Luz was listening, watching them.
Danny felt like crap. Take the money and he’d be showing love for lucre but not really caring at all about Luz or her family’s graves. Don’t take it and he’d piss off both her and the shooter. The shooter had put Danny in a hard place, and he didn’t like it, made him a little scarlet in the face.
Danny turned half around and said, “We’ll go down to Ceylaya, Luz. Stop crying, for chrissake.”
He gave the money back to the shooter. “Here, it’s your trip. The money we agreed on is enough.” Greed had its limits. Not often, but sometimes.
In Escuinapa the shooter watched a señorita cross the street in front of them while they were stopped for a light. She was taller than most Mexican women and longer in the legs, in tight cutoff jeans and a peach top similar to a man’s sleeveless undershirt. Under the cloth her breasts swung pleasantly back and forth as she walked. Good-looking woman, long brown hair with copper highlights and almost Asian in her facial structure. She carried a plate of food, and the shooter watched her until she turned in a storefront.
He looked over at Danny and grinned, little embarrassed kind of grin coming from the fact Danny had seen him watching the woman. He shook his head a bit, as if to say “Real nice.”
Or maybe “It’s been a long time.”
Or maybe “Wish I was younger.”
As they moved along the street, the shooter turned and stared at the doorway where the señorita had disappeared. In the store window were steel tips for spear guns, ends for outboard motor gas lines, two mouthpieces for trumpets, camera, film, masks for scuba diving, handheld telephones, car and boat oil, flares, blank audiotapes, two flatirons, basketball, two soccer balls, compasses, padlocks, fishing lures, swimming goggles, car headlights, clocks.
Danny turned west toward the sea while Luz was watching the shooter, who had watched the young woman in a peach top.
Six miles down the road they crossed a long bridge across some kind of backwater. A village sat on the far side of the water, off to the right. In front of the third house along a dirt street was a cage under a banana tree, and whatever was in the cage prowled back and forth.
The shooter saw it, too, pointing. “What’s that all about? The cage?”
“I don’t know. Mexicans keep all kinds of animals for pets.”
“Pull over. I’d like to see whatever it is up close.”
To Danny, this was starting to feel like a tour. But what the hell. He swung into the village and drove up the dirt street, stopping in front of the third house.
In the cage, brown spots on buff gray fur moved behind heavy wire. An ocelot, full grown, was pacing rapidly in a space only a little longer than its own body, barely room enough for it to turn around. And it was two short steps to one end, where it wheeled and took two steps back to where it had started in some kind of mindless protest, the sequence repeating over and over in an eternal journey taking it nowhere.
Danny’s stomach turned just watching it; he could sense, feel, its desperation, a kind of impotent fury or raging agony or whatever feelings humans ascribe to animal behavior. Years before, he’d interviewed a zoologist who was on one of her tours talking about chimpanzees. In preparation for the interview, he’d done some reading on animal behavior and found that animals in captivity undergo change, were not the same animals they started out to be. It was bad enough in zoos, but in close quarters such as the ocelot’s cage, they went the human equivalent of insane. Danny mentioned that, and the three of them sat there for a minute looking at an ocelot no longer an ocelot, but something else, some creature existing nowhere else except in this village, in this yard, in this cage under a banana tree.
“How much you think they’d sell it for?” The shooter’s eyes never left the animal.
“The cat? You thinking of buying it?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll let it go. They’re almost extinct in this part of Mexico, all over, I guess. Read that in a magazine a while back.”
Jesús-on-the-dashboard, talk about nutty stuff, talk about crazy. Danny could see it all: him driving, Luz sitting on an assassin’s lap, while three inches behind the driver was an insane ocelot, and all of them heading toward a cemetery Danny didn’t want to visit in the first place.
Still, he understood the shooter’s point. “Probably want thousands of dollars for it. Five, ten thousand, I really don’t know. Not only do zoos love ’em, but fancy ladies covet ocelot coats.”
