Yellow Mesquite (46 page)

Harley had never been there, but everybody knew of Villa Acuña
.
It was a place high school boys bragged about going to for a weekend, a place that when you mentioned it by name caused grown men to look off into the distance and shake their heads. Uncle Jay said there wasn’t anything to be had from Villa Acuña but gonorrhea and jail, and he didn’t have much use for either. It didn’t sound like a place for women—didn’t sound like much of a place for anybody, for that matter. But Darlene had been there…with railroaders? And she had had a good time?

“How far is it?” he asked.

“About a hunnerd and fifty or so. It don’t take all that long. About two and a half hours, at most. That road’s just straight as a plank and hardly nothing on it.”

He looked at his watch. 10:45 a.m. “That’d put us in there at around one-thirty. Probably two-thirty by the time we get out of here.”

Darlene’s eyes brightened. “You wanna do it? Go down there, spend the night, come back Sunday?”

The thought of going away with Darlene, spending the night with her, made him weak. But it also troubled him in some way he couldn’t explain. “Sure,” he said. “Sounds good.”

She drew her shoulders up, a mischievous smile. “You just won’t believe it till you see it.”

“Well, then, let’s get a shake on.”

“This is exciting, Harley Jay! You and me. Imagine that!”

He was imagining it all right. At the same time he was thinking of Frankie. She had told him to get lost, but was that permanent? He knew in his heart of hearts that Darlene no longer meant anything to him, long term. So why was he going with her to Mexico, and feeling more guilty than ever?
 

Back at her house, she went into her bedroom to pack. He was relieved when she emerged wearing regular jeans, her shirttail stuffed in. She had packed an overnight bag, and she carried a brown paper grocery sack. She wrote a quick note for Fran, left it on the dining table. “I’m set.”

“I’ll carry those for you,” he said as they stepped out onto the porch.
 

She handed over the suitcase and locked the door to the house. “I’ll carry this one,” she said of the paper bag.”

“That the latest in designer luggage?” he said of the grocery sack, opening the trunk.
 

“You’ll be surprised,” she said with a coy smile. She set the mystery sack in alongside their bags. He closed the trunk and opened the passenger door for her.

Chapter 49

Mexico

H
IGHWAY 277 RAN
due south with hardly a wobble from San Angelo through the small brush-and-prickly-pear settlements of Eldorado and Sonora. From Sonora, the blacktop cut through the wilderness for ninety miles straight to Del Rio. It wasn’t much of a road, but they had it to themselves; in the last hour, they’d met just two pickups and one truck.
 

Except for a little barbed-wire fencing, the only sign of civilization in this desolate stretch was a manmade pond of stone and cement. The pond stood in a thin copse of mesquite trees just off the road on the left. Roughly thirty feet across, the walls were low to accommodate livestock.
 

The weather was warm, warmer as they traveled south. It was hard to imagine the cold, the slush of snow he had left in New York just…what, three days ago? He recalled Frankie as if in a dream, shivering on the sidewalk as he rode away in the taxi. He glanced aside at Darlene, her sandals in the footwell, bare feet propped on the dash, going at her bubble gum. It was hard to think of her and Frankie in the same frame of reference. He considered the possibility that he might have become unhinged and just didn’t know it, mistaking insanity—poor judgment, the ringing in his ears—for physical exhaustion.

Darlene seemed happy, excited. She went on at some length about roller skating in San Angelo. She had her own skates and a cute little outfit—a short, red pleated skirt and black tights; she was one of the better skaters and liked to skate-dance, however there were very few men, mostly just boys. She wanted to know if he was still “doodling them drawings?” He laughed out loud, but he didn’t quite know why. He told her a little about New York, about the loft where he lived and worked. She looked at him askance. “My goodness. I can’t imagine.” She wondered aloud if he made any money.
 

“No much,” he said.
 

It was 2:00 p.m. when he turned left onto Highway 90 near Del Rio. A few squat dwellings, pink and green stucco, were visible back off the road in the brush. Then the town began to materialize—commercial buildings, wool and mohair warehouses, a burger joint, a service station. He pulled into the station and had the tank filled. The attendant washed the windshield and checked the tire pressure. And, yes, there was a Holiday Inn just up the road.

