by Shaun Harris
We reached La Paz by two in the morning, and revelers were still roaming the streets looking for a good time. The majority of them were dressed for the nightlife: a few women in cocktail dresses, and the odd man in an open-collared shirt. The last dregs of a Saturday night in a town that catered to rich tourists. As we drove past, I looked out the window at the nightclubs and after-hours bars the way a homeless man might covet the food at an open-air café. These people were my people, drowning themselves in pleasure and narcissism. I was desperate to join them, but Digby didn’t stop for margaritas. He kept the RV rolling toward the seedy fringe these people would never condescend to visit.
The public ferry east across the Gulf of California wasn’t due to leave until the following evening, and Digby felt we shouldn’t wait for it. The idea of waiting around all day with a likely posse coming down on us was, at best, unappealing. There were one or two commercial vessels that could take us across, but Digby nixed that as well, saying it would be a good idea to keep our departure “low-key” and “off the radar.” He knew a guy who could get us across, and we all went along with it. He also knew someone in Tequilero who, he believed, could help us, and we went along with that too. Part of it was that it was the closest thing we had to a lead on the suitcase, but it was mostly that going along with Digby was the natural inclination of anyone who met him.
The nightlife and, for that matter, the streetlights ended abruptly at La Paz Street, as if there were a city ordinance mandating wretchedness in the docks area. Digby pulled down an unmarked alley, and we parked next to a Dumpster in front of a rusted metal door. Digby got out without a word and started for the door. Grady started to follow, but Digby held up his hand, freezing Grady with one foot hanging out of the RV. He pulled it back in, closed the door, and twisted the wire-hanger lock.
“You notice he calls me ‘Boss,’” Grady said out the side of his mouth.
“I feel like that’s more of a ceremonial title,” I said. Digby knocked on the door several times and waited with his hands held out to his sides as if he were carrying invisible pails of water. A Judas window in the door slid back, and a shaft of gold light flowed out onto Digby’s face. He nodded at something and turned slowly around, lifting his jacket up and out. When he finished, the door opened just far enough for Digby to slide inside. It closed again and the slice of light went with it.
“So we just wait then?” Milch asked. “It’d be nice if he told us what was going on.”
“Who says I don’t know what’s going on,” Grady said, and winked at me. “You just sit tight, Milch.” We waited five minutes exactly. I know because I occupied myself by following the second hand in the luminescent clock on the dash. The door opened again and Digby edged out. He walked slowly to the cab and climbed inside.
“We got a ride across the Gulf,” he said. “But it’s gonna cost us. Anybody got five hundred dollars?”
“Not on me,” I said. “Is there an ATM around here?”
Digby snickered and shook his head. He glanced up to make sure Milch wasn’t watching and picked at a piece of duct tape on the driver’s seat. It tore away and he slid his hand inside it. When he pulled out a wad of cash, I cocked my head and gave him a quizzical look.
“Better than Bank of America,” he said with a smirk. He eased the bills into his jacket pocket and started up the RV. Another few minutes, a couple of twists and turns, and we pulled onto a grim pier made of weathered wood. There was a ferry at the end of it large enough to handle the RV, but old enough to make the venture questionable. We all held our breath as we drove onto it.
The ferryman was a young Mexican dressed in khaki pants and a worn-out Styx T-shirt. He shook Digby’s hand vigorously and they talked while we sat in the RV. When their chat was finished Digby clapped him on the shoulder and jogged back to us. I felt a jolt as the ferry pulled away from the dock. My stomach lurched along with the rhythm of the water. I closed my eyes, but it didn’t help.
“Ride’s gonna take at least three hours,” Digby said, after climbing into the back of the RV and closing the door. “That’s if this rust-bucket doesn’t sink on the way over.”
“Can we get out?” Grady asked. “Walk around a little.”
“Sure, but stay by the RV,” Digby said. The ferry’s rails barely left room to open the RV’s doors. The captain’s cabin, housing the wheel, was about two feet from the front bumper, and the RV’s rear scraped against the aft rail with a distressing grate each time we hit a swell.
I climbed up the RV’s rear ladder and stretched out on the roof, careful to stay clear of the hole and the jagged fiberglass that surrounded it. Grady joined me, dragging the cooler with him. He tossed me a beer and a ham sandwich. Beside us the Gulf of California chugged by. It looked rough and uninviting. I stretched my legs and watched the stars peek out from the wisps of a few early-morning clouds. Grady was silent, sipping his beer and taking the occasional peek at the ferryman standing at the wheel. Our captain was steering through a grotesque blackness with just a penlight to check his instruments.
“You know we’re smuggling something, don’t you?” Grady said, crushing his can and tossing it through the hole in the roof. It rolled back and forth on the floor below us as the boat rocked, adding an annoying accompaniment to our conversation. I handed him another beer without being prompted.
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“For one thing, we don’t have any lights on. A little dangerous for heavily trafficked waters,” Grady said, cracking his beer and looking back at the cabin. The ferryman looked back at us and Grady gave him a friendly wave. The ferryman nodded back and checked something with his penlight. “Secondly, that radio ain’t tuned into the harbor. He’s listening to the judiciales radio ban. Shit, we paid this fucking guy five hundred dollars and we’re his damn cover.”
