The Ultimate Good Luck (16 page)

“Take your business somewhere else,” Quinn had said. The answer seemed obvious.

“Oh shit no,” Davito had said loudly and smiled. “I wouldn’t do that.” He smiled even broader so Quinn could see his teeth behind a stubble of beard and mud. “I couldn’t live without them.”

“Then get rid of one,” Quinn said. “Just pull her plug.”

“That’s too raw, Jack,” Davito said, shaking his head. The draft off the big planes stung their faces. “That’d be like living in Minnesota again. I use one against the other. You can’t fly
solo.” Davito laughed. “You need your little cushion,” he said, and jumped out of the bunker and began running through the mud onto the open runway. Rounds were falling in, and Quinn squeezed deeper into the dirt, waiting for the next bird to bank out of the swirling clouds.

It made him think about the dead kid in his communion suit and half his ear whipped off. He seemed to have lost the cushion for it, the escape hatch to make that death not seem like his own death. And that was a cushion he needed if he was going to take this to the end.

The man who looked like Davito had strolled across the plaza and stopped in the sun at the edge of Hidalgo Street, hands in his pockets, looking longingly into the Portal, as if he wished he could get a table there where all the tables were full. The man looked like somebody you’d like, Quinn thought. His family was straggling behind looking inconvenienced. The girl in the pink shorts was still thinking about the soldiers and pulling her shorts down behind. The wife looked disappointed by how she felt and where she was. They seemed to be from Minnesota, and out of place on the zócalo in Oaxaca, and needed to be someplace where they could be happier. The man turned and looked at his family in a heartsick way, and when he did Quinn caught his eye for a long moment, as if there was something he wanted to say, though there wasn’t. The man’s family caught up with him at once and his wife began talking seriously, staring into his chest. His daughter had noticed Rae and was looking at her curiously, twitching her hip from side to side as if they were sharing something evil. The wife quit talking suddenly and extended her hands to prove they were empty and started walking away angrily, and the man looked back at Quinn and smiled and shook his head and stared down a moment, then stepped into Hidalgo Street to follow his wife. The girl waited a moment longer, entranced with Rae, until her father called and she turned away, her yellow hair catching a moment of pure sunlight.

The man made him feel like something was trying to get inside
of him, something he didn’t want, like a regret, but that regret was only the advance party for.

“I was wondering why the streets all changed names in the middle of town,” Rae said cheerfully.

“Too many heroes,” he said, “not enough streets.”

“That must be a big problem in underdeveloped nations,” she said. She put her arms around his shoulders and held him tightly. He felt the same thick ether of regret rising in him. “You can’t let fellow Americans bother you,” she said in a friendly way. “They’re just in love, and they don’t know how to express it. Isn’t that what you believe?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“You liked those shorts too, didn’t you?” Rae tilted her face back into the warm sunlight and closed her eyes. “Tight pussy,” she said dreamily. “It’s very stylish now in Moline or Carbondale, or wherever they’re from. Maybe Charlevoix.”

“I didn’t last very long up there,” he said.

She smiled into the sunlight. “You’re a great kidder,” she said. “You can’t be serious a minute. It makes it all seem worthwhile.”

“Just your bad luck,” he said. “You might’ve hooked up with a comedian like your brother and had it all your way.”

The day had begun to hot up. Second-class buses wallowed in through the streets, windows full of mute Indian faces. Diesel had begun to overpower the sweet cinnamon smell filtering out of the mercado. All the fountains were on.

He watched the Americans emerge onto the Avenue Independencia from the Portal, and into the sun toward the Baskin-Robbins where the grate had just been pulled open and a boy was mopping in the unlit inside. The Americans stopped below a chiropractor’s neon sign made to look like a spine, all the vertebrae curved and articulated, and bracketed to the chiropractor’s windowsill above the Avenue Independencia. They stood beside the Baskin-Robbins, and the girl was staring up while
her father pointed out the sign, sweeping his big arm up and down to explain the shape. His wife was gazing out across the street and imagining, Quinn thought, that the day was heading downhill. There was a brown dog standing beside her looking where she was looking. Her husband turned and spoke to her. Quinn could see consolation on the man’s wide face. “I think knowing too much just makes you miserable,” Rae said, for no reason, and at that moment the Baskin-Robbins exploded.

And for a moment you could see nothing, and then you could see everything.

There was one great bulb of orange flame roaring outward and bursting apart in the air, and then a huge hot noise, and then the air suddenly was emptied of sound and filled with a baked greenish dust. It seemed, for a moment, as if a meteor had hit the building. A bright green taxi that had been in front of the Baskin-Robbins was blown away from the curb and into the street, and the air seemed for a moment to be the color of the taxi reduced to dust. The Baskin-Robbins, Quinn could glimpse through the panes of rising dust, looked like a garbage can emptied and kicked on its side. Whatever was inside was blown outside now or gone altogether. The chiropractor’s sign was missing. There were rag figures strewn on the sidewalk and in the street, but nothing was moving or flailing. Men began rushing off the adjoining street into the space of the explosion as though they were drawn in by the suck of air. Loud whistles were beginning. Tourists were running out of the zócalo in all directions. A woman screamed a long beseeching scream, and then a lot of people started yelling and the noise and swarming commotion took over.

Quinn was on his feet going toward the Americans or toward where they had been a moment before, but weren’t now. Outside the park shade the sun was suddenly much hotter and brighter, and he could smell rank-burned metal and cordite. It was familiar and became almost pleasant when the air overheated.

A siren began somewhere out of the Centro, and he stopped
and looked at Rae, who was still at the bench, standing on it, her hands over her ears as though she could still hear an explosion. She had her glasses on and her face was unrevealing. He started back toward her through the mix-up of sprinting Mexicans chattering and searching all directions at once for a new peril. He was too used to being alone. His instincts were adjusted to that, but it was witless to leave her. Rae suddenly raised her hand and flung it forward, her face as calm as when she had turned it toward the sun. She thought there was no danger and he should do whatever he had begun to do. He stared at her a moment in the sunlight, then turned back to where the explosion had been.

Out in the street he saw the American girl’s pink hot pants. They weren’t on her now but were wadded into the muffling system of the taxi that had been blown over. He couldn’t see the girl, though he saw her father, twenty meters down Independencia lying in a clutter with his white T-shirt blown off his shoulders and his skin blacked and starting to bleed. There was more screaming as more became visible in the street. The siren noise became more intense and nearer. Soldiers were coming from all directions, running with their M-16s ready at their shoulders, approaching heavy-footed and knee-bent as though they were receiving fire from somewhere, their mouths closed and drawn back, ready to shoot somebody.

He felt himself suddenly lose breath. His legs became awkward and painful, and he knew it was the way you felt just before you got shot, ultimate vulnerability. He thought about his gun, about the precise location of it in the bungalow, and the good it would do him to have it right now. None.

He knelt beside the American on the sidewalk and discovered his daughter was under him, odd-shaped and missing most of the part of her where her shorts had been. Her father was making a big blood bubble out of his mouth. They were both dead. He stood up and looked quickly for the wife, tried to find her white blouse in the rubble, but couldn’t see her. The dog was sitting
alone in the opening where the Baskin-Robbins had been. The woman could’ve been sheltered, he thought, but he didn’t see how. Articles of clothing and peelings off the ice-cream machines were blown out into the street as though the explosion had curved as it went outward, throwing as much down-street as directly across toward the park. It made everything the same.

People were yelling in Spanish now very fast and loud, something he couldn’t understand, that sounded like “I own her.” He walked back into an area of sidewalk that was suddenly deserted, and he felt all at once that he was conspicuous and shouldn’t be here and shouldn’t let himself be separable at all. There was a theory for that too. Trucks were approaching. He could hear them straining gears. The sidewalk began vibrating. He posed an unreasonable risk now. On the front of the chiropractor’s building was the long red and black boxing poster he had seen all week and that had not been touched. It showed two giant black boxers with their fists clenched in fight postures above the words “Sin Empate, Sin Indulto.” No Holds Barred.