The Holiday was a simple two-story concrete-block building, it too painted sea-foam green. There was a breezeway, and an inside staircase ascended to a walkway around the second floor. He signed them in, then carried their two bags into their ground-floor room while Darlene carried the grocery bag.
 

The room was borderline shabby, the chenille bedspread not quite white. On the wall hung a Walter Keane reproduction—a big-eyed waif with a tear the size of a hundred-watt lightbulb oozing down her cheek.
 

“I’m starved,” Darlene said. She hung a change of clothes in the alcove. She had already dumped a plastic zip-bag of makeup on the bathroom’s vanity, and placed the paper bag underneath.
 

“What the heck is that?” he said of the paper bag.

She paused, studying him, her color rising a little. “You’re not gonna get mad, are you?”

“Mad?”

“Well…it makes some men mad.” She lowered her gaze. “But, Harley Jay, it’s the only way I can do it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s something new. For women.”

He stared, bewildered.

Darlene took the paper bag up and set it on the countertop. She removed a little red tackle box. She gave him another furtive look, then snapped it open.
 

“This is for you,” she said, holding up a diaphragm and a tube of jelly. She laid the diaphragm aside and took out a plastic penis. “And this is for me.”
 

He continued to stare, at a loss.

“You’re not gonna get mad, are you?”

There were half a dozen plastic penises in the box—red, yellow, blue, some with ridges…
 

“You are,” Darlene said. “You’re mad…”

“Mad?”
 

“Well, it’s the only way I can do it. I mean, I can put it in and do it like anybody else, sure, but I can’t
do
it. You know, climax they call it.”

He wasn’t mad. He didn’t know what he was, but it wasn’t mad. Confused? Surprised? Bewildered? Whatever, he wasn’t up to expending energy sorting it out. What he really wanted was to lie across that chenille bedspread and sleep for ten hours straight. Forget everything.
 

“I’m not mad,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
 

“Well, I hope you’re not mad,” she said, putting everything away. “It’s not all that unusual, you know. Lot’s of women haven’t ever done it. Read
Cosmopolitan
.
 

“I guess I need to upgrade my reading material,” he said.
 

She didn’t appear to catch the sarcasm.
 

“There’s a real good place to eat in Acuña, way out on the other side. You like Meskin food, don’t you?”
 

“Sure.”

“I like it kinda hot, with pepper sauce and stuff.”

“If you like highly seasoned food, you should try some Indian sometime.”
 

“Indian?”
 

“Not like Apache Indian, India Indian.”

“Yeah? Where’d you ever have any a that?”

“An Indian couple live right below me in New York. She cooks up the best food you ever ate.” He felt a sudden longing to be back in his loft. It surprised him to realize that here he was with Darlene Delaney, and he was missing New York City…and Frankie. Especially Frankie.

He experienced a moment of clarity: What the hell was he doing here at all? He’d taken off like a mental case when he found Sherylynne’s letter, propelled on a furious charge of adrenaline that had blasted and re-blasted until by now his brains were scrambled. Now, thinking about it, he was astonished that he’d almost killed Whitehead, that he had hit Sherylynne, that he had tried to kidnap Leah… And now, here he was in Mexico with Darlene Delaney?
 

Darlene looked at him, pouty. “You don’t like Meskin?”

“Sure, I like it,” he said, sharper than he intended. “Who said I didn’t?”

She puckered her lips in a pout. “Maybe you didn’t really wanna come down here?”

He thought about that. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

She softened a little. “Well, we’re gonna have us a real good time. When I come down here with them railroaders we had the best time I ever had. You’ll see.”

She unwrapped a fresh plug of Bazooka, read the comic, then dropped it in the little trash can on the way out.

His ears rang. His tongue was thick and his mouth tasted like rusty iron.
 

IT WAS A
little after three when he drove them through Del Rio. Up ahead, the bridge stretched out over the shallow river. A sign read: C
ITIZENS
I
NTERNATIONAL
B
RIDGE
.
 