“I don’t have that much extra money with me. How long does it take to get money down here by wire?”
“Hard to say. Two days, a week, maybe, for the kind of money you’re talking about. Start transferring that much and everybody gets interested, including the DEA in the United States. They all figure you’re dealing dope.”
The shooter lay back in his seat, face clenched and hard. “Let’s roll.”
“It’s a tough world,” Danny said, shifting gears, getting back up on the pavement. “Ever been to a bullfight? That’s something else all over again, a ceremony about death, about the control of man over an animal.”
“No. I refuse to go.” The shooter was still looking straight ahead, lips almost closed while he talked. “But it gets worse than bullfights. Ever hear of the sanguinary fiestas populares? Translates as ’bloody festivals.’ Have them in Spain all the time. I saw one once. Couldn’t believe it.”
“Can’t say I have.”
“There’re different versions of it, depending on the place and the fiesta in progress. One version, one they like in Coria, is where a bull is set free in a street. People try to put out its eyes with steel-tipped darts, the literal version of a bull’s-eye. Clever, huh? After a while the bull is full of darts, stuck in him every which way and all over and staggering around.
“Then the crowd starts torturing him, beating on him and pulling his tail and stabbing him with metal spikes that have barbs on them. Finally the bull is killed and castrated. When that’s done, the fun seekers—and we’re talking men,
women, and children—smear themselves with its blood. The climax is parading the poor sonuvabitch’s testicles around town as part of the celebration. Other versions involve dwarves or clowns mocking the real bullfights by using calves. It’s torture, pure and simple. I like most Spanish and Mexican people I meet, but I’ve never understood the way some of them treat animals, particularly when all of that shit is done under the heading of religion, which it often is. Hell, in Spain even the local priests come out to bless the affair. Maybe they do here, for all I know.”
“Well, we hang ’em up and slit their throats in packing houses,” Danny said. “Hunt ’em down with high-power rifles. See any difference?”
“I see a big difference, but I don’t much like that, either. Hunted animals when I was a kid, don’t anymore. Got this notion of parallel civilizations in my head. Has to do with the equality of living things… all things… rocks and trees and ocelots and bulls and humans, learning to love the snake as much as you love the butterfly. Not sure when I started thinking like that.”
He paused, looking out the side window. “Ah, to hell with it all.”
Danny felt like mentioning the dogfights and cockfights and animal mutilations that still went on in the States, but he could see the shooter was in a nasty mood and left him alone with his contradictions.
On the edge of Ceylaya, the shooter and Danny sat in the Bronco while Luz walked up a long hill to the cemetery. Flies everywhere and hot wind and a young boy driving a herd of cattle past them along the road. They swatted flies while the shooter watched Luz through the heat waves. After a while, saying nothing, he got out and followed her.
In central Mexico’s hottest time of the year, the sun was a laser and beat upon him as he climbed the hill. Danny watched him tug a bandanna from his right hip pocket, wiping his face and neck while he walked.
Luz was kneeling in the middle of the little graveyard. The shooter walked
over to her and stood quietly, noticing how her hair clung to the back of her neck and how her brown skin shone from sweat and sunlight. After a minute or two, she rose, and Danny could see her saying something to him. The shooter nodded and they talked, at first not smiling, then smiling a little as they came slowly down toward the Bronco.
When they were twenty yards out, Luz stopped and gathered a handful of flowers, asking the shooter to hold them while she got settled in Vito. He looked slightly uncomfortable clutching flowers, and when he handed them back to Luz, one fell from his hands and blew into the ditch on a gust of morning wind. Luz said never mind, but he retrieved the single yellow flower and held it out to her. As Danny started the engine and headed toward the beach, Luz was bending toward the flowers and smelling them. The shooter watched the road ahead, and smiled.