“What are we smuggling?” I asked. Grady shook his head.
“Maybe just us. I don’t know.”
“One of Hemingway’s last books was about a smuggler in Cuba.”
“How’d it end?”
“Badly,” I said. “Must make you uncomfortable, you know, former agent and all.”
“I can handle it.”
“Was it tough being an agent?”
“Just the paperwork.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Why don’t you ask the question you really want the answer to, Coop?”
“What question is that?” I asked.
“Was I dirty?” Grady said. He was looking past me, over the edge of the ferry, at the gently rocking waves.
“Were you?” I said. He knew what was on my mind, and there was no reason to pretend otherwise.
“You wondering if you can trust me?” Grady asked.
“No,” I said, then after a moment, “Yes.”
“Then I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘dirty,’” he said. I listened to the radio static mix with the waves against the boat. It was clear that was all he was going to say on the subject.
“Fair enough,” I said.
“There’s gonna be a moment,” Grady said, motioning for another beer. I obliged. “I’m gonna tell you we gotta ditch Milch. When I do, don’t question it. Just do what I say.”
“You think he’s that bad?”
“I’m just saying I don’t trust him,” Grady said.
I ate my sandwich and Grady drank his next beer. I tried to listen to the scratchy tones coming from the ferryman’s radio, but the Spanish sounded even more foreign than usual. I closed my eyes and was just about to fall into sweet sleep when Grady spoke again.
“Why’d he do it?” Grady asked. “Hemingway, I mean.”
“Why’d he get Ebenezer to steal the suitcase?” I said. I had been thinking about the same question for most of the drive. I tried to conjure a portrait of Hemingway as he was in Paris. Up to that time the most interesting thing he had been a part of had been World War I. His poor eyesight had kept him out of the army and so he had joined the Red
Cross as an ambulance driver. Everyone knows the story of his injury and his ensuing infatuation with Agnes von Kurowsky, the nurse who tended to him. An infatuation that ended bitterly for Hemingway when Agnes spurned his love, not for another man, but for the idea of future men who would be better than poor Ernest. Her reasoning was that he was just a kid, but more to the point, he was not a man.
Kept out of the military due to a physical defect, and kept from love because of a character defect, the Parisian-era Hemingway was obsessed with the idea of manliness. It didn’t help that the people with whom he surrounded himself were all successful either critically or financially. Hemingway, on the other hand, was struggling to get just one of his stories published. He’d already lost at love, despite the presence of both Hadley and Pauline. A failure in his chosen profession would certainly complete the emasculation double whammy.
Lying about the suitcase made perfect sense, at least to me it did. Hemingway wrote down his entire life as idealized fantasy in most of his novels. He reinvented every pathetic trial he’d endured. His failure to become a soldier was turned into the story of a brave ambulance driver. He inflated the story of his injury with each telling. He downplayed his involvement in the Red Cross, going so far as cutting his uniform so it would look like a real soldier’s. His inability to satisfy a woman was rewritten as the manliest love story ever told, A Farewell to Arms. The line between his fictional life and his real one became increasingly obfuscated until it was completely obliterated in A Moveable Feast. If Hemingway’s career had been built from lies, then why wouldn’t it have started with one that would be the cornerstone for all the others to come? A lie that could earn him sympathy with influential friends, while at the same time pinning his failures on a woman, sounded like a pretty good gambit for the young writer. Why the hell not? Fiction writers are really nothing more than excellent liars anyway. Why should he have consigned those lies solely to the written word?
I explained all of this to Grady, ending with the coda, “He would have been desperate.”
“You said he was working for a newspaper. He had a job. He had a wife, a girlfriend too. He was doing pretty good.”
“I’m not sure Milch has the timeline right about Pauline,” I said.
“Still though.”
I opened my eyes and the night’s sky looked like sugar spilled over dark linoleum. I tried to find some constellations I could recognize. I couldn’t.
Hemingway did have a decent job, a loving wife, and an interesting life in a major European city. If he had been an ordinary man, it would have been more than satisfying, but Hemingway was not an ordinary man. He was a writer. Few professions draw such insecure, narcissistic, paranoid, depressive, and needy applicants as the writing life. The need to be published, to be validated, churns in the writer’s breast like a nonstop, manic engine. The writer’s waking life is filled with dreams of success, and his sleep is plagued by nightmares of failure.
I thought back to the first time I tried to get a novel published, the one that eventually failed. My work was my raison d’être, a mooring line to my worth as a person. Each submission felt like I was sending my firstborn out into the world, and each rejection felt like a serrated blade slashing into my soul. I remembered the clenched fists and bitter tears. The process took two years to complete, but it took decades off my life. And I wasn’t surrounded by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein rubbing it in with their easy genius.
“He would have been desperate,” I repeated. It wasn’t worth explaining to a man like Grady. Like war, it couldn’t be truly understood by anyone who hadn’t been through it. Except going to war was at least brave, noble even. There was nothing noble about writing, at least not the way I did it.
