.

“What have you got behind the toilet?” Rae said, without moving, her hands in her lap.

He wiped his hands on his pants. “Ordnance.”

“Always a tough guy, right?”

“Eagle Scout. We always lead the survivors out,” he said. He leaned on the doorjamb and squeezed dirt off his fingers. “It keeps me straight.”

Light was failing except for a square, gold panel of sunshine on the floor in the living room. It made the bungalow appealing.

“You don’t have any vices, do you, Harry?” She gazed at him as if she wasn’t interested in the answer. “I thought you got cocaine from Colombia, not Mexico. Baranquilla. Isn’t that right?”

“This is the peewee league,” he said.

“What did they do to him?” she said.

He traced his finger down the rough door molding. “Nothing interesting. I think they tied a roach bag on his head. I’m not sure. He didn’t know anything, he just
had
the right stuff.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

“They try to be humane down here.” It seemed like a waste of time to talk about Sonny. He stood in the doorway and admired her features relaxing in the green air.

“How do you feel?” she said, looking at him. “You look a little peaked.”

He put his ear against the adobe. He could feel himself letting go a little. “A little detached. Like
I
was trying to bust out. I don’t mind feeling that way usually. But I mind it now, I’m not sure why.”

“Do you trust this guy Bernhardt?”

“If I knew him in the States I’d be sure.” It was something the Italian girl had said the night before in the same bed, no reference frame. It was odd to hear himself say it. Someplace in the colonia a sound truck began to play a record of someone singing passionately about love. It was the everyday event. He couldn’t understand the words, but the sound consoled.

“So who do we pay?” Rae said.

“A judge. But it’s Bernhardt’s trick.”

“And what do I have to do?” She lay backward on the bed in the dying light and covered her eyes with her arm. His stomach flinched high up where a pill wouldn’t help.

“Nothing,” he said “You can leave.”

“Maybe I will,” she said.

She turned her cheek against the bedspread and lay still a moment. “This bed smells like your last guest,” she said.

He didn’t answer. His mind wandered back up into the day toward the Italian girl but wouldn’t reach all the way. Everything was the way he wanted it. She lay on the spread without moving, her arm over her eyes, talking into the air. “I discovered something, you know,” she said slowly, as if she could see it out in the blindness.

“What’s that?”

“Love is a kind of loss,” she said. “You know what I mean?” She breathed in heavily. “I never realized that before I lived with you. You probably knew it, though, didn’t you? Not that there’s anything to do about it.” The music truck wove through the terraces and down Reforma hill. She was waiting for him to answer. She knew what he knew. “You don’t have any capacity for small talk anymore, Harry. I’m sorry.” She leaned on her elbows and looked at him, her green eyes dry and blinking. “You used to, when we were in Morgan City. You used to jabber. And then you quit. I thought about that while I was gone.” She let her head fall and swung her hair behind her. She made him feel kind. “Couldn’t we make love?” she said, gazing at the ceiling as though she was talking to him there, somewhere up out of the cool air in the room. The music truck turned a corner and came closer, on a closer street. He felt transported now, somewhere indistinct, drawn outside of himself. “It’ll change your luck.” She put her hand out and touched his chest, measured his breathing, and smiled, and he felt bad luck moving out of him as if the atmosphere had become too fine for anything inessential to stay alive.

At six o’clock Rae went into the bathroom and stayed a long time. Light was down and the mountains he could see from the bed through the window wore the same smeared patches of black,
like silk draped beneath an orange blaze. It was the dangerous time now, the end of day, the time when prisoners in the prisión gave up and started patting their veins. It had become the worst time in Michigan when Rae was gone, desperation time, when the lake changed from the natural sequins of afternoon to dull oyster grey, and the first dim lights of the deep, white-fish trollers froze in through the gloom. It was, he thought, listening to the shower hiss behind the door, a bad time to be anywhere by yourself. It had come to be the time he liked in Mexico, as if the country was the tissue of everyone’s loneliness.

He got up, put on his pants, and walked in his bare feet onto the little pink stone patio that opened on the city and the smooth white-rock roofs terraced into the evening. The air was damp and eucalyptus sweet, and he could see a long way up the hazy valley beyond where the city stretched to an end, to where the light was amber and smokes dwindled out through the palms from the pueblos you couldn’t see in daylight. The city lay out in the dun darkness with no lights burning, as if the space were empty and there was no one alive for miles.

When Rae had been gone three months he had driven into South Bend and caught the train to Chicago to see a woman he’d met in a bar in Charlevoix, whose husband worked for a company that kept him in California. He could remember dozing in the parlor car in the early-morning silence, watching the snow fall in the Indiana freight yards, waiting for the train to move. While he sat, a string of cars was pulled away from near the window and he could abruptly see out in the yards toward the St. Joseph, where a snowman had been put up in the center of the eastbound main line to Detroit. The snowman had been built that morning. Its lineaments were crisp, and there were heavy prints flattening a circle around the base. The snowman was tricked out with gravel features, a blue and gold watch cap, and a half broomstick, and stood between the shining frozen rails, smiling perfectly into the face of its own hot doom.