By the number of Tecate bottles on the table in front of them, Danny guessed the hombres in the Teacapán beach restaurant had been drinking beer for a couple of hours, since late morning, maybe. The men had pulled a Dodge pickup close to where they were sitting and had the doors swung open with the truck radio pounding like the heat itself. The hood on the truck was raised, and one of them had apparently been working on it, judging by the oil and grease on his light cotton shirt. Danny could smell gasoline and concluded that he’d been fiddling with the carburetor.
There were eight of them, drinking and sweating under the thatched roof, laughing too loudly for whatever the occasion might be, fingering their machetes lying on the table. One of them set a beer bottle on the blade of his machete and flipped the bottle end over end into the air, trying to catch it on the blade when it fell. The reach of his intent far exceeded his skill, and the bottle broke on the tabletop. His compadres laughed.
Luz whispered the Mexican word for drunks—“borrachos.”
The juggler looked over at Danny, Luz, and the shooter, mean little sneer on his face. The song blasting from the truck radio had something to do with nortearnericanos, something about what rich, sloppy jerks they were and how poorly they treated the migrant laborers stooped low in the fields of their truck farms. Danny picked up that much.
Within two minutes, all eight were looking at Danny, Luz, and the shooter, talking in the way drunken men all over the world talk. Get two or more of them together— Mexican or otherwise—get them drinking a little, and the testosterone seems to obtain a multiplier effect from alcohol and numbers. Here in a thatched roof bar on the coast of Mexico, an extra dimension of the thing called machismo was sprinkled over the hormones and mob bravado.
It was the kind of situation where you think, God, I’m glad I don’t have a woman with me, especially a pretty one. But Danny did, and she was Mexican and she was with two gringos, and that just complicated things even more. Danny was watching the shooter’s face and could tell he didn’t like what was going on, either. But he was staying quiet, drinking his beer, keeping one foot against his knapsack under the table.
“Hey, gringo, got a match?” Oily Shirt was leaning backward toward the shooter, speaking rough English. The shooter looked at him for a long moment, then reached in his left breast pocket and took out the silver lighter.
“Oh, no, amigo.” The bormcho laughed and switched over to Spanish, black hair falling partly over his face. “I no longer need a match, I have found it—my butt and your face.”
Evidently the shooter didn’t understand, since he continued to hold the lighter toward the Mexican. The entire table of them was roaring with smart-ass laughter now. They’d found someone to ridicule, someone so old and afraid, he’d still light their cigarettes even after they’d insulted him.
One of them shouted, “Polio,” clucking and squawking in a bad imitation of a barnyard hen, at the same time holding up his right hand with only the first and little fingers extended—”Screw you” in Mexican sign language—and burbled through his laughter, “No huevos”—literally, “no eggs,” “no balls.” It was a way of showing the pretty señorita what cowards gringos really were. Danny started to make get-ting-up-and-leaving moves.
Oily Shirt decided to let the shooter light a cigarette, since the thin, gray-haired man in jeans and khaki shirt and ball cap was clearly anxious to please and thereby avoid any trouble. The man shook out a cigarette and leaned toward the shooter.
What happened next happened fast, and Danny wasn’t quite sure how it got done, but the shooter torched the Mexican’s oil- and grease- and gasoline-soaked shirt with his lighter. The man jumped around, slapping at the flames and trying to unbutton the shirt all at the same time, couldn’t get it off in his panic, and began running for the ocean twenty yards away. Danny knew the three of them were in real trouble and already had Luz on her feet and heading toward the Bronco.
One of the other hombres grabbed a machete and came toward the shooter, swinging it. The shooter went into a half crouch, executed some kind of martial arts move— graceful-like, arms and long thin legs all moving at the same time—and the Mexican went to his knees, nose smashed and bent sideways, piece of broken cheekbone poking through his skin, machete lying in the sand beside him. Two others jumped up. The shooter reached under his shirt in the back and pulled out a knife with a bone handle and four-inch blade. Everything stopped for a moment, while the bar owner screamed at all of them.