“You’re looking at it like he was a character in a book,” Grady said, crushing his beer can and tossing it playfully at my head. “He was real. Flesh and blood, not words on a page. No one really thinks that way in real life.”
“Writers think that way,” I said. “Hemingway thought that way.”
“Bullshit” he said with a sniff.
“Fine, then,” I said, and laid my arm across my eyes. “How about this. A lot of historians think he had hemochromatosis. His body couldn’t process iron, and it affected his brain. It’s why he put a shotgun in his mouth in Idaho. Maybe he was crazy in Paris, too.”
“I can buy that,” Grady said. “Then again, just being in Idaho was probably enough to make him blow his brains out.” I felt him waiting for a reply. I didn’t give him one. Instead I let the wariness of the day wash over me and I drifted away. I dreamed of a mountain made of books smoldering under pink flames, and in the shadows, I heard my father laughing.
Chapter Fourteen
We arrived in Tequilero just as the sun skulked over the Madres and illuminated the tiny town coiled up in the foothills. Grady drove our vehicular dinosaur as Digby guided him through the small city like a U-boat through enemy waters. The buildings fluctuated in shape and size from small and deflated to large and ornate and back again. We turned down a dusty street strewn with debris and infested with stray dogs, and parked in front of a two-story wooden building with batwing doors and a host of faded beer signs on the front. He cut the engine and we sat in silence, listening to the town wake up.
“Who’s this guy now, Digby?” Grady said, looking through the grime of the cracked windshield.
“A guy I used to know,” Digby said. He pulled his pistol out of his gun belt and checked the cylinder. Satisfied, he slapped it home with a flick of his wrist, and slipped the gun into the waistband at the small of his back. He slid the gun belt off and tossed it on the floor between the front seats. “He’s been around Tequilero forever. If Milch’s uncle came through here, he would’ve known him or his father would have. He’d also know if Thandy hired any talent to come looking for us, too. If he’s alive.” He leaned back so he could look at me. “You come in with me, Coop. Mr. Doyle and Milch can hang out here and keep a lookout just in case.”
“Why can’t I come in?” Milch asked, rousing himself from his slumber. He had slept for nearly the entire ride from the ferry.
“Because Coop is a writer. That’ll be our in,” Digby said.
“A writer?” Milch said. “Look, man, if you need a writer I can play a writer.”
“Not in there you can’t,” Digby said. “Do you know where we are now? Tequilero is at the edge of the Monte.”
“The Monte?” Grady and I said together.
“The Wild,” Digby said. “The Monte is the Madres proper, where civilization ends. You’ll find no god in the Monte, but you’ll find shrines to Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of hit men, bandits, narcotraficantes, and other bits of human filth. These are the people you will have to deal with. People Thandy will have to deal with. These people keep their own council and they have no trust reserved for outsiders. In the Monte, blood is currency and death is the language.”
“And you speak the language?” Milch asked with a scoffing sniff. Digby tossed his cigarette out of the window.
“Fluently,” he said, and stabbed his finger at the dilapidated hovel across the street. “And so do the people in there. They know your kind. They’ll smell the grift on you. You won’t get more than four words out before they slice open your throat and pull your tongue out through the hole.”
Milch looked unimpressed. I did not share his skepticism.
“Maybe Grady should go,” I said. Digby slapped me on the shoulder.
“You’ll be fine,” he said, and got out. He started across the street without waiting for me. Grady nodded some encouragement and I crawled out of the RV. I could hear the tendons in my legs creak as I half-jogged to catch up with Digby. I had slept intermittently while on the ferry, but when we had reached the dock, a rickety structure that tilted back and forth with each incoming wave, Grady had shaken me awake and shoved me into the front seat so I could keep him awake while he drove. I was on about two hours of sleep and no coffee, about to wal
k into a building filled with people who are adept at a Colombian necktie.
A filthy Rottweiler stood at attention at the door. It growled at us, a low guttural noise, but Digby passed by and pushed through the batwings without breaking stride. The Rottie’s head followed him and then snapped back to me. The growl grew louder and he raised his hackles as if to pounce.
“Leave him be, cabrón,” Digby said. He had reappeared at the door, arms hanging lazily over the batwings. His tone was bucolic, his manner disinterested. The beast sat down on its haunches, stopped growling, and panted contentedly. I inched by it and slipped through the batwing Digby held open for me.
“I remember when that dog was just a puppy,” he said. “Try not to fall behind.”
We stood in a large open room with a bar at one end and a few sporadic tables filling out the rest of the floor. The paint on the wooden walls had faded into an indiscernible color—I don’t know, maybe it was green—and the splintered floorboards were caked with so much dirt I originally thought there wasn’t any floor at all. The bar was a sturdy burled walnut, and the lacquer had been filled with chips and divots, giving it a veteran appearance. Glass shelves lined the wall behind it, but there were only a few bottles, and thick layers of dust obscured the labels of each one. At the end of the bar, a staircase built from unfinished wood climbed to a balcony that circled the room. There were four doors above the bar on the second floor.