Soldiers had begun forcing people away from the Baskin-Robbins, pushing some unselectively, face-first into the wall of the chiropractor’s building using their gun barrels, and kicking them in the hamstrings and yelling. The soldiers thought the bomber was on the scene and they were going to catch him, and Quinn knew if he didn’t walk off the open sidewalk at that moment they would see him and take that occasion to arrest him. Firemen had begun covering the taxi with AFF foam, getting it on everything including the soldiers, who began kicking the people against the wall harder and pushing more people into line. The rag figures were covered, and he realized now he couldn’t tell the woman from the mop boy if he found her. The commotion was maddening and all around, and he walked out into the Avenue Independencia and into the park through the crowd at the curb, away from where the soldiers were yelling and kicking people in the back.

Rae was alone on the bench, the zócalo having emptied. The
cab drivers and shine boys had all run out across Hidalgo, leaving their cabs and their chairs warming in the sun. They stood inside the shadows of the Portal with the tourists, whispering and gesturing toward the uproar. Rae sat facing the Baskin-Robbins, which was, except for two circus bubbles hung high on the building’s façade, completely flocked in foam.

Quinn sat down without speaking and stared at the plaza. And for a moment, sitting in the sunlight beside Rae in the consoling wake of violence, he felt insulated from trouble, almost drowsy in the warmth of the afternoon. A monotony anyone could get inside of, anyone could feel safe in.

“Didn’t you see me waving?” Rae said, her voice cheerful, though not looking at him. “I stood up on the bench and waved at you. I thought you saw me. You looked like you did.”

“I saw you fine,” he said. He let the drowsiness come down on him.

“Then you’re just a stupid fuck, aren’t you?” she said, her voice not steady now. She looked at him, her face wild. “It’s the oldest trick they know. Set a bomb and three minutes later set another one, and you get the police and all the other stupid assholes.” She shook her head. Her hair was damp. “You’re fucked up. You’re just fucked up. Didn’t they teach you anything in the marines?”

“They lit that girl up,” he said. Sirens were very near and more police whistles echoed through the empty park. There was a sudden, sharp pocking noise, close in, very fast, an M-16 going off at full, the familiar, unreverberating plastic noise, like a fire-cracker going off underwater. It wasn’t a bothersome sound.

Rae stamped her foot on the pavement. “What happens to me?” She looked away from him fiercely. “You tell me, all right? What in the hell happens to me if you get blown up?”

He stared in the direction of the automatic weapons fire. It came from toward the Reforma. The soldiers had somebody trapped and were free-firing in on top of them. It began to be intense. “There’s no way in hell those people could’ve expected that,” he said.

Rae stared at him strangely. “What’s the matter with you?” she said, unable to keep her head still.

“Not anything,” he said. He felt tense now and his legs trembled. It wasn’t a bad sign to tremble, it meant you were alert, and you needed to move. “I didn’t see it right, that’s all,” he said.

A green and white ambulance truck turned onto the Avenue Hidalgo and idled along the perimeter of the park. The driver pointed to them for someone in the back of the truck, who suddenly peered out through the window. A two-way radio crackled inside, and the man in the window said something to the driver and the truck speeded up.

“Everything’s gone so
bad,”
Rae said. She was squeezing her hands in her lap. “I really can’t do this.”

“Yes you can,” he said. “You certainly can. Let’s get up.” He heard more pocking sounds—thick, padded noises from streets much nearer. Something in the nearness alerted the soldiers in front of the Baskin-Robbins, and they began running toward the noise, their legs webbed with foam, their helmets and canteens bouncing, crouched in anticipation of shooting. The people against the wall began to stray away unhurriedly. It made him feel safe not to be interesting to soldiers or ambulance drivers. “Just stand up,” he said. He stood and felt lightheaded.