After a few seconds, the shooter picked up his knapsack and walked toward the Bronco, looking over his shoulder once. The hombres stayed where they were, stunned by what had happened. The man with the burned shirt and burned chest came out of the water, stumbling across the sand toward the Bronco, tatters of shirt waving and arms flailing, calling the shooter everything bad you can say in colloquial Mexican Spanish when you’re mad and ready to kill. The shooter let him come on, then kicked him in the crotch when he got close enough.
Danny started Vito. The shooter slid in and looked down at the Mexican puking on the beach.
“Let’s get out of this shithole,” he said, sticking the knife back under his shirt.
He lit a cigarette and settled back in his seat, watching the hombres as the Bronco went past them. He wasn’t smiling, yet he didn’t look particularly mad, either. Danny was shaking and checked his side mirror, where he could see two of the hombres gathered around their fallen amigo on the beach. The man was still on his hands and knees, retching. Under the thatched roof, the others were tending to the man whose nose had been smashed and whose face would never look the same.
A few miles down the road, Danny calmed a little and glanced over at the shooter, noticing a bad scrape on the left side of his face, just in front of his ear. He’d poured some water on a blue bandanna and was dabbing at the scrape.
“You okay?” Danny asked, feeling bad about not helping him out in the fight, though not too bad, since he wouldn’t have been much help.
The shooter didn’t look at Danny, but continued working on his face with water and cloth. “Yeah, edge of the machete just clipped me when it came out of his hand. It was a stupid thing to do. I’m getting too old for that nonsense, letting pride overcome good judgment. I know better and should’ve just backed out of it.”
He was missing part of the cut as he worked on it. Luz reached out and took the bandanna from him, steadied his neck with her right hand, and gently wiped away blood with her other hand. He stiffened a little, either because of the touch of her hand on his neck or because of the wound. Danny couldn’t tell which. After that, the man who called himself Peter Schumann sat very still while she cleaned up his face.
”fou sure seemed to handle it all right.”
The shooter dug around in his knapsack, brought out a tube of ointment, and smeared it on the cut. “It was stupid.
There were eight of them. If they’d all come at once, we’d still be back there, and I’d have a lot more to tend to than a minor scrape. There’s been a general decline in the gene pool all over, and it’s best just to ignore it. You can’t fight the world.”
“I feel bad about not helping you out.”
> “No, you did the right thing, getting Luz out of there. ’You’d have just been in my way. I’m used to taking care of myself.”
“Where’d you learn to fight like that? Was it karate or what?” What Danny was really wondering was how far things would have had to go before he’d have used the gun in the knapsack.
He wasn’t smiling. “Combination of things I picked up a long time ago.” He sighed, leaned back, and lit another cigarette, watching the countryside going by.
A minute or two passed, then he said, “Wonder what it feels like to be an insane ocelot… inside the head, you know. Must be colored a burning red orange… what you’d see in there, like fire so hot you can’t stand it, like a white-hot poker on the tongue… like fire ants crawling around in your rectum.”
He was talking to himself more than to Danny. Danny let it go by and glanced over his shoulder at Luz. She sat quietly, looking at the back of the shooter’s head. After a while she came to her knees and put her chin on Danny’s shoulder, put a hand inside his shirt. The wound on the shooter’s face looked dry-blood red and sore. Luz took her hand out of Danny’s shirt and laid it on the shooter’s arm. The shooter didn’t move and kept staring straight ahead.
When they passed Ceylaya again, Luz turned and sat looking through the rear window of Vito. The village lay a quarter mile off the road.
She had been born there, María de la Luz Santos, born low. How far down? Being the last of six children in a Mexican peasant family, and a girl to boot, was bad enough. Because the other five were all boys, she’d started out twenty-some cuts beneath rock bottom. The social rankings worked to favor gender first, age after that. The males dominated, and deference to them was compulsory, particularly and especially to the father. Tack youth on to that, and María de la Luz Santos had been subservient to everyone.
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