“The thing is to park in one of them lots on this side and take a taxi across. You don’t wanna take a good American car over there.”
 

He turned into a parking lot where big orange signs with black lettering read, P
ARKING,
T
AXI,
T
OURS,
C
HEAPEST
R
ATES
, the rates themselves printed in little tiny letters. A few men in short-sleeved shirts and sandals slouched around old cars with missing chrome and patchworks of paint primer, “Taxi” lettered on the doors.

A pudgy little Mexican with big white teeth and a Purina Feed gimme cap ran to meet them as they pulled into the lot. “Buenos días!” he cried, huffing alongside the car, guiding them into a parking place, although the lot was practically empty. The man paused, giving Harley a second look—his cupped nose, his black eyes. Then, cautiously: “You wish a taxi, no? A little shopping? A tour perhaps? Alfredo Renaldo Lopez! Sí, is me. I know the best deal for turistas in all México!”

Harley followed Darlene into the backseat of Alfredo’s little Volkswagen bug parked among the old Chevys and Fords. The VW’s front passenger seat had been removed for easy access.
 

Darlene unwrapped a new plug of Bazooka as they raced at the bridge, the little VW rattling like a worn-out sewing machine. They slowed to a stop at the American Customs—back-to-back boxlike buildings that resembled enlarged toll booths. Alfredo flashed his smile. The agent at the window gave them a cursory glance and waved them on through. They crossed over the Rio Grande, half-naked children playing in the shallow pools below. On the Mexican side, Alfredo barely slowed, got an indifferent nod from the agent, and then the street narrowed, funneling them in between two-story stucco buildings painted every possible shade of magenta, yellow, green. A profusion of merchandise spilled out of the doorways onto broken sidewalks. Flowering plants filled window-boxes and pocket balconies.
 

A few Anglos meandered from shop to shop, men and women in shorts, sneakers, Hawaiian shirts, women in denim wrap-around skirts and pastel blouses. Somber Mexicans loitered here and there, little groups leaning against old cars, squatting against the walls. Other than the tourists, there were few women, one here and there on a balcony or roof, hanging out laundry.
 

“I know where we want to go,” Darlene said, “it’s this restaurant, but I don’t know the name of it. I know you go on down this street here for a ways. Then you take a left out through some slums. It must be…what, three or four miles maybe?”

Alfredo brightened. He put the VW in gear. “Sí, is maybe El Toro Negro, no?”
 

Soon the shops and two-story buildings played out to shacks of wood and tin. Cook fires smoked behind makeshift walls. Thin dogs slunk about. Pigs rooted in open sewers.

Darlene wrinkled her nose. “Ain’t this just awful? I don’t know why anybody’d wanna live like this.”

Harley rode in silence, as if observing himself from a distance—he and Darlene and this excitable little Mexican—way off down here in nowhere-Mexico. It was hard to entertain simultaneously the image of upscale Fifth Avenue and the poverty slipping past on either side of the clattering little VW.
 

The restaurant was at the edge of town, not quite in the country, but away from the slum area. A waiter led them to a table. The place looked clean. There were maybe a dozen customers, mostly Anglos
.
Alfredo wedged himself into a booth near the door and settled down to wait. Harley and Darlene took a table, and after a margaritas, they ordered tortilla soup and chicken mole. Harley studied the restaurant, it’s customers, Darlene, as if he were afloat in some dreamy never-never land—the tequila fueling a somnolent sense of wellbeing.
 

“Don’t eat the salad,” Darlene said. “It’ll give you the drizzlies.”
 

Six musicians in big sombreros stood to one side, conchos big as silver dollars down the outseams of their tight, ill-fitted pants, singing: “Va-ya con Dios, my dar-leeng / va-ya con Dios, my love…” Harley ordered two more margaritas, shelled out another buck to the musicians.

Chapter 50

The Joyful Door

T
HE LIGHT OUTSIDE
was blinding. Harley staggered. Darlene giggled and hung onto his arm.
 

Alfredo seemed to roll around them in circles. “My friends, you wish to see the sights, no?”

“Hell, yes,” Harley said. “We gonna ride around all over town!” It echoed in his head, as if someone else